Invisible Boy Read Online Free Page A

We had a cinder-brick air
     shaft view: the quality of light made it seem like the asshole of February, year-round.
    Yong Sun was running the credit-card batch while Yumiko and Karen typed away with phones to their ears.
    I booted up my PC and took a sip of coffee, waiting for the third line to ring. The cool part of the job was talking to customers.
     We had a direct hookup with Baker & Taylor’s warehouses in New Jersey and Illinois—wholesalers with instant access to virtually
     any book in print.
    People called from Tucson, Fargo, Bakersfield, Anchorage. They faxed orders from Buenos Aires and Paris and Guam. They sought
     lost favorite volumes to share with their children. They yearned for obscure absurdist novels, slender poetry collections,
     meaty anthologies. They thirsted for noir and space opera and Zane Grey, Aeschylus and
    Kipling and
Hollywood Babylon
. They wanted to tie knots and grow roses and build wooden dinghies, to mend fences and marriages and classic muscle cars.
    The phone rang at last. I punched the blinking button for line
    three and picked up. “Good morning, this is the Catalog, how may I help you?”
    At the end of my shift a few hours later, I found Pagan lying sideways on the front-office carpet. She was surrounded by leaning
     towers of paper trays, her head and arms shoved into the guts of our Xerox machine.
    “Fucking jammed again,” she said, pushing herself back out. “Not like it matters, since we’re out of fucking toner.”
    The only indication that it was probably ninety degrees and muggy out on West Fifty-seventh by now was the dark tan of Pague’s
     legs, unbroken from her flip-flops to the hem of her raggedy shorts.
    You want people to wear stockings and shit, you’ve gotta pay
way
more than six bucks an hour.
    Pagan slotted all the trays back into the machine and tried to push its door closed, but the catch was blown so it took two
     slams with the side of her fist to make it stay shut.
    “Espece de merde,”
she muttered.
“Ma che cazzo fai.”
    I leaned against the edge of the reception desk. “So get Tracy to make the
Granta
Bitches let us use theirs.”
    “She’s stuck in Geoffrey’s office with Betty, going over edits for the Fall Bulletin.”
    “O joy, O rapture.”
    Betty was the ex-wife of Julian, the owner, and had retained enough post-divorce cred to march down from the
Review
and slap us around whenever she felt like it. On bad days that was pretty much hourly.
    A door crashed open against Sheetrock, down the short hallway toward Editorial.
    I could hear Betty doing her usual screech-ranting-banshee number: all “congenital
idiocy
” and “how-
dare
-you-fuck-with-me-like-this,” and
blah blah
psycho-bipolar-hosebeast
blah
.
    Pague and I flinched at the noise of a sudden crack-splash explosion:
Crockery v. Wall.
    “Fucking Betty,” said my sister. “She made me bring her that coffee. In
my
mug from home.”
    “Bitch throws like a champ, though. Especially considering she’s missing an arm.”
    “Don’t be evil,” said Pagan.
    “Compared to
Betty
?”
    “You want to be like her when you grow up?”
    She narrowed her eyes at me, hands on her hips. No one can shame me like Pagan. Especially when she’s right.
    “No,” I said. “Of course not.”
    “Go tell the
Granta
Bitches I need to make copies. I don’t want to extend Betty’s psychotic break du jour.”
    I checked my watch. “Can’t. Late for the cemetery.”
    “Chickenshit.”
    “What if I interrupt some
Granta
-Bitch Kill-Toddlers-for-Satan fest?” I asked. “They’ll go for my throat like a pack of Dobermans.”
    She rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe I’m related to you.”
    “Them’s the breaks. Gotta run.”

5

    I ’d never thought of Jamaica as an actual place.
    It had always been more transition than geography. Three stops out of Penn Station and you alighted briefly at this celestial
     concrete expanse carpeted all Jackson Pollock with discarded Kool butts and