"Thomas M. Disch - Camp Concentration" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

John Bunyan,
The Pilgrim's Progress




BOOK ONE
May 11
Young R.M., my Mormon guard, has brought me a supply of paper at last.
It is three months to the day since I first asked him for some. Inexplicable,
this change of heart. Perhaps Andrea has been able to get a bribe to him.
Rigor Mortis denies it, but then he would deny it. We talked politics, and I
was able to gather from hints R.M. let drop that President McNamara has
decided to use "tactical" nuclear weapons. Perhaps, therefore, it is to
McNamara, not to Andrea, that I am indebted for this paper, since R.M. has
been fretting these many weeks that General Sherman, poor General Sherman, had
been denied adequate hitting power. When, as today, R.M. is happy, his fearful
smile, those thin lips pulled back tightly across the perfect deathshead
teeth, ifickers into being at the slightest pretense of humor. Why do all the
Mormons I have known have that same constipated smile? Is their toilet
training exceptionally severe?
This is my journal. I can be candid here. Candidly, I could not be more
miserable.


May 12
Journals, such as I have erewhile attempted, have a way of becoming
merely exhortatory. I must remember, here, to be circumstantial from the
start, taking as model that sublime record of prison existence, _The House of
the Dead_. It should be easy to be circumstantial here: not since childhood
has mere circumstance so tyrannized me. The two hours each day before dinner
are spent in a Gethsemane of dread and hope. Dread lest we be served that vile
spaghetti once again. Hope that there may be a good hunk of meat in my ladle
of stew, or an apple for dessert. Worse than "chow" is each morning's mad
spate of scrubbing and polishing to prepare our cells for inspection. The
cells are as bony-clean as a dream of Philip Johnson (Grand Central Bathroom),
while we, the prisoners, carry about with us the incredible, ineradicable
smell of our stale, wasted flesh.
However, we lead here no worse a life than we would be leading now
outside these walls had we answered our draft calls. Nasty as this prison is,
there is this advantage to it--that it will not lead so promptly, so probably,
to death. Not to mention the inestimable advantage of righteousness.
Ah, but who is this "we"? Besides myself there are not more than a dozen
other conchies here, and we are kept carefully apart, to prevent the
possibility of esprit. The prisoners--the _real_ prisoners--hold us in
contempt. They have that more sustaining advantage than righteousness--guilt.
So our isolation, my isolation, becomes ever more absolute. And, I fear, my
self-pity. There are evenings when I sit here _hoping_ that R.M. will come by
to argue with me.
Four months! And my sentence is for five years. . . . That is the Gorgon