Nine Island Read Online Free

sit and look at people and think. Do you hear me? Everything. I’m telling you too much. I should stop telling you all this. It only gives you more power.
    Well, maybe.
    Did I notice he was the one driving?
    Months later, when in exchange for all the power he gave me I’d given him all he loved, in an airport, spotting friends from home, he spun and strode fast from me to them, arm swinging forward in greeting. He did not turn his black-coiled head when I passed; his eyes took care not to know me.
    Fucker , typed my thumbs to him.
    Fucker, fuckee, said myself back to me.
    So who told you to climb on the shark?

O UT BACK TODAY, two of the hot tubs bubbled. In the first a man with threads of gray hair on a barnacled skull held a leg to the jets, face fixed in excruciated pleasure. In the next a withered woman floated with her eyes shut. By the rail overlooking the dock were two men in scrubs and, between them, the Mummy. Strapped in a wheelchair fitted with bottles and stalks, his hair a white cloud, eyes shut, mouth open, chin propped up by a metal brace. He was probably awfully handsome once, is still a handsome ninety. He hasn’t been conscious for a very long time.
    Over the cracked concrete to the pool.
    Was on my sixth lap when Fran rolled out. She is ninety-nine and enormous. She had on a white robe, orange one-piece, and pink bathing cap, and her face is square with a complex, cragged topography. When she and the aide pushing her got near, Jorge dumped his towels and came to help lower her in.
    Once in the water, she became queen of the sea, surveying her surf. She shook a hand for her aide to give her a snorkel and mask, fit them on her head, turned, and started motoring around the shallow end. Slow circles, her back a floating isle.
    I timed my laps not to collide with her circles, but she’s strong as a ship and circled so steadily she created a gyre, and I got caught in her current and swerved. Was getting my footing when I saw her planted nearby. She’d taken off her snorkel and mask and fixed me with a glittering eye.
    Guess what, she said.
    What?
    I’ve lost almost everything. Both breasts, a hip, my hair, a kidney, and another piece I forget. But you know what?
    What?
    I don’t give a damn!
    Good for you!
    Nope, she said. I’m ninety-nine and don’t give a goddamn. Hell with it all. She looked at me hard, grinned without teeth, adjusted the snorkel, and pumped on.
    Floating in the cracked hourglass pool . . .
    With Fran’s lost parts and a barnacled man and the Mummy.
    Stop it! wrote K. You are NOT in a retirement home .
    Might be just the thing.

N OT SURE I’VE mentioned the deadline for Ovid: twentyfour verse stories in a hundred and one days. Lots of money in work like this, I can tell you. Sort of translation, but only to start: am changing his stories around. I don’t think Ovid of all people would mind.
    Trans-ferre, tuli, latus : the kind of pattern you can’t shake from your head if this is what you’ve fed it for thirty-plus years.
    Conjugations, declensions. Also lyrics.
    A song starts in my head, plays in a loop for weeks, won’t stop until a new one knocks it from orbit.
    But I believe those songs tell me things, floating to my inner ear from a deeper, Delphic self.
    Maybe tomorrow, maybe someday, you’ll change your place in this world .
    This one I heard for years, until I finally left my death-in-life marriage in Deutschland, and the song magically stopped.
    Had the lyrics wrong, but still, they helped.
    Anyway.
    Spread my blue towel on a lounge chair, settled upon it, put glasses on nose, fixed the Latin open with a black binder clip, splayed the dictionary on the concrete.
    â€”She had no chance of running away from that hunter, and when she realized this, she changed tack: she caught a trunk, skinning her arms, shut her eyes, and screamed silently but so intensely that the waves of her will went down through her loins, legs, and