"2 - Idoru" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William - The Bridge Trilogy)

tickets in their limp beige plastic folder from the travel agent in the mall.

Going now.

She took a deep breath. Her mother's house seemed to take one as well, but more tentatively, its wooden bones creaking in the winter morning cold.



The cab arriving as scheduled, but magically nonetheless, and no, it didn't honk, exactly as requested. Kelsey having explained how these things were done. Just as Kelsey, briskly interviewing Chia on the circumstances of her life, had devised the cover for her impending absence: ten days in the San Juans with Hester Chen, whose well-heeled luddite mother so thoroughly feared electromagnetic radiation that she lived phoneless, in a sod-roofed castle of driftwood, no electricity allowed whatever. "Tell her you're doing a media fast, before your new school thing comes together," Kelsey had said. "She'll like that." And Chia's mother, who felt that Chia spent entirely too much time gloved and goggled, did.

Chia was actually fond of the gentle Hester, who seemed to get what Lo/Rez were about, though somehow without being quite as fundamentally moved as could have been expected, and Chia had in fact already tried the pleasures of Mrs. Chen's island retreat. But Hester's mother had made them both wear special baseball caps, sewn from some EMR-proof fabric, so that their young brains might not be bathed quite so constantly in the invisible soup of bad media.

Chia had complained to Hester that the caps made them both look like meshbacks.

-Don't be racist, Chia.

-I'm not.

-Classist, then.

-It's a matter of aesthetics.

And now in the overheated cab, her one bag beside her on the seat, she felt guilt at this deception, her mother sleeping there be-
15
hind those darkened windows matted with frost, under the weight of her thirty-five years and the flowered duvet Chia had bought at Nordstrom's. When Chia had been small, her mother had worn her hair in a long braid, its tip skewered with turquoise and abalone and carved bits of bone, like the magical tail of some mythical animal, swaying there for Chia to grab. And the house looked sad, too, as if it regretted her leaving, white paint peeling from the underlying gray of ninety-year-old cedar clapboards. Chia shivered. What if she never came back?

"Where to?" the driver said, a black man in a puffy nylon jacket and a flat plaid cap.

"SeaTac," Chia said, and pushed her shoulders back into the seat.

Pulling out past the old Lexus the neighbors kept up on concrete blocks in the driveway.



Airports were spooky places, early in the morning. There was a hollowness that could settle on you there, something sad and empty. Corridors and people moving away down them. Standing in line behind people she'd never seen before and would never see again. Her bag over her shoulder and her passport and ticket in her hand. She wanted another cup of coffee. There was one back in her room, in the Espressomatic. Which she should've emptied and cleaned, because now it would go moldy while she was away.

"Yes?" The man behind the counter wore a striped shirt, a tie with the Air Magellan logo repeated down it diagonally, and a green jade labret stud. Chia wondered what his lower lip looked like when he took it out. She never would, she decided, if she had one of those. She handed him her ticket. He sighed and removed them from the folder, letting her know that she should've done that herself.

She watched him run a scanner over her ticket.

"Air Magellan one-oh-five to Narita, economy return."

"That's right," Chia said, trying to be helpful. He didn't seem to appreciate that.
"Travel document."

Chia handed him her passport. He looked at it as though he'd never seen one before, sighed, and plugged it into a slot in the top of his counter. The slot had beat-up aluminum lips, and someone had covered these with transparent tape, peeling now and dirty. The man was looking at a monitor Chia couldn't see. Maybe he was going to tell her she couldn't go. She thought about the coffee in her Espressomatic. It would still be warm.

"Twenty-three D," he said, as a boarding-pass spooled from a different slot. He pulled her passport out and handed it to her, along with her ticket and the boarding pass. "Gate fifty-two, blue concourse. Checking anything?"