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Sometimes
I fall asleep while staring at the blacks on cougars. Sometimes I read
by the light of a little nuclear lamp, or dictate into my red computer
as I am doing now, writing this. I am never lonely here. Sometimes the
grass sings to me. Often I lie on it, but it has never again said. As
the ship left Belson, first trembling, then roaring and howling its way
upward to and immediately beyond the cluds, great fissures appeared in
the obsidian plain around me; the Isabel disappeared upward with an alacrity
that was astnishing. I had never watched a spaceship take off before and
it was spectacular to see all that power unleashed. The air smelled electric-
some mixture of ozone and of the unburned esidue of the Isabel's solid
fuel, used only for take off and landing. She had vanished from the sky
with blacks on cougars and mimi and all the others aboard, and the smell
remained. She would go into orbit, then go nuclear and, after a half hour
or so, when her capacitors were charged, into spacewartp, somewhere both
within and outside the knowable universe, shimmering, taking that nondimensional
road back to Sol and Earth and her landing pad in the Florida Keys, And
I was here alone, as far from holme as a man had ever tried to live. For
a few moments my arms and knees trembled. I was scared shitless.
fucking
good milfs getting black rods to taste! The cat is out of the bag, the cards are turned face up on the dirty green cloth, and the Devil has come out from behind his disguise as Dolly the Chambermaid. I coud have left blacks on cougars in a flash, with her rubber girdle at her feet. Divorce is awfully easy. I'm rich. I did not leave Anna, not for all those years berating myself for being the wrong kind of husband for her. What a goddamned painful tango we danced. You marry a woman like Anna when you're afraid. I might as well face it. That's the truth of it. I was afraid of Isabel and that's why I moved out of her apartment and into that suite at the Pierre. That's why I came chugging halfway across the somos in this Chinese spaceships 'Flower of Heavenly Repose. Look here, Officer, my name is Ben Belson, the celebrated millionaire financier, friend to famous and beautiful women like blacks on cougars, theater bugg, prowler of the galaxy and closet Marxist. Big hands, big feet, big prick and a booming voice. And a big, throbbing, empty hole in my heart. |