"Patrick O'Leary - The Dream of Vibo" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'leary Patrick)

Finally Vibo sighed, and sniffed, and collected himself. тАЬThere was a day,тАЭ Vibo began, тАЬwhen all life
depended on one moment. And everything before and everything since depended on that one moment. It
passed and nobody knew it.тАЭ

On this day, a sad man woke and found his wife smiling down at him. She hadnтАЩt done that for
years. And it was the nicest morning he could have imagined. The sun came through the window
behind her and gave a nimbus glow to her thin gray hair. And he asked her what she was thinking
that made her so happy. I was thinking of you, she answered. And why I love you. Outside their
window a red cardinal swooped down past the bird feeder over the white lawn to rest on the low
branch of a tree. There he smelled the boys who played in the treehouse they built that summer.
And the cardinal cocked his head in question. And in the house next door the boy he smelled
leaned down to pick up a golden cat. The cat purred and accepted the boyтАЩs warm arms. The boy
looked deeply into the catтАЩs eyes. And wondered why he purred. And the boy felt the catтАЩs answer.
Because somebody loved me. And the boy smiled. And his mother caught his smile as she was
washing the smeared window that overlooked the white lawn, the white rag squeaking, squeaking
as it absorbed the ammonia water and grime. And a flash of red went by and she thought: Is that
a cardinal? Then she recalled birthing the boy, how after a long, hard labor, he erupted between
her legs, folded onto her chest, took his first breaths, and transformed limb by limb, like a great
spreading blush from a blue baby who loved her on the inside into a pink soft creature who loved
her on the outside, too. And she recalled the smiling nurse who swabbed him gently and asked his
name. And at that moment, that very important moment, that nurseтАЩs sister (who had moved into
the neighborhood last summer) was dying. And she reached up to touch the chin of her husband
(the only place he had to shave), who had sat in vigil at her bedside for many long and harrowing
months. And she smiled a weak smile, and said Remember Ford Road? And their smiles deepened
as they recalled the night they drove off the freeway, deep into the dark and found a side dirt
road, then a crooked two-lane trail that led them to a hidden cove in the heart of the woods. And
crawling into the back seat of their car they hungrily, desperately stripped off their clothes and
made love wildly, screaming as they never could before. And they wept there in their bed,
surrounded by the sacred memory. What was that? the dying sister said as a red streak flitted past
their window and paused before it dipped and found a perch on an aluminum gutter where a dead
brown leaf lay frozen in a posture of wide wonder. Like an open fist. The leaf had escaped its tree,
the only tree it ever knew, its only home. And caught by a gust of October wind and torn from the
branch, it had been swept away into the first and only flight of its life. And as it spun and twirled
it knew that this, this was what it was made for, not to cast its dark shape into a fluttering patch
of shade in the hot summer sun, not to bathe in the chill spring rains or even to lie frozen and
splayed out in a gutter to bask in its memories, but for that one, brief dizzy moment of flight. The
red bird understood and he affirmed the leafтАЩs joy by spreading his wings wide. Then he coasted
down to where a car was trying to back out of a drive. Stuck. Its rear tires spinning, spinning in
two slick grooves of snow and ice, and what interesting music it makes, the bird thought. And a
young man was behind the wheel, shifting back and forth from drive to reverse, and slamming the
accelerator and letting it go. And cursing to the young woman beside him: It is an awful world, a
fucking awful world. Why would anyone want to live in it? And the young woman told him why
and for that moment he wanted to live again, if only to see in her eyes the beauty she saw in him.
What was that? said the young woman. A cardinal, said the young man, and they watched it
disappear over a roof in a perfect acrobatic arch. And in the next yard an old man stood looking
up at the clouds gray and close and thought, have I done nothing right, have I wasted every
moment, will I always wonder if it mattered? And he heard a sound and turned in his sorrow to
find the red bird tasting water from the broken ice of a puddle in the shape of a shoe. I made that
puddle, the old man thought, recalling the crunch and the shallow sink of his foot as he had
stepped despairing out onto the white lawn to look at the sky and consider all his life had brought