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

who had tried to encourage her to play a more active and
responsive role in their conjugal relations. It was even more the
case with the Halfacres, who had spent some time in custody in
their teenage years for practicing necrophilia. Because of their age
there had been no permanent record of that unfortunate episode,
but during the time they spent in a supervised environment their
shadows had become ascendant in their lives. That they should
become employees in such a place as Raines Adult Home had been
almost inevitable, shadows being drawn to other shadows in the
way that insects swarm about light bulbs. If it had not been the
home, it would have been one of the local prisons, or a school of
Special Education.
Such were the Halfacres. For we may as well speak of their
shadows as though they were the Halfacres, and of AngieтАЩs shadow
as though she and it were the same entity, for when a shadow has
long been in command, the conventional boundaries between self
and shadow blur and become unimportant. Who shall say that a
particular crime was the work of someoneтАЩs shadow or her own?
More than once in her years at the home AngieтАЩs shadow
committed an opportunistic act of malice (accidents are so
common among the elderly), and the other resident shadows did
the same, or tried to. Had her role ever been discovered, Angie
could have protested that she was innocent, that she could not
remember having released the switch or pulled the plug, and she
might have passed a polygraph test when she testified to that effect.
But increasingly Angie remembered nothing that she did, as her
mind continued its long slow fade to gray. In such cases innocence
becomes a semantic quibble, as it is so often in courts of law.
When shadows dominate those who are young and virile, like
the Halfacres, their control has a different character than with
someone like Angie. The shadows of the robust must give their
hosts a freer rein, so that they can play an active role in the
everyday worldтАФat a job or a gym, on the highway, in a barтАФand
still be on call, as it were, for the shadow to command. These are
the shadows who become momentarily notorious for some
impulsive and seemingly motiveless crime, pushing a stranger in
front of a train or shooting another driver in a fit of тАЬroad rage.тАЭ
Working at the home, the shadows of the Halfacre boys had
achieved a modus vivendi that made such extreme outbursts
unnecessary. Like children taking ritalin or diabetics protected by
insulin, the Halfacres got along from day to day with the calming
assistance of their own private harem, among whom Angie, as the
most recent arrival and sturdiest, figured as odalisque-in-chief, a
golden-age and mute Scheherazade.
Even for a genuine AlzheimerтАЩs victim, someone too out of it
to resent having no other wardrobe than a blanket and adult
diapers, the Adult Home might have seemed a sorry fate. Angie did
have moments unattended by her shadow when she became
conscious of the horror of her circumstances. Orville or Wilbur
would be spooning cubes of Jell-O into her mouth (to their credit,