"Neal Stephenson - Spew" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

and Evan ignore me. I approach the desk. I clear my throat. I come right up to
the desk and put my bag down on the counter right there and sigh very loudly.
Evan is poking randomly at the computer and you are misfiling thousands of tiny
little oaktag cards, the color of old bananas, in a small wooden drawer.
I inhale and open my mouth to say excuse me, but Evan cuts me off:
"Customerrrrzz . . . gotta love 'em."
You grin wickedly and give him a nice flirty conspiratorial look. No one has
looked at me yet. That's OK. I recognize your technique from the surveillance
camera: good clerk, bad clerk.
"Reservation for Stark," I say.
"Stark," Evan says, and rolls it around in his head for a minute or so,
unwilling to proceed until he has deconstructed my name. "That's German for
'strong,' right?"
"It's German for 'naked,' " I say.
Evan drops his gaze to the computer screen, defeated and temporarily humble. You
laugh and glance up at me for the first time. What do you see? You see a guy who
looks pretty much like the guys you hang out with.
I shove the sleeves of my ratty sweater up to the elbows and rest one forearm
across the counter. The tattoo stands out vividly against my spudlike flesh, and
in my peripheral I can see your eyes glance up for a moment, taking in the black
rectangle, the skull, the crossed fish. Then I pretend to get self-conscious. I
step back and pull my sleeve down again - don't want you to see that the tattoo
is only about a day old.
"No reservation for Stark," Evan says, right on cue. I'm cool, I'm expecting
this; they lose all of the reservations.
"Dash these computers," I say. "You have any empty rooms?"
"Just a suite. And a couple of economy rooms," he says, issuing a double
challenge: do I have the bucks for the former or the moxie for the latter?
"I'll take one of the economy rooms," I say.
"You sure?"
"HIV-positive."
Evan shrugs, the hotel clerk's equivalent of issuing a 20-page legal disclaimer,
and prods the computer, which is good enough to spit out a keycard, freshly
imprinted with a random code. It's also spewing bits upstairs to the computer
lock on my door, telling it that I'm cool, I'm to be let in.
"Would you like someone to show you up?" Evan says, glancing in mock surprise
around the lobby, which is of course devoid of bellhops. I respond in the only
way possible: chuckle darkly - good one, Ev! - and hump my own bag.
My room's lone window looks out on a narrow well somewhere between an air shaft
and a garbage chute in size and function. Patches of the shag carpet have fused
into mysterious crust formations, and in the corners of the bathroom, pubic
hairs have formed into gnarled drifts. There is a Robobar in the corner but the
door can only be opened halfway because it runs into the radiator, a 12-ton
cast-iron model that, randomly, once or twice an hour, makes a noise like a rock
hitting the windshield. The Robobar is mostly empty but I wriggle one arm into
it and yank out a canned Mai Tai, knowing that the selection will show up
instantaneously on the computer screens below, where you and Evan will derive
fleeting amusement from my offbeat tastes.
Yes, now we are surveiling each other. I open my suitcase and take my own Spew
terminal out of its case, unplug the room's set and jack my own into the socket.