"L. Timmel Duchamp - The World and Alice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duchamp L Timmel)

THE WORLD AND ALICE by L. Timmel Duchamp
L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of a collection of short fiction--Love's Body,
Dancing in Time--a collection of essays--The Grand Conversation--and three
novels--Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, and The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding). She
has been a finalist for the Nebula and Sturgeon awards and been shortlisted for
the Tiptree Award several times. A selection of her essays and fiction can be
found at ltimmel.home.mindspring.com. Her latest tale for Asimov's tells the
extraordinarily sad story of...

1.

She didn't belong in the world. Alice knew this as a fact by the time she reached middle age, but she had
always felt it for as long as she could remember. Her being lacked some vital element, as though she
were a shadow enjoying physical extension that could be touched and weighed and measured and yet did
not add up to a solid body boasting independent existence. Others might see her, but few registered her
presence. She thought of her lack as one not of soul, but of heft. Of gravity. Of placed-ness. Her self,
simply, possessed no proper place in the world.

She belonged somewhere else. Or perhaps nowhere, nowhere at all. And so she thought of herself as the
world's mistake. A century earlier, she believed, the mistake could not have been made.

In its use of its technologies, the world, she considered, had a lot to answer for.

2.

Alice realized early that most people took their belonging in the world for granted. Perhaps the world did
not always take as much notice of them as they'd like, but it recognized the ontological rightness of their
presence and never prompted so much as a fleeting doubt about that. A few people, though, exerted so
much heft that they were nearly worlds in themselves, immense wells of gravity around which others
orbited. Alice's grandmother, who cared for her from the time of her emergence from an incubator until
she started kindergarten, seemed to Alice as much a place in the world as a person. A lap, after all, was
a place, though it only existed in special conditions subject to swift and sudden change; and so, surely,
the whole of a person could be a place, too.

Her grandmother would open a pint jar of beets she had pickled months before, and she and Alice would
eat the smooth shiny flesh with homemade bread thickly buttered for lunch. They would sit at the kitchen
table, spearing the slices of beet with their forks, and the energy of a powerful pull would vibrate through
Alice's being, as though the fragile threads of her insubstantial self had been drawn into her grandmother's
gravitational field, exerting a force nearly strong enough to keep her from drifting thinly away into air, a
force that promised to ground her in love and blood and earth. Feeling in that moment as though she
belonged, she would admire the way the beets shone like jewels and wonder how each slice could be so
thrillingly smooth even as it revealed a pattern that reminded her of a tree trunk that had been cut close to
the ground, like the rough-textured stump beside the garage, on which she often laid red, gold, and
orange leaves and the glossy horse-chestnuts the squirrels would steal the minute she turned her back.
Alice observed that her grandmother saw this and all other connections and resemblances; and she
understood that her grandmother encompassed the totality of her world. And for all the time that world
included only the two of them, Alice inhaled happiness with every breath and knew that the world was
beautiful, however tenuous her place in it might be.

When Alice was thirty-four she decided that her grandmother had given her child's self heft not through