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:
“And I have no past. I gave it all to you.”
“You hated it; it’s gone.”
“I’m walking streets without markers ...”
“Losing memories doesn’t mean losing your memory. Back then, didn’t you recognize a friend even when you had forgotten some of the things you did together? You still have the friend, you just don’t have the memory.”
“And changing ...”
“You’ll get old like everyone else, but you’ll no longer have to labor at rewriting your past or remodeling yourself. Give us memory, now, give it. Remember!”
“I can’t take prison. I can’t stand these days ...”
“Find the stories for us. They’re there—hundreds, thousands more. You don’t want them, you don’t use them. Give us—give us—and we’ll see you’re comfortable, sleeping, reading, rocking on the porch—”
He went back to his cell and lay on his bunk ransacking. Friends, all gone, foods, names, flowers. He got ten things on a list and another ten that might yield-flowerpot, a broken flowerpot. Where was it? When did it happen? He went to the screaming cafeteria, writing all the associations he had, desperately seeking—plaid shirt—madras shirt—whose? It was a kid in school, Prentice. There had to be more. The evening dragged. A washcloth—injuries. When? Where? Ten more memories, another ten. Remember the time I shut my finger in the car door and my dad was ... he slept.
On the 250th day he woke in a dry, familiar desperation, went through a list of one hundred words seeking to evoke—there—nothing to give now. He tried another hundred, hoping for the eye-corner phantom that runs for safety before it can be seen and identified, a moment, a girl, a friend . . .
The past was bare, a twilit plain without the beauty of twilight, and unchanging.
To the screams of anguish he said, “It’s over.”
“Find it—find it!”
“I’m done.”
He rose into the prison morning. There he lay and counted the time remaining to him, the two thousand one hundred days before he could be accepted for parole. Each of those days would be a prison day, a day through which he would walk skin-stripped at the mercy of his senses, uninsulated. He would not be clever because vulnerable people aren’t clever and because of that he might be beaten, stabbed, made a victim again. He wanted to cry but the wake-up sounded, raw in his ears. Then the whole tier groaned, and rose in hate. It occurred to Leonard that simpler than what the Spirit had said about recasting life, every prisoner had a small place of refuge through the day. The refuge was memory. The man at the laundry basket piling and sorting clothes might be fishing on a once-seen lake, or simply cruising the main drag in Coffeeville on a Saturday night, with the car radio on and a girl in a tight sweater. Leonard, whose experiences had been more varied than most of the prisoners, had, by choice, given away the geography of his childhood and adolescence. There was nothing left to glow behind the hideous moment and make it bearable.
The days, taken raw, went hour by hour. He had begun to think of suicide. Then Rimper on tier three had a heart attack. Leonard put in for the job at the power plant and got it, there being no other con who wanted it.
The work was simple. He checked the gauges that monitored the lights, heat, and power. Years ago, the job had been vital and heavy with perks. Now, all the systems were on backup and auxiliary power and the job was only boring. Leonard wanted it because it let him be alone, free of having to fake the self he had been while his real self slept.
May. His parents came. They were, as always, cowed by the prison. They huddled and shrank. His mother brought bribe food, and spoke in whispers. “Are you all right?” He told them he was. They began to talk about family news: Aunt Essie had had a stroke. Cousin Brian was getting married. Births and Bar Mitzvahs. For none, not one, had Leonard a memory. He recognized his parents, but they had lost definition and it was hard to follow their simplest talk. “It takes me in the feet—you know me and my feet, all the years standing ...” And Leonard didn’t have a clue to what his father meant or to his mother’s sighed, “Betty’s upset, naturally. You’d think after all her troubles ...”
He sat and watched them suffer behind the Plexiglas. He had given away all the cousins and the aunts and the days, landmarks of his childhood, mountains, seashores, clouds, spiderwebs from which hung . . . wait . . . from which dew hung ... He saw it with perfect, pristine clarity, a memory without defensiveness or self-serving, a simple, stunning picture infused with childhood’s awe. The dew was suspended in such a way on that perfect web that each drop carried, weighing and trembling lightly on the suspension cables of the web, a little rainbow. He saw it again, how the light brimmed in the tiny prisms, and prism and drop and web hung in the spring morning where he stood close to the smell of the wet grass, because he was a little kid. Grass touched his knee, cold-green with the morning’s cold dew. Then there was a little breeze and the web trembled and the drop suddenly shuddered and the prism scattered rainbow and fell from the web like tears. “I remember,” he said. They thought he was speaking of Aunt Essie and nodded.
The ruined landscape had yielded up a survivor. Where there was one there might be others. One by one, they might creep from under the rubble. Hadn’t he been seeing someone home drunk one night in college? Didn’t he pretend to be drunker than he was so he might look up at the vast spread of stars and yes, yes, he had been wearing a ... it was a wool jacket, heavy, and a blue knit watch-cap and his friend—a shadow now—had still some part of him that had not been given away. Web and starry-night, warm-jacket shadow friend would be his to use, to remake himself, bit by bit, year by year. His friend was singing away in his ear. He couldn’t capture the tune and there was a destination he couldn’t place, but the memory, wind and cold and gin and being tired and the stars and the singing . . . dew in the web—Thank God. “Did you ever have long hair?” he asked his drawn, huddled mother; “Was it ever held with two curved combs at the sides of your head?”
YOU’LL NEVER EAT LUNCH ON THIS CONTINENT AGAIN
Adam Gopnik
The following story is pure California, albeit the West Coast of two hundred million years ago. This wickedly funny fantasia comes from The New Yorker, where Adam Gopnik works as a staffer, and which has published a number of his other pieces.