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

"No, you don't understand. They're really gone. As in `vanished.' Poof! Green
light...and gone."

I sat up, turned on the bed lamp. "Green light?"

"Urey had 'em in tow, he was takin' 'em down the front steps, and there was this
green light, and Urey's standin' there with his dick in his mitt." He coughed
nervously. "In a manner'a speakin'." I was silent.

"So, uh, Lootenant, they're, uh, like no longer wit' us."

"I got it. They're gone. Pool."

I hung up on him, and I went back to sleep. Not immediately, but I managed. Why
not. There was a big knife with a tag on it, in a brown bag, waiting for me; and
some blood simples I already knew; there were three supermodels drunk with love
who now had vanished in front of everyone's eyes; and we still had an old dead
man with his head hanging by a thread.

The Boss had no right to talk to me like that.

I didn't collect old newspapers. I had a subscription to Time. And the J. Crew
catalogue.

And it was that night, in dreams, that the one real love of my life came to me.

As I lay there, turning and whispering to myself, a woman in her very early
forties, tired as hell but quite proud of herself, only eleven years on the
force and already a Lieutenant of Homicide, virtually unheard-of, I dreamed the
dream of true love.

She appeared in a green light. I understood that...it was part of the dream,
from the things the bum Richard had said, that the women had said. In a green
light, she appeared, and she spoke to me, and she made me understand how
beautiful I really was. She assured me that Angie Rose and Hypatia and Camilla
had told her how lovely I was, and how lonely I was, and how scared I was...and
we made love.

If there is an end to it all, I have seen it; I have been there, and I can go
softly, sweetly. The one true love of my life appeared to me, like a goddess,
and I was fulfilled. The water was cool and clear and I drank deeply.

I realized, as I had not even suspected, that I was tired. I was exhausted from
serving time in my own life. And she asked me if I wanted to go away with her,
to a place where the winds were cinnamon-scented, where we would revel in each
other's adoration till the last ticking moment of eternity.

I said: take me away.

And she did. We went away from there, from that sweaty bedroom in the three-room