"Richard Laymon - Dreambox Junkies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laymon Richard)

without doubt that you love her, you want her, she's right, the one for you?
He had tried to get all of this through to Ruth, but to little avail. For Ruth,BoxRuth , things were simple:
Groundworld was real; all those boxworlds just fantasies. Who cared what he got up to in his dreams?
He could hook and fuck around to his cold male heart's content, so far asBoxRuth was concerned.
Down here, of course, was a different matter.

If only they could have hooked together, shared the box and built a new world between them. But you
couldn't co-hook; it had been tried, and both minds got sizzled. The Berkeley Effect, the barely
comprehensible quantum compliance phenomenon by means of which the Dreambox worked its magic,
was fucked up by a di-or multiencephalic intravironment. The two minds cancelled each other out in an
unresolvable id war. There was no room for two Fichtean Overminds lording it over the same boxworld.
Indeed, Paulie reflected, the Berkeley Effect might more fittingly have been thought of as the Fichte Effect
in its identification of the box user with the Overmind; only the support of the worldcopy rendered the
boxworld more than a solipsistic phantasm.

All of this was so much gobbledegook to Ruth. And yet, she was his accomplice. Somehow, she had
brought herself to believe in him, in what he was attempting to achieve through sheer force of imagination,
sleight-of-brain. She abetted his insanity. Out of love, she colluded in his delusion that he was no ordinary
box junkie. At that very moment, in compressed time, in affluent bedrooms and scuzzy hovels alike, a
thousand million acts of violence, sex, and violent sex were quasoccurring in a thousand million private
boxworlds, predominantly male-generated, most of them numbingly near-identical in their swaggering
scorn for the cerebral. Well, not for him those paltry little power trips and id orgies, those puerile
superhero scenarios stuffed with gunplay and sexplay: Paulie Rayle had in mind a far, far higher purpose
than mere self-gratification.

Face it, Paulie thought, I'm a complete and utter flancase.

Ruth deserved better.

He had been Frances's kept man, and now here he was, a kept man again, a born taker.

Was it worth it, what he was putting Ruth through?

He gathered his saliva and swallowed the half-tab of Crowning Glory, followed by the C capsule.
Getting water to wash them down would have meant going out there and seeing Ruth again and feeling
the knife twist in his stomach.

He felt dizzy. Dizzy from thinking about things. Wasn't that why he had come here, away from it all, to
Hilford Abbots? All the shit the world expected of you, nowadays. And it was getting worse. How could
they possibly function out there, all those stressmonkeys, up over their heads in the technocosm?

But then, these were the folks who made the world go round.

And people like Paulie Rayle?

Useless eaters. The best that could be said about them was that they did at least refrain from making a
more active nuisance of themselves, they didn't go out and commit crimes. Bigger crimes than
no-goodness and parasitism.

The door was opened again, more slowly this time.