"Jack Dann - Art Appreciation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dann Jack)

toward the door. Now for the first time the guards seemed to take an interest; they
peered in.
“One moment,” Evans said. “Uno momento, I have to tell you something. I
wanted to say how beautiful you are. You’re a whole gallery in yourself.”
The woman turned, as if ready to break into a full run. At least I’ve saved her,
Evans thought. This is a dangerous situation, very perilous, hardly explicable, but at
least I got her out of this.
“So listen to me,” he said. “Before you go away, before you talk to the guard,
before you complain, you’ve got to understand my angle here. It’s not just because
you’re beautiful. It’s because -- “
Obviously, he had not put this the right way. She ran away, the red and brown
handbag flapping like a decapitated bird. The guards were crooning to one another,
then seemed to make a collective decision: They advanced.
Evans reversed his course, backed, moved toward the painting. There was
simply nowhere else to go. “Hold it,” a guard said, “just hold it right there, pal, we
want to talk to you.” Talk did not seem to be properly in his mind, however. The
guard seemed enormous, a club extended like a baton from his right hand. He was
conducting the others into a massed assault.
“Oh, damn,” Evans said hopelessly. He scuttled toward the painting. On his
right shoulder, then, he could feel a burning touch, a grasp of enormous assurance
and power and then smoothly, inevitably, he felt himself moved upwards. Glug, he
thought. Glop. He was too high now to see the guards or to judge their reactions. He
seemed quite out of control; and yet, at the center was an awful certainty.
He felt the pressure and the wind as he was drawn.
You don’t understand, he thought. “You don’t understand,” he wanted to say
to the guards. He wanted to explain somehow, tell them about the fleeting, righteous
woman, the vanished jogger, all of the vanished women of his Yellow and Blue
periods; but the words would not come. “This is dangerous,” he wanted to say.
“This is a dangerous place. I just wanted to save her, can’t you understand that?”
“It’s not lust, it’s humanity,” he wanted to say.
Glop.
 No, it seemed that they could not understand that. Evans was plunged into a
clinging darkness, damp, cold certainty pressing around him and then, shocking, he
was falling. I wonder if there’ anything down there, he thought. I always wanted to
see Venice in its seasons, see the colors of the old Renaissance. Maybe that’s
waiting for me, maybe the others are waiting there, too, he thought. He thought many
other thing as well, but they do not fall into the scope of this present narrative. He is
still thinking. He will be thinking for long time.
Alas, those further thoughts are not to be recorded.
He is not on exhibition, not exactly.
Evans is on permanent loan.