Madart: переводы

→I take a deep breath. Pull it together, kid.

→“Keep it up and you’re going to have to buy me a drink,” I say.

→“No sir,” I reply, figuring that even drug dealers appreciate good manners.

→I nod and continue without further incident to the fourth floor, where Apartment 4D anchors the end of the hall. I knock on the door.

→“Marvin Kirschenbaum sent me. I’m looking for—”

→I begin a cautious ascent, encountering the source of the commotion, or at least a key participant, on the stairs between the second and third floors. He’s a kid about my age, Puerto Rican, wearing an oversized Tommy Hilfiger shirt and baggy, low-riding Girbaud jeans, plus scuffless Air Jordans that would set me back what I make in a week at Carvel. Noticing me, he spits on the ground. Then he rips a Motorola pager from the hem of his pants and smashes it against the wall.

→The switchblade was another Italian souvenir, something she began carrying full-time after a female student had been raped on campus. She dislodged the knife from my shoulder. I had time to scream in pain before she stuck me again, this time in my thigh. Then she went for the chest. Some instinct toward self-defense ordered my forearm to push back, flinging her backward almost comically into a snowdrift. I tried to step toward her, but the pain in my leg dictated otherwise. I crumpled to my knees and rolled onto my back, staring at the dark gray sky, bleeding into the snow, waiting to die.

→It wasn’t very hard. She’d fallen to her knees about thirty yards from the road. I approached slowly, softly repeating her name, trying to get a read on her emotional temperature. I interpreted her silence as welcoming so I moved in, placing a hand on her shoulder. A sharp burst of pain in my own shoulder provided instant feedback as to just how badly I’d misread the situation.

→I banged the steering wheel angrily. I had a pretty good case for leaving her here. Let her hitch a ride. She’d get home eventually, full of piss and vinegar and maybe unwilling to ever forgive me, but fuck it: This time our relationship was done. Number Two had become Number One and there was no going back. I slammed the wheel a few more times, cursing Daphne, Dino, myself, and lastly my parents for being such assholes that I’d had to even take this goddamn trip. Then I unbuckled my seat belt and played a real-life game of Frogger across the highway, hoping to find her.

→We sat in the emergency lane, motionless and silent. Until Daphne leapt out of the passenger seat, skirted three lanes of interstate traffic, and disappeared into a snowy copse of trees.

→Now we were facing oncoming traffic. Cars swerved past us, their drivers’ faces rigid with shock, terror, and fury at an unpredictable universe. I began to smile, the same dumb expression that was plastered on my face when the Civic completed its 360-degree turn and slammed broadside into the center divider.

→The car began to spin, slowly, but still precariously out of control. I struggled to restore authority over the vehicle with my free arm while deflecting punches with the other. “I hate consumerism!” she continued to yell again and again, like a chanting monk.

→“I hate consumerism!” she screamed.

→Her response was fast, effective, and very nearly fatal for both of us. She grabbed my arm, pulling me—and the steering wheel—toward her. As I leaned the other way to straighten the wheel, she punched me, without letting go of my arm, around my head and neck as hard and as fast as she could. What she lacked in strength, she more than made up for in speed.

→“Just saying. Real geniuses don’t live with their parents.”

→“You know damn fucking well that’s the traditional living arrangement in Italy. It’s not like the consumerist hell we live in here. Family values actually mean something.”

→“Dino,” I continued. “The genius artist who’s what, thirty? And still lives with his parents.”

→“That wasn’t funny the first time you said it. Or the six thousand times since.” Daphne’s spine stiffened for a fight. And I was feeling stupid enough to give her one.

→“Ah, Dino,” I said. “Your friend with the Flintstones name.”

→Dino was a Roman she’d dated during a semester in Italy when she was an undergrad art major. He’d been a genius artist, or so she said. I tended to ignore most of what she said about Dino, as in addition to vast artistic talent he’d apparently been endowed with a cock molto mostruoso and the equivalent of a graduate degree in Italian lovemaking. While I was generally confident in my own size and skills, talking Dino reminded me that Daphne was our relationship’s wiser and wilder elder, making me feel like a groping pretender.