"Harlan Ellison - Shatterday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

“So when I was in the middle of the lecture, reading the section where the lead
character is having the argument with his alter ego about his mother, I realized for the first
time that I wanted my mother to die.”
The interviewer looked uncomfortable.
“No, wait, listen,” I said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean that I wanted her to die, just to be
gone. See, my mother was quite old at that time, she’d been extremely ill off-and-on for
years, and in that eerie way we have of exchanging places with our parents when they grow
old, I’d become the parent and she’d become the child; and I was responsible for her. I
supported her, and tried to keep her comfortable down in Miami Beach where she was living,
and that gave me pleasure, to play at being a real grownup son, and like that. But she was just
a shadow. She hadn’t been happy in a long time, she was just marking out her days, and I
wanted to be free of that constant realization that she was out there. I loved her, she was a
nice woman. I didn’t have any rancor or meanness in me...I just had to admit that I wanted her
gone.”
The interviewer looked really uncomfortable now.
“Well, oh boy, that was some helluva thing to have to admit to myself. ‘You slimy
sonofabitch,’ I thought, and I was still reading aloud to the audience that had no tiniest idea
what monstrous and hellish thoughts were tearing me up. ‘You evil, ungrateful, selfish prick!
How the hell could you even consider something as awful as that? She never did anything to
you, she raised you, put up with your craziness and always had faith in you when everyone
else said you’d wind up in some penal colony or the chipmunk factory! You sleazy, vomitous
crud, how can you even think of her being dead?’ And it was terrible, just terrible. I thought I
was scum unfit to walk with decent human beings, to harbor these secret feelings about a
perfectly innocent old woman. And I remembered what Eric Hoffer once wrote: ‘What
monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.’
“But there it was, in the story.I’d written it and had to confront it and learn to live
with it.” It was like the line out of another story in this book, “ All the Lies That Are My
Life,” where I mention the ugliness of simply being human. But I hadn’t thought of that line
then. And the interviewer didn’t quite know what to say to me. What the hell can you say to
some dude sitting there copping to wanting his mother to pass away?
Well, it was one of those call-in radio shows, and we started taking calls from Salt
Lake citizens who were pissed off at an “outsider” coming in to tell them that Utah’s not
ratifying the ERA was a sinful and mischievous act. And then, suddenly, there was a woman
on the line, coming over the headphones to me in that soundproof booth, with tears in her
voice, saying to me, “Thank you. Thank you for telling that about your mother. My mother
was dying of cancer and I had the same thoughts and I hated myself for it. I thought I was the
only person in the world who ever thought such an awful thing, and I couldn’t bear it. Thank
you. Oh, thank you.”
And I thought of that heartrending scene in Jack Gelber’s play, The Connection,
where the old Salvation Army sister who has been turned into a medical junkie by inept
doctors says to this apartment full of stone-righteous street hypes, “You are not alone. You
are not alone.”
I damned near started to cry myself. I wanted to hug that nameless woman out there
in Salt Lake City somewhere, hug her and say you are not alone.
That’s why I tell you all this.
You are not alone. We are all the same, all in this fragile skin, suffering the ugliness
of simply being human, all prey to the same mortal dreads.
When I lecture I try to say this, to say most of the fears you invent--atomic war,
multinational conspiracies, assassination paranoias, fear of ethnic types, flying saucers from
Mars--those are all bullshit. I inveigh against illogical beliefs and say that the mortal dreads