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invaded him from all quarters, tumbling him in his own bed like a
pebble in a flash flood. Shamed and terrified, he bit his mouth and
clenched around himself, but the cry clawed free of him at the last, as
his body shook loose from his will, resonating helplessly to the alien
joy that used him in order to savor itself that much more and had
already forgotten him as it let him go. He fell back to sleep instantly
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r r
and dreamed that he was being murderously assaulted by the Thumper's
bunny. Neon eyes weeping flames, it kept shaking him and screaming,
"You're a spy! You're a spy!" And in the dream, he was.
At breakfast Ben corrected exams while Sia sat in the kitchen's
small bay window with a newspaper, eating her favorite morning glop of
yogurt, honey, mangos, and dry cereal and giggling softly over the
comic strips. The one time she caught Farrell staring at her, she asked
him to make her a cup of herb tea. She was dozing when he left for
work, a dusty gray Persian cat sprawled twitching in the sunlight, and
Ben was snapping pencil points and cursing middle-class illiteracy.
_So, it will make us mad_.
He literally ran into Suzy McManus, coming through the front door
as he was going out. It was dangerously easy not to see Suzy; she took
up so little space so quietly. She was a thin woman, almost gaunt, pale
of eye and skin and hair, and her voice, addressing anyone but Sia, was
equally anorexic, starved of all inflection. Only when she spoke with
Sia did she even begin to take on color; and on the occasions when
Farrell came on them laughing together, he was astonished each time to
realize how young she was. He had promptly determined that he would
make Suzy laugh himself, but it was all he could do to get her to talk
to him, let alone understanding her mumbled responses to his jokes and
questions. Now, righting her before she fell, he flirted with her,
saying, "Suzy, this makes the third time I've knocked you down and
stepped on you. Don't I get to keep you now?"
Suzy answered him in--as far as he could ever tell--absolute
seriousness, in her usual downcast whisper. "Oh, no, it takes much more
trampling than that." She ducked her head abruptly, in a way she had,
turning so that she almost looked directly at him, yet Farrell never
saw her eyes. Then she vanished, which was another way of hers,
slipping past him toward thç kitchen, but trailing away into air before
she reached the door. Farrell had a very bad day at Thumper's.
Farrell had spent a good deal of his adult life hunting up a new
place to stay. In any other city he would have set out with the fewest
possible expectations. But his image of Avicenna was ten years old and
full of big, sunny rooms and flowery, winy, rickety houses where all
his friends lived. It took him a week to discover that almost every one
of the dear places where he had been drunk and in love and floating
were now either parking lots or university offices. The few that
remained were happily unchanged, except that their rents had
quadrupled. Farrell stood for a while in the fuchsiablurred courtyard
under the window of Ellen's little room. He knew she was long gone from
there, or he would never have made the visit, but it was a matter of
continuity.
"There were so many good ones," he said to Ben. "Sometimes you
couldn't remember whose house you were in, they were all so good."
"They were dumps," Ben said. "We were just too horny to notice at
the time."
Farrell sighed. "Was that it? So much for golden lads and
lasses." They were alone in the faculty locker room at the gymnasium,
stripping to swim. Ben liked to go there at least twice a week, after
his night class. Farrell said, "I miss them anyway, those times. Not
me, you understand, just the times."
Ben glanced briefly at him. "Hell, you were homesick for
everything while it was all going on. You just wandered along backward,
fastest nostalgia in the West." He stuffed his socks into his shoes and
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r r
put the shoes in his locker, and the compressed, delicate violence of
the movement made Farrell think of a leopard floating with his ripped
prey up to the fork of a tree. Ben had always been deceptively strong,
the result of dutiful exercise, but his strength had seemed acquired,
rented for the occasion, not a casual fire. He said, "Come on, drag you
for beers."
Farrell was a good swimmer, for Ben had taught him, in the old
days, all that a dolphin can actually tell anyone about moving in the
water. He kept decently even with Ben for five laps, began to wallow a
bit on the sixth, and hauled out to sit with his legs dangling and
watch his friend working up and down the pool, arms reaping the water
in short, flat slashes, head turning only slightly to breathe. Yet it
struck Farrell strangely that once or twice Ben lost the water
altogether, flailing and gasping in a moment of distorting terror.
Farrell decided that it was one of the mysterious games Ben liked to
play alone, for each time he caught his stroke immediately and swam on
as powerfully as ever. After the second time, he climbed out at the far
end of the pool and came around to Farrell, shaking himself dry.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It was meant to be a compliment, actually.
You were always so aware of loss--you were missing things before it was
fashionable, before whales and old people were in. I remember, you used [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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