"Gardner Dozois - A Kingdom by the Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

years. He has his collar up against the wind, hands in pockets, no hat: his hair is damp, plastered to his
forehead. He stands somewhat slouched, head slumped forward just the tiniest bit—he is tired, the
muscles in his shoulders are knotted with strain, the back of his neck burns. He is puzzled by the
excessive fatigue of his body; uneasy, he shifts his weight from foot to foot—standing here after a day
spent on his feet is murder, it gets him in the thighs, the calves. He has forgotten his raincoat again. He is
a big man, built thick through the chest and shoulders, huge arms, wide, thick-muscled wrists, heavy-
featured, resigned face. He is showing the first traces of a future potbelly. His feet are beginning to
splay. His personnel dossier (restricted) states that he is an unaggressive underachiever, energizing at
low potential, anally oriented (plodding, painstaking, competent), highly compatible with his fellow
workers, shirks decision-making but can be trusted with minor responsibility, functions best as part of a
team, unlikely to cause trouble: a good worker. He often refers to himself as a slob, though he usually
tempers it with laughter (as in: "Christ, don't ask a poor slob like me about stuff like that," or, "Shit, I'm
only a dumb working slob"). He is beginning to slide into the downhill side of the middle thirties. He
was born here, in an immigrant neighborhood, the only Protestant child in a sea of foreign Catholics—he
had to walk two miles to Sunday school. He grew up in the gray factory city—sloughed through high
school, the Army, drifted from job to job, town to town, dishwashing, waiting tables, working hardhat
(jukeboxes, back-rooms, sawdust, sun, water from a tin pail), work four months, six, a year, take to the
road, drift: back to his hometown again after eight years of this, to his old (pre-Army) job, full circle.
This time when the restlessness comes, after a year, he gets all the way to the bus terminal (sitting in the
station at three o'clock in the morning, colder than hell, the only other person in the huge, empty hall a
drunk asleep on one of the benches) before he realizes that he has no place to go and nothing to do if he
gets there. He does not leave. He stays: two years, three, four, six now, longer than he has ever stayed
anywhere before. Six years, slipping up on him and past before he can realize it, suddenly gone
(company picnics, Christmas, Christ—taxes again already?), time blurring into an oily gray knot,
leaving only discarded calendars for fossils. He will never hit the road again; he is here to stay. His
future has become his past without ever touching the present. He does not understand what has happened
to him, but he is beginning to be afraid.

He gets on the bus for home.

In the cramped, sweaty interior of the bus, he admits for the first time that he may be getting old.

Mason's apartment was on the fringe of the heavily built-up district, in a row of dilapidated six-story
brownstones. Not actually the slums, not like where the colored people lived (Mason doggedly said
colored people, even when the boys at the plant talked of niggers), not like where the kids, the beatniks
lived, but a low-rent district, yes. Laboring people, low salaries. The white poor had been hiding here
since 1920, peering from behind thick faded drapes and cracked Venetian blinds. Some of them had
never come out. The immigrants had disappeared into this neighborhood from the boats, were still here,
were still immigrants after thirty years, but older and diminished, like a faded photograph. All the ones
who had not pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to become crooked politicians or gangsters or
dishonest lawyers—all forgotten: a gritty human residue. The mailboxes alternated names like Goldstein

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 A Kingdom by the Sea

and Kowalczyk and Ricciardi. It was a dark, hushed neighborhood, with few big stores, no movies, no
real restaurants. A couple of bowling alleys. The closest civilization approached was a big concrete
housing project for disabled war veterans a block or two away to the east, and a streamlined, chrome-
plated, neon-flashing shopping center about half a mile to the west, on the edge of a major artery. City
lights glowed to the north, high rises marched across the horizon south: H. G. Wells Martians, acres of