It’s rip cord time: fat glebes of rubber are peeling off my brain. I’m treadless; I have the old Synapse Collapse. My eyes corner like an acid-fool Ferrari. I’m reading. It’s a speed and comprehension test. Opened up full, I will score 316 wpm and 76 per cent. But when you consider that I read every damn thing three times—once) for meaning; twice) for style; thrice) for what I can steal—my flat-out rate is probably closer to 105.33333. Yet there are perks that come with being a trilobite-slow reader. I’m transient: I live in books, I don’t read them. Point at any title in my library. Go on: try me. I can tell you exactly where I read it: time of day, temperature, and the stewardess’ cup size. As for plot, character, and general gist: flunk: I have no idea whatever. The pages might never have been cut. You’ve heard about Total Recall. What we have here is Total Remiss.
The Little Man will speak in hyphens, e.g., “Upon completion of this speed-reading program, the average person is reading anywhere-from-l,500-to-2,500-wpm with approximately one-and-one-half-times-more-comprehension.” We’ll all be word jocks. Excuse me: think I’ll put on my sneakers and read a bit. The Little Man straight-jives and nice-guys us right to brownringville. He’s very young and clean: but even now there’s a prefatory bummishness about him. I figure he looks the way Ratso Rizzo must have looked taking his First Communion. “You’ll get a certificate from our speedreading school. It-sounds-pretty-impressive-on-a-résumé.” On an otherwise blank resume. The Little Man mentions this 14-year-old chick who can do 13,000 wpm: Jaws in 4.22 minutes. And I wonder, suppose it were a supercomic novel instead, a great Evelyn Waugh. Would her laughs come out—hpp, hpp, hpp,—high-voiced and jerky, like 33 rpm on 78?
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