"Thomas M. Disch - After Pottsville" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

whirled it about the inconsolable ghost. Briefly Terry forgot David Golden and
savored the fleeting instant, the wreathing interplay of plastic and
ectoplasm.

Then he resumed his task as Postville’s awakener and guide to the afterlife,
its Hermes Hypnopompe. Slowly, with many repetitions, like a schoolteacher
teaching the multiplication tables, he instructed David Golden in the laws
governing his altered existence, how he must remain in Postville until, like
compost worked into a garden’s soil, he had been entirely assimilated, until
the wind and rain had worn away all that was dross and his spirit could at
last see clearly the shape of the life it had lost. This, Terry told him,
would probably take a long time, for the shape of any life is a function of
the lives in which it is enmeshed, and often there is a great tangle to
unravel.

"None of this," said David Golden, "pertains to me. I’m Jewish."

"Do you want me to help you across the street?" Terry asked again.

"I don’t want anything from you. And I don’t want to be ‘assimilated’ into
your goyish shithole. Is that clear? I don’t see how I could make it any
clearer." A single precious tear moistened his stubbled cheek.

But Terry insisted. "We must learn to be friends, David. Here–give me your
hand."

He extended his own hand, palm up, and David, who could not act otherwise,
placed his left hand in Terry’s. They both stared at the object of shredded
flesh and splintered bone as though it were an item of ritual significance, a
pyx or scroll whose esoteric markings must be pondered and taken to heart.

But for now it was inscrutable, mere meat like the beef or lamb that was
dressed and blessed, packaged, frozen and shipped from the Jews’ kosher
slaughterhouse. Terry handed it back to David Golden with a sense of
embarrassment, as though he had accidentally touched the man’s genitals. Then
he went across the street, leaving David rocking back and forth with a grief
that had begun to be conscious, though still it was silent.



Terry knew when someone could see him, because it was only then that he could
see himself–as now, mirrored in the shop windows of Main Street, kitted out
with cap and bandanna and his full panoply of merit badges, from Agribusiness
to Space Exploration, with stops along the way for Leatherwork, Shotgun
Shooting, and, last but not least, Disabilities Awareness. He’d taken on
Disabilities Awareness at the behest of his scoutmaster and pastor at the
Lutheran church, Jim Quist (whose wife Elaine was in a wheelchair with MS),
thinking it would be another easy score like Consumer Buying or Dog Care. It
had turned out to be the single most useful merit badge on his bandolier, the
one that had paid the biggest dividends in the afterlife.