"Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

man had wandered off the path of human
sympathy. Of all the towns packed with all
the impotent intensive-care facilities in the
world, Ressler chose that one to return his
metastasized cells to at the end, as they ran
him back into randomness.
I believed, until that minute, that business
as usual was the only consolation life
allowed. But now the idea of going back to
work right away—ever—appalled me. I
returned to the vegetables on the kitchen
counter and heaped them into a semblance
of salad. But eating anything was beyond
me. I put the food on the sill for whatever
not-yet-extinct birds still braved the
Brooklyn biome. A sympathetic mass took
over my chest. The block spread into my legs,
threatened to stiffen them if I didn't keep
moving. So I did what I always do in the face
of unnameable grief. I began straightening
things. I picked up the books dispersed over
my study. I threw away the accumulated
advertising fliers. Dusting the record
collection, I suddenly knew what I had been
delaying, the act I needed to send him off.
There, in my front room, trembling the
record from its dust jacket, I set on my
ancient turntable the piece of music the
newly cadenced man most loved. I sat limp
and listened all the way through, the way he
had listened once, motionless except to flip
the record. Four notes, four measures, four
phrases, pouring forth everything. The
sound of my grief, my listening ritual, will be
the closest the professor gets to a memorial
service. Franklin, wherever he now is, must
have resorted to the same. Two listeners to
that simple G scale and all the impossible
complexity spun from it. I heard, in that
steady call to tonic, how Dr. Ressler had
amortized bits of himself for decades. Now
he was paid off. Back at Do.
The music—I can't say what the music
sounded like. Whole now, with none of its
many endings the last word. That emotional
anthology is so continuous that I could not
tell whether my discovery dated from a year
ago, under the dead man's guidance, or this
afternoon, at his private wake. Only Dr.
Ressler's perpetual running commentary was