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

He must, therefore, still be somewhere above the main floor. The absence of
exits, though disconcerting, could be explained by some quirk in the floor
plan. The absence of signs was merely a carelessness on the part of the
management.




┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖


He tucked Vanity Fair into his shopping bag and stepped onto the grilled lip
of the down-going escalatorтАФnot, it must be admitted, without a certain degree
of reluctance. At each landing, he marked his progress by a number spoken
aloud. By eight he was uneasy; by fifteen he was desperate.
It was, of course, possible that he had to descend two flights of stairs for
every floor of the department store. With this possibility in mind, he counted
off fifteen more landings.

тАФNo.

Dazedly, and as though to deny the reality of this seemingly interminable
stairwell, he continued his descent. When he stopped again at the forty-fifth
landing, he was trembling. He was afraid.

He rested the shopping bag on the bare concrete floor of the landing,
realizing that his arm had gone quite sore from supporting the twenty pounds
and more of groceries and books. He discounted the enticing possibility that
"it was all a dream," for the dream-world is the reality of the dreamer, to
which he could not weakly surrender, no more than one could surrender to the
realities of life. Besides, he was not dreaming; of that he was quite sure.

He checked his pulse. It was fastтАФsay, eighty a minute. He rode down two more
flights, counting his pulse. Eighty almost exactly. Two flights took only one
minute.

He could read approximately one page a minute, a little less on an escalator.
Suppose he had spent one hour on the escalators while he had read: sixty
minutesтАФone hundred and twenty floors. Plus forty-seven that he had counted.
One hundred sixty-seven. The Sky Room was on 15.

167-15=152.

He was in the one-hundred-fifty-second sub-basement. That was impossible.

The appropriate response to an impossible situation was to deal with it as
though it were commonplaceтАФlike Alice in Wonderland. Ergo, he would return to
Underwood's the same way he had (apparently) left it. He would walk up one
hundred fifty-two flights of down-going escalators. Taking the steps three at
a time and running, it was almost like going up a regular staircase. But after