"Dan Simmons - Iversons Pits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

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As a young boy, I was not afraid of the dark. As an old man, I am wiser. But it was
as a boy of ten in that distant summer of 1913 that I was forced to partake of
commu-nion with that darkness which now looms so close. I re-member the taste of
it. Even now, three-quarters of a century later, I am unable to turn over black soil in
the garden or to stand alone in the grassy silence of my grand-son's backyard after
the sun has set without a hint of cold fingers on the back of my neck.
The past is, as they say, dead and buried. But even the most buried things have their
connections to the present, gnarled old roots rising to the surface, and I am one of
these. Yet there is no one to connect to, no one to tell. My daughter is grown and
gone, dead of cancer in 1953. My middle-aged grandson is a product of those
Eisenhower years, that period of endless gestation when all the world seemed fat and
confident and looking to the future. Paul has taught science at the local high school
for twenty-three years and were I to tell him now about the events of that hot first
day and night of July, 1913, he would think me mad. Or senile.
My great-grandchildren, a boy and a girl in an age that finds little reason to pay
attention to such petty distinctions as gender, could not conceive of a past as ancient
and irretrievable as my own childhood before the Great War, much less the
blood-and-leather reality of the Civil War era from which I carry my dark message.
My great-grandchildren are as colorful and mindless as the guppies Paul keeps in his
expensive aquarium, free from the terrors and tides of the ocean of history, smug in
their almost total ignorance of everything that came before themselves, Big Macs,
and MTV.
So I sit alone on the patio in Paul's backyard (why was it, I try to recall, that we
turned our focus away from the front porch attention to the communal streets and
side-walks into the fenced isolation of our own backyards?) and I study the old
photograph of a serious ten-year-old in his Boy Scout uniform.
The boy is dressed far too warmly for such a hot sum-mer dayтАФhis small form is
almost lost under the heavy, woolen Boy Scout tunic, broad-brimmed campaign hat,
baggy wool trousers, and awkward puttees laced almost to the knees. He is not
smilingтАФa solemn, miniature dough-boy four years before the term doughboy had
passed into the common vocabulary. The boy is me, of course, stand-ing in front of
Mr. Everett's ice wagon on that day in June when I was about to leave on a trip much
longer in time and to places much more unimaginably distant than any of us might
have dreamed.
I look at the photograph knowing that ice wagons exist now only as fading memories
in aging skulls, that the house in the background has long since been torn down to be
replaced by an apartment building which in turn was re-placed by a shopping mall,
that the wool and leather and cotton of the Boy Scout uniform have rotted away,
leaving only the brass buttons and the boy himself to be lost some-where, and
thatтАФas Paul would explainтАФevery cell in that unsmiling ten-year-old's body has
been replaced several times. For the worse, I suspect. Paul would say that the DNA
is the same, and then give an explanation which makes it sound as if the only
continuity between me now and me then is some little parasite-architect, blindly
sitting and smirking in each otherwise unrelated cell of the then-me and the now-me.
Cow manure.
I look at that thin face, those thin lips, the eyes nar-rowed and squinting in the light
of a sun seventy-five years younger (and hotter, I know, despite the assurances of
reason and the verities of Paul's high school science) and I feel the thread of
sameness which unites that unsus-pecting boy of tenтАФso confident for one so