"Ellison, Harlan - Objects Of Desire (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

those sets is female, and the other is male. What we have here is --"

"Hermaphrodite?"

"No, goddamit!" He actually snapped at me. "Not some freak of nature, not some
flunked transvestism exercise. What I'm describing to you, Francine, is two
complete bodies jammed neatly and working well into one carcass. And the woman
in there is about three months' gone with child. I'd say it would have been a
perfectly normal -- but how am I to know, really -- a perfectly normal little
girl. Now, all three of them are dead."

We talked for a lot longer. It never got any clearer. It never got any easier to
believe. If it had come from anyone but Dear Old Doc Death, I'd've had the
teller of the tale wrapped in the big Band-Aid. But who could doubt a man with
that much moss coming out of his earholes?

One of the supermodels was Hypatia. Like Iman or Paulina or Vandela. One name.
Maybe before the advent of blusher she was something additional, something
Polish or Trinidadian, but to eyes that rested on glossy pages of fashion
magazines, she was one name. Hypatia.

Candor: I wanted to kill her. No one of the same sex is supposed to look that
good after wallowing in an alley, on her knees, in the rain and garbage, amid
blood and failure.

"Care to tell me about it?"

She stared back at me across a vast, windy emptiness. I sighed softly. Just
once, lord, I thought, just once give me Edna St. Vincent Millay to interrogate,
and not Betty Boop.

"I don't know what you mean," she said. Gently. I almost believed she didn't
have a clue.

"Well, how about this for a place to begin: you are a pretty famous celebrity,
make many hundreds of thousands of dollars just to smile at a camera for a few
hours, and you're wearing a Halston suit I'd price at maybe six-five or seven
thousand dollars. And you were on Skid Row, outside the Midnight Mission --
where the name Donna Karan has never been spoken t kneeling in a pool of blood
spilled by an old, old man, and you're crying as if you'd lost your one great
love."

"I did."

The other two were equally as helpful. Camilla DelFerro was brave, but barely
coherent. She was so whacked, she kept mixing her genders, sometimes calling him
"her." Angie Rose just kept bawling. They were no help. They just kept claiming
they'd loved the old guy, that they couldn't go on without him, and that if they
could be permitted, if it wasn't an inconvenience, they would all three like to
be buried with him. Dead or alive, our option. Whacked; we're talking whacked