"Paul Park - The Tourist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

Tenochtitlan, and fares were down as a result. I bought a ticket for
Paleolithic Spain. Far enough away for me to think that things might be
different there. I thought there might be out-of-the-way places still.
Places pure and untouched and malleable, where I could make things
different. Where my imagination might still correspond in some sense to
reality--I might have known. My ex-inlaws had sent me postcards. They
had
recently been on a mastodon safari not far from Jaca, where they had
visited Suzanne. "The food is great," they wrote me--never a good sign.
I might have known I was making a mistake. There is something about the
past which makes what we've done to it even more poignant. All the
brochures and the guidebooks say it and it's true. It really is more
beautiful back then. The senses come alive. Colours are brighter.
Chairs
are more comfortable. Things smell better, taste better. People are
friendlier, or at least they were. Safe in the future, you can still
feel
so much potential. Yet the town I landed in-- my God, it was such a sad
place. San Juan de la Cruz. We came in over the Pyrenees, turned low
over
a lush forest, and then settled down in an enormous empty field of
tarmac.
The hangar space was as big as Heathrow's, but there was only one other
commercial jetliner-- a KLM. Everything else was US military aircraft
and
not even much of that, just five beige transports in a line, and a
single
helicopter gunship.
We taxied in toward His Excellency the Honorable Dr Wynstan Mog (Ph.D.)
International Airport, still only half built and already crumbling,
from
the look of it. For no perceptible reason the pilot offloaded us about
200
yards from the terminal, and then we had to stand around on the melting
asphalt while the stewardesses argued with some men in uniform. I
didn't
mind. The sky was cobalt blue. It was hot, but there were astonishing
smells blown out of the forest toward us, smells which I couldn't
identify, and which mixed with the tar and the gasoline and my own
sweat
and the noise of the engines into a sensation that seemed to nudge at
the
edges of my memory, as if it almost meant something, just in itself.
But
what? I had been born in Bellingham; this was nothing I recognized. It
was
nothing from my past. I put my head back and closed my eyes,
dangerously
patient, while all around me my 19 fellow passengers buzzed and
twittered.