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

with her to the Greyhound Terminal (her parents being deceased) and gave her
this parting advice: "Watch out for the roaches, Marcia darling. New York City
is full of cockroaches." At that time (at almost any time really) Marcia
hardly paid attention to her aunt, who had opposed the trip from the start and
given a hundred or more reasons why Marcia had better not go, not till she was
older at least.
Her aunt had been proven right on all counts: Marcia after five years and
fifteen employment agency fees could find nothing in New York but dull jobs at
mediocre wages; she had no more friends than when she lived on West 16th; and,
except for its view (the Chock Full O'Nuts warehouse and a patch of sky), her
present apartment on lower Thompson Street was not a great improvement on its
predecessor.
The city was full of promises, but they had all been pledged to other
people. The city Marcia knew was sinful, indifferent, dirty, and dangerous.
Every day she read accounts of women attacked in subway stations, raped in the
streets, knifed in their own beds. A hundred people looked on curiously all
the while and offered no assistance. And on top of everything else there were
the roaches!
There were roaches everywhere, but Marcia didn't see them until she'd
been in New York a month. They came to her--or she to them--at Silversmith's
on Nassau Street, a stationery shop where she had been working for three days.
It was the first job she'd been able to find. Alone or helped by a pimply
stockboy (in all fairness it must be noted that Marcia was not without an acne
problem of her own), she wandered down rows of rasp-edged metal shelves in the
musty basement, making an inventory of the sheaves and piles and boxes of bond
paper, leatherette-bound diaries, pins and clips, and carbon paper. The
basement was dirty and so dim that she needed a flashlight for the lowest
shelves. In the obscurest corner, a faucet leaked perpetually into a gray
sink: she had been resting near this sink, sipping a cup of tepid coffee
(saturated, in the New York manner, with sugar and drowned in milk), thinking,
probably, of how she could afford several things she simply couldn't afford,
when she noticed the dark spots moving on the side of the sink. At first she
thought they might be no more than motes floating in the jelly of her eyes, or
the giddy dots that one sees after over-exertion on a hot day. But they
persisted too long to be illusory, and Marcia drew nearer, feeling compelled
to bear witness. How do I know they are insects? she thought.
How are we to explain the fact that what repels us most can be at
times--at the same time--inordinately attractive? Why is the cobra poised to
strike so beautiful? The fascination of the abomination is something that ...
Something which we would rather not account for. The subject borders on the
obscene, and there is no need to deal with it here, except to note the
breathless wonder with which Marcia observed these first roaches of hers. Her
chair was drawn so close to the sink that she could see the mottling of their
oval, unsegmented bodies, the quick scuttering of their thin legs, and the
quicker flutter of their antennae. They moved randomly, proceeding nowhere,
centered nowhere. They seemed greatly disturbed over nothing. Perhaps, Marcia
thought, my presence has a morbid effect on them?
Only then did she become aware, aware fully, that these were the
cockroaches of which she had been warned. Repulsion took hold; her flesh
curdled on her bones. She screamed and fell back in her chair, almost