"Kathleen Ann Goonan - The String (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

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
own lives against those who made a profit from them being powerless. He
remembered the beauty of the country from a trek he'd made in his student
days,
and the one healthy village he'd seen among all the poor ones. If only all of
them could prosper. He carried that image with him into dreams as he put his
head down, just to rest for a minute, and fell asleep at the table.
The next morning, while eating breakfast, he leafed through the paper to the