self help reading

from The Body Artist, Don Delillo:

It felt like home, being here, and she raced through the days with their small ravishing routines, days the same, paced and organized but with a simultaneous wallow, uncentered, sometimes blank in places, days that moved so slow they ached.

Her body felt different to her in ways she did not understand. Tight, framed, she didn’t know exactly. Slightly foreign and unfamiliar. Different, thinner, didn’t matter.

She woke early every morning and this was the worst time, the first murderous instant of lying in bed and remembering something and knowing in the flow of the same breath what it was.

The plan was to organize time until she could live again.



She looked at him.
“Tell me. You’ve been here how long?”
He didn’t raise his head. There was something so strange about him that she heard her words hang in the room, predictable and trite. She felt no fear. He had a founding quality—lost and found—and she was, she guessed, the finder.
“You have been here,” she said, speaking clearly, pausing between words.

“Talk to me. I am talking,” he said.
She thought she understood what he meant by this. There was a certain futility in his tone, an endlessness of effort, suggesting things he could not easily make clear to her no matter how much he said.

She knew it was foolish to examine so closely. She was making things up. But this was the effect he had shadow-inching through a sentence, showing a word in its facets and aspects, works like moons in particular phases. . . He talked about objects in the room, stumblingly, and she wondered what he saw, or failed to see, or saw so differently she could begin to conjure its outlines.

She says she is going to the restroom . . . wait . . . but she doesn’t comes back.



She stopped at the edge of the doorway, aware of the look on her face.
She knew this look, a frieze of false anticipation.
She stood for a while, thinking into this.
Her face still wore a decorative band, a trace across the eyes of a prospect of wonders. It was a look that nearly floated free of her so she could puff her cheeks, childlike, and blow it away.