[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

World the rooms would hold. Here a 23" television set, its rabbit-ears askew
against the wall ...
there a dehumidifier, busily purring at the silence ... over there a set of
Royal Doulton mugs, Pickwick figures cherubically smiling at their own
ingenuousness ... and a paint-by-the-numbers portrait of Washington astride a
white stallion ... a lemon glass vase overflowing with swizzle sticks from
exotic restaurants ... a stack of Life, Time, Look and Holiday magazines ... a
reclining lounge chair that vibrated ... a stereo set with accompanying racks
of albums, mostly
Offenbach and Richard Strauss ... a hide-a-bed sofa with orange and brown
throw pillows ... a novelty bird whose long beak, when moistened, dipped the
creature forward on its wire rack, submerging its face in a glass of water,
then pulled it erect, to repeat the performance endlessly...
The jerky movement of the novelty bird in the room, a bad cartoon playing over
and over, was intended as reassurance of life still going on; yet it was a
cheap, shadowy substitute, and instead of charming the two high school boys
Page 168
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
who had brought Lilian Goldbosch home, it unsettled them. It made them aware
of the faint scent of decay and immolation here; a world within a world, a
specie of creative precontinuum in which emotions had palpable massiveness,
greater clarity.
The boys helped the still-shaken woman to the sofa, and sat her down heavily.
Her face was not old, the lines were adornment rather than devastation, but
there was a superimposition of pain on the tidy, even features. Cobwebs on
marble. Her hair--so carefully tended and set every week by a professional,
tipped, ratted, back-combed, pampered--was disheveled, limp, as though soaked
with sweat. Moist stringlets hung down over one cheek. Her eyes, a light blue,
altogether perceptive and lucid, were filmed by a milkiness that might have
been tears, and might have been gelatinous
file:///F|/rah/Harlan%20Ellison/Ellison,%20Harlan%20-%20Love%20Ain't%20Nothing
.txt (123 of 148) [1/15/03 6:37:34 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Harlan%20Ellison/Ellison,%20Harlan%20-%20Love%20Ain't%20Nothing
.txt anguish. Her mouth seemed moist, as though barely containing a wash of
tormented sounds.
The years rolled back for Lilian Goldbosch. Once more she knew the sound of
the enclosed van whose exhaust pipes led back into the prisoners' compartment,
the awful keee-gl keee-gl keee-gl of the klaxon, rising above the frozen
streets; frozen with fear of movement (if I stay quiet, they'll miss me, pass
me by). The Doppler-impending approach of the van, its giant presence directly
below the window, right at the curb, next to the face and the ears, and then
its hissing passage as it swept away, a moving vacuum cleaner of living
things, swallowing whole families. With eyes white eggshells in pale faces.
And into the rear of that van, the exhaust whispering its sibilant tune of gas
and monoxided forever. All this came back to Lilian Goldbosch as she
shamefully spaded-over her memories of the past half hour. Those boys. Their
armbands. Her fear. The crowd attacking. The way she had leaped at them. The
madness. The fear.
The fear.
Again, the fear.
Burning, blazing through all of it: the fear!
That boy with his imperious blond good looks, the Aryan Superman: could he
really know? Could he somehow, this American child born between clean sheets,
with the greatest terror afailing mark in school, could he somehow know what
that hated black swastika meant to her, to whole generations, to races of
individuals who had worn yellow Stars of David and the word Juden, to
shattered spirits and captured hearts who stood on alien roads as Stukas
dived, or walked in desolate resignation to already filling mass graves, or
labored across no-man's-lands with shellbursts lighting the way? Could he
know, or was this something else ... a new thing, that merely looked like the
old sickness, the fear?
For the first time in more years than she cared to remember--had it been only
twenty years since all of it?--Lilian Goldbosch had a surge of desire. Not the
gilded wastes she had substituted for caring: not the pathological attention
to hair in the latest frosted style, not the temporal acquisition of goods to
fill empty rooms, not the television with it gray images, surrogates of life. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]