Paradise Park by Goodman Allegra

Author:Goodman, Allegra [Goodman, Allegra]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

Marlon very ill. Feline AIDS.

I took the piece of paper outside and I walked and walked with my backpack slung over my shoulder. I didn’t think about my feet touching the ancient stones or any of that crap. I thought about poor Marlon, home sick. Probably dying there alone. And I thought about his little cat body, and his paws all limp. And I thought how I’d let him down again, and I remembered his face when I got so excited about coming to Torah Or, his little wrinkled seen-it-all face; his baleful yellow eyes. He was so knowing. He saw right through me. Every time. He just never, due to the ancient eco-socio injustices of man, had the power to change my mind.

I had no idea where I was going. I just kept walking on. And I walked all the way up the road, up the hill, and I got to this park with a building that was the Jerusalem Nature Conservation Office. And I sank down, too tired to walk anymore. I sat on a bench. Well, I thought. Now you’re all alone. Now your boats are burned in all directions.

I shivered, I was so chilly. My bench was actually a huge stone from an olive press, a huge round stone lying on its side. It looked like stone money from Yap. I didn’t have a sweater. I just had my backpack at my feet, all full of notebook paper and doodlings from class.

This thing I had about looking for truth. The truth about what? About God? About the universe? Who did I think I was kidding? Truth probably wasn’t meant for humans—not in such large quantities. Dosing on truth. That would be a dangerous game. That would be like breathing pure oxygen, and you would explode. Or sipping absinthe. You could become addicted to the true. You could become one of those lost souls in the boulevards and the cafés. The absinthe drinkers.

The sky was starting to fade. The round olive press stone was so cold. I thought: Marlon knew the truth. I thought: You dilettante. It was actually cleansing to think so ill of myself. It was actually some relief.

I opened up my backpack. I pulled out my loose-leaf papers and, in there with them, my hothead letter to Friedell. “The big phallus,” I’d called him. “Classical shit,” I’d called his course. Yeah, that would show him. Yeah, right. I looked at my letter and I saw all that anger. I saw exactly the kind of person Friedell thought I was—another shrill feminist anti-the-educational-system ranting about her ideas and her emotions.

All around me the sky was turning lavender. The evening was coming on from far away. I turned over my letter, the cheap typing paper all scribbled over with indignations. And I took out my scratchy ballpoint, and I wrote:

That stuff before. That place I was before—please excuse my language (or spelling if there was any). Let me clarify what I was talking about:

I know you

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