"John Kessel - Some Like It Cold - v 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

SOME LIKE IT COLD

John Kessel

Her heroes were Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein. Lincoln was out c the question, but with a little work I could look Einsteinesque. I grew a dark mustache, adopted wild graying hair. From wardrobe I requisitioned a pair of wool slacks, a white cotton shirt, a gabardine jacket with narrow lapel The shoes were my own, my prized possession-genuine leather, Australia copies of mid twentieth-century brogues, comfortable, well broken in. The

prep-room mirror reflected back a handsomer, taller, younger relative of old Albert, a cross between Einstein and her psychiatrist Dr. Greenson.
The moment-universes surrounding the evening of Saturday, August 4 were so thoroughly burned-tourists, biographers, conspiracy hunters, masturbators-that there was no sense arriving then. Besides, I wanted to get a taste of the old LA, before the quake. So I selected the Friday evening 18:00 PDT moment-universe. I materialized in a stall in the men's room at the Santa Monica Municipal Airport. Some aim for deserted places; I like airports, train stations, bus terminals. Lots of strangers if you've missed some detail of costume. Public transport easily available. Crowds to lose oneself in. The portable unit, disguised as an overnight bag, never looks out of place. I stopped in a shop and bought a couple of packs of Luckies. At the Hertz counter I rented a navy blue Plymouth with push-button transmission, threw my canvas camera bag and overnight case into the back and, checking the map, puzzled out the motel address on Wilshire Boulevard that Research had found for me.
The hotel was ersatz Spanish, pink stucco and a red tile roof, a colonnade around a courtyard pool where a teenage boy in white T-shirt and DA haircut leaned on a cleaning net and flirted with a couple of fifteen-year-old girls. I sat in the shadowed doorway of my room, smoked a Lucky and watched until a fat woman in a caftan came out and yelled at the boy to get back to work. The girls giggled.
The early evening I spent driving around. In Santa Monica I saw the pre-tsunami pier, the one she would tell Greenson she was going to visit Saturday night before she changed her mind and stayed home. I ate at the Dancers: a slab of prime rib, a baked potato the size of a football, a bottle of zinfandel. Afterward I drove my Plymouth along the Miracle Mile. I rolled down the windows and let the warm air wash over me, inspecting the strip joints, theaters, bars, and hookers. A number of the women, looking like her in cotton-candy hair and tight dresses, gave me the eye as I cruised by.
I pulled into the lot beside a club called the Blue Note. Over the door a blue neon martini glass swamped a green neon olive in gold neon gin. Inside I ordered a scotch and listened to a trio play jazz. A thin white guy with a goatee strangled his saxophone: somewhere in there might be a melody. These cutting-edge late-modems thought they had the* future augured. The future would be cool and atonal, they thought. No squares allowed. They didn't understand that the future, like the present, would be dominated by saps, and the big rush of 2043 would be barbershop quartets.
I sipped scotch. A brutal high, alcohol, like putting your head in a vise. I liked it. I smoked a couple more Luckies, layering a nicotine buzz over the

alcohol. I watched couples in the dim comers of booths talk about their pasts and their futures, all those words prelude to going to bed. Back in Brentwood she was spending another sleepless night harassed by calls telling her to leave Bobby Kennedy alone.
A woman with dark Jackie hair, black gloves, and a very low-cut dress sat on the stool next to me. The song expired and there was a smattering of applause. "I hate this modem crap, don't you?" the woman said.
"It's emblematic of the times," I said.
She gave me a look, decided to laugh. "You can have the times."
"I've seen worse," I said.
."You're not American, are you? The accent."
"I was born in Germany."
"Ah. So you've seen bad times?"
I sipped my scotch. "You could say so." Her eyelids were heavy with shadow, eyelashes a centimeter long. Pale pink lipstick made her thin lips look cool; I wondered if they really were. "Let me buy you a drink."
"Thanks." She watched me fumble with the queer, nineteenth-century style currency. Pyramids with eyes on them, redeemable in silver on demand. I bought her a gin and tonic. "My name's Carol," she told me.
"I am Detlev. "
"Detleff? Funny name."
"Not so common, even in Germany."
"So Detleff, what brings you to LA? You come over the Berlin Wall?" "I'm here to see a movie star."
She snorted. "Won't find any in here."
"I think you could be a movie star, Carol."
"You're not going to believe this, Detleff, but I've heard that line before.
"You'll have to offer me another then."
We flirted through three drinks. She told me she was lonely, I told her I was a stranger. We fell toward a typical liaison of the Penicillin Era: we learned enough about each other (who knew how much of it true?) not to let what we didn't know come between us and what we wanted. Her image of me was compounded by her own fantasies. I didn't have so many illusions. Or maybe mine were larger still, since I knew next-to-nothing about these people other than what I'd gleaned from images projected on various screens. An image had brought me here; images were my job. They had something to do with reality, but more to do with desire.
I studied the cleavage displayed by Carol's dress, she leaned against my shoulder, and from this we generated a lust we imagined would turn to sweet compassion, make up for our losses, and leave us blissfully complete in the same place. We would clutch each other's bodies until we were spent, lie holding each other close, our souls commingled, the first moment of a perfect

marriage that would extend forward from this night in an endless string of equally fulfilling nights. Then we'd part in the morning and never see each other again. That was the dream. I followed her back to her apartment and we did our best to produce it. Afterward I lay awake thinking of Gabrielle, just after we'd married, sunbathing on the screened beach at Nice. I'd watched her, as had the men who passed by. How much of her wanted us to look at her? Was there any difference, in her mind, between my regard and theirs?
I left Carol asleep with the dawn coming up through the window, made my way back to the pink hotel, and got some sleep of my own.
Saturday I spent touring pre-quake LA. I indulged vices I could not indulge in Munich in 2043. 1 smoked many cigarettes. I walked outside in direct sunlight. I bought a copy of the Wilhelm edition of the I Ching, printed on real paper. At mid-afternoon I stepped into a diner and ordered a bacon cheeseburger, rare, with lettuce and tomato and a side of fries. My mouth watered as the waitress set it in front of me, but after two bites I felt overcome by a wave of nausea. Hands sticky with blood and mayonnaise, I watched the grease congeal in the comer of the plate.
So far, so good. I was a fan of the dirty pleasures of the twentieth century. Things were so much more complicated then. People walked the streets under the shadow of the bomb. They all knew, at some almost biological level, that they might be vaporized at any second. Their blood vibrated with angst. Even the blonde ones. I imagined my ancestors half a world away in a country they expected momentarily to turn into a radioactive battleground, carrying their burden of guilt through the Englischer Garten. Sober Adenauer, struggling to stitch together half a nation. None of them fat, bored, or decadent.
And Marilyn, the world over, was their goddess. That improbable female body, that infantile voice, that oblivious demeanor.
Architecturally, LA 1962 was a disappointment. There was the appropriate amount of kitsch, hot-dog stands shaped like hot dogs and chiropractors' offices like flying saucers, but the really big skyscrapers that would come down in the quake hadn't been built yet. Maybe some of them wouldn't be built in this time-line anymore, thanks to me. By now my presence, through the butterfly effect, had already set this history off down another path from the one of my home. Anything I did toppled dominoes. Perhaps Carol's life would be ruined by the memory of our night of perfect love. Perhaps the cigarettes I bought saved crucial lives. Perhaps the breeze of my Plymouth's passing brought rain to Belgrade, drought to India. For better or worse, who could say?
I killed time into the early evening. By now she was going through the

two-hour session with Greenson trying to shore up her personality against that night's depression.
At 9:00 1 took my camera bag and the portable unit and got into the rental car. It was still too early, but I was so keyed up I couldn't sit still. I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway, walked along the beach at Malibu, then turned around and headed back. Sunset Boulevard twisted through the hills. The lights of the houses flickered between trees. In Brentwood I had some trouble finding Carmelina, drove past, then doubled back. Marilyn's house was on Fifth Helena, a short street off Carmelina ending in a cul-de-sac. I parked at the end, slung my bags over my shoulder, and walked back.
A brick and stucco wall shielded the house from the street. I circled round through the neighbor's yard, pushed through the bougainvillea and approached from the back. It was a modest hacienda-style ranch, a couple of bedrooms, tile roof. The patio lights were off and the water in the pool lay smooth as dark glass. Lights shone from the end bedroom to the far left.
First problem would be to get rid of Eunice Murray, her companion and housekeeper. If what had happened in our history was true in this one, she'd gone to sleep at mid-evening. I stepped quietly through the back door, found her in her bedroom and slapped a sedative patch onto her forearm, holding my hand across her mouth against her struggling until she was out.
A long phone cord snaked down the hall from the living room and under the other bedroom door. The door was locked. Outside, I pushed through the shrubs, mucking up my shoes in the soft soil, reached in through the

bars over the opened window, and pushed aside the blackout curtains. Marilyn sprawled face down across the bed, right arm dangling off the