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

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THE BUSINESSMAN. Copyright 1984 by Thomas M. Disch. All rights reserved. Printed in the
United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East
53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Limited, Toronto.




The issue always and at bottom is spiritual.

- DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
CHAPTER

1



When she awoke she did not realize for some time where she was. Then it sank in -
she was dead and buried in a grave. How she knew this, by what sense informed, she could
not tell. Not by the sight of her eyes, or by any spiritual analog of sight, for how can there
be sight where no light enters? Nor was there any tingle of fleshy consciousness in limbs or
loins, in heart or mouth. Her body was here in the coffin _with_ her, and in some way she was
still linked to its disintegrating proteins, but it wasn't through her body's senses she knew
these things. There was only this suspended sphere of self-awareness beyond which she
could discern certain dim essentials of the earth immuring her - a dense, moist, intricated
mass pierced with constellations of forward-inching hungers, nodules of intensity against a
milky radiance of calm bacterial transformation.

_The worms crawl in_ - she remembered the rhyme from childhood. _The worms crawl
out. The worms play pinochle on your snout_.

How long would this go on? The question framed itself coolly, without triggering alarms.
Ghosts - such ghosts as she had ever heard of - were supposed to be free to range where
they would. Were said to flit. Whereas she remained attached, by some sort of psychic
gravity, to this inert carcass, in which even the process of decay was impeded by the
chemicals that had been pumped into it.

Almost as the question was formed, the answer existed within her sphere of sentience.
Her thinking self would go on thinking . . . indefinitely. Not "forever." Forever remained as
unfathomable and foggy an idea as it had been when she was alive. She knew, too, that she
would not always be confined to her corpse's coffin, that a time would come when she'd be
able to slip loose from the clinging raiment of flesh to flit at liberty like other ghosts.