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

His face was the face Dan had imagined. In fact, his breathing stopped for a
second as he realized that he'd pictured Frank sitting here just like this,
although he'd imagined that the source of his happiness was instead a new
girlfriend.
"I bet they are," said Dan.
The clicking of computer keys in the corner stopped and Anita said, "I wish Dan
would do something besides work on that ridiculous string. He needs to get out
and do something else."
"Like what, Anita?" asked Dan, wondering at the fear he felt about being
separated from his string.
"Like a movie now and then, that's what. Or just going out for dinner. We
haven't done anything in the evening except sit here like two lumps, and I'm
getting tired of it!"
"You should have said something," said Dan, pushing the string away. He was very
pleasantly surprised, even if Anita was just reacting jealously to his attention
to the string. "I think we can just make the eight o'clock movie if we hurry."
"Who's going to watch Jessica?"
"I will," said Frank. He often baby-sat, but not usually on such short notice.
"Are you sure?" asked Dan.
"Of course he's sure," said Anita, getting up in a hurry. "Now, where are my
keys?"
While he was at the movie, all Dan could think about was what his next move
would be in the unravelling of the string. He even dreamed of the string now,
and had it memorized, as if it were a chess game he could project. Yet, whenever
he loosened one segment, deeper and more complex tanglings became apparent. Each
time, instead of being frustrated, he eagerly delved into the new mystery.
Dan was startled by a loud explosion. Several characters had just been blown up,
and the screen was filled with gore.
He found that for some odd reason he had to fight back tears. How could it be
possible for humans to watch so many deaths, even acted-out deaths, and not be
moved? As he watched, he thought of the war that was in the news lately, in
Nepal, as China and India battled it out with the Nepalese Nationalists for
control of the poor, mountainous country. The face of a dead villager that he'd
seen on the cover of Time replaced what was happening in the movie. These wars
would go on and on, and humanity for the most part were as unmoved as those in
the theater with him, and the victims would slide into the vast unnamed history
which held all the countless humans who had been killed by other humans.
He found Anita's hand, and it was cold and unmoving. " Dan, she whispered, "Not
so tight. You're hurting me."
He let go, closed his eyes, and tried to unravel the string from memory. As he
did, something white-hot began to burn inside him, anger with all the murders,
all the killing, all the pain.
He was still angry when they got home and he took the string down. He knew that
Anita was completely disgusted by the way she stomped upstairs, but he couldn't
help himself.
Faces filled his vision as he delicately pulled and probed: black and white dead
people lined up in Prudential's The World At War that his father had watched
every Sunday night, leaning against the doorjamb thoughtfully with his lit pipe
in hand; faces from the Vietnam war; the peasant faces from a hundred countries
around the world, stolid and set, fighting for the right to have a say in their