Panorama City by Antoine Wilson

Author:Antoine Wilson [Wilson, Antoine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780544106277
Publisher: Mariner
Published: 2012-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

GRACE

A few nights later, I told Aunt Liz I was going to take a walk around the block to settle my stomach, to aid my digestion, not that her cooking hadn’t been delicious, it had been, I’d just eaten it too quickly. Which was entirely true until I started down the block and noticed a glow behind the sheets hanging in the window of the milky blue house. I had tried knocking on the door several times already, after work, to speak with the inhabitants about their lawn, or about their patch of wilderness, which took up the space where others would have kept a lawn, I wanted to introduce myself as a new neighbor, and let them know how much I appreciated their not cutting the grass to within a literal inch of its life, as Aunt Liz had done and kept doing, or as her gardener kept doing, I should say, on her orders. But nobody had ever answered. This time when I knocked a fellow who looked like a young Indian chief answered the door, his name was Chuy. I complimented him on the wilderness that was his lawn, but he said the place wasn’t his, he was just visiting. He asked me where the pizza was, what had happened to the pizza. I told him I was not the pizza guy. He asked me if I was the police, I said I wasn’t. A car pulled into the driveway then, which turned out to be the pizza guy. Chuy disappeared with the pizza and someone named Nick came to the door to pay. He invited me in, it was his house, or his grandmother’s house, or it had been, before she went into a home, she had memory and balance problems. Nick’s hair was slicked back and he had a goatee, or part of a goatee, on the point of his chin, and a tiny mouth compared to the rest of his face, it was fascinating to watch him eat pizza with it. Chuy lit what he called some Buddha and smoked and passed it on to the other guy on the couch, who passed it on to Nick, who put his pizza down to have a puff, who passed it on to me. When in Rome, wear a toga, your grandfather used to say. I took a puff, I inhaled and then let it out quickly. I am not a smoker, I have never been a smoker, but I could see immediately that one of the appeals of smoking is that when you let the smoke out of your mouth you feel like a dragon. A few moments later, or a few hundred, who can say, I couldn’t remember what I’d just thought, or what I’d said, or what someone else had said, and so I spent much of my thinking trying to chase down what I’d forgotten. I became uncertain about what these people really looked like. The harder I stared the less concrete their features became, like when you try to look at a dim star dead on and it disappears on you.

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