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

"It wasn't," she said, and he remembered the look she had given him from the
kitchen door that night when he'd carried her back to bed.
She knew. She knew, anyway, what he thought had been happening. They had always
been so close.
He hugged her now. "It was just a string, honey. That's all. A little game for
daddy, a puzzle. It was taking up all my time." "Something like that should take
up all of your time," she said, and he was startled by the gravity and
conviction in her voice.
#

Two weeks later Dan got a call at work about Jessica, who had been suddenly
unable to breathe at school. An ambulance had just picked her up.
Dan rushed to the hospital. Anita was already there, in Jessica's room. Jessica
had an oxygen mask over her face.
"They don't know what happened," she said, crying. "Oh, Dan, I just can't stand
it. I guess I was hoping that she was really better, even though it just doesn't
make sense. They kept saying that it was experimental."
Dan held her as she cried, and looked over her shoulders onto Jessica's still
face.
They decided to take turns staying with her in intensive care. Anita took the
first night, and after Dan had dropped off some clothes and books for her, he
went home to a dark, empty house.
He turned on the kitchen light, opened the drawer, and got out the string.
It was just a rough, inert mass of cord. Nothing more. He was an idiot, a crazy
man, to believe that such things were possible, no matter what the evidence
seemed to be. He bent over it for an hour or more, but found, to his surprise,
that he was crying. What had gone wrong? His little girl had been coming alive.
Now it was all back the way it was before. How many times had they run this
hospital drill before? How many nights by her bedside while she struggled for
breath, the innocent victim of their gene sequences? Shit on this string, shit
on this idiocy, shit on this stupid, imperfect life where little girls died for
no good reason, where genocide and hate prevailed, where nothing was ever any
good.
He flung it into the corner of the room and turned out the light. His heart,
when he climbed the stairs alone, was heavier than it had ever felt in his
entire life, even when they'd finally had the sweat test done on Jessica and
found that she had CF. Because it had seemed within his power, during these last
few months, to actually change things for the better, the contrast was grim and
complete.
And maybe, he thought on the verge of sleep, it had been within his power, and
he had, quite miserably failed. Out of selfishness and greed, as if he were in a
Grimm's fairy tale, because he had wanted his own way, his own vision, to
prevail, and because there were places of darkness in that vision of which he
could not ever be aware.
#

Dan woke, and the room was black.
And yet, something had happened.
His body felt light and spacious, and he wondered if he was dreaming. Within his
interior was not blood and cells, not bones and blood and muscles.