The Visible Filth Read Online Free Page A

in time.”
    She walked up to where he sat, standing over him and pressing herself close. “Asshole,” she said, and kissed him. He felt himself rise to her, and she grinned as she pushed his hands away. “I have to work.”
    “Evil,” he said, pulling her down for another kiss first, then watching as she went to her office in the next room, which was a calamity of stacked papers, earmarked books, discs, DVDs, and zip drives. She settled into her chair in the midst of all of this, as comfortable in the apparent chaos as a fish in its grotto. She clicked the computer on, cradling a mug in both hands while it booted up. Her t-shirt gathered at her waist and Will was briefly mesmerized by the golden cast of her legs in the morning sunlight.
    “You’re beautiful, you know,” he said.
    She gave him a sweet smile. “Good boy.”
    He shambled into the bathroom and started the shower, trying to decide what to do to fill his day until he had to be back at work. There was a lot of empty space until then, and empty spaces suited him just fine.
     
     
    A S HE WALKED through the dense morning heat, heading toward the bar and Eric’s apartment, Steve nested in the middle of Will’s mind, bending every other thought toward him like some terrible star. He seemed to represent an inevitable end, and though Will knew himself well enough to understand that this feeling was as much a product of his own insecurity as of anything else, he couldn’t escape its pull.
    Will had spent his life skimming over the surface of things, impatient with the requirements of engagement. He told himself that this was because he was open to experience in a way most people weren’t, that you sapped the potential for spontaneity from life if you regimented your hours with obligation. This rationalization came upon him in college, shortly after he dropped out, converting all that money invested by his parents into so much tinder for the fire.
    Most of the time he believed it.
    And why not? Women liked him. He was tall, and he stayed fit without too much effort. He was generally cheerful and had an easy charisma. As long as he had a woman in his life and reasonable access to booze and the occasional line of coke, he figured he’d be okay. He’d been working as a bartender since dropping out of school six or seven years ago, and he believed he might just be able to live out the next fifty years of his life in this state of calibrated contentment.
    He loved Carrie, he supposed, but love was a tide that came and went. Who knew how long she would stay with him? She was ambitious, and he could tell it annoyed her that he wasn’t. He figured her patience would wear out sometime in the next six months. Another reason that being a bartender was such an ideal job. The girls grew like fruits on a tree. You practically just had to reach out and pluck one.
    Life so far seemed like a kind of dance to him, and he was pleased to discover that he was pretty good at it. If there was something hollow underneath it all, a well of fear that sometimes seemed to pull everything else into it and leave him clutching the stone rim for fear of falling into himself, well, that was just part of being human, he supposed. That’s what the booze was for.
    This line of thought brought him back around to Alicia, and her irritating infatuation with her little hipster douchebag beau-du-jour, Jeffrey. Alicia played the field even more shamelessly than he ever had, and while that intimidated him at first, he eventually came around to admiring her for it. She’d sit at the bar by herself and they’d bullshit about work, her latest boyfriend, his newest girlfriend. When Carrie came along and stuck around longer than most, Alicia had the good sense to spare her from attack, without even having to be asked. Will found that impressive. They hadn’t ever slept together – a fact which apparently never crossed Alicia’s mind, but which lodged like a seed in his brain and had since sprouted