"patrick_o'_leary_bad_boy" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'leary Patrick)

He smoked.
And read the marvelous new voice in fiction.
And his son stared at the bat, leaning his golden hair on his golden arms,
resting his head.
There are transitional moments which deny physics and taste: this is one of
them.



The father noticed the bat was out of the cage. Or rather he saw that it was on
the opposite side of the golden bars.
One moment it was inside, the next...
He wondered. Was it possible for reality to turn inside out? What if the
intelligence imbedded in the world operated on assumptions we know nothing
about? What if the world was as ineffable as god to an atheist, as hockey to a
Brazilian, as a hickey to boy's neck?
The spaces between the bars were narrow safe things.
Like comfortable ideas no one cares to re-examine.
Up. Down.
Time. Death.
The Designated Hitter Rule.
How did the bat get out?
His son examined it sleepily.
"Did you see it get out?" he asked, amazed that he had missed something so
provocative. "Did you do that? Did you see it?"
His son, who had never transcended the grade "C," who had regarded homework as
the Definition Of Hell, who could not grasp the rewards of scholarship, who
lived in a state of constant distraction, stomping, for example, the powder on
the lines of the soccer field when he should have been charging the honeycombed
ball like the rest of the team, who actually preferred to watch cartoons upside
down while squirming on the couch, oblivious to the chocolate stains that ringed
his mouth or how this reflected on his parent's hygiene, tugging his penis at
random in front of company, dubious of the whole concept of Bedtime, and,
without fail, incapable of putting together three words of wit or insight or
even the childish wisdom supermarket magazines always quoted. His son gazed
dreamily at the bat outside the cage, crawling downward like a man with no
legs...
His son said:
"Father...The bat has bitten me. Do not look for the scar нн it has healed by
occult means long discredited. And, though you won't believe me, I feel
compelled to confess that I am transformed as an apple dipped into melted
caramel. Only by the narrowest of margins have I escaped the obvious. For a bat
cannot be said to occupy time and space as you and I. His is a changeling
nature. I see not as you see but as a creature of the night. The world is a
dangerous place. Ugly blue jays can nip your wing for spite, simply because they
are bigger than you. My sonar reflects a world of great chaos and arbitrary
beauty, with abundant clouds of juicy bugs. Blood is a good thing unlike math. I
love you, so I would never bite you unless, of course, you under do it at
Christmas or miss another Halloween. You do not reckon my sagacity: the bravery
it took to snare the bat. The ingenuity it took to wrangle the golden cage off