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

learned early on that my appearance made people uneasy. There was nothing pretty about my androgyny. I
was nearly six feet tall and vaguely threatening. I wore my hair long but otherwise made no concessions to
fashion, no makeup, no lipstick. I wore my father's white shirts over patched blue jeans or men's trousers I
bought at the Junior League Shop. I wouldn't meet people's eyes. I didn't like people looking at me. It made
me feel sick; it reminded me of that great eye above the empty field.
"She looks like a scarecrow, Dad," Brigid said once when I was sixteen. She and her husband were in
Kamensic for a rare visit. "I mean, look at herтАФ"
"I think she looks fine," my father said mildly. "She's just built like her mother was."
"She looks like a drug addict," Brigid snapped. She was sensitive about her weight. "We see them out
where we live."
I pointed out to the bird feeder at the edge of our woods. "What, like the chickadees? We see them too," I
said, and retreated to my room.
Several months later I had this dream. I was kneeling in the field where I'd seen the eye. A figure appeared
in front of me: a man with green-flecked eyes, his smile mocking and oddly compassionate. As I stared up
at him, he extended his hand until his finger touched the center of my forehead.
There was a blinding flash. I fell on my face, terrified, woke in bed with my ears ringing. It was the morning
of my seventeenth birthday. My father gave me a camera. I sat at the breakfast table, turned it in my
hands, and remembered the dream. I saw my face distorted in the round glass of the lens, like a flaw; like
an eye staring back at me.
I took an introductory photography class in high school and was encouraged to take more.
I never did. I quickly learned what I needed to know. I liked a slow lens. I liked grainy black-and-white film
and never worked in color. I liked the detail work of creating my own photographic paper, of processing
then developing the film myself in the school photo lab. I loved the way the paper felt, soft and wet in the
trays, then the magical way it dried and turned into something else, smooth and rigid and shining, the images
a mere byproduct of chemistry and timing.
I didn't care if the pictures were over- or underexposed, or even if they were in focus. I liked things that
didn't move: dead trees, stones. I liked dead things: the fingerless soft hand of a pheasant's wing, mouse
skulls disinterred from an owl pellet, a cicada's thorax picked clean by tiny green beetles. I liked portraits of
my friends when they were sleeping. I've always watched people sleep. When I occasionally babysat, I'd
go into the children's rooms after they were in bed and stand there, listening to their breathing, waiting until
my eyes adjusted to the soft glow of nightlight or moonlight. I liked to watch them breathe.
When I was seventeen I fell in love with a boy from a neighboring village. He was a year younger than me,
fey, red haired, with sunken, poison green eyes: a musician and a junkie. I'd hitch to his town and sit on the
library steps across the street from his big Victorian house and wait there for hours, hoping to see him but
also wanting to absorb his world, clock the comings and goings of his younger siblings, parents, his golden
retriever, his friends. I wanted to see the world he knew from inside his junkie's skin, smell the lilacs that
grew outside his window.
One day his sister came out and said, "My brother's inside. He's waiting for you to come over."
I went. No one else was home. We crawled underneath the Steinway Grand in the living room, and I
sucked him off. Afterward we sat together on the front porch while he smoked cigarettes. This pattern
continued until I left high school. One night we broke into the village pharmacy and stole bottles of Tuinals
and quaaludes before the alarm went off then ran laughing breathlessly back to his house, where he
pretended to sleep while I hid in his closet. We weren't caught, but I was too paranoid to ever try it again.
I liked to watch him sleep; I liked to watch him nod out. I took pictures of him and got them processed over
in Mount Kisco. At night in my room I'd look at those photographsтАФhis eyes closed, cigarette burning in his
handтАФand masturbate. I told him I'd do anything for him. A few years later, he got caught burglarizing
another drugstore up in Putnam Count His parents bailed him out and he wrote to me, desperate and lonely,
while he was awaiting sentencing. I never wrote back. His family moved to the Midwest somewhere. I
don't know what happened to him.
He was the only person I ever really cared about. I still have those photos somewhere.