"M John Harrison - Isobel Avens Returns To Stepney In The Spring" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

Japanese. There is hardly room to move. Despite this, on a patch of grass
by the water, two lovers, trapped in the great circular argument, are
making that futile attempt all lovers make to get inside one another and
stay there for good. He can't stop touching her because she wants him so.
She wants him so because he can't stop touching her. A feeding swan
surfaces, caught up with some strands of very pale green weed. Rippling in
the sudden warm breeze which blows across the river from the direction of
the theatre, these seem for a moment like ribbons tied with a delicate
knot--the gentle, deliberate artifice of a conscious world.
"Oh look! Look!" she says.
He says: "Would you like to be a swan?"
"I'd have to leave the aerodrome."
He says: "Come and live with me and be a swan."
Neither of them have slightest idea what they are talking about.

Business was good. Within three months I had bought a second van. I
persuaded Isobel Avens to leave Stratford and throw in with me. On the
morning of her last day at the aerodrome, she woke up early and shook me
until I was awake too.
"China!" she said.
"What?"
"China!"
I said: "What?"
"I flew!"
It was a dream of praxis. It was a hint of what she might have. It was her
first step on the escalator up to Alexander's clinic.
"I was in a huge computer room. Everyone's work was displayed on one
screen like a wall. I couldn't find my A-prompt!" People laughed at her,
but nicely. "It was all good fun, and they were very helpful." Suddenly
she had learned what she had to know, and she was floating up and flying
into the screen, and through it, "out of the room, into the air above the
world." The sky was crowded with other people, she said. "But I just went
swooping past and around and between them." She let herself fall just for
the fun of it: she soared, her whole body taut and trembling like the
fabric of a kite. Her breath went out with a great laugh. Whenever she was
tired she could perch like a bird. "I loved it!" she told me. "Oh, I loved
it!"
How can you be so jealous of a dream?
I said: "It sounds as if you won't need me soon."
She clutched at me.
"You help me to fly," she said. "Don't dare go away, China! Don't dare!"
She pulled my face close to hers and gave me little dabbing kisses on the
mouth and eyes. I looked at my watch. Half past six. The bed was already
damp and hot: I could see that we were going to make it worse. She pulled
me on top of her, and at the height of things, sweating and inturned and
breathless and on the edge, she whispered, "Oh lovely, lovely, lovely," as
if she had seen something I couldn't. "So lovely, so beautiful!" Her eyes
moved as if she was watching something pass. I could only watch her,
moving under me, marvellous and wet, solid and real, everything I ever
wanted.