"M. Rickert - Anyway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rickert Mary)

He's relieved, I can tell. I carry the shoebox of stones into my bedroom, where I
crawl into bed and fall asleep. When I wake up, feeling sweaty and stinky, creased by
the seams of my clothing, it is like waking from a fever. The full moon sheds a cool
glow into the room and throughout the house as I walk through it aimlessly. In the
kitchen I see that Robbie amended the note on the magnetic board on the
refrigerator. "Gone. Back later. Love."

I go to the bedroom to get the box of stones. I drop them onto the kitchen table.
They make a lovely noise, like playing with marbles or checkers when I was young
and Tony was young too and alive. I pick up a stone, pop it into my mouth, and see,
almost like a memory but clearer (and certainly this is not my life), the life of a
young man, a Roman, I think. I don't know how long this process takes, because
there is a strange, circular feeling to it, as though I have experienced this person's
entire life, not in the elongated way we live hours and days and years but rather as
something spherical. I see him as a young boy, playing in a stream, and I see him
with his parents, eating at some sort of feast, I see him kiss a girl, and I see him go
to battle. The battle scenes are very gruesome but I don't spit out the stone
because I have to know how it turns out. I see him return home, I see his old
mother's tearful face but not his father's, because his father was killed in the war,
but then there are many happy scenes, a wedding, children, he lives a good life and
dies in a field one day, all alone under a bright sun, clutching wet blades of grass with
one hand, his heart with the other. I pick up another stone and see the life of
another boy, and another, and another. Each stone carries the whole life of a son.
Now, without stopping to spit them out, I shove stones into my mouth, swirling
through centuries of births and wars and dying until at last I find Tony's, from the
blossomed pains of his birth, through his death in Berkeley, stabbed by a boy not
much older than he was, the last thing he saw, this horrified boy saying, "Oh, shit." I
shove stones into my mouth, dizzy with the lives and deaths and the ever-repeating
endless cycle of war. When my mouth is too full, I spit them out and start again. At
last I find Robbie's, watching every moment of his birth and growing years while the
cacophony of other lives continues around me, until I see him in a bedroom, the
noise of loud music, laughter, and voices coming through the crack under the door.
He is naked and in bed with a blond girl. I spit out the stones. Then, carefully, I pick
up the wet stones one at a time until I again find Robbie's and Tony's. These I put
next to the little Buddha in the hallway. The rest I put into the box, which I shove
under my bed.


┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖


The next day, I drive Robbie to the bus depot.

"I don't want you worrying about me. I'm going to be fine," he says.

I smile, not falsely. The bus is late, of course. While we wait we meet two other
families whose children are making the same trip as Robbie is. Steve, a blue-eyed
boy with the good looks of a model, and Sondra, whose skin is smooth and brown,
lustrous like stone. I shake their hands and try to say the right things, but I do not