"William Tenn - The Lemon-Green Spaghetti-Loud Dynamite-Dribble Day" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

there I stopped dead. It's one of the most expen-sive car hangars in the Village and it looked like, I don't
know, a junkyard soufflé.
In the dimness, I could see cars mashed against cars, cars mashed against walls. Broken glass mixed
in with strips of torn-off chrome. Fenders ripped off, hoods sprung open and all twisty.
Charlie, the attendant, came dragging out of his cubicle and kind of grinned at me. He looked as if
he'd tied one on last night.
"Wait'll your boss sees this," I told him. "Man, you'll be dead."
He pointed at two cars locked together nose to nose near the entrance. "Mr. Carbonaro was here.
He kept asking them to go on making love. When they wouldn't, he said to hell with them, he was going
home. He was crying just like a milk bottle."
It was turning into one weird morning. I was only half surprised when there was no one on duty in
the subway change booth. But I had a token on me. I put it in the turnstile and clunked through.
And that's when I first began to get scared—on the platform of the subway station. Whatever else is
going on in the world, to a New Yorker the subway is a kind of man-made natural phenomenon, routine
and regular as the sun coming up. And when the routine and regularity stop in the subway, you sure as
hell notice it.
Like the guy on his hands and knees at one end of the platform staring up a woman's dress, she
rocking on high heels and singing a song to the ceiling. Or this pretty young Negro girl, sitting on a
wooden bench, crying her heart out and wiping her eyes with great big newsprinted sheets of that
morning's Times. Or the doctor-lawyer type mim-ing a slalom in and out of the iron pillars of the
platform. He was chanting, "Chug, chug, chug-azoom, chug, chug, chug-azoom." And nobody in the
station being startled, or even looking worried.
Three trains in a row came in and went right on through without stopping, with-out even slowing
down. The engineer of the last one was a big, white-haired guy who was laughing his head off as he
flashed past. Then a fourth train came in, and this one stopped.
Only two of us on the platform made a dash for it: me and a young fellow in khaki pants and a
brown sweater. The doors opened and shut, zip-zip, practically in the same motion. The train took off
without us.
"What's going on?" the young fellow whined at me. "I'm late for work—I had to run out of the house
without any breakfast. But I can't get a train. I paid my fare. Why can't I get a train?"
I told him I didn't know, and I left him and went upstairs. I was very scared. I got into a phone
booth and tried to call my office. The phone rang for a long time: no answer.
Then I wandered around on that corner near the subway station for a while, trying to decide what I
should do next, trying to figure out what was happening. I kept call-ing the office. No luck. That was
damn funny—it was way after nine o'clock. Maybe no one at all had come in today? I couldn't imagine
such a thing.
I began noticing that the people going by on the street had a funny sort of stare, a kind of pop-eyed,
trancy look. Charlie, the garage man, he'd had it. But the kid in the brown sweater on the subway
platform, he didn't have it. I saw a mirror in a store window and looked at myself. I didn't have it.
The store was a television repair place. They had a television set in the window, tuned into a
program, and I got all involved in watching it. I don't know what the program was—two men and a
woman were standing around talking to each other, but the woman was doing a slow strip. She was
talking and peeling off her clothes at the same time. She had trouble with the garter belt and the men
helped her.
Next door, there was a liquor store. People were going in and out, buying a lot of liquor. But then I
saw that buying wasn't exactly the right word. What they'd do, they'd walk in, shoot a quick, suspicious
look at the owner, grab up a couple of bottles—and walk out. The owner was watching them do this
with a big, beaming smile.
A guy came out with a couple of fifths, a stinking, dirty guy, strictly a Bowery type. He was all
happy—you know, the millennium.