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

leaves and sprained my ankle leaving the bus. Those failures were at least
vivid. Most of my unmarketable memories are just dull-so many soft, tasteless
noodles in the soup of the past.
The fun past, the yummy past, the past one sings of on New Year's Eve-all that
is unrecapturable, sold off in weekly and monthly lots. There is one entire
year, my twenty-ninth, wiped from the slate of memory. What seas of pleasure I
cruised that year, what wine cellars were plundered on my behalf, what
dainties ravished my tongue, only the directors and patrons of the Albright
Know Museum are privileged to know, since the public, which includes me; is
denied access to the documentation (never mind the use) of those three hundred
sixty-five rings. But even unremembered pipers must be paid. One cannot
gourmandize through the day and into the night and then, just by turning the
lights low, summon Romance or even Raunch. Eventually there is an energy
crisis. Instead of resisting that eventuality when it came upon me, I began
unwisely to live higher off the hog and, at the same time, to sample my own
tapes (with the excuse that I would do my own documentation and thus save
gallery fees). Alas, pleasures that are remembered cannot be repeated with
equal pleasure. I went through cycles of hunger and satiety, excess and
disillusion. Instead of living for my public, I began to live for myself, with
predictable results. My life fell apart, and my recordings got so bad that
even I was bored by them. Bye-bye, career.
All that was Auld Lang Syne. To return to the present, there I was in my
humble (one-hundred-sixty-eight-
square-foot) home, with my own recent acquisition around my finger, itching to
be unveiled. I climbed into the antique dentist's chair, fastened the
seatbelt, and stuck my ring-hand into the Ringmaster's maw. I thumbed the
switch and felt the prick of the recall needle as it passed through the center
of the ring and pierced my finger. The filament began to revolve, and then,
poof, nada, night and fog.
I thought (that much of me that could still think independently), I've been
had! But, no, the ring was functioning, and I-the other "I" of the
recording-was walking through a foggy night, heart speeding, muscles tense,
ears alert to the traffic noises. I was conscious, too, in an amateurish way,
of the energy belt that powered my ring.
A city street, but what city I couldn't tell, for my eyes avoided all telltale
specifics-street signs, shop fronts, the license plates of cars. The mind of
the woman behind the ring was almost as featureless as the pavement underfoot,
a blur of anxiety and fear, with some black purposes locked in its back room.
As the ring's previous owner had warned, this was a rather unprofessional
recording, but in a way the very lack of definition added to the fun, if you
count suspense as fun.
My temporary self stepped into the recessed entrance to a narrow brick
building and reached into her pocket for the simple tools of her trade. Even
numbed with cold, her fingers were quick in solving the riddle of the lock.
After taping over the tumblers so the door would not lock behind her, she set
off, in deeper darkness, down a corridor, up two flights of stairs, and along
a longer corridor until her flashlight's beam picked out, stenciled on a gray
steel door, the number 33. Here her task was more delicate, her workmanship
more ingenious, but on that first viewing it was the thrills more than the
skills of the burglary that I