The Narcissist's Daughter

Read The Narcissist's Daughter for Free Online

Book: Read The Narcissist's Daughter for Free Online
Authors: Craig Holden
floated back and I saw it then—my answer, whole, fully formed, delivered unto me like some goddamn apocalypse of insight and cunning and circumstance all come together as if by voodoo. It was perfect; it was exactly poetically what they deserved; it would ring their bell more soundingly than almost anything else I could do, than anything I’d thought of short of some pyrrhic act of hyperviolence that would ruin me along with them. It was the sort of dawning that was almost enough to make you believe in something. It even happened (as if the whole thing had been orchestrated, ordained) that I’d driven Brigman’s new-old ’Cuda which, when Jessi saw it, inspired her to grab my arm and shriek, “Oh, my god! Is that yours?”
    “Sort of.”
    “It is amazing .”
    “You’re into muscle?” (Who knew?)
    “I went out with this guy who had a Nova SS so I got to know a lot about it. He even raced some. My parents hated him.”
    I said, “This one’s only got a 340 in it, but it’ll be nice when it’s ready.”
    “It looks great now.”
    “I could take you for a ride sometime.”
    “For real?”
    I waited. I said, “And maybe we could grab a bite or something then.”
    She laughed, then got quiet. She looked up at me. She said, “Really?”
    “Really.”
    “All right. Yeah. That’d be great.”
    “Call you?”
    “You don’t have the number.”
    “I think I can find it.”
    “Not my private line.”
    Ah. I found a pen and she held my hand and wrote on my palm, and then, bracing herself against my arms, reached up and brushed her lips across my cheek. She had that ability to be immediately familiar, the gift of affable touch. But of course she would have, I thought. It was, after all, a part of her endowment.

FOUR
    I t both irritated and impressed me that Dr. Kessler was right. Not only did the logistics of nights work well for me but I found myself falling into their flow as if I’d been born to it. I came to love that otherworldliness, the sense that we who worked there lived in the same place as everyone else but in our own dimension of it. More important, whatever happened on the surface of my life was subsumed by a much deeper satisfaction that I was more securely in this place I wanted to be, and that I found myself believing in the possibility of my future in a way I never quite had. Medicine had seemed a slightly fantastic dream, a thing to lust after but not quite to trust in the possibility of, as with a girl you knew was too good for you so that when she flirted you held something back in order not to be crushed when she ran away. Though I was taking a full load of classes now for the first time, I found myself doing well, the texts seeming to beam themselves into my brain. I’d come into a zone of concentration and focus I had never visited before. Old Dr. Masterson even called me into his office to congratulate me on how it was all going.
    In the mornings when I came out I liked to stand on top of the parking garage and breathe. The night air was frigid now and the fetid fragrances of the city tamped down by it, and as the sun broke over the sagging houses outside the high fence and between the great brick buildings inside and came off all the thousands of panes of glass, I had to narrow my eyes. I often came off so hungry that my gut hurt as if I’d been punched or was sick. Sometimes I joined others at the Sunshine Diner for the breakfast platters or went out with Ray; often I went somewhere by myself and had only fruit and oatmeal and cigarettes; some mornings I went to Jerry Sobecki’s on Monroe just where it came into the downtown. It was one of the rare decent places open that early and was always nearly empty then except for the odd wino or some autoworkers when the AMC plant was running a third shift, or sometimes a few from the hospital, people I knew well enough to nod at but not to want to drink with. Once or twice in the beginning they waved for me to join them but soon they

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