And Now You Can Go: A Novel - Softcover

Vida, Vendela

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400032415 ISBN 13: 9781400032419

Verlag: Anchor, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Vendela Vida’s fearless, critically acclaimed fiction debut follows the unpredictable recovery of a young woman as she tries to make sense of her life after an encounter at gunpoint.

Accosted one afternoon in Riverside Park by a man who doesn't want to die alone, Ellis, a young grad student, talks her way out of the situation by reciting poetry to her desperate captor. He lets her go, but is she free? Rejecting the overtures of her kind-hearted boyfriend, the police, and the suitors who would like to save her, Ellis finds herself unable to escape the event. She leaves the city to visit her family; joins her mother on a medical mission to the Philippines. When she returns, Ellis discovers something more about life–perhaps even how to take back her own.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vendela Vida's first book, Girls on the Verge–a journalistic study of female initiation rituals–grew out of her MFA thesis at Columbia University. She is co-editor of The Believer magazine, and lives in Northern California with her husband. And Now You Can Go is her first novel.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

morous, fast-paced debut novel about the effects—some predictable, some wildly unexpected—that an encounter at gunpoint can have on the life of a (previously) assured young woman.

The gun in question is pointed at twenty-one-year-old Ellis as she walks through a New York City park. In the end she is unrobbed and physically unharmed. But she is left psychologically reeling.

Over the next few weeks Ellis keeps everyone at bay: the police, the men who want to save her (“the ROTC boy” poet and “the red-faced representative of the world”), and the university therapist who hints that her sweaters may be too tight. But when Ellis accompanies her mother, a nurse, on a mission to the Philippines, she finds that life—even if held up—cannot be held back, and neither, finally, can she.


From the Hardcover edition.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

What Happens When These Things Happen

It was 2:15 in the afternoon of December 2 when a man holding a gun approached me in Riverside Park. I know this because, five minutes before, a mother pushing a sleeping girl in a blue stroller had asked me for the time.

I was twenty-one and had moved to New York that September, knowing no one, and my days were the meekly sunlit rooms of a vacant house. I spent my afternoons in Riverside Park, across the street from my apartment. The trees were tall, and, by December, without birds. In my mind, the story is always in the present, always starting at 2:15. I'm walking along the park's promenade when a man behind me says, "Ma'am?"

I turn around, guessing he needs directions, or that I've dropped a glove. Who would call a young woman ma'am? The man is wearing a black leather jacket, unzipped, and glasses with thin frames. His right hand is tucked into his jacket and he appears to be holding the left side of his waist, like Napoleon. He's large--more wide than tall--and his thick legs step closer. I'm on the promenade and I can hear kids playing with their nannies, with their dogs, and the sound of their laughter is the distance between me and them. I take a step backward, then turn and keep walking in the direction I was before, but faster.

"Ma'am," the voice behind me says. "I have a gun. If you keep walking I'll shoot you. Just do as I say."

I turn back around to face him. I think, I hope, he's joking, until he opens his jacket and shows me the gun in his right hand. I've seen guns before--I've held them in my hands, at a shooting range in Florida, with an old boyfriend before we got orange and lime ice cream. I've felt their weight, been thrown back after firing a .55. But I have never seen a gun pointed at me.

"Do you want money?" I say, and empty out the pockets of my blue coat. The lining is plaid; I don't know if I've noticed this before. I rummage up eighty cents in a shaky hand and offer it to him. "It's all I have," I say. I want to believe money is what he wants.

He looks at my hand as if it has a hole in it. "I don't want your money," he says. "And stop walking away or I'll shoot." I didn't know I was walking away. Now I'm saying "No, no, no," in something like a chant, and I realize I'm not saying no to him, but to the plot I sense developing. I know what happens when these things happen.

There's a wall on the right side of the promenade, parallel to the river, and I imagine that behind this wall is where he'll take me with the gun he'll hold to my head as he rapes me.

"Let's just go over here," he says, and juts his chin toward the wall. I think about making a break for it, about running so fast I can't even look down for fear of stumbling. But I imagine myself being shot in the back. Paralyzed. No, I decide, rape is better.

The man with the gun and I are walking next to each other, along the promenade. We're a couple going for a stroll in the park.

"Let's sit on this bench here," he says. There are two benches: one faces the river and New Jersey, the other faces the park. I'm relieved when he picks the bench that faces the park and the promenade, where there are usually people, where I pray there will soon be people.

"I want to die," he says.

His eyelashes are long. Maybe he doesn't want to kill me. He only wants to die. I've been holding my breath, and I try to exhale without him noticing.

"I want to die," he repeats.

I heard you, I want to shout, but don't. He's staring at the trees in front of us.

"There's nothing," he says.

I wonder what brought him here. Has he been fired? From what job? Something professional--the glasses. Or someone left him. There must be a reason he chose me. A woman left him and I look like her. Maybe there's no reason. I picture a woman who looks nothing like me. I try to place him at a Chinese restaurant or at the head of a table, blowing out birthday candles. But I can't imagine him doing anything but sitting next to me in this park, holding a gun.

"I don't want to die alone," he says.

My hands, still inside my gloves, are soaked with sweat.

"I want to die with someone."

I can smell the leather of his jacket and I see he's wearing glasses that say "Giorgio Armani" in tiny, precise letters on the side. I am going to be killed by a man wearing Giorgio Armani glasses. He takes the gun out of his jacket and puts it to my head.

The pressure against my skull, just above my ear, makes me think I've been shot and there is a bullet going through my thoughts. I picture the only time I saw my mother cry.

I was fifteen and my father was gone. We didn't know where he was. He was still our father, and my parents were not divorced, but now he lived in Minnesota. His explanations were business-related, and he spent some weekends at home. This time he hadn't been in touch in months.

When he finally called one day, the ringing of the phone sounded different--sirenlike, screaming. My mother answered. I knew who it was when she said "Hello" and then stared at the phone, crying. I had never seen her cry before, and it was an ugly sight: the flat planes of her face went limp, shifted like sand. I ran to her, near the kitchen sink, put my hand over hers, and guided the phone back into the cradle.

The man with the gun is waiting for me to say something. But what? I imagine the barrel is an outgrowth of my head: the stem of a thought bubble in a cartoon.

"Maybe you're just having a bad day," I say to him, with a tilted head and hope.

He doesn't say anything. It's quiet for too long.

I smell garlic. It's coming from the gun. Does this mean the gun's recently been fired? Or that it hasn't been used in years? Somehow, this distinction seems important. I look down at the man's Doc Martens, the laces tied in double bows. A few feet over, a used condom has been discarded. I look back at the double bows and then re-tilt my head so it's up against the gun--I don't want him to think I'm trying to get out of this.

Then the gun is down. The man has put the gun in his lap so he can talk. "I feel calm next to you," he says. "You make me feel calm." He's looking at the gun in his hands.

"Calm is good," I say.

"Yeah," he says. "It's good. I feel calm enough to finally die. For us to die together."

I can see people to my right, approaching. A woman and two children. I want them to be three men.

The man is still talking. I watch his chapped lips move and I think, I am still alive. I look toward the woman and children and see they've turned back the other way. Across from me--maybe seventy-five feet in front of me--is a parks service man who is cutting down trees or using a leaf blower. I can't see what he's doing, but he's making so much noise that even if I screamed he wouldn't hear me. And if I did scream, wouldn't the man with the gun shoot?

It hits me: Bookstore. Durer. I'll get the man with the gun to a populated place, where there are people and phones and police. I'll get him to go back to the bookstore with me. I was there three hours before. I was going to buy a book on Durer. Woodcuts! I'll get him excited about woodcuts, or maybe frescoes, and then we'll go to the bookstore, to the oversized-book section, and he won't suspect even for a moment what my agenda is. Or maybe he will suspect, but by then it will be too late. I can suddenly smell the trees we're sitting under.

"You know what?" I say. "There's so much good stuff out there. There's painting!" I feel like a cheerleader gone haywire.

He...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anchor
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1400032415
• ISBN 13: 9781400032419
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland