"Levy-NewHorizons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levy Robert J)

hoist himself up and climb it. Instead, he just seemed to pass straight through
the metal mesh. I figured there was a hole there, but as I neared the fence I
saw it was intact. Weird, I thought as I climbed over.

It was almost dark now, and I was only able to make my way because I had played
war games in the lot on many occasions. Littered as it was with rocks, broken
bottles and cans, the lot would have posed a threat to anyone unfamiliar with
it. I heard a noise and crouched behind a nearby bush. There was Huge, sitting
crosslegged against a boulder, staring up at nothing. He had some provisions, a
crummy blanket, but not much else.

I waited awhile. Soon he went into a sort of trance. As I crouched there, barely
breathing, I saw "things," for want of a better word, appear and disappear in
the air above him. They were like tiny versions of the portal that had opened
during the stickball game, like the door Mitch and I saw in the sky the day
before.

Odd shapes gyrated in jet black gateways floating above him. They did not look
like "images" in the air, but rather like tiny cross-sections cut out of another
world. As they coalesced and evanesced, Huge's face was constricted with intense
concentration, as though he were trying incredibly hard to conjure this other
reality into this one. Or, I wondered, could it be that he was trying to conjure
himself back into that other dimension? And was that other place "home," or, as
I suspected, some universe as strange and wonderful to him as he was to me?

And what in the world did stickball have to do with all of this?

That night, lying in bed after having quietly sneaked back over the fence, I
felt I had undergone some sort of catharsis, that I had to reassess not only the
normally torpid streets of Queens, but my whole view of reality. I had long
believed that Queens was the ultimate hicksville, that Manhattan, the great city
a subway ride away, was the exciting decadent gotham that called to me and my
ambitions. Suddenly, though, that island of skyscrapers seemed less important,
less of a goal, more of a way station between here and a reality so unbounded as
to be unthinkable to my adolescent imagination. I went to sleep that night with
images of starships and supernovas gyrating wildly in my head.

Late in the afternoon of the next day, I found myself standing again at the foot
of Burton Street. Despite my disquiet about yesterday's events, I felt
irrevocably drawn to the site of Huge's miraculous fly ball. I figured that I'd
probably be the only person there, that everyone else had been permanently
spooked and would have gone elsewhere for stickball -- to Dietetic Crescent,
maybe, or Metropolitan Boulevard.

Boy, was I wrong. One by one, over the next half-hour, those same kids who only
yesterday had run home to their mamas in a panicky sweat straggled in, as though
they too had been drawn by the promise of something grand and marvelous that
would transform their lives forever.

Then -- right on cue, as though it were the final note in a symphony, while we