"Kelley Eskridge - Alien Jane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eskridge Kelly)

We walked down the stairs. I went first. "Three floors down," she said. She was close, only a step or
two behind me. Her smell came down over me like green apples.

"Rita... you know that Jane agreed to work on these experiments with Doctor Novak. She's a volunteer.
I just want you to remember when you see her... I don't want you to think... she isn't being hurt ..." she
said in a queer, rushed voice that didn't even sound like Rousseau. I stopped. Her hands were jammed
into the pockets of her white coat and her face was turned to the wall, and she wouldn't look at me.

That was the strangest thing of all, and it scared me. It wasn't Rousseau standing over ffiтВм, her red hair
sparhng under the stairwell light. My doctor wasn't scared; my doctor was an Amazort, a mother
confessor, a carrrer of fearlessness that she would breed into me like a new branch grafted onto a young
tree. My doctor wasn't this person who was saFng, "Just be calm and don't worry, everything will be
fine."

"What's the matter with her?"

"Let's go."

My slippers rustled on the stair tread and on the linoleum of the hall when we went through the landing
door. I followed the stripes painted on the wall, around and around the hallways like a maze. We came
to a locked ward door and a nurses' station beyond it. The two rnen behind the desk wouldn't let me in
until they checked with Novak on the telephone. The brown-haired one had a badge with a metal clip
Alien Jane тАв 87

that he tried to put on ffiтВм, and I wondered if I would have to hurt him, but Rousseau said, "I)on't touch
her."

"I)octor?"

"Let her put it on herself."
Brown-hair rolled his eyes and handed me the badge dangling between two fingertipr, arm outstretched.
Rousseau said nothing, but she was shaking just a little as we went down the hall. We could hear
Brown-hair say something to the other one and they both laughed and I didn't like being there at all, in a
place I didn't hrow, with strangers.

The hall was long and mostly bare, with only a few metal-backed chairs next to closed doors. The air
smelled like ammonia and sweat and burned electrical wires. It was quiet except for our breathing, the
rsshhh rsshhh sounds of our clothes, and Rousseau's hard-heeled, strong step. Then I began to hear
another sound, a rise and fall of muffled noise like music, but something about it made me want to walk
faster, and then it was jane screamirrg and I began to run.

The place where they had her was at the end of the hall, a high-ceilinged room that made an echo out of
|ane. The lab was full of white: white-coated doctors, orderlies in white pants and shirts, Jane in her
cotton pajamas with her rolling eyes that showed white and blue, white and blue. She sat in a wooden
chair with a high back and arms. Thin rainbows of color twisted out of her head, wires running out of her
scalp into the machines around her. More wires with small disks on the end lay taped like lollipop strings
against her neck; her left wrist; her pink-scarred calf; her ankle; under her pajamas at her heart. She sat
very straight in the chair because her shins and forearms and ribs and head were belted against the wood
with padded ties the color that white people call flesh, and I wondered if they thought that no one would