"Barry N. Malzberg - Those Wonderful Years" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

we won't really ever see what's going on now but I won't fall for it and I
won't let you fall for it." She leaps from the bed, breasts shaking, and
seizes me around the neck, gathers me in. "Please," she says, "you must
face your life, must face what you've become and where you're going, you
can't live in the past," moving her body like a lever against mine, bone to
bone, flesh to flesh and for all of my embarrassment and rage it is difficult
to suppress desireтАФElvira and I always did have a good sexual
relationship, I have saved certain memories of it and bring them out now
one by one in privacy to masturbateтАФbut suppress desire I do, hurling her
from me.

"Don't you ever say that," I say to her, "the past is immutable, the past
is strong and beautiful, the past is the only thing we have ever known,"
and resist as she may, I convey her shrieking from bed to wall to door,
pausing to guide her fallen clothes with little kicks toward the exit. At the
door, I pull the knob with enormous speed and strength and then throw
her, weeping, into the hall, kicking her clothes after her. "Get out of here,
get out of my life, get out of my way," I say to her and not bothering to
gauge the effect which these words have had, slam the door closed and
lock it, turn my back to it trembling and then stride toward the radio.

Turning it on to the station of the golden forever I hope that I will find
some music of the '60's which will galvanize me with energy and help me
find emotional equivalent in events of the past but something is wrong
with the radio; the dial is somehow set toward the only station in the area
which plays current hits and in palpitation and dread I find myself
listening to the Number Two maker on the charts, something about
Meanies and Beanies, the tune confusingly disordered to me.

It is too much. I simply cannot cope with it; not this on top of Elvira. I
sit on the bed wracked with sobs for a while, whimpering like a dog
against the strange music and then in the hall I hear the softest and
strangest of noises, as if Elvira had somehow found a key and was
insinuating herself withinтАж and then as the music tumbles cheerfully on I
have a vision and the vision is that not only she but the quadruple
amputee who I have serviced have somehow managed to get into my
room.

They sing along with the radio, I watch them, the vision turns and I
shriek like wind out the other side of that tube. From a far distance then I
hear Meanies and Beanies for what it always was; an artifact of that
forgotten decade, as the nineties overtake me in sound and the amputee
and Elvira roll against one another on the floor, their defeat accomplished
as the smooth, dense wax of the embalmer pours from the tubes of the
radio to cover them like lava on volcanic ash.

Proofed by FishNChips