"Gardner Dozois - Machines of Loving Grace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE
By Gardner Dozois
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DAWN WAS JUST beginning to color the sky. She huddled inside the small
bathroom—door closed, bolt slid and locked—sitting on the toilet lid and hugging
her knees. Her head was tilted and hung down, chin almost on breast, and her eyes
were nearly closed. She had wrapped her hands around her ankles. Her fingers were
turning white. There was no noise in the empty apartment, not even the scurry of a
cockroach. She had stopped crying hours ago.
There was noise beyond the window on her left, be-yond plaster and glass,
outside the vacuum of bedroom-kitchen-livingroom-guestroom-bath: a frozen
automobile horn had been honking steadily for the last hour, occasionally traffic
whined on the asphalt below, earlier in the evening there had been radios in nearby
buildings, tuned to the confusion of a dozen different stations and fading one by one
toward morning. She didn’t pay any attention to these noises. The silence inside her
apartment was too loud.
She opened her hands, flexed her stiff fingers, let her legs uncurl. One of them
had gone to sleep, and she stamped it softly, automatically, to restore circulation.
The floor was cold under her bare feet. Gooseflesh blossomed along her arms and
she ran her hands down over them to smooth it. She had put on a new half-slip for
the occasion. She shifted her weight; the toilet lid had been chilly at first, but now it
had grown hot and sticky with the heat of her body. She leaned in closer to the
hotwater pipe that descended from ceiling to floor—it was still warm to the touch.
The dull paint had flaked off it in jigsaw pieces. There was a dingy gray toilet brush
leaning against the base of the pipe. The bristles were broken and matted down. All
this without thinking at all.
To be free, she thought.
Her head came up; eyes snapped open, closed to slits, opened again, wider.
The muscles in her neck had started to cord.
Her head jerked to the left. She stared out the window. Dawn was a growing
red wash across the horizon, clustered buildings blocky beast-silhouettes, a factory
plume of smoke etched black against tones of scarlet. Lights far away and lonely. A
television antenna like a cross of stark metal. Her head turned back to center,
wobbling: the string cut.
For a while she did not think. The shaving mirror on the wall over the sink,
clutter on the shelves to the right of the basin: empty bottles of mouthwash, witch
hazel, deodorant, the cardboard center from a roll of toilet paper, crumpled
toothpaste tube, box of vaginal suppositories. The burlap curtains, frayed edges
polarizing in the new light. Cracked and chipped plaster around the edges of the
windowsill, streaks of white on the walls where paint had run thin. The closed door,
the whorls in dark wood: beyond were the cluttered kitchen, the empty bedroom.
They pressed in against the door. The door hinges were made in five sections.
I’m going to go crazy, she thought.
She reached out and flicked off the light switch. It was bright enough now to
see: a gritty, hard light; harsh, too much grain and contrast. She had begun to
tremble. The noise of the horn in the background was a steady buzz through her
teeth. She picked up the razor blade from the window ledge. The horn stopped
abruptly. In the silence, she could hear pigeons fluttering and cooing on the adjacent
roof.
She turned the razor blade over in her fingers. The blade was smooth and