Work in progress
RomanRoman
The green-eyed boy sat alone in the food court and fingered the needle in his pocket. The syringe was empty and unused, he had no use for the syringe. He had use for the needle. The green-eyed boy—he was called Roman, but what you will have seen first was the eyes—wore a tailored Milanese blazer, one hand in pocket, and blue jeans. He was pale and lean and as handsome as a hatchet, and in egregious style and snobbery a hopeless contrast from the suburban mall food court where he sat and looked in the middle distance and fidgeted with the needle in his pocket.
He unzipped his jeans, freeing his erection, and laced his hands behind his head. He waited. After a few moments the passenger-side door opened and the girl got in and he closed his eyes as she lowered her head to his lap.
Roman was also a senior, well within the innermost ring of privilege and popularity. The Godfrey name as sovereign as Dupont or Ramses, and he made no attempt to obscure it from hair he would think nothing of taking a half day off school to go into the city to have styled and bleached
(his bone pallor suggesting a natural dark, not to mention a general indisposition to playing outside), or the small but impressive pharmacy he carried in a tin mint container. And obviously the car. The desire to be burdened by possessions was one that had in the main escaped Peter, but as a teenager of traveling blood he had no defense against anything with a combustion engine and the fact was that car was totally metal. But Roman otherwise had little in common with the other rich kids, exhibiting a nearly complete lack of regard for social expectation. His behavior not rebellious so much as entirely unmotivated to behave in any way that didn’t conform exactly to the cast of his mood at the moment, his sense of entitlement as phenotypal as the green eyes. This characteristic of his dynasty dating back to its first possessor, his three times great-grandfather the legendary steel baron, Jacob Godfrey.
(Green of course being the color of money.) It had made him mercurial.
But none of this was what Peter found so compelling about Roman Godfrey.
Да-да-да, в книге Роман - крашеный блондин)
There was a breeze and it carried the smell of grass and he held up his hands to feel it pass between his fingers when he saw something in the tree line: a gleaming—no, a twin gleaming, eyeshine: it was a pair of eyes, glowing like a cat’s. Peter rose. Roman Godfrey emerged.
У Романа глаза в темноте светятся, как у кошки)
Roman looked at him, he looked into his eyes and for a fleeting moment his own candesced in that same cat’s eye way that had attracted Peter’s attention in the first place, and he said with a kind of rote inflection as though feeding an actor his line, “But his old lady’s gonna be a pain in the balls.”
But as someone who was by nature a taker he knew when he had taken exactly as much as he was going to get. Though it had never before been so much more and so much less than what he wanted.
As they passed over Indian Creek, Letha looked at Roman. The moonlight on his affectless face like silk gliding over stone.
Later that night Roman was sitting at the darkened dining room table sipping from the flask and slowly counting the number of crystals that comprised the chandelier—160, he knew well, but the product of 40 fours was considerable comfort to him and its confirmation a soothing process—when those crystals began to glitter from a faint light.
У Романа свои числовые ритуалы. Он считает, что четверки приносят удачу, а простые числа и тройка, самое ужасное из простых чисел, - предвестники катастрофы и посланники тьмы.
Roman elbowed his way through the Sworn twins and there was a hush as he stood, his green Godfrey eyes were hard candy.The boys backed into the lockers, vainly and stupidly protesting their innocence. Roman looked at his sister on the ground. Her head was still bowed forward and her massive humped shoulders were shaking. He looked into the eyes of the second boy and in a tone striking for its reason said, “Kiss him. Kiss his pretty little mouth.”
“I’ve never believed in God,” said Roman in the too-fast blurt of an illicit confession.
Однако в часовне молился вместе с Летой)
Roman led him to his room, which was nearly the footage of Peter’s trailer. On the door was a picture of a crucifix with a serpent wrapped around it. The serpent’s tail was in its mouth. Otherwise there was an almost total lack of decoration, except mounted to the wall a train car coupling link, an old oblong of warped and rusted steel. Which despite its meager appearance Peter immediately knew without being told was the most valuable thing Roman owned.
Самое ценное, чем Роман владеет, - фрагмент цепи из ржавой стали, нам показывали его в сериале.
Вообще для Романа на самом деле много значит его наследие, потом еще будет эпизод на заводе, когда он не захотел гипнотизировать полицейских - его имя на собственности, какое право они имели запрещать ему там находиться?
Roman turned back in what Peter at first feared was for the purpose of some kind of stage wink or equally bonehead gesture but instead he swept his arm at the side of the building—to what end Peter did not know but he could not imagine what was preventing him from employing the one thing he was reliably good for.
“The eyes,” Peter whispered desperately. “Do the crazy roofie eyes.”
In fact, what Roman was indicating was the faded six-foot white lettering on the side of the building: GODFREY STEEL COMPANY. And he had seen his name put to too much ill use this day to resort to parlor tricks; real things were at stake here and had to be put to right.
That evening Roman stood nude facing the bathroom mirror with the blade of a box cutter pressed just to the side of his pubis, and he made a small incision. He was in the habit of on occasion cutting open —nothing excessive—his chest or his abdomen; not to release any inner pain or cause a fuss, but simply because he liked to, liked the feeling of hot blood trickling down his belly or his legs or his cock, liked the complementarity of it, that life was in essence liquid, not solid. He watched in the mirror the rivulet curve with his hip down his inner thigh and the hairs of his legs stood, the warmth of it versus the cold of the tile under his feet. He tightened his core and clenched his buttocks to increase the flow.
“Roman doesn’t have enough friends. I mean, there’s those people.” She nodded her head toward Roman’s lunch table. “But all they care about is the name. Nobody really knows him. Least of all, Roman.” И Роман не знает сам себя...
“Gee, I wish I was cool enough to know magic tricks,” said Roman. Подожди немного, Роман) Будут тебе magic tricks)
Roman regarded the clock in a cold sweat: 1:11. There was no way to convey how fatal an augur it would be to embark on this task when the time was a succession of primes that added to the worst of primes, so he didn’t bother. He waited until it turned 1:12—a cumulative 4.
И опять числовые ритуалы: единицы и тройка как плохая примета, четверка - как хорошая.
“Do you know who knocked up my daughter?” he said.
“No,” said Roman. “If I did, he’d be at the bottom of the river right now.”
It astounded Godfrey that he had missed what a charming young man his nephew had become.
Roman stood in his room regarding the coupling link mounted on the wall. While it looked like worthless junk, this was the first item produced by Jacob Godfrey for the Pennsylvania Railroad and its value was beyond measure: an empire had been built on it. Roman picked it up and held it in front of his heart and pulled with both hands as hard as he could, but to no avail even a century after its production: it was Godfrey steel. He put it back on its mount and went to his dresser, where there was a glass of vodka and ice and a small mound of cocaine on a pewter tray. He took out his mint container, where he stored a blade for a box cutter and segments of straw, and divided the cocaine into several lines and snorted them. He took a heavy sip of vodka. He looked at himself in the mirror.
“Godfrey steel,” he said.
He held the blade of the box cutter to the corner of his eye and made a quick vertical slash down his cheek. He closed his eyes and felt the pleasing warmth as blood issued onto his face. He opened his eyes and put a finger to the cut and traced it under both eyes and over his lips in a parody of his mother applying makeup. He batted his eyes for the mirror and puckered his lips.
“Shut up and kiss me,” he said.
She lifted the bandage, gauging immediately that the cut was superficial and self-inflicted. Further that the boy was high and recently had had his heart broken and that this made him defenseless and dangerous, so conveniently incautious for her purposes.
“Shelley, we have a visitor who’d like to meet you.”
Chasseur noted the softening of his manner. He held some things sacred. Шелли для Романа - это святое.
She regarded the boy: a narcissistic, insecure, oversensitive, and underparented adolescent heir to a Fortune 500 company with a substance abuse problem and homoerotic tendencies—it would have been more surprising if he didn’t “see things sometimes.”
Roman watched.
Sheets of rain washed over the glass and Roman watched the two of them inside. They were on the couch. She was facing down and he was on top of her. Her arm was outstretched and his fingers laced through hers. Roman stood in the hemlocks with his hair matted to his forehead and arms dead at his sides and watched. Peter worked his hand under her and up her clit and her mouth made a moan and his hair brushed her face and her mouth closed. Sucking on it. Sucking his fucking rat faggot hair.
Rain hit a puddle by his feet like a thousand damned mouths wailing O.
Roman turned away and walked around front and got into his car. His wet clothes suctioned him to the leather and he tried counting the worms of rain racing down his windshield but they all ran together. It was nothing but a measure of disorder. That was all it was.
The shadows dancing in the corners of his eyes laced gently together now, forming a merciful black.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
He lowered his head and did not meet her eyes. The candle flickered over the hard geometry of his face. She noticed the stain of red under the bandage on his cheek.
“Roman, what happened?”
He was staring blankly and his cheeks gleamed because he was crying.
He looked Pryce in the eye. “Tell me—” said Roman.
Pryce clicked his pen three times in succession. clickclickclick. It cut Roman’s focus off at the knees. Three. Atonal, asymmetrical, amoral. Bad luck’s favorite number, its association with the divine the devil’s hat trick. Roman sputtered, trying to expel this emissary of the dark place.
Вот как в книге Прайс вырубил Романа - тройные щелчки, и посланники тьмы-тройки забрали Романа во тьму.
And then it was quiet again, and what boundary there was between Roman and the dark place fell away, and his eyes turned backwards and he saw the other side of it, he saw with clarity something he once knew, the most forbidden possible thing to know, the thing that Francis Pullman had seen when he looked into his eyes. The thing that had happened, and was still to come.
Roman screamed, and his knees buckled under him and he fell to the lawn screaming, and the ground around him buckled inward in a concavity of a perfect circumference that appeared around him, but he did not notice as the ground rippled and then fell away and he was swallowed by the pit.
She tightened the straps. “Roman,” she said, “what can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more. This is not your friend. This is not a person. I know it’s hard for you to accept and I believe it’s hard for him too. I believe that you wanted to find the monster, and so did he. Because he couldn’t know that about himself. You can’t know that about yourself and continue being a person.”
Roman shook his head. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “That’s just bullshit.”
She gave Peter’s restraints a once-over and stood. “This is an animal,” she said. “That’s what it is.”
Roman looked pleadingly at her. She repeated her admonition about eye contact.
“If you’re wrong, someone is going to die tonight,” said Roman. “Can’t you see I’m just trying to help? Why won’t you let me help?”
“Because you don’t believe in God,” she said.
Roman went to Shelley. He put his hands behind her head and pulled her to a crouch so his forehead touched hers and he breathed with her down to a gentle lull. He was calming because he was calm himself. He had made mistakes out of confusion but just now, when he had pulled up out front, he had heard the sound of his sister needing his help and this was all the focus he needed.
The cat splayed on his back and Roman rubbed his belly. He curled like a black velvet fist around his hand and bit him.
“Hey hey hey,” said Roman, “we don’t love with our teeth.” Хорошая фраза))
И еще один случай, Роману выдали ТРИ доллара сдачи:
Though the total was just over $22 the cashier gave him an even $3 in change.
Roman paled.
“Oh no,” he said.
The cashier began ringing the next customer’s purchases, though Roman had not moved.
“I need my change,” he said.
“Excuse me?” said the cashier.
“My change,” said Roman, handing back the third bill with shaking fingers.
The cashier looked at him, wondering if he was serious. Roman blinked back tears of desperation.
He held the dollar out in one hand and the receipt in the other.
“I need the exact change right here,” said Roman.
“Why?” said the cashier, who was a gaunt gray young girl possessed of the spirit of reverse charity that overtakes some when seeing another in clear need.
“Because I can’t go,” Roman pleaded heedlessly. “I need you to give me the amount of money that’s here on the receipt before I can go.”
“Sir, I’m assisting another customer.”
Roman commanded his feet to lift from where they stood, but it would have taken a claw hammer.
He felt distantly like he was forgetting something and he started breathing again. But the fact remained, blank and pitiless: the numbers didn’t add up and he could not go before they did, the fact of it crushing him like the handshake of a small-dicked god.
The old woman after him gave Roman a nervous look as she handed over her money.
“I’m … I’m not normal,” he said apologetically, then suddenly muscled between her and the checkout counter and snaked his arm into the register as it opened and helped himself to a handful of coins and sprinted to the exit as commotion rose behind him, counting out his exact change and flinging the excess behind him, the weight of the heavens from his shoulders.
Роман в книге забирал Кристину с Летой без Питера и по дороге раздумывал, а не приказать ли Кристине себя убить)
He looked at her face and it occurred to him he could just do it. Here and now. They did not have to get where they were going, Peter did not have to be the one to decide. Roman could just give her the blade and tell her to cut her own wrists and inside of her legs and her neck and anywhere else that would bleed fast and comprehensive into the dirt. Maybe he could even tell Letha to forget. For all he knew he could do that too. He looked at her. He tried to summon the intention and warrior’s focus he had felt so recently looking into the mirror, but this was not a picture, it was a person. A little fucking girl. Roman did not feel like much of a warrior.
The white wolf ripped off half the brown wolf’s ear and its rear claws hooked into its stomach and tore, but in all its savage power it could not hurt the brown wolf enough to make its release. So the primal intercourse. Good versus evil at its most raw and elemental. But standing beholden to the full catharsis of what had seemed so necessary to Roman now just seemed tiring. Tiring because he felt prematurely the weight of carrying how stupidly fucking sad this was for the rest of his days.
He noticed a low murmuring by his ear. It was Letha. She was praying. She was praying for her angel. You crazy-ass fucking bitch, thought Roman. He started praying too.
Roman had a series of protocols that was supposed to maintain order and balance in the world. He had an alliance with the virtuous and harmonic number four and multiples thereof and was an enemy of primes; primes the emissaries of the dark place. He would reset his alarm a fixed number of times depending on the hour it was supposed to go off, would sooner step on a nail than a crack, could not fall asleep unless he was certain every drawer and cupboard in the house was securely shut, always entered water with his left foot, and always untied knots. But as he worked with trembling fingers, freeing one fiber and another and another, frantically loosing individual and innocuous strands by the light of the institute, it occurred to him for the first time in his life that what he was doing was completely pointless. That there was no protocol that could undo the things that had been done this night in the naming of what is good and evil. He dropped the thread to the ground, his work unfinished. He had never performed such a breach before. Could never have imagined such a thing. He felt empty. He had never imagined such an emptiness. Вот так Роман понял, что все его ритуалы, алгоритмы и протоколы не имеют влияния на окружающую действительность.
And then the light of the White Tower went dark.
Roman would have written off the entire expedition as a fool and his money, except that he had been experiencing headaches of increasing severity lately. A heightened photosensitivity of the eyes that forced him to keep his sunglasses on more or less continuously before dusk.
В конце книги Роман ходит в темных очках - повышенная светочувствительность, с чего бы это))
PeterPeter
Peter, who was seventeen at the time of which I'm writing, liked accidents: modern times were just so fucking structured.
Two of the cops combing the area by the swings he knew; they’d hassled him a couple of times in that kind of obligatory cop way that, in Peter’s experience, every uniform was an SS uniform.
Nicolae had always told him that he had been born with an unusually receptive Swadisthana chakra and that underneath the surfaces of things, the illusion of the illusion, there is a secret, sacred frequency of the universe and that the Swadisthana was the channel through which it would sing to you. And the Swadisthana being located of course just behind the balls, he should always always trust his balls.
The Rumanceks preferred trade to charity out of principle
He had his family and infinite roads to explore and could not imagine needing more, and if this was at the expense of fitting in—whatever that meant—so what. There was so much to learn from every place. Or at least something worth watching. Who was in love with their best friend’s boy- or girlfriend, who was in love with their best friend, who cut, who starved, who locked themselves in the handicapped bathroom to jerk off or cry, who was addicted to what or had been raped by whom—it was everywhere, a wonderful world of darkness and desire right under the roaring bleachers, if you had your eye out.
There was something else, a presence of some kind, dwelling underfoot, no manner of thing under the sun. Peter could not get a grasp of its horns but he knew it was down there, older than the hills it lived under. There had been a couple of times when, in a liminal state on the hammock, a vision would come to him of a snake, a Bible black serpent slowly and sensually consuming itself by the tail. But then his eyes would snap open and he would look at the sky through a lattice of boughs and irritatedly push it out of his mind.
Peter had a great talent for not losing sleep over questions to which he did not know the answer, so these intrusions on that very sleep really rattled his cage. But it, whatever it was in some dark place underneath and older than these hills, was not the same thing that had killed Brooke Bluebell from Penrose.
A cloudywing moth passed close by and Peter’s arm darted out to catch it. A flair for opportunistic showmanship ran in the Rumanceks’ blood and he was pretty sure he could get twenty bucks from the rich kid in a dare to eat off.
“What’s it like?” he said. “Living like, you know. You people.”
It didn’t bother Peter being referred to as “you people”—it respected the fundamental boundary of life: haves and have-nots. And Peter did not account himself the impoverished one.
“I guess there’s always something over the hill I gotta see,” he said.
What a devil he is!—a few inches shorter than the other boys his age, but broader in the shoulder (of course, either way he is doll-sized relative to your affectionate authoress). He is of swarthy complexion with a black ponytail possessing the sheen that suggests petroleum jelly as his hair product of choice.
After the bell rang, Peter approached Roman. He had debated all period and convinced himself that indulging the other boy’s curiosity was the more sensible course than evasion—discouraging him would only egg him on. But in truth his Rumancek blood would not permit him to pass up an opportunity to show off. He said, “Come by around five.”
The news of the second girl had come as no surprise to him, only the length of time it had taken to come out. He knew now what was happening, or at least enough to know how much he’d rather think about just about anything else, but of course that would now require shaking the upir from his tail.
“Have you ever attacked anyone?” he said. “As the wolf?”
“No,” said Peter.
“Have you ever … wanted to?”
“I’ve never had a reason to.”
He was not comfortable with this degree of intimacy. He did not like where this was going. The layers of outer affectation peeled away to reveal the other boy’s inner need. His need that he thought Peter could somehow meet. The only thing that scared Peter off more than other people’s needs was a cage, though in the end what was the difference?
And though he regretted the pain this vargulf was causing, and would continue to in all likelihood before its inevitable self-termination, pain was as much a part of this life as the summer and the winter and the rain, and there was no greater asshole than the one who believed you can cure it. That you ought to. Peter did not consider himself a defeatist, but Nicolae had taught him not to scratch where it doesn’t itch, and he had a highly evolved sense of what was and was not his problem.
“Let’s be clear, only one thing matters here: not putting me in a cage.”
[Peter] was not comfortable with this degree of intimacy. He did not like where this was going. The layers of outer affectation peeled away to reveal the other boy’s inner need. His need that he thought Peter could somehow meet.
“People see what they see,” she said. “They see someone like Peter and he’s just a blank page that people can put on whatever they’re afraid of. You know how people are.”
And now, upon meeting the accused in person, Dr. Godfrey was more sympathetic to his daughter’s point of view: Peter was a different breed. He was not our neighbor. He did not want the things we wanted. If you told him to straighten up and fly right he could only look at you in utter confusion: to his mind this was exactly what he was doing. Foremost he was guilty of civilization’s unthinkable crime, as plain in his walk as a limp: he was not owned by anyone.
“To Roman,” said Peter, and in his eye was a sort of strange character Godfrey had caught at odd moments all through the meal, not so much a maturity as a nature consciousness as though he were at times a boy exactly of his years and others a soul out of time wearing a boy mask.
They wanted him to give them a reason but Peter had been on the wrong end of enough beatings to know that nothing was worth it. This was what made Peter not like Roman; Peter had control. When they can take that from you there is no floor under what else you can lose.
“If you were going to run away, would you tell me?” she said.
“I’m not going to run away,” said Peter.
“I’ll go with you if you run,” she said.
He looked out at the round moon.
“I’m not fast enough to outrun this,” he said.
Peter still did not answer; it was not because he didn’t have one but because he was too tired to hear it himself. That what had happened the last two turns was going to happen again tomorrow night, and the whole town knew it. Unless he killed it. That this thing knew who he was and there was nothing he could do now to make himself not part of this. Unless he killed it. That he had a fear now even deeper than the cage and it was for what had happened to those other girls to happen to her, for her to be alive and watching while teeth and claws ripped open sacks of meat and jelly and shit and the life inside her. Unless he killed it. That life is a game, with the clearest stakes possible, and that losing it blows beyond all comprehension. He was not a killer, he did not want to kill anything, fuck all this killing.
And Roman. Help Roman become a man on the path of light and love. Not the other way. Tell Roman … all the things I couldn’t.
Letha approached the wolf. It lay on its side, unconscious and wheezing and its fur stickied red. She lay behind it and pulled its body into hers and looked into its eyes. The wolf looked back and they were Peter’s eyes. She was the only one to learn Peter’s true secret: that there is no “it,” only him, always him.
Roman and PeterRoman and Peter
Roman says he is a werewolf. Mother says he is vermin and to have no truck with him (directed, naturally, at Roman—it would not occur to her to include me in such an admonition).
Roman weak-kneed with admiring envy of those fangs, white fangs gleaming, gloating over the purest dichotomy of having/not having.
“Can I … pet him?” said Roman, somewhat recovered. To the extent he ever would be.
“Roman was unstable, like a coin spun on a tabletop: the closer it came to rest, the greater its velocity, now one end up then the other. He was neither heads nor tails. And of all potential outcomes in their continued association nearly none fell outside Peter’s extensive Hierarchy of Shit He Could Live Without.”
“Have you ever heard of the Order of the Dragon?” he said.
Peter looked at him. This better be good.
“It was a group of knights from the Crusades. My mom used to tell us stories.”
Peter looked at him, but more so.
“I … I’ve always wanted to be a warrior,” said Roman.
Peter came to the silent conclusion that this conference was about to jump several echelons of his Hierarchy.
So there you had it. Behind that aloof and mercurial façade was a battle, and he had to decide the outcome: Was he the hero or the villain? And so what could be more black-and-white than a quest to slay the monster that was terrorizing the countryside? Wow. Peter didn’t want to touch that with your dick.
“Roman,” said Peter, “maybe this is the kind of thing you should be talking about with the guidance counselor.”
Peter was still entranced by this intricate arboreal obscenity when Roman appeared alone.
“Yeah?” he said, with the cold aloofness of a scorned woman.
“Well?” said Roman, with the cold, aloof satisfaction of a scorned woman to whom you’ve come crawling back.
Roman replied they were partners on a school project. Mother was not satisfied by this patent evasion.
“Do you want the truth?” said Roman.
“Yes,” said Mother.
Roman gave a lengthy and graphic account of a homosexual affair.
“Because we’re going to dig her up.”
Peter was not sure if the joyful light that suddenly shone in Roman’s green Godfrey eyes was indicative of how auspicious or dumbfuck a partnership this would be.
“We’re not calling ourselves the Order of the Dragon,” said Peter.
“Make no mistake about their kind,” she said. “I was in love with an upir once. Someday when I’m drunk enough I’ll tell you about it. But please take my word for it: Never forget what he is. Especially if he has.”
“Promise me something,” she said. “Promise you won’t let things go too far. Promise you’ll keep him from doing anything stupid.”
Peter made a solemn face and smiled inside: he enjoyed the ceremony and impressiveness of making promises completely irrespective of his intention of keeping them.
“I promise I won’t let that happen,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“What do you do when you get horny? While you’re turned?”
Peter looked up at the lines of parallel lights extending into the white vanishing point at the tunnel’s far end. He didn’t answer.
THE BREAK-UP SCENE
“I think something is going on at the White Tower,” said Roman.
Peter smoked and watched the birds.
“I don’t know if it’s connected or not, but I can get us in,” said Roman.
Crosshatching the sky were gauzy tendrils of black. Rain later.
Roman saw it in his face. “What?” said Roman.
“No,” said Peter.
“What do you mean, no?” said Roman.
“It’s over,” said Peter.
“What are you talking about?”
“This is over. We’re done.”
Roman looked at him and saw he was serious. Suddenly he wanted to rip that faggot fucking ponytail out of his head. He wanted to find whatever words it would take to make him change his mind.
“Why?” said Roman.
Peter did not answer. He hated that he was having this conversation; this sort of thing was no less suffocating to him than when he was younger and an older cousin would trap him in a blanket and sit on him and it felt like the worst of all possible deaths. Getting mixed up in other people’s feelings, only himself to blame. Also he blamed Roman.
“What, you mean the cops?” said Roman. His tone reflected the boringness and triviality of the incident. “You said get rid of them and I did. Oh, and that was very considerate, dropping my car off with an empty tank, incidentally.”
He waited to see if interjecting levity made the situation any different but it didn’t.
“Okay,” said Roman. “Okay, it was stupid. It was really stupid and I’m an asshole and what is there to say other than that I was being an asshole, but come on. Think about what you’re doing. You can’t walk away over a stupid thing like that. You can’t walk away from … this.”
He pronounced this in the phonetically correct fashion, but somehow it still rhymed with us.
Peter thought about how he might explain things to Roman in a way that wouldn’t upset him further. Explain that they were not alike, that however different from the rest of the world Roman felt, he was still rich and so tolerably different. He did not know what things were like for Peter, he did not fear the cage. The cage was the worst of all possible deaths. But there was no way to make that real for someone like Roman in the same way you could hardly say to a tiger in the jungle, Do you know how free you really are? Because how can he know any other way to be? There was no way to make this a picture in Roman’s brain, so he bounced his heel off the railing for a while and wondered if he could get away with not saying any more than he’d already said.
“Will you fucking say something,” said Roman.
“You should go,” said Peter. “There’s no good for you here. You should get away from this death and this town and your name. Make it all clean. And I don’t know. Figure it out from there.”
Roman regarded his hand. His hand was shaking and wasn’t much use for holding a cigarette, so he flicked it. “I bet you’d like that,” he said. “I bet you’d find that very convenient, you Gypsy piece of shit. You know if you fuck my cousin, I’ll kill you.”
Peter looked at him.
“You’re not better than me,” said Roman, bitter.
Peter kept looking at him.
Roman turned his head. “That’s a faggot fucking ponytail,” he said.
Peter got up and went inside. Roman looked up at the glowering sky. “Fuck,” he said. There was a constriction in his throat.
Then there was a movement in the corner of his vision. Peter coming back out, not leaving it like this. Like before, Peter getting the hard-on thing out of his system but coming back to him. Roman looked pridefully ahead but knew he would let him. That was just his way, Peter was all right for a hard-on. Roman would let him come back again. But the door did not open and Peter did not come, and the movement he had seen was suddenly in the opposite side of his mind’s eye, and it was like dark fingers of black shadow performing sleight of hand to get his attention. Roman’s eyes fluttered.
He bent and picked up the brick and the door closed after it and he hurled it over the hill. There was a metallic crunch and a car alarm went off and Roman sat against the locked door and after a moment held up his still-trembling hand palms outward and scurried his fingers in the air, watching the dance of spidery veins.
“Roman seemed weird today,” she said.
“He’s pissed at me,” said Peter.
“Why?”
“Because there’s a big Roman-shaped blind spot in the way Roman sees things.”
“Are you going to try to fuck me?” she said.
Peter sucked in breath. “Well, here we are,” he said.
“What kind of thing is that to say!” she said.
Peter grimaced.
“What is it?” she said.
His grimace tightened and he licked the back of his teeth.
“Roman,” he said.
“What does Roman have to do with the price of rice in China!”
“You know,” he said.
Outside, Roman headed back down the walk. His shoulders were clenched and his cheeks were as hot as though they’d been slapped, and so acute was his annoyance and embarrassment over this failure that he very nearly, without even thinking about it, stepped on a crack, catching his foot just at the last moment. He looked down appalled at this averted catastrophe.
“Fucking Peter!” he said. “Fucking goddamn Peter!”
The wolf shot through the rail yard for the trees. It was immediately apparent nothing on two legs could keep pace. Roman watched the wolf race over the muddy outskirts of the yard and leap over the fence. The hairs on Roman’s arms prickled as he watched the wolf leap: clearing the razor wire with a brute and unsurpassable grace, its coat rippled like a breeze over a wheat field and if its paws never touched ground again Roman would have been just as happy, he would have been just as happy to watch his friend fly forever.
“If you hurt him, you are dead,” said Roman. “Do you hear me? Dead,” he stressed pathetically.
“He’s fine,” said Chasseur. “And if you threaten me again I’ll come over there and break your fucking teeth in.”
“I watched you change back,” he said. “This morning.”
There was another pause. “Yeah?” said Peter.
“Yeah. It’s actually … it’s … beautiful.”
“Okay,” said Peter.
“I’m not a homo,” said Roman. He hung up, noticing a black shape reflected in the driver’s window, and turned to find the cat sitting a few paces off.
With a troubling sense of déjà vu Peter was shaken awake by Roman the second day running.
“I ordered a redhead,” said Peter.
Roman did not acknowledge the joke.
Peter didn’t understand, then he did. The thing they didn’t talk about, because when one friend has this power, not talking about it is a lot easier than talking about it; the paths it can lead down that one virtue of the male sex is an unparalleled lack of curiosity to see where they go. The power behind his eyes, and the meaning of this power.
He sat and looked at Peter. Peter fidgeted, uncomfortable. He could sense when Roman was going to bring up that night at the chapel, and though he didn’t mind providing an ear he was himself loath to volunteer anything. In truth he had almost no memory of what happened, and he didn’t want it otherwise. The thing about coming back from the dead was that your life went on, and he didn’t like dwelling on it. The presentiment of an unpaid debt that he didn’t like dwelling on at all.
“When you did what you did,” said Roman, “how were you not afraid?”
But this was not a question Peter was expecting. At first he was bemused, then he chuckled andshook his head as though at a foreigner’s comical malapropism.
Roman was as baffled as a Chinaman. “What?” he said.
“I’ve never been more scared of anything in my life. I could never have done it if I didn’t know you were there too.”
They were quiet. Roman looked out at the hills, seven shades of ever flusher and more life-giving green. He shook his head.
“Fucking angels,” he said.
Then it came: from within the trailer the cry of the left-behind. She stood where she was as the cry rose at the immensity and grandeur of this desolation; she waited as the boy’s pathetic howl went on, and on, and her heart howled right along with it. She was here, she was right here.
ShelleyShelley
Шелли тоже родилась в сорочке:
How I could not believe my luck when Shelley too was born with the caul, but in intoxication over my prosperity sautéed with wine and wild mushrooms—only for the child to pay the price for my license.
I am ugly, Uncle. There is no other way to put it. But that does not mean I am without pride, without joy, without the same entitlement to feel deserving of love from those not obligated by blood to give it. I may be ugly, but I can hardly imagine a reason to act like it.
A body comma he was making his best girl a body comma and until he had perfected the procedure for Shelley Godfrey’s rebirth into a body to make the world love her as much as he did comma whatever was required of him to keep the lights on was a small price full stop.
“You’re a lamp,” he said. “You shine on people and you’re either going to show what’s best in them or what’s the most crummy. And you always got the best of me because there you were, lighting the way. So it’s even worse how you had to learn about my shitheel side. But that’s your tragedy, and nothing breaks my heart more: you’re always going to be surrounded by people who don’t deserve you.”
…steamed inexorably for the only destination, all that was left, and far behind her Roman crested the hill to see her blue light; from this height it might have been a firefly as it approached the institute, the place of her creation, coming closer and closer before, as he knew it would in the moment just cusping the actual event, winking out as though swallowed by the very earth.
ChristinaChristina
…and the only person her own age she knew who wanted nothing more when she grew up than to be a Russian novelist.
This was incredible to her. It was enough putting her lips on this boy’s because it was just the perfect thing to do in the moment, but to think of the whole of him on top of her and the rest of it, nature’s final puzzle, what was between his legs and what was between hers.
But an incredulity no different than if they had slipped a poison into her drink that was a thousand needles in her heart and delivered this information to her with a blushing glee she—she—was expected to take part in.
How they could do that to her.
What happens when the head is not removed from a werewolf after its death? It is doomed to tell its story. The forever howl.
Christina was a girl both young and old for her years; she had never shed the breathless curiosity of a child assembling its universe: What is that? Where did that come from? Why is that like that and not another way and what is its orientation with every other thing?
Why?
Why?
Why?
She is her own Greek chorus now, and she’s very very sorry for everything that happened.
Christina looked at Letha. Yesterday, seeing Roman and the doctor slipping food and blankets into the chapel, she knew that Peter was in there. It was no more in question than the location of her own heart. Peter had made her, he was part of her now. There was no hiding from yourself, not in the end.
“Because when I saw you in here with your ugly little thing in that whore I wanted more than anything to feel her fear on my tongue and her bones crunch between my teeth and her blood run down the fur of my neck.”
She looked at him hopefully. “We can eat her together,” she said. “I always left you the bigger piece.”
NormanNorman
Dr. Godfrey was a trim man in his middle age with prematurely graying hair and beard, and eyes that under normal circumstances had a certain cast of patrician magnanimity, this the favored result of the parallel character traits of a deep fundamental kindness and near complete lack of humility. But these were not normal circumstances and his stride was hard with purpose, his green Godfrey eyes bullets in extreme slow motion.
Норман знает, что Оливия причастна к беременности Леты
Last night his crying wife had left the room and he had remained seated and his child had taken his hand across the table with the grace of the sunrise, and in that moment when there wasn’t another comprehensible thing left to him he had a feeling. Darkly and obscurely and defiant of any rational analysis, he felt Olivia’s hand in this. And that feeling, it had to be admitted, was not having things under control. It was in fact no more rational than his daughter’s explanation.
He lied without charity that he would and in the interim had not. He had instead taken up drink as affective novocaine. If the point of novocaine was the numbing of a numbness. In his last loveless years Jacob Godfrey was known to spend hours on end standing in the front yard of the house he had constructed at the summit of the highest hill in the valley. He would survey the land of his sovereignty, a land he had forged into his own vision through blood and fire, and know at his life’s epilogue that itwas all a petty, transient thing, nothing about it transubstantial, and that here he was just a lone and useless rich man at the house on the hill, visible and still forgotten. Dr. Godfrey had spent his entire life terrified of this fate and taking every step to rebel against it by throwing himself into a vocation that was as antithetical as he could imagine: compassion. Hence his calling to psychiatry, the meeting place of matter and spirit. He had helped people, so many people, and what more can be said than that? I helped. Tell me what else there is to be said.
However, the antagonist who stood before him was less the lion of proud imperial hypocrisy than a version thereof that had been put through a paper shredder and Scotch-taped back together.
“I have a teenage daughter I’m taking to the OB-GYN tomorrow,” he said. “If I get solid evidence you had any involvement in that, I will have you killed. That is not an exaggeration.”
Godfrey employed a mental exercise. He had read at a young age a guiding principle that had changed the course of his life: The first step to liberty is respecting the rights of others. This had made him something of an aberration in the Godfrey line, the idea that each and every soul with whom you share this planet, no matter how unlike, much less appalling to yourself, was worthy of empathy and respect in all circumstances. So the exercise was simply continuing to sit here with this magazine whose words were a blur of irritation and trying to find a modicum of generosity toward this particular segment of humanity instead of escaping to the car and having a slug from the flask that he rationalized he wasn’t hiding because the glove compartment wasn’t a hiding place, it was a perfectly innocent compartment. What distinguished this exercise from punishment was a question of degree rather than intent.
LethaLetha
Letha was a small and sandy blond girl with distinctively idiosyncratic features that were as far from pretty in the conventional sense as they were from homely, and where Roman was mercurial, Letha was mystical.
She possessed a kind of half-step-removed sense of discovery as though she passed through life having just woken from a successful nap. Naturally this polarity drew them only closer—a fact that filled her father with no small disquiet.
“(D),” she said, “saying it is a person, and saying you find him: What are you going to do?”
“What do you think, sweetheart?” said Roman. “Put him in the pound.”
Letha turned back to the obvious brains (if that was the word for it) of this operation with the look of chastising mother all women are born with. “Can I ask you what possible good you think is going to come from this?”
He met her look with a face evincing that great rarity: not even the hint of need for selfjustification.
“No,” he said.
They stopped at a red light abreast a garbage truck and she studied him and wrestled with the conflicting impulses of the ever Herculean endeavor of saving Roman from himself, and in her new faith-filled condition saying yes to whatever this mysterious moron asked of her as her ears were filled with the implacable grind of the neighboring trash compactor.
She leaned in with a confidential aspect and looked at him intently, and Peter saw now with clarity. Her soul’s light, the wide-eyed mysticism that set her apart from the rest of these dipshits.
Peter and LethaPeter and Letha
Not that they had had any real interaction, but he struck her as one of those boys with overly supportive mothers and proportionate grossly inflated sense of their own hotness. Which isn’t to say she was not dismayed by his social ostracism in a generic state-ofthe-world sort of way, but this did not detract from the pervert stare he gave any passing skirt with the apparent conviction when caught at it that his gross gawking was a kind of flattery. And this showboating performance right now, something inherently sad and stupid about exhibiting a pointless skill that required an investment of hours totally out of balance with its value, like the skater boys she always mentally crossed a finger would crash. The fact is, other people being jerks to you doesn’t make you not inherently kind of a jerk. Then, the climax: Peter bending to one knee and catching two of the rocks in his hat and impeccably timing an am-I-forgetting-something face a split second before the third landed on his skull.
Somehow, in her appraisal of his round brown face and feral stubble and deep almond eyes as being vain and vulgar, it had eluded her that it was quite possibly the most interesting face she had seen in her life, a riddle yearning to be solved—the vanity and vulgarity twin guardians of some unknowable mystery it goes without saying she would have to possess. She left her hand on the headrest fearing that if she lifted it to shake his she would reach and touch his face, the precise reason she couldn’t stand museums. Who wants to sit around looking at things?
Peter wondered why Roman’s cousin was looking at him like that, and why she wasn’t shaking his hand. This family.
OliviaOlivia
Olivia was an unpleasantly beautiful woman of indeterminate age. She wore a white Hermès pantsuit in brazen Old World indifference that Labor Day had been weeks ago, with a head scarf around a head of black hair and blacker Jackie O sunglasses. She sipped a gin martini.
Her accent was careful British with continental traces. She had been in her time an actress of some favor on the boards of the Lyceum and even at their most extemporaneous her words had the ring of her craft.
There ran along Olivia’s spine above the coccyx, like the mountain range of a relief map, a pale, pinkie-length scar, the remnant of some crude surgery.
He knew married men who would kill for it. Men who would kill for her.
She was wearing a white robe and her hair was damp and she moved and also stood still like milk being poured under the full moon, and though she would have had neither time nor purpose to apply cosmetics after bathing, her lips were a shock red that in their present purse of distaste caused within Peter’s privatemost circuitry a sudden and confusing crossfiring at how arousing and simultaneously dick-shriveling this apparition was.
He added that it would be for the best if Peter didn’t drop by his place anymore—getting himself mixed up in a series of grisly killings was exactly the kind of thing his mother would view like showing up to a dinner party without a bottle of wine: in poor taste.
Olivia standing nude, waist deep, staring off at those lights dotting the hillside and gently disrupting the surface tension with a slow back-and-forth motion of her arms. Pryce’s eye fell to the scar on the small of her back, all that demarcated her as an earthly body. Eventually she turned and waded back, emerging on the bank and standing before him. She was covered with gooseflesh and her nipples were small and dark and black trails of mascara ran down from her eyes.
Norman and OliviaNorman and Olivia
He allowed her to pull him down. He lay with his head to her breast and she ran her hand up and down his back. Their first time had been on this floor many years ago. If it had seemed like he couldn’t have felt worse about it then it was because he had been too young a man to know yet that time is cyclical, that there is no upward limit to the number of times you can make the same mistake.
“My poor, poor Norman,” she said.
He would have liked to lie here weeping for a while but was too depleted to cry. It felt like all the world’s kindness was in the flat of her hand.
Roman and OliviaRoman and Olivia
Her face clouded darkly and she spoke with dread calm. “You think you can hide behind your name like every other time, but I have made my position clear on your association with that Gypsy trash. And whatever preposterous goddamn game you think you’re playing to get a rise out of me, you have a rather great deal more to lose than that thick, spoiled head is allowing for.”
Roman did not immediately respond, and wanting least in the world to bring attention to herself Shelley held her breath and there was only the high-frequency pitch of the muted television.
“Jesus, you need to get laid,” said Roman.
Shelley gasped and raced from the room. Olivia looked at Roman. He was too pleased with himself to be finished, so she waited.
“Is Norm busy?” he said.
Now there was the rush! She rose and stood before him, regarding the child with a thrill of gall.
And then she slapped his face with such force it knocked him back over the end table, and he made no attempt to protect himself as she knelt over him and slapped both sides of his face until his cheeks were an angry rose red. Then, suddenly short of breath, she backed off and turned away, leaving him on his back. There was a flicker in the window, the reflected screen of the television. The film’s spurned heroine on a chaise smoking with languid animus. Olivia stared captive as the image diffused into a liquid flux of the light and dark and she felt herself sinking, sinking somehow away and into it at the same time …
She felt a pair of strong hands steady her shoulders and Roman caught her just before she fell.
“Any designs on the evening?” said Olivia.
“Nein,” said Roman with a crisp Nazi salute. He went inside.
“You need to be very careful around Roman Godfrey and his mother,” she said.
“The little prince has no teeth,” said Peter. “And the queen is an actress. Underneath the mask she’s just bored.”
“He has no teeth yet. But I could see with my Third Eye a trouble with his Anahata chakra, and just like I knew there would be, there’s a dangerous conversion of his fate line and his heart line. He is going to face the hardest choice he will ever have to make, and however he falls will have very very large consequences for anyone around him.
“And you should watch your step around an actress whether or not she’s upir. Because you never know how many masks that crazy bitch is wearing.”
At first light the master bedroom door opened and Olivia emerged. She wore a white satin robe and passed down the hall and stopped at the door with the Dragon on it and entered. The room was dark; morning light visible around the edges of the curtains. He was still sleeping. She came forward and stood over him. His bare chest and neck were long and lean and white. She placed the backs of her fingers to his neck and felt the living miracle of the young heart in his chest, the conduit between it and her own. His eyes opened. She caressed his face and his scalp.
“We’ll need to bleach you soon,” she said. “Your roots are showing.”
Интересные фактыИнтересные факты
Дочь Оливии Магдалена – та самая женщина из рассказов Николая, Роман и Питер – родственники)
So the child was taken to the swineherd, the old Rumancek, whose low name the tainted bloodline would forever bear, and Olivia informed her father she would be going to the academy in the city, to learn the dramatic arts.
Норман был под гипнозом в день рождения Романа:
I placed Norman in the extaz for fear that the program of the evening would physically kill him. Оливия Нормана любит и не будет подвергать опасности)
В день рождения Оливия освободила Романа от гипноза - разом выдала ему всю правду про Лету и ребенка:
He stood in speechless soliloquy. I held his face in my hands and his eyes with mine and released him, by extaz released him from the unknowing it had been necessary to hold him in until this moment. All those secrets, whispers of a dream, now revealed.
Шелли тоже родилась в сорочке:
How I could not believe my luck when Shelley too was born with the caul, but in intoxication over my prosperity sautéed with wine and wild mushrooms—only for the child to pay the price for my license.
Кажется, у Романа сын, а не дочка : )
He looked up at me. All ambivalence and abhorrence now gone from his eyes. He knew. I held out my hand and he rose. Hand in hand we stood before the bassinet. The child now peaceful as he looked up at his father. Blood of blood. I released Roman’s hand and stood back as the flesh of my arms rose. I could hear it in his veins. It was happening. I stood witness to the most delicate miracle of creation. Never in my life had I better earned a cry. So I bawled and he Became, forged as is needful for our kind in the furnace of incommunicable loss...
Предположения и находки
The green-eyed boy sat alone in the food court and fingered the needle in his pocket. The syringe was empty and unused, he had no use for the syringe. He had use for the needle. The green-eyed boy—he was called Roman, but what you will have seen first was the eyes—wore a tailored Milanese blazer, one hand in pocket, and blue jeans. He was pale and lean and as handsome as a hatchet, and in egregious style and snobbery a hopeless contrast from the suburban mall food court where he sat and looked in the middle distance and fidgeted with the needle in his pocket.
He unzipped his jeans, freeing his erection, and laced his hands behind his head. He waited. After a few moments the passenger-side door opened and the girl got in and he closed his eyes as she lowered her head to his lap.
Roman was also a senior, well within the innermost ring of privilege and popularity. The Godfrey name as sovereign as Dupont or Ramses, and he made no attempt to obscure it from hair he would think nothing of taking a half day off school to go into the city to have styled and bleached
(his bone pallor suggesting a natural dark, not to mention a general indisposition to playing outside), or the small but impressive pharmacy he carried in a tin mint container. And obviously the car. The desire to be burdened by possessions was one that had in the main escaped Peter, but as a teenager of traveling blood he had no defense against anything with a combustion engine and the fact was that car was totally metal. But Roman otherwise had little in common with the other rich kids, exhibiting a nearly complete lack of regard for social expectation. His behavior not rebellious so much as entirely unmotivated to behave in any way that didn’t conform exactly to the cast of his mood at the moment, his sense of entitlement as phenotypal as the green eyes. This characteristic of his dynasty dating back to its first possessor, his three times great-grandfather the legendary steel baron, Jacob Godfrey.(Green of course being the color of money.) It had made him mercurial.
But none of this was what Peter found so compelling about Roman Godfrey.
Да-да-да, в книге Роман - крашеный блондин)
There was a breeze and it carried the smell of grass and he held up his hands to feel it pass between his fingers when he saw something in the tree line: a gleaming—no, a twin gleaming, eyeshine: it was a pair of eyes, glowing like a cat’s.
Peter rose. Roman Godfrey emerged.У Романа глаза в темноте светятся, как у кошки)
Roman looked at him, he looked into his eyes and for a fleeting moment his own candesced in that same cat’s eye way that had attracted Peter’s attention in the first place, and he said with a kind of rote inflection as though feeding an actor his line, “But his old lady’s gonna be a pain in the balls.”
But as someone who was by nature a taker
he knew when he had taken exactly as much as he was going to get. Though it had never before been so much more and so much less than what he wanted.As they passed over Indian Creek, Letha looked at Roman. The moonlight on his affectless face like silk gliding over stone.
Later that night Roman was sitting at the darkened dining room table sipping from the flask and slowly counting the number of crystals that comprised the chandelier—160, he knew well, but the product of 40 fours was considerable comfort to him and its confirmation a soothing process—when those crystals began to glitter from a faint light.
У Романа свои числовые ритуалы. Он считает, что четверки приносят удачу, а простые числа и тройка, самое ужасное из простых чисел, - предвестники катастрофы и посланники тьмы.
Roman elbowed his way through the Sworn twins and there was a hush as he stood, his green Godfrey eyes were hard candy.
The boys backed into the lockers, vainly and stupidly protesting their innocence. Roman looked at his sister on the ground. Her head was still bowed forward and her massive humped shoulders were shaking. He looked into the eyes of the second boy and in a tone striking for its reason said, “Kiss him. Kiss his pretty little mouth.”“I’ve never believed in God,” said Roman in the too-fast blurt of an illicit confession.
Однако в часовне молился вместе с Летой)
Roman led him to his room, which was nearly the footage of Peter’s trailer. On the door was a picture of a crucifix with a serpent wrapped around it. The serpent’s tail was in its mouth. Otherwise there was an almost total lack of decoration, except mounted to the wall a train car coupling link, an old oblong of warped and rusted steel. Which despite its meager appearance Peter immediately knew without being told was the most valuable thing Roman owned.
Самое ценное, чем Роман владеет, - фрагмент цепи из ржавой стали, нам показывали его в сериале.
Вообще для Романа на самом деле много значит его наследие, потом еще будет эпизод на заводе, когда он не захотел гипнотизировать полицейских - его имя на собственности, какое право они имели запрещать ему там находиться?
Roman turned back in what Peter at first feared was for the purpose of some kind of stage wink or equally bonehead gesture but instead he swept his arm at the side of the building—to what end Peter did not know but he could not imagine what was preventing him from employing the one thing he was reliably good for.
“The eyes,” Peter whispered desperately. “Do the crazy roofie eyes.”
In fact, what Roman was indicating was the faded six-foot white lettering on the side of the building: GODFREY STEEL COMPANY. And he had seen his name put to too much ill use this day to resort to parlor tricks; real things were at stake here and had to be put to right.
That evening Roman stood nude facing the bathroom mirror with the blade of a box cutter pressed just to the side of his pubis, and he made a small incision. He was in the habit of on occasion cutting open —nothing excessive—his chest or his abdomen; not to release any inner pain or cause a fuss, but simply because he liked to, liked the feeling of hot blood trickling down his belly or his legs or his cock, liked the complementarity of it, that life was in essence liquid, not solid.
He watched in the mirror the rivulet curve with his hip down his inner thigh and the hairs of his legs stood, the warmth of it versus the cold of the tile under his feet. He tightened his core and clenched his buttocks to increase the flow.“Roman doesn’t have enough friends. I mean, there’s those people.” She nodded her head toward Roman’s lunch table. “But all they care about is the name. Nobody really knows him. Least of all, Roman.”
И Роман не знает сам себя...“Gee, I wish I was cool enough to know magic tricks,” said Roman. Подожди немного, Роман) Будут тебе magic tricks)
Roman regarded the clock in a cold sweat: 1:11. There was no way to convey how fatal an augur it would be to embark on this task when the time was a succession of primes that added to the worst of primes, so he didn’t bother. He waited until it turned 1:12—a cumulative 4.
И опять числовые ритуалы: единицы и тройка как плохая примета, четверка - как хорошая.
“Do you know who knocked up my daughter?” he said.
“No,” said Roman. “If I did, he’d be at the bottom of the river right now.”
It astounded Godfrey that he had missed what a charming young man his nephew had become.
Roman stood in his room regarding the coupling link mounted on the wall. While it looked like worthless junk, this was the first item produced by Jacob Godfrey for the Pennsylvania Railroad and its value was beyond measure: an empire had been built on it.
Roman picked it up and held it in front of his heart and pulled with both hands as hard as he could, but to no avail even a century after its production: it was Godfrey steel. He put it back on its mount and went to his dresser, where there was a glass of vodka and ice and a small mound of cocaine on a pewter tray. He took out his mint container, where he stored a blade for a box cutter and segments of straw, and divided the cocaine into several lines and snorted them. He took a heavy sip of vodka. He looked at himself in the mirror.“Godfrey steel,” he said.
He held the blade of the box cutter to the corner of his eye and made a quick vertical slash down his cheek. He closed his eyes and felt the pleasing warmth as blood issued onto his face. He opened his eyes and put a finger to the cut and traced it under both eyes and over his lips in a parody of his mother applying makeup. He batted his eyes for the mirror and puckered his lips.
“Shut up and kiss me,” he said.
She lifted the bandage, gauging immediately that the cut was superficial and self-inflicted. Further that the boy was high and recently had had his heart broken
and that this made him defenseless and dangerous, so conveniently incautious for her purposes.“Shelley, we have a visitor who’d like to meet you.”
Chasseur noted the softening of his manner. He held some things sacred. Шелли для Романа - это святое.
She regarded the boy: a narcissistic, insecure, oversensitive, and underparented adolescent heir to a Fortune 500 company with a substance abuse problem and homoerotic tendencies—it would have been more surprising if he didn’t “see things sometimes.”
Roman watched.
Sheets of rain washed over the glass and Roman watched the two of them inside. They were on the couch. She was facing down and he was on top of her. Her arm was outstretched and his fingers laced through hers. Roman stood in the hemlocks with his hair matted to his forehead and arms dead at his sides and watched. Peter worked his hand under her and up her clit and her mouth made a moan and his hair brushed her face and her mouth closed. Sucking on it. Sucking his fucking rat faggot hair.
Rain hit a puddle by his feet like a thousand damned mouths wailing O.
Roman turned away and walked around front and got into his car. His wet clothes suctioned him to the leather and he tried counting the worms of rain racing down his windshield but they all ran together. It was nothing but a measure of disorder. That was all it was.
The shadows dancing in the corners of his eyes laced gently together now, forming a merciful black.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
He lowered his head and did not meet her eyes. The candle flickered over the hard geometry of his face. She noticed the stain of red under the bandage on his cheek.
“Roman, what happened?”
He was staring blankly and his cheeks gleamed because he was crying.
He looked Pryce in the eye. “Tell me—” said Roman.
Pryce clicked his pen three times in succession. clickclickclick. It cut Roman’s focus off at the knees. Three. Atonal, asymmetrical, amoral. Bad luck’s favorite number, its association with the divine the devil’s hat trick. Roman sputtered, trying to expel this emissary of the dark place.
Вот как в книге Прайс вырубил Романа - тройные щелчки, и посланники тьмы-тройки забрали Романа во тьму.
And then it was quiet again, and what boundary there was between Roman and the dark place fell away, and his eyes turned backwards and he saw the other side of it, he saw with clarity something he once knew, the most forbidden possible thing to know, the thing that Francis Pullman had seen when he looked into his eyes. The thing that had happened, and was still to come.
Roman screamed, and his knees buckled under him and he fell to the lawn screaming, and the ground around him buckled inward in a concavity of a perfect circumference that appeared around him, but he did not notice as the ground rippled and then fell away and he was swallowed by the pit.
She tightened the straps. “Roman,” she said, “what can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more. This is not your friend. This is not a person. I know it’s hard for you to accept and I believe it’s hard for him too. I believe that you wanted to find the monster, and so did he. Because he couldn’t know that about himself. You can’t know that about yourself and continue being a person.”
Roman shook his head. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “That’s just bullshit.”
She gave Peter’s restraints a once-over and stood. “This is an animal,” she said. “That’s what it is.”
Roman looked pleadingly at her. She repeated her admonition about eye contact.
“If you’re wrong, someone is going to die tonight,” said Roman. “Can’t you see I’m just trying to help? Why won’t you let me help?”
“Because you don’t believe in God,” she said.
Roman went to Shelley. He put his hands behind her head and pulled her to a crouch so his forehead touched hers and he breathed with her down to a gentle lull. He was calming because he was calm himself. He had made mistakes out of confusion but just now, when he had pulled up out front, he had heard the sound of his sister needing his help and this was all the focus he needed.
The cat splayed on his back and Roman rubbed his belly. He curled like a black velvet fist around his hand and bit him.
“Hey hey hey,” said Roman, “we don’t love with our teeth.”
Хорошая фраза))И еще один случай, Роману выдали ТРИ
доллара сдачи:Though the total was just over $22 the cashier gave him an even $3 in change.
Roman paled.
“Oh no,” he said.
The cashier began ringing the next customer’s purchases, though Roman had not moved.
“I need my change,” he said.
“Excuse me?” said the cashier.
“My change,” said Roman, handing back the third bill with shaking fingers.
The cashier looked at him, wondering if he was serious. Roman blinked back tears of desperation.
He held the dollar out in one hand and the receipt in the other.
“I need the exact change right here,” said Roman.
“Why?” said the cashier, who was a gaunt gray young girl possessed of the spirit of reverse charity that overtakes some when seeing another in clear need.
“Because I can’t go,” Roman pleaded heedlessly. “I need you to give me the amount of money that’s here on the receipt before I can go.”
“Sir, I’m assisting another customer.”
Roman commanded his feet to lift from where they stood, but it would have taken a claw hammer.
He felt distantly like he was forgetting something and he started breathing again. But the fact remained, blank and pitiless: the numbers didn’t add up and he could not go before they did, the fact of it crushing him like the handshake of a small-dicked god.
The old woman after him gave Roman a nervous look as she handed over her money.
“I’m … I’m not normal,”
he said apologetically, then suddenly muscled between her and the checkout counter and snaked his arm into the register as it opened and helped himself to a handful of coins and sprinted to the exit as commotion rose behind him, counting out his exact change and flinging the excess behind him, the weight of the heavens from his shoulders.Роман в книге забирал Кристину с Летой без Питера и по дороге раздумывал, а не приказать ли Кристине себя убить)
He looked at her face and it occurred to him he could just do it. Here and now. They did not have to get where they were going, Peter did not have to be the one to decide. Roman could just give her the blade and tell her to cut her own wrists and inside of her legs and her neck and anywhere else that would bleed fast and comprehensive into the dirt. Maybe he could even tell Letha to forget. For all he knew he could do that too. He looked at her. He tried to summon the intention and warrior’s focus he had felt so recently looking into the mirror, but this was not a picture, it was a person. A little fucking girl. Roman did not feel like much of a warrior.
The white wolf ripped off half the brown wolf’s ear and its rear claws hooked into its stomach and tore, but in all its savage power it could not hurt the brown wolf enough to make its release. So the primal intercourse. Good versus evil at its most raw and elemental. But standing beholden to the full catharsis of what had seemed so necessary to Roman now just seemed tiring. Tiring because he felt prematurely the weight of carrying how stupidly fucking sad this was for the rest of his days.
He noticed a low murmuring by his ear. It was Letha. She was praying. She was praying for her angel. You crazy-ass fucking bitch, thought Roman. He started praying too.
Roman had a series of protocols that was supposed to maintain order and balance in the world. He had an alliance with the virtuous and harmonic number four and multiples thereof and was an enemy of primes; primes the emissaries of the dark place. He would reset his alarm a fixed number of times depending on the hour it was supposed to go off, would sooner step on a nail than a crack, could not fall asleep unless he was certain every drawer and cupboard in the house was securely shut, always entered water with his left foot, and always untied knots. But as he worked with trembling fingers, freeing one fiber and another and another, frantically loosing individual and innocuous strands by the light of the institute, it occurred to him for the first time in his life that what he was doing was completely pointless. That there was no protocol that could undo the things that had been done this night in the naming of what is good and evil. He dropped the thread to the ground, his work unfinished. He had never performed such a breach before. Could never have imagined such a thing. He felt empty. He had never imagined such an emptiness. Вот так Роман понял, что все его ритуалы, алгоритмы и протоколы не имеют влияния на окружающую действительность.
And then the light of the White Tower went dark.
Roman would have written off the entire expedition as a fool and his money, except that he had been experiencing headaches of increasing severity lately. A heightened photosensitivity
of the eyes that forced him to keep his sunglasses on more or less continuously before dusk.В конце книги Роман ходит в темных очках - повышенная светочувствительность, с чего бы это))
PeterPeter
Peter, who was seventeen at the time of which I'm writing, liked accidents: modern times were just so fucking structured.
Two of the cops combing the area by the swings he knew; they’d hassled him a couple of times in that kind of obligatory cop way that, in Peter’s experience, every uniform was an SS uniform.
Nicolae had always told him that he had been born with an unusually receptive Swadisthana chakra and that underneath the surfaces of things, the illusion of the illusion, there is a secret, sacred frequency of the universe and that the Swadisthana was the channel through which it would sing to you. And the Swadisthana being located of course just behind the balls, he should always always trust his balls.
The Rumanceks preferred trade to charity out of principle
He had his family and infinite roads to explore and could not imagine needing more, and if this was at the expense of fitting in—whatever that meant—so what. There was so much to learn from every place. Or at least something worth watching. Who was in love with their best friend’s boy- or girlfriend, who was in love with their best friend, who cut, who starved, who locked themselves in the handicapped bathroom to jerk off or cry, who was addicted to what or had been raped by whom—it was everywhere, a wonderful world of darkness and desire right under the roaring bleachers, if you had your eye out.
There was something else, a presence of some kind, dwelling underfoot, no manner of thing under the sun. Peter could not get a grasp of its horns but he knew it was down there, older than the hills it lived under. There had been a couple of times when, in a liminal state on the hammock, a vision would come to him of a snake, a Bible black serpent slowly and sensually consuming itself by the tail. But then his eyes would snap open and he would look at the sky through a lattice of boughs and irritatedly push it out of his mind.
Peter had a great talent for not losing sleep over questions to which he did not know the answer, so these intrusions on that very sleep really rattled his cage. But it, whatever it was in some dark place underneath and older than these hills, was not the same thing that had killed Brooke Bluebell from Penrose.
A cloudywing moth passed close by and Peter’s arm darted out to catch it. A flair for opportunistic showmanship ran in the Rumanceks’ blood and he was pretty sure he could get twenty bucks from the rich kid in a dare to eat off.
“What’s it like?” he said. “Living like, you know. You people.”
It didn’t bother Peter being referred to as “you people”—it respected the fundamental boundary of life: haves and have-nots. And Peter did not account himself the impoverished one.
“I guess there’s always something over the hill I gotta see,” he said.
What a devil he is!—a few inches shorter than the other boys his age, but broader in the shoulder (of course, either way he is doll-sized relative to your affectionate authoress). He is of swarthy complexion with a black ponytail
possessing the sheen that suggests petroleum jelly as his hair product of choice.After the bell rang, Peter approached Roman. He had debated all period and convinced himself that indulging the other boy’s curiosity was the more sensible course than evasion—discouraging him would only egg him on. But in truth his Rumancek blood would not permit him to pass up an opportunity to show off.
He said, “Come by around five.”The news of the second girl had come as no surprise to him, only the length of time it had taken to come out. He knew now what was happening, or at least enough to know how much he’d rather think about just about anything else, but of course that would now require shaking the upir from his tail.
“Have you ever attacked anyone?” he said. “As the wolf?”
“No,” said Peter.
“Have you ever … wanted to?”
“I’ve never had a reason to.”
He was not comfortable with this degree of intimacy.
He did not like where this was going. The layers of outer affectation peeled away to reveal the other boy’s inner need. His need that he thought Peter could somehow meet. The only thing that scared Peter off more than other people’s needs was a cage, though in the end what was the difference? And though he regretted the pain this vargulf was causing, and would continue to in all likelihood before its inevitable self-termination, pain was as much a part of this life as the summer and the winter and the rain, and there was no greater asshole than the one who believed you can cure it. That you ought to. Peter did not consider himself a defeatist, but Nicolae had taught him not to scratch where it doesn’t itch, and he had a highly evolved sense of what was and was not his problem.
“Let’s be clear, only one thing matters here: not putting me in a cage.”
[Peter] was not comfortable with this degree of intimacy. He did not like where this was going. The layers of outer affectation peeled away to reveal the other boy’s inner need. His need that he thought Peter could somehow meet.
“People see what they see,” she said. “They see someone like Peter and he’s just a blank page that people can put on whatever they’re afraid of. You know how people are.”
And now, upon meeting the accused in person, Dr. Godfrey was more sympathetic to his daughter’s point of view: Peter was a different breed. He was not our neighbor. He did not want the things we wanted. If you told him to straighten up and fly right he could only look at you in utter confusion: to his mind this was exactly what he was doing. Foremost he was guilty of civilization’s unthinkable crime, as plain in his walk as a limp: he was not owned by anyone.
“To Roman,” said Peter, and in his eye was a sort of strange character Godfrey had caught at odd moments all through the meal, not so much a maturity as a nature consciousness as though he were at times a boy exactly of his years and others a soul out of time wearing a boy mask.
They wanted him to give them a reason but Peter had been on the wrong end of enough beatings to know that nothing was worth it. This was what made Peter not like Roman; Peter had control. When they can take that from you there is no floor under what else you can lose.
“If you were going to run away, would you tell me?” she said.
“I’m not going to run away,” said Peter.
“I’ll go with you if you run,” she said.
He looked out at the round moon.
“I’m not fast enough to outrun this,” he said.
Peter still did not answer; it was not because he didn’t have one but because he was too tired to hear it himself. That what had happened the last two turns was going to happen again tomorrow night, and the whole town knew it. Unless he killed it. That this thing knew who he was and there was nothing he could do now to make himself not part of this. Unless he killed it. That he had a fear now even deeper than the cage and it was for what had happened to those other girls to happen to her, for her to be alive and watching while teeth and claws ripped open sacks of meat and jelly and shit and the life inside her. Unless he killed it. That life is a game, with the clearest stakes possible, and that losing it blows beyond all comprehension. He was not a killer, he did not want to kill anything, fuck all this killing.
And Roman. Help Roman become a man on the path of light and love.
Not the other way. Tell Roman … all the things I couldn’t. Letha approached the wolf. It lay on its side, unconscious and wheezing and its fur stickied red. She lay behind it and pulled its body into hers and looked into its eyes. The wolf looked back and they were Peter’s eyes. She was the only one to learn Peter’s true secret: that there is no “it,” only him, always him.
Roman and PeterRoman and Peter
Roman says he is a werewolf. Mother says he is vermin and to have no truck with him (directed, naturally, at Roman—it would not occur to her to include me in such an admonition).
Roman weak-kneed with admiring envy of those fangs, white fangs gleaming, gloating over the purest dichotomy of having/not having.
“Can I … pet him?” said Roman, somewhat recovered. To the extent he ever would be.
“Roman was unstable, like a coin spun on a tabletop: the closer it came to rest, the greater its velocity, now one end up then the other. He was neither heads nor tails. And of all potential outcomes in their continued association nearly none fell outside Peter’s extensive Hierarchy of Shit He Could Live Without.”
“Have you ever heard of the Order of the Dragon?” he said.
Peter looked at him. This better be good.
“It was a group of knights from the Crusades. My mom used to tell us stories.”
Peter looked at him, but more so.
“I … I’ve always wanted to be a warrior,” said Roman.
Peter came to the silent conclusion that this conference was about to jump several echelons of his Hierarchy.
So there you had it. Behind that aloof and mercurial façade was a battle, and he had to decide the outcome: Was he the hero or the villain? And so what could be more black-and-white than a quest to slay the monster that was terrorizing the countryside? Wow. Peter didn’t want to touch that with your dick.
“Roman,” said Peter, “maybe this is the kind of thing you should be talking about with the guidance counselor.”
Peter was still entranced by this intricate arboreal obscenity when Roman appeared alone.
“Yeah?” he said, with the cold aloofness of a scorned woman.
“Well?” said Roman, with the cold, aloof satisfaction of a scorned woman to whom you’ve come crawling back.
Roman replied they were partners on a school project. Mother was not satisfied by this patent evasion.
“Do you want the truth?” said Roman.
“Yes,” said Mother.
Roman gave a lengthy and graphic account of a homosexual affair.
“Because we’re going to dig her up.”
Peter was not sure if the joyful light that suddenly shone in Roman’s green Godfrey eyes was indicative of how auspicious or dumbfuck a partnership this would be.
“We’re not calling ourselves the Order of the Dragon,” said Peter.
“Make no mistake about their kind,” she said. “I was in love with an upir once. Someday when I’m drunk enough I’ll tell you about it. But please take my word for it: Never forget what he is. Especially if he has.”
“Promise me something,” she said. “Promise you won’t let things go too far. Promise you’ll keep him from doing anything stupid.”
Peter made a solemn face and smiled inside: he enjoyed the ceremony and impressiveness of making promises completely irrespective of his intention of keeping them.
“I promise I won’t let that happen,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“What do you do when you get horny? While you’re turned?”
Peter looked up at the lines of parallel lights extending into the white vanishing point at the tunnel’s far end. He didn’t answer.
THE BREAK-UP SCENE
“I think something is going on at the White Tower,” said Roman.
Peter smoked and watched the birds.
“I don’t know if it’s connected or not, but I can get us in,” said Roman.
Crosshatching the sky were gauzy tendrils of black. Rain later.
Roman saw it in his face. “What?” said Roman.
“No,” said Peter.
“What do you mean, no?” said Roman.
“It’s over,” said Peter.
“What are you talking about?”
“This is over. We’re done.”
Roman looked at him and saw he was serious. Suddenly he wanted to rip that faggot fucking ponytail out of his head. He wanted to find whatever words it would take to make him change his mind.
“Why?” said Roman.
Peter did not answer. He hated that he was having this conversation; this sort of thing was no less suffocating to him than when he was younger and an older cousin would trap him in a blanket and sit on him and it felt like the worst of all possible deaths. Getting mixed up in other people’s feelings, only himself to blame. Also he blamed Roman.
“What, you mean the cops?” said Roman. His tone reflected the boringness and triviality of the incident. “You said get rid of them and I did. Oh, and that was very considerate, dropping my car off with an empty tank, incidentally.”
He waited to see if interjecting levity made the situation any different but it didn’t.
“Okay,” said Roman. “Okay, it was stupid. It was really stupid and I’m an asshole and what is there to say other than that I was being an asshole, but come on. Think about what you’re doing. You can’t walk away over a stupid thing like that. You can’t walk away from … this.”
He pronounced this in the phonetically correct fashion, but somehow it still rhymed with us.
Peter thought about how he might explain things to Roman in a way that wouldn’t upset him further. Explain that they were not alike, that however different from the rest of the world Roman felt, he was still rich and so tolerably different. He did not know what things were like for Peter, he did not fear the cage. The cage was the worst of all possible deaths. But there was no way to make that real for someone like Roman in the same way you could hardly say to a tiger in the jungle, Do you know how free you really are? Because how can he know any other way to be? There was no way to make this a picture in Roman’s brain, so he bounced his heel off the railing for a while and wondered if he could get away with not saying any more than he’d already said.
“Will you fucking say something,” said Roman.
“You should go,” said Peter. “There’s no good for you here. You should get away from this death and this town and your name. Make it all clean. And I don’t know. Figure it out from there.”
Roman regarded his hand. His hand was shaking and wasn’t much use for holding a cigarette, so he flicked it. “I bet you’d like that,” he said. “I bet you’d find that very convenient, you Gypsy piece of shit. You know if you fuck my cousin, I’ll kill you.”
Peter looked at him.
“You’re not better than me,” said Roman, bitter.
Peter kept looking at him.
Roman turned his head. “That’s a faggot fucking ponytail,” he said.
Peter got up and went inside. Roman looked up at the glowering sky. “Fuck,” he said. There was a constriction in his throat.
Then there was a movement in the corner of his vision. Peter coming back out, not leaving it like this. Like before, Peter getting the hard-on thing out of his system but coming back to him. Roman looked pridefully ahead but knew he would let him. That was just his way, Peter was all right for a hard-on. Roman would let him come back again. But the door did not open and Peter did not come, and the movement he had seen was suddenly in the opposite side of his mind’s eye, and it was like dark fingers of black shadow performing sleight of hand to get his attention. Roman’s eyes fluttered.
He bent and picked up the brick and the door closed after it and he hurled it over the hill. There was a metallic crunch and a car alarm went off and Roman sat against the locked door and after a moment held up his still-trembling hand palms outward and scurried his fingers in the air, watching the dance of spidery veins.
“Roman seemed weird today,” she said.
“He’s pissed at me,” said Peter.
“Why?”
“Because there’s a big Roman-shaped blind spot in the way Roman sees things.”
“Are you going to try to fuck me?” she said.
Peter sucked in breath. “Well, here we are,” he said.
“What kind of thing is that to say!” she said.
Peter grimaced.
“What is it?” she said.
His grimace tightened and he licked the back of his teeth.
“Roman,” he said.
“What does Roman have to do with the price of rice in China!”
“You know,” he said.
Outside, Roman headed back down the walk. His shoulders were clenched and his cheeks were as hot as though they’d been slapped, and so acute was his annoyance and embarrassment over this failure that he very nearly, without even thinking about it, stepped on a crack, catching his foot just at the last moment. He looked down appalled at this averted catastrophe.
“Fucking Peter!” he said. “Fucking goddamn Peter!”
The wolf shot through the rail yard for the trees. It was immediately apparent nothing on two legs could keep pace. Roman watched the wolf race over the muddy outskirts of the yard and leap over the fence. The hairs on Roman’s arms prickled as he watched the wolf leap: clearing the razor wire with a brute and unsurpassable grace, its coat rippled like a breeze over a wheat field and if its paws never touched ground again Roman would have been just as happy, he would have been just as happy to watch his friend fly forever.
“If you hurt him, you are dead,” said Roman. “Do you hear me? Dead,” he stressed pathetically.
“He’s fine,” said Chasseur. “And if you threaten me again I’ll come over there and break your fucking teeth in.”
“I watched you change back,” he said. “This morning.”
There was another pause. “Yeah?” said Peter.
“Yeah. It’s actually … it’s … beautiful.”
“Okay,” said Peter.
“I’m not a homo,” said Roman. He hung up, noticing a black shape reflected in the driver’s window, and turned to find the cat sitting a few paces off.
With a troubling sense of déjà vu Peter was shaken awake by Roman the second day running.
“I ordered a redhead,” said Peter.
Roman did not acknowledge the joke.
Peter didn’t understand, then he did. The thing they didn’t talk about, because when one friend has this power, not talking about it is a lot easier than talking about it; the paths it can lead down that one virtue of the male sex is an unparalleled lack of curiosity to see where they go. The power behind his eyes, and the meaning of this power.
He sat and looked at Peter. Peter fidgeted, uncomfortable. He could sense when Roman was going to bring up that night at the chapel, and though he didn’t mind providing an ear he was himself loath to volunteer anything. In truth he had almost no memory of what happened, and he didn’t want it otherwise. The thing about coming back from the dead was that your life went on, and he didn’t like dwelling on it. The presentiment of an unpaid debt that he didn’t like dwelling on at all.
“When you did what you did,” said Roman, “how were you not afraid?”
But this was not a question Peter was expecting. At first he was bemused, then he chuckled andshook his head as though at a foreigner’s comical malapropism.
Roman was as baffled as a Chinaman. “What?” he said.
“I’ve never been more scared of anything in my life. I could never have done it if I didn’t know you were there too.”
They were quiet. Roman looked out at the hills, seven shades of ever flusher and more life-giving green. He shook his head.
“Fucking angels,” he said.
Then it came: from within the trailer the cry of the left-behind. She stood where she was as the cry rose at the immensity and grandeur of this desolation; she waited as the boy’s pathetic howl went on, and on, and her heart howled right along with it. She was here, she was right here.
ShelleyShelley
Шелли тоже родилась в сорочке:
How I could not believe my luck when Shelley too was born with the caul, but in intoxication over my prosperity sautéed with wine and wild mushrooms—only for the child to pay the price for my license.
I am ugly, Uncle. There is no other way to put it. But that does not mean I am without pride, without joy, without the same entitlement to feel deserving of love from those not obligated by blood to give it. I may be ugly, but I can hardly imagine a reason to act like it.
A body comma he was making his best girl a body comma and until he had perfected the procedure for Shelley Godfrey’s rebirth into a body to make the world love her as much as he did comma whatever was required of him to keep the lights on was a small price full stop.
“You’re a lamp,” he said. “You shine on people and you’re either going to show what’s best in them or what’s the most crummy. And you always got the best of me because there you were, lighting the way. So it’s even worse how you had to learn about my shitheel side. But that’s your tragedy, and nothing breaks my heart more: you’re always going to be surrounded by people who don’t deserve you.”
…steamed inexorably for the only destination, all that was left, and far behind her Roman crested the hill to see her blue light; from this height it might have been a firefly as it approached the institute, the place of her creation, coming closer and closer before, as he knew it would in the moment just cusping the actual event, winking out as though swallowed by the very earth.
ChristinaChristina
…and the only person her own age she knew who wanted nothing more when she grew up than to be a Russian novelist.
This was incredible to her. It was enough putting her lips on this boy’s because it was just the perfect thing to do in the moment, but to think of the whole of him on top of her and the rest of it, nature’s final puzzle, what was between his legs and what was between hers.
But an incredulity no different than if they had slipped a poison into her drink that was a thousand needles in her heart and delivered this information to her with a blushing glee she—she—was expected to take part in.
How they could do that to her.
What happens when the head is not removed from a werewolf after its death? It is doomed to tell its story. The forever howl.
Christina was a girl both young and old for her years; she had never shed the breathless curiosity of a child assembling its universe: What is that? Where did that come from? Why is that like that and not another way and what is its orientation with every other thing?
Why?
Why?
Why?
She is her own Greek chorus now, and she’s very very sorry for everything that happened.
Christina looked at Letha. Yesterday, seeing Roman and the doctor slipping food and blankets into the chapel, she knew that Peter was in there. It was no more in question than the location of her own heart. Peter had made her, he was part of her now. There was no hiding from yourself, not in the end.
“Because when I saw you in here with your ugly little thing in that whore I wanted more than anything to feel her fear on my tongue and her bones crunch between my teeth and her blood run down the fur of my neck.”
She looked at him hopefully. “We can eat her together,” she said. “I always left you the bigger piece.”
NormanNorman
Dr. Godfrey was a trim man in his middle age with prematurely graying hair and beard, and eyes that under normal circumstances had a certain cast of patrician magnanimity, this the favored result of the parallel character traits of a deep fundamental kindness and near complete lack of humility. But these were not normal circumstances and his stride was hard with purpose, his green Godfrey eyes bullets in extreme slow motion.
Норман знает, что Оливия причастна к беременности Леты
Last night his crying wife had left the room and he had remained seated and his child had taken his hand across the table with the grace of the sunrise, and in that moment when there wasn’t another comprehensible thing left to him he had a feeling. Darkly and obscurely and defiant of any rational analysis, he felt Olivia’s hand in this. And that feeling, it had to be admitted, was not having things under control. It was in fact no more rational than his daughter’s explanation.
He lied without charity that he would and in the interim had not. He had instead taken up drink as affective novocaine. If the point of novocaine was the numbing of a numbness. In his last loveless years Jacob Godfrey was known to spend hours on end standing in the front yard of the house he had constructed at the summit of the highest hill in the valley. He would survey the land of his sovereignty, a land he had forged into his own vision through blood and fire, and know at his life’s epilogue that itwas all a petty, transient thing, nothing about it transubstantial, and that here he was just a lone and useless rich man at the house on the hill, visible and still forgotten. Dr. Godfrey had spent his entire life terrified of this fate and taking every step to rebel against it by throwing himself into a vocation that was as antithetical as he could imagine: compassion. Hence his calling to psychiatry, the meeting place of matter and spirit. He had helped people, so many people, and what more can be said than that? I helped. Tell me what else there is to be said.
However, the antagonist who stood before him was less the lion of proud imperial hypocrisy than a version thereof that had been put through a paper shredder and Scotch-taped back together.
“I have a teenage daughter I’m taking to the OB-GYN tomorrow,” he said. “If I get solid evidence you had any involvement in that, I will have you killed. That is not an exaggeration.”
Godfrey employed a mental exercise. He had read at a young age a guiding principle that had changed the course of his life: The first step to liberty is respecting the rights of others. This had made him something of an aberration in the Godfrey line, the idea that each and every soul with whom you share this planet, no matter how unlike, much less appalling to yourself, was worthy of empathy and respect in all circumstances. So the exercise was simply continuing to sit here with this magazine whose words were a blur of irritation and trying to find a modicum of generosity toward this particular segment of humanity instead of escaping to the car and having a slug from the flask that he rationalized he wasn’t hiding because the glove compartment wasn’t a hiding place, it was a perfectly innocent compartment. What distinguished this exercise from punishment was a question of degree rather than intent.
LethaLetha
Letha was a small and sandy blond girl with distinctively idiosyncratic features that were as far from pretty in the conventional sense as they were from homely, and where Roman was mercurial, Letha was mystical.
She possessed a kind of half-step-removed sense of discovery as though she passed through life having just woken from a successful nap. Naturally this polarity drew them only closer—a fact that filled her father with no small disquiet.
“(D),” she said, “saying it is a person, and saying you find him: What are you going to do?”
“What do you think, sweetheart?” said Roman. “Put him in the pound.”
Letha turned back to the obvious brains (if that was the word for it) of this operation with the look of chastising mother all women are born with. “Can I ask you what possible good you think is going to come from this?”
He met her look with a face evincing that great rarity: not even the hint of need for selfjustification.
“No,” he said.
They stopped at a red light abreast a garbage truck and she studied him and wrestled with the conflicting impulses of the ever Herculean endeavor of saving Roman from himself, and in her new faith-filled condition saying yes to whatever this mysterious moron asked of her as her ears were filled with the implacable grind of the neighboring trash compactor.
She leaned in with a confidential aspect and looked at him intently, and Peter saw now with clarity. Her soul’s light, the wide-eyed mysticism that set her apart from the rest of these dipshits.
Peter and LethaPeter and Letha
Not that they had had any real interaction, but he struck her as one of those boys with overly supportive mothers and proportionate grossly inflated sense of their own hotness. Which isn’t to say she was not dismayed by his social ostracism in a generic state-ofthe-world sort of way, but this did not detract from the pervert stare he gave any passing skirt with the apparent conviction when caught at it that his gross gawking was a kind of flattery. And this showboating performance right now, something inherently sad and stupid about exhibiting a pointless skill that required an investment of hours totally out of balance with its value, like the skater boys she always mentally crossed a finger would crash. The fact is, other people being jerks to you doesn’t make you not inherently kind of a jerk. Then, the climax: Peter bending to one knee and catching two of the rocks in his hat and impeccably timing an am-I-forgetting-something face a split second before the third landed on his skull.
Somehow, in her appraisal of his round brown face and feral stubble and deep almond eyes as being vain and vulgar, it had eluded her that it was quite possibly the most interesting face she had seen in her life, a riddle yearning to be solved—the vanity and vulgarity twin guardians of some unknowable mystery it goes without saying she would have to possess. She left her hand on the headrest fearing that if she lifted it to shake his she would reach and touch his face, the precise reason she couldn’t stand museums. Who wants to sit around looking at things?
Peter wondered why Roman’s cousin was looking at him like that, and why she wasn’t shaking his hand. This family.
OliviaOlivia
Olivia was an unpleasantly beautiful woman of indeterminate age. She wore a white Hermès pantsuit in brazen Old World indifference that Labor Day had been weeks ago, with a head scarf around a head of black hair and blacker Jackie O sunglasses. She sipped a gin martini.
Her accent was careful British with continental traces. She had been in her time an actress of some favor on the boards of the Lyceum and even at their most extemporaneous her words had the ring of her craft.
There ran along Olivia’s spine above the coccyx, like the mountain range of a relief map, a pale, pinkie-length scar, the remnant of some crude surgery.
He knew married men who would kill for it. Men who would kill for her.
She was wearing a white robe and her hair was damp and she moved and also stood still like milk being poured under the full moon, and though she would have had neither time nor purpose to apply cosmetics after bathing, her lips were a shock red that in their present purse of distaste caused within Peter’s privatemost circuitry a sudden and confusing crossfiring at how arousing and simultaneously dick-shriveling this apparition was.
He added that it would be for the best if Peter didn’t drop by his place anymore—getting himself mixed up in a series of grisly killings was exactly the kind of thing his mother would view like showing up to a dinner party without a bottle of wine: in poor taste.
Olivia standing nude, waist deep, staring off at those lights dotting the hillside and gently disrupting the surface tension with a slow back-and-forth motion of her arms. Pryce’s eye fell to the scar on the small of her back, all that demarcated her as an earthly body. Eventually she turned and waded back, emerging on the bank and standing before him. She was covered with gooseflesh and her nipples were small and dark and black trails of mascara ran down from her eyes.
Norman and OliviaNorman and Olivia
He allowed her to pull him down. He lay with his head to her breast and she ran her hand up and down his back. Their first time had been on this floor many years ago. If it had seemed like he couldn’t have felt worse about it then it was because he had been too young a man to know yet that time is cyclical, that there is no upward limit to the number of times you can make the same mistake.
“My poor, poor Norman,” she said.
He would have liked to lie here weeping for a while but was too depleted to cry. It felt like all the world’s kindness was in the flat of her hand.
Roman and OliviaRoman and Olivia
Her face clouded darkly and she spoke with dread calm. “You think you can hide behind your name like every other time, but I have made my position clear on your association with that Gypsy trash. And whatever preposterous goddamn game you think you’re playing to get a rise out of me, you have a rather great deal more to lose than that thick, spoiled head is allowing for.”
Roman did not immediately respond, and wanting least in the world to bring attention to herself Shelley held her breath and there was only the high-frequency pitch of the muted television.
“Jesus, you need to get laid,” said Roman.
Shelley gasped and raced from the room. Olivia looked at Roman. He was too pleased with himself to be finished, so she waited.
“Is Norm busy?” he said.
Now there was the rush! She rose and stood before him, regarding the child with a thrill of gall.
And then she slapped his face with such force it knocked him back over the end table, and he made no attempt to protect himself as she knelt over him and slapped both sides of his face until his cheeks were an angry rose red. Then, suddenly short of breath, she backed off and turned away, leaving him on his back. There was a flicker in the window, the reflected screen of the television. The film’s spurned heroine on a chaise smoking with languid animus. Olivia stared captive as the image diffused into a liquid flux of the light and dark and she felt herself sinking, sinking somehow away and into it at the same time …
She felt a pair of strong hands steady her shoulders and Roman caught her just before she fell.
“Any designs on the evening?” said Olivia.
“Nein,” said Roman with a crisp Nazi salute. He went inside.
“You need to be very careful around Roman Godfrey and his mother,” she said.
“The little prince has no teeth,” said Peter. “And the queen is an actress. Underneath the mask she’s just bored.”
“He has no teeth yet. But I could see with my Third Eye a trouble with his Anahata chakra, and just like I knew there would be, there’s a dangerous conversion of his fate line and his heart line. He is going to face the hardest choice he will ever have to make, and however he falls will have very very large consequences for anyone around him.
“And you should watch your step around an actress whether or not she’s upir. Because you never know how many masks that crazy bitch is wearing.”
At first light the master bedroom door opened and Olivia emerged. She wore a white satin robe and passed down the hall and stopped at the door with the Dragon on it and entered. The room was dark; morning light visible around the edges of the curtains. He was still sleeping. She came forward and stood over him. His bare chest and neck were long and lean and white. She placed the backs of her fingers to his neck and felt the living miracle of the young heart in his chest, the conduit between it and her own. His eyes opened. She caressed his face and his scalp.
“We’ll need to bleach you soon,” she said. “Your roots are showing.”
Интересные фактыИнтересные факты
Дочь Оливии Магдалена – та самая женщина из рассказов Николая, Роман и Питер – родственники)
So the child was taken to the swineherd, the old Rumancek, whose low name the tainted bloodline would forever bear, and Olivia informed her father she would be going to the academy in the city, to learn the dramatic arts.
Норман был под гипнозом в день рождения Романа:
I placed Norman in the extaz for fear that the program of the evening would physically kill him.
Оливия Нормана любит и не будет подвергать опасности)В день рождения Оливия освободила Романа от гипноза - разом выдала ему всю правду про Лету и ребенка:
He stood in speechless soliloquy. I held his face in my hands and his eyes with mine and released him, by extaz released him from the unknowing it had been necessary to hold him in until this moment. All those secrets, whispers of a dream, now revealed.
Шелли тоже родилась в сорочке:
How I could not believe my luck when Shelley too was born with the caul, but in intoxication over my prosperity sautéed with wine and wild mushrooms—only for the child to pay the price for my license.
Кажется, у Романа сын, а не дочка : )
He looked up at me. All ambivalence and abhorrence now gone from his eyes. He knew. I held out my hand and he rose. Hand in hand we stood before the bassinet. The child now peaceful as he
looked up at his father. Blood of blood. I released Roman’s hand and stood back as the flesh of my arms rose. I could hear it in his veins. It was happening. I stood witness to the most delicate miracle of creation. Never in my life had I better earned a cry. So I bawled and he Became, forged as is needful for our kind in the furnace of incommunicable loss...Предположения и находки