Octavia Butler - The Evening and the Morning and the Night.pdf

(185 KB) Pobierz
667890191 UNPDF
THE EVENING
AND THE
MORNING AND
THE NIGHT
Octavia Butler
When I was fifteen and trying to show my independence by
getting careless with my diet, my parents took me to a
Duryea-Gode disease ward. They wanted me to see, they said,
 
where I was headed if I wasn’t careful. In fact, it was where I was
headed no matter what. It was only a matter of when: now or later.
My parents were putting in their vote for later.
I won’t describe the ward. It’s enough to say that when they
brought me home, I cut my wrists. I did a thorough job of it, old
Roman style in a bathtub of warm water. Almost made it. My
father dislocated his shoulder breaking down the bathroom door.
He and I never forgave each other for that day.
The disease got him almost three years later—just before I
went off to college. It was sudden. It doesn’t happen that way
often. Most people notice themselves beginning to drift—or their
relatives notice—and they make arrangements with their chosen
institution. People who are noticed and who resist going in can be
locked up for a week’s observation. I don’t doubt that that
observation period breaks up a few families. Sending someone
away for what turns out to be a false alarm… Well, it isn’t the sort
of thing the victim is likely to forgive or forget. On the other hand,
not sending someone away in time—missing the signs or having a
person go off suddenly without signs—is inevitably dangerous for
the victim. I’ve never heard of it going as badly, though, as it did in
my family. People normally injure only themselves when their time
comes—unless someone is stupid enough to try to handle them
without the necessary drugs or restraints.
My father had killed my mother, then killed himself. I wasn’t
home when it happened. I had stayed at school later than usual,
rehearsing graduation exercises. By the time I got home, there were
cops everywhere. There was an ambulance, and two attendants
were wheeling someone out on a stretcher—someone covered.
More than covered. Almost… bagged.
The cops wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t find out until later
exactly what had happened. I wish I’d never found out. Dad had
killed Mom, then skinned her completely. At least that’s how I
hope it happened. I mean I hope he killed her first. He broke some
 
of her ribs, damaged her heart. Digging.
Then he began tearing at himself, through skin and bone,
digging. He had managed to reach his own heart before he died. It
was an especially bad example of the kind of thing that makes
people afraid of us. It gets some of us into trouble for picking at a
pimple or even for daydreaming. It has inspired restrictive laws,
created problems with jobs, housing, schools… The Duryea-Gode
Disease Foundation has spent millions telling the world that
people like my father don’t exist.
A long time later, when I had gotten myself together as best I
could, I went to college—to the University of Southern
California—on a Dilg scholarship. Dilg is the retreat you try to
send your out-of-control DGD relatives to. It’s run by controlled
DGDs like me, like my parents while they lived. God knows how
any controlled DGD stands it. Anyway, the place has a waiting list
miles long. My parents put me on it after my suicide attempt, but
chances were, I’d be dead by the time my name came up.
I can’t say why I went to college—except that I had been
going to school all my life and didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t
go with any particular hope. Hell, I knew what I was in for
eventually. I was just marking time. Whatever I did was just
marking time. If people were willing to pay me to go to school and
mark time, why not do it?
The weird part was, I worked hard, got top grades. If you
work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget
for a while about the things that do.
Sometimes I thought about trying suicide again. How was it
I’d had the courage when I was fifteen but didn’t have it now? Two
DGD parents—both religious, both as opposed to abortion as they
were to suicide. So they had trusted God and the promises of
modern medicine and had a child. But how could I look at what
had happened to them and trust anything?
 
I majored in biology. Non-DGDs say something about our
disease makes us good at the sciences—genetics, molecular
biology, biochemistry… That something was terror. Terror and a
kind of driving hopelessness. Some of us went bad and became
destructive before we had to—yes, we did produce more than our
share of criminals. And some of us went
good—spectacularly—and made scientific and medical history.
These last kept the doors at least partly open for the rest of us.
They made discoveries in genetics, found cures for a couple of rare
diseases, made advances against other diseases that weren’t so
rare—including, ironically, some forms of cancer. But they’d found
nothing to help themselves. There had been nothing since the latest
improvements in the diet, and those came just before I was born.
They, like the original diet, gave more DGDs the courage to have
children. They were supposed to do for DGDs what insulin had
done for diabetics—give us a normal or nearly normal life span.
Maybe they had worked for someone somewhere. They hadn’t
worked for anyone I knew.
Biology school was a pain in the usual ways. I didn’t eat in
public anymore, didn’t like the way people stared at my
biscuits—cleverly dubbed “dog biscuits” in every school I’d ever
attended. You’d think university students would be more creative. I
didn’t like the way people edged away from me when they caught
sight of my emblem. I’d begun wearing it on a chain around my
neck and putting it down inside my blouse, but people managed to
notice it anyway. People who don’t eat in public, who drink nothing
more interesting than water, who smoke nothing at all—people like
that are suspicious. Or rather, they make others suspicious. Sooner
or later, one of those others, finding my fingers and wrists bare,
would fake an interest in my chain. That would be that. I couldn’t
hide the emblem in my purse. If anything happened to me, medical
people had to see it in time to avoid giving me the medications
they might use on a normal person. It isn’t just ordinary food we
have to avoid, but about a quarter of a Physicians’ Desk Reference of
widely used drugs. Every now and then there are news stories
 
about people who stopped carrying their emblems—probably
trying to pass as normal. Then they have an accident. By the time
anyone realizes there is anything wrong, it’s too late. So I wore my
emblem. And one way or another, people got a look at it or got the
word from someone who had. “She is !” Yeah.
At the beginning of my third year, four other DGDs and I
decided to rent a house together. We’d all had enough of being
lepers twenty-four hours a day. There was an English major. He
wanted to be a writer and tell our story from the inside—which had
only been done thirty or forty times before. There was a
special-education major who hoped the handicapped would accept
her more readily than the able-bodied, a premed who planned to go
into research, and a chemistry major who didn’t really know what
she wanted to do.
Two men and three women. All we had in common was our
disease, plus a weird combination of stubborn intensity about
whatever we happened to be doing and hopeless cynicism about
everything else. Healthy people say no one can concentrate like a
DGD. Healthy people have all the time in the world for stupid
generalizations and short attention spans.
We did our work, came up for air now and then, ate our
biscuits, and attended classes. Our only problem was
house-cleaning. We worked out a schedule of who would clean
what when, who would deal with the yard, whatever. We all agreed
on it; then, except for me, everyone seemed to forget about it. I
found myself going around reminding people to vacuum, clean the
bathroom, mow the lawn… I figured they’d all hate me in no time,
but I wasn’t going to be their maid, and I wasn’t going to live in
filth. Nobody complained. Nobody even seemed annoyed. They
just came up out of their academic daze, cleaned, mopped, mowed,
and went back to it. I got into the habit of running around in the
evening reminding people. It didn’t bother me if it didn’t bother
them.
 

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin