"Thomas M. Disch - In Xanadu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

laughter that had greeted it, the laughter of children captured on a home video, silvery and chill.
"If we suppose," she said thoughtfully, tracing the line of a vein on the back of his hand with her red
fingertip, "that our senses can deceive
us, then what is there that can't?" She raised her eyebrows italic-wise. "I mean," she insisted, "my
body might be an illusion, and the world I think surrounds me might be another. But what of that 'I
think'? The very act of doubting is a proof of existence, right? I think therefore I am."
"Descartes," he footnoted.
She nodded. "And who would ever have supposed that that old doorstop would be relevant to
 real life, so-called? Except I think it would be just as true with any other verb: I love therefore I am."
"Why not?" he agreed.
She squirmed closer to him until she could let the weight of her upper body rest on his as he lay
there sprawled on the lawn, or the illusion of a lawn. The theme music had segued, unnoticed, to a
sinuous trill of clarinets and viola that might have served for the orchestration of a Strauss opera, and the
landscape was its visual correlative, a perfect Pu-vis de ChavannesтАФthe same chalky pastels in thick
impasto blocks and splotches, but never with too painterly panache. There were no visible brush strokes.
The only tactile element was the light pressure of her fingers across his skin, making each least hair in its
follicle an antenna to register pleasure.
A pleasure that need never, could never cloy, a temperate pleasure suited to its pastoral source, a
woodwind pleasure, a fruity wine. Lavender, canary yellow. The green of distant mountains. The
ripple of the river.


caverns measureless to man
The water that buoyed the little skiff was luminescent, and so their progress through the cave was not a
matter of mere conjecture or kines-thesia. They could see where they were going. Even so, their speed
could only be guessed at, for the water's inward light was not enough to illumine either the ice high
overhead or either shore of the river. They were borne along into some more unfathomable darkness far
ahead as though across an ideal frictionless plane, and it made him think of spaceships doing the
same thing, or of his favorite screen saver, which simulated the white swirl-by of snowflakes when driving
through a blizzard. One is reduced at such moments (he was now) to an elemental condition, as near to
being a particle in physics as a clumsy, complex mammal will ever come.
"I shall call you Dynamo," she confided in a throaty whisper. "Would you like that as a
nickname? The Dynamo of Xanadu."
"You're too kind," he said unthinkingly. He had become careless in
their conversations. Not a conjugal carelessness: he had not talked with her so very often that all her riffs
and vamps were second nature to him. This was the plain unadorned carelessness of not caring.
"I used to think," she said, "that we were all heading for hell in a handbasket. Is that how the saying
goes?"
"Meaning, hastening to extinction?"
"Yes, meaning that. It wasn't my original idea. I guess everyone has their own vision of the end. Some
people take it straight from the Bible, which is sweet and pastoral, but maybe a little dumb, though one
oughtn't to say so, not where they are likely to overhear you. Because is that really so different from
worrying about the hole in the ozone layer? That was my apocalypse of choice, how we'd all get terrible
sunburns and cancer, and then the sea level would rise, and everyone in Calcutta would drown."
"You think this is Calcutta?"
"Can't you ever be serious?"
"So, what's your point, Debora?" When he wanted to be nice, he would use her name, but she never
used his. She would invent nicknames for him, and then forget them and have to invent others.
It was thanks to such idiosyncrasies that he'd come to believe in her objective existence as something
other than his mental mirror. If she were no more than the forest pool in which Narcissus gazed adoringly,