Odlomak 27

(John Updike, Rabbit at Rest)

They take the slate-gray Celica, the more Batmobilelike and steely car, on this desperate mission in the dead of the night. Along the stilled curving streets of Penn Park, the oaks are just budding but the maples are filling in, no longer red in tint but dense with translucent tender new leaves. The houses have an upstairs night light on here and there, or a back porch light to keep cats and raccoons away from the garbage, but only the streetlamps compete with the moon. The trimmed large bushes of the groomed yards, the yews and arborvitae and rhododendrons, look alert by night, like jungle creatures come to the waterhole to drink and caught in a camera’s flash. It seems strange to think that while we sleep these bushes are awake, exhaling oxygen, growing; they do not sleep. Stars do not sleep, but above the housetops and trees crowns shine in a cold arching dusting sprinkle. Why do we sleep? What do we rejoin? His dream, he way it fit him all around. At certain angles the lit asphalt feels in the corners of his eyes like snow. Penn Park becomes West Brewer and a car or two is still awake and moving on blanched deserted Penn Boulevard, an extension of Weiser with a supermarket parking lot on one side and on the other a low brick row of shops from the Thirties, little narrow stores selling buttons and bridal gowns and pastry and Zipf Chocolates and Sony TVs and hobby kits to make model airplanes – they still manufacture and sell those in this era when all the kids are supposedly couch potatoes and all the planes are these wallowing wide-body jets with black noses like panda bears, not sleek killing machines like Zeros, Messerschmitts, Spitfires, Mustangs. Funny to think that with all that world-war effort manufacturers still had the O.K. to make those little models, keeping up morale in the kiddie set. All the shops are asleep. A flower shop shows a violet growing light, and a pet store a dimly lit aquarium. The cars parked along the curb display a range of unearthly colors, no longer red and blue and cream but cindery lunar shades, like nothing you can see or even imagine by daylight.