Read Online The Children of Hamelin by Norman Spinrad - Free Book Online

on some gut-level, she had known all along that the real choice wasn’t between good and evil but between two different styles of reality and neither was Shangri-La. But down here, at the bottom of New York’s Stalinist-gray bummer, I could see, could accept the fact, that the break from this to the Village had been a move towards freedom, a tropism towards light, a flight from a reality of walls to a place of the possible, where evil was ranker and good was more luxuriant, where “humanity festers rich as rotting fruit,” life, is all.
    I didn’t like the game, but those were the cards, and it had been the only game in town. I had nothing to regret.
    “Time for another magic carpet ride,” Robin said.
     
    We got out of the cab at Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue: the cabbie had been giving us the “dirty hippie treatment” all the way, so I handed him a single and two quarters for the $1.50 meter, paused just long enough to let him wind up for a curse, then handed him another single and said: “And that for you, my good man.”
    Walking up Fifth Avenue from the gaping cabbie, Robin said: “Why did you do that? That cat was bumming us all the way.”
    “Precisely,” I said. Jesus, it had been the obvious move, hadn’t it? “Huh?”
    “I did it to teach the bounder a lesson,” I explained patiently. “Man,” she said respectfully but obviously uncomprehendingly, “are you stoned!”
    Ah, the poor child, I thought with a sudden surge of well-being.
    No sense of savoir-faire, no appreciation of true class, no instinct for the Grand Gesture. Jeez, it felt good to be walking up Fifth Avenue, posh gleaming banks, opulent shops, wide sidewalks, muted underplayed storefronts, great office buildings where the wheels of the world hummed, little touches of pure idiot elegance like the gilded lamp-posts and trash-baskets, all bathed in the Technicolor glow of a golden sunset.
    “Dig it, dig it, dig it...” Robin mumbled.
    “I dig, I dig,” I assured her. This was the real New York where, as Dickie Lee says, the Big Game is played. Here the huge buildings weren’t dead useless stone but great buzzing beehives, busy, busy, busy, fortunes won and lost, paper empires rising and falling, yeah, this is where the action is. That son of a bitch Dirk had pegged it right; he knew his own turf, had to give him that.
    “Man, just so big, so big...” Robin said.
    “Oh yeah, big all right!” Fifth Avenue on a sunset Saturday was empty but not deserted, expensive chicks in expensive shops, mysterious cats bustling around on mysterious day-off missions, tourists gawking; but still not the weekday mob jamming the sidewalks, moving at double-time. No, now Fifth Avenue was like some smoothly-oiled racing-engine taking it easy, idling, not much really happening, but man, dig the power in that lazy throb!
    “Oh shit... wow...”
    We were on the corner of Fifth and Forty-Fourth now; two blocks north was the second-string office building that housed the Dirk Robinson Literary Agency. A weird feeling, walking around outside the old boiler factory on a Saturday, with the building closed, stoned on acid! Wouldn’t it blow old Dirk’s mind to see me? Or would it? It wasn’t blowing my mind; it was unblowing it. Fifth Avenue had a real reality, a sense of contact with the Great World Out There. Even my shitty job, stupid maybe, corrupt maybe, in that office on this street, put me in some kind of contact with the pathetic dreams of the losers and the Big Game of the winners; it was possible to sit behind my typewriter and sniff the goings-on in both realities of the office, to glide back and forth between the Big Game and the compost-heap of broken dreams....
    “Shit... shit... oh Christ...”
    Hey, Robin was babbling! Her free hand was balled into a fist, her hand in mine digging into my flesh like a claw. I put my free hand on her shoulder, spun her around to face me. Her eyes were wild, unfocused; her mouth was trembling. She