"Jack Dann - Cafe Culture" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dann Jack)

CAFÉ CULTURE
by Jack Dann

Jack Dann’s last story for us was the Nebula-Award-winning novella,
“Da Vinci Rising” (May 1995). His latest novel, The Rebel: an
Imagined Life of James Dean, came out from Morrow in August
2005. (Check out www.ReadTheRebel.com and/or visit the author at
jackdann.com.) Jack lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea
and “commutes” to Los Angeles and New York. After far too long an
absence, he returns to our pages with a deeply disturbing look at an
unpromising future.

A word of warning: there are scenes in this story that may be
disturbing to some readers.

“From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion.”
—Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

****

After six Baptist suicide bombers met their god in the fiery nave,
aisles, apse, towers, and main altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the cafés that
crowded Fiftieth and Fifty-First Streets became de rigueur for writers,
artists, actors, news personalities, wealthy dilettantes, activists, dissidents,
tourists, the Christian left, and wannabees. Young Muslim women, faces
covered in black muslin, sipped ginger ale beside their Armani suited,
bearded partners, while students wearing Christ’s Commandos® T-shirts
argued about the morality of selling a watch that had lodged in a schoolgirl’s
neck during an explosion on a school bus.

“Well, the poor thing’s dead. The suicide bomber’s watch went to pay
for the funeral.”

“That would have been one heck of a funeral.”

“It was.”

Max Rosanna’s Café was always mobbed with those who needed to
be seen and those who needed to see, and the outside tables closest to
the stained glass door of the establishment were always on reserve for the
titled, the famous, and those who could slip old Max a thousand dollar bill
for a sweaty croissant and a flat white coffee. Max’s was directly across the
street from the cathedral ruins, and Max had his contractors cement the
shards of stained glass from the exploding cathedral into the floors and
ceiling of the café. At night, lights strobing, Max’s would glitter like an old
psychedelic dream.

But it was spring, 11:00 AM, Friday, and the pioneers of the New
Rebellion, the New Yorkers who would not show even a flicker of fear,