"William Gibson - Spook Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

with Woolite. Socks were no longer quite so foreign in themselves, but the weight of these, wet, still
amazed him. And still his feet were sometimes cold, in spite of a variety of insulated insoles from the
surplus store on Broadway.

He remembered the sink in his motherтАЩs apartment in Havana. The plastic bottle filled with the henequen
sap she used as a detergent, the pad of coarse fibers from the interior of the same plant, and a small can
of charcoal. He remembered the tiny ants, speeding along the edge of his motherтАЩs sink. In New York,
Alejandro had once pointed out, ants moved much more slowly.

Another cousin, relocated from New Orleans in the wake of the flood, had spoken of seeing a swarming,
glittering ball of red ants in the water. This was how ants avoided drowning, it seemed, and Tito, hearing
the story, had thought that his family was like that as well, afloat in America, less numerous but supported
by one another on their invisible raft of tradecraft, the protocol.

Sometimes he watched the news in Russian, on the Russian Network of America, on his Sony plasma
screen. The voices of the presenters had begun to acquire a dreamlike, submarine quality. He wondered
if this was what it felt like, to begin to lose a language.

He rolled his socks, squeezed water and suds from them, emptied and refilled the sink, put them back in
to rinse, and dried his hands on an old T-shirt he used as a towel.

The room was square, windowless, with a single steel door and white-painted plasterboard walls. The
high ceiling was raw concrete. He sometimes lay on his mattress, staring up, and traced the edges of
vanished sheets of plywood there, fossil impressions dating from the pouring of the floor above. There
were no other live-in residents. His floor-neighbors were a factory where Korean women sewed
childrenтАЩs clothing, and another, smaller firm, something to do with the Internet. His uncles held the lease
here. When they required a place to do certain kinds of business, Tito sometimes slept at AlejandroтАЩs, on
his cousinтАЩs Ikea couch.

His own room had a sink and toilet, a hotplate, a mattress, his computer, amp, speakers, keyboards, the
Sony television, an iron, an ironing board. His clothing hung on an ancient wheeled iron rack, rescued
from the sidewalk on Crosby Street. Beside one of his speakers stood a small blue vase from a Chinese
department store on Canal, a fragile thing he had secretly dedicated to the goddess Ochun, she whom
Cuban Catholics knew as Our Lady of Charity, at Cobre.

He cabled his Casio keyboard, added warmer water to the rinsing socks, pulled a long-legged folding
directorтАЩs chair close to the sink, and climbed up into it. Perched in the tall, unsteady chair, from that
same Canal Street department store, he settled into the sling of black canvas and lowered his feet into the
water. With the Casio across his thighs, he closed his eyes and touched the keys, searching for a tone
like tarnished silver.

If he played well, he would fill OchunтАЩs emptiness.
3. VOLAPUK
M ilgrim, wearing the Paul Stuart overcoat heтАЩd stolen the month before from a Fifth Avenue deli,
watched Brown unlock the oversized steel-sheathed door with a pair of keys taken from a small
transparent Ziploc bag, exactly the sort of bag that Dennis Birdwell, MilgrimтАЩs East Village dealer, used
to package crystal.

Brown straightened up, fixing Milgrim with his habitual look of alert contempt. тАЬOpen it,тАЭ he ordered,
shifting slightly on his feet. Milgrim did, keeping a fold of overcoat between his hand and the knob. The