"Alice Hoffman - Second Nature" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Alice)

Second Nature
by
Alice Hofman

Berkley Pub Group;

ISBN: 0425146812

Copyright 1995

Nature never deceives us, it is always we who deceive ourselves.

--Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

BY APRIL most people had already forgotten about him, except for some of
the nurses on the floor, who crossed themselves when they walked past
his room. The guard stationed outside his door, who had little to do
but read magazines and drink coffee for more than three months, bragged
to his friends that on nights when there was a full moon he needed a
whip and a chair just to set a dinner tray on the other side of the
door. But in fact, the guard had never even dared to look around the
room, where the metal bed was made up with clean white sheets every
week, though it had not once been slept in.

The man who occupied the room had no name. He refused to look anyone in
the eye or, even after months of work with the speech therapists, to
make any sound whatsoever, at least not in the presence of others.

Officially he was listed as patient 3119, but among themselves the staff
called him the Wolf Man, although they were expressly forbidden to do
so. He was underweight and had a long scar along the inside of one
thigh that had healed years before but still turned purple on cold or
rainy days. For two months he'd needed to wear a cast on his
reconstructed foot, otherwise he was in surprisingly good health.

Since he had no birthday, the staff at Kelvin Medical Center had
assigned him one. They'd chipped in to buy him a sweater, blue wool, on
sale at Bloomingdale's, and one of the cooks had baked and frosted an
angel food cake. But that was back in January, after he learned to use
a fork and dress himself, and they'd still had hope for him. Now, they
left him alone, and when he sat motionless, and sunlight came through
the bars on his window, some of the nurses swore that his eyes turned
yellow.

The evening before his transfer upstate, the barber was sent to his
room. There would be no need to sweep the floor after his shave and
haircut, the raven that had been perching on the window ledge was
waiting to dart through the bars and gather up the hair to wind into its
nest. One lab technician, who had been brave enough to look through the
glass window in the door, had once seen the raven eating right out of