Green Shadows, White Whales. Ray Bradbury

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СКАЧАТЬ the lights out, and the rain flailing the dank shoulders and soaked caps and ice-watering the noses and seeping through the sheep-smelling tweeds.

      Going upstairs, I glanced out a streaming window. There, on the street, riding by under a lamp, was a man on a bike. He was terribly drunk. The bike weaved back and forth across the bricks, as the man vomited. He did not stop the bike to do this. He kept pumping unsteadily, blearily, as he threw up. I watched him go off in the dark rain.

      Then I groped up to find and die in my room.

Chapter 7

      On Grafton Street just halfway between The Four Provinces pub and the cinema stood the best, or so John said, Gentleman Riders to Hound emporium in all Dublin, if not Ireland, and perhaps one half of Bond Street in London.

      It was Tyson’s, and to speak the name was to see the front windows with their hacking coats and foulards and pale yellow silk shirts and velvet hunting caps and twill pants and shining boots. If you stood there long enough you could hear the horses fribbling their lips and snorting their laughter and twitching their skin to jerk the flies off, and you could hear the hounds whining and barking and running in happy circles (dogs are always happy and thus their smiles, unless they are miserable because their master crossed his eyes at them); but as I say, if you stood there long enough waiting for someone to hand you the reins, the owner of the shop, seeing you as one of the blindfolded hypnotics wandered out of Huston’s Barn, might come out and lead-kindly-light your way into the smell of leather and boot cream and wool; and buckle on your new trenchcoat for you and fit on a tweed cap abristle for a thousand rains within the month and measure your pigfoot and wonder how in hell to shove it into a boot and all the while around you Anglo-Irish gents being similarly whisper-murmured at by lilting tongues; and the weather turned bad outside within thirty seconds after you set foot within, that you linger and buy more than your intent.

      Where was I? Oh, yes. I stood out in front of Tyson’s on three separate nights.

      Looking at the wax model, as tall as Huston and as strideful and arrogant in all his Kilcock Hunt finery, I thought: How long before I dress like that?

      “How do I look, John?” I cried, three days later.

      I spun about on the front steps of Courtown House smelling of wool, boot leather, and silk.

      John stared at my tweed cap and twill pants.

      “I’ll be goddamned,” he gasped.

Chapter 8

      “You know anything about hypnotism, kid?”

      “Some,” I said.

      “Ever been hypnotized?”

      “Once,” I said.

      We were sitting by the fire after midnight with a bottle of Scotch now half empty between us. I hated Scotch, but since John relished it, I drank.

      “Well, you haven’t been in the hands of a real pro,” said John, languidly, sipping at his drink.

      “Which means you,” I said.

      John nodded. “That’s it. I’m the best. You want to go under, son? I’ll put you there.”

      “I had my teeth filled that one time, my dentist, a hypnodontist, he—”

      “To hell with your teeth, H.G.” H.G. was for H.G. Wells, the author of Things to Come, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man. “It’s not what comes out in teeth, it’s what goes on in your head. Swallow your drink and give me your paw.”

      I swallowed my drink and held out my hands. John grabbed them.

      “Okay, H.G., shut your eyes and relax, total relaxation, easy does it, easy, easy, nice and soft and slow and easy,” he murmured, as my eyes shut and my head lolled. He kept speaking and I kept listening, nodding my head gently and he talked on, holding my hands and breathing his mellow Scotch in my face and I felt my bones go loose in my flesh and my flesh lounge out under my skin and it was easy and nice and sleepy and at last John said: “Are you under, kid?”

      “Way under, John,” I whispered.

      “That’s the way. Good. Fine. Now listen here, H.G., while you’re there and relaxed, is there any one message you want to tell me so I can tell yourself? Give instructions, as it were, for self-improvement or behavior tomorrow? Spit it out. Tell me. And I’ll instruct you. But easy does it. Well …?”

      I thought. My head swayed. My eyelids were heavy.

      “Just one thing,” I said.

      “And what’s that, kid?”

      “Tell me—”

      “Yes?”

      “Instruct me to—”

      “What, kid?”

      “Write the greatest, most wonderful, finest screenplay in the history of the world.”

      “I’ll be damned.”

      “Tell me that, John, and I’ll be happy …,” I said, asleep, deep under, waiting.

      “Well,” said John. He leaned close. His breath was like an aftershave on my cheeks and chin. “Here’s what you do, kid.”

      “Yes?” I said.

      “Write the damnedest, finest, most wonderful screenplay ever to be written or seen.”

      “I will, John,” I said.

Chapter 9

      It’s not often in the life of a writer lightning truly strikes. And I mean, there he is on the steeple, begging for creative annihilation, and the heavens save up spit and let him have it. In one great hot flash, the lightning strikes. And you have an unbelievable tale delivered in one beauteous blow and are never so blessed again.

      And here’s how the lightning struck.

      I had been hard at it with harpoon and typewriter for three hours out at Courtown House when the telephone rang. John, Ricki, and I had gathered for lunch and another try at trapping the pale flesh of the great Beast. We looked up, glad for the interruption.

      John seized the phone, listened, and gave a great gasping cry.

      “Well, I’ll be goddamned!”

      Each word was exquisitely pronounced—no, not pronounced: yelled—into the telephone.

      “Well, I’ll be absolutely and completely goddamned!”

      It seemed that John had to shout all the way to New York City and beyond. Now, gripping the phone, he looked out across the green meadows in December light as if somehow, too, he might stare long distance at that man he was yelling at so far away.

      “Tom, СКАЧАТЬ