Read Straight Cut for Free Online

chickens in this particular shot: a big village dance scene full of activity. But the native insists that he saw a chicken and nothing more. The anthropologists adjourn the screening and examine the relevant section of film on hand rewinds. At length they discover that a chicken does indeed appear on about twelve frames of the film, for approximately half a second, deep in the shot and obscured by two lines of vigorous masked dancers, scurrying between two huts in the background.
    So the anthropologists gather the natives again and once more they screen the film. The native who originally saw the chicken still sees the chicken, in the precise spot where the anthropologists now know that the chicken is located, and he sees nothing more.
    They run and rerun the film. Eventually more natives begin to see the chicken, and only the chicken. Then they begin to perceive other isolated and improbable items until they are seeing the entire movie. At last, they have been successfully initiated into a whole new culture of illusion.
    But what does it all mean? No one knows for sure. Though the legend has it that all commercially successful films in the West do have a chicken in them somewhere; be it only for half a second …
    An apocryphal story, in all probability. But I like it. So much so that I kept telling it to myself, elaborating the details over and over, all the way east, across the long, barren, and ever so slightly dangerous section of Delancey Street just before the bridge. Then up the stairs and the first interminable leg of the walkway, still pushing, still rehearsing the chicken theory, until I reached the center of the main span, where I felt that I could stop. After drinking so much and walking so far, I had to be in control. Downhill the rest of the way, and I had pushed myself up within sight of the limit of my physical endurance, my shoulder bag growing a little heavier with each step, as though it had translated into weight the thousand-odd miles I’d traveled so far that day and the few thousand more I’d travel tomorrow. The walkway was even more dilapidated than it had been the last time I’d been up there, and at the place where I stopped the rail was broken off on the north side, so that with a good running start I might have cleared the roadway and landed just in the wake of that tug and barge shoving slowly up the East River, to sink and perhaps be dissolved in the poisoned water even before I could drown.
    If I wanted to. But I didn’t care for that or for anything else in particular, except for a quietus to be set upon my consciousness. To not think of possible applications of the chicken theory, so beautiful in the abstract, to my own predicament. To not consider that, of the long procession of images I had witnessed, only the presence of two people, however fleeting, had made the whole thing visible for me. That of the two, I could not tell which one had made the image real and brought the monster of memory back up whole and alive into my life.

4
    F LORENCE FROM THE B ELVEDERE . It is no more possible truly to describe a landscape than it is to describe a face. And if a landscape such as that, or any other, were by some miracle to discover a mouth and speak for itself, it would have such a burden of history to unfold that it would not be done with it before the end of the world. But for my own little story, the scene was not much more than a background.
    That would have been ten or twelve years back, the time of one of the first “Italian jobs” I did with Kevin. I had left Rome to take a break from the singular madness of Italian movie making, and in Florence I had walked across the river and out of the city to seek relief from the confusion of an ununderstood language (I spoke only about ten words of Italian at the time, whereas now I speak almost thirty) and also to get away from the tourists; it was the height of the summer season and all Italy was thronged with them.
    Owing to this set of