"Paul Park - Get A Grip" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

PAUL PARK

GET A GRIP

So far as we know, Paul Park is the author of delightfully baroque and rich
novels such as Celestis, The Gospel of Corax, and the Starbridge chronicles. An
e-mail we received from him notes that this story appeared first electronically
in February in Omni Online, but you'll forgive us if we wonder a bout the
veracity of all these facts once you read this brief report.

Here's how i found out: I was in a bar called Dave's on East 14th Street. It
wasn't my usual place. I bad been dating a woman in Stuyvesant Town. One night
after I left her place, I still wasn't eager to go home. So on my way I stopped
into Dave's.

I used to spend a lot of time in bars, though I don't smoke or drink. But I like
the secondhand stuff. And the conversations you could have with strangers -- you
could tell them anything. "Ottawa is a fine city," you could say. "My brother
lives in Ottawa," I could say, though in fact I'm an only child. But people
would nod their heads.

This kind of storytelling used to drive my ex-wife crazy. "It's so pointless.
It's not like you're pretending you're an astronaut or a circus clown. That I
could see. But a Canadian?"

"It's a subtle thrill," I conceded.

"Why not tell the truth?" Barbara would say. "That you're a successful lawyer
with a beautiful wife you don't deserve. Is that so terrible?"

Not terrible so much as difficult to believe. It sounded pretty thin, even
before I found out. And of course none of it turned out to be true at all.

Anyway, that night I was listening to someone else. Someone was claiming he had
seen Reggie Jackson's last game on TV. I nodded, but all the time I was looking
past him toward a corner of the bar, where a man was sitting at a table by
himself. He was smoking cigarettes and drinking, and I recognized him.

But I didn't know from where. I stared at him for a few minutes. What was
different -- had he shaved his beard? Then suddenly I realized he was in the
wrong country. It was Boris Bezugly. It truly was.

I took my club soda over to join him. We had parted on such good terms.
"Friends, friends!" he had shouted drunkenly on the platform of Petersburg
Station, saliva dripping from his lips. Now he was drunk again. He sat picking
at the wax of the red candle. When he looked up at me, I saw nothing in his
face, just bleared eyes and a provisionary smile.
We had met two years before, when a partner in the firm was scouting the
possibility of a branch office in Moscow. Even in Russia he was the drunkest man
I ever met. When we were introduced, he had passed out and fallen on his back as