"Whitley - Strieber - The Wild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strieber Whitley)

"You hope. But the statistics are on my side."

"Come on, sit like an adult. I don't want people to think I'm married to an overgrown child."

"You are."

"You're going to hurt your neck."
"Pain is good for me. Pain means something."

Cindy muttered a reply. What was it? Fatuous? He hadn't heard, but he didn't care, either, because he
saw clouds. Another jet passed, and beneath the clouds it was so small. He imagined the people and the
books up there, the copies of Time and Newsweek in the laps of the travelers, and their unimaginable
dreams. He visualized the stewardesses stowing the empty food trays, the pilots reading off vectors,
pulling and pushing levers, wheels, buttons, and the fire in the engines, the white fire of JP-6 waiting there
to fulfill its dream, the dream of all jet fuel, which is to bum its creators.

He would have to go down to Atlanta bright and early Monday morning, a guest of Apple Computer, to
attend a two-day session about the Macintosh Office. Wonderful, crazy, impossible computer, the Mac.
All the people from Apple would be smiling, everything calm and rich in the Westin Hotel, and at night, in
their dark rooms, they would all be lying awake worrying about their jobs.

He did not want to fly to Atlanta. He did not want to attend the conference with the despairing computer
salesmen. He did not want to lie in an oversize bed in the Westin, wishing he was home in Cindy's arms,
listening to A Sea Symphony while the stars passed and the pacing in the apartment upstairs went on and
on.

I'm a selfish man, he said in his mind. A brat.

He sat up straight, surprised.

What was happening to him?

If only there was some way to tell her how he was suffering, surely she would have compassion тАФshe
would fill with compassionтАФand let them go out into the streets, go to a movie, to a restaurant, home,
anywhere but this damned zoo.

The wolf was still staring at him. Its ears were pricked forward, adding to the impression of almost
supernatural concentration.

Wolf, or man-wolf?

It blinked its eyes as the sun emerged. The animal within Bob reacted: he felt a slow, intimate movement
beneath his flesh. He recalled his wolf dream with the kind of insight that brings sudden and intense
clarity. Raising a boy, loving a wife, writing poetry, selling, advising, flying, eating, waiting, he had driven
himself insane. A wolf in the belly was not the fantasy of a sane man. Should he go into analysis?
Expensive, and also the only psychiatrist he knew was Monica Goldman, who was Cindy's dearest friend
and the only woman he had ever desired to distraction, but for Cindy herself.

At the Esopus Hunt Club one night Monica and Steve had come in, she flushed with pride at the