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

side, receiver clutched in her hand. I found the unbarred casement window on the adjacent side of the house, broke it open, then climbed inside. Her breathing was deep and irregular. Her skin was clammy. Only the faintest pulse at her neck.
I rolled her onto her back, got my bag, pried back her eyelid and shone a light into her eye. Her pupil barely contracted. I had come late on purpose, but this was not good.
I gave her a shot of apomorphine, lifted her off the bed and shouldered her toward the bathroom. She was surprisingly light-gaunt, even. I could feel her ribs. In the bathroom, full of plaster and junk from the remodelers,

I held her over the toilet until she vomited. No food, but some undigested capsules. That would have been a good sign, except she habitually pierced them with a pin so they'd work faster. There was no way of telling how much Nembutal she had in her bloodstream.
I dug my thumb into the crook of her elbow, forcing the tendon. Did she

inhale more strongly? "Wake up, Norma Jean," I said. "Time to wake up. No reaction.

I took her back to the bed and got the blood filter out of my camera bag. The studio'd had me practicing on indigents hired from the state. I wiped a pharmacy's worth of pill bottles from the flimsy table next to the bed and set up the machine. The shunt slipped easily into the artery in her arm, and I fiddled with the flow until the readout went green. What with one thing and another I had a busy half hour before she was resting in bed, bundled up, feet elevated, asleep but breathing normally, God in his heaven, and her blood circulating merrily through the filter like money through my bank account.
I went outside and smoked a cigarette. The stars were out and a breeze had kicked up. On the tile threshold outside the front door words were emblazoned: "Cursum Perficio. " I am finishing my journey. I looked in on Mrs. Murray. Still out. I went back and sat in the bedroom. The place was a mess. Forests of pill bottles covered every horizontal surface. A stack of Sinatra records sat on the record player. On top: "High Hopes. " Loose-leaf binders lay scattered all over the floor. I picked one up. It was a script for Something's Got to Give.
I read through the script. It wasn't very good. About 2:00 a.m. she moaned and started to move. I slapped a clarifier patch onto her arm. It wouldn't push the pentobarbital out of her system any faster, but when it began to take hold it would make her feel better.
About 3:00 the blood filter beeped. I removed the shunt, sat her up, made her drink a liter of electrolyte. It took her a while to get it all down. She looked at me through fogged eyes. She smelled sour and did not look like the most beautiful woman in the world. "What happened?" she mumbled.
"You took too many pills. You're going to be all right."
I helped her into a robe, then walked her down the hallway and around the living room until she began to take some of the weight herself. At one end of the room hung a couple of lurid Mexican Day of the Dead masks, at the other a framed portrait of Lincoln. When I got tired of facing down the leering ghouls and honest Abe, I took her outside and we marched around the pool in the darkness. The breeze wrote cat's paws on the surface of the water. After a while she began to come around. She tried to pull away but was weak as a baby. "Let me go," she mumbled.
"You want to stop walking?"
"I want to sleep," she said.
"Keep walking.- We circled the pool for another quarter hour. In the distance I heard sparse traffic on Sunset; nearer the breeze rustled the fan palms. I was sweaty, she was cold.
"Please," she whined. "Let's stop."
I let her down onto a patio chair, went inside, found some coffee and set a pot brewing. I brought a blanket out, wrapped her in it, poked her

to keep her awake until the coffee was ready. Eventually she sat there sipping coffee, holding the cup in both hands to warm them, hair down in her eyes and eyelashes gummed together. She looked tired. "How are you?" I asked.
"Alive. Bad luck." She started to cry. "Cruel, all of them, all those bastards. Oh, Jesus . . . "
I let her go on for a while. I gave her a handkerchief and she dried her eyes, blew her nose. The most beautiful woman in the world. "Who are you?" she asked.
"My name is Detlev Gruber. Call me Det."
"What are you doing here? Where's Mrs. Murray?"
"You don't remember? You sent her home."
She took a sip of coffee, watching me over the rim of the cup.
"I'm here to help you, Marilyn. To rescue you."
"Rescue me?"
"I know how hard things are, how lonely you've been. I knew that you would try to kill yourself."
"I was just trying to get some sleep."
"Do you really think that's all there is to it?"
"Listen, mister, I don't know who you are but I don't need your help and if you don't get out of here pretty soon I'm going to call the police. " Her voice trailed off pitifully at the end. "I'm sorry," she said.
"Don't be sorry. I'm here to save you from all this."
Hands shaking, she put down the cup. I had never seen a face more vulnerable. She tried to hide it, but her expression was full of need. I felt an urge to protect her that, despite the fact she was a wreck, was pure sex. "I'm cold," she said. "Can we go inside?"
We went inside. We sat in the living room, she on the sofa and I in an uncomfortable Spanish chair, and I told her things about her life that nobody should have known but her. The abortions. The suicide attempts. The Kennedy affairs. The way Sinatra treated her. More than that, the fear of loneliness, the fear of insanity, the fear of aging. I found myself warming to the role of rescuer. I really did want to hold her, for more than one reason. She was not able to keep up her hostility in the face of the knowledge that I was telling her the simple truth. Miller had written how grateful she was every time he'd saved her life, and it looked like that reaction was coming through for me now. She'd always liked being rescued, and the men who rescued her.
The clarifier might have had something to do with it, too. Finally she protested, "How do you know all this?"
"This is going to be the hardest part, Marilyn. I know because I'm from

the future. If I had not shown up here, you would have died tonight. It's recorded history."
She laughed. "From the future?"
"Absolutely.
"Right. "
"I'm not lying to you, Marilyn. If I didn't care, would you be alive now?"
She pulled the blanket tighter around her. "What does the future want with me?"
"You're the most famous actress of your era. Your death would be a great tragedy, and we want to prevent that. "
"What good does this do me? I'm still stuck in the same shit.
"You don't have to be." She tried to look skeptical but hope was written in every tremble of her body. It was frightening. "I want you to come with me back to the future, Marilyn."
She stared at me. "You must be crazy. I wouldn't know anybody. No friends, no family. "