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

that much was sure, but how and why were questions that could never be answered. The
Institute saw to that. A shipwrecked marriage was the commonest reason statistically, closely
followed by business reverses. At least that was what people put down on their
questionnaires when they applied to the Institute. Somehow he doubted those reasons were
the real ones. People who'd never been erased seemed oddly unable to account for their
behavior. Even to themselves they would tell the unlikeliest tales about what they were doing
and why. Then they'd spend a large part of their social life exposing each others' impostures
and laughing at them. A sense of humor they called it. He was glad he didn't have one, yet.



Most of his free time he spent making friends with his body. In his first weeks at the halfway
house he'd lazed about, eaten too much junk food, and started going rapidly to seed. Erasees
are not allowed to leave their new selves an inheritance of obesity or addiction, but often the
body one wakes up in is the hasty contrivance of a crash diet. The mouth does not lose its
appetites, nor the metabolism its rate, just because the mind has had memories whited out.
Fortunately he'd dug in his heels, and by the time he had to bid farewell to Delphi's communal
dining room he'd lost the pounds he'd put on, and eight more besides.

Since then fitness had been his religion. He bicycled to work, to Stop-and-Shop, and all about
Denver, exploring its uniformities. He hiked and climbed on weekends. He jogged. Once a
week, at a Y, he played volleyball for two hours, just as though he'd never left the Institute.
He also kept up the other sport he'd had to learn at Delphi, which was karate. Except for the
volleyball, he stuck to the more solitary forms of exercise, because on the whole he wasn't
interested in forming relationships. The lecturers at the halfway house had said this was
perfectly natural, and nothing to worry about. He shouldn't socialize until he felt hungry for
more society than his job and his living arrangements naturally provided. So far that hunger
had not produced a single pang. Maybe he was what the Institute called a natural integer. If
so, that seemed an all-right fate.

What he did miss, consciously and sometimes achingly, was a purpose. In common with most
fledgling erasees, there was nothing he believed in -- no religion, no political idea, no ambition
to become famous for doing something better than somebody else. Money was about the only
purpose he could think of, and even that was not a compelling purpose. He didn't lust after
more and more and more of it in the classical Faustian go-getter way.

His room and a half looked out across the tops of a small plantation of spruces to the highway
that climbed the long southwestward incline into the Rockies. Each car that hummed along the
road was like a vector-quantity of human desire, a quantum of teleological purpose. He might
have been mistaken. The people driving those cars might be just as uncertain of their ultimate
destinations as he was, but, seeing them whiz by in their primary colors, he found that hard to
believe. Anyone who was prepared to bear the expense of a car surely had somewhere he
wanted to get to or something he wanted to do more intensely than he could imagine, up here
on his three-foot slab of balcony.

He didn't have a telephone or a TV. He didn't read newspapers or magazines, and the only
books he ever looked at were some old textbooks on geology he'd bought at a garage sale in
Denver. He didn't go to movies. The ability to suspend disbelief in something that had never
happened was one he'd lost when he was erased, assuming he'd ever had it. A lot of the time
he couldn't suspend his disbelief in the real people around him, all their pushing and pulling,