Read Online The Coming by Joe Haldeman - Free Book Online

button to start it running and went out to get some lunch.
    Good timing. José y María did make you feel famished about an hour after you popped. It was a healthy hunger, though; felt good.
    He walked down tree-lined Second Avenue to downtown, studying the undergraduate girls. His appreciation of their beauty had an exquisite purity, partly because he couldn't do anything about it until a day or so after the drug wore off. But that was not really a problem, he told himself. For every thing there is a season. He tried to ignore the persistent itching pain at the injection site, the slight numb erection.
    It wasn't just the way they looked, moving in their soft summer clothes. He could smell them as they passed; smell the secret parts of their bodies as well as the public perfume, the astringent sunblock. He could feel the heat from their bodies on his face, on the back of his hand, as they passed. He could almost read their thoughts, at least when they were thinking of him.
    What a wonderful day. He even loved the heat, the blast that glowed up from the asphalt as he floated across streets. It was as if he walked on the heat. Cars stopped for him respectfully, their horns music. Brakes squealing in beautiful unison as he triggered the street's emergency mode.
    As he approached Hermanos, the smell of meats frying was almost too much for him. He swallowed saliva and walked into the cool and dark.
    What were all these people doing here? Usually Hermanos was uncrowded until after one, when the Cubans and Mexicans started drifting in. There were only two tables unoccupied. Ybor sat down at the bar.
    The owner Sara waited on him. She made him uncomfortable. He had known her before the accident, when she was a lifeguard at the Eastside pool. He had studied her body for hours when he was eleven and twelve, and it disgusted him to think of what it must look like now. But he always went to the bar when she was serving.
    "Hola, Ybor. What'll it be?"
    He didn't have to look at the menu. "Ropa vieja y vino tinto."
    She wrote it down. "Old rags and new wine, coming up." She poured him a glass of red wine, cold, and went back to the kitchen.
    Ybor took a sip of the wine and then held the glass between his palms, warming it. Like everything, the bar was transformed by the drug, made more real and more fantastic at the same time. The cheap paneling became a whorl of frozen life, tropical trees microtomed over and over. The liquor bottles with their rainbow of colors and flavors; from yards away he could smell them individually. The slow ceiling fans pushed gentle puffs of cool air over him, like slaves waving palm fronds. The mirror showed a young man capable of great things. Thirty-five was still young.
    Sara brought the stew with a plate of warm tortillas and the green hot sauce Ybor liked. Ropa vieja, literally "old clothes," was beef slowly cooked in tomato sauce and peppers, until it fell apart into shreds. Ybor liked it but had chosen it mainly because he knew it would just be ladled out and brought to him. He could have starved to death while they were fixing a hamburger.
    Sara watched him tear into it with a spoon in one hand and a rolled tortilla in the other. "I like a man who likes to eat," she said, smiling, and went off to fill a bar order.
    This drug could make eating a cracker into a sensual experience. The spicy stew played an ecstatic symphony in his mouth, nose, palate; the act of swallowing was a complex and delightful counterpoint.
    Sara came back. "So how about these aliens?"
    "¿Cómo?" She going to carry on about immigrants again, interrupt this symphony?
    "Right next door to you." She waved a hand at all her new customers. "All these reporters. All because of Aurora Bell."
    That got his attention. "What'd Dr. Bell do?"
    "What, you live in a goddamn cave?"
    "Working all morning. What she do?"
    "She got some signal from outer space. Some aliens coming to Earth, like in the movies."
    "Aw, bullshit, Sara. You're