"George R. R. Martin - Portraits of His Children" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

"What does that mean?" Cantling snapped.

"You live in a dream world, old man, you know that? Maybe you like to pretend you were like me, but
there ain't no way it's true. I was the big man at Ricci's. At Pompeii, you were the four-eyes hanging out
back by the pinball machine. You had me balling my brains out at sixteen. You never even got bare tit till
you were past twenty, off in that college of yours. It took you weeks to come up with the wisecracks you
had me tossing off every fuckin' time I turned around. All those wild, crazy things I did in that book, some
of them happened to Dutch and some of them happened to Joey and some of them never happened at
all, but none of them happened to you, old man, so don't make me laugh."

Cantling flushed a little. "I was writing fiction. Yes, I was a bit of a misfit in my youth, butтАж"

"A nerd," Dunnahoo said. "Don't fancy it up."

"I was not a nerd," Cantling said, stung. "Hangin' Out told the truth. It made sense to use a protagonist
who was more central to the action than I'd been in real life. Art draws on life but it has to shape it,
rearrange it, give it structure, it can't simply replicate it. That's what I did."

"Nah. What you did was to suck off Dutch and Joey and the rest. You helped yourself to their lives,
man, and took credit for it all yourself. You even got this weird fuckin' idea that I was based on you, and
you been thinking that so long you believe it. You're a leech, Dad. You're a goddamned thief."

Richard Cantling was furious. "Get out of here!" he said.

Dunnahoo stood up, stretched. "I'm fuckin' wounded. Throwing your baby boy out into the cold Ioway
night, old man? What's wrong? You liked me well enough when I was in your damn book, when you
could control everything I did and said, right? Don't like it so well now that I'm real, though. That's your
problem. You never did like real life half as well as you liked books."

"I like life just fine, thank you," Cantling snapped.

Dunnahoo smiled. Standing there, he suddenly looked washed out, insubstantial. "Yeah?" he said. His
voice seemed weaker than it had been.

"Yeah!" Cantling replied.

Now Dunnahoo was fading visibly. All the color had drained from his body, and he looked almost
transparent. "Prove it," he said. "Go into your kitchen, old man, and take a great big bite out of your
fuckin' raw onion of life." He tossed back his hair, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed, until he was
quite gone.

Richard Cantling stood staring at the place where he had been for a long time. Finally, very tired, he
climbed upstairs to bed.

He made himself a big breakfast the next morning: orange juice and fresh-brewed coffee, English muffins
with lots of butter and blackberry preserves, a cheese omelette, six strips of thick-sliced bacon. The
cooking and the eating were supposed to distract him. It didn't work. He thought of Dunnahoo all the
while. A dream, yes, some crazy sort of dream. He had no ready explanation for the broken glass in the
fireplace or the empty beer bottles in his living room, but finally he found one. He had experienced some