Einstein's Monsters by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online

surprisingly, stayed out of it, held his distance, remained solid—though he did try to keep the little girl, Boguslawa, safely at home, out of the turbulence. You would often see old Roza ferrying the kid from one flat to the other. After her second spell in the hospital (cracked ribs this time) Leokadia called it a day and went home for good. Then Pat showed up with his pals and found Bujak waiting.
    The three men (I saw it all) had an unmistakable look about them, with that English bad-boy build, proud guts and tapering legs that bent backward from the knee down, sparse-haired with old-young faces, as if they had done their aging a lot quicker than one year at a time. I don’t know whether these guys would have frightened anybody much on the American circuit, but I guess they were big enough and their intention was plain. (Did you read about the Yablonsky murders? In the States these days, if you’re on the list, they come in and do the whole family. Yes, they just nuke you now.) Anyway, they frightened me. I sat writhing at my desk as Pat led them through the garden gate. I hated the flares of his jeans, the compact running shoes, the tight Fred Perry. Then the front door opened: bespectacled Bujak, wearing braces over his vest, old, huge. In a reflex that spelt seriousness and scorn, the men loosened their shoulders and let their hands dangle in readiness. Words were exchanged—demand, denial. They moved forward.
    Now I must have blinked, or shut my eyes, or ducked (or fainted). I heard three blows on a regular second beat, clean, direct, and atrocious, each one like an ax splitting frozen wood. When I looked up, Pat and one of his friends were lying on the steps; the other guys were backing away, backing away from the site of this incident, this demonstration. Expressionlessly Bujak knelt to do something extra to Pat on the floor. As I watched, he tugged back the hair and carefully poked a neutronium fist into Pat’s upturned face. I had to go and lie down after that. But a couple of weeks later I saw Pat sitting alone in the London Apprentice; he was shivering remorsefully in the corner behind the jukebox; the pleated welt on his cheek bore all the colors of flame, and he was drinking his beer through a straw. In that one blow he had taken payment for everything he had given Leokadia.
    With Bujak, I was always edging into friendship. I don’t know if I ever really made it. Differences of age aren’t easy. Differences of strength aren’t easy. Friendship isn’t easy. When Bujak’s own holocaust came calling, I was some help to him; I was better than nothing. I went to the court. I went to the cemetery. I took my share of the strong force, what little I could take.… Perhaps a dozen times during that summer, before the catastrophe came (it was heading toward him slowly, gathering speed), I sat up late on his back porch when all the women had gone to bed. Bujak stargazed. He talked and drank his tea. “Traveling at the speed of light,” he said one time, “you could cross the whole universe in less than a second. Time and distance would be annihilated, and all futures possible.” No shit? I thought. Or again: “If you could linger on the brink of a singularity, time would be so slow that a night would pass in forty-five seconds, and there would be three American elections in the space of seven days.” Three American elections, I said to myself. Whew, what a boring week. And why is he the dreamer, while I am bound to the low earth? Feeling mean, I often despised the dreaming Bujak, but I entertained late-night warmth for him too, for the accretions of experience (time having worked on his face like a sculptor, awful slow), and I feared him—I feared the energy coiled, seized, and locked in Bujak. Staring up at our little disk of stars (and perhaps there are better residential galaxies than our own: cleaner, safer, more gentrified), I sensed only the false stillness of the black nightmap, its beauty