"Goonan, Kathleen Ann - The String" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goonan Kathleen Ann)

Dan grabbed it, feeling unaccountably protective. "It's fun," he said. "You'd
have to pay a lot of money for a puzzle as good as this." He put it up on a
shelf. "Here, I'll help you set the table," he said.
After dinner, when everything was put away, Anita flipped on her CAD again. Her
work was never done. Jessica started her homework, and Dan got his string down
off the shelf and started to play with it.
It was wound quite tightly. He needed something to slide underneath the strands
and pull them. Absently, he got up, rummaged in the drawer, and got two oyster
forks. Hooking one through the central morass, he used the other to work a loop
loose.
As he concentrated, he found himself thinking not about the string, but about
Jessica. He tried to push back the relief and happiness he felt about the lung
capacity--after all, within the progress of the disease, it only meant a
temporary surcease--but joy nonetheless that Jessica might have a time of easier
breathing, however short, flooded him. Despite himself, he imagined her running,
playing, like other children, unburdened by her constant unnatural prescience of
her own mortality. She was in the baseball field, up to bat, her little rear end
stuck out as she leaned forward from the waist, grasping the bat. Her hair
streamed back from her face. "Put 'er here," she yelled at the pitcher.
"What are you doing, Dan?" asked Anita, as her shadow fell across the table.
"Well," he said, startled back into the present, "these are the rules. Since the
ends didn't cross when this was made, the rule is that I have to straighten it
out without pulling the ends through. They always have to stay on the outside."
"Good lord," she said. "Well, it's after midnight." He looked up and saw she had
her nightgown on. "I've been in bed for an hour. You know you don't feel good if
you don't get enough sleep, and I don't know when you got to bed last night."
"You're right," he said, and put the string up on the shelf and went to bed.
But the image of Jessica rounding the bases persisted into his dreams.
#
Three weeks later, he had still not solved the string. He worked on it nightly,
much to Anita's disgust. "It's getting dirty," she said.
One Tuesday evening, Dan looked up at a knock on the screen door. "Frank," he
said. "Come on in."
Frank Jones, a widower from down the street, did, and the door slammed shut
behind him. Crickets were gaining in volume and the smell of new-cut grass
wafted into the kitchen. Frank, a tall thin man with a good head of snow-white
hair, though he was almost seventy, put his hands on his hips and frowned. "What
the hell are you doing?" he asked.
"Behaving like a crazy man, that's what," said Anita from her terminal.
"Dad's untying the string," said Jessica as she rushed through the kitchen.
"Where do you think you're going?" asked Dan.
"I'm just going out to play hide-and-seek with the kids."
"You've got exactly fifteen minutes."
"Oh, Dad!"
"I mean it." Dan was secretly pleased. It had been years since she'd felt well
enough to keep going for so long, and now she'd be out with the neighborhood
kids well after dark each night if he didn't put his foot down.
"Oh, all right," she grumbled, and rushed out the door.
"Get a beer, Frank, and sit down," said Dan, not lifting his eyes from his
puzzle.