Radiance

Оглавление

Louis B. Jones. Radiance

Отрывок из книги

Table of Contents

Title Page

.....

Lotta and the paraplegic drummer had stayed downstairs in the hotel bar, drinking decaffeinated confections, communing, talking with bowed heads together. Mark had actually crept down, via elevator, about one in the morning to check on them, and they were consulting in such serious attitudes together they might have been praying, the boy’s sporty no-armrest wheelchair docked at the table corner nearest Lotta. They had to be talking about Noddy. Just from how they sat, he knew. He could tell the Ohio boy was dispensing some kind of solace, or some kind of advice, and Lotta was being filled up by it. For some reason the relationship of supplicant to authority looked, to his fatherly eye, unwholesome, or fraudulent. They sat at a dim booth—the table’s lightbulb was quenched—because the boy had environmentalist objections to the burning of electricity and made a point of turning out lights around himself, creating fresh darkness wherever he went.

Then later, after he’d gone back up to his bed, Lotta came up and let herself into Mark’s room. Believing he was asleep, she sat for a few minutes on the arm of a chair, looking out the window into the warm haze of the L.A. night, then went off for her own room, closing Mark’s door after herself with the saddest tact. It was as if she’d wanted to talk but lost courage. That boy had planted something.

.....