"MOON, Elizabeth - Aura (V1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

She still did not know the room. Or, she told herself, she knew it intellectually, but as an abstraction. She knew the canned peas would be behind that door; she knew her dishes had a pattern of blue flowers on white. It did not interest her, and it held no memories of emotion. Her dishes could have been cream with pink roses, or yellow with a chain of blue squares. The table on which she had served so many meals might have been oblong instead of round. It might have had another cloth on it. The printed pattern of hers, a wreath of green vine leaves, seemed to mock her.

Take your medicine, one comer of her mind told her. Take it now. Medicine. The medicine was down the hall again, in the dark, in the bathroom cabinet. It was locked, she would have to turn on the light to find the key. Brad would waken, and be muzzily sympathetic. In less than a breath, the right side of her face went stiff, she could feel the hardening of that side of her brain, as if someone had poured concrete into her empty skull. Too late now . . . a spike of pain impaled her head. Nausea rolled her stomach. So stupid, she told herself. You should have taken the medicine when you woke Up. She told herself that every time.

She could not have worked on taxes the next day even if the threat of another migraine had not pressed in on her, squeezing her mind to the lining of her skull. She had visitors.

"Do you come from a dysfunctional family?" asked the new rector's wife. They had come to introduce themselves, to I earn "about your needs and how the church can help you," they had said. The rector's wife had the competent air of a good nurse who expects cooperation.

"No . . . not really," She had backed into her chair as far as she could; she flinched inwardly from the rector's wife's expression. They would already know, she supposed. They would already have made their judgments. "My -- uh -- parents were divorced, but aside from that --" That was not something most people could put aside, but she still felt that society's reaction m divorce, especially in school, had done her more harm than the divorce itself. Now it was fashionable to have, come from a dysfunctional family; back then only perfection would do. She distrusted the change in attitude.

"Aahh." A knowing professional sound, judgment made and rendered all in one. Efficient. "Are you all right, really?"

She was all right, really. She had learned to ignore the shimmering edges, the sudden disruption of vision into fragmented, faceted forms (easier, now, with computer graphics so common -- she could tell herself firmly that her visual computer was malfunctioning), even the strangeness that made her own house, her own family, so disturbing. Migraine aura. That's all it was, and the association with a childhood event purely accidental. No alcoholism, no drug addiction, no physical or sexual or emotional abuse. You've got nothing to complain about, said the anonymous voice. You're lucky. Luck being, as it were, her only handicap.

"Really all right," she repeated, hoping it was only once. "Fine." The rector's wife had begun to glitter dangerously; perhaps she would leave before she turned into an abstraction of planes and angles of beaten gold. The rector's wife would be terrifying as an insect, vast and intrusive; she would have grasping claws and the impersonal determination of a mantis dissecting a grasshopper for lunch. She must have said something else, because the rector was talking now, replying, it seemed, to something she had said. Something about her father. She blinked, hoping to resolve the pattern of bright dots and dark ones into something recognizable. The rector had dark hairs on the backs of his hands, and fingernails neatly dipped.

"-- ought to tell him how you feel," the rector said. "Or that's a kind of lying, too, isn't it? Concealing things? One should be honest . . ."

As a child, perhaps, A child craving attention. A child honestly curious. A child putting together those two childish things . . . instead of putting away childish things . . . and thereby releasing . . . whatever she had released. She knew better than to say that; she had said too much already. She walked them from the houses they smiled and waved. They had left their packet of wisdom for her. Honesty, forgiveness, love, wrapped in shining paper with shining ribbons around it. Her mind plucked at the glittering bows.

But it was not hers. It belonged to someone else. She glanced around, feeling unseen eyes. They had been blue, she remembered. Clear blue, and the whites very white, only a slight rim of red at the edge of the eyelid, probably from the smoke. Below his eyes a gray stain of sadness, the flesh sagging away from the bones. He had had one crooked front tooth, and some steel caps when he spoke that reflected points of light. It's not me that won't forgive, she said silently to the car that had long since driven away.

Around her, the gray blocks piled up, neatly, inexorably. The time she had said something about Emily's nose, the time she had snapped at Laura, the time she had lied about the check being in the mail. Days of plenty and peace, days of happiness, days when she had not thought of him at all, each one a gray stone walling her in. Stupid questions, cruel remarks, each a spike fixed in the stones, pointing inward. Clumsiness, inattention, laziness: the complaints of her teachers. Pride, insensitivity, selfishness: the complaints of her spiritual leaders. Hypersensitivity, priggishness: the complaints of her friends.

She looked at her arms, unsurprised to find them covered with blue numbers, zero to infinity, all she had done wrong and failed to do right. Her head shuddered and split into wedges, like a chopped tomato. Each wedge, impaled on a spike, had its own faceted eyes with which to see, and what remained of her voice rose from the soggy puddle of juice at the joining of the wedges. Sorry, it said, in a child's tremulous whisper. I'm sorry. Being sorry is not enough, said the voice she would never quite forget, in the language she had never heard before. She knew the meaning though. She always did.

Her usual reluctance to confront numbers suggested the mail as an escape. A pile of bills, advertisements, and two magazines. She picked up the magazine and flipped it open.

She had scarcely looked at the picture when her vision blurred; with no warning aura, the migraine invaded, overfilling her skull, pressing cruel thumbs on her eyeballs. She squinted at the magazine anyway. A black and white photograph danced on the page like a clipping on the wind.

Blurred face, sad eyes, lines of age and pain. She could not read the obituary, not really . . . she had never known his name; she had never remembered his profession. This was not the same man, could not be. One word only resolved into letters, quivering. She had seen that name in school, under the pictures of dead men stacked like firewood, a few survivors' masklike faces. Those faces shifted, merged into faces from later pictures, later wars, flickered through her mind in an endless stream: men, women, children, babies, bodies, mouths gaping, eyes wide or closed in death, crowds behind barbed wire, single prisoners bunched in cells, eyes glistening in the camera's flash, staring at her, through the lens and flickering shutter, with that expression she had never forgotten, that disbelief, that horror, that disgust.

The migraine squeezed itself, contracting to a single point of pain in midbrain. She grunted, as if someone had slugged her belly. Nothing was enough, nothing would ever be enough. She thought, as always too late, what she could have said to the rector's smiling wife: "No, not a dysfunctional family. A dysfunctional world."

With the suddenness of a pricked soap bubble, the migraine disappeared, leaving her unbalanced, almost giddy.

She laid the magazine on her desk, atop the piles of bank statements, the half-finished tax return. She felt warm and moist, a loaf of bread new-baked, steaming slightly. While her head was clear, while she could think, she would try to finish the taxes. Such respites, rare proof of the reality of miracles, lasted at most a few hours.

The numbers lay quiet, their meaning leached of danger, no more remarkable than a collection of letters. She fed them into the calculator, copied them, added and subtracted as the directions specified. The result had a certainty she had never associated with numbers, a feeling of solidity so new that it surprised her into noticing.

Tentatively, she let her mind visualize a number: just a number, not a dark mark on white skin. A cascade of them, in the bright pastels of her childhood's books, tumbled over each other, eager as puppies. Little yellow fives, soft lavender fours, orange threes, blue twos, fat white marshmallow ones, no longer scintillating in dangerous light, but docile, friendly, even affectionate. She felt as if she had stumbled into a strange universe where all the familiar rules changed.

In one blinding flash more intrusive than even the migraine, she saw the book itself, its pages smudged and worn at the edges, its pictures simple and innocent and harmless. Her own hand, none too clean (her adult eye recognized grape jelly and peanut butter) spread starfish-wise, her own voice piping "I like one and I like two and . . . that makes three, Mommy!"

So she had not always hated numbers; she had not always been driven to blind panic by the operation of one upon another. Had that panic come from her question, which even now loomed worse than the pain of migraines? She shivered, hoping as always that she would not remember it. But the numbers themselves surrounded her, touched her hands, stroked her head; softly, gently, insistently, they urged her through that final door where the terrible question lay, coiled malice, proof of iniquity beyond forgiveness, steeped in a poison only she could brew. No aura splintered that sight into painless abstraction, no migraine split her consciousness away from it -- the numbers, merciless once more, compelled her.

Cowering in the comer of her mind, that memory trembled, fragile as a wineglass, as a child's trust, as an adult's courage.

She had thought he had numbers on his arm because he liked numbers, just as she liked numbers. Why else would someone put numbers on his arm, instead of the dragon or heart or snake tattoos she had seen on other men? She wanted numbers too, perhaps in pretty colors like the dragons. She waited for a pause in the conversation, because she knew that interrupting was rude, and she asked her question as politely as she knew how. "When will I get my numbers?"