Read The Wonders of the Invisible World for Free Online Page A

wakes?
    He carries the laundry upstairs and looks in again: Deke’s on his side, mouth slack, his outbreaths roaring in the silenthouse. Then he creeps into his own room, slips
Fuckbuddies
into the sports section of the
Times,
carries it out to the breezeway, still in his stocking feet, and sticks it in with the garbage. He pours yet another finger of Macallan, gets into bed and opens
The Interpretation of Dreams,
his current go-to-sleep book: in
The Western Canon,
his previous go-to-sleep book, Harold Bloom did such a good job of selling Freud as imaginative literature that Billy’s giving it another try. He begins “The Dream of the Botanical Monograph,” which sounds like a Sherlock Holmes title, or Borges maybe, but quickly becomes impenetrable.
Behind “artichokes” lay, on the one hand, my thoughts about Italy and, on the other, a scene from my childhood which was the opening of what have since become my intimate relations with books.
Do tell. He pages around and stumbles across the part about staircase dreams, which he’d always heard were supposedly sexual. So
that
was why? Because you mount higher and higher and pant as you reach the top? What incredibly silly shit.
    He realizes after a while that he’s been cruising along with his eyes closed, following some parallel story about painting over wallpaper with a roller; this is not, technically, reading. He reaches over and puts out the light, then instantly comes wide awake, worrying what question he could ask if Dennis should call. The only question he can think of is
Did you ever fly when you were a little boy
? Because he’s imagining Deke in a Diamond Dogs uniform, soaring around the bases six feet above the ground, making smart right-angle turns like Casper the Friendly Ghost. So maybe he’s asleep and doesn’t know it.
    The light wakes Billy up too early Saturday morning: those flower-print curtains of his mother’s just don’t cut it. He reads until he hears Deke calling, then delivers a clean outfit, goes tothe kitchen to start coffee and puts on the Shostakovich, skipping right to the zippy second movement. Before breakfast they play three games of Old Maid. Billy’s caught with the Old Maid each time, in scary defiance of the law of averages; but even if this meant something, it would simply mean what he already knows. He gets out bowls, milk, spoons and Product 19. No TV, no sugared cereals, no throwaway pop music—someday Deke will hold all this against him. Assuming Deke just stays on and on, which Billy shouldn’t be assuming.
    “So I thought today we better make a pumpkin run,” he says. Halloween’s a week away. Make it through that and they’ve got Thanksgiving. And then Christmas.
    “What’s a pumpkin run?”
    “Maybe five dollars. That was a joke.”
    “I don’t get it.” Deke’s eating with his face down in the bowl, holding his spoon overhand. Must this be corrected, or do kids grow out of it automatically?
    “Don’t worry, it wasn’t funny. What I meant was, we should go out and get a pumpkin. You ever make a jack-o-lantern?”
    “I don’t know. Can we read first?”
    “Sure. We got the whole day.” Though in fact Billy would like to get the hell out of here before Dennis calls back. “What did you have in mind?”
    “I don’t know.” But of course it turns out to be
The Runaway Bunny.
    “Heck of a story,” Billy says when he’s finished reading the thing. “Now, would you go get your shoes, please?”
    “Thank you,” Deke says. A reflex triggered by the
please
? Or is Deke actually thanking him?
    “You’re welcome.” Billy decides to break the rule. “Tell me something. Are you missing your mom today?”
    “Not really. Can we call her?”
    “We can’t call
her,
but she’ll probably call
us
later on.”
    “Can we wait?”
    This requires a lie. “The last time I talked to her, she said she probably wouldn’t be calling till tonight.” Mistake: this invention is checkable. “Or that’s what I