Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

You're either for me or against me, thought Alex-Li Tandem,
referring to the daylight and, more generally, to the day. He
stretched flat and made two fists. He was fully determined to lie
right here until he was given something to work with, something
noble, something fine. He saw no purpose in leaving his bed for a
day that was against him from the get-go. He had tried it before;
no good could come from it.

A moment later he was surprised to feel a flush of warm light
dappled over him, filtered through a blind. Nonviolent light. This
was encouraging. Compare and contrast with yesterday morning's
light, pettily fascist, cruel as the strip lighting in a hospital
hallway. Or the morning before yesterday morning, when he had kept
his eyes closed for the duration, afraid of whatever was causing
that ominous red throb beneath the eyelids. Or the morning before
that, the Morning of Doom, which no one could have supposed would
continue for seventy-two hours.

NOW OPTIMISTIC, ALEX grabbed the bauble that must be twisted to
open blinds. His fingers were too sweaty. He shuttled up the bed,
dried his left hand on the wall, gripped and pulled. The rain had
come in the night. It looked as if the Flood had passed through
Mountjoy, scrubbed it clean. The whole place seemed to have
undergone an act of accidental restoration. He could see brickwork,
newly red-faced and streaky as after a good weep, balconies with
their clean crop of wet white socks, shirts and sheets. Shiny black
aerials. Oh, it was fine. Collected water had transformed every
gutter, every depression in the pavement, into prism puddles. There
were rainbows everywhere.

Alex took a minute to admire the gentle sun that kept its mildness
even as it escaped a gray ceiling of cloud. On the horizon a
spindly church steeple had been etched by a child over a skyline
perfectly blue and flatly colored in. To the left of that sat the
swollen cupola of a mosque, described with more skill. So people
were off to see God, then, this morning. All of that was still
happening. Alex smiled, weakly. He wished them well.

IN HIS BATHROOM, Alex was almost defeated by the discovery of a
sequence of small tragedies. There was an awful smell. Receptacles
had been missed. Stuff was not where stuff should be. Stepping over
stuff, ignoring stuff, stoic Alex turned to the vanity mirror. He
yanked it towards him by its metal neck until its squares became
diamonds, parallelograms, one steel line. He had aged, terribly.
The catch in his face, the one that held things up, this had been
released. But how long was it since he had been a boy? A few days?
A year? A decade? And now this?

He bared his teeth to the mirror. They were yellow. But on the plus
side, they were there. He opened his Accidental eyes (Rubinfine's
term: halfway between Oriental and Occidental) wide as they would
go and touched the tip of his nose to the cold glass. What was the
damage? His eyes worked. Light didn't hurt. Swallowing felt basic,
uncomplicated. He was not shivering. He felt no crippling paranoia
or muscular tremors. He seized his penis. He squeezed his cheeks.
Present, correct. Everything was still where it appears in the
textbooks. And it seemed unlikely that he would throw up, say, in
the next four hours, something he had not been able to predict with
any certainty for a long time. These were all wonderful, wonderful
developments. Breathing heavily, Alex shaved off three days' worth
of growth (had it been three days?). Finishing up, he cut himself
only twice and applied the sad twists of tissue.

Teeth done, Alex remembered the wear-and-tear deposit he had paid
his landlord and shuffled back to the bedroom. He needed a cloth,
but the kitchen was another country. Instead he took a pillowcase,
dipped it in a glass of water and began to scrub at the handprint
on the wall. Maybe it looked like art? Maybe it had a certain
presence? He stepped back and looked at it, at the grubby yellow
outline. Then he scrubbed some more. It didn't look like art. It
looked like someone had died in the room. Alex sat down on the
corner of his bed and pressed his thumbs to his eyes to stop two
ready tears. A little gasp escaped him. And what's remarkable, he
thought, what's really amazing, is this, is how tiny the actual
thing was in the first place. This thing that almost destroyed me.
Two, no, maybe three days ago he had placed a pill on his tongue,
like a tiny communion wafer. He'd left it there for ten seconds, as
recommended, before swallowing. He had never done anything like
this before. Nothing could have prepared him! Moons rose, suns
fell, for days, for nights, all without him noticing!

Legal name: Microdot. Street name: Superstar. For a time it had
made itself famous all through his body. And now it was
over.

The Autograph Man
by by Zadie Smith [5]

Genres: Fiction [10]
hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Random House
ISBN-10: 037550186X
ISBN-13: 9780375501869