"Harlan Ellison - Troublemakers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

struck a spark off the cobblestones with his right front hoof. “I know,” I said to him, “we’ll soon start the
downhill side. But not just yet. Be patient. I won’t forget you.”
Lizette and I went inside the Café du Monde and I ordered two coffees with warm milk and two orders
ofbeignets from a waiter who was originally from New Jersey but had lived most of his life only a few
miles from College Station, Texas.

There was a coolness coming off the levee.

“I was in New York,” I said. “I was receiving an award at an architects’ convention — did I mention I
was an architect — yes, that’s what I was at the time, an architect — and I did a television interview.
The mother saw me on the program, and checked the newspapers to find out what hotel we were using
for the convention, and she got my room number and called me. I had been out quite late after the
banquet where I’d gotten my award, quite late. I was sitting on the side of the bed, taking off my shoes,
my tuxedo tie hanging from my unbuttoned collar, getting ready just to throw clothes on the floor and sink
away, when the phone rang. It was the mother. She was a terrible person, one of the worst I ever knew,
a shrike, a terrible, just a terrible person. She started telling me about Bernice in the asylum. How they
had her in this little room and how she stared out the window most of the time. She’d reverted to
childhood, and most of the time she couldn’t even recognize the mother; but when she did, she’d say
something like, ‘Don’t let them hurt me, Mommy, don’t let them hurt me.’ So I asked her what she
wanted me to do, did she want money for Bernice or what . . . did she want me to go see her since I was
in New York . . . and she said God no. And then she did an awful thing to me. She said the last time
she’d been to see Bernice, my ex-wife had turned around and put her finger to her lips and said, ‘Shhh,
we have to be very quiet. Paul is working.’ And I swear, a snake uncoiled in my stomach. It was the
most terrible thing I’d ever heard. No matter how secure you are that you honest to God hadnot sent
someone to a madhouse, there’s always that little core of doubt, and saying what she’d said just burned
out my head. I couldn’t even think about it, couldn’t even reallyhear it, or it would have collapsed me.
So down came these iron walls and I just kept on talking, and after a while she hung up.

“It wasn’t till two years later that I allowed myself to think about it, and then I cried; it had been a long
time since I’d cried. Oh, not because I believed that nonsense about a man isn’t supposed to cry, but just
because I guess there hadn’t been anything that important to cryabout . But when I let myself hear what
she’d said, I started crying, and just went on and on till I finally went in and looked into the bathroom
mirror and I asked myself, face-to-face, if I’d done that, if I’d ever made her be quiet so I could work on
blueprints or drawings . . .

“And after a while I saw myself shaking my head no, and it was easier. That was perhaps three years
before I died.”

She licked the powdered sugar from thebeignets off her fingers, and launched into a long story about a
lover she had taken. She didn’t remember his name.

It was sometime after midnight. I’d thought midnight would signal the start of the downhill side, but the
hour had passed, and we were still together, and she didn’t seem ready to vanish. We left the Café du
Monde and walked into the Quarter.

I despise Bourbon Street. The strip joints, with the pasties over nipples, the smell of need, the dwarfed
souls of men attuned only to flesh. The noise.

We walked through it like art connoisseurs at a showing of motel room paintings. She continued to talk
about her life, about the men she had known, about the way they had loved her, the ways in which she