"Attanasio, A A - Radix 02 - In Other Worlds 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Attanasio A.A)

bankruptcy. He would never have had anything to do with a
business as tattered as the one riven-faced Caitlin had revealed
to him were Sheelagh not there. She was a smart kid, finishing
high school a year ahead of her class and sharp enough with
figures and deferredpayment planning to keep the Shamrock
floating long after her besotted mother would have lost it.
Sheelagh was the one, in her. defiant-child's manner, who had
shown him' that the business could be saved. The
neighborhood was growing with the artistic overflow from
Greenwich Village, and there was hope, if they could find the
money and the imagination, to draw a new, more affluent
clientele. After talking with the girl, Carl had flared with ideas,
and he had backed them up with the few thousand dollars he
had saved. The debts were paid off, old Caitlin reluctantly
became the house chef, and Carl took over the bartending, the
books, and the refurbishing. A year later, the Shamrock had
almost broken even as the Blue Apple, a name Carl had
compressed from the Big Apple and the certain melancholy of
his hopeless love for Sheelagh. That love had recently increased
in both ardor and hopelessness now that Sheelagh had
finished high school and had come to work full-time in the
Blue Apple while she saved for college..
On Carl Schirmer's last day as a human, when he entered
,the restaurant with his collar of red hair sticking out from his
head, his clothes knotted with static, and his eyes shining with
the beauty of the day, Sheelagh was glad to see him. The new
tables they had ordered had come in and were stacked around
the bar, legs up like a bamboo forest. "Aren''t they fine?"
Sheelagh asked.
In the year since they had first met, she had filled out to
the full dimensions of a woman, and Carl was not

addressing the tables when he answered: "Beautiful. just
beautiful."
With his help, she moved aside the old Formicatop table
from the choice position beside the window and placed the
new wooden one there. Sunlight smeared its top like warm
butter. She sighed with satisfaction, turned to Carl, and put her
arms about him in a jubilant hug. "It's happening, Carl. The
Blue Apple is beginning to shine." She pulled back, startled.
"You smell wonderful. What are you wearing?"
He sniffed his shoulder and caught the cool fragrance
misting off him, a scent kindred to a mountain slope. "I don't
know," he mumbled.
"Long night on the town, huh?" She smiled slyly. She
truly liked Carl. He was the most honest man she'd ever
known, a bald, boy-faced pal, soft around the middle but with
a quiet heart and an inward certainty. His experience as an
account exec had earned him managerial skills that to Sheelagh
seemed a dazzling ease with the world of things.. For the first