Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel by Walter Mosley

Author:Walter Mosley [Mosley, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9780747593140
Google: d0K95qWNb5AC
Amazon: 1596912278
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2008-02-15T19:44:44+00:00

A week before, I was barely alive and didn‘t know it. I didn‘t know what sex was or what love was. I didn‘t understand hatred or desire. I had no notion of the bloodlust that thrived in my heart. If only I could have turned around, walked back through the days to the time I was supposed to be on that noon train to Philadelphia.

Standing in the kitchen with a knife in my hand. How did I get there? Shouldn‘t a sane man remember the steps that brought him to the brink of murder?

I was sitting on the sofa in front of the great plasma screen. I thought maybe Sisypha had an answer for me. I reached for the remote control, and the phone rang.

Stop, the jangling bell screamed.

“Hello?"

“L?"

“Oh. Hi, Lucy,” I said.

“You sound funny."

“I‘m anything but funny,” I said.

“Are you okay?"

“Sure. Sure. Fine. My heart‘s beating hard. The blue in the sky is no longer just a memory.” I was speaking freestyle, the way I had been writing in the coffee shop.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“You know when you look at something you‘ve seen a thousand times,” I said.

“Like this cup sitting on my desk?” she asked.

“Yeah. Like your cup. If you‘re just looking for something to drink out of, you glance over at it, you think you know what you‘re looking at, but you don‘t really."

“Why not?” she asked, obviously taking my words quite seriously.

“Because the cup is in your mind,” I said. “A kind of imperfect memory—or maybe an ideal memory. You‘ve probably never looked at that particular cup very closely. You‘ve owned it and used it for years but you never noticed the little bump near the base of the handle or the place where the glaze bubbled up and left the clay underneath uncovered."

“You‘re right,” she said. “I‘m looking at it right now. I got it at a pottery sale in Northampton when I was spending a semester at Smith. I think of it as a blue cup, but now that I look at it, only a part of it is blue. The other half is a sea green. And the green has tiny gold flecks in it."

“You could probably spend the whole day looking at that piece of pottery and you‘d come up with something new every few minutes. There‘s probably a whole novel in there."

I thought to myself that this was just college stuff, the kind of thinking that kids discover—or rediscover—the first time they‘re away from home. But it meant more to me. I felt what I was saying to Lucy. I‘d skimmed across the top of things my whole life, never-looking deeply, never knowing what it was that I experienced—what it was I had missed.

“I called to talk to you about something,” Lucy said.

“Sure,” I replied. “The art galleries . . ."

“No,” she said. “No. I don‘t expect you to get anywhere with them for a while yet."

I was about to contradict her, but she went on. “It‘s about the other night.

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