"Kim Stanley Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

But he couldn't visit Anna and her family now. Showing up unannounced, with no
place to goтАФit would have been pitiful.
He drove on. Homeless, homelessтАФhe go down to find another home.
Chevy Chase looked relatively untouched by the flood. There was a giant hotel above
Dupont Circle, the Hilton; he drove down Wisconsin and Massachusetts and turned up
Florida to it, already feeling like he was wasting his time. There would be no rooms
available.
There weren't. Homeless, homeless. Midnight come, and blah blah blah blah blahhhh.
He drove up Connecticut Avenue, completely without a plan. Near the entrance to
the National Zoo damage from the flood suddenly became obvious, in the form of a
mud-based slurry of trash and branches covering the sidewalks and staining the
storefronts. Just north of the zoo, traffic stopped to allow the passage of a backhoe. Street
repairs by night, in the usual way. Harsh blue spotlights glared on a scene like
something out of Soviet cinema, giant machines dwarfing a cityscape.
Impatiently Frank turned right onto a side street. He found an empty parking spot on
one of the residential streets east of Connecticut, parked in it.
He got out and walked back to the clean-up scene. It was still about 90 degrees out,
and tropically humid. A strong smell of mud and rotting vegetation evoked the tropics,
or Atlantis after the flood. Yes, he was feeling a bit apocalyptic. He was in the end time
of something, there was no denying it. Home-less; home-less.
A Spanish restaurant caught his eye. He went over to look at the menu in the window.
Tapas. He went in, sat down and ordered. Excellent food, as always. D.C. could almost
always be relied on for that. Surely it must be the great restaurant city of the world.
He finished his meal, left the restaurant and wandered the streets, feeling better. He
had been hungry before, and had mistaken that for anxiety. Things were not so bad.
He passed his car but walked on east toward Rock Creek Park, remembering the
article in the Post. A return to wilderness.
At Broad Branch Road Frank came to the park's boundary. There was no one visible
in any direction. It was dark under the trees on the other side of the road; the yellow
streetlights behind him illuminated nothing beyond the first wall of leaves.
He crossed the street and walked into the forest.

The flood's vegetable stench was strong. Frank proceeded slowly; if there had been
any trail here before it was gone now, replaced by windrows of branches and trash, and
an uneven deposition of mud. The rootballs of toppled trees splayed up dimly, and
snags caught at his feet. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he came to feel that
everything was very slightly illuminated, mostly no doubt by the luminous city cloud
that chinked every gap in the black canopy.
 He heard a rustle, then a voice. Without thought he slipped behind a large tree and
froze there, heart pounding.
Two voices were arguing, one of them drunk.
"Why you buy this shit?"
"Hey you never buy nothing. You need to give some, man."
The two passed by and continued down the slope to the east, their voices rasping
through the trees. HomeтАФless, homeтАФless. Their voices had reminded Frank of the scruffy
guys in fatigues who hung out around Dupont Circle.
Frank didn't want to deal with any such people. He was annoyed; he wanted to be out
in a pure wilderness, empty in the way his mountains out west were empty. Instead,
harsh laughter nicotined through the trees like hatchet strokes. "Ha ha ha harrrrrr." There
went the neighborhood.