"Dan Simmons - Eyes I Dare Not Meet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams
by Dan Simmons
Introduction
The summer of 1969 was very hot. It was especially hot where I spend itтАФliving in
the "ghetto" section of Germantown, Pennsylvania. Germantown, a pleasant little
village in pre-Revolutionary War days, was an inner-city enclave of Philadelphia by
1969. The streets were hot. TempersтАФracial and otherwiseтАФwere even hotter.
I rented the attic of a neighborhood Settlement House/ birth control
clinic/community medical center for $35 a month. It was a small attic. On evenings
when the tiny second-floor wasn't busy serving as a waiting room, I could put it to
use as a living room and use the tiny kitchen off of it. Most evenings it was busy.
From my attic dormer windows, I watched several gang battles and one full-fledged
riot that summer.
But it is the evenings seen from the front stoop I most remember: a brick canyon
rich with human noise, the long sweep of Bringhurst Street's rowhouses illuminated
in the sodium-yellow glow of "crime lights" while children jumped Double Dutch and
played the dozens in the street, the endless parade of people strolling and laughing
and chatting and making room on the step for visitors. To this day, confronted with
the privacy-fenced sterility of suburban back-yard patios, I wonder what lunacy
made us turn away from the front porch and the front step, the communal ownership
of the street, to flee to these claus-trophobic plots of isolation.
During the day in that long-ago summer of 1969, I worked as a teacher's aide in the
Upsal Day School for the Blind. The children often were not merely blindтАФsome
were also deaf and severely mentally retarded. Many of them had been this way since
birth.
The wonderful thing about working in such an envi-ronment is that one learns
quickly that human beingsтАФeven human beings with such terrible and relentless
disadvantagesтАФmaintain not only the essence of human-ity and the full panoply of
human desires and strengths, but also somehow retain the capacity to struggle, to
achieve ... to triumph.
On the day after human beings first set foot on the moon in that hot summer of
1969, I celebrated the event with my class. They were very excited. Thomas, one of
the young adolescents who had been blind and retarded since birth but who could
hear, had taught himself to play the piano. Another hearing studentтАФa young lady
who had been brain-damaged as a result of extreme abuse as an infantтАФsuggested
that we end the celebration of the lu-nar landing by having Thomas play our national
anthem.
He did.
He played "We Shall Overcome."
***
Bremen left the hospital and his dying wife and drove east to the sea. The roads were
thick with Philadelphians fleeing the city for the weekend, and Bremen had to
con-centrate on traffic, leaving only the most tenuous of touches in his wife's mind.
Gail was sleeping. Her dreams were fitful and drug-induced. She was seeking her
mother through endlessly interlinked rooms filled with Victorian furniture.
As Bremen crossed the pine barrens, the images of the dreams slid between the
evening shadows of reality. Gail awoke just as Bremen was leaving the parkway. For
a few seconds after she awoke the pain was not with her. She opened her eyes, and
the evening sunlight falling across the blue blanket made her thinkтАФfor only a
momentтАФthat it was morning on the farm. Her thoughts reached out for her husband