"William Gibson - All tomorrow's parties" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

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All Tomorrow's Parties

By

William Gibson


1. CARDBOARD CITY
THROUGH this evenings tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled
umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the stations airless heart, comes
Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but
moderately successful marine species.

Evolved to cope with jostling elbows, oversized Ginza shopping bags, ruthless briefcases, Yamazaki
and his small burden of information go down into the neon depths. Toward this tributary of
relative quiet, a tiled corridor connecting parallel escalators.

Central columns, sheathed in green ceramic, support a ceiling pocked with dust-furred ventilators,
smoke detectors, speakers. Behind the columns, against the far wall, derelict shipping cartons
huddle in a ragged train, improvised shelters constructed by the city's homeless. Yamazaki halts,
and in that moment all the oceanic clatter of commuting feet washes in, no longer held back by his
sense of mission, and he deeply and sincerely wishes he were elsewhere.
He winces, violently, as a fashionable young matron, features swathed in Chanel micropore, rolls
over his toes with an expensive three-wheeled stroller. Blurting a convulsive apology, Yamazaki
glimpses the infant passenger through flexible curtains of some pink-tinted plastic, the glow of a
video display winking as its mother trundles determinedly away.
Yamazaki sighs, unheard, and limps toward the cardboard shelters. He wonders briefly what the
passing commuters will think, to see him enter the carton fifth from the left. It is scarcely the
height of his chest, longer than the others, vaguely coffin-like, a flap of thumb-smudged white
corrugate serving as its door.
Perhaps the~~ will not see him, he thinks. Just as he himself has never seen anyone enter or exit
one of these tidy hovels. It is as though their inhabitants are rendered invisible in the
transaction that allows such structures to exist in the context of the station. lie is a student
of

existential sociology, and such transactions have been his particular con-
cern.
And now he hesitates, fighting the urge to remove his shoes and place them beside the rather
greasy-looking pair of yellow plastic sandals arranged beside the entrance flap on a carefully
folded sheet of Parco gift wrap. No, he thinks, imagining himself waylaid within, struggling with
faceless enemies in a labyrinth of cardboard. Best he not be shoeless.
Sighing again, he drops to his knees, the notebook clutched in both hands. He kneels for an
instant, hearing the hurrying feet of those who pass behind him. Then he places the notebook on
the ceramic tile of the station's floor and shoves it forward, beneath the corrugate flap, and
follows it on his hands and knees.
He desperately hopes that he has found the right carton.
He freezes there in unexpected light and heat. A single halogen fixture floods the tiny room with
the frequency of desert sunlight. Unventilated, it heats the space like a reptile's cage.