The Grand Ballast Read Online Free PDF

wagging dog. He leaned
toward the flame and inhaled, waiting for his cigarette to catch.
“A star, to be sure.”
    “ Fuckin’
right I am.” Bode blew smoke toward the ceiling.
Audiences did love him. He was a cele-bri- teeee .
    He had done a lot of
thinking in the forty-eight hours since he’d stopped taking the
pills. His thoughts weren’t terribly articulate—slashes of anger,
crude recollections, an uncharacteristic desire for company. He’d
decided that the most important thing was not to let on to anyone
how confused he was.
    “ I’ve
missed you,” Kilroy had said last
night as they’d lain in bed together after their dance.
    Bode glanced now at the
bed. Wondered how many times he’d lain on that mattress, clinging
to threads of awareness. He was surprised to find he recalled last
night moment for moment. He even remembered his dreams.
    “ Audiences lerve him.” O’ Fauh had a tendency to pronounce
his uh sounds as er , and was inclined to speak of Bode in the third
person.
    “ I’m fortunate to have
him.” Kilroy wiped under his nose with the back of one hand and
ashed his cigar on the windowsill. Bode stared at the ash. It
looked like a clot of filthy snow. He reached to put the tip of his
finger in it. Stopped as he noticed bruises in a circle around his
wrist. He tried to recall where he’d gotten those.
    “ Surely you didn’t come
here simply to drool over Bode,” Kilroy told O’ Fauh.
    Why not? Bode continued to study his wrist. What would
Kilroy do if he started gnawing on it like an animal? If he grinned
with lips slick with fat and blood, little vessels caught in his
teeth, and then went back to chewing until bone bone bone and no way to get
through.
    O’ Fauh leaned back. His
chair creaked, and Bode noticed a tiny trickle of blood on the
man’s temple—from what looked like a popped pimple. “There’s no
doubt you have wern erv the finest X-shows around.”
    Kilroy tensed visibly at
“one of.” “I’d like to see one better,” he said quietly.
    O’ Fauh pinched his
too-short pant legs and tried to pull them down. He was as bulky as
Mr. Lein, but without Lein’s sharp nose. His features seemed to
drip down his face, and the bristly roll of loose skin under his
chin looked like a ruff. “You heard erv the Hydra
Arena?”
    Kilroy used the ashtray
this time. “Heard of it, yes.”
    “ That’s getting serm
attention.”
    Kilroy shook his head and
puffed the cigar. “They all get attention at first. Then the
novelty fades and they fold.”
    Bode turned to peer out the
window behind him. Evening was falling—a soft, lush blue. Spindly
trees held only a last few dry, curled leaves, so pale they looked
like lights threaded through the drooping branches. Kilroy’s hand
brushed his knee, and he snapped forward again, nearly losing his
cigarette.
    “ This one might be ehround
a while.” O’ Fauh scratched his thigh through his trousers. “All
takes place in eh fancy-pantsy swimming pool. And the performers
end the show dead.”
    “ Dead?” Kilroy
repeated.
    “ Well, not all erv ’em.
Some erv ’em they take close to the edge—bleed ’em, choke ’em—bert
let ’em live. Bert for the finale they have the werns who wanna die
do these, errr, elaborate scenes ernderwater—then they kill ’em.
Pretty ferked erp. And I don’t say that about many
things.”
    Bode’s heart pounded. He
didn’t want to think about people dying in X-Shows. Didn’t want to
think about it at all.
    “ I fail to see the
entertainment value in what you describe,” Kilroy said coolly. “Any
slob can kill. People can go to the Last Operas if they want to see
someone slaughtered onstage.”
    Bode remembered hearing
about the Last Operas long ago. They were an artistic protest
popular in the northeast. Opera students underwent years of
traditional training, learning their craft to perfection so one day
they could put on a performance in which they were murdered
onstage. Lensky from Eugene
Onegin