GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll (funny books to read .txt) 📕

She said it in English for some reason. It was the first time she had ever spoken to him in that language although she knew that he was fluent. Maybe it was because they had entered another country of the heart now. German was spoken in their Before, English in this After.

Obermars smirked and bent down to the floor to retrieve his clothes. He didn’t want to look at her because right then she was lovelier than he had ever seen her. He didn’t know if that was because she was naked or because he knew there was no chance with her. This was the one and only time he would ever see her this way. His longing and sense of utter defeat were equal. Her face glowed in the soft light of the room, the whiteness of the rumpled sheets contrasting with her tan skin.

“You look like a piece of toast,” he said, looking for his second sock. He had nothing else to lose. He could say whatever he wanted now.

“Like what?” She slowly sat up but did nothing to hide her body. He thought she would cover it after what had just happened between them and her wish to leave.

“Like a piece of toast. Your skin against those sheets. You look like a piece of golden toast on a white plate.”

She remembered that image and the look on Frank’s face when he said it. She saw the unhappiness there, the way his spirit was already moving away from her out of that lovely room, into the car, onto the road, back to Vienna where their lives would never intersect again. She didn’t care. She only wanted to go home and try to figure out a way to live the rest of her life.

“Fizz?”

She came out of her memory tunnel blinking several times at the sound of Ettrich’s voice. After a few seconds pause she asked, “What do you want to know, Vincent? How do you know about Frank?”

He pushed the sugar bowl across the table to her. “It came before, when you asked for the meaning of anak. A picture of you and him came to me at the same time as the definition of the word.”

“Oh. What picture of us?” She turned her hand over but anak was no longer written there on her skin.

“At the rest stop on the autobahn—when you had him pull over so that you could throw up.”

She put her hand over the top of the cup and instantly felt heat lick the middle of her palm. She assumed by his tone of voice that Vincent knew everything that had happened between her and Obermars. “I said I had to go to the toilet and would he please pull over. But what I really needed to do was puke.” Her voice suddenly rose almost into anger. “I had to get away from you, Vincent. My head, my body, all of it had to break away. You were over. We were over. I had to clean you out of my system or else I couldn’t have survived. So there was Frank. And I tried with him but it was a disaster. Does that make sense? Do you understand?”

“Yup. Drink your coffee.”

She looked at him suspiciously, not believing the calm and even tone of his voice. “Do we talk about Frank now or can we talk about something else? Because I want to know something, Vincent: two times today you’ve gone into my life like you were just entering a room—it was that simple. How did you do that? It’s like you just turned some doorknob and walked right in. How does it happen?”

He looked away and then turned toward her. “By talking to time.”

“Say that again.”

“You talk to time. Because it’s organic; it understands.

“Look Fizz, you asked before what I learned when I was dead. I said I didn’t know. I don’t remember much about being dead except for little pieces; fragments and fuzzy snapshots of mysterious things, images that have no meaning to me.

“But today I discovered something at the cemetery. I realized something, or understood it, or whatever, and goddamn if it didn’t work. Do you know about Lomo photography?”

“Lomo? No, what’s that?”

“Interesting stuff. We used it very successfully in an advertising campaign at our agency once. Years ago in Russia, before the Iron Curtain came down, they sold this cheap little camera there called the Lomo. I think that’s the name of the company that makes them. It cost almost nothing and was really primitive. You have to wind the film advance with your thumb and I don’t think that you can even adjust the focus on it. Back in those days in Russia what could you expect? But it made it possible for everyone there who wanted one to have a camera.

“Eventually some smart guy came along with the idea of using the camera’s limitations as advantages. They began taking pictures with a Lomo without looking or framing the shot. Or they didn’t aim. They didn’t even look through the viewfinder. They took pictures from the hip, over the shoulder, or holding the camera behind their backs and snapping whatever was there, off to the side… it didn’t matter. Spontaneous, accidental, whatever way you want to do it—just shoot and shoot in every way and direction you can think of. That way, chance decides whether the pictures will be any good or not.

“And you know what? Some were. Some of them were fan-tastic. Today it’s huge—there are Lomo exhibits all over the world: Lomo galleries, clubs, websites… It’s become very popular because it works. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the pictures are awful—lousy, out of focus, dull. But one in a million is totally brilliant.

“My memories of being dead are like a big batch of Lomo photographs piled on a table. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of them are bad, out-of-focus crap. You can’t even tell what’s pictured in most of them. But today when we touched Petras’s gravestone together I found one picture