"Thomas M. Disch - Understanding Human Behavior" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

Understanding Human Behavior
By Thomas M. Disch


I

He would wake up each morning with a consciousness clear as the Boulder sky, a sense of
being on the same wave length exactly as the sunlight. Innocence, bland dreams, a healthy
appetite -- these were glories that issued directly from his having been erased. Of course,
there were some corresponding disadvantages. His job, monitoring the terminals of a drive-in
convenience center, could get pretty dull, especially on days when no one drove in for an
hour or so at a stretch, and even at the busiest times it didn't provide much opportunity for
human contact. He envied the waitresses in restaurants and the drivers of buses their chance
to say hello to real live customers.

Away from work it was different; he didn't feel the same hunger for socializing. That, in fact,
was the major disadvantage of having no past life, no established preferences, no identity in
the usual sense of a history to attach his name to -- he just didn't want anything very much.

Not that he was bored or depressed or anything like that. The world was all new to him, and
full of surprises: the strangeness of anchovies; the beauty of old songs in their blurry Muzak
versions at the Stop-and-Shop; the feel of a new shirt or a March day. These sensations
were not wholly unfamiliar, nor was his mind a tabula rasa. His use of the language and his
motor skills were all intact; also what the psychologists at Delphi Institute called generic
recognition. But none of the occasions of newness reminded him of any earlier experience,
some first time or best time or worst time that he'd survived. His only set of memories of a
personal and non-generic character were those he'd brought from the halfway house in Delphi,
Indiana. But such fine memories they were -- so fragile, so distinct, so privileged. If only (he
often wished) he could have lived out his life in the sanctuary of Delphi, among men and
women like himself, all newly summoned to another life and responsive to the wonders and
beauties around them. But no, for reasons he could not understand, the world insisted on
being organized otherwise. An erasee was allowed six months at the Institute, and then he
was dispatched to wherever he or the computer decided, where he would have to live like
everyone else, either alone or in a family (though the Institute advised everyone to be wary
at first of establishing primary ties), in a small room or a cramped house or a dormitory ship in
some tropical lagoon. Unless you were fairly rich or very lucky, your clothes, furniture, and
suchlike appurtenances were liable to be rough, shabby, makeshift. The food most people ate
was an incitement to infantile gluttony, a slop of sugars, starches, and chemically enhanced
flavors. It would have been difficult to live among such people and to seem to share their
values, except so few of them ever questioned the reasonableness of their arrangements.
Those who did, if they had the money, would probably opt, eventually, to have their identities
erased, since it was clear, just looking around, that erasees seemed to strike the right
intuitive balance between being aware and keeping calm.

He lived now in a condo on the northwest edge of the city, a room and a half with unlimited
off-peak power access. The rent was modest (so was his salary), but his equity in the condo
was large enough to suggest that his pre-erasure income had been up there in the top
percentiles.

He wondered, as all erasees do, why he'd decided to wipe out his past. His life had gone sour,