Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Author:Ron Carlson [Carlson, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: USA
ISBN: 9780393245400
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1977-05-16T14:00:00+00:00

28

At night still, I’d lie in my bed, but I couldn’t believe I’d made it. In the period before sleep when people do their best thinking and from which no thought is recoverable, my mind slipped through the successive holes of thought faster and faster, like a car’s motor racing after it has stopped, the whirling centrifugal whine, metal against metal, all oil gone up in spires of tinged steam, and the clutch, wouldn’t you know it, in. That is to say, among the other fifty billion thoughts that flew by like bats in the cave of my indignant rage, I thought about my own responsibility and guilt. I had felt guilty before about different things, so I knew what it should feel like if it came. I had had black-hearted moods, entire atmospheres of guilt, in which conscience like a drunken lumberman fed the long planks of my raw remorse to the sawblade; but I didn’t feel that way now. At all. Perhaps it was the deep sense of embarrassment I felt for all the hundreds of paper readers and civil employees who thought I was guilty that led me onto that trackless train of thought, onto that rapid-fire midnight docket. The sentences flew out like the years in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing:

For ever knowing and associating with Dorothy “Dotty” Everest—five years and a thousand-dollar fine, fine suspended because of Mexican penalties paid …

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