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

conversations, and seemed to see things in the upper comers of the room, things no one else
could see... or wanted to see. I suppose the word that best suited him was haunted. What his
life had become... well, haunted suited him.
 Leona Kinzer tried valiantly to compensate. No matter what hour of the day I visited,
she always tried to foist food on me. And when Jeffty was in the house she was always at him
about eating: “Honey, would you like an orange? A nice orange? Or a tangerine? I have
tangerines. I could peel a tangerine for you.” But there was clearly such fear in her, fear of her
own child, that the offers of sustenance always had a faintly ominous tone.
Leona Kinzer had been a tall woman, but the years had bent her. She seemed always
to be seeking some area of wallpapered wall or storage niche into which she could fade, adopt
some chintz or rose-patterned protective coloration and hide forever in plain sight of the
child’s big brown eyes, pass her a hundred times a day and never realize she was there,
holding her breath, invisible. She always had an apron tied around her waist, and her hands
were red from cleaning. As if by maintaining the environment immaculately she could payoff
her imagined sin: having given birth to this strange creature.
Neither of them watched television very much. The house was usually dead silent,
not even the sibilant whispering of water in the pipes, the creaking of timbers settling, the
humming of the refrigerator. Awfully silent, as if time itself had taken a detour around that
house.
As for Jeffty, he was inoffensive. He lived in that atmosphere of gentle dread and
dulled loathing, and if he understood it, he never remarked in any way. He played, as a child
plays, and seemed happy. But he must have sensed, in the way of a five-year-old, just how
alien he was in their presence.
Alien. No, that wasn’t right. He was too human, if anything. But out of phase, out of
sync with the world around him, and resonating to a different vibration than his parents, God
knows. Nor would other children play with him. As they grew past him, they found him at
first childish, then uninteresting, then simply frightening as their perceptions of aging became
clear and they could see he was not affected by time as they were. Even the little ones, his
own age, who might wander into the neighborhood, quickly came to shy away from him like
a dog in the street when a car backfires.
Thus, I remained his only friend. A friend of many years. Five years. Twenty-two
years. I liked him; more than I can say. And never knew exactly why. But I did, without
reserve.
But because we spent time together, I found I was also polite society--spending time
with John and Leona Kinzer. Dinner, Saturday afternoons sometimes, an hour or so when I’d
bring Jeffty back from a movie. They were grateful: slavishly so. It relieved them of the
embarrassing chore of going out with him, of having to pretend before the world that they
were loving parents with a perfectly normal, happy, attractive child. And their gratitude
extended to hosting me. Hideous, every moment of their depression, hideous.
I felt sorry for the poor devils, but I despised them for their inability to love Jeffty,
who was eminently lovable.
I never let on, of course, even during the evenings in their company that were
awkward beyond belief.
We would sit there in the darkening living room--always dark or darkening, as if kept
in shadow to hold back what the light might reveal to the world outside through the bright
eyes of the house--we would sit and silently stare at one another. They never knew what to
say to me.
“So how are things down at the plant?” I’d say to John Kinzer.
He would shrug. Neither conversation nor life suited him with any ease or grace.
“Fine, just fine,” he would say, finally.