To be honest, I respect the millionaire's housekeeper: though not in good health she has a great deal of energy; though she's simple, she's capable of loving the complex, even decadent. With pride and adoration befitting a mother, she says that at the last party all women asked the hostess, «Who is this sexy guy?» – more than about any other men. «It's about you, Edward!»
It'd be interesting to take a peak into the soul of this strapping girl with big feet, protruding soft butt, and strangely long, chubby – still child's – hands. What's in there, in her soul? Why does she enjoy giving food and drink, and look after – in various ways – after this villain who's twelve years her senior, who obviously wants to be somewhere else, and in whose bathroom she finds women's wrist watches and probably even women's underwear. But the housekeeper doesn't complain. She graduated from a Catholic school. Had she died, she could be canonized saint.
But precisely because she hasn't died, I hate her sometimes for her caring for me, and I despise her for her being asexual. «The doctor told me that soon I'll be healthy and you'll be able to go inside of me,» she tells me with a lisp. If only she'd known how many times I've done this «going inside» with the Bald Diva (who begins to bore me now), she'd die of fear and envy.
Though the millionaire's housekeeper has a mere flu, I have an impression that she's almost dying. I love the dying, that's why I'm here in the New Year's night. She's in her bed on the fourth floor; she sighs and moans and reads the children's poet A.Milne, while I'm downstairs in the kitchen, having my own fun. I'm eating shchi with pies – I've made this all earlier. I'm drinking Stolichnaya and Martini, talk on the phone occasionally, and I keep my spirits up – everything will be all right, and although the life is closer to the end than to the beginning, we'll have time to show off our brilliance, Eduard Veniaminovich, we'll have time to frolic and to show our teeth and the sideview of our severe face, and then, with thunder and flames, we'll take off once and for all into the yawning abyss – death.
And in the meantime, a swan-like beauty – and there'll be more than one – will bend over me, you just wait.
Maybe you need to sleep, maybe you don't – I don't know. Maybe you need to stay up without sleep: write, seek inspiration, chew on your pen, waste paper. But for some reason I have no reason to do any of the above. I'm just sitting – vacantly – at the table, not going to bed; I'm quietly processing my thoughts, and this terribly slow process in the state of semi-consciousness is – as it turns out – a true sensation of life that is no more than the pulsating blood and this semi-delirium. It's like a bull's-bladder in the window of my grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-father's. There's a glimmer of light through the bladder.
Once – it was freezing cold – I, poorly dressed, was returning from the Bald Diva. In the subway, the RR line, there was a crazy guy – smiling, slobbering – he kept saying the names of the presidents and it was turning out that he was a relation to Roosevelt; in fact he was his son.
On the 6 train, the Lexington line, where I later transferred, there was another crazy. This time it was a black guy in boxers holding a pair of pants under his arm – he was a lot meaner. He harassed a black girl who was deathly scared and shoved people out of his way, and at the end, he chased away everyone from the car, everyone but me. Uneasy yet calm, I resolved to stab him in his belly if he touched me. He didn't, though he hobbled nearby.
It's snowing, and I'm thinking of how nice it would be to poison myself by drinking some bright and vile liquid, leaving a bit of it in a narrow glass. Poison myself while staring at the snow. And do this because I'm ecstatic about life, just because I'm ecstatic, yes, just out of awe and ecstasy.
I came out, straightened my jacket and said:
«You have to understand, guys, this is our final battle. It's unlikely that we'll escape, don't entertain any illusions. There's only one thing in this world that's higher than life: a good hero's death. Antonio and Barbara will go with me to the left room, to the windows, the others will do as they did yesterday. Sheila, put on that insane record, it fits the mood now. What a sunny morning we have today!»
«And what are they doing there downstairs? When are they going to start moving?» He asked Luciano who stood leaning against the hole in the wall.
The soldiers' black backs began to move around below on a far-off street.
The love for my revolver shows in that at night I often put the gun on a small pillow under a lamp in my study; I lovingly take it apart, lay out all the parts and admire them. He's my devoted, tough, and loyal friend. He's graceful, elegant, and his entire silhouette, as well as his parts, is endowed with strength, significance, and expression. When I look at my revolver, I feel good.
Usually I examine my revolver for a long time. Then I stroke it and grease it with the best grease I can find in our town.
Once, I had a young, white-breasted girl – I loved her a lot. We fucked many times a day, and when I got dead tired but still wanted to see how she twitches and cries from love's pleasures, I replaced my prick with a revolver. This was greatly successful and met with acclaim by my girlfriend. I always took the cartridges out though.
We were both mysterious crazies, she and I, that's why she turned away when I took the cartridges out, she wanted to believe that I didn't take all of them out and that maybe I had left one in, and she was scared.
New York looks leaden in the cold end-of-January twilight. Leaden pavement and the sky is the same; some houses are entirely leaden, some only in places. Yellow is especially dismal in such weather.
It's a frightening city, both to its observer and dweller. You hug the heater and look out the window: it's natural for a man to be scared but also to peak at the frightening.
And so I think: Why am I living here? Why am I not going to the woods and glades where it's green and the space is warm and gay all year round – it's possible to find this on earth. Why am I living here? See this vile brown smoke going up from the roof of a neighboring building? The Devil only knows. I don't understand this today. Ugh, what an inhuman abomination it is outside!
First, my roommate shaved his beard, now he's cut his hair. It seems like he started a new life.
I too want something new. I'll go to a store and will buy a new gun. Or two guns. I'll hang them on the walls, then I'll buy cartridges and gunpowder, and my life will change and it will flourish.
One of the guns, I've decided, will be a fowling piece, and I've known how to use it since childhood. I'll sow off its muzzle and if a mob bursts in here, it will be met by a dense charge of shot.
They don't like this, I know this since childhood. I remember my neighbor Mitka, he ran to the doorstep of his house and shot at the mob who came to kill him with picks and axes. How they screamed and ran away! And he shot just once! It was not Sicily where I lived, it was Ukraine.
I'm standing by the window, hands in my pockets, and I say to myself: «So, disgusted, are you? Feeling empty? Why the fuck did you masturbate then? You know this since your childhood, it's bad, even your mother told you so. Besides, it's embarrassing – there're plenty of females around. They always call you on the phone, and you masturbate, eh?»
«Well, the females are not my kind, there's no flame in them. Yes, I fuck them, but there's no great pleasure in it,» I reply to myself. «I can't find the one aflame, and so I've committed a sin, have entered the fantasy about this angel, tender and vicious.»