"Amy Sterling Casil - Jonny Punkinhead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Casil Amy Sterling)

large, brown, and very pretty, I can pretend for a moment he's a normal child.
He tums toward me as he laughs, and it's impossible to pretend any longer.

Jonny's third eye stares vacantly. He can see only from his left eye, not the
one on the right or the one in the center of his large, flat forehead. I gently
stroke his veined head, which is twice as large as the head of a child his age
should be, and I whisper that his grandmother will be very pleased with his
gift.

Someone has named the syndrome from which Jonny suffers Webern syndrome. it's
not a common birth defect, but it's one of the more unpleasant conditions
children have come to suffer from in this, our pestilent age.

I'm Hedrick Arian, forty-six years old, a doctor of education, not medicine.
I've been the administrator of Southern California Sherman Institute for
Differently Abled Children for six years. Jonny is nearly seven. He and I
arrived at this place on the same day. He is a part of the landscape, like our
chairs, molded in solid hunks of indestructible plastic, the mottled gray
composite floors, the nurses, the aides, the everpresent medication and the
constant stream of visitors who want to gawk at the children.

"Gramma is coming," he says, spraying my face with his spittle. "This year, I
know she'll come."

"Of course she will," I say. The lies fall so easily from my lips these days. I
pat Jonny's twisted back and watch him wheel slowly from my office, waving
goodbye with one tiny six-fingered hand.

Jonny's family signed him over to the state and has forgotten he was ever born.
Part of me understands their distress at bearing such a child into the world.
Another part of me knows the history. and I can't help but feel a nasty stab of
fury in my gut, because Jonny's mother drank daily during her pregnancy, and
took every drug she could find in staggering quantities.

Was it the drugs that made Jonny what he is? I don't know. They say the virus
which altered Jonny's genes is both sly and opportunistic. The thing at work
inside of him found a dirty needle somewhere or came through a perforated
condom, that much we do know.

When I first came, my friends would ask, "How can you stand all those little
children, suffering?" They said this in a disbelieving tone that really meant,
"I can't believe you're taking care of those wretches."

Now, they ask less often.

Years ago, Sherman housed developmentally disabled children, the ones they
called "morons" and "imbeciles." But no longer. This disease Jonny has, the DNA
thief, started a decade ago. The initial wave of the stricken didn't fall ill,
so most of them didn't realize that anything was happening, while the tiny bit
of protein that saw them as a universe of meat lodged in their gametes,