Читать онлайн «The Quick and the Dead»
Автор Джой Уильямс
Joy Williams
The Quick & the Dead
And whatever is not God is nothing,
and ought to be accounted as nothing.
Toward a place where
I could not find safety I went.
Book One
~ ~ ~
SO. YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN A FUTURE LIFE.
Then do we have the place for you!
You’d be home now if you lived here, as the old signs promised.
But first, a few questions. To determine if you qualify.
What is the difference between being not yet born and having lived, being now dead?
Don’t use reason without imagination here.
A hare is the determinative sign defining the concept of being. Say you catch an actual hare of the desert and place a mirror to his nose; you will observe that a moist breath mark will appear on the glass. The moisture comes from the hare, though there is not a drop of moisture going into him. Does this disprove the axiom “Out of nothing, nothing comes”?
Do you consider the gulf between the material and spiritual worlds only apparent?
Don’t worry about catching the hare.
Do you believe that what has been is also now and that what is to be has already been?
The dead have certain obligations. Is one of them to remember us?
Do you find that offensive?
Do you find the dead ridiculous? How about the dead finding the living ridiculous?
Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible. How do you propose to remember that in time?
Which would you prefer to have your life compared to, wind or dust?
Why?
Sorry.
1
The winter had not brought rain and there were no flowers, there would be no flowers. Still, the land in the spring of the year when Alice would turn sixteen could not be said to be suffering from drought. The desert knew no drought, really. Anything so habitual and prolonged was simply life — a life invisible and anticipatory. What was germinative would only remain so that spring. What was possible was neither dead nor alive. Relief had been promised, of course.
For more than a month now, after school, Alice had been caring for six-year-old fraternal twins, Jimmy and Jacky.
They lived with their mother, who was away all day, cutting hair. Their father was off in another state, building submarines. Hair, submarines, it was disgusting, Alice thought. She did not find the children at all interesting. They cried frequently, indulged themselves in boring, interminable narratives, were sentimental and cruel, and when frustrated would bite. They had a pet rabbit that Alice feared for. She made them stop giving it baths all the time and tried to interest them in giving themselves baths, although in this she was not successful. She assisted them with special projects for school. It was never too early for investigative reporting. They should not be dissuaded by their teacher’s discomfort; to discomfort teachers was one’s duty. They were not too young to be informed about the evils of farm subsidies, monoculture, and overproduction. They should know, if only vaguely at first, about slaughterhouses. They shouldn’t try to learn everything at once — they’d probably get discouraged — but they should know how things come into being, like ponies, say, and how they’re taken out of being and made into handbags and coats. They should get a petition going to stop the lighting of athletic fields, since too much light obliterated the night sky. Excessive light was bad. On the other hand, some things perceived as bad were good. Wasps, for instance. They should not destroy the wasp nest they discovered in their garage with poisons because wasp-nest building was fun to watch in a time-lapse photography sort of way. They should marvel at the wasps’ architectural abilities, their insect awareness of a supreme future structure they alone were capable of creating. Wasps were cool. The queens knew how to subsist in a state of cryogenic preservation in the wintertime. Jimmy and Jacky could get special credit for their understanding of wasps, agribusiness, slaughterhouses — just to name a few possibilities. She was willing to make learning interesting for them.
