"Elizabeth Hand - Generation Loss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

Generation Loss
Elizabeth Hand

Part One
Burning In
There's always a moment where everything changes. A great photographerтАФsomeone like Diane Arbus,
or me during that fraction of a second when I was greatтАФshe sees that moment coming, and presses the
shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don't see it coming, if you blink or you're drunk or
just looking the other wayтАФwell, everything changes anyway, it's not like things would have been different.
But for the rest of your life you're fucked, because you blew it. Maybe no one else knows it, but you do. In
my case, it was no secret. Everyone knew I'd blown it. Some people can make do in a situation like that.
Me, I've never been good at making do. My life, who could pretend there wasn't a big fucking hole in it?
I grew up about sixty miles north of the city in Kamensic Village, a haunted corner of the Hudson Valley
where three counties meet in a stony congeries of ancient Dutch-built houses, farmland, old-growth forest,
nouveau-riche mansions. My father wasтАФisтАФthe village magistrate. I was an only child, and a wild thing
as the privileged children of that town were.
I had from earliest childhood a sense that there was no skin between me and the world. I saw things that
other people didn't see. Hands that slipped through gaps in the air like falling leaves; a jagged outline like a
branch but there was no branch and no tree. In bed at night I heard a voice repeating my name in a soft,
insistent monotone. Cass. Cass. Cass. My father took me to a doctor, who said I'd grow out of it. I never
did, really.
My mother was much younger than my father, a beautiful Radcliffe girl he met on a blind date arranged by
his cousin. She died when I was four. The car she was driving, our old red Rambler station wagon, went off
the road and into the woods, slamming into a tree on the outskirts of town. It was an hour before someone
noticed headlights shining through the trees and called the police. When they finally arrived, they found my
mother impaled on the steering column. I was faceup on the backseat, surrounded by shattered glass but
unhurt.
I have no memory of the accident. The police officer told my father that I didn't cry or speak, just stared at
the car's ceiling, and, as the officer carried me outside, the night sky. Nowadays there would have been a
grief counselor, a child psychologist, drugs. My father's Irish Catholic sensibility, while not religious,
precluded any overt emotion; there was a wake, a funeral, a week of visiting relatives and phone calls.
Then my father returned to work. A housekeeper, Rosie, was hired to tend me. My father wouldn't speak
of my mother unless asked, and, forty-odd years ago, one didn't ask. Her presence remained in the framed
black-and-white photos my father kept of her in his bedroom. While Rosie vacuumed or made lunch I
would sit on his bed and slowly move my fingers across the glass covering the pictures, pretending the dust
was face powder on my mother's cheeks.
I liked being alone. Once when I was fourteen, walking in the woods, I stepped from the trees into a field
where the long grasses had been flattened by sleeping deer. I looked up into the sky and saw a mirror
image of the grass, black and yellow-gray whorls making a slow clockwise rotation like a hurricane. As I
stared the whorl began to move more quickly, drawing a darkness into its center until it resembled a vast
striated eye that was all pupil, contracting upon itself yet never disappearing. I stared at it until a low
buzzing began to sound in my ears. Then I ran.
I didn't stop until I reached my driveway. When I finally halted and looked back, the eye was still there,
turning. I never mentioned it to anyone. No one else ever spoke of seeing it.
My sense of detachment grew when I started high school, but as my grades were good and my other
activities furtive, my father never worried much about what I did. Our relationship was friendly if distant. It
was my Aunt Brigid who worried about me on the rare occasions she paid us a visit.
Brigid was like my father, stocky and big boned and red haired. I resembled photos of my mother. Tall and
angular, narrow hipped, my mother's soft features honed to a knife-edge in my own. Pointed chin, uptilted
nose, dirty-blond hair and mistrustful gray eyes. If I'd been a boy I might have been beautiful. Instead I