"Vonnegut, Kurt - Galapagos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

o

Before that, her wonderful brain had entrusted a thief at the airport with a suitcase containing all her toilet articles and clothes which would have been suitable for the hotel. That had been her carry-on luggage on a flight from Quito to Guayaquil. At least she still had the contents of the suitcase she had checked through rather than carried, which included the evening dress in the closet, which was for parties on the _Bahнa de Darwin_. She was also still in possession of a wet suit and flippers and mask for diving, two bathing suits, a pair of rugged hiking boots, and a set of war surplus United States Marine Corps combat fatigues for trips ashore, which she was wearing now. As for the pants suit she had worn on the flight from Quito: Her big brain had persuaded her to send it to the hotel laundry, to believe the sad-eyed hotel manager when he said she could surely have it back by morning, in time for breakfast. But, much to the embarrassment of the manager, that, too, had disappeared.
But the worst thing her brain had done to her, other than recommending suicide, was to insist that she come to Guayaquil despite all the news about the planetary financial crisis, despite the near certainty that "the Nature Cruise of the Century," booked to capacity only a month before, would be called off for want of passengers.
Her colossal thinking machine could be so petty, too. It would not let her go downstairs in her combat fatigues on the grounds that everybody, even though there was practically nobody in the hotel, would find her comical in such a costume. Her brain told her: "They'll laugh at you behind your back, and think you're crazy and pitiful, and your life is over anyway. You've lost your husband and your teaching job, and you don't have any children or anything else to live for, so just put yourself out of your misery with the garment bag. What could be easier? What could be more painless? What could make more sense?"

o

To give her brain its due: It wasn't entirely its fault that 1986 really had been a perfectly awful year so far. The year had started out so promisingly, too, with Mary's husband, Roy, in seemingly perfect health and secure in his job as a millwright at GEFFCo, the principal industry in Ilium, and with the Kiwanis giving her a banquet and a plaque celebrating her twenty-five years of distinguished teaching, and the students naming her the most popular teacher for the twelfth year in a row.
At the start of 1986, she said, "Oh, Roy -- we have so much to be thankful for: we're so lucky compared to most people. I could cry for happiness."
And he said, putting his arms around her, "Well now, you just go ahead and cry." She was fifty-one and he was fifty-nine, and they were great lovers of the out-of-doors, hiking and skiing and mountain-climbing and canoeing and running and bicycling and swimming, so they both had lean and youthful bodies. They did not smoke or drink, and they ate mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, with a little fish from time to time.
They had also handled their money well, giving their savings, in financial terms, the same sort of sensible nourishment and exercise that they gave themselves.
The tale of fiscal wisdom which Mary could tell about herself and Roy, of course, would be a thrill to James Wait.

o

And, yes, Wait, that eviscerator of widows, was speculating about Mary Hepburn as he sat in the bar of the El Dorado, although he had not met her yet, nor learned for certain how well fixed she was. He had seen her name on the hotel register, and had asked the young manager about her.
Wait liked what little the manager was able to tell him. This shy and lonesome schoolteacher upstairs, although younger than any of the wives he had ruined so far, sounded to him like his natural prey. He would stalk her at leisure during "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

o

If I may insert a personal note at this point: When I was alive, I often received advice from my own big brain which, in terms of my own survival, or the survival of the human race, for that matter, can be charitably described as questionable. Example: It had me join the United States Marines and go fight in Vietnam.
Thanks a lot, big brain.









7



The national currencies of all six guests at the El Dorado, the four Americans, one claiming to be a Canadian, and the two Japanese, were still as good as gold everywhere on the planet. Again: The value of their money was imaginary. Like the nature of the universe itself, the desirability of their American dollars and yen was all in people's heads.
And if Wait, who did not even know that there was a financial crisis going on, had carried out his masquerade as a Canadian to the extent of bringing Canadian dollars into Ecuador, he would not have been as well received as he was. Although Canada had not gone bankrupt, people's imaginations in more and more places, including Canada itself, were making them unhappy about trading anything really useful for Canadian dollars anymore.
A similar decay in imagined value was happening to the British pound and the French and Swiss francs and the West German mark. The Ecuadorian sucre, meanwhile, named in honor of Antonio Josй de Sucre (1795-1830), a national hero, had come to be worth less than a banana peel.

o

Up in her room, Mary Hepburn was wondering if she had a brain tumor, and that was why her brain was giving her the worst possible advice all the time. It was a natural thing for her to suspect, since it was a brain tumor which had killed her husband Roy only three months before. It hadn't been enough for the tumor to kill him, either. It had to addle his memory and destroy his judgment first.
She had to wonder, too, when his tumor had begun to do that to him -- whether it wasn't the tumor which had made him sign them up for "the Nature Cruise of the Century" in the promising January of that ultimately horrible year.

o

Here was how she found out he had signed them up for the cruise: She came home from work one afternoon, expecting Roy still to be at GEFFCo. He got off work an hour later than she did. But there Roy was, already home, and it turned out that he had quit at noon. This was a man who adored the work he did with machinery, and who had never taken off so much as an hour from his job during his twenty-nine years with GEFFCo -- not for sickness, since he was never sick, not for anything.
She asked him if he was sick, and he said that he had never felt better in his life. He was proud of himself in what seemed to Mary the manner of an adolescent who was tired of being thought a good boy all the time. This was a man whose words were few and well-chosen, never silly or immature. But now he said incredibly, and with an inane expression to match, as though she were his disapproving mother: "I played hookey."
It had to have been the tumor that said that, Mary now thought in Guayaquil. And the tumor couldn't have picked a worse day for carefree truancy, for there had been an ice storm the night before, and then wind-driven sleet all day. But Roy had gone up and down Clinton Street, the main street of Ilium, stopping in store after store and telling the salespeople that he was playing hookey.