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

I have been trying to read. I take up a book, but after a few paragraphs it loses my interest. One after another, I set aside Palgrave, Huizinga, Lowell, Wilenski, a chemistry text, Pascal's _Provincial Letters_, and _Time_ magazine. (We are, as I suspected, using tactical nuclear weapons now; two students were killed in a protest riot in Omaha.) I haven't felt a like restlessness since my sophomore year at Bard, when I changed my major three times in one semester.
The giddiness infects my whole body: There is a hollowness in my chest, a dryness in my throat, an altogether inappropriate inclination to laughter.
I mean, what's so funny?


June 4
A soberer morning-after.
As Haast requests, I will recount the events of the interim. May they be used in evidence against him.
The day after "The Silkworm Song"--that would be May 20--I was still sick and had remained in the cell while Donny and Peter (already reconciled) and the Mafia were out on a work detail. I was summoned to Smede's office to receive at his hand the package containing my personal effects. He made me check it item for item against the inventory that had been drawn up the day I'd entered prison. Searing blasts of hope, as I imagined that some miracle of public protest or judicial conscience had set me free. Smede shook my hand, and, delirious, I _thanked_ him. Tears in my eyes. The son of a bitch must have been enjoying himself.
He handed me over then, with an envelope the same sickly yellow color as my prisoned flesh (this was the Sacchetti dossier, surely) to two guards in black uniforms, trimmed in silver, very Germanic and, as we used to say, tuff. Calf-high boots, leather straps that formed a veritable harness, mirror sunglasses, the works: Peter would have groaned with envy, Donny with desire. They said not a word but went straight to their work. Handcuffs. A limousine with curtains. I sat between them and asked questions of their stone faces and shielded eyes. An airplane. Sedation. And so, by a route unmarked even by bread crumbs, to my comfy little cell in Camp Archimedes, where the witch feeds me very good meals. (I have only to ring a bell for room service.)
I arrived here, I'm told, the twenty-second. First interview with H.H. the next day. Warm reassurances and obstinate mystifications. As noted, I remained nonconimunicative until the second of June. Those nine days passed in an Empyrean of paranoia, but that, like all passions, ebbed, diminished to an ordinary humdrum horror, thence to an uneasy curiosity. Shall I confess that there is a kind of pleasure to be had in the situation, that a strange castle _is_ rather more interesting than the same old dungeon all the time?
But confess it to whom? To H.H.? To Louie II, whom I must confront in the mirror almost every day now?
No, I shall pretend that this journal is just for me. My journal. If Haast wants a copy, Haast will have to supply me with carbon paper.

_Later_:
I wonder, reading over "The Silkworm Song," if the fifth line is quite right. I want an effect of disingenuous pathos; perhaps I've achieved no more than a clichй.


June 5
Haast informs me, by inter-office memo, that the electric typewriter I use is part of a master-slave hookup that automatically produces, in another room, second, third, and fourth impressions of everything I type. H.H. gets his _Journal_ fresh off the press--and think of all the money he saves not having to supply me with carbon paper.
Today, the first evidence that there is that here which merits chronicling:
On the way to the library to get tapes to play on my hi-fl (a B & O, no less) I encountered one of the spirits inhabiting this circle of my new hell, the first circle, if I am to go through them in a proper, Dantean order--Limbo--and he, stretching the analogy a bit further, would be the Homer of this dark glade.
Dark it was, for the fluorescent fixtures had been removed from this length of corridor, and as in a glade a constant and chill wind swept through the pure Eucidean space, some anomaly in the ventilating system, I suppose. He stood there blocking my way, his face buried in his hands, corn-silkwhite hair twined about the nervous fingers, swaying and, I think, whispering to himself. I approached quite close, but he did not rouse from his meditation, so I spoke aloud: "Hello there."
And when even this drew no response, I ventured further. "I'm new here. I was a prisoner at Springfield, a conchie. I've been brought here illegally. Though God knows to what purpose."
He took his hands from his face and looked at me, squinteyed, through the tangled hair. A broad, young face, Slavic and guileless--like one of the second-string heroes in an Eisenstein epic. The broad lips broadened in a chill, unconvinced smile, like a stage moonrise. He lifted his right hand and touched the center of my chest with three fingers, as though to assure himself of my corporeality. Assured, the smile became more convinced.
"Do you know," I asked urgently, "where we are? Or what's to be done with us?"
The pale eyes looked from side to side--in confusion or fear, I could not tell.
"What city? what state?"
Again, that wintry smile of recognition, as my words bridged the long distance to his understanding. "Well, the nearest any of us can tell, we're in the mountain states. Because of _Time_, you know." He pointed to the magazine in my hand. He spoke in the most nasal of Midwestern voices, in an accent unmodified by education or travel. He was in speech as in looks a model Iowa farmboy.
"Because of _Time?_" I asked, soniewhat confused. I looked at the face on the cover (General Phee Phi Pho Phum of North Malaysia, or some other yellow peril), as though he might explain.
"It's a regional edition. _Time_ comes out in different regional editions. For advertising purposes. And _we_ get the mountain states edition. The mountain states are Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado . . ." He named their names as though twanging chords on a guitar.
"Ah! Yes, I understand now. Slow of me."
He heaved a deep sigh.
I held out my hand, which he regarded with undisguised reluctance. (There are parts of the country, the West Coast especially, where because of the germ warfare the handshake is no longer considered good form.) "The name's Sacchetti. Louis Sacchetti."
"Ah! Ah yes!" He took hold of my hand convulsively. "Mordecai said you were coming. I'm so glad to meet you. I can't express--" He broke off, blushing deeply, and pulled his hand out of mine. "Wagner," he mumbled, as if an afterthought. "George Wagner." Then, with a certain bitterness, "But _you_ would never have heard of me."
I've encountered this particular form of introduction so often at readings or symposia, from other little-magazine writers or teaching assistants, smaller fry even than myself, that my response was almost automatic. "No, I'm afraid I haven't, George. Sorry to say. I'm surprised, as a matter of fact, that you've heard of _me_."
George chuckled. "He's surprised . . ." he drawled, "as a matter of fact . . . that I've heard of _him!_"
Which was no little disconcerting.
George closed his eyes. "Excuse me," he said, almost whispering. "The light. The light is too bright."
"This Mordecai that you mentioned . . . ?"
"I like to come here because of the wind. I can breathe again. Breathing the wind. Here." Or perhaps what he said was "hear," for he went on: "If you're very quiet you can hear their voices."
I was indeed very quiet, but the only sound was the seashell roaring of the air conditioners, the gloomy blasts of chill air through the chambered corridor.
"Whose voices?" I asked with a certain trepidation.
George furrowed his white brows. "Why, the angels, of course."
Mad, I thought--and then realized that George had been quoting my own poem to me--the paraphrase-cum-parody I'd done of the Duino Elegies. That George, this ingenuous Iowa boy, should so lightly toss off a line from one of my uncollected poems was even more disconcerting than the simpler supposition that he was off his nut. "You've read that poem?" I asked.
George nodded and the tangle of corn silk crept down over pale eyes, as though from shyness.
"It isn't a very good poem."
"No, I suppose not." George's hands, which had till now been preoccupied with each other behind his back, began to creep back up to George's face. They reached up to push the drooping hair back from his eyes, then stayed atop his head, as though snared. "But it's true anyhow . . . you _can_ hear their voices. Voices of silence. Or the breath, it's the same thing. Mordecal says that breath is poetry too." The hands slowly came down in front of the pale eyes.
"Mordecai?" I repeated, with some urgency. I could not then, I still cannot, shake off the feeling that I've heard that name elsewhere, elsewhen.
But it was like speaking to someone in a boat that the current was ineluctably bearing away. George shuddered. "Go away," he whispered. "Please."