"Harlan Ellison - Shatterday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

don’t feel right; they’re not thick and solid like the old ones, they’re thin and you can bend
them... that doesn’t seem right to me. Restaurants don’t serve cream in pitchers any more, just
that artificial glop in little plastic tubs, and one is never enough to get coffee the right color.
You can make a dent in a car fender with only a sneaker. Everywhere you go, all the towns
look the same with Burger Kings and McDonald’s and 7-Elevens and Taco Bells and motels
and shopping centers. Things may be better, but why do I keep thinking about the past?
What I mean by five years old is not that Jeffty was retarded. I don’t think that’s what
it was. Smart as a whip for five years old; very bright, quick, cute, a funny kid.
But he was three feet tall, small for his age, and perfectly formed: no big head, no
strange jaw, none of that. A nice, normal-looking five-year-old kid. Except that he was the
same age as I was: twenty-two.
When he spoke it was with the squeaking, soprano voice of a five-year-old; when he
walked it was with the little hops and shuffles of a five-year-old; when he talked to you it was
about the concerns of a five-year-old... comic books, playing soldier, using a clothespin to
attach a stiff piece of cardboard to the front fork of his bike so the sound it made when the
spokes hit was like a motorboat, asking questions like why does that thing do that like that,
how high is up, how old is old, why is grass green, what’s an elephant look like? At twenty-
two, he was five.

Jeffty’s parents were a sad pair. Because I was still a friend of Jeffty’s, still let him
hang around with me, sometimes took him to the county fair or miniature golf or the movies,
I wound up spending time with them. Not that I much cared for them, because they were so
awfully depressing. But then, I suppose one couldn’t expect much more from the poor devils.
They had an alien thing in their home, a child who had grown no older than five in twenty-
two years, who provided the treasure of that special childlike state indefinitely, but who also
denied them the joys of watching the child grow into a normal adult.
Five is a wonderful time of life for a little kid... or it can be, if the child is relatively
free of the monstrous beastliness other children indulge in. It is a time when the eyes are wide
open and the patterns are not yet set; a time when one has not yet been hammered into
accepting everything as immutable and hopeless; a time when the hands can not do enough,
the mind can not learn enough, the world is infinite and colorful and filled with mysteries.
Five is a special time before they take the questing, unquenchable, quixotic soul of the young
dreamer and thrust it into dreary schoolroom boxes. A time before they take the trembling
hands that want to hold everything, touch everything, figure everything out, and make them
lie still on desktops. A time before people begin saying “act your age” and “grow up” or
“you’re behaving like a baby.” It is a time when a child who acts adolescent is still cute and
responsive and everyone’s pet. A time of delight, of wonder, of innocence.
Jeffty had been stuck in that time, just five, just so.
But for his parents it was an ongoing nightmare from which no one--not social
workers, not priests, not child psychologists, not teachers, not friends, not medical wizards,
not psychiatrists, no one--could slap or shake them awake. For seventeen years their sorrow
had grown through stages of parental dotage to concern, from concern to worry, from worry
to fear, from fear to confusion, from confusion to anger, from anger to dislike, from dislike to
naked hatred, and finally, from deepest loathing and revulsion to a stolid, depressive
acceptance.
John Kinzer was a shift foreman at the Balder Tool & Die plant. He was a thirty year
man. To everyone but the man living it, his was a spectacularly uneventful life. In no way was
he remarkable... save that he had fathered a twenty-two-year-old five-year-old.
John Kinzer was a small man; soft, with no sharp angles; with pale eyes that never
seemed to hold mine for longer than a few seconds. He continually shifted in his chair during