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

been a parable, it would have ended happily. But it was his life, and he was
still, in his heart, a prodigal, and there were times when he wished he had
died during the famine of the cities.
But in a contest between the belly's hunger and the mind's variable
predilections, the belly is likelier to win. The prodigal's rebeffion had been
reduced to catchwords and petty crochets: an obstinate refusal to use the word
_ain't_, an abiding contempt for country music, a distaste for "chewing," and
a loathing for the hick, the hayseed, and the dumb cluck. In a word, for Neil.
The heat and his body's weariness conspired to direct his thoughts to
less troubled channels, and as he stood gazing into the slowly filling
buckets, his mind surged with the remembered images of other times. Of
Babylon, that great city.
He remembered how at night the streets would be swiftflowing rivers of
light and how the brilliant, antiseptic cars had streamed down those rivers.
From hour to hour the sound would not abate nor the lights dim. There had been
the drive-ins, and when there was less money, the White Castles. Girls in
shorts waited on your car. Sometimes the shorts were edged with little,
glittering fringes that bounced on tan thighs.
In the summer, when the hicks had worked on the farms, there had been
flood-lit beaches, and his parched tongue curled now remembering how--in the
labyrinth of empty oil drums supporting the diving raft--he would have kissed
Irene. Or someone. The names didn't matter so much any more.
He made another trip down the row, and while he fed the corn he
remembered the names that didn't matter now. Oh, the city had swarmed with
girls. You could stand on a street corner, and in an hour hundreds would walk
past. There had even been talk about a population problem then.
Hundreds of thousands of people!
He remembered the crowds in the winter in the heated auditorium on the
university campus. He would have come there in a white shirt. The collar would
be tight around his neck. In his imagination, he fingered the knot of a silk
tie. Would it be striped or plain? He thought of the stores full of suits and
jackets. Oh, the colors there had been! the music, and, afterward, the
applause!
_But the worst of it_, he thought, resting by at the Plant again, _is
that there isn't anyone to talk to any more_. The total population of Tassel
was two hundred and forty-seven, and none of them, not one of them, could
understand Buddy Anderson. A world had been lost, and they weren't aware of
it. It had never been their world, but it had been, briefly, Buddy's, and it
had been beautiful.
The buckets were full, and Buddy grabbed hold of the handles and made
his way back to the field. For the hundredth time that day, he stepped over
the cankerous knob of tissue that had formed on the stump of the Plant that
had irrigated these rows last year. This time his bare foot came down on a
patch of the slick wood where there was a puddle of slippery sap. Weighted
down by the buckets, he couldn't recover his balance. He fell backward, the
sap in the buckets spilling out over him. He lay in the dirt, and the sap
spread across his chest and down his arms, and the myriad flies settled to
feed.
He didn't try to get up.
"Well, don't just _lay_ there," Anderson said. "There's work to do." He