"Ian McDonald - Some Strange Desire" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

communicated most strongly to me. It is despair. Derelicts, burned out like the
hulls of Falklands' warships, waved hallucinatory greetings to me as I swirled
past, coat billowing in the warm wet wind that blew across the wastelands. Eyes
moved in cardboard shelters, cardboard coffins, heads turned, angered by the
violation of their degradation by one who manifestly did not share it. When it
is all you possess, you treasure even degradation. Figures gathered around
smudge fires, red-eyed from the smoke, handing round hand-rolled cigarettes.
Where someone had scraped enough money for batteries there was dance music from
boom boxes. They would not trouble me. My pheromones made me a shadowy, godlike
figure moving on the edge of the darkness.
Where should I go? I had asked.
Where no one will be missed, my mother had replied.
I went to the viaduct arches, the motorway flyovers, the shop doorways, the
all-nite burger-shops, the parking lots and playgrounds. I went down into the
tunnels under the stations.
Trains ground overhead, carrying the double-breasted suitmen and cellphone women
back to suburbs ending in "ng" or "wich," to executive ghettos with names like
Elmwood Grove and Manor Grange. The tunnels boomed and rang, drops of
condensation fell sparkling in the electric light from stalactites seeping from
the expansion joints in the roof. I paused at the junction of two tunnels.
Something in the air, a few vagrant lipid molecules carried in the air currents
beneath the station.
How will I know them? I had asked.
You will know them, my mother had said.
The trail of pheromones was fickle, more absent than present. It required the
utmost exercise of my senses to follow it. It led me down clattering concrete
stairways and ramps, under striplights and dead incandescent bulbs, down,
underground. As I was drawn deeper, I dissolved my aura of awe and wove a new
spell: allure. Certain now. Certain. The lost children in their cribs barely
acknowledged my presence, the air smelled of shit and ganja.
She had found a sheltered corner under a vent that carried warmth and the smell
of frying food from some far distant point of the concourse. An outsize Aran
sweater --much grimed and stretched-- was pulled down over her hunched-up knees.
She had swaddled herself in plastic refuse sacks, pulled flattened cardboard
boxes that had held washing machines and CD midi-systems in around her.
I enveloped her in a shroud of pheromones. I tried to imagine what she might
see, the tall woman in the long coat, more vision than reality, demon, angel,
standing over her like judgment. How could she know it was my pheromones, and
not her own free will, that made her suddenly want more than anything, anything
she had ever wanted in her life, to bury her face between my nylon-smooth
thighs? I knelt down, took her chin in my hand. She looked into my eyes, tried
to lick my fingers. Her face was filthy. I bent toward her and she opened her
mouth to me. She ran her tongue around the inside of my lips; whimpering, she
tried to ram it down my throat.
And I was certain. Truth is in the molecules. I had tasted it.
I extended a hand and she took it with luminous glee. She would have done
anything, anything for me, anything, if I would only take her away from these
tunnels and the stink of piss and desperation, back to my apartment: I could do
whatever I wanted, anything.
The corridors shook to the iron tread of a train.