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

Joyce Carol Oates - In Shock

Woke in the ambulance

Didn't know what had hit me, and woke in the speeding ambulance

Speaking of the accident (as she would afterward call it, when she spoke of it at all) she intended to give, to friends, an account of her own folly. How impulsive she was. Yet brave. Yet reckless. Woke in the ambulance and the first thing I asked, Am I still alive?

Rachael her name was spelled in the old way RACHAEL.

Rachael this was a sign (she'd so interpreted it, since girlhood) of belonging to another, more significant time.

Rachael she was not a girl any longer. A woman who'd behaved, in an emergency, without due caution.

But the boy was hurt! I had to help him.

Yes. There was a boy!

What relief, to get outside! After the storm.

She'd walked on Pine Ridge Road in the breathless aftermath of pelting rain, gale-force winds. Oh, but Rachael felt good, outdoors after that long thunderous night! Her breath steamed. For mid-April, it was damned cold. But blindingly bright. The storm had been blown away. The sun, pale and opalescent, looked to have been washed clean. Everywhere were puddles glaring with light like broken pieces of mirror. The road was strewn with storm debris. Fallen limbs of trees, enormous branches, an uprooted, aged pine. A heavy pine bough had crushed a neighbor's mailbox. Tree branches were twined in telephone lines that drooped as in a surreal work of art. Beside the road high tension wires hung loose, crackling dangerously, giving off visible sparks. Rachael heard a warning sound as of a hive of maddened wasps.

In the night she'd heard the Harpie-cries. Spirits of storm that carry souls to Hades.

Hiking now in the center of the road, where there were fewer puddles. This was a semi-rural, semi-suburban neighborhood built on a densely wooded glacial ridge above a city of forty thousand inhabitants, in eastern Pennsylvania. Most of the houses on Pine Ridge Road were small mansions originally built by railroad and mining executives in the early decades of the twentieth century; made of sandstone, or limestone, or brick-and-stucco, or granite. Some of these old houses were in immaculate condition; others were weatherworn and grimy, with peeling paint, rotting shutters and roofs, overgrown shrubbery and scrawny evergreens. The part-timbered Tudor house belonging to Rachael's parents was neither in immaculate condition nor was it a neighborhood eyesore, but its leaky roof did need repair and its living room fireplace had been a kind of inverted fountain during the storm, spewing sooty rainwater out onto the floor. Rachael had been alone in the house, up from Philadelphia for the weekend. Her parents, retired, lived in Florida. They were reluctant to sell the house, which had been built in 1911 by Rachael's father's grandfather, and Rachael hadn't pushed them, though the high property tax had become her burden. As a portion of her parents' expenses, in their retirement village in Coral Gables, had become her burden. One by one the elegant old houses of Pine Ridge were being sold to developers to be ignominiously razed and replaced by smaller houses or condominiums. It was only a matter of time before the De Long house was sold, too. Rachael knew. She wasn't a sentimental person. But to sell the house would be to break forever with the past and Rachael wasn't ready for that, yet.

For once the past is gone it's gone. Time seemed to her a sickle-shaped shadow like that caused by a lunar eclipse, swiftly passing over the earth's surface, over the startled faces of observers, no sooner glimpsed than gone.

Suddenly she was hearing a noise behind her, in the roadway. She'd been approaching the cul-de-sac of Pine Ridge Road where pines grew in profusion on a steep, rocky hill and no houses had ever been built, thinking it strange that no one else was out on this bright, blazing Sunday morning after an exhausting storm) hearing then a sound of movement behind her, and turning in surprise to see a boy on a shiny bicycle, pedaling furiously. The boy was no more than ten years old, with a pale, plumpish face and jaws set in a look of adult aggression. He'd come out of nowhere. He ignored Rachael, who had to step aside. Glassy blue eyes flicking toward Rachael and in the same instant away, as if she were of absolutely no significance to him though he'd nearly run her down. He was wearing a windbreaker with a hood, and his hands were bare. He pedaled his bicycle hunched over as if racing.

A cruel, crude face. In a child.

Rachael paused in the road, staring after the boy. Where was he going? The road dead-ended within a few hundred feet. How could parents allow a child so young to be riding a bicycle on this road, in such conditions? The boy was weaving his bicycle skillfully around tree debris, making a game of it, sharply turning his front wheel from side to side, now standing up on the pedals, shaking his handlebars as you might shake the reins of a horse, and crashing through less substantial branches in a flutter of wet leaves not seeming to mind if the new, shiny bicycle was getting scratched, or twigs were catching in the spokes. That face. But not familiar. Where? Rachael saw in horror that the boy was propelling his bicycle directly toward one of the loose wires that lay partly in the road, drooping down from a pole like a broken-backed snake. Before she could scream a warning, the front wheel of the bicycle ran over the wire, and immediately the rear wheel, she heard an outcry like that of an injured animal, and in the next instant both the boy and the bicycle fell over, skidding on the roadway; the shiny-spoked wheels were spinning.

"Are you hurt? Oh my God --"

Rachael was crouching beside the boy, seeing his face had gone deathly white and his eyes had rolled back into his head. Had he stopped breathing? The broken wire, tangled in the front wheel of the bicycle, was making a high thrumming-buzzing sound. Not thinking of the risk to herself, Rachael tried to dislodge the boy from beneath the bicycle, in so doing leaned against the bicycle, and in that instant she was knocked backward as if she'd been struck, out of nowhere, a blow like a fiery comet.

IN HADES, the spirits of the dead have no speech and are blind and groping and of no more substance than sooty smoke. Your hand passes through them. If you try to embrace them, you embrace only air. Only by sipping blood can they simulate life, but only for a brief while. Then they fade away. The spirits of the dead not fully dead. But never again to be alive.

Didn't know what hit woke in the ambulance

Her mouth stiff as if she'd had a stroke. (Had she had a stroke?) Asking am I alive am I still alive? For she'd believed she must be dead. Or (this seemed quite logical at the time, though clearly it was a mad speculation) what had been Rachael had somehow been dislodged and jolted into another body, into another brain that didn't operate as Rachael's did. So, speaking, she could not shape the words she wished. These were stones too large for her mouth. Her tongue was too long for her mouth. The wailing siren was confused with the storm. Was it still night, and still the storm? She'd been standing at an upstairs window of the darkened old house as rain lashed furiously at the windowpane. She'd been headstrong as her parents used to scold her, with affection, and her former husband had scolded; she was impetuous, stubborn, unyielding without affection, standing at a window watching lightning, the night sky vividly illuminated by lightning like suddenly irradiated veins. Oh but her heart beat quickly, as thunder broke in deafening peals about her head! I love to be alone. I love my aloneness. And the next minute strapped onto a stretcher. Punishment for being headstrong, standing at a window during a thunderstorm, and alone.

Beside her crouching Charon the boatman with his fiery eyes.

Rachael her name was spelled in the old way R A C H A E L.

Rachael she'd lost the baby at three months, two weeks and one day. She'd been a young woman in her mid-twenties at the time. A decade ago. She'd ceased grieving long ago. She was a poet and a translator and she traveled a good deal and she'd ceased grieving for what was lost, and irretrievable, as she'd ceased being a woman, a wife, a mother-to-be. The man who'd been her husband at that time and the baby's father had meant to console her. Darling look as the doctor has said it's possibly for the best nature spontaneously abhors her errors And Rachael laughed saying Aborts, you mean aborts her errors and her husband was offended by Rachael's laughter and by her tone of voice. Aborts isn't that what I said, nature spontaneously aborts her errors And Rachael asked calmly why is nature her why is nature she