Sunday, August 23, 2015

the last book I ever read (Mat Johnson's Pym, excerpt five)

from Pym: A Novel by Mat Johnson:

“This bar holds a lot of memories for me. I was here, taking a break from working a dock in Brooklyn, the morning the truck bomb went off in the shipping entrance of the Twin Towers. I heard the bomb go off, went outside. Smelled the smoke and saw the soot-covered people, and it all kicked in. I knew exactly what I had to do. It was time to march,” he told me, hit the last word slow and hard so that I could feel the impact, then took a swig of his carrot juice. Immediately locating a Kinko’s, my cousin had a flyer typed, printed out, and copied by the hundred before the smoke had even cleared. Setting the rally for four hours in the future, Booker Jaynes barked the news and handed out the flyers as he took his long walk north, from City Hall to Fourteenth Street. Hours later, flyers dispensed and throat parched from calling others to the cause, Booker Jaynes arrived at his rally point at Union Square, the historic site of American civil disobedience, and received the shock of his life.



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