Цитаты из книги Девственницы-самоубийцы

She had the rectitude, Joe Hill Conley later said, of someone who had just come from weeping in the next room. He had sensed (this said many years later, of course, when Joe Hill Conley claimed to tap at will the energy of his chakras) an ancient pain arising from Mrs. Lisbon, the sum of her people's griefs. "She came from a sad race," he said. "It wasn't only Cecilia. The sadness had started long before. Before America. The girls had it, too." He had never noticed her bifocals before. "They cut her eyes in half.

It was the decay that brought Muffie Perry back. Her grandmother's cycnoches had nearly died of blight; parasites overran her three extraordinary dendrobiums; and the bank of miniature masdevallias, whose purple velvet petals tipped in blood Mrs. Huntington Perry had herself bred through elaborate hybridization, looked for all the world like a rack of cheap nursery pansies. Her granddaughter had been volunteering her time in the hope of restoring the flowers to former glory, but she told us it was hopeless, hopeless. The plants were expected to grow in the light of a dungeon. Hoodlums jumped the back fence and ran through the greenhouse, uprooting plants for the fun of it. Muffie Perry had wounded one vandal by wielding a garden trowel. We had a hard time directing her attention back from the world of cracked windows, heaped dirt, unpaid admissions, and rats nesting in Egyptian bulrushes. Gradually, however, feeding the tiny faces of the orchids with an eyedropper filled with what looked like milk, she told us how the girls had appeared during their sessions with Miss Kilsem.

The truth was, even the wimpiest boys were more adept than Trip at asking girls out, because their sparrows' chests and knockknees had taught them perseverance, whereas Trip had never even had to dial a girl's phone number. It was all new to him: the memorization of strategic speeches, the trial runs of possible conversations, the yogic deep breathing, all leading up to the blind, headlong dive into the staticky sea of telephone lines. He hadn't suffered the eternity of the ring about to be picked up, didn't know the heart rush of hearing that incomparable voice suddenly linked with his own, the sense it gave of being too close to even see her, of being actually inside her ear. He had never felt the pain of lackluster responses, the dread of "Oh .. . hi," or the quick annihilation of "Who?" His beauty had left him without cunning

He didn't notice a single face as he took a seat. He saw neither teacher nor students, and was aware only of the heavenly light in the room, an orange glow from the autumnal foliage outside. The room seemed full of a sweet viscous liquid, a honey nearly light as air, which he breathed in. Time slowed down, and in his left ear the ringing of the cosmic Om started up clear as a telephone. When we suggested these details had been laced with the same THC in his blood, Trip Fontaine thrust a finger into the air, the only time his hands stopped shaking during the entire interview. "I know what it's like to be high," he said. "This was different." In the orange light the students' heads looked like sea anemones, undulating quietly, and the silence of the room was that of the ocean floor. "Every second is eternal," Trip told us, describing how as he sat in his desk the girl in front of him, for no apparent reason, had turned around and looked at him. He couldn't say she was beautiful because all he could see were her eyes. The rest of her face the pulpy lips, the blond sideburn fuzz, the nose with its candy-pink translucent nostrils-registered dimly as the two blue eyes lifted him on a sea wave and held him suspended. "She was the still point of the turning world," he told us, quoting Eliot, whose Collected Poems he had found on the shelf of the detoxification center. For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. "You never know what'll set the memory off," he told us. "A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything."

As the diary progresses, Cecilia begins to recede from her sisters and, in fact, from personal narrative of any kind. The first person singular ceases almost entirely, the effect akin to a camera's pulling away from the characters at the end of a movie, to show, in a series of dissolves, their house, street, city, country, and finally planet, which not only dwarfs but obliterates them. Her precocious prose turns to imersonal subjects, the commercial of the weeping Indian paddling his canoe along a polluted stream, or the body counts from the evening war