Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

“You loved me . . . because I was worthless?”

“Well, what did you think you were?”

“You loved me for being rotten?”

“What else did you have to offer? But you didn’t have the humility to appreciate it. I wanted to be generous, I wanted to give you security—what security is there in being loved for one’s virtues? The competition’s wide open, like a jungle market place, a better person will always come along to beat you! But I—I was willing to love you for your flaws, for your faults and weaknesses, for your ignorance, your crudeness, your vulgarity—and that’s safe, you’d have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, you could be yourself, your real, stinking, sinful, ugly self—everybody’s self is a gutter—but you could hold my love, with nothing demanded of you!”

“You wanted me to . . . accept your love . . . as alms'”

“Did you imagine that you could earn it? Did you imagine that you could deserve to marry me, you poor little tramp? I used to buy the likes of you for the price of a meal! I wanted you to know, with every step you took, with every mouthful of caviar you swallowed, that you owed it all to me, that you had nothing and were nothing and could never hope to equal, deserve or repay!”

“I . . . tried . . . to deserve it.”

“Of what use would you be to me, if you had?”

“You didn’t want me to?”

“Oh, you goddamn fool!”

“You didn’t want me to improve? You didn’t want me to rise? You thought me rotten and you wanted me to stay rotten?”

“Of what use would you be to me, if you earned it all, and I had to work to hold you, and you could trade elsewhere if you chose?”

“You wanted it to be alms . . . for both of us and from both?

You wanted us to be two beggars chained to each other?”

“Yes, you goddamn evangelist! Yes, you goddamn hero worshipper!

Yes!”

“You chose me because I was worthless?”

“Yes!”

“You’re lying, Jim.”

His answer was only a startled glance of astonishment.

“Those girls that you used to buy for the price of a meal, they would have been glad to let their real selves become a gutter, they would have taken your alms and never tried to rise, but you would not marry one of them. You married me, because you knew that I did not accept the gutter, inside or out, that I was struggling to rise and would go on struggling—didn’t you?”

“Yes!” he cried.

Then the headlight she had felt rushing upon her, hit its goal—and she screamed in the bright explosion of the impact—she screamed in physical terror, backing away from him.

“What’s the matter with you?” he cried, shaking, not daring to see in her eyes the thing she had seen.

She moved her hands in groping gestures, half-waving it away, half trying to grasp it; when she answered, her words did not quite name it, but they were the only words she could find: “You . . . you’re a killer . . . for the sake of killing . . .”

It was too close to the unnamed; shaking with terror, he swung out blindly and struck her in the face.

She fell against the side of an armchair, her head striking the floor, but she raised her head in a moment and looked up at him blankly, without astonishment, as if physical reality were merely taking the form she had expected. A single pear-shaped drop of blood went slithering slowly from the corner of her mouth.

He stood motionless—and for a moment they looked at each other, as if neither dared to move.

She moved first. She sprang to her feet—and ran. She ran out of the room, out of the apartment—he heard her running down the hall, tearing open the iron door of the emergency stairway, not waiting to ring for the elevator.

She ran down the stairs, opening doors on random landings, running through the twisting hallways of the building, then down the stairs again, until she found herself in the lobby and ran to the street.

After a while, she saw that she was walking down a littered sidewalk in a dark neighborhood, with an electric bulb glaring in the cave of a subway entrance and a lighted billboard advertising soda crackers on the black roof of a laundry. She did not remember how she had come here. Her mind seemed to work in broken spurts, without connections.

She knew only that she had to escape and that escape was impossible.

She had to escape from Jim, she thought. Where?—she asked, looking around her with a glance like a cry of prayer. She would have seized upon a job in a five-and-ten, or in that laundry, or in any of the dismal shops she passed. But she would work, she thought, and the harder she worked, the more malevolence she would draw from the people around her, and she would not know when truth would be expected of her and when a lie, but the stricter her honesty, the greater the fraud she would be asked to suffer at their hands. She had seen it before and had borne it, in the home of her family, in the shops of the slums, but she had thought that these were vicious exceptions, chance evils, to escape and forget. Now she knew that they were not exceptions, that theirs was the code accepted by the world, that it was a creed of living, known by all, but kept unnamed, leering at her from people’s eyes in that sly, guilty look she had never been able to understand—and at the root of the creed, hidden by silence, lying in wait for her in the cellars of the city and in the cellars of their souls, there was a thing with which one could not live.

Why are you doing it to me?—she cried soundlessly to the darkness around her. Because you’re good—some enormous laughter seemed to be answering from the roof tops and from the sewers. Then I won’t want to be good any longer—But you will—I don’t have to—You will—I can’t bear it—You will.

She shuddered and walked faster—but ahead of her, in the foggy distance, she saw the calendar above the roofs of the city—it was long past midnight and the calendar said: August 6, but it seemed to her suddenly that she saw September 2 written above the city in letters of blood—and she thought: If she worked, if she struggled, if she rose., she would take a harder beating with each step of her climb, until, at the end, whatever she reached, be it a copper company or an unmortgaged cottage, she would see it seized by Jim on some September 2 and she would see it vanish to pay for the parties where Jim made his deals with his friends.

Then I won’t!—she screamed and whirled around and went running back along the street—but it seemed to her that in the black sky. grinning at her from the steam of the laundry, there weaved an enormous figure that would hold no shape, but its grin remained the same on its changing faces, and its face was Jim’s and her childhood preacher’s and the woman social worker’s from the personnel department of the five-and-ten—and the grin seemed to say to her: People like you will always stay honest, people like you will always struggle to rise, people like you will always work, so we’re safe and you have no choice.

She ran. When she looked around her once more, she was walking down a quiet street, past the glass doorways where lights were burning in the carpeted lobbies of luxurious buildings. She noticed that she was limping, and saw that the heel of her pump was loose; she had broken it somewhere in her blank span of running.

From the sudden space of a broad intersection, she looked at the great skyscrapers in the distance. They were vanishing quietly into a veil of fog, with the faint breath of a glow behind them, with a few lights like a smile of farewell. Once, they had been a promise, and from the midst of the stagnant sloth around her she had looked to them for proof that another kind of men existed. Now she knew that they were tombstones, slender obelisks soaring in memory of the men who had been destroyed for having created them, they were the frozen shape of the silent cry that the reward of achievement was martyrdom.

Somewhere in one of those vanishing towers, she thought, there was Dagny—but Dagny was a lonely victim, fighting a losing battle, to be destroyed and to sink into fog like the others.

There is no place to go, she thought and stumbled on—T can’t stand still, nor move much longer—I can neither work nor rest—I can neither surrender nor fight—but this . . . this is what they want of me, this is where they want me—neither living nor dead, neither thinking nor insane, but just a chunk of pulp that screams with fear, to be shaped by them as they please, they who have no shape of their own.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *