Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel by Peter Cameron

Author:Peter Cameron [Cameron, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780312428167
Amazon: B003JTHSBI
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2007-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

I ran out into the middle of the parking lot and stood there for a moment, hidden between two hulking SUVs. I felt as if I had escaped from a house on fire; I was actually panting, and I thought if I turned around I would feel the hot bright conflagration of the strip mall. So I did not turn around, I ran across the parking lot and into the field behind it. I walked toward the center of the field—it wasn’t really a field, it might have been a field once, but now it was just a sort of open, abandoned, useless garbagy space. I thought how the center is defined by the spot farthest from every point of the perimeter. Since it wasn’t a very big field it did not take me long to reach its (supposed) center. I unzipped and peed fiercely, proudly, into the ground, as if that was the one thing I could do well. Then I looked around. The four sides of the field were bounded by the strip mall’s parking lot; a highway; a row of identical subdivision houses, the back of each exactly the same, except each house had a different pattern of lighted windows, like patterns of Braille spelling out different messages: baby’s asleep, daddy’s home, nobody’s home; and a long line of trees, obscuring whatever lay beyond them. I felt I was presented with four choices, four different places to go, and as I did not want to return to the theater, or look into the lighted windows of the subdivision, or expose myself to the glare and gore of the highway, the only remaining choice was the trees, and I ran toward them, before anyone could come chasing after me and force me back into the theater.

The trees were more substantial than I expected, and actually amassed themselves into something resembling a forest. Unlike the field, which was littered with the revolting effluvia of human lives, the forest seemed, at least in the dark, to be pristine. I don’t know why, but I often think about when any particular patch of ground was last touched by human feet or hands or regarded by human eyes. In the city, there’s a small area on the corner of LaGuardia Place and Houston Street that has been fenced in and allowed to return to its primordial state, before the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Indians for $24. I like to look at it when I pass by, although it just looks like an overgrown abandoned lot. But I always have this feeling that I’ll see something startling inside the fence—a fox or a turtle or a coyote or some animal that has miraculously returned to this little pristine patch of land. I think it’s because I want to know that time can move backward as well as forward. That we could return to that moment when Manhattan was, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, “a fresh, green breast of the new world,” not the dirty brown crotch it is now.

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