"Barry N. Malzberg - Ready When You Are" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

Gold, his sprig of astonishment, attending to the ghostly shrieks and
stammer which lurk at the border of memory.

And still great hours later, still feeling the thrust and urgency of
that
applause, a vast and gaping need, an emptiness in the continuum which
pleaded for him alone, the superhero and top director lies in his
palatial
bedroom clutching Eve Harlow or Dorothea Harkins (call her what you
will,
she remains adoring), watching a tape of his award-winning film on the
videocassette recorder he takes with him everywhere. This film, Thrills
and Wonder in America, traces the odyssey of a young man from Flatbush
who
comes to rule the world, first by film and then by American salute: he
ventures into politics, becomes President and the leader of the new
world
government. Thrills and Wonder is a metaphor for his own desire, a
subsumed autobiography: Finzie knows the real meaning of all this
stuff.
As in Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, huge crowds chant, there are
posed friezes of splendid, beseeching athletes and supporters who usher
the actor to ever greater power while Finzie, superheroic filmmaker and
highly experienced lover of women who in the old days would have passed
him in contempt, looks at his accomplishment in awe. He appears to be
playing the lead role too, and making a splendid job of this. What he
has
done is truly remarkable, he thinks: he has through the medium of his
art
made the world an adjunct to his obsession. All these actors screaming,
those thousands of extras posturing and saluting and he in control of
every gesture. It goes beyond gesture, beyond metaphor: he has made the
world the paradigm of his desire, his need. Griffith, Reifenstahl,
Huston,
Capra: these predecessors tried that as well but he, Finzie, has taken
the
obsession to consummation. Here in the splendor of Cannes he has made
his
film not an accessory but an empire. Shattered, almost humbled by the
power of his vision, the magnificent and heroic director of the year
reaches for Eve Harlow.
"What do you think?" he says, "Is this as good as it gets or what? How
could it be any better?"
The splendid Eve grinds a hip, brushes a breast to his side, touches
his
back. "Who is to know?" she says. "If you say it's so, then it is so."
An
actress, not introspective like most of them, Eve Harlow seems to have
exhausted most of her capacity for invention by accepting her change of
name. Twice married and twice divorced with many feature films beside