"Wilhelm,_Kate_-_Julian(1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

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Julian
by Kate Wilhelm
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Copyright (c)1977 Kate Wilhelm
First published in Analog Yearbook, ed. Ben Bova, 1977

Fictionwise Contemporary
Science Fiction


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THE YEAR Julian was twelve he received a telescope for Christmas. A telescope in a great city is a particularly useless gift, he had learned. There had been three nights since the first of the year, and this was May, when he had been able to see the sky well enough to use it, and what little he had seen he might have observed just as easily with his own eyes. The moon was good, but he quickly became bored with looking at dark and light patches that could have been craters, or clouds, or smudges on his lens. What the telescope was good for was to observe the city.
The city climbed a hill in the section where Julian lived. His apartment building was high enough for him to be able to look out over the roofs of many buildings all the way to the river and up the hillside across it. He could see small boats, fishing boats, tugs laboring with barges, people on the bank walking, kissing, throwing stuff into the water.
In March a demolition crew had started to raze a tall gray office building a block from Julian's window. All spring Julian had been plagued with a series of minor complaints that had kept him out of school -- sore throats, stomachaches, headaches. He had watched the destruction of the building from start to finish. Now it was no more than a pile of trash. On this day Julian had got up with a stomachache, and as soon as his parents had gone to work, and his younger sister had left for school, he had got out his telescope to watch the workmen with their bulldozers and cranes clean up the mess they had made.
He swept the scene slowly, pausing to watch two men chug-a-lug from a thermos, moved on to where a grader was pushing the trash into a heap of different proportions. He raised the telescope to see what had been revealed by the removal of the last wall, and there were tops of buildings, more windows to investigate, the river, and on a hill across the river, revealed to him for the first time, was a motel. It was a grand location, with a view of the river below it and the city sprawling upward. He found the motel swimming pool with no difficulty; there were two children playing in it, and a woman nearby in a canvas chair. A man was cutting grass. A dog ran after him opening its mouth, probably barking. The man stopped to pick up a stone and throw it at the dog. There were seven cars in the parking area. Julian began to examine the building itself.
There were three black women with cleaning carts, and a man with a tool box who went into one of the rooms. He watched a maid run her vacuum cleaner in four passes and then leave a room. There were two doors with Do Not Disturb signs. He began to go down the row of second-floor rooms. The third one had one side of the drapes opened in an irregular way, as if the fabric had caught on a chair or something and had remained like that, unnoticed by the occupant. Working carefully Julian focused on the opening, then brought the room into sharp view. He could see little of it, the foot of the bed, a space, part of a dresser, the alcove where the bath was. As he studied it, a naked woman appeared. She came from the side of the bed, stopped at the dresser.
She was doing something in front of the mirror, her hands out of sight, only her back profile visible, from her head down to her calves. He couldn't see the floor. She was skinny, but his heart was pumping hard anyway, because a skinny naked lady was better than no naked lady at all. He wanted her to turn around and face him. Again and again he wiped his hands on his jeans, although his mouth was dry; his eyes were burning from not blinking. He had seen his sister, of course, but she was only eight and that was different. He had seen pictures of naked ladies, and that was different too. This was the real thing, this counted. He was afraid to touch the telescope now, for fear he would move it, lose her, and have trouble finding her again. Her hair was long and brown, lank, it looked oily; there was a hollow place on the side of her hip. She was almost as flat as he was. She moved back a step and he caught his breath as her breast in profile came into his range. It was like a small bag, not the high, nipple-pointed breast of the ladies in the magazines. She was old, he decided, and again, it was better to see an old naked lady than no naked lady at all. Now she turned and walked away from him, and he wiped his hands as he stared at the way her ass moved when she walked.
He leaned back weakly and became aware of his heart pounding and the clamminess of his hands, and the dryness of his mouth. Also he had an erection, and he couldn't do anything about it, because what if there was someone out there in one of those rooms with a telescope watching his every movement?
He looked at the room, still empty, and wondered how long she would be in there, wondered if she was on the john or in the shower, wondered if she would reappear with a towel around her, or a robe on. The pounding in his chest and the pounding in his groin became one painful rhythmic beat. Maybe she had an accident, fell in the shower, was drowning. His head began to ache, and his eyes were tearing. When he felt he could stand it no longer, she stepped into view once more, dripping, her hair streaming water. She had hair on her lower belly, glistening wet, and little rivulets of water running down her smooth rounded stomach; her breasts were pink and...
Suddenly he ejaculated and involuntarily knocked the telescope askew. When he could train it on the motel window again, she was gone. Exhausted, he threw himself on his bed, face down in the pillow, and he fell asleep.
He woke up in a paroxysm of terror, fighting the sheet, battling his pillow, gasping for air. He had been dreaming, had a nightmare, but there was no memory of it. He went to the bathroom and washed his face, then got on clean clothes -- his others were sweat-soaked and smelled foul -- and lay down again, this time with a comic book. He didn't read it, or even track the pictures. He dozed, woke with a jerk of fear, and got up, afraid of another nightmare. He noticed his telescope at the window and put it away without a glance outside. It was only twelve, but he felt that the day already had been endlessly long, as if he had a fever that was distorting his perceptions of time.
His mother called during her lunch hour.
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing. Reading comics."
"How do you feel?"
"Okay."
"Julian, is your stomach still hurting?" There was a new note of anxiety in her voice.
He made an effort to sound natural, but even to him his voice sounded strange, toneless. "I feel okay now, Mom."
After a silence while she considered, she said, "I'm calling Esther Manning to drop by. Let her in when she rings. And just lie around and take it easy."
"I don't need anyone to look at me, Mom. I'm okay now."
"Yes, I expect you are, but it won't hurt. Bye, honey. See you later."
Mrs. Manning was a tall heavy woman, not fat, but broad and big-boned. She could tell fortunes with playing cards, and knew many strange and esoteric things, like when and where to go out and find wild mushrooms, and if it was going to snow, and when to go out to hear migrating geese. One time when Julian had stayed home from school, she had dropped in, and when his mother had mentioned his complaint, she had turned to Julian and winked quite openly.
She arrived an hour after his mother's call.
"Ah, Julian, another headache? A sore throat? A singularly bad case of boredom?" She smiled widely and went ahead of him into the apartment. At the entrance he had been in shadows, but now in the light from a broad tall window, she paused to examine his face, find her manner changed. "Back into bed, my boy, and I'll read you a story."
He protested that he did not want to go to bed, that he did not want her or anyone to read to him now, because he was too old, that he wanted to finish his model plane, but in the end he lay down and listened to her begin "The Hound of the Baskervilles."
She read with expression that often was comical, sometimes chilling. Julian began to feel better, less dopey and strange, more relaxed. After half an hour she stopped to make tea, and he tagged along to the kitchen with her, talking about the moors. "It's just like that in real life," she was saying, washing her hands at the sink. She turned to find a towel, and he stared at her wet hands, and for a moment felt the room spin sickeningly. She took a step toward him, reaching for him with her wet hands, and he fainted.
* * * *
For the next week Julian was hustled from doctor to doctor, to laboratories where they took blood samples and x-rays of his head and made other tests. At the end of the time his doctor said they had found nothing.
"We want to talk to you," his father said that night, and Julian felt crushed by a sudden depression.
His father waited for him to sit down, his mother was already in her chair. "Julian, you have missed twelve days of school this spring. You say you're sick but no one can find any germs, or anything else they can point to. What have you to say about that?"
Julian shifted uncomfortably and stared at the beige carpeting. It was dirty under his feet, not bad, but grayer than the rest of the room.
"Julian! Look at me! If you are sick we want you to get well. If you aren't sick, we want to know why you pretend you are. Are you just too bored with school to sit through it every day? If that's it, for heaven's sake, say so. We can understand that."
Julian shrugged. When he said his head ached, it usually did; and if he stayed home with a stomachache, it really hurt for a while.
"Julian." His mother spoke now for the first time. "Is something else bothering you? Something on your mind? Something that puzzled you or frightened you?"