"Gene Wolfe - Morning Glory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

MORNING-GLORY
Gene Wolfe


Smythe put his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. He
was a short and untidy man now well entered on middle age, and his face
showed embarrassment.
"Well, go on," Black said.
Smythe said, "My father felt bread was sacred; if a piece was accidently
dropped on the floor he would demand that it be picked up at once and
dusted off and eaten; if someone stepped on it he was furious."
"Was this element of your father's character present in reality, or is it only
a part of the dream logic?"
Smythe put his head down and looked at Black in irritation. "This is just
background," he said. "My father would say, 'Bread is the life of man, you
dirty little hyena. Pick it up.' He had been brought up in Germany."
"Specifically, what was your dream?" Black opened his notebook.
Smythe hesitated. For years now he had been giving Black entries, and
he had almost always made them up, thinking them out on the bus he took
to the campus each morning. It seemed now a sort of desecration, a cheat,
to tell Black a real dream. "I was a vine," he said, "and I was pounding on a
translucent wall. I knew there was light on the other side, but it didn't do me
any good where I was. My father's voice kept saying: See! See! See! Over
and over like that. My father is dead."
"I had supposed so," Black said. "What do you think this dream has to do
with your father's reverence for bread?"
More disturbed by the dream than be wanted Black to know, Smythe
shrugged. "What I was trying to communicate was that my father had a sort
of reverence for food. 'You are what you eat,' and all that sort of thing. I
chewed morning-glory seeds once."
"Morning-glory seeds?"
"Yes. Morning-glory seeds are supposed to be a sort of hallucinogen,
like LSD or peyote."
"I suppose your father caught you and punished you?"
Smythe shook himself with irritation. "Hell no. This wasn't when I was a
child; it was about three years ago." He felt frustrated by Black's invincible
obtuseness. "All the blah-blah was going on in the newspapers about
drugs, and I felt that as a member of the department I ought to know at
least a little bit about it. I didn't know where to get LSD or any of those other
things, but of course I had morning-glory seed right in the lab." He
remembered the paper seed packet with its preposterously huge blue
flower and how frightened he had been.
"You didn't think you should obtain departmental permission?"
"I felt," Smythe said carefully, "that it would be better for the department if
it were not on record as having officially approved of something of that
sort." Besides, he told himself savagely, you were afraid that you would
get the permission and then back out; that's the truth, and if you tell too
many lies you may forget it.
"I suppose you were probably right," Black said. He closed his notebook
with a bored snap. "Did you really have hallucinations?"