Bokelskere.no

Jeg begynte å tro at jeg endelig hadde funnet min drink: Vodka. Den smakte ikke noe , men den gikk rett ned i magen som et sverdslukersverd og fikk meg til å føle meg mektig og gudelignende .

Hvis det er noe jeg ser ned på , er det en mann i blå klær. Svart eller grått , eller til og med brunt , går an. Blått får meg bare til å le.

Han bare glante på henne på samme måte som folk glaner på den store hvite araen i zoologisk hage og venter på at den skal si noe menneskelig.

I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery - air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, 'This is what it is to be happy.'

A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig-tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn't shut out the light. They hung the raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough.
It needed about a ton more weight to make me sleep.

A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.
It was my last night.
I grasped the bundle i carried and pulled at a pale tail. A strapless elasticized slip which, in the course of wear, had lost its elasticity, slumped into my hand. I waved it, like a flag of truce, once, twice... The breeze caught in, and I let go.
A white flake floated out into the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street or rooftop it would come to rest.
I tugged at the bundle again.
The wind made an effort, but failed, and a batlike shadow sank towards the roof garden of the penthouse opposite.
Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the grey scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it.
I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.

Hva var det med oss på Belsize som var så annerledes enn pikene som spilte bridge og sladret og leste på colleget som jeg skulle tilbake til? De pikene satt også under en slags glassklokker