Alice & Oliver: A Novel by Charles Bock

Author:Charles Bock
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Literary, Medical, Contemporary Women, Fiction
ISBN: 9781400068388
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

Today that wasn’t happening. Today was something else.

He’d withdrawn eighteen twenty-dollar bills from the company account. Fifteen sat neatly in an unsealed white mailing envelope, which Oliver now withdrew from a desk drawer and placed in the front left pocket of his corduroy pants. The other three were in his wallet, just in case. At the base of his keyboard lay a creased, lemon-yellow business card. He was supposed to call the number at 5:00 P.M. But he couldn’t call from the office phone, as there could be no record of this call, and the people he needed did not talk to anybody on a cellular—twice Oliver had forgotten, been hung up on.

Just fuck it.

Rising from his desk, he glanced around, quickly checked his reflection in the terminal screen.

—

Heading eastward, passing the sneaker stores and boot stores and the health food place, his steps were making him a bit queasy, though Oliver still moved with speed. He didn’t want to be late. He kept an eye out, cursed to himself because goddamn Giuliani still hadn’t replaced any of the pay phone receivers or gutted wires. Moving to the other side of Broadway, nearing the triangle of busy avenues at Astor Place. And it was here that the old truism presented itself, the idea that you were only part of the city when your history here reached out for you. For Oliver it was a bulky line of bodies, ensnaring him in its meaty arm. Blocking half of the sidewalk and running along the base of the large commercial stone building that had been built back during the previous century. Bodies grouped in twos and threes, bunching up, leaning against, and blocking the large pictures that took up the windows of Astor Wines & Spirits; all these people killing time, shooting the shit with the neighboring stranger; standing and staring out at whatever. A blow-up doll was being batted like a beach ball.

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