"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Courting Disasters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

COURTING DISASTERS
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Simon remembered the vision of the crash. He saw the windows shatter, the splash of glass, the
crunching, inward impact. He was aware of the steering wheel smashing into his ribcage, the windshield
battering his face, and the carтАЩs front end crushing his legs as the Ferrari and the redwood met, but he
didnтАЩt feel the pain. There were certain sensations he allowed to travel from his body to his home, deep in
his skull, but pain was not one of them. He had learned how to turn off the pain when he was eight.

But he didnтАЩt hear anything, either, and that disturbed him; he had never damped sound before. Hearing
and sight were his favorite senses, vital to his job as well as to his off-hour pleasures. He recalled the
mixture of desperation, abandon, and numbness he had felt; the pulse of the car around him, the cool
night air blowing in the vents, the driving beat of rock music from the speakers behind him, the scent of
wet and redwood as he mazed his way around the curves of the Avenue of the Giants.

When his control collapsed, when the road curved and his car did not, sound vanished. Instead, in the
last moment before blackout, images battered his mind. He felt himself shaped and hammered in the heart
of fire. He felt his feet had turned to hands with a million pale slim fingers, reaching downward into moist,
fragrant earth.

======

In the blinking moment it took him to focus, Simon noted the colors around him: a muted sand-beige
ceiling, warm gold curtains dangling from a host of bead-chains locked into a ceiling track that
half-circled his bed on his left, light apricot walls to his right. According to the Luscher color test, these
colors should be relaxing yet slightly energizing, which seemed appropriate to the environment. He
suspected this was a hospital, since the bed he lay in had rails.

He heard breathing: his own, and someone elseтАЩs. The other personтАЩs breathing was slow, with long
pauses between inhalation and exhalation.

Messages waited for him from outlying areas of his body, but he sensed the scream of pain in them and
shunted them away. His glance fell on a tall machine beside the bed. It hummed and ticked very
quietly-Red LED numbers flashed and changed on the face of a small blue box hanging midway down a
chrome pipe. Drops travelled from a fat, clear hanging bottle down a plastic tube which vanished into the
blue box, re-emerged from the bottom, and snaked under a bandage on his left forearm, which was
taped to the bedrail.

Fueling up, he thought. Something about getting life-juice from a hose felt familiar to him. With his eyes
shut he could imagine himself healthy, crouched upon asphalt, his rigid form encapsulating a power
waiting to growl to life, a human heart locked inside him, the all-important spark that set everything in
motion and brought him to waking life.

Simon lay and grinned beneath his bandages. His fantasies were usually darker. He had never suspected
his Ferrari loved him as much as he loved it. He lay imagining the warmth that entered the car when the
human sat in its seat, turned the key, pressed pedals, shifted gears, and laid hands on the steering wheel.
An almost unbearable thrill of anticipation simmered in him, like an unscratchable itch. The car did not
care where it went. Movement excited it, the continual meeting and mating with the surface of the road.

Fueling up. The car understood.