Free The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith

and cheongsam. She was lost on the streets of fifties Broadway. And then, on the left, the same girl but now made over, dressed as the toast of Hollywood, in a mushroom-shaped ball gown, with the little white gloves, the pink princess slippers, the coil of lustrous black hair peeking over one shoulder. The story of the film, essentially, was the progress from the picture on the right to the picture on the left. You had to read the video case backwards, like Hebrew.
    There was a split in the protective plastic. Alex slipped his finger in and felt around, touching first one Kitty and then the other.
Citizen Kane. Battleship Potemkin. Gone with the Wind. La Strada.
It amazed him that so many people—in fact, it would be fair to say
most people
—were unaware that the 1952 Celebration Pictures musical
The Girl from Peking,
starring Jules Munshin as Joey Kay and Kitty Alexander as May-Ling Han, was in fact the greatest movie ever made. Carefully, he squeezed her into a fold of his bag.
    IN THE HALLWAY , he took his waxy trench coat off the stand and put it on. He felt small in it today. He was twenty-seven years old. He was emotionally undeveloped, he supposed, like most Western kids. He was probably in denial of death. He was certainly suspicious of enlightenment. Above all, he liked to be entertained. He was in the habit of mouthing his own personality traits to himself like this while putting his coat on; he suspected that farm boys and people from the Third World never did this, that they were less self-conscious. He was still,
still
slightly thrilled by the idea of receiving post addressed to him and not to his mother. Bending down, he picked up a bundle from the mat and flicked through bills, bills, pizza advert, bank statement, envelopes from America containing movie stars and presidents, a brochure regarding erectile dysfunction, a free package of creamy foundation for an imaginary white woman he wasn’t sleeping with.
    3.
    Occasionally he went to Western doctors. They prescribed things to relax him (the ugly neologism of choice was
de-stress
), ranging from fresh air to ball games to little colored pills. Last year he had visited Poland and walked the placid squares of Kraków, dosed to the eyeballs, feeling some sort of communion, holding his breath when the bells rang, keening in cafés over an unbounded loss he couldn’t quite name. The pills had a priapic side effect. Each pair of feminine legs clipping past caused him agony. He had the oddest feeling: a need to impregnate everyone in the country. Walking through a narrow street near O´swie,cim he had been confronted by a huge cloud of pollen—at least, he had presumed it pollen and walked straight through it. Actually, it was a wasp swarm. Being a young man of Mountjoy, a young man with all the mod cons and every expectation of security, personal and national, he had not been able to conceive that the dark cloud he strode into might be anything dangerous. He had written a poem about all of this, his second poem in twenty-seven years. It was not good. But what might he have been in 1750 in one of these Polish squares, wearing boots and a hat and the expectations of the Enlightenment and an impressive gold-buckled belt? What would Rubinfine have been? And Adam? And Joseph?
I saw the best minds of my generation / accept jobs on the fringes of the entertainment industry.
    The phone rang. The downstairs phone being without cord, Alex picked it up and walked to and fro with it in the hallway for a while, like a new father with a distressed baby, hoping the thing might either make a new noise or fall silent. It did not. On his third fro, he came up against his own front door and stopped. He looked at the door. He turned from it, and tried looking at it again. He drew his fingers along the groove of the unvarnished pine, against it. The phone continued to ring.
    4.
    Autograph collecting, as Alex is not the first to observe, shares much with woman-chasing and