Infinite Home

Начало книги

THE NEIGHBORS HADN’T NOTICED the building’s slow emptying, didn’t register the change until autumn’s lavish colors arrived and leaves sailed through the windows the man hadn’t bothered to shut. The wind captured various vestiges — a sun-bleached postcard covered in outmoded cursive and a chipped plastic refrigerator magnet shaped like a P and a curling photo of a red-haired woman asleep on a couch — and flew the tenants’ things before relinquishing them to the sidewalk.

He was often visible in the evenings, backlit by a feeble table lamp, immobile in a plastic school chair placed against a top-floor sill, and he seemed untouched by any changes in sound or light or weather, an ambulance’s amplifying moan or the snap of a storm on parked cars or the inked saturation of the sky at dusk. Some nights his seat remained empty, and yellows and whites and golds briefly filled each room before darkening and appearing in the next, the lights traveling from the first floor to the third, and the movement of electricity was a quiet spectacle, like the reappearance of hunger after a long illness.

Читать дальше →