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.Which character did my mother not want to be anymore? I wondered.Were there so many characters in her that the moment she stopped being one, she immediately became another?"That's right," Lees Ardor said.She picked her head up and looked at me urgently, as though she was saying something important for the first time ever."I didn't want to be the hard-bitten character who had endured tragedy and come out a better, more sympathetic person.""Why not?""You don't understand," she said, and started wailing again."I want to be a real person.""I do understand," I said.Because I was pretty sure I did, and I was also pretty sure I knew why she didn't believe in literature or like it very much, either.She didn't believe in or like books because she feared being a character in them and thus not a real person, whatever that was, and not knowing what a real person was made her hate the books even more, the books and the words within them, too, and then that hatred extended to all words everywhere, like "cunt," which was a word she loathed but could not stop using and which, like all words, was lousy and inadequate.Maybe it was words, all of them, all of them that could gesture feebly toward your anger but not do justice to the complexity of it, that made her ― or her Wesley Mincher ― go out and contact a complete stranger and ask him to burn down the Mark Twain House.This theory came out of my head, fully formed, like that Greek god's daughter, who leaped out of his skull and into the ancient world, fully formed.Then I made a mistake.Empathy makes us do things we shouldn't, which makes you wonder why it's one of our most respected emotions.Empathy made me touch Lees Ardor, gently on her back, just to let her know that I understood what she was going through and that I was there, as her detective, to comfort her.But it seemed as though she didn't want a detective or a comforter.At my touch, she leaped out of her chair and turned to face me.Her tears disappeared almost immediately, as though made of an especially fast-drying sort of salt."Who the hell are you, anyway?" she asked."I'm Sam Pulsifer.Your" ― and here I paused, as anyone would have ― "manfriend, Professor Mincher, wrote me a letter a long time ago, asking me to burn down the Mark Twain House." "Her face changed dramatically then.Outrage and suspicion took the place of sadness, as so often happens."So you're fucking Sam Pulsifer."I am," I said, although the way she said it made me wish I weren't.Lees Ardor looked at me in such disbelief that I thought it might move the discussion along if I gave her some form of identification.So I took my driver's license out of my wallet and handed it to her.She looked at it, looked at me, looked at it again, and then said in a low, hissing voice, "You owe us three thousand dollars.""I do?" I said."You do," she said."Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about.""I'm not pretending," I said."You are," she said."I'm not," I said, and we went around like this for a while, like enemies without weapons and armed with only a very limited vocabulary.Finally I decided just to ask the question that might end the fight: "Why do I owe you three thousand dollars?""Fine," she said.Then she adopted a theatrically bored tone, to let me know she was playing along but not at all happy to do so: "You owe us three thousand dollars because that's what we paid you to burn down the Mark Twain House.Which you did not do.""Did you pay me in person?" I asked, playing along myself."No," she said."You sent Wesley a letter saying you would be willing to burn down the house for three thousand dollars.Wesley agreed.He left the money in an envelope inside a dumpster next to the Cumberland Farms, right down the street from the Mark Twain House.That was yesterday at noon.You were very specific in your instructions.""I guess I was," I said."Except that wasn't me." And before she could respond, I said, "If that was me, then why would I show up right now, after I hadn't successfully set the fire you paid me to set, so that you could then demand your money back? Now that I had your money, why wouldn't I just disappear?"She thought for a while, her forehead wrinkled, as if I were an especially difficult passage in a novel and she were trying to unpack me.Who knows, maybe she was trying to figure out whether I was a character, too, and if so, which one or ones."Shit," Lees Ardor finally said."We'd better go see Wesley [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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