"Alexander Jablokov - Doing The Circuit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

"I know, I know. I'll have to give up on geographical features. I'm ready."

Fiona, like many of my clients, is desperate to adhere to society's arbitrary standards of beauty. And she
is gorgeous, I must admit. There are times when the arbitrary is universal, eternal. I'm glad this is the time
I live in.

She's completely covered with matted reddish hair, so that her green eyes look like jade earrings lost on
a shag carpet. Her fingers and toes are webbed, nothing excessive, nice and subtle. She's scrimshawed
her surgically implanted walrus tusks with faux-na‹f images representing the passage of a bill through
Congress. I can smell the bitter musk of her anal glands.

I would be head over heels, except I'm in love with someone else. Someone I can no longer reach.

"Can I...touch your skull?" I say to Fiona.

"Oh, go right ahead. Lots of people like to."

Her cranial bones flex under my fingers. Through hormonal regression she's regained the open sutures
and the fontanel of a newborn infant. She wears a slant board strapped tight to her forehead. In a few
months it will give her that popular Mayan deformation of the skull, with the sloping forehead and the
egg- shaped head.

"Mayan mothers used to dangle a bead in front of their child's eyes," I say. "It crossed their eyes. That
was considered extremely fashionable."

"Oh, really?" I can tell she thinks I'm really lame, out of it.

I recover by getting businesslike. "All right. We'll start right off with preacher-bench curls, nothing heavy
--"

"Did I tell you how I met her?"

"Who?"

"My girlfriend."

It doesn't look like there's any way to avoid it.

"No, you didn't."

"She hit me with a long-distance Taser shot while I was hanging out with some friends in an abandoned
swimming pool. Isn't that silly? Nothing was in it but some rotting lime Jello from some old party. When I
recovered from my convulsions I looked up and fell in love. You might have heard of her? Janine
Pingree?"

"Janine Pingree? Glasstooth Pingree?"

She smirks. "That's right. That's her."