Subtle Bodies Read Free

didn’t realize it, exactly. He thought everything was love with them, but it wasn’t. She would have been his friend whenever. It was a standard fantasy when you fell in love to imagine you could go back in time and find your beloved growing up, appear there, save him or her, get together as adolescents, by magic, and go on together, fighting for one another, into old age, never wavering. It was a pure friendship fantasy. Not sexual.
    And that was why she was enraged at the man, enraged. She had to get this rage out of her, so she could kill him when she caught up with him. He was an idiot. He was reckless. He was hopeless. He had shit for brains. He couldn’tbe counted on. He was a fool. These people had hurt him in the past, Douglas had. She only knew some of it.
    She was moving around too much in her seat. The woman next to her was unhappy.
    She offered the woman her uneaten dessert, an industrial brownie still in its packaging. Nina had watched the woman devour her own brownie in two bites, earlier.
    “No,” said the woman, quite forcefully.
    She thinks I’m affiliated with Satan, Nina thought.

 
    3 His great friend was dead.
    Ned wanted to embrace his dead friend. An imaginary burning feeling ran across Ned’s chest and down his arms. He wanted to embrace his friend. Where Douglas’s body was, even, Ned didn’t know. No clue whether it had been removed from the estate, no clue what shape it might be in wherever it was. Nobody could have gotten there from the West Coast any faster than he had. And still he was late. Except that when the call had finally come from Elliot, it had already been too late, whatever he meant by that. He meant something. Your thinking is choppy, he thought.
    Douglas had died when his riding mower had pitched him down into a ravine, the mower on top of him, when the ground at the edge had given way. So he had been buried once already.
    These were the Catskills, all around. The upward road he was walking on ran through terrain jammed with trees still dripping from a monster rainstorm he had just missed. It was trees, trees, and glimpses of hills farther off, also burdenedwith trees, as Douglas might have put it. The ruts in the unpaved road were running like brooks. It was all uphill. There were regular trees in their last leaf, intermixed with unwelcoming, bristling evergreens. It was four in the afternoon.
    It was muggy. This was not where he would choose to die, in a ditch in this vicinity. What had Douglas seen, dying, his neck broken and mud sliding over him? No friend near, no one around, black mud engulfing him.
    Ned shrugged off his rucksack and, holding it against his chest to give his shoulders a break, continued on. He had brought too much reading matter and had so far only managed to get cursorily through three recent issues of
The Economist
. That had been during the San Francisco–to–Houston leg of the trip, before guilt had shut him down. He was agitated about the war that was coming and guilty that he’d been forced to drop the little he was doing in the effort to stop it. There was going to be a march—the Convergence was what they were calling it—to protest the rush toward war in Iraq. It was looking immense. Feeder marches from all over Northern California would culminate in San Francisco. Contingents were coming from as far north as Yreka, for Christ’s sake. There was a coalition for the Convergence,
his
coalition. It was funny, the anarchists were the easiest to deal with and the Quakers were the most difficult. Oh and of course he felt like shit about leaving Nina with so little notice, and leaving exactly when the timing on their personal project was so critical. He couldn’t think about that.

 
    4 He had come to a rude plank bridge across a gully occupied by a roaring brown torrent. Spray was coming up through gaps in the planking. The bridge meant that he was better than three-quarters of the way up the road to Douglas’s estate. He supposed it had