"Harlan Ellison - Paingod & Other Delusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

enough to quiet just about anyone, but a tolerance had built up), she was beginning to look around and see things,
to form relationships, with people (she was schizophrenic, and was actually reaching out...incredible). She still had
relapses, incidents of going for people, of throwing things, but they were abortive. She was getting better.
Some time passed...she continued to improve. I got taken off my job for awhile to go through the hospital’s
orientation program, came back again for a little while, found her doing well, took a few days’ leave for Discon,
came back, found her still getting better-and then everything fell in on me-on her-rather suddenly.

This requires a small digression. We have on this ward, on the evening shift, an idiot. It has the letters RN
after its name, but don’t let it fool you: a nurse it ain’t. This person delights in tormenting the patients verbally, and
not getting caught at it. God knows I’ve tried, but I must walk too heavy or something. On this particular night she
told the patient that the day nurse (whom the patient loved dearly, and who was having her turn in orientation) was
never, never coming back again. Are there words foul enough for such a person? Well...
I came on at 12, checked my ward, found things quiet: the patient in question resting in bed, awake. I went
to her, checked her casts (arm and both legs), spoke to her: she didn’t answer. This was par for the course, so I
wished her good night and went away.
About 1:30 I heard something go crack! and then heard glass shatter on the floor. By the time I was
standing up, something went thud! and by the time I reached the door of the office, so had my patient. She was out of
her bed, teetering on her casts, with a big sharp piece of glass in her uncasted left hand. The hand was bleeding a
little, but that was not what concerned me. This lady was no amateur, no wristslasher; she would bend her head
back to cut her throat. She was faster than I was: also somewhat larger. (Picture it if you will, Harlan: 160 lbs. of
her, about six feet tall: 104 lbs. of me, 5’6”: and she has the glass. Who wins the wrestling match? You can’t use
aikido holds on someone with three casted extremities. I can’t anyway.) (Not when the fourth is flailing glass-and
it’s my patient.)
So we stood there, and I looked up (a mile or so, it seemed) and said, “What’s the matter?” and she said,
“Pat’s not coming back, (the RN) said so, and I don’t want to believe her: but if it’s true, then I want to be dead. And
if it’s not true, look at me, look how easily someone made me go crazy! I ought to be dead.”
Everything useful or therapeutic I had ever learned, heard or read went shoosh! out of my head, leaving me
tabula rosa, as the saying goes, and feeling hopeless. And I opened my mouth, knowing full well that nothing
worthwhile would come out, and the tail of my eye caught sight of an idea, sitting on top of a pile of books on
calligraphy that I had brought with me: a copy of I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM. I said, “Come on in,
sit down, let’s talk about it. I have something here that may interest you.” And we sat down, and I took my life in my
hands and read her “Lonelyache.”
You proclaimed the story to be therapy in the introduction, of course. I have often wondered after reading it
just how far your won experience paralleled it. Merely clinical interest-all the wondering went out of me that night.
I was watching my lady.
About halfway through she put the glass aside and shut her eyes and listened. I shook and kept reading.
When it was nearly finished, I panicked: the ending was too downkey: the protagonist commits suicide! I
didn’t know if I could turn her mood upward again.
I finished it, and she looked at me hard for a few seconds, and I said, “Well, what does it do for you?” She
was quiet for a moment and then said, “He wanted to be brave on the way out, didn’t he?”
“I think so,” I said.
She thought some more. “But he did go out.”
I nodded. It was all that was left in me: I was getting the beginnings of Oh-God-I-Did-The-Wrong-Thing!
and I was holding hard to keep it from showing.
“Is that the only way to go, then?” she asked, and oh! The despair. I wanted to cry and couldn’t. I said,
“but consider first: why did he go?”
“Because he was all alone.” And she looked at me, and fed me the straight line I had been praying for: “I’m
all alone too, though-aren’t I?”
“Do you think you’re all alone?”
She looked at me, and at the glass, and at me again, and stood up rocking on her casts again. She tossed