"Spider Robinson - The Magnificent Conspiracy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

worth the terrible danger of dying. And so my body healed slowly, by the same
instinctive wisdom with which it had kept my forebrain in a coma until it could cope
with the extent of my injuries.
And then I met John Smiley.

[Cardwell paused for so long that I had begun to search for a prompting remark
when he continued.]

John was an institution at that hospital. He had been there longer than any of the
staff or patients. He had not left the bed he was in for twelve years. Between his
ribcage and his knees he was mostly plastic bags and tubes and things that are to a
colostomy bag what a Rolls-Royce is to a dogcart. He needed one and sometimes
two operations every year, and his refusal to die was an insult to medical science,
and he was the happiest man I have ever met in my life.
My life had taught me all the nuances of pleasure; joy, however, was something I
had only dimly sensed in occasional others and failed to really recognize. Being
presented with a pure distillate of the thing forced me to learn what it wasтАФand from
there it was only a short step to realizing that I lacked it. You only begin to perceive
where you itch when you learn how to scratch.
John Smiley received the best imaginable care, far better than he was entitled to.
His only finan-cial asset was an insurance company which grudgingly disbursed
enough to keep him alive, but he got the kind of service and personal attention
usually given only to a man of my wealth. This puzzled me greatly when I first got to
know him, the more so when I learned that he could not explain it himself. But I
soon understood.
Virtually every doctor, nurse, and long-term patient in the hospital worshipped
him. The rare, sad few who would have blackly hated him were identified by the rest
and kept from him. The more common ones who desperately needed to meet him
were also identified, and sent to him, subtly or directly as indicated.
Mr. Campbell, John Smiley was simply a foun-tain of the human spirit, a healer of
souls. Utterly wrecked in body, his whole life telescoped down to a bed he didn't
rate and a TV he couldn't afford and the books scrounged for him by nurses and
interns and the Pall Malls that appeared magically on his bedside table every
morningтАФand the people who chanced to come through his door. John made of life
a magnifi-cent thing. He listened to the social and sexual and financial and emotional
woes of anyone who came into his room, drawing their troubles out of them with his
great gray eyes, and he sent them away lighter in their hearts, with a share of the
immeasurable joy he had somehow found within himself. He had helped the charge
nurse when her marriage failed, and he had helped the head custodian find the
strength to raise his mongoloid son alone, and he had helped the director of the
hospital to kick Demerol. And while I knew him, he helped a girl of eighteen die with
grace and dignity. In that hospital, they sent the tough ones around, on one pretext
or another, to see John SmileyтАФand that was simply all it took.
He had worked for the police as a plain-clothesman, and one day as he and his
partner were driving his own car into the police garage, a two-ton door had given
way and come down on them. Ackroyd, his partner, had been killed outright, and so
Mrs. Ackroyd received an award equivalent to half a million dollars. John's wife was
less fortunateтАФhis life was saved. They explained to her that under the law she
would not collect a cent until he was dead. Then they added softly that they gave
him a month at the outside. Twelve years later he was still chain-smoking Pall Malls