Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

Author:Hari Kunzru
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

2008

Nicky’s leg was throbbing. He spent most of the night sitting on the bed in his underpants, picking little black splinters out of his calf and watching old movies on cable. Men lit women’s cigarettes. Soldiers sacrificed themselves for their buddies. Cowboys raced the stagecoach, watched by Indians on the ridge. It all circled round and round until he couldn’t follow anymore and drifted off to sleep. When he woke, the room was too hot. The sun backlit the curtains. Someone was running a vacuum cleaner on the other side of the wall. He supposed he had to make a decision. Should he go back to L.A.? He just didn’t have the heart for it. The explaining. Rehab. The self-righteous shit Jimmy would come out with at band meeting.

Someone knocked on his door and called out in Spanish. He shouted at them to wait. Breakfast. Never get into anything heavy before breakfast. He limped about looking for shades and car keys, then drove down the hill to the diner, the run-down one shaped like a spaceship. At the counter, he got in a weird row with the waitress about bacon. It’s not supposed to be burnt to a cinder, he told her. It’s bacon, she sneered. Bacon is crispy. If you didn’t want crispy you should have ordered ham.

He came out of the place brushing bits of food off his clothes and decided to have a gander round town. The only place that looked at all enticing—in fact the only place in walking distance that wasn’t boarded up or selling fast food—was a bunkerlike thrift store. Toys and furniture were piled up on the pavement outside. Two supersize women reclined on unplugged massage chairs either side of the door, like a pair of obese ornamental lions. Both gave him the evil eye as he walked up. Inside, the place was a consumer graveyard. The wreckage of every cultural fad since the late seventies had been piled up on long metal shelves. Games cartridges, Barbie dolls, VHS tapes, dusty framed posters of cars and airbrushed Coke cans. A slurry of Reader’s Digests spilled out of a cardboard box in one aisle, blocking the way to the crockery. The rear opened out onto a large back lot filled with appliances and laminate furniture and racks of paperback books bleached pale yellow by the sun. A Jet Ski was surreally beached in front of a row of fridges marking the yard’s back boundary. A rack of clothes, mostly desert fatigues, had a Marine’s dress uniform at one end. Nicky slipped on the jacket. Nice. Team it with some glitter and it’d look fierce on Brick Lane. Still wearing it, he wandered back inside, half aware of someone hovering about behind him.

Finally, he found the vinyl, stacked up in milk crates in a corner. Usual crap. Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, Two Hundred Million More Yuletide Classical Faves Sung by a Tit in an Orange Tie. There were a couple of good sleeves, eighties people with neon clothes and flammable hair.

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