"James Morrow - Auspicious Eggs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrow James)

 "Too bad."
At last the mattress to Stephen's left becomes free, and they climb on
top and begin reifying the Doctrine of Affirmative Fertility. The candle
flames look like spear points. Stephen closes his eyes, but the effect is
merely to intensify the fact that he's here. The liquid squeal of flesh
against flesh grows louder, the odor of hot paraffin and warm semen more
pungent. For a few seconds he manages to convince himself that the woman
beneath him is Kate, but the illusion proves as tenuous as the surrounding
wax.
When the sacrament is accomplished, Valerie says, "I have something for
you. A gift."
"What's the occasion?"
"Saint Patrick's Day is less than a week away."
"Since when is that a time for gifts?"
Instead of answering, she strolls to her side of the room, rummages
through her tangled garments, and returns holding a pressed flower sealed in
plastic.
"Think of it as a ticket," she whispers, lifting Stephen's shirt from
its peg and slipping the blossom inside the pocket.
"To where?"
Valerie holds an erect index finger to her lips. "We'll know when we
get there."
Stephen gulps audibly. Sweat collects beneath his sperm counter. Only
fools consider fleeing Boston Isle. Only lunatics risk the retributions meted
out by the Corps. Displayed every Sunday night on _Keep Those Kiddies Coming,_
the classic images -- men submitting to sperm siphons, women locked in the
rapacious embrace of artificial inseminators -- haunt every parishioner's
imagination, instilling the same levels of dread as Spinelli's sculpture of
the archangel Chamuel strangling David Hume. There were rumors, of course,
unconfirmable accounts of parishioners who've outmaneuvered the patrol boats
and escaped to Quebec Cay, Seattle Reef, or the Texas Archipelago. But to
credit such tales was itself a kind of sin, jeopardizing your slot in Paradise
as surely as if you'd denied the unconceived their rights.
"Tell me something, Stephen." Valerie straps herself into her bra.
"You're a history teacher. Did Saint Patrick really drive the snakes out of
Ireland, or is that just a legend?"
"I'm sure it never happened literally," says Stephen. "I suppose it
could be true in some mythic sense."
"It's about penises, isn't it?" says Valerie, dissolving into the
darkness. "It's about how our saints have always been hostile to cocks."
****
Although Harbor Authority Tower was designed to house the
merchant-shipping aristocracy on whose ambitions the decrepit Boston economy
still depended, the building's form, Connie now realizes, perfectly fits its
new, supplemental function: sheltering the offices, courts, and archives of
the archdiocese. As he lifts his gaze along the soaring facade, Connie thinks
of sacred shapes -- of steeples and vaulted windows, of Sinai and Zion, of
Jacob's Ladder and hands pressed together in prayer. Perhaps it's all as God
wants, he muses, flashing his ecclesiastical pass to the guard. Perhaps
there's nothing wrong with commerce and grace being transacted within the same