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

soaked in flannel. I sponged clean, washed
my hair, ate an insignificant breakfast, and
brushed my teeth without conviction. I sat in
the dining nook, in the first, full heat of
summer, trying to retrieve that snowscape.
Awake, I let the man ask the question I'd
earlier forestalled: what could be simpler? He
remained a geneticist despite everything,
partial to the purposive pattern, the
generative thread. But his four-phrased,
simple explanation was as unrecoverable
from my breakfast table as that New
Hampshire weekend, the whole aborted
year.
Fragment, endorphin-induced, absolutely
commonplace: easier to count the nights
when I don't dream of those two than when
I do. Still, this one torched my morning. I
filled with the urge to make the call, but had
no number. I came within a dot of dashing
off the telegram composed since last spring,
but knew no sending address. The way back,
the suggestion forced open again overnight
was sheer perversity. I sat at the breakfast
table until the moment passed. Then I made
my way to the archives.
I was first at work, always easiest. I
unlocked the library and headed by rote to
the Reference Desk, my half-dream still an
embryo in me. The day would have been
long in any event. The longest day of the
year, even had I gotten eight good hours. By
ten, I found myself seriously questioning the
charter of a big-city branch library. Our
catalogued, ecumenical clearinghouse of
knowledge was running at about double
average gate. Kitty-corner to me, a pack of
pubescents prowled the genre racks, eyes on
the signaling flesh at adjoining tables. A few
bruised retirees, two years from terminal
Medicare, pored over magazines, persisting
in forcing the weekly news into a parody of
sense. In the adjoining children's room, a
pride of early readers, spirits not yet broken
by summer camps, disguised the fact from
their unwitting parents that books mystified
them more than the real world. Behind the
Reference Desk, on the peak day of our peak
season, I fielded questions from this
community of needs. First day of summer: