The Knife Thrower by Steven Millhauser

Author:Steven Millhauser
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307763877
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-01T10:00:00+00:00

THE DREAM OF THE CONSORTIUM

THE PURCHASE OF the department store by the consortium filled us with uneasiness and secret hope. The department store was the last of the grand old emporiums in our city; from earliest childhood we had ridden its aging escalators and wandered its faded departments. Our very idea of excess, of wonder, had been formed by its shelves of merchandise stretching into brown distances and rising through all twelve floors. In the glare of the new glass mall the old stores had vanished one by one, already our visits to the fading department store had become tinged with resignation and melancholy. Therefore the purchase of the department store by the consortium was a sharp blow, even a devastation, but at the same time a solace, for hadn’t we always known that our store was nothing but an awkward survivor, almost an embarrassment, in a certain sense an illusion?

From the very first it was said that the consortium planned to preserve the block-long building down to the last architectural detail, from the ornamental leaves and berries on its entrance columns to the quaint nineteenth-century marble fountain located in a far corner of the ground floor. It was rumored that the preserved building was to be turned into suites of offices, but immediately a counter-rumor arose, and now it was whispered that the consortium planned to revive the department store, to restore it to its former grandeur. Reports began to circulate that the consortium had been purchasing other department stores in other cities, that factories and warehouses belonging to the consortium were springing up in remote places. To all such talk we listened with a certain reserve, for we no longer knew whether we really desired the rebirth of our department store or longed only for its continuance in a perpetual brown twilight of decline.

The opening was to take place in early spring. All that fall and winter we waited anxiously, while behind the large display windows, covered by white sheets, we heard the sounds of workmen’s radios, of banging and sawing, of heavy loads scraping across floors; and high above, in the white skies of winter, the dark scaffolding seemed a complex, riddling work of destruction.

We thought, without speaking of it, of long-drawn-out childhood waiting, of the waiting that gradually becomes infected with anxiety, with unhappiness, as the dreamed-of day, drawing closer and closer, grows heavy with the burden of impossible desires.

And the day came, a day like all others, a cool bright mid-April morning. And we were struck by surprise: before our eyes, but as if secretly, a grand department store had sprung up, a new emporium that seemed always to have been there, obscured by the shadow of our faded hopes. The new store rose nineteen stories into the bright blue day. In the broad plate-glass windows of the ground floor and the brilliant, arched windows of the renovated granite facade, distorted reflections of red and brown office buildings seemed to tremble and shimmer.

Despite the already

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.