"Alexander Jablokov - Fragments Of A Painted Eggshell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

good shape, so they sealed them with house wrap and nailed up fresh clapboards. They sucked almost
everything out of the inside of the house, finding corncob insulation between some of the studs.

Leo was a big, hairy bear of a man, sexily sloppy, gloomy. As they tore apart and rebuilt his house, he
crouched in an upstairs room, beneath the flapping blue plastic tarp that had replaced an out-of-period
dormer and did...well, whatever it was he did.

He only came down when the crew finished. On the third day, Paula was there when he did, making sure
the tools were all arranged in the corner. Leo let them store on the site, saving her a good hour hauling
the stuff off the truck and into her basement when she was through, so the least she could do was see that
everything was out of his way.

"Why here?" she asked. "This area's a nightmare." They had already cleaned spray-painted graffiti off the
foundations.

"This is where the house originally stood. I checked out the records. Here in Crow's Fields."

"This isn't Crow's Fields anymore."

"Gotta start somewhere." Leo heated up a can of soup, poured a glass of whiskey, ripped chunks of
bread off and stuffed them into his mouth, all as if he was completely alone.

"Start what?"
"Getting this place to remember to remember what it once was." He sat down and slurped soup.

Once woodlands, swamp, farmer's fields -- now abandoned warehouses, shabby rubble-strewn lots,
useless parking lots. Who the hell cared?

"You mean what it really was?"

He shifted in the beat-up old dining room chair he used at his kitchen table. It creaked perilously. Dried
remnants of milk and cereal were still on the tablecloth in front of him, generations of them.

"You know, people give me a lot of shit about what I do, but when they need me, they come here." He
scratched vigorously in his beard with blunt fingers. "I used to make a lot of money, you know. A lot of
money. I was Engram's chief designer. But then, I dunno, I got afflicted with art." He paused over the
initial vowel. "Aaht. Bad thing, for a professional. Interferes with your work something terrible. Regular
people don't need memories that blaze like stained-glass windows. It just disturbs them."

Paula thought about Rue, her Rue, perambulating around those solemn houses in the woods, part of her
new family. It was a fashion, of course, these colonies, far from malls and overlit parking structures. Did
fourteen-year-olds think that kind of thing was cool now? Paula wondered how much it had cost
someone to get them to think that, and what money stood to be made from it.

"So how do you choose memories that won't drive people crazy? How do you fit them in with everything
else?"

Leo snorted. "You know, everyone can't just remember growing up in the Swiss Family Robinson. Rubs
up against things too hard. 'Hey, when I was a kid, me and my whole family, we lived in a tree'. Nope,
no way. World's not ready for shit like that. Not yet, anyway. Once it gets accepted that it's all...well, not