"Thomas M. Disch - The Businessman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

CHAPTER

7

All the bodies were arranged in a pattern that resembled the neatest of suburbs, a
checkerboard, a gigantic crossword puzzle. Above the dead, like clues to the puzzle, their
names would be cut into the stones. The bodies she was aware of, quite as though she were
in a room with them; the names and stones she had to imagine. All that lay above the ground
was denied to her perception as much as that which loomed beyond the red-checked veil -
heaven, she supposed.

As a girl, she'd been troubled by the pictures she'd seen of heaven - the saints and
angels going to church in the clouds - until Sister Rita had explained to her that it would
surely be more exciting than that, that it just wasn't possible from our point of view here
below to imagine the splendor of looking straight at God's face.

She still couldn't imagine it, though she could, almost at will now, approach that
crisscrossed whatever-it-was that separated her from . . .

Then she remembered.

Remembered, in the first instance, only the checked potholder clinging mysteriously to
the white enamel face of the Frigidaire.

Then floods of remembrance. Not the small change the mind yields up by pressing
associative buttons, such as that little homily Sister Rita had delivered in fifth grade; instead,
a _whoosh_ of awareness that she was a complete, unique person with her own identity and
a past life and a name that had always made her uncomfortable: Giselle. After the singer,
Giselle McKenzie. One day in the middle of that life (or what ought to have been the middle of
it) she'd realized, in just such a flash of clarity as this, that perfection existed and she was
part of it. She had been standing in the kitchen and _zing_, it had come to her with sudden,
sweet inevitability, like the punch line of a joke.

Like (which it was) the gift of grace. She hadn't understood then, or for a long while
afterward, that _she_ had been changed, only that the kitchen didn't quite seem itself. It was
breathtaking, a fairy kingdom, lovely, inexplicable, hilarious.

And _mild_.

She could see it all again and hear, here in the stillness of the grave, the Frigidaire and
the clock above the stove humming their old electric song. The clock face, which was
contained, like a large fried egg with numbers on it, in a walnut skillet, gave the time to be
3:06. She had watched (and she watched again now) the thin red hand sweep graciously
around the face. Its motion soothed her quite as though it were a human hand, stroking away
all pain, all memories, every thought. She could have watched it go around all day, forever,
mindless as the moon, but then as though to demonstrate that in fact she could not, that
time and consciousness march on, there was a knock on the door and she had gone to answer
it.