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:
How Gehenna loved the robberies. There were other voices now, a gabble of them, and when the memory was interesting or special they moaned like lovers. For the slack or incomplete memories, they urged and pulled. “The day, what was it like?”
“It was the night we planned the second bank job,” Leonard said. He had a sudden spasm of guilt about giving up the names and faces, invoking them in his mind-voice. They had sworn secrecy. . . .
“Memory! Memory—” They gibbered like bats.
He hesitated. Miller was doing time here, too, but in another building, and they seldom met. Lorenzo had copped a plea, Seybright had escaped, and as far as Leonard knew was still free. The loyalty they had sworn ... He dove into the memory.
It was a summer night, hot and muggy. They had all felt powerful, in command. Action against property was righteous, Lorenzo had said. Leonard’s part had been to map the bank, detail the exits, and later watch how it opened.
“Give us all of it!”
He tried to give the details he knew they craved. Lorenzo’s apartment, dank but cool. They drank beer, having sworn off drugs until after the job. Leonard had laid out the bank’s floor plan. They were all on a high, a quiet high, like rafting on fast water. . . . That made him remember rafting, another memory, another day’s respite, and he slept and woke and gave them the water, sun-glinted as he came toward the rapids, the mile-long sinews contracting and stretching against his boat. I remember . . . and then he slept.
“About the robbery ...” she said. The robbery itself had been a comedown because they had been off stride that day; he knew it waking up, but couldn’t remember specifically enough, and the job had only one strong memory, the moment of their being in the bank, of his dropping the attache case and having to pick it up. He tried to tell her—them—in his mind-voice that it should have been funny, clumsiness when grace was called for—a robbery was, after all, a public appearance—and how he had almost said “oops,” but it wasn’t funny. The onlookers had been terrified; thwarting him might result in his firing his gun and a red-splattered—“Oh, God!” a woman had cried, and fainted. A new voice demanded that minute and Leonard tried, picturing humor gone cold, the smell of the air just at that moment, hot day, cold sweat, and how they were off rhythm so that no one had thought to plan who went through the door first so there was a scramble and Lorenzo nearly fell.
“Feelings, what were your feelings?”
He knew what they wanted by now, shame, rage, triumph, joy. He had had none of those. “You try for nothingness, no emotion. There’s too much else to think of.” He remembered the belly-clutch of fear just then. The door. Then he remembered seeing how ordinary the street looked, how out on that ordinary street they had gone back to their plan to split up. He gave them bright sun, dislocation, fear, relief within seconds. They took that moment.
On the 210th day, Leonard suffered a kind of breakdown. He woke up and there was nothing. He felt no sensation, saw no picture in his mind—none. They came: “Remember. Remember!”
“I have nothing. ” There was a cry from hell—anguish and rage, the cry of the addicted. Leonard felt their terror and then his own. “I’m dried up. I can’t. . .” and then there was only the prison day, bearing down.
For the first time in seven months, Leonard rose resident in his body, heard the wake-up coughs and hawks of the men on the tier, men pissing, groaning, cursing.
He smelled the smells. The seven months he had escaped into memory had blunted his ability to protect himself from the onslaught of his senses. He dressed, fumbling, almost weeping, was walked to breakfast, recoiled in the ugly impacted hate and rage of the men around him, paranoid spew, fume of ungratified sex, their sounds their smells their hair-trigger touchiness or obtunded despair. Now and then men came to him and said things, things pertaining to the life his surrogate self shared with them. He answered as well as he could. Once or twice he saw puzzlement on their faces. It was masked quickly as everything was, and he yearned almost to tears for the salvation he was losing—why couldn’t he remember? There must be more. During the evening break he went to the library and looked at cookbooks for memories, at catalogues, at pictures, for any clue that would open the magic door again, door through which he had once walked so easily. The day passed. Another, another.
Leonard’s search became desperate because somehow he wasn’t able to adjust to prison life as he had before. The possibility of an alternative had destroyed his ability to tighten himself against the assaults of its boredom, danger, and ugliness. Three days. She came to the visitors’ room again.
If anything, she was skinnier, more withered, tighter. Her hands never stopped their pinching, picking, spidering in her ragged clothes.
“I’ve lost it,” he said. “There is no more.”
“Nonsense. Of course there’s more. Look around. You don’t want to be here— find something. Listen!”
“I'm played out. Done.”
Her eyes lit. “You need a vacation,” she said.
It was a car ad he had seen years before, a gracious old house among big trees. There was a wide veranda with a rocker on it. A sports car was in front of the house, and in it were scuba things and picnic baskets.
“Wonderful,” she said, “go there and rest. The house has everything you’ll need.”
“How long?”
“A week. We have Ringnose now, for what he’s worth, Luchese, Kent. Enjoy yourself. ”
All the days were sun-dappled. He lay in the meadow in front of the house or rocked and read magazines on the porch. Twice he took the car to the lake with the people who came by, owners of the gear and the picnic things. They were pretty laughing girls and clean-limbed young men, but they were ad people—they had no pasts, no futures, no hopes, no memories. They took him scuba-diving but the lake was silted and the company boring. He made love to the girls and forgot it immediately after doing it. He had vowed he would rest from memory, but a few times he tried it gingerly, like a neurology patient testing for the paralysis that might or might not still be there. There was no remembering and in the old brass bed, open-window cool in the moonlight, he heard rats scrabbling in the walls.
And the days there were unchanging. It never rained; there was no sense of movement through a season, no old flowers dying or new ones in bud.
“You’ve rested. Let’s begin. There’s more—of course there’s more.”
“Something has let go . . .’’he said, “I can feel it.”
“Only memories.”
“Don’t he. I felt it there, lazing in the sun, reading, riding, making love. I’ve sold you my soul, haven’t I?”
She laughed the screeching laugh that drove the guards behind the doors. “No one, not even you, gives up his soul.”
“What do I give up, besides those memories? I felt something stop and break away and flow away inside me.”
“Oh, that—that’s not serious—it’s not a vital need.”
“What is it?”
“If it’s gone, it would have been the ability to change, to recreate yourself. It’s more of a choice than a need, and you’ve never wanted change in yourself.” “I’m pledged to work for change. The movement ...”
“Your bunch wants everyone else to change—society.”
“How do people change?” Leonard asked.
For a moment she slowed and went quieter. “They start with changing their own stories, by retelling them with new shadings. Are there gentler moments in memory? Are there cruder? By stroke and stroke, memory by memory, over time they remodel their pasts and then themselves, their ideas of who they were, then are, and then, of who they will be.”