"Paul Di Filippo - A year in the Linnear City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

Diego lived in the Borough of Gritsavage. Population: 100,000 or so, distributed up and down one
hundred Blocks; current Mayor: the loudly opinionated Jobo Copperknob; ambiance: despite the
Borough's grim appellation, quite cultured and congenial. Diego's digs: a Streetview apartment on the
10,394,850th Block of Broadway, above a fruit and vegetable store named Gimlett's Produce. (His
father dwelled just a few Blocks Downtown.) The bluestone building housing Diego and his immediate
neighbors occupied the Riverside of Broadway.

Streetview and Riverside both: sweet. (Not always thus. Diego frequently winced to remember a
childhood of grim days and eerie nights spent in the same apartment that now housed the dying Gaddis
Patchen. The subliminally whispering distant flames from the Wrong Side of the Tracks cast capering
shadows on young Diego's bedroom walls no matter how firmly he tried to paste the lowered green
oilcloth rollershade against the window glass before sleep. And the regular roar of Uptown-bound trains
rattled those same panes. What Diego enjoyed nowadays, he had earned through his own endeavors, not
effortless inheritance.)

This overcast winter morning, Diego, lazing a-bed, found real wakefulness hard to attain. A late night out
with friendsтАФinvolving too many cigarettes, an excess of highflown bloviation and a constant stream of
hops-heavy Rude Bravo beer from the neighboring Borough of ShankbushтАФhad taken its predictable
toll. Mired in his clammy sheets, Diego's sour mood allowed him to contemplate only the many injustices
thrust upon him by existence, rather than any of the compensating glories. Thus the parade of his thoughts
featured such performers as these:

His cheap and refractory landlord, Rexall Glyptis, who had for months running now failed to hire even an
apprentice ingeniator to repair the radiators in Diego's apartment, a failure made all the more galling by
the fact that the heatful steam itself was free, piped beneath every Block as part of the ineffable
infrastructure of the Linear City.

His best friend, the impulsive and wily Zohar Kush, who had discovered the saloon in the10,395,001st
Block of Broadway named The Lookalike Boys, where Rude Bravo flowed like liquid suicide, and who
had insisted on staging a drinking contest with some of the Shankbush locals.

Kush's newest lover, the capricious Milagra Eventyr, who had, by sensually occupying Diego's lap at one
point in the boozy, bleary evening, precipitated a fight with Diego's own lover, the formidable Volusia
Bittern.

Volusia, in turn, came in for her share of mild mental recriminations, as Diego recalled how she had
punctuated her jealous accusations with a wild swing at MilagraтАФa swing which fortunately, given
Volusia's physical proportions vis a vis Milagra, had failed to connect, due to a certain boozy skewing of
perceptions. The hot temper some devilishly attractive women had!

And then of course one could not omit from the catalog of infamy Yale Drumgoole, Diego's fellow writer.
Although neither a proponent nor practitioner of CF and consequently a member of a rival literary camp,
Yale had been invited along for the night's spree. But Drumgoole's one accomplishment of the evening
had been only to prove his utter inability to process internally more than five pints of Rude Bravo without
blithely and crudely propositioning the wife of the brutish bouncer of The Lookalike Boys, thus earning
the Patchen party summary ejection into the Shankbush slush, which differed not one whit in its wet chilly
properties from the slush one-hundred-and-fifty-one Blocks Downtown.

Memories of the sight of the puffy flesh around Yale's left eye mottling colorfully as they all rode the
Subway home cheered Diego up slightly, and he inched several toes out from under the blankets to test