"Paul Park - A Man on Crutches" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

the bus station and waiting there until morning, but instead I walked around the
streets of Santa Monica, trying to retrace the way back to my fatherтАЩs off ice. I
wanted to look over his letters again. I wanted to go through them and read over
where he mentioned me - I remembered once I went out to visit him and Barbara. He
came down into the kitchen at three oтАЩclock in the morning to find me watching TV,
and he took me to an all-night hamburger stand somewhere. тАЬThe best egg creams in
California,тАЭ he said. Surely, I thought, he would have told Jacques about that. I
remembered the date, or at least the year.
I didnтАЩt find the off ice again. The vial of ashes Barbara gave me - I threw it
away too. By the time I got back to Meridan that phone number in Oakland was the
only thing left, and when I found out it had been disconnected, I felt as if some
essential link had been destroyed. A link to urgent knowledge - now it seems
obvious. Now it seems easy to say where my trouble really started. In the absence of
facts, in the absence of anything to hold on to, I began to imagine a whole world.
And the moving spirit of that world was Jean-Jacques Brauner. From the
beginning, of course, I had been thinking about him, trying to make a picture of him
in my mind. Or rather, not trying - the picture came by itself, and I found myself
looking at it, hour after hour. It was so clear, I began to think it must be founded on
something, some snap-shot in my fatherтАЩs file that I couldnтАЩt quite remember. It took
me a long time to realize that the model for the picture was myself. I am five-eleven.
Jean-Jacques was six feet. I am handsome. Jean Jacques was beautiful. Men and
women turned to look at him when he walked past.
The foreign name, the hint of foreignness in the voice on the tape, I thought,
must be an affectation, the residue from a privileged childhood spent abroad - he
didnтАЩt really need the money that my father had been sending him. Where had he
gone to college? Some expensive school, Berkeley, perhaps. No doubt he had
graduated near the top of his class. No doubt he had won prizes, cash prizes which
gave him the time and the prestige to pick and choose among employers. Whereas I
had gone to the University of Connecticut and my mother had paid. A second-rate
B.A. with third-rate grades - it was hard for me to find anything. I had a job in a
health club for six dollars an hour.
This sounds carping and resentful, but in fact I did not envy his success. He
was too far away. In the morning I would watch the weather channel, and it never
rained in Oakland. The temperature was always fifty-seven degrees. I had never been
there, but in my mindтАЩs eye I pictured it, conveniently located atop the San Andreas
Fault, midway between Yosemite National Park and the stupefying beauty of Big
Sur. The capital of a new and perfect California, where fathers loved their sons and
chastised them lovingly. Where college graduates found interesting, high-paying
jobs. How could I begrudge Jacques anything? He was my counterpart, my double
in that uncorrupted world.
And yet there must have been some conduit between that world and this,
because from time to time I would catch sight of him. Not at first. At first all I
noticed was a tension in the air, a sudden electricity. At certain moments in the street
in Meridan, during my lunch hour perhaps, I would feel a new small sensitivity. I
would know Jean-Jacques was thinking about me, that our thoughts were colliding
like cold and hot fronts over Kansas. Colliding but not mixing - frustrated, later, by
our lack of communication, I began to imagine that he was leaving me clues.
Arrangements of sticks, of trash, junk mail, graffiti on the street, all seemed like
messages in a language I could not decode.
But IтАЩm going too fast. These delusions came gradually. And always there