The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
In forty days Leonard had decimated most of his childhood. At first he had imagined he had endless memories to give—his playmates, teachers, Mrs. Teel, Paulie Malone. There was the day he wet his pants because he had played too long at recess and misjudged the time. There were school trips and days home sick and the way the afternoon light lay long knives of shadow across his bed. He had thought all that would fill years. Once, waking, it occurred to him that dreams were memories, too, and for a while he lived off his store of childhood dreams and adolescent sex fantasies, those which were complete enough for her to take.
It was now winter and his wakings to the drip of melting icicles from fifth tier’s overhang or the feathery fall of snow past the window made him know that Gehenna was keeping its part of the bargain. He had moments of anxiety about his part of it. Eighty days had gone from 2,375. He had 2,295 left. Did he have as many memories? Did he have a thousand? A hundred more?
His wakings came to be edged with anxiety. Then he discovered he could get better access to his memory if he gave himself simple nouns: pine tree, apple, street. He could remember specific things connected with those. He had sixty more days, but on the sixty-first he hit the blank wall of his bankrupt past. It happened with the word caramel corn. He was remembering a carnival he had gone to, a day for which he had waited, he and ... he and . . . silence. Nothing. The day had been shared by someone, someone eager, happy, waiting. He and someone had gone in the car, laughing and joking, had ridden the rides, eaten the caramel corn. The memory with the loss of that someone lay deflated, spent. Although he got the day, childhood intensity of hot sun and the cooking-sugar smell of the caramel and the oily smell of the popping corn, carnival music, and the colors all around them, he had seen the end. The memories were not to be shared, but given, and when there were no more, he would hit the wall, blank, total, with no face or scenes he knew. There would, when it was all over, be no evocation of anything, no memory at all.
It was too late to stop. The few moments of waking, stretching, formulating his memory were horrible to him, unbearable to smell and see. His cell was small, two bunks, one very low toilet, the high sink over it—a man had to wash sometimes with the stink of a stopped up commode directly under him. The walls were full of graffiti so that the eye was caught by the ugly screed of words scratched in the thousand angers of a thousand cons. He was buying his way out of it with something that had, only one hundred forty-one days ago, seemed less valuable than the smallest coin made. Remember. It caught. They were at the beach, his aunt and uncle, mother and father of . . . the wall again. He remembered his aunt who, for the beach, always wore a kerchief, a white one with red dots. . . . He realized he was working hard, trying to squeeze detail out of a resisting past without giving too much. Memories could be divided, saved, husbanded. The day at the beach, though, was it one or a distillation of many such days? In either case it must be rationed, given in segments like an orange, because like an orange, part by part, his mind was being eaten. The wall told him so. There had once been someone connected with him for whom there was now no evocation of any kind.
On day 150 (2,225 days remaining), Leonard awoke and begged for a rest. The Spirit howled from helclass="underline" “Do you know how to lie in fire, to freeze in the shame of your pleasant past?”
“I don’t have anything more to give—”
“Then live the rest of your sentence.”
“No, please ... I can’t do that.”
“Try harder. We fixed it with Ringnose and no one bothers you now. We have done well by you.”
“You’re eating me alive.”
“Listen! You have relatives, friends, you went to school, camp, you are middle class. Never in human history have people had more novelty of experience, trips, visits, outings, vacations. It is novelty on which memory is based. Listen!” “Give me time to go to the library, to get some books, pictures ...”
“Give it—give it!” she cried.
Some time later he woke and found himself holding his high school and college yearbooks. He opened them greedily, no longer caring to separate the pleasant from the unpleasant, the whole from the fragmented. He knew he would give all he had, wherever 2,225 memories were stored. He started with The Cougar, his high school yearbook.
The teams; there were the coaches, the clubs, the green springtimes and the blue-wind autumns. He had once thought he might save the best of these, a simple memory of Willie Madigan, Joe Sperber, Clem Jones, and himself, walking across the far end of the track after school. It was the day they had all decided to quit football. Willie and Clem were first string, Joe and Leonard were third, where no one cared. They were, that day, amazed and proud of Willie and of their friendship. They had made a decision, the first that pitted them against the adult world of expectation. It was a heady moment. The trees across the road were bare, the wind almost cold and whipping the school flags so that their sound was like applause. They were dressed for the cold—Willie was in his letterman’s blue and white, he himself was in a trainman’s coat he had gotten secondhand and wore like a dare. Such were their bodies then that they could have gone coatless and not really minded. They felt this somehow to be their strength. They gave none of the credit to their youth. Invincible, they were making the choice to step down. For Willie and Clem this had not been possible until they knew they were capable of first-string play. Caught in that memory, Leonard paused a moment in a pain almost great enough to stop it, and then he let it go, evoked it, and it was taken and he slept again.
He used up the high school yearbook in thirty days. He could read it from cover to cover and evoke nothing, no one. Junior high had gone months ago. Grade school was a fitful flicker like lightning at the horizon reflecting itself against clouds—seen and gone before it could be caught.
College. Relatively few of the cons had gone to college and there was a certain envy, felt and sometimes expressed by them. One of the blacks Leonard had bunked with had said: “You jivin’, everybody be the same, you be robbin’ banks for the poor. That’s after you done got all you can get. ”
Leonard had answered, “Everyone gets what he can,” but he had stopped defending himself and then he had stopped trying to alter his speech to be more like theirs.
College was where Leonard felt he had come into his own. It was the time of his greatest excitement and awakening. His activities didn’t appear in the yearbook, the arguments, the commitments, the people. Nowhere were there pictures of Anthony Lorenzo, of all the talking and the listening that had formed his political awareness, of Barbara and Teri, Don Miller, Ken Seybright. Still, the scenes of the campus, the dorms, and student center brought back many of the memories of their meetings, bull-sessions, the organizing and defining by themselves as a serious political group and by the other students as radicals. Leonard had liked the term radical. He enjoyed being unique, separated. Lorenzo was a brilliant leader, a patriot in a way that didn’t make Leonard want to gag at the word. He was Len, now, Len Future, and he and Lorenzo and Seybright and Barb and Teri were going to do what the books only talked about. They would shatter and remake, explode and rebuild. They held protests and marches and when they turned around they saw others marching with them. They began to think of more direct forms of action.
In the beginning Leonard had thought he would keep those memories as his own, but now he told himself it would be foolish and romantic to save what had no practical use and what was an unnecessary possession, a mental photo album as trite and bourgeois as the yearbooks he now held. He spent the next wakings on his later days, the robberies.