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.” (Blake.) Only I didn’t tell it, actually.I swallowed it, and like a bit of unwholesome food it pained my belly awhile, and then the pain subsided as my system digested it.Silly monkey—educations are for kids.So I had to sate myself with watching in glazy-eyed awe as the tempests of numbers and other symbols shot from the tip of her pencil as if from the end of a wizard’s wand.“Fuck off,” she said, in a voice unheated with any real anger.“I can’t concentrate with you standing there, like, breathing on me.Go away.” I retreated from looking over her shoulder in remorse, and instead occupied myself with her books, or in inspecting all the artifacts contained in the room.Dejectedly, I sat down and played with the sexless woman-dolls in their dollhouse.So we passed the remaining hours of the waking night, she bent monastically over her studies with pencil, calculator, and book, and I sitting on her floor playing with dolls.It is a woeful thing to be a striver like me.The hours ticked away like this until the house gradually grew silent and dark.Other noises had helped to animate this house—footsteps and so on from downstairs, and the murmur of a TV—but these noises died away as the evening wore on, and soon in little Emily’s bedroom we could tell by the silence and the absence of vibration in the rest of the house that everyone else in it had gone to bed.There was a soft knock on the door.I abandoned the dolls and swiftly hid myself amid the lint and dust under the bed.“Come in,” sang little Emily.In the sliver of visibility beneath the scrim of her bed, I saw a pair of slippered feet quietly enter the room.The slippers crossed the carpet to where little Emily sat at her desk, the desk lamp burning her shadow long across the room.The slippers walked up behind her chair, and a female voice said: “Good night, sweetie.”“Good night, Mom,” said little Emily, with a note of annoyance.“I love you.”“Love you too.” Little Emily’s voice was quick and flat.The slippers left the room, the door shut.I dared not emerge yet from beneath the bed.I saw the crack of light under the door go dark.Little Emily did not tell me to come out from under the bed, so there I remained.I heard the thump of her shutting her mathematical textbook, and the click of her pencil lain to rest on the desk.I saw her small bare feet step swiftly out of the room.Her bare feet came back a few minutes later.“You can come out now.My mom and dad went to bed.” I slithered out from beneath the bed.Little Emily was pouring red wine into two wineglasses on the desk.“They have so much wine they never notice when I steal a bottle,” she said.We drank the wine in the bathroom, where little Emily stood on the lid of the toilet seat and smoked another cigarette, surreptitiously blowing the smoke through the window, which she’d propped open to the cold March night.We talked for a long time after that.Little Emily told me all about her complex family and social lives.She told me that she was a four-time child beauty pageant winner.She told me that as far back as she could remember her life had been a harried circus of traveling, preening, and display.She also told me that her mother wanted for her a life of celebrity.She told me about being dragged to auditions in the city, about endless hours of acting lessons, singing lessons, lessons in any discipline that might increase her value in the entertainment industry, about her mother taking her to be consulted by certain professionals on matters like what clothing would most flatter her unripe physique, what hair and what makeup.She said her summers were always eaten up by all these lessons and auditions, and by rehearsals for the plays and TV commercials she had successfully auditioned for, and in flying back and forth to Hollywood to film these commercials when they couldn’t be filmed in New York.She said she had been in TV commercials for all sorts of various products: for fast food restaurant chains, for toothpaste, for waffles, for breakfast cereals—any sort of product that a smiling, adorable young girl might help to sell.She told me that she was currently slated to star in a production of Little Orphan Annie.All this she told me, and more.In a way I sympathized with her, even identified with her life.Both of us had been selected by forces greater than ourselves for lives of careful study and display.Little Emily had been sold into entertainment, just as I had been sold into science.XXXVIn the morning I woke alone in little Emily’s pink bed, where she had let me sleep beside her.She had long since gone to school.I could tell it was late in the morning by the angle and quality of the light, and by the quietness outside that it had snowed overnight.I did not want to leave her bed.That big fat squishy mattress was so impossibly soft, and warm from the warmth of our two blood-filled bodies.I had little desire to expose my sore, battered little body to the fatalistic whimsy of the outside world.I wanted only to let my eyelids slide back over the wet globes of my eyes, submerge my brain again in darkness, steep it in dreams, my body safely enveloped once in pink sheets and again in the curtains, kept company by little Emily’s stuffed animals.I wanted to never leave that bed, to exist in that room for the rest of my life as little Emily’s kept ape [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]