"Thomas M. Disch - After Pottsville" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

Each badge was emblem of some essential mystery, the one thing you learn that
is the key in the lock of that skill or study and which once you know it
you’ll never forget. For the Disabilities Awareness badge that secret was that
we are all disabled. There are shelves we can’t reach, doors we can’t open,
languages we can’t speak–something that makes us unable to fit in no matter
what kind of effort we make. Elaine Quist had helped Terry understand that,
though as she had also said, quite truly, "It’s a lesson we all get taught in
due course, without outside help."

She had a particular way of smiling when she said that that Terry had come to
recognize as the Disabilities Awareness look. Also known as a wry smile, a
sour grin, or sadder but wiser. It was a look you saw on almost all those
newly dead when they realized that all their plans for the future had not just
been put on hold, they were canceled. That trip to Dubuque to see Aunt
Marianne for one last time would never happen. The bulbs from Gurney’s would
never be planted. That last jar of corn relish from 1996 would never get
brought up from the cellar, never be opened, never tasted.

Those were the losses that mattered most to the newly dead, not the things
that got people riled up on talk radio. Once they were past the first shock,
the bombshell announcing that they were at most only onlookers now, they
stopped taking an interest in the official concerns of good citizens. Terry
was an exception to the rule in that regard. He’d earned three of his merit
badges for Citizenship (Citizenship in the Community, in the Nation, and in
the World) and the habit of being a concerned citizen had stayed with him.
Perhaps it was the thing that kept him especially glued to the here and now of
Postville in the Third Millennium and allowed him to act as a latter-day
Charon, ferrying the dead, once they were ready, to the other side. That, and
a basic inclination to be helpful.
So here he was on the main street of Postville, looking at himself with
astonishment in the front window of Mamie’s Thrift Shop and Video Rentals
(which, sadly, hadn’t been open for business for the last two years). After
blinking away his surprise, he scanned Main Street to see who it was who was
looking at him. Usually you know at a glance. On a street of living people a
dead person sticks out like a sore thumb. But not today. There was the usual
crowd of Mexicans hanging out in front of Cucina Linda and two bearded rabbis
dragging their male offspring along at a brisk pace, as though pursued (the
Jewish women, young and old, lived in some kind of purdah, and were less often
seen on the streets of Postville, except in pairs, pushing strollers and
sporting almost identical wigs, as their religion required). There were even
one or two indigenes, very old, very slow, rather sad. But where amidst this
usual spectrum of Postville’s diversities was the dead somebody who had taken
note of Terry?

There: half hidden round the corner of the Corner Cafe, the specter of Rabbi
Irving Rosen, the oldest undeparted victim of the bombing of Mount Zion
Synagogue and Terry’s favorite Jew. Rabbi Rosen had been hard to spot, because
instead of having his attention fixed on Terry, the only other ghost in the
area, he was watching the Corner Cafe’s sole customer, George Scully, tucking