Witz полностью

We asked the questions — and anything they answered we questioned again and again. And this was how it worked for generations, in every land and in all its languages forever. Call it a parasitic symbiosis, call it Ishmael — just don’t call it late for dinner, was the joke. Some years, some centuries, were better than others. America, for one. The here and now, the recently at least.

For us, no questions were forbidden — they were all our sons, and however they were born to us we loved them; we brought them up without an image, letting them take whatever form they would. As for our firstborn son, we named him Why? In every generation, he’s born beautiful, which is forgivable, and brilliant, which can be forgiven, too, but he’s also born blessed and chosen, and so is hated by the world. As he is pure and peaceful, he’s killed and dies without a thought. In every generation. We are proud, and loud with grief, and so we mourn him by praying his own name.

Though Why? is never asked or answered, only said. Or else it’s both asked and answered, or neither and green, flint as much as diamond. This is where the difficulties begin, when the generations become tangled, ensnared — trippedup on marks of punctuation…interrogatories phrased falsely as pronouncements, prophecy no longer extolled from the mountaintop but whispered from the valleys, without authority, unsure. It’s that we have forgotten how to ask — how to bring into this answering world a boy who is Himself a question. And so what ensures survival is not to search for Why? but instead to search for others who also search for Why? then to embrace them, give them gifts and marry them off to our sisters. This is the only way to peace. In this way, we increase our inheritance, which are our generations — and soon the Why? it’s said, becomes less a search than a limb. And then less a limb than a germ — a gene. Passed down. Flung among. Reactive, it’s been said. In our day, this inheritance has been programmed for extinction. Traits come up for expiration. A breath — expired. Rumors abound. After their death, the world deals only with the second rate, trafficks exclusively amid the middling and managing, the niggling clerks, the bores and the hopeless…gone are the thinkers; remaining are only the losers, the gentile. Unspeakable, thy name is mediocrity. It’s the best they have. We might as well make do.

And did they ever make do! Garden, Inc., its president Der, with the approval then partnership of the Shade Administration selling stock in stock, in the drained blood of the Affliated to anyone who’d afford it; huge banks stored in the holds of those tankers anchored out in flowing water past the freeze, a haul of the consanguine made public, nominally, in concept — not that any of these shareholders would ever come into actual physical possession of so precious a commodity, but — the coffers cough, spit thick gobs of gold. Though the blood it’s just a portion, a peripherally profitable venture, of this government scheme only vaguely privatized within the icicled gates of the Garden to preserve for the powerful the merest assurance of plausible deniability — this project proposing to study the physiological and psychological conditions of the ingathered survivors, which means tests: the laborious filling out of forms by which they sign themselves away, assenting to all manner of invasive procedures not limited to the sampling of everything from everywhere, whenever, intensive patience tries, the trial withholding of approval, hat and shoetightening, protracted submersion within lukewarm water; damningly, the injection of miscellaneous fluids, spuriously saving plasmic transfusions, veined in the hues of the last rainbow ever to be hung sagging over Liberty scorched to the east.