"Oates, Joyce Carol - Feral" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

Joyce Carol Oates - Feral

1.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most celebrated women of letters in the U.S. Among her dozens of novels and story collections are them, BlackWater, and most recently My Heart Laid Bare. Man Crazy, and We Were the Mulvaneys. Much of her fiction has explored the darker regions of the soul, and in the past decade she has contributed to many horror anthologies as well as having edited the anthology American Gothic Tales. Many of her horror stories are collected in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. She lives in Princetown, New Jersey, where she has taught for many yeats.

This new story explores that dark realm known as suburbia. What it finds there is harrowing. The eyes. His eyes. What was human is gone from them. What was ours is gone from them. Where?

2.

THE CHILD WAS SIX YEARS, three months old when what happened to him, happened. Derek was healthy, big-boned and inclined to fleshiness, with a soft-rubbery feel to his fair skin that had given him the look, when younger, of a large, animated doll. His hair was silky brown and his moist warm brown eyes blinked frequently. His smile was sweet, tentative. He'd been named Derek (for his mother's nowdeceased father) which didn't at all suit him, so his parents began calling him "Derrie" from the start-- "Derrie-darling," "Derrie-berry," "Derrie-sweet." He had the petted, slightly febrile look of an only child whose development, weekly, if not daily, is being lovingly recorded in a series of albums. Yet, surprisingly, he wasn't at all spoiled. His mother had had several miscarriages preceding his birth and by the age of thirty-nine when he was finally born, she joked of being physically exhausted, emptied out, "eviscerated." It was a startling, extreme figure of speech but she spoke with a wan smile, not in complaint so much as in simple admission; and her husband kissed and comforted her as they lay together in their bed by lamplight, reluctant to switch off the light because then they wouldn't be able to see their baby sleeping peacefully in his crib close by. "God, yes, I feel the same way," her husband said. "Our one big beautiful baby is more than enough, isn't he?"

And so, for more than six years, he was.

3.

If he would see me again. If his eyes would see me.

If he would recognize me: I am your child, born of your body, of the love of you and Daddy.

If he would tell me: Mommy, I love you!

They were devoted parents, not-young but certainly youthful, vigorous. They were Kate and Stephen Knight and they lived in the Village of Hudson Ridge, an hour's drive north from New York City on the Palisades Parkway. Hudson Ridge, like other suburban communities along the river, was an oasis of tranquil tree-lined residential streets, customdesigned houses set in luxuriously deep, spacious wooded lots. At the core of the village was a "downtown" of several blocks and a small train depot built to resemble a gazebo. The Hudson River was visible from the Ridge, reflecting a steely blue on even overcast days. But there were few overcast days in Hudson Ridge. This was an idyllic community, resolutely nonurban: its most prestigious roads, lanes, "circles" were unpaved. Black swans with red bills paddled languidly on its mirror-smooth lake amid a larger, looser flotilla of white geese and mallard ducks. Kate and Stephen had lived in New York City, where they'd worked for eight years, before Derek was born; determined that this pregnancy wouldn't end in heartbreak like the others, Kate had quit her job with an arts foundation, and she and Stephen had moved to Hudson Ridge -- "Not just to escape the stress of the city, but for the baby's sake. It seems so unfair to subject a child to New York." They laughed at themselves mouthing such pieties in the cadences of those older, status-conscious suburban couples they'd once mocked, and felt so superior to -- yet what they said, what they believed, was true. In the past decade, the city had become impossible. The city had become prohibitively expensive, and the city had become prohibitively dangerous. Their child would be spared apartment living in a virtual fortress, being shuttled by van to private schools, being deprived of the freedom to roam a back yard, a grassy park, neighborhood playgrounds. So ironic, so bitter! -- that it should happen to him here. In Hudson Ridge, where children are safe. In the members-only Hudson Ridge Community Center.

4.

Had there been any premonition, any forewarning? The Knights were certain there had been none.

Derek, "Derrie," was very well liked by his first-grade classmates, particularly the little girls. He was the most mild-mannered and cheerful of children. At an age when some boys begin to be rowdy, prone to shouting and rough-housing, Derek was inclined to shyness with strangers and most adults, even with certain of his classmates, and older children. As a student he wasn't outstanding, but "so eager, optimistic" as his teacher described him, "he's a joy to have in the classroom." Derek was never high-strung or moody like his more precocious classmates, nor restless and rebellious like the less gifted. He was never jealous. Despite his size, he wasn't pushy or aggressive. If at recess on the playground other, older boys were cruel to weaker children, Derek sometimes tried to intervene. At such times he was stammering, tremulous, clumsy, his skin rosily mottled and his eyelashes bright with tears. Yet he was usually effective-- if pushed, shoved, punched, jeered at, he wouldn't back down. His flushed face might shine with tears but he rarely cried and would insist afterward that he hadn't done anything special, really. Nor would he tattle on the troublemakers. Almost inaudibly he'd murmur, ducking his head, "I don't know who it was, I didn't see." His first-grade teacher told Kate that Derek possessed, rare among children his age, and among boys of any age, a "natural instinct" for justice and empathy. "His face shines so, sometimes -- he's like a Baby Buddha."

Kate reported this to Stephen and they laughed together, though somewhat uneasily. Baby Buddha? Their little Derrie, only six years old? Kate shivered, there was something about this she didn't like. But Stephen said, "It's remarkable praise. No teacher of mine would have said such a thing about me, ever. Our sweet little Derrie who had so much trouble learning to tie his Shoelaces -- an incarnation of the Buddha!" They joked about whose genetic lineage must have been responsible, his or hers.

Yet it worried Kate sometimes that Derek was in fact so placid, amenable, good-natured. Just as he'd begun to sleep through an entire night of six, seven, eight hours while in his first months, so he seemed, at times, dreamy, precociously indifferent to other children taking advantage of him. "It doesn't matter, Mommy, I don't care," Derek insisted, and clearly this was so, but was it normal? At games, Derek didn't care much about winning, and so he rarely won. If he ran and shouted, it seemed to be in mimicry of other boys. Watching him trot after them, eager as a puppy, Kate felt her heart swoon with love of her sweet, vulnerable child. My own heart, exposed. My baby-love. She perceived that Derek would require protection through his life and it was her innocent maternal vanity to believe that so good, so radiant, so special, so blessed a being would naturally draw love to him; and this love, like a mantle of the gods, shimmering-gold, would be his protection.

5.

Yet what happened to Derek happened so swiftly and mysteriously that no one, it seemed, could have protected him. Not even Kate who was less than thirty feet away.

"The accident" -- it would be called.

"The accident in the pool" -- as if amplication were needed.

How many times Kate would repeat in her numbed, disbelieving voice, "I'd been watching Derek, of course. Without staring at him every moment --of course. And then, when I looked -- he was floating face down in the water."

Kate had brought Derek to swim in the children's pool at the Hudson Ridge Community Center as she did frequently during the summer. The warm, sunny July morning had been like any other, she'd had no premonition that anything out of the ordinary would be happening, and the "accident" itself would never have happened if there hadn't been, purely by chance, another commotion in the pool at the same time: a nervous, tearful ten-year-old girl, the daughter of friends of the Knights, had jumped off the end of the diving board and gotten water up her nose and was crying and thrashing about and the lifeguard had hurried into the water to comfort her, though she wasn't in any danger of drowning; Kate, too, had hurried to the edge of the pool, to watch, her attention was focussed on this minor incident, and the attention of other mothers at poolside; whatever happened to Derek, at the opposite end of the po01, had passed unnoticed. Derek had been swimming, or rather paddling, in his not-verycoordinated way, in water to his waist, and (this might have happened: it was a theory Kate would not wish to explore, lacking proof) an older boy, or boys (who'd bullied Derek in the past, in the pool) might have pushed him under, not meaning to seriously injure him (of course, Kate had to believe this: how could she face the boys' mothers otherwise?) and he'd panicked and swallowed water, flailed about desperately and swallowed more water, and (in theory, it hurt too much to wish to believe this) the boy, or boys, had continued to hold his head under water until (how many hellish seconds might have passed? ten? fifteen? ) he'd lost consciousness. His lungs filled with chlorine-treated water, he began to sink, taking in more water, breathing in water, beginning to drown, beginning to die.

The boy, or boys, who'd done this to Derek, if they'd done it (Kate had no proof, no one would offer proof, Derek would never make any accusation), were at least ten feet away from him when Kate saw him floating face down in the glittering aqua water, his pale brown hair lifting like seaweed, shoulders and back several inches below the surface. "Derek! Derek!" -- she ran blindly to leap into the pool and pull at his limp body, desperately lifting his head so that he could breathe: but he wasn't breathing. His eyes were partly open but unfocussed, his little body was strangely heavy. She was hearing a woman's screams--hysterical, crazed. At once the lifeguard blew his whistle, came to haul the unconscious child up onto the tile and began immediately to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; but Derek didn't begin to breathe, and didn't begin to breathe; Kate stood, dripping wet, staring down at the pale, unresisting body that was her son, her Derek, uncomprehending as if she'd been struck a violent blow on the head yet hadn't yet fallen, her eyes open, stricken with disbelief. This can't be happening. This is not happening. This is not real. Then she was being helped stumbling and sobbing into the rear of an ambulance. One of the paramedics, a red-haired girl who looked hardly older than sixteen, was comforting her, calling her Mrs. Knight. They were speeding to a hospital in the next suburb, and Derek died, in the ambulance he died, heart ceased to beat yet in the emergency room Derek was resuscitated, heart galvanized into beating again, and he began again to breathe, it would be said He was saved! Brought back to life.

Kate had had no time to assimilate either of these facts. The first, that Derek had died, she would see (she would be made to see, by Stephen) was absurd and illogical; he'd ceased breathing temporarily, and his heart had ceased beating temporarily, but he hadn't died. It was the second, that he'd been saved by medical technology, "brought back to life" she would focus upon; everyone would focus upon. Her husband, their families, relatives, friends; for this was the truer of the two facts, the more logical, reasonable.