The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen Read Free Book Online

it.”

26

    H e would love to have heard Hitler or Mussolini bellow from his marble balcony, to have seen partisans hang him upside down; to see the hockey crowds lynch the sports commissioner; to see the black or yellow hordes get even with the small outposts of their colonial enemies; to see the weeping country folk acclaim the strong-jawed road-builders; to see football fans rip down goalposts; to have seen the panicking movie-viewers stampede Montreal children in the famous fire; to see five hundred thousand snap into any salute at all; to see a countless array of Arabian behinds pointing west; to see the chalices on any altar tremble with the congregational Amen.
    And this is where he would like to be:
    in the marble balcony
the press-box
the projection-room
the reviewing stand
the minaret
the Holy of Holies
    And in each case he wants to be surrounded by the best armed, squint-eyed, ruthless, loyal, tallest, leather-jacketed, technical brain-washed heavy police guard that money can buy.

27

    I s there anything more beautiful than a girl with a lute?
    It wasn’t a lute. Heather, the Breavmans’ maid, attempted the ukulele. She came from Alberta, spoke with a twang, was always singing laments and trying to yodel.
    The chords were too hard. Breavman held her hand and agreed that the strings were tearing her fingers to pieces. She knew all the cowboy stars and traded their autographs.
    She was a husky, good-looking girl of twenty with high-coloured cheeks like a porcelain doll. Breavman chose her for his first victim of sleep.
    A veritable Canadian peasant.
    He tried to make the offer attractive.
    “You’ll feel wonderful when you wake up.”
    Sure, she winked and settled herself on the couch in the crammed basement store-room. If only it would work.
    He moved his yellow pencil like a slow pendulum before her eyes.
    “Your eyelids will feel heavy as lead on your cheeks.…”
    He swung the pencil for ten minutes. Her large eyelids thickened and slowed down. She followed the pencil with difficulty.
    “And your breathing heavy and regular.…”
    Soon she let out a sigh, took in a deep breath, and breathed like a drunkard, laboured and exhausted.
    Now the eyelashes barely flickered. He couldn’t believe that he had ordered the changes in her. Maybe she was joking.
    “You’re falling backwards, you’re a tiny body falling backwards, getting smaller and smaller, and you can hear nothing but my voice.…”
    Her breath was soft and he knew it would smell like wind.
    He felt as though he had got his hands under her sweater, under her skin and ribs, and was manipulating her lungs, and they felt like balloons of silk.
    “You are asleep,” he commanded in a whisper.
    He touched her face in disbelief.
    Was he really a master? She must be joking.
    “Are you asleep?”
    The yes came out the length of an exhalation, husky, unformed.
    “You can feel nothing. Absolutely nothing. Do you understand?”
    The same yes.
    He drove a needle through the lobe of her ear. He was dizzy with his new power. All her energy at his disposal.
    He wanted to run through the streets with a bell and summon the whole cynical city. There was a new magician in the world.
    He had no interest in ears pierced by needles.
    Breavman had studied the books. A subject cannot be compelled to anything which he would consider indecent while awake. But there were ways. For instance, a modest woman can be induced to remove her clothes before an audience of men if the operator can suggest a situation in which such an act can be performed quite naturally, such as taking a bath in the privacy of her own home, or a naked rest under the sun in some humid deserted place.
    “It’s hot, you’ve never been so hot. Your sweater weighs a ton. You’re sweating like a pig.…”
    As she undressed Breavman kept thinking of the illustrations in the pulp-paper Hypnotism for You manuals he knew by heart. Line drawings of fierce men leaning over smiling, sleeping women.