Hunger and Thirst Read Online Free Page B

did you fall on the floor?
    Ava Gardner looked at him and, to his question, gave no answer. He looked back at her.
    In the dreary, waking drone of a city morning they were immobile and gazing at each other.
    He looked over her torso and saw her firm, rising breasts and his organ was erect and stiff. But he didn’t feel a thing. He might have been in church so pure and unsullied by libidinous thoughts was he. He looked at her breasts and his eyes observed how lovely they were, how soft and curved and…
    He lifted his eyes to the ceiling without caring anymore.
    His eyes fastened on the ceiling, the brownish white tint of the ceiling plaster. It was almost the same shade as her flesh. How different the source. Yet the same too. Both the result of thirty odd years of wear and maturation. His eyes saw that, deep-set, lack-lustre eyes. He looked at the plaster falling off. How can a room be so dirty, he wondered, how can it possibly be so dirty and ugly?
    The ceiling wavered. His brain slid off its perch and for a split second, he wondered where he was again. Then his eyes, as if to answer the question of his mind, dropped their gaze and he was looking at the money again. And he remembered.
    There were five twenty-dollar bills, six, no, seven of them. He could see them by squinting. He tried to remember where his glasses were. He couldn’t remember. He wished he had them though. He felt that if he could see the world more clearly he would be more a part of it and able to return to it the sooner. But the way it was, his myopia caused the world to be blurred. It was not sharp and pin-pointed in detail. It separated him. He was in another bourne. He was apart, just a little bit yes, but still apart, some distance from the maximum point of being alive in the world.
    Since he could not see his way back completely, there was only one thing to do.
    He must sit up and wash his face.
    He had to get out of there. He couldn’t wait. He’d rested. Now he had to get up. The shock must have worn off, he told his system. “All right,” he said. And said it calmly as he could as if by cajoling his body, he could soothe it into motion.
    “Now,” he said.
    Very calmly, and with a thin assured smile on his face, he tried to sit up.
    Muscles pulled in their slack. They tightened. The levers of his skeleton and covering cables began to pull. They jerked once like a mulish derrick, trying to lift him up.
    The pain in his back began to throb. He felt as if he were being held against a great spinning carborundum wheel.
    And his body stayed. And the smile stayed, frozen hard as his flesh tightened. Rocklike, struggling to sit up, he looked like a pop-eyed, grinning idiot.
    “All right!”
    His voice became shaky and alarmed again. He lost calm detachment. He lost his assurance and his cloak of forced confidence. He struggled. He pushed and clutched and strained every muscle, his body aching and burning. Breaths blew great bubbles of saliva through the spaces between his clamped teeth. They popped from his lips and broke, running down over his chin. His right hand twitched under him, his body shook like a piece of metal caught and spun by a buzzing drill bit.
    He heard the bed springs squeaking, outside the busses roaring and hissing and the cars running along and the trains grinding on their tracks while he, like a shuddering statue, tried to sit up.
    “No!”
    He could not stifle the cry as his muscles lost grip and strength slid from him. And, although he had not risen at all, it seemed as if he fell back, slumping heavily on the mattress, gasping with open mouth, his body swelling and throbbing with great waves of pain.
    One brown-trousered leg was thrown over the edge of the bed. His hands were motionless, five pronged lumps of dry, dirty flesh. He looked like a marionette taken from its box and tossed there carelessly, unable to move or compose its floppy limbs.
    Oh, my God, it’s true.
    The inner chamber of his mind spoke as if alarmed