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

The man who'd been her husband backed away. That look of revulsion in his eyes. Your grief is seeking someone to blame you are an angry woman

But Rachael was not an angry woman. Not was she a morbidly grieving woman. She'd ceased dreaming of the lost baby, long ago. She remembered no dreams.

Am I am I alive? Hot knowing who this person was. Gripping her limp icy hand. There was kindness proffered here. But was this a person, exactly. Her eyesight was blurred, she seemed to be squinting through steam. A shape in white, where the face should have been there was only gauzy light like the moon. Am I? Is this -- alive? The medic (she would realize afterward who it was) had tried to answer her. He'd seemed to know what her garbled frightened words were. He'd tried to console her. Calling her ma 'am, that was all she would remember clearly. Ma'am he'd maybe said you're going to the hospital. Plausible to imagine he'd said Ma'am you're going to be all right just lie still. She'd been taken by ambulance to a hospital long ago in another city hemorrhaging from between her legs. This time, it seemed she'd been struck by lightning having stood recklessly at a window, in an electric storm? In the old Tudor house on Pine Ridge Road where no one now lived? The lights that had been flickering had gone out suddenly. In darkness she'd made her careful way downstairs, and in a denser darkness she'd groped her way into the kitchen, to get a flashlight from a drawer. And candles: she'd lighted candles to read by. It would be difficult to sleep, that night. She'd tried to work (often, Rachael worked through the night, under ordinary circumstances) but the candlelight generated strange slanted shadows from her own hand onto the paper. She was translating Virgil, that book of the Aeneid in which Aeneas, guided by the Sibyl, visits the Underworld. Virgil's Latin seemed to the translator chill and unyielding as stone. Stones in her mouth. Stones she must suck, her only nourishment. This Underworld, sunk in feculent darkness. Monster-shapes abided there that were yet mere phantoms to be dispersed as empty air, if, like Aeneas, you had the power to dispel them. The souls of the unborn crowding near. Like the milling confusion of a subway platform in rush hour, if the lights had gone out. Infants wailing to be born who'd never been born, and would never now be born. They'd lost their chance forever.

Yes, Rachael was alive.

They smiled, assuring her. Telling her such good news.

She'd been admitted to an emergency room. She'd wakened fully, but confused, with a pounding headache. Her eyes felt to her like burst egg yolks. She was lying on a gurney, trying to sit up to protest, she wasn't hurt, why was she here? Feeling as if she'd been lifted twenty feet above the earth and let go.

Her crotch was damp, where pee had leaked in panicked dribbles out of her, at the time of her collapse. Embarrassing, before strangers.

"But -- what happened to me?"

She was told what astonished her, yet made immediate sense: she'd suffered a severe shock when apparently she'd touched a live, broken electrical wire in the road near her house; she'd been knocked unconscious. Luckily for her, the shock hadn't been strong enough to kill her. Luckily for her, a neighbor had discovered her and called an ambulance. It was sheerly luck, too, that telephones were working on Pine Ridge Road and that an ambulance had been able to make its way through the storm debris in the city, to get to her in time.

In time. Rachael was listening anxiously, and with respect.

She would have time to ponder afterward what the terse expression in time meant.

"I nearly died, then? Oh God."

An older doctor came to speak with her briefly. She listened to his voice that came to her from a distance, as if over a poor telephone line. Words carefully chosen and reasonable yet unwieldy as small stones being pushed through a viscous liquid. Rachael knew that something was wrong. Something was missing. What?

A nurse had given her a codeine tablet, still her head pounded with pain. She heard herself ask, almost inaudibly, "The boy, is he -- ? Is he all right, too?"

The doctor asked her to repeat her question, which Rachael did.

"Boy? What boy?"

Rachael said, uncertainly, "A boy on a bicycle.... He'd been knocked out by the wire, too."

The doctor shook his head. "There was no boy brought into emergency."

"They didn't just leave him there, did they? I think he was badly hurt. I was afraid he'd stopped breathing...."

"Where was this boy, exactly?"

"Where I was! On Pine Ridge Road. Where the ambulance attendants found me."

"But there doesn't seem to have been a boy. I can check our records...."

"Of course there was a boy! About ten years old, riding a bicycle. I don't know many people in the neighborhood anymore, I didn't recognize him. He must have run over a broken wire and was shocked and fell and I went to help him, that's why I...was hurt. I must have touched the wire trying to help him."

Out of Rachael's earshot there was a consultation. She was sitting up now on the gurney. She was becoming agitated. An attendant from the emergency crew was summoned to speak with her and he too insisted there'd been no boy -- "Only you, ma'am. In the road."

Rachael said, "But what happened to him? He was just a little boy. He couldn't have gotten up and walked away!"