"Nancy Kress - The Mountain to Mohammed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

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He packed the computer last, fitting each piece carefully into its original packing.
Maybe that would raise the price that Second Thoughts was willing to give him:
Look, almost new, still in the original box. At the last minute he decided to keep
the playing pieces for go, shoving them into the suitcase with his clothes and medical
equipment. Only this suitcase would go with him.
When the packing was done, he walked up two flights and rang Anne's bell. Her
rotation ended a half hour ago. Maybe she wouldn't be asleep yet.
She answered the door in a loose blue robe, toothbrush in hand. "Jesse, hi, I'm
afraid I'm really beatтАФ"
 He no longer believed in indirection. "Would you have dinner with me tomorrow
night?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, I can't," Anne said. She shifted her weight so one bare foot
stood on top of the other, a gesture so childish it had to be embarrassment. Her
toenails were shiny and smooth.
"After your next rotation?" Jesse said. He didn't smile.
"I don't know when IтАФ"
"The one after that?"
Anne was silent. She looked down at her toothbrush. A thin pristine line of
toothpaste snaked over the bristles.
"Okay," Jesse said, without expression. "I just wanted to be sure."
"JesseтАФ" Anne called after him, but he didn't turn around. He could already tell
from her voice that she didn't really have anything more to say. If he had turned it
would have been only for the sake of a last look at her toes, polished and shiny as
go stones, and there really didn't seem to be any point in looking.


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He moved into a cheap hotel on Boylston Street, into a room the size of a supply
closet with triple locks on the door and bars on the window, where his money would
go far. Every morning he took the subway to the Copley Square library, rented a
computer cubicle, and wrote letters to hospitals across the country. He also
answered classified ads in the New England Journal of Medicine, those that offered
practice out-of-country where a license was not crucial, or low-paying medical
research positions not too many people might want, or supervised assistantships. In
the afternoons he walked the grubby streets of Dorchester, looking for Kenny. The
lawyer representing Mr. and Mrs. Steven Gocek, parents of the dead Rosamund,
would give him no addresses. Neither would his own lawyer, he of the collapsing
books and desperate clientele, in whom Jesse had already lost all faith.
He never saw Kenny on the cold streets.
The last week of March, an unseasonable warm wind blew from the south, and
kept up. Crocuses and daffodils pushed up between the sagging buildings.
Children appeared, chasing each other across the garbage-laden streets, crying
raucously. Rejections came from hospitals, employers. Jesse had still not told his