"Lisa Goldstein - The Narcissus Plague" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldstein Lisa)

The Narcissus Plague
a short story by Lisa Goldstein

Lisa Goldstein writes...
I wrote 'The Narcissus Plague' after a week where everyone I met seemed to
talk about nothing but themselves, and I began to wonder if there was some
sort of plague going around.

The man in the tollbooth had the Narcissus Plague. "We moved when I was
nine," he said earnestly. I held my dollar out to him, watched it sway in
the breeze. "My dog never did get used to the new house. One day he got
out and chased the mailman up a tree. No one was home, and the neighbors
had to call the police ..."
Finally he took my money and I sped away. A minute later I looked in my
rearview mirror and saw that the car after me was still trapped at the
booth. A narrow escape, I thought. I checked my oxygen mask and surgical
gloves and hurried toward the newspaper office where I work.
I parked in the lot and rode the elevator up to my floor. "Hi, Amy, how
are you?" my editor Thomas asked. This is the only way we greet each other
now. It's meant to assure other people that we can still take an interest
in them, that we don't have the plague.
"Fine, how are you?" I said. He followed me down the hall toward my
cubicle.
"Hi, guys," my co-worker Gary said, heading toward his desk. "I stayed up
all last night working on that article you wanted, Thomas."
We turned and watched him go. If it had been anyone else in the office we
would have worried about the plague, but Gary has talked about nothing but
himself for as long as any of us can remember.
"Listen -- I've got an assignment for you," Thomas said. "Someone at one
of the labs says she's come up with a cure."
"A cure? You're kidding me," I said.
"I'm not, but it's possible she is. That's what I want you to find out.
Her name's Dr. Leila Clark."
He gave me the doctor's address and phone number, and I hurried to my desk
to call. To my annoyance an answering machine came on. "Hello, you've
reached the office of Dr. Leila Clark. We can't answer your call right
now, but if you leave your name and number I'll get back to you just as
soon as I go visit my boyfriend. He said he was going to break up with
that other woman, but I bet he hasn't done it. He's been saying he'll
break up with her since last winter, when I caught them at our favorite
restaurant together --"
I hung up. The chances for a cure did not look good.

The lab turned out to be on the other side of the park from the
newspaper's offices. The sun had risen above the clouds; it was turning
into a warm, beautiful day. I decided to walk.
The fountain in the center of the park was stagnant, green algae lapping
at the rim. Its filtering mechanism had clogged; it was making strange
mechanical whimpering noises as it tried to get the water to circulate.
The person responsible for fixing it probably had the plague, I thought.