"Barry N. Malzberg - Shiva" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

sustained as had most of those he knew by the belief that
destiny was benign, that life was a sentence with a structure
and that nothing so terrible could happen that would not yield
salvation in the nick of time.
But the decade shook that faith. It shook faith but good,
shock, implosion, the feeling of circumstance turning upon
itself and there had been a period, it must have gone on for
years, when Anderson had found himself questioning the
sense of it all, when paralysis had settled like a cloak upon
him; for a long time he had been unable to perform all but
the simplest actions. Sex, sleep, panels, conventions. Never
an introspective manтАФbut not nearly as stupid as a lot of
them took him to be; that was his secret and his strengthтАФhe
had found it hard to handle, like an undiagnosed, dreadful
virus hanging on at the lip of reason.
It was the riots, the war, the circling anguish and the
bewilderment, the terrible settling anger in this country that
he loved and to which he had dedicated his life and purpose.
Anderson could not get a handle on it. Surely it would have to
be the times and not himself, because this should have been
the best period of his life. Sylvia and he had the
understanding, he had the travel and the conventions,
physically he might not be all that he had once been, a little
shaky in crowds maybe, not as certain in bed as he had once
taken for granted but the sense of decay which cut from the
center had to do with politics.
They were making shit of everything decent, of everything
for which he stood, and it was too easy to say that they were
communist dupes. That wasn't it at all. Anderson knew the
13
 Shiva and Other Stories
by Barry N. Malzberg


truth by now; RED CHANNELS had sucked him in but he had
outgrown that: there might be fifty practicing communists
left. Underground there were fifty thousand or a million of
them hiding but they were not coming out and they were not
practicing their deceit. No, it was the kids themselves and the
war and the outside agitators from the Congo running around
to the ghettos on expense accounts inciting to riot. God damn
it; he was a man of reasonable sensitivity but there was such
a thing as going too far.
He went to the back lot to discuss it with the Lump
brothers one morning. The Lumps hadn't been heard from in
years and years: they had gone into the can along with
Republic Studios but they were still there for pain and
conversation, bored and lonely like most of the old