"Disch, Thomas M. - Camp Concentration" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

June 2
I am being held prisoner! I have been kidnapped from the prison where I by law belong and brought to a prison in which I do not belong. Legal advice is denied me. My protests are ignored with maddening blandness. Not since the playground tyrannies of childhood have the rules of the game been so utterly and arrogantly abrogated, and I am helpless to cope. To whom shall I complain? There is not even a chaplain in this place, I'm told. Only God hears me now, and my guards.
In Springfield I was a prisoner for a stated reason, for a fixed term. Here (wherever that may be) nothing is stated, there are no rules. I demand incessantly to be returned to Springfield, but the only answer I receive is to have waved in my face the slip of paper that Smede signed approving my transfer. Smede would have approved my being gassed, if it came to that. Damn Smede! Damn these new anonymities in their spiff, black, unidentifying uniforms! Damn me, for having been fool enough to place myself in a situation where this sort of thing can happen. I should have been foxy, like Larkin or Revere, and faked a psychosis to stay out of the Army. This is where all my fucking prissy morality gets me--fucked!
What caps it off is this: The aged mediocrity before whom I am regularly brought for interviews has asked me to keep a record of my experience here. A journal. He says he admires the way I write! I have a real gift for words, this aged mediocrity says. Ye Gods!
For over a week I tried to behave like a proper prisoner of war--name, rank, and Social Security number--but it's like the hunger strike I attempted way back when in the Montgomery jail: People who can't diet four days running shouldn't attempt hunger strikes.
So here's your journal, aged asshole. You know what you can do with it.


June 3
He thanked me, that's what he did. He said, "I can understand that you find all this very upsetting, Mr. Sacchetti." (Mr. Sacchetti, yet!) "Believe me, we want to do everything in our power here at Camp Archimedes to make the transition easier. That's my Function. Your Function is to observe. To observe and interpret. But there's no need to start right away. It takes time to adjust to a new environment, I can certainly understand that. But I think I can safely say that once you have made that adjustment you'll enjoy your life here at Camp Archimedes far more than you would have enjoyed Springfield--or than you've enjoyed Springfield in the past. I've read the few notes you kept there, you know--"
I interrupted to say that I _didn't_ know.
"Ah yes, Warden Smede was kind enough to send them along, and I read them. With great interest. In fact, it was only at my request that you were allowed to begin that journal. I wanted a sample of your work, so to speak, before I had you brought here.
"You really presented a very harrowing picture of your life in Springfield. I can honestly say I was shocked. I can assure you, Mr. Sacchetti, that _here_ you'll suffer no such harassments. And there's none of that disgusting hanky-panky going on here either. I should think not! You were _wasting_ yourself in that prison, Mr. Sacchetti. It was no place for a man of your intellectual attainments. I am myself something of an Expert in the R & D department. Not maybe what you'd call a Genius, exactly, I wouldn't go as far as that, but an Expert certainly."
"R & D?"
"Research and Development, you know. I have a nose for talent, and in my own small way, I'm rather well known. Inside the field. Haast is the name, Haast with a double _A_ ."
"Not _General_ Haast?" I asked. "The one who took that Pacific island?" My thought, of course, was that the Army had got me after all. (And for all I know that may yet be the case.)
He lowered his eyes to the surface of his desk. "Formerly, yes. But I'm rather too old now, as I believe you have yourself pointed out, eh?" Looking up resentfully: "Too _aged_ . . . to remain in the Army." He pronounced _aged_ as a single syllable.
"Though I have preserved a few Army ties, a circle of friends who still respect my opinion, aged as I am. I am surprised that _you_ associate my name with Auaui. . . 1944 was rather before your time."
"But I read the book, and that came out in . . . when? . . . 1955." The book I referred to, as Haast knew at once, was Fred Berrigan's _Mars in Conjunction_, a very slightly fictionalized account of the Auaui campaign. Years after the book appeared I met Berrigan at a party. A splendid, intense fellow, but he seemed to be sweating doom. That was just a month before his suicide. All of which is another story.
Haast glowered. "I had a nose for talent in those days too. But talent sometimes goes hand in glove with treason. However, there is no point in discussing the Berrigan affair with you, as you've obviously made up your mind."
He returned then to the Welcome Wagon bit: I had the run of the library; I had a $50 weekly allowance (!) to spend at the canteen; movies on Tuesday and Thursday nights; coffee in the lounge; that sort of thing. Above all, I must feel free, feel free. He refused, as he always had before, to explain where I was, why I was there, or when I might expect to be released or sent back to Springfield.
"Just keep a good journal, Mr. Sacchetti. That's all we ask."
"Oh, you can call me Louie, General Haast."
"Why, thank you. . . Louie. And why don't you call me H.H.? All my friends do."
"H.H."
"Short for Humphrey Haast. But the name Humphrey has the wrong associations in these less liberal days. As I was saying--your journal. Why don't you go back and ifil in where you left off, when you were brought here. We want that journal to be as thoroughgoing as possible. Facts, Sacchetti--excuse me, Louie--_facts!_ Genius, as the saying goes, is an infinite capacity for taking pains. Write it as though you were trying to explain to someone outside this. . . camp. . . what was happening to you. And I want you to be brutally honest. Say what you think. Don't spare _my_ feelings."
"I'll try not to."
A wan smile. "But try and keep one principle in mind always. Don't become too, you know. . . obscure? Remember, what we want is facts. Not . . ." He cleared his throat.
"Poetry?"
"Personally, you understand, I have nothing against poetry. You're welcome to write as much of it as you like. In fact, do, do, by all means. You'll find an appreciative audience for poetry here. But in your journal you must try to make sense."
Fuck you, H.H.
(I must here interpose a childhood memory. When I was a paper boy, at about age thirteen, I had a customer on my route who was a retired Army officer. Thursday afternoon was collection day, and old Major Youatt would never pay up unless I came into his dim, mementoed living room and heard him out. There were two things he liked to soliloquize about: women and cars. On the first subject, his feelings were ambivalent; an itchy curiosity about my little girl friends alternated with oracular warnings about V.D. Cars he liked better: his eroticism was uncomplicated by fear. He kept pictures in his billfold of all the cars he had ever owned, and he would show them to me, tenderly gloating, an aged lecher caressing the trophies of past conquests. I have always suspected that the fact that I was twenty-nine years old before I learned to drive a car derived from my horror of this man.
The point of the anecdote is this--that Haast is the mirror image of Youatt. They are cut with the same template. The key word is _fitness_. I imagine Haast still does twenty push-ups in the morning and rides a few imaginery miles on his Exercycle. The wrinkly crust of his face is crisped to a tasty brown by a sun lamp. His sparse and graying hair is crew cut. He carries to an extreme the maniacal American credo that there is no death.
And he is probably a garden of cancers. Isn't that so, H.H.?)

_Later_:
I have succumbed. I went to the library (of Congress? it is _vast!_) and checked out some three dozen books, which now grace the shelves of my room. It is a room, not a cell at all: the door is left open day and night, if there can be said to be a day and night in this unwindowed, labyrinthine world. What the place lacks in windows it makes up for in doors: there are infinite recessions of white, Alphavillean hallways, punctuated with numbered doors, most of them locked. A regular Bluebeard's castle. The only doors I found open were to rooms identical to mine, though apparently untenanted. Am I in the vanguard? A steady purr of air conditioners haunts the hallways and sings me to sleep at, as the saying goes, night. Is this some deep Pellucidar? Exploring the empty halls, I oscillated between a muted terror and a muted hilarity, as one does at a slightly unconvincing but not incompetent horror show.
My room (you want facts, you'll get facts):

I love it. Look at how dark it is. One might almost call it stark. The white paint is no longer white. It is more like moonlight than like white paint. I almost faint, looking at it. I think it is yellow, but I am unable to say.
H.H. isn't going to be happy, I can tell. (Honestly, H.H., that just happened.) For instant poetry it doesn't quite come up to the level of "Ozymandias," but in all modesty I will be satisfied with less, yes.
My room (let's try it again):
Off-white (there's the difference, in brief, between fact and poesy); original abstract oil paintings on these off-white walls, in the impeccable corporate taste of the New York Hilton, paintings as neutral in content as blank walls or Rorschach cards; expensive Danish-mod slabs of cherrywood tricked out here and there with cheery, striped, cubical cushions; an Acrilan carpet in off-ochre; the supreme luxury of wasted space and empty corners. I would estimate that I have five hundred square feet of floor space. The bed is in its own little ell and can be screened from the main body of the room by vapid, flowery drapes. There is a feeling that all four off-white walls are of one-way glass, that every drooping milky globe of light masks a microphone.
What gives?
A question that is on the tip of every guinea pig's tongue.
The man who stocks the library has more exquisite taste than the interior decorator. For there was not one, not two, but three copies of _The Hills of Switzerland_ on the shelf. Even, so help me God, a copy of _Gerard Winstanley, Puritan Utopist_. I read _Hills_ through and was pleased to find no misprints, though the fetish poems had been put in the wrong order.

_Still later_: