Read The City of Your Final Destination for Free Online Page B

simian aspects in Mrs. Dalloway ,” said Omar.
    â€œOf course there are. You can find aspects of anything in Virginia Woolf. Or Lucy Greene-Kessler can. I could meet you at eight-thirty. But what is this about? What’s happened? You sound like something is wrong.”
    â€œSomething is wrong,” said Omar. The dog jumped down from the picnic table and then immediately jumped back up. This meant feed me now .
    â€œYou haven’t burned anything down, have you?”
    â€œNo,” said Omar.
    â€œThen what?”
    â€œI’ll tell you when I see you. I have to explain it. It’s complicated.”
    â€œWrong and complicated. That doesn’t sound good. Are you okay? Can this wait until eight-thirty?”
    â€œYes,” said Omar. “It will take me a while to get downtown. Assuming the car will start.”
    â€œYou should get a new car.”
    â€œThe car is presently the least of my problems.”
    â€œOh, my. Is the complicated wrong thing something medical?”
    â€œNo,” said Omar.
    â€œYou’re not going to die or anything, are you?”
    â€œNo. Well, eventually. But no sooner than I thought. I think.”
    â€œGood. Where do you want to meet? How about Kiplings?”
    â€œAll right. Fine. Although I haven’t got any money.”
    â€œI do. I’ll see you there at eight-thirty. A little before, maybe. I’ll try to sneak out. Once Lucy gets going she never looks up.”
    Omar parked behind the bank, in the lot reserved for customers. Although it was empty, as it was evening and the bank was closed, the sign that threatened that the cars of noncustomers would be
towed at their expense made him nervous. In most public matters he was by nature literally and pridefully obedient. Two girls were playing hopscotch on hastily chalked squares in the far corner of the empty lot. Omar got out of the car. The girls knelt down and watched him cautiously as he crossed the parking lot, as if he might do them some harm. He smiled and waved at them but they just crouched and stared. When had children stopped trusting him? Why?
    He walked up the alley to the street. He stopped outside the bookstore to cruise the free-books box but he couldn’t deal with it: it always depressed him, these books out on the streets, begging to be taken home, like dogs at the pound, books that had filtered down through the economic system and arrived, irrevocably, at the bottom, in a box on the sidewalk. He walked past the shoe store that mysteriously stayed in business even though the shoes in the window never changed. An old couple ran the store and one of them was always sitting inside, smoking. Tonight it was the wife. Omar looked at the shoes behind the transparent yellow shade that was kept perpetually lowered, so the shoes were observed through a sort of jaundiced screen. They were mostly the kind of shoes old ladies wore when their feet got arthritic and gnarled, but most of the old ladies Omar saw in the grocery store now wore sneakers.
    Just past the obsolete shoe store was Kiplings. Kiplings was an Indian restaurant for people who were leery of foreign food. It was Indian cooking filtered through British imperialism and modified for Americans. It was a fairly dismal, awful place but some of the curries were decent and the beer was cheap, and if you drank enough of it the place seemed less awful and dismal. Deirdre was sitting at the bar drinking a Bass Ale with lime, a combination she liked that always slightly revolted Omar. Just the thought of it made the inside of his mouth blanch. He sat down beside her. She kissed his cheek and laid her hand on his shoulder. “How are you?” she asked.

    â€œOkay,” he said. “How are you?”
    â€œAwful. I passed by the bookstore and found out they ordered the wrong translation of Turgenev for my 201 next semester. They claimed the one I wanted wasn’t available so they went ahead and ordered the