"Alexander Jablokov - Market Report" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

4 ALEXANDER JABLOKOV

"You know," Dad said, "your mother still has the darkest blue eyes I have ever seen."

"She does have lovely eyes."

"Cornflower blue, I always thought. Her eyes cornflower blue."

Stacy's eyes were brown, but I guessed my fathe; wasn't interested in hearing about that. "Cornflowers

figure that out. "That's right."

"Someone once told me," I said, "that you can he nights. A night like tonight."

"You need quiet to hear it," he said. "You don't like quiet, do you, Bert?" He was already looking for an argument. "You can't market quiet."

"That's where you're wrong," I said. "There's an ambient recording you can buy of corn growing. Cells dividing. Leaves rustling. Bugs, I don't know, eating the leaves. That little juicy crunch. Call it a grace note."

"And so you play it over your Home Theater system. With subwoofer, side speakers, the works? Pour yourself a single-malt, sit back, relax?"

"You don't listen to ambient, Dad. You let it wash over you. Through you. The whole point of modern life is never giving your full attention to any one thing. That gets boring. So you put the corn in the CD stack with the sound of windblown sand eroding the Sphinx, snow falling on the Ross Ice Shelf, the relaxing distant rattle of a horde of lemmings hitting the ocean, pop open your Powerbook to work some spreadsheets, and put a football game on the giant TV. You'll get the Oneness thing

"Are you getting it?" he asked softly. It wasn't like his regular voice at all. "What?"

MARKET REPORT 5

"The Oneness. Whatever it is you're looking for." "There was a rime when I was so close I could taste it. ..."

"Bertram! There you are!" Had my mother just come out of the woods? She was knotting the sash of a fluffy white terrycloth robe, as if she'd just stepped from the bathroom. Her gray hair was cut close to her scalp. She looked great. She always had. Even rubbing sleep out of her eyes, her feet bare. She still painted her toe-nails, I noticed, and they weren't even chipped. "Franklin, weren't you going to go get him a tent?" "I was," my dad said.

She hugged me, then tugged at the sleeve of my jacket. "Isn't it a little hot for wool?"

"It's tropic weight," I said. "Gabardine." "The tropics have nothing on Illinois in August." With that last shot, my dad disappeared into the garage. "Franklin's right. Here." An antique steamer trunk stood on end next to where the house's air-conditioning unit poked out of the rhododendrons.

Then my jacket was off, my tie was gone, and I was sitting at the picnic table with an iced glass of cranberry juice in my hand. Mothers do card tricks with comfort. All Dad had offered me was an argumentЧbut then that was his way of letting me know I was home. "Did the power go out, Mom?" I said. She laughed. "Oh, no. How do you think I made the ice cubes? It's just the way we live now. Out here in the country."

Now that I had a chance to relax, I could see that the other backyards visible had encampments in them too: tents, tables, meat smokers, greenhouses, even a Port-O-Let or two. I could hear people talking quietly, even at this hour, and smell the smoke of banked cook-fires. Something was wrong, seriously wrong, with this exclusive residential community. I should have known it

6 ALEXANDER JABLOKOV

as soon as my mom gave me the cranberry juice. Her comfort meant that something was not right.

There were times in my childhood when everything had been stable. For a couple of years, for example, my dad had worked in a regular pet store, selling neon tetras and spaniels to wide-eyed children who would lose interest in them as soon as they got them home. We'd lived in a suburban house with a yard, all that, and I'd been able to tell the other kids what my dad did for a living. The TV shows I watched seemed to be intended to be watched by people living the life I then lived.

But during that time my mother had barely paid attention to me. TV dinners had been the order of the day, and I remembered a lot of drive-thru eating. She thought I was safe, then, and could take care of myself.

It was times like when my dad tried to build a submerged house at the bottom of an abandoned water-filled quarry and stock the water with ornamental piranha that my mother would bake me apple cobbler and paint farm scenes with smiling cows on the riveted bulkhead in my room. She had always intervened to keep the panic in my memories on a perfectly even keel.

"I should have known," I said.