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

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He moved out of the hotel just as the last of his money ran out. The old man's
wife, Androula Malakasses, found him a room in somebody else's rambling,
dilapidated boardinghouse. The house was noisy at all hours, but the room was
clean and large. Androula's cousin brought home an old, multi-positional dentist
chair, probably stolen, and Jesse used that for both examining and operating table.
Medical substancesтАФantibiotics, chemotherapy, IV drugsтАФ which he had thought
of as the hardest need to fill outside of controlled channels, turned out to be the
easiest. On reflection, he realized this shouldn't have surprised him.
In July he delivered his first breech birth, a primapara whose labor was so long
and painful and bloody he thought at one point he'd lose both mother and baby. He
lost neither, although the new mother cursed him in Spanish and spit at him. She
was too weak for the saliva to go far. Holding the warm-assed, nine-pound baby
boy, Jesse had heard a camera click. He cursed too, but feebly; the sharp thrill of
pleasure that pierced from throat to bowels was too strong.
In August he lost three patients in a row, all to conditions that would have
needed elaborate, costly equipment and procedures: renal failure, aortic aneurysm,
aneurism, narcotic overdose. He went to all three funerals. At each one the family
and friends cleared a little space for him, in which he stood surrounded by respect
and resentment. When a knife fight broke out at the funeral of the aneurysm, the
family hustled Jesse away from the danger, but not so far away that he couldn't treat
the loser.
In September a Chinese family, recent immigrants, moved into Androula's
sprawling boarding house. The woman wept all day. The man roamed Boston,
looking for work. There was a grandfather who spoke a little English, having learned
it in Peking during the brief period of American industrial expansion into the Pacific
Rim before the Chinese government convulsed and the American economy
collapsed. The grandfather played go. On evenings when no one wanted Jesse, he
sat with Lin Shujen and moved the polished white and black stones over the grid,
seeking to enclose empty spaces without losing any pieces. Mr. Lin took a long time
to consider each move.
In October, a week before Jesse's trial, his mother died. Jesse's father sent him
money to fly home for the funeral, the first money Jesse had accepted from his
family since he'd finally told them he had left the hospital. After the funeral Jesse sat
in the living room of his father's Florida house and listened to the elderly mourners
recall their youths in the vanished prosperity of the 1950's and '60's.
"Plenty of jobs then for people who're willing to work."
"Still plenty of jobs. Just nobody's willing any more."
"Want everything handed to them. If you ask me, this collapse'll prove to be a
good thing in the long run. Weed out the weaklings and the lazy."
"It was the sixties we got off on the wrong track, with Lyndon Johnson and all
the welfare programsтАФ"
They didn't look at Jesse. He had no idea what his father had said to them about
him.
Back in Boston, stinking under Indian summer heat, people thronged his room.
Fractures, cancers, allergies, pregnancies, punctures, deficiencies, imbalances. They