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

The Roaches
by Thomas M. Disch


Miss Marcia Kenwell had a perfect horror of cockroaches. It was an
altogether different horror than the one which she felt, for instance, toward
the color puce. Marcia Kenwell loathed the little things. She couldn't see one
without wanting to scream. Her revulsion was so extreme that she could not
bear to crush them under the soles of her shoes. No, that would be too awful.
She would run, instead, for the spray can of Black Flag and inundate the
little beast with poison until it ceased to move or got out of reach into one
of the cracks where they all seemed to live. It was horrible, unspeakably
horrible, to think of them nestling in the walls, under the linoleum, only
waiting for the lights to be turned off, and then ... No, it was best not to
think about it.
Every week she looked through the Times hoping to find another apartment,
but either the rents were prohibitive (this was Manhattan, and Marcia's wage
was a mere $62.50 a week, gross) or the building was obviously infested. She
could always tell: there would be husks of dead roaches scattered about in the
dust beneath the sink, stuck to the greasy backside of the stove, lining the
out-of-reach cupboard shelves like the rice on the church steps after a
wedding. She left such rooms in a passion of disgust, unable even to think
till she reached her own apartment, where the air would be thick with the
wholesome odors of Black Flag, Roach-It, and the toxic pastes that were spread
on slices of potato and hidden in a hundred cracks which only she and the
roaches knew about.
At least, she thought, I keep my apartment clean. And truly, the linoleum
under the sink, the backside and underside of the stove, and the white contact
paper lining her cupboards were immaculate. She could not understand how other
people could let these matters get so entirely out-of-hand. They must be
Puerto Ricans, she decided--and shivered again with horror, remembering that
litter of empty husks, the filth and the disease.
Such extreme antipathy toward insects--toward one particular insect may
seem excessive, but Marcia Kenwell was not really exceptional in this. There
are many women, bachelor women like Marcia chiefly, who share this feeling
though one may hope, for sweet charity's sake, that they escape Marcia's
peculiar fate.
Marcia's phobia was, as in most such cases, hereditary in origin. That is
to say, she inherited it from her mother, who had a morbid fear of anything
that crawled or skittered or lived in tiny holes. Mice, frogs, snakes, worms,
bugs--all could send Mrs. Kenwell into hysterics, and it would indeed have
been a wonder, if little Marcia had not taken after her. It was rather
strange, though, that her fear had become so particular, and stranger still
that it should particularly be cockroaches that captured her fancy, for Marcia
had never seen a single cockroach, didn't know what they were. (The Kenwells
were a Minnesota family, and Minnesota families simply don't have
cockroaches.) In fact, the subject did not arise until Marcia was nineteen and
setting out (armed with nothing but a high school diploma and pluck, for she
was not, you see, a very attractive girl) to conquer New York.
On the day of her departure, her favorite and only surviving aunt came