The Children of Hamelin by Norman Spinrad Read Free Book Online

capable of taking me for a ride.
    Five minutes and 75 cents including tip later, we were standing behind an iron fence overlooking the East River in the long, narrow strip of park that runs along the bank across the East River Drive from the big low-rent housing project that parallels the river along Avenue D. Uptown from us on the concrete path along the bank, a gang of kids from the project were doing their thing; we walked a few dozen yards further downtown and found an empty wooden bench facing the river in a section of the park that seemed deserted. It was well up into the fifties now—I felt it was a good omen—and warm enough to sit down on the bench, even though it was November.
    “Feel anything yet?” Robin asked. She studied me with eyes that seemed to pick up a misty sheen from the gray water lapping at the stone embankment no more than a dozen feet in front of us.
    Turning my attention inward, I seemed to discover a not-unpleasant vagueness in my stomach, a slight tension in my jaw muscles, maybe the hint of a light-headed buzz behind my eyes.
    “I’m not sure—”
    She laughed, her face seemed to crinkle, said: “Don’t worry, when it hits, you’ll know.”
    I stared out across the river where the smokestacks of Brooklyn were pouring gray smoke into the clear blue sky; digging the chugging factories far away across the flat graygreen water, and the two of us sitting alone on a bench in a thin strip of non-city without another human being in easy sight, I had the damndest feeling of being on the stern of a cruise ship slowly pulling out of the harbor, its bow pointed to the far horizon, slipping out to sea real peaceful and groovy.
    “This is just about the grooviest place in the East Village to go up in,” Robin said. “Of course if we were blowing heavier bread, we could’ve gone up to the Cloisters and gone up digging the Hudson... No, we’d never have made it up there in time, and going up in a cab can be a real bummer, especially if you get stuck with a cab driver who won’t shut up....”
    I was beginning to see deeps in this girl: she knew what she was doing, she had an esthetic, and any chick who could get a cab to stop for her on Second Avenue wearing nothing but boots and an old peacoat had to have style.
    “Did anyone every tell you you hail a cab with class?” I said.
    A groovy little laugh like lips on my body. Her eyes were really starting to shine, huge and glowing. One of us was starting to feel something.
    “It’s all in the fingers and wrist,” she said. She waved her right hand limply in the air. “Now who would stop for some dingy chick waving a dead fish?” She straightened her wrist and snapped her fingers once, imperiously. “Dig— there’s a princess in a plastic hippy disguise!”
    I took her hand, kissed it like a Transylvanian nobleman, ran my eyes slowly up her smooth white wrist disappearing into the floppy sleeve of her peacoat, along acres of midnight-blue felt parkland rippling and folded geologically over her hidden flesh like the frozen time of a Greek statue’s concrete drapery, and met the cool black pools of her eyes phosphorescent surface sheen over wells of mysterious female darkness.
    Time stopped. I swan-dived into the universe of her eyes, deep down, way down, all the way to a velvet-black grotto that seemed to go all the way through her, to open into an infinite void that was the same void behind my eyes too, where some essence of me mingled with the essence of her, and when I came bubbling up to the surface again, there seemed to be a tiny spark of her inside my head and from the now-hidden depths of her pupils, a piece of me seemed to look back.
    “Hello,” she said softly—a confirmation.
    “Hello.”
    Silently, we looked out over the waters together, the rolling gray waters of the East River redolent with the wasted substance of New York, carrying its rich soup down to the ocean, there to nourish the amnion of the primal womb of all life.