"Charles de Lint - Spirits in the Wires" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

put enough of them in a line
and who knows where
they will take you.


тАФSASKIA MADDING,
тАЬCorridorтАЭ (Mirrors, 1995)




Saskia Madding
I remember opening my eyes andтАФ
You know how if you blow up an electronic image too much, you donтАЩt have a picture
anymore? When you push the image that far, all you really have left is a pixelated fog, a
screen full of tiny coloured squares that donтАЩt form a recognizable pattern, never mind an
image.
That was the first thing I saw.
I opened my eyes and I couldnтАЩt focus on anything. A hundred thousand million dots of


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/de%20Lint,%20Charles%20-%20Spirits%20in%20the%20Wires%20(v1.0).html (9 of 346)8-12-2006 23:50:50
SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint


colour and light filled my vision. I stared hard, trying to make sense of them, and slowly they
started to come together, forming recognizable objects. A dresser. A cedar chest. An
armchair with clothes draped over the arms and back. A closed wooden door. A poster from
the Newford Museum of Art advertising a retrospective of Vincent RushkinтАЩs work. Close
by my head on the night table was an unlit candle in a brass holder, and a leather-bound
book with a pattern of pussywillows stamped into the leather, a fountain pen lying on top of
it.
It was all familiar, but I knew IтАЩd never seen it before. Just as I myself was familiar, but I
didnтАЩt know who I really was. I knew my name. I knew there was a computer and paper trail
tracing my backgroundтАФwhere I was born, grew up, went to schoolтАФbut I couldnтАЩt actually
recall any of it. The details of the experiences, I mean. The sounds, the smells, the tactile
impressions associated with them. All I knew were the bare bones of cold facts.
I studied the explosion of pigeons in the painting theyтАЩd used in the poster for the Rushkin
show and tried to make sense of how I could be in my own bedroom, but have no sense of
where it was or how I got here or anything that had happened to me before I opened my
eyes at that moment.
And I was strangely calm.
I knew I shouldnтАЩt be. Somewhere a part of me was registering the fact that none of this was
rightтАФneither the where and how of where IтАЩd found myself upon waking, nor my reaction
to it.
I had the strongest sense of being temporary. A shadow cast by a light that was about to
move or be turned off. An image in a film that the camera had lingered up on before moving
on.
I held one of my hands up in front of my eyes, then the other. I sat up and looked at the
reflection of the woman in the mirror on the back of the dresser.