"Pat Murphy - Rachel In Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Pat)

She shares Jake's cookies and potato chips and looks at the Love Confessions magazine that she took
from the trash. The first story that she reads is about a woman named Alice. The headline reads: "I
became a GoGo dancer to pay off my husband's gambling debts, and now he wants me to sell my body."

Rachel sympathizes with Alice's loneliness and suffering. Alice, like Rachel, is alone and misunderstood.
As Rachel slowly reads, she sips her second cup of whiskey. The story reminds her of a fairy tale: the
nice man who rescues Alice from her terrible husband replaces the handsome prince who rescues the
princess. Rachel glances at Jake and wonders if he will rescue her from the wicked people who locked
her in the cage.

She has finished the second cup of whiskey and eaten half Jake's cookies when Jake says that she must
go back to her cage. She goes reluctantly, taking the magazine with her. He promises that he will come
for her again the next night, and with that she must be content. She puts the magazine in one corner of the
cage and curls up to sleep.

She wakes early in the afternoon. A man in a white coat is wheeling a low cart into the lab.

Rachel's head aches with hangover and she feels sick. As she crouches in one corner of her cage, he
stops the cart beside her cage and then locks the wheels. "Hold on there," he mutters to her, then slides
her cage onto the cart.

The man wheels her through long corridors, where the walls are cement blocks, painted institutional
green. Rachel huddles unhappily in the cage, wondering where she is going and whether Jake will ever be
able to find her.

At the end of along corridor, the man opens a thick metal door and a wave of warm air strikes Rachel. It
stinks of chimpanzees, excrement, and rotting food. On either side of the corridor are metal bars and
wire mesh. Behind the mesh, Rachel can see dark hairy shadows. In one cage, five adolescent chimps
swing and play. In another, two females huddle together, grooming each other. The man slows as he
passes a cage in which a big male is banging on the wire with his fist, making the mesh rattle and ring.

"Now, Johnson," says the man. "Cool it. Be nice. I'm bringing you a new little girlfriend."

With a series of hooks, the man links Rachel's cage with the cage next to Johnson's and opens the doors.
"Go on, girl," he says. "See the nice fruit." In the cage is a bowl of sliced apples with an attendant swarm
of fruit flies.

At first, Rachel will not move into the new cage. She crouches in the cage on the cart, hoping that the
man will decide to take her back to the lab. She watches him get a hose and attach it to a water faucet.
But she does not understand his intention until he turns the stream of water on her. A cold blast strikes
her on the back and she howls, fleeing into the new cage to avoid the cold water. Then the man closes
the doors, unhooks the cage, and hurries away.

The floor is bare cement. Her cage is at one end of the corridor and two walls are cement block. A door
in one of the cement block walls leads to an outside run. The other two walls are wire mesh: one facing
the corridor; the other, Johnson's cage.

Johnson, quiet now that the man has left, is sniffing around the door in the wire mesh wall that joins their
cages. Rachel watches him anxiously. Her memories of other chimps are distant, softened by time. She