St. Famous by Jonathan Dee

Author:Jonathan Dee [Dee, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49127-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1996-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

“Can you call the police?” I said.

She did not respond. I may have detected a further, slight hardening in her expression as she faced me, though perhaps that was my imagination.

“Do you live nearby?” I said.

Her large brown eyes watched me with no curiosity. It was just as if I were on a TV screen, a kitschy image of a man in distress, unlikely perhaps but no more so than a lot of other things she might see.

“Don't you think we ought to call the police?” I said.

And before I could have sensed it, a group of eight or ten men had broken off from the general throng and were running toward me, pointing at me. I couldn't turn around quickly in the narrow space between the two cars. Still, I made it back into my car before they got to me, even managed to shut the door; but before I could lock it they yanked it ajar again and pulled me out into the open. Someone struck me on the back of the head and at that point, for a few seconds at least, I ceased to be able to see. The men shouted, as they hit me, in a manner which I could not understand. I lost my balance. Then, at last, I heard the sirens, it sounded like a thousand of them, coming from every direction, not the sound of deliverance but merely of a new level of engagement. The men surrounding me heard the sirens as well, and a tone of frantic uncertainty entered their own voices. A final muffling of sound indicated to me, just before I believe I passed out, that I had been taken indoors.

At this point Paul turned the typewriter off and put his hands behind his head, scowling slightly. Something was unsettling him; but he rejected the idea that that something was the dread reawakened by his beginning to live through, again, the most painful and dangerous hours of his life. Writing about an event was not reliving it; that was a canard favored by those who had no direct experience of writing's true nature. No, he decided; what galled him about these last few pages was the particular tyranny of the narrative itself, the tyranny that he strove to overcome in all his fiction but that for some reason seemed particularly hard to disobey here. And he believed he had a new insight into what had caused him to want to disown these events in the first place; it was that very and-then-and-then-and-then quality, the futility of it, that seemed to mock him and his efforts. It was too much like a movie. He himself was getting lost in it. Any idiot could connect one line of dialogue to another; he was missing the real story. Between every pair of these sentences, he thought as he read over the day's work, were five or six unwritten pages: on the face of that black woman on the stoop, on the psychology

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