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

Transfer

By Barry N. Malzberg
I have met the enemy and he is me. Or me is he. Or me and he are we; I really find it impossible to
phrase this or to reach any particular facility of description. The peculiar and embarrassing situation in
which I now find myself has lurched quite out of control, ravaging its way toward what I am sure will be a
calamitous destiny, and, yet, I have always been a man who believed in order, who believed that events
no matter how chaotic would remit, would relent, would suffer containment in the pure limpidity of The
Word engraved patiently as if upon stone. I must stop this and get hold of myself.

I have met the enemy and he is me.

Staring into the mirror, watching the waves and the ripples of The Change, seeing in the mirror that beast
take shape (it is always in the middle of the night; I am waiting for the transference to occur during the
morning or worse yet at lunch hour in the middle of a cafeteria; waves may overtake me and I will
become something so slimy and horrible even by the standards of midtown Manhattan that I will cause
most of the congregants to lose their lunch), I feel a sense of rightness. It must always have been meant to
be this way. Did I not feel myself strange as a child, as a youth, as an adolescent? Even as an adult I felt
the strangeness within me; on the streets they stared with knowledge which could not have possibly been
my own. Women turned away from me with little smiles when I attempted to connect with them, my
fellow employees here at the Bureau treated me with that offhandedness and solemnity which always
bespeaks private laughter. I know what they think of me.

I know what they think of me.

I have spent a lifetime in solitude gauging these reactions to some purpose, and I know that I am separate
from the run of ordinary men as these men are separate from the strange heavings and commotion, ruins
and darkness which created them. Staring in the mirror. Staring in the mirror I see.

Staring in the mirror I see the beast I have become, a thing with tentacles and spikes, strange loathsome
protuberances down those appendages which my arms have become, limbs sleek and horrible despite all
this devastation, limbs to carry me with surging power and constancy through the sleeping city, and now
that I accept what I have become, what the night will strike me, I am no longer horrified but accepting.
One might even say exalted at this moment because I always knew that it would have to be this way, that
in the last of all the nights a mirror would be held up to my face and I would see then what I was and why
the mass of men avoided me. I know what I am, those calm, cold eyes staring back at me in the mirror
from the center of the monster know too well what I am also, and turning them from the mirror,
confronting the rubbled but still comfortable spaces of my furnished room, I feel the energy coursing
through me in small flashes and ripples of light, an energy which I know, given but that one chance it
needs, could redeem the world. The beast does not sleep. In my transmogrification I have cast sleep
from me like the cloak of all reason and I spring from these rooms, scuttle the three flights of the
brownstone to the street and, coming upon it in the dense and sleeping spaces of the city, see no one,
confront no one (but I would not, I never have) as I move downtown to enact my dreadful but necessary
tasks.
The beast does not sleep, therefore I do not sleep. At first the change came upon me once a week and
then twice тАж but in recent months it has been coming faster and faster, now six or seven times a week,
and furthermore I can will the change. Involuntary at first, overtaking me like a stray bullet, it now seems
to be within my control as my power and facility increase. A latent characteristic then, some recessive
gene which peeked its way out shyly at the age of twenty-five, first with humility and then with growing
power, and, finally as I became accustomed to the power, it fell within my control.