"Richard McKenna - Casey Agonistes" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKenna Richard)

RICHARD McKENNA
Casey Agonistes

The late Richard McKenna was probably best known in his lifetime as
author of the fat and thoughtful bestselling main-stream novel The Sand
Pebbles—later made into a big-budget but inferior (to the book) screen
spectacular starring Steve McQueen—but during his short career, before
his tragically early death in 1964, he also wrote a handful of powerful and
elegant short science fiction stories that stand among the best work of the
first half of the 1960s. The roster of them, alas, is short: the strange and
wonderful novella “Fiddler’s Green,” “The Secret Place”—for which he won
a posthumous Nebula Award—“The Night of Hoggy Darn.” “Mine Own
Ways.” “Hunter, Come Home.” “Bramble Bush.” Many of them question the
nature of reality, and investigate our flawed and prejudiced perceptions of it
with a depth and complexity rivaled elsewhere at that time only by the work
of Philip K. Dick. Ail of them reveal the sure touch of a master craftsman,
and it is intriguing—if, of course, pointless—to wonder what kind of work
McKenna would be turning out now, if fate had spared him.

The best of the McKenna stories, though, is the one that follows,
“Casey Agonistes,” one of the most powerful stories ever published in the
genre—or out of it, for that matter. Amazingly, it was McKenna’s first
published story.

Almost all of McKenna’s short fiction was collected in Casey
Agonistes and Other Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories. A collection of
his essays, New Eyes For Old, was published after his death.

****

You can’t just plain die. You got to do it by the book.

That’s how come I’m here in this TB ward with nine other recruits.
Basic training to die.

You do it by stages. First a big ward, you walk around and go out and
they call you mister. Then, if you got what it takes, a promotion to this
isolation ward and they call you charles. You can’t go nowhere, you meet
the masks, and you get the feel of being dead.

Being dead is being weak and walled off. You hear car noises, and
see little doll-people down on the sidewalks, but when they come to visit
you they wear white masks and nightgowns and talk past you in the wrong
voices. They’re scared you’ll rub some off on them. You would, too, if you
knew how.

Nobody ever visits me. I had practice being dead before I come
here. Maybe that’s how I got to be charles so quick.

It’s easy, playing dead here. You eat your pills, make out to sleep in