Kensington Gardens

Excerpted from Kensington Gardens by Rodrigo Fresan. Copyright 2006 by Rodrigo Fresan. Published in June 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. THE CONDEMNED It begins with a boy who was never a man and ends with a man who was never a boy. Something like that. Or better: it begins with a man's suicide and a boy's death, and ends with a boy's death and a man's suicide. Or with various deaths and various suicides at varying ages. I'm not sure. It doesn't matter. Everybody knowsit's understandable, excusablethat numbers, names, and faces are the first to be jettisoned or to throw themselves from the platform during the shipwreck of memory, which always lies there ready for annihilation on the rails of the past. One thing, at any rate, is clear. At the end of the beginningat the beginning of the endPeter Pan dies. Peter Pan kills himself and here comes the train. The scream of steel hurtling through the guts of London like a curse, like the happiest of lost souls. Peter Pan jumps onto the tracks at just the right moment. Peter Pan is one of those two people a week whostatistics saythrow themselves onto the rails with British punctuality just before the train's triumphal entrance. A woman screams when she sees him jump. A woman screams when she sees a woman screaming. All at oncescreams are more contagious than laughter, and there are so many screams in this storyit's the same scream that leaps from woman to woman, from mouth to mouth. The same scream makes the cars brake, and the brakes also scream at the unexpected and futile effort of having to stop all those wheels and all the steel riding on those wheels. Yes, without warning the whole world is one single scream. It's April 5, 1960, the hypothetical day of my increasingly hypothetical birth (the scream of my hypothetical mother, who spreads her legs to push me and my hypothetical first scream out), and it's the day of the death and suicide of the respected publisher Peter Llewelyn Davies, founder of Peter Davies Ltd., considered an "artist among editors." "Peter Pan Becomes a Publisher," ran the headline reporting the professional birth of the man who now emerges at dusk from the Royal Court Hotel and crosses Sloane Square, thinking that he became an editor in an attempt to vanquish the horror of having been a character for so many years, too many years. And I like to thinkbecause it's so fitting at the start of a book, and because certain gestures tell us so much about a protagonistthat Peter Llewelyn Davies is accosted by an anachronistic pack of Chelsea beggar boys; I hesitate when it comes to deciding whether he passes out a handful of coins. What I am sure of is that Peter Llewelyn Davies goes down the stairs to the underground station and waits a few minutes on the platform, until he sees the light at the end of the tunnel, a light that grows steadily stronger and closer. Peter Llewelyn Davies jumps and doesn't scream. Let everybody else scream, thinks Peter Llewelyn Davies, in the enormous second it takes his body to fall to the rails; then comes a blue spark, and a smell of electricity, and the wheels, and the scream, and the screams. To believeif karma's concentric spirals and the zigzagging laws of reincarnation don't deem it impossiblethat the immortal spirit of Peter Llewelyn Davies abandons his ruined body and floats far away, and then enters my brand-new self at almost the instant I am born,Wimmer, Natasha is the author of 'Kensington Gardens ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780374181017 and ISBN 0374181012.