Название: The American Shore
Автор: Samuel R. Delany
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая фантастика
isbn: 9780819574206
isbn:
“Angouleme” is the third written story in such an s-f series.
1. The comparison is specifically with movie, television, and “manufactured” best-seller writing, where a writer is paid a sum, frequently hundreds of times that which an s-f writer commands for equal wordage, basically to suffer the abuse entailed in becoming, essentially, an advisory scribe to an hysteric committee which decrees, sometimes page by page, what will and what will not be in the text, and which commands enough advertising funds to then parlay the practically lifeless product to some sort of profit.
2. Pavic, paved over or relating to pavement.
2
The Refused Text
We shall flex the text with a number of carets, marginally cardinalled for later reference. At the base of the print-line they should not be obtrusive; the average reader seldom looks at more than the top half of the print—it contains quite enough information to read with. The only ambiguities are v/y, :/;, and O/Q; contextual order is usually strong enough to prevent confusion.
Our lexias will sometimes not constitute “complete units of meaning” in the standard grammatic sense; but they will roughly enclose lengths of language that more or less strongly support our subsequent co-textual statements.
Thomas M. Disch’s
ANGOULEME1
There were2 seven Alexandrians involved in the Battery plot—Jack, who was the youngest and from the Bronx, Celeste DiCecca, Sniffles and MaryJane, Tancred Miller, Amparo (of course), and of course, the leader and mastermind, Bill Harper, better known as Little Mister Kissy Lips. Who was passionately, hopelessly in love with Amparo. Who was nearly thirteen (she would be, fully, by September this year), and breasts just beginning. Very very beautiful skin, like3 lucite. Amparo Martinez.4
Their first, nothing operation was in the East 60’s, a broker or something like that. All they netted was5 cufflinks, a watch, a leather satchel that wasn’t leather after all, some buttons, and the usual lot of useless credit cards.6 He stayed calm through the whole thing, even with Sniffles slicing off buttons, and soothing. None of them had the nerve to ask, though they all wondered, how often he’d been through this scene before. What they were about wasn’t an innovation. It was partly that, the need to innovate, that led them to think up the plot.7 The only really memorable part of the holdup was the name laminated on the cards, which was, weirdly enough, Lowen, Richard W. An omen (the connection being that they were all at the Alexander Lowen School), but of what?8
Little Mister Kissy Lips kept the cufflinks for himself, gave the buttons to Amparo (who gave them to her uncle), and donated the rest (the watch was a piece of crap) to the Conservation booth outside the Plaza right where he lived.9
His father was a teevee executive. In, as he would quip, both senses.10 They had got married young, his mama and papa, and divorced soon after but not before he’d come to fill out their quota. Papa, the executive, remarried, a man this time and somewhat more happily. Anyhow it lasted long enough that the offspring, the leader and mastermind, had to learn to adjust to the situation, it being permanent.11 Mama simply went down to the Everglades and disappeared, sploosh.12
In short, he was well to do. Which is how, more than by overwhelming talent, he got into the Lowen School in the first place.13 He had the right kind of body though, so with half a desire there was no reason in the city of New York he couldn’t grow up to be a professional dancer, even a choreographer. He’d have the connections for it, as Papa was fond of pointing out.
For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic.14 He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer.15 He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bonafide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available16 murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School17 but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century.18 They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America.19
The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell.20 The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years.21
Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline22 (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated, had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffer.23 Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts.24 In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised.25
“Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.”26
But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity.27 And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.28
They settled on the Battery29 because, one, none of them ever were there ordinarily; two, it was posh and at the same time relatively, three, uncrowded, at least once the night shift were snug in their towers tending their machines. The night shift seldom ate their lunches down in the park. And, four, because it was beautiful,30 especially now at the beginning of summer.31 The dark water, chromed with oil, flopping against the buttressed shore; the silences blowing in off the Upper Bay, silences large enough sometimes that you could sort out the different noises of the city behind them, the purr and quaver of the skyscrapers, the ground-shivering mysterioso of the expressways, and every now and then the strange sourceless screams that are the melody of New York’s theme song; the blue-pink of sunsets in a visible sky; the people’s faces, calmed by the sea and their own nearness to death, lined СКАЧАТЬ