Read The Book of Daniel for Free Online Page B

nevertheless the signal had been sent, discharged even, from the spasm of soul that was required—and that was the sense of summons I felt sneaking up over the afternoon like a blanket of burned space around my ears. Susan and I, we were the only ones left. And all my life I have been trying to escape from my relatives and I have been intricate in my run, but one way or another they are what you come upon around the corner, and the Lord God who is so frantic for recognition says you have to ask how they are and would they like something cool to drink, and what is it you can do for them this time.
FIRE SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!
        One picture poster, 36 × 24, used in demonstrations. Like new! Black and white double portrait depicts Isaacsons two faces historical curiosity cheap very cheap worthless comes in its own up-yours tube corners slightly deteriorated weighted with pieces of plaster amuse your friends with this historical curio free them. I remember his cock. Face it, if I do, I do. Always shaved without clothes. She, too, shameless by design. I remember the hair around her slit, sparse and uneven. One of the theories of aspiring modernity. Treat the body without shame. Let the kid see it, let him learn to be natural and uninhibited. They didn’t go so far as to let me watch them fucking, but I did that too one way or another—Iwas a small criminal of perception; and that doesn’t mean just to see them or hear them, which is the same as seeing, but knowing when they had and sometimes even when they were going to. But everything was theory. Everything was done for a reason, and was usually not the way the rest of the world did it. All the more reason. All part of the plan. The idea I had was of life as training. We were all training for something. There was some kind of moral, intellectual and physical award that would be available to those who worked for it, and were worthy of it. The State of Perfection Award. And I was not to be amazed that we were serious candidates, or that our pursuit of this perfection never brought us any closer. And I wasn’t, I bought it all. Why shouldn’t I? We were us.
    Like those trips to the beach. My God. Late Sunday morning, Dr. Mindish would come by in his car; I remember it, a 1942 Chrysler New Yorker, high off the ground, with small windows, the upholstery torn. And we’d all pile in and go down the Concourse, across the Triborough Bridge, to the Grand Central Parkway, on toward Jones Beach (named for the common man), and the traffic would stack up, and maybe by three in the afternoon we’d get to the huge parking lot packed with baking cars and buses fourteen miles from any beach, and they’d all be sweating, and grumbling and arguing with each other and shushing each other, Dr. Mindish and his dumb wife and their cretin daughter, almost six feet tall, and Mom and Pop and me and the baby, Susan, all stuck in that stuffy car, sick with the fumes, and no, my father would say, this lot is too far away and we’d angle around, and sneak past the attendants, and bickering and sweating, complaining, and swearing never to do it again, my mother declaring my father a torturer, the Mindishes mad now because they wanted to park and walk the damn five hundred miles from the lot to the beach, with the sun baking the roof of that car and the baby spitting up like mushed bananas, and little carsick bastard Daniel complaining too (Mindish drove cruelly, starting and stopping, a jerk driver too), and then my father, leaping out of the car and guarding a parking space, miraculously found near the beach itself, with horns blowing and another driver threatening, he, Paul Isaacson, sweating and triumphant, guiding, like a cop, the bigdented Chrysler into the space; and then a long enough walk to the beach through odd grass gardens for the common man: planted with tiger lilies and geraniums unbelievably ugly in the hot sun; to the beach so crowded that it seemed impossible to find room to