"Carrol, Jonathan - Fish In A Barrel (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Carroll Jonathan)

But old Kropik didn't appear affected by this staggering coincidence. He had
picked up a perfectly sharpened Yellow pencil and was softly tapping its pink
eraser end on his desk -- one of the many signs he was irritated. He was staring
at Aoyagi with his patented "Can we move forward?" look. Kropik and his looks.
Kropik and his life.

Once again Aoyagi realized how much he disliked his coworker. Disliked him and
his abstemiousness, his Orderly life, his oh-so carefully wrapped sandwiches.
Disliked Kropik's opinions on everything (even when he agreed with them),
disliked his safe, never more than all right, no-risk days, no-risk anything.
The pressed slacks, the nest egg of safe investments, the professional (dead)
smile when in truth the only smile he had in his heart was for order. Because
Kropik was nothing else but order -- alphabetized and color-coded. Aoyagi was
sure if they cut the other's heart open they would find brown file cabinets and
bar codes inside instead of blood and muscle.

In this miserable room where people came to try and undo the tight knot of their
failed lives via lost memories, Kropik was content pulling files and handing
them over. With never so much as a grunt or a lifted eyebrow when he saw these
sad sacks one and all melt into jelly when they were confronted by the full ugly
magnitude of their lives in Cinerama, Dolby surround, eight-track twelve-track
give the dog a bone ....

At least he could have been a sadist. If only Kropik had gotten a sick kick out
of seeing these people laid flat time after time after time. But not even that.
He would hand over a file, watch the person implode and then offer them exactly
one pale yellow (always yellow, never any other color) tissue out of a box he
kept in the upper right hand drawer of his desk. Aoyagi often peeked in those
drawers when Kropik was out of the office to see if anything was amiss, had
changed, moved, was different. Never. Never once was a thing out of place. The
eternally fixed longitude and latitude of his scissors, paper clips, rubber
bands. Everything exactly where it should be and always was.

Yet how could that be when day after day the man's job was to toss bombs into
people's lives and be there to see them explode? How could he never be touched,
affected, worn down by the years of this terrible job? Where was his soul?

Aoyagi often wept. He would tramp disconsolately home from a bar, a movie, or a
park bench, and sitting alone in his apartment, weep. He'd had a wife, a dog, a
cat. All gone. None of them had cared what he did for a living so long as he
brought home a paycheck. His wife left, the dog died, the cat jumped over the
moon for all he knew. But that was okay because he didn't miss them. Over the
years this job had stripped him bare. The only things he seemed to have left
were a desire to read, look at tall blond women and hope that whatever life he
had left would be better in eleven years when his retirement began. Nevertheless
he still had enough compassion left to carry a truckful of sadness inside his
soul for the people who came to this office hoping for redemption, a small
miracle, at the very least a way home. Weirdly enough, he knew he wept sometimes
because he missed these doomed strangers. Whoever came here was an optimist, a