"Rudy Rucker - Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

More ways than I'd imagined.

Because now, walking off the campus and getting a coffee, I'm paying attention and I'm noticing
differences in our non-Bosch world. There aren't any ads for horror movies in the paper, for instance,
which is way odd.

The Episcopal church that used to be by the coffee shop is a pho noodle parlor. On a hunch, I look in the
yellow pages in the coffee shop, and there's no Episcopal or Baptist or Proletarian or whatever churches
in town at all. With no Bosch, the Protestant thing never happened! The sisters that whipped me through
grade school would be happy, but I'm thinking, Dear God, what have I done?

The cars are different too, duller than before, and every single one of them is cream-colored, not even
any silver or maroon.

The barrista in the coffee shop who usually wears foundation and drawn-on eyebrows has her face bare
as a granola hippie's. And her hair is all bowl-cut and sensible. Ugh. The world is definitely lagging
without the cumulative influences of my man Jerome.
On the plus side, you can smoke in the coffee shop now, and all the cigarettes are fat and laced with
nutmeg and clove, which I dig. The Supertaqueria next door isn't selling tongue anymore, also fine by me.
The fonts on the signs are somehow lower and fatter and more, like, Sanskrit-looking. The people in the
magazine ads are wearing more clothes, and generally heavier.

Hey, I can live with some change, if that's what it takes to get Glenda her man.

I buy Jerome a canvas and some acrylics at the Art Mart—putting them on a new credit card that some
pinheads mailed me last week. Back home, my Dutch Master sniffs suspiciously at the paint, preparing to
start layering the stuff over the colored drawing on my smaller wall.

There's a knock on the door. I've been expecting this. I peep through the peephole and it's Harna,
looking just like her voice sounds, like a rich old white woman in a flowery dress and pillbox hat. I don't
want to let her in, but she walks right through the closed door.

"Hello, Glenda and Jerome," goes Harna. "I have a commission for the artist." She plumps a velvet sack
right down on my kitchen table. Clink of gold coins. Perfectly calculated to get Jerome's juices flowing.

"What kind of painting do you need, my lady?" asks Jerome, setting down his paintbrush and making a
greedy little bow.

"A picture of that," she says, pointing out the window to Sixth Street and the San Jose cityscape. "With
full perspective accuracy. You can paint it—there." She points to my big blank living room wall.

"How soon would you need it?" asks Jerome.

"By sundown," says Harna.

"He can't paint that fast," I protest.

"I'll speed him up," says Harna, with a twitch of her dowager lips. "I'll return with the rising of the moon."