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

those caves of ice!
Ebay was a lonely place, as holy and enchanted as some underwater cathedral in the poem of a French
symbolist, or a German forest late at night. If you have worked at night as a security guard for the Mall of America,
or if you've seen Simone Simon in Cat People as she walks beside the pool (only her footsteps audible, her
footsteps and the water's plash), only then can you imagine its darkling beauty, the change that comes over the
objects of our desire when they are flensed of their purveyors and consumers and stand in mute array, aisle after
aisle. Then you might sweep the beam of your flashlight across the waters of the re-circulating fountain as they
perpetually spill over the granite brim. No silence is so large as that where Muzak played, but plays no more.
Imagine such a place, and then imagine discovering an exit that announces itself in the darkness by a dim red light
and opening the door to discover a Piranesian vista of a further mall, no less immense, its tiers linked by purring
escalators, the leaves of its potted trees shimmering several levels beneath where you are, and twinkling in the
immensity, the signs of the storesтАФevery franchise an entrepreneur might lease. Armani and Osh-Kosh, Hallmark,
Kodak, Disney-Mitsubishi, American Motors, Schwab. A landscape all of names, and yet if you click on any name,
you may enter its portal to discover its own little infinity of choices. Shirts of all sizes, colors, patterns, prices; shirts
that were sold, yesterday, to someone in Iowa; other shirts that may be sold tomorrow or may never find a taker.
Every atom and molecule in the financial continuum of purchases that might be made has here been numbered and
cataloged. Here, surely, if anywhere, one might become if not invisible then scarcely noticed, as in some great
metropolis swarming with illegal aliens, among whom a single further citizen can matter not a jot.
Fran became a mote in that vastness, a pip, an alga, unaware of his own frenetic motion as the flow of data took
him from one possible purchase to the next. Here was a CD of Hugo Wolflieder sung by Elly Ameling. Here a pair
of Lucchese cowboy boots only slightly worn with western heels. Here six interesting Japanese dinner plates and a
hand-embroidered black kimono. This charming pig creamer has an adorable French hat and is only slightly
chipped. These Viking sweatshirts still
have their tags from Wal-Mart, $29.95. Sabatier knives, set of four. A 1948 first edition of The Secret of the Old House.
Hawaiian Barbie with hula accessories. "Elly Ameling Sings Schumann!" Assorted rustic napkins from Amish
country.
There is nothing that is not a thought away, nothing that cannot be summoned by a wink and a nod to any of a
dozen search engines. But there is a price to pay for such accessibility. The price is sleep, and in that sleep we buy
again those commodities we bought or failed to buy before. No price is too steep, and no desire too low. Cream will
flow through the slightly chipped lips of the charming pig creamer in the adorable hat, and our feet will slip into the
boots we had no use for earlier. And when we return from our night journeys, like refugees returning to the shells of
their burned homes, we find we are where we were, back at Square One. The matron was bellowing over the PA, "Le
temps s'en va, mesdames! Le temps s'en va!" and Fran wanted to die.


grain beneath the thresher's flail
She was growing old in the service of the Khan, but there was no advantage to be reaped from long service,
thanks to the contract she'd signed back when. She had become as adept with the hammers of the dulcimer as ever
Chantal had been (Chantal was gone now, no one knew whither), but in truth the dulcimer is not an instrument that
requires great skillтАФand its rewards are proportional. She felt as though she'd devoted her lifeтАФher afterlifeтАФto the
game of Parcheesi, shaking the dice and moving her tokens round the board forever. Surely this was not what the
prospectus promised those who signed on.
She knew, in theory (which she'd heard, in various forms, from other denizens), that the great desideratum here, the
magnet that drew all its custom, was beauty, the rapture of beauty that poets find in writing poetry or composers in
their music. It might not be the Beatific Vision that saints feel face-to-face with God, but it was, in theory, the next best
thing, a bliss beyond compare. And perhaps it was all one could hope for. How could she be sure that this bliss or
that, as it shivered through her, like a wind through Daphne's leaves, wasn't of the same intensity that had zapped the
major romantic poets in their day?
In any case, there was no escaping it. She'd tried to find an exit that didn't, each day, become the entrance by