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

She looked blank.
"In _Dr. A. Busk_," I clarified.
"Oh, that. It stands for Aimйe."
"And which private foundation is supplying the cash for this place?"
"I could tell you, but really, Mr. Sacchetti, don't you think you'd be better off not knowing? The subjects have been instructed that there are certain things which, for your own sake, it would be better that they not discuss with you. Because you will, I presume, want to leave here sometime, won't you?"
Dr. Aimйe Busk uncrossed her legs with a slither of nylon and stood up. "The guards will be here directly to take you back upstairs. I shall see you again next week at the latest. In the meantime, feel free to come and ask me any question that you're certain you want to have the answer to. Good day, Mr. Sacchetti." With three brisk scissor steps she left the room. Having scored all the points for _that_ round.

_Later_:
Within an hour after I'd typed this journal entry, a note came from H.H.: "She's thirty-seven. H.H."
Interdepartmental rivalries? (Don't answer that question.)


June 7

I had thought my migraines, being so clearly psychosomatic, had been exorcized by my psychotherapy, but they returned last night with a vengeance. Where one twinge had been there now are seven. Perhaps La Busk, being an initiate to the mysteries, was able to work some countermagic to Dr. Mieris's cure; perhaps it was simply that I stayed up past two o'clock in a fit of scribbling. I don't yet have enough distance from it to judge whether the poem was worth such a price. Though who knows? Perhaps it was the migraine brought on the poem.
So much for the life of the mind; the notable event of the day was the visitation, shortly after breakfast (at noon) of the fabled Mordecai Washington. He came unannounced by any guard, knocked but didn't wait to be invited in. "May I?" he asked, having already done so.
Even face to face, even with his voice, his loud voice, thudding against my migraine, I did not recognize him as my supposed high school friend, as anyone.
A first impression: He is not good-looking. I'll admit my standards of beauty are ethnocentric, but I don't think many Negroes would find Mordecai Washington good-looking either. Very dark he is, well-nigh purplish. Long in the face, with a jaw that juts and blub lips (flattened against the plane of the face, however, rather than protruding; vertical lips, one might call them), a minimal nose, and tousley neo-Maori hair. A chest that would a century past have been called consumptive, negligible shoulders, bandy legs, clodhopper feet. A gravelly rasp of a voice, like Punch in a puppet show. Handsome eyes, however (though it's always easy to concede that to ugly people).
Even so, I will insist that he has extraordinary eyes, at once moist and lively, suggesting depths but never revealing them, oxymoronal eyes.
"No, stay where you are," he insisted, when I begin to climb out of bed. He dragged a chair across the room to my bedside. "What are you reading? Ah, a picture book. You've been here all this while, and no one told me. I found out from George. It's a pity, but then I've been temporarily"--He waved a hand above his head vaguely. (His hands, like his feet, were disproportionately big. Fingers splayed at the tips like a workman's, but quick, almost fluttery. His gestures tend to be overdramatic, as though to compensate for his deadpan face.) --"defunct. Inert. Moribund. Comatose. But that's all over now. And you're here. I'm glad. I am. Mordecai Washington."
Gravely, he offered me his hand. I could not help sensing a certain irony in this gesture, as though in accepting it I was serving as his straight man.
He laughed, shrill parrot laughter pitched two octaves higher than his speaking voice. It was as though another person did his laughing for him. "Oh, you can touch it. I won't give you any goddamn germs. Not that way, boss."
"It hadn't even occurred to me . . . Mordecai." (I have never been able to use first names with strangers readily.)
"Oh, I didn't expect you'd remember me. Don't feel bad on that account. And you don't have to tutoyer me, yet." This, in abysmal French. "But I've remembered you. Eidetically, the way you remember a particular moment from a horror movie. _Psycho_, for instance? Remember _Psycho?_"
"Yes, the shower sequence. Was I like Tony Perkins in those days? God forbid."
"You were terrifying enough in your own way. To me. We were in the same homeroom. Miss Squinlin, remember her?"
"Miss Squinlin! Yes, I hated that woman."
"Fat old red-faced cunt--I hated her a hell of a lot more than you ever did, brother. I had her for English 10-C. _Silas Marner_, _Julius Caesar_, _Rime of the Ancient Mariner_. Jesus Christ, I almost stopped speaking the fucking language, she made me hate it so."
"You still haven't explained what I had in common with _Psycho_."
"Well, let's say _Donovan's Brain_ instead. A brain in a glass tank. The Octopus intellect sniffing off after scholarships, knowing all the answers, devouring all the shit that the Squinlins could shovel in. The cerebrum as Cerberus." He spoiled the cleverness of this by mispronouncing both words.
"And when you wanted to, you could put _down_ people like old Squinlin. Me, I just had to sit there and take their shit. I knew it was shit, but what could I do? They had me coming and going.
"The thing about you that's really stuck in my mind--hell, it changed my life!--was one day in the spring of '55, you and a couple of those Jewish broads you hung around with were staying after school yakking away about whether or not there was a Gaud. That's what you called him--Gaud. You had a real fakey accent then--from seeing too many Laurence Olivier movies, I'll bet. I was sitting at the back of the room on detention. Sullen and invisible, as was my way. Does any of it come back?"
"Not that particular day. I talked a lot about Gaud that year. I had just discovered the Enlightenment, as it's called. I remember the two girls though. Barbara--and who was the other one?"
"Ruth."
"What a fearful memory you have."
"The better to eat you with, my darling. Anyhow, to get back--the two broads would bring up those hoary arguments about the universe is like a watch, and you can't have a watch without a watchmaker. Or the first cause, that no other cause causes. Till that day I'd never even heard the watchmaker bit, and when they came out with it, I thought, Now, _that'll_ stop old Donovan's Brain. But not a bit of it--you just tore their sappy syllogisms"--another foul mispronunciation-- "to pieces. They never got the message, they just kept coming on with the same old crap--but I did. You toppled me right out of that old-time religion."
"I'm sorry, Mordecai. Truly I am. One never realizes how many other lives we can poison with what we think is our own error. I don't know how--"
"Sorry? Baby, I was _thanking_ you. It may seem a strange way to do it, having you hijacked to this hole-in-the-ground, but it's a better life you'll lead here than you led in Springfield. Haast showed the journal you were keeping there. You're well out of it. But I'll admit it wasn't only altruism made me ask Haast to bring you here. It was my big chance to meet a first-class, bonafide, published poet. You really went the whole way, didn't you, Sacchetti?" Impossible to sort out the feelings he mingled in that one question: admiration, contempt, envy, and--which affected nearly everything Mordecai said to me--a sort of haughty mirth.
"I take it that you've read _The Hills of Switzerland?_" I returned. Trust a writer's vanity to take the first opportunity to sneak that in!
Mordecai shrugged his negligible shoulders. "Yeah. I read it."
"Then you know that I've outgrown the callow materialism of those days. God exists quite independently of Aquinas. Faith is more than a mastery of syllogisms."
"Fuck faith, and fuck your epigrams. You're not my Big Brother any more. I'm two years _your_ senior, friend. And as for your latter-day piety, I had you brought here _despite_ that, and despite some stinking awful poetry too."
What could I do but flinch?
Mordecai smiled, his anger bevanished as soon as expressed. "There were some stinking good poems too. George liked the book as a whole better than I did, and George knows more about such things. For one thing, he's been here longer. What'd you think of him?"
"Of George? He was. . . very intense. I'm afraid I wasn't quite prepared for so much all at once. I'm afraid I'm still not. You're pretty fast and loose down here, especially after the total vacuum of Springfield."
"Like hell. What's your I.Q. anyhow?"
"Does it make sense, at my age, to talk about I.Q.'s? In '57 I scored a hundred and sixty on one test, but I don't know how far along the standard curve that would take me. But _now_ what difference does a printed test make? It's a question entirely of what you _do_ with your intelligence."
"I know--ain't it a bitch?" Lightly as he tossed this off, I felt that I had for the first time in our talk touched a theme that Mordecai regarded with any sort of seriousness.
"What _are_ you doing, Mordecai? Here, in this place. And what is this place? What are Haast and Busk trying to get out of you people?"
"This is hell, Sacchetti, didn't you know? Or its antechamber. They're trying to buy our souls up so they can use our bodies for sausages."