The Steam-Driven Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

thirty-four apricot pies, she is rushed off to the hospital to have her stomach pumped.
    Here kind Fate aids her suicide plan. In this ever-summery Southern city the hospital is located in a veritable forest of honeysuckle, rambling rose and lilac. This summer evening the windows of the pumping room are open for coolness, and the sweet scent drifts in. Glinda is unable to speak, so the attendants assume she is a pill suicide attempt. They strap her down, gag her throat open with a plastic funnel and slide the pump tube down to her stomach. Soon a swarm of honeybees, attracted from their murmurous haunts by the smell of pumped apricots, streams into the room.
    Glinda lies helpless as the bees chase her attendants away, then enter this curious red flower, hot on the scent of fetid apricot jam. Her death agonies, Dick speculates in what is for him an unusual moment of subjectivity, must have been excruciating.
    When Farmer Bill learns of the death of his beloved, he behaves stoically, determined to transmute his feelings into art. He begins a giant, three-storey fresco called
Gilda
.
    Dick explains here that this is his suicide note. He cannot go on without Adrian, and so has already made ample preparation for his own death:
    Having acquired a considerable fortune through investments in horticultural enterprises, Dick Hand has been able to purchase control of the government of a small African nation. Carefully he sows the seed of revolt here, employing men expert in such matters to (1) rouse the populace to acts of rebellion, and (2) persuade the government to take ever-stricter reprisals (decimations, unbearably heavy taxes, compulsory military service for the aged and unfit, curfews in effect at strange hours of the day, fines for drinking water, etc.).
    The head of state, President Rudy Bung, is so terrified of his own people that he is forever incognito, wearing a black stocking over his head and giving his speeches falsetto. Having made sure the revolution will succeed, Dick secretly spirits away Rudy Bung, kills him and assumes his identity. Alone in the presidential office, Dick is killed at once by the insurgents and – as he had hoped and planned – unspeakable things are done to his corpse.
    This last story is a news clipping, of course. In the next column is an item about the collapse of a large wall; the frescoist Farmer Bill is crushed under seventy tons of wet plaster.
    The End
     
    The above ending was rejected by the publisher as ‘too downbeat’. Accordingly the author wrote the following ending, which the publisher accepted:
    Book Eight:
Dick
: Epilogue.
    Much has happened since that fateful vacation. After their rescue these eight characters part and go each his own way in search of a story. Dick Hand keeps track of them, however:
    Adrian and Etta decide to face squarely and together the problem of his drinking. She works as a movie extra to raise the money for his psychiatrist. Adrian is fiddling with a brilliant new design for a bomb shelter, the ‘clamshell womb’. It has the unique feature of being located well
above
the blast area, on a tower several miles high. A world-renowned architect, now crippled with age, comes as a humble student to study and admire Adrian’s design. Etta gets a starring role, which she declines. Being Adrian’s wife, she says, is fame enough for any gal!
    Glinda and Van Cook are drifting apart, as he gives up his job with the paper and becomes a pilot, seeding clouds. But after all their differences, after the failure of a dozen ministers and marriage counsellors, they are at last reunited by the smallest imaginable of marriage counsellors, a gentleman only five pounds three ounces in weight – Van Jr. Van begins work on a novel about his work, THE RAINMAKERS. He flies his GeeBee racer seldom and with great care – now that he has so much love to come home to.
    Theda has become a beautician, Mr Theda, famous on three continents. She has not seen Bill for seventeen years.