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

that was the first lesson of the afterlife. Patience unmeasured by calendar or clock, or even
by the cadences of articulated thought. Most of her subjective time went by in flows of
low-level sentience, such as one slips into, in life, only at the edge of sleep. No telling how
long these periods of spiritual sleep had lasted. They might be ten-minute dozes; just as likely
she might have slept away an entire winter like a seed in frozen ground. Sometimes the
constellations of hungers creeping in the soil above her would have completely altered when
she awakened, or the liquifying tissues of her dead body would have entered upon some new
and more drastic stage of disintegration.

Impossible, even as a spirit divorced from flesh, not to regard these transformations
without aversion. Impossible not to strain against that still unbroken linkage that kept her
here, sealed in this coffin like a genie in a jug. Not, however, with any sense of dread; rather,
she regarded her corpse as she would, in the world above, have reacted to some derelict on
Hennepin Avenue, who smells and whose clothes are in rags and whom no one can help even
if help had been asked for.

Once it seemed that she had actually won free. A tendon of the corpse's flesh, drying,
had tugged a bone out of its socket: it was that sudden popping out she'd thought to be the
breaking of the lock. And perhaps it did signal, in a small way, the beginning of her liberation,
for afterward the horizon of her awareness seemed greatly enlarged. She came to have an
almost panoramic sense of the cemetery grounds - not just the sphere of earth immediately
about her but beyond that, to where the other corpses lay and decayed. All of them dead, all
inert and without consciousness. She alone, in all that cemetery, lived in the afterlife.

No, that wasn't so. She alone had failed to cross that inner threshold into the realm of
the endless gingham cloth. It wasn't just her body she was trapped in, it was the whole world.

CHAPTER

5

The source of grace has its favorite bloodlines, for which there is no accounting. Grace
runs in families; it has no relation to merit. Entire generations of sons-of-bitches may enjoy
the most infamous good luck, while the wise, the virtuous, and the deserving suffer and sink
beneath insupportable burdens. It is perfectly unfair, yet there is nothing religiously inclined
people so long for as the assurance that they and theirs belong to a chosen people.

The Ankers were such a family. Joy-Ann, who was doubly an Anker, having been born
an Anker and married an Anker Cousin, would have denied this emphatically, but those who
are so chosen seldom suspect it till quite late in life. She was still too young, at forty-eight,
to recognize the marks of grace in what she considered a string of tragic misfortunes. For the
source of grace - let us be honest and call it God - is also an ironist and a dweller in
paradoxes; He produces good from evil as a matter of course.

The Ankers were not notably wicked as a family. They were, admittedly, layabouts and
drifters, by and large (even, in a few instances, bums and drunks), but not evil in large,
oppressive ways; victims, not victimizers; the sort of people, mournful, meek, and poor in
spirit, to whom the Beatitudes have promised, not without irony, heaven and earth. Joy-Ann,
for instance, in the fifteen years since her husband's death, had been exempted from the
common curse of having to work for a living by an insurance policy her husband had purchased