Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner

Author:Wendy Brenner [Brenner, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780393316483
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Published: 1996-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

the reverse phone book

Dallas’s dream was to someday live in an apartment large enough for him and his dearest friends to whip through it on roller skates, screaming, “It’s happening! It’s happening!” at the moment of his triumph, but he was already thirty, lived alone on a waiter’s salary, and had neither triumphs nor dear friends. His last friend had been his nearly silent college roommate, Chune Pei Liu, but Chune had gone to jail one night for uprooting and dragging a small holly tree across campus and then threatening the officers who tried to arrest him with kitchen knives, and he moved out without warning soon after that. He did not contact Dallas again, even though he left behind half his clothes and twenty Ramen Dinners and his Daisy Seal-A-Meal and a hairbrush full of hair. He must have undergone some sort of spiritual revelation or transformation, Dallas figured. He was mildly envious.

Dallas knew he should have a plan, but he didn’t have one. He loved music but had never laid his hands on a single musical instrument of any kind. Still, he often stayed up late at night listening to his old clock-radio, watching the flapping digits until they blurred and picturing his own hidden talent someday shooting out of him like staples from a gun. “This could use an arpeggio,” he liked to say, with authority, when listening. He loved arpeggios. He loved arpeggios and he adored the phrase WIDE LOAD. “WIDE LOAD, coming through!” he shouted whenever he had to carry a tray with more than three items on it out of the kitchen at the restaurant at which he worked. The restaurant was quite busy and so this happened several times each night, causing Dallas’s coworkers to treat him as though he were a moron. He knew they thought he was a moron and yet he couldn’t help himself.

Why was he given to such extravagance and exclamation? he wondered. Had he seen something, such as the Space Shuttle, explode when he was a child, and he just didn’t remember it? He had read somewhere that the children who witnessed that event were given to conditions like his, a chronic unease with the normal pace and pitch of the world, something like motion sickness. They did things like bite the button eyes off their stuffed rabbits and choke, or grow up and refuse to move out of their parents’ houses. But Dallas was sure he hadn’t seen anything explode. Well, one time he had seen a potato his mother had failed to puncture explode in the oven but he loved that. “Poomp!” he had shouted at his mother, for weeks afterward.

He didn’t know why he was the way he was, but he was beginning to feel like he’d spilled something on his own life, ruining it even before it was fully his. The feeling was familiar; as a child he had accidentally broken almost everything he touched, including most of his own belongings. His mother had referred to him in conversation as Destructo.

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