"Jeff VanderMeer - Flight Is For Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

voice, the anticipation, the hope, sends a tremor down Gabriel's spine,
even as he faces the prisoner.
"What?"
"My wife's name is Maria. Maria D'Souza. She lives in Carbajal, in the
projects. Please. It is not very far. She is tall and thin and has hair as
long and thick as the silk of angels. Please. Her name is Maria. Tell her
where I am. Tell her I think of her. Tell her to visit my father and let
him know where I am. Her name is Maria."
Inside of Gabriel, something comes loose. A lurching nausea, a
dislocation. It will pass, he tells himself. It has always passed before,
no matter how they plead - which is not often because most times they just
sit and stare at the walls.
But he says only, "No. I cannot."
"Please?"
"No."
D'Souza comes swiftly to the front of the cell, silent, his white, white
skin stretched over his scarecrow frame, mottled by moonlight and shadow.
His hands around the bars are gray and splashed with a violet color that
would be red by any other light. D'Souza has burning pink flesh instead of
fingernails. His face is a welter of dried blood and yellowing bruises. An
apparition from the Night of All Saints, a carnival figure, but too grim
for a clown. D'Souza stares at Gabriel and Gabriel, transfixed, stares
back, wondering at the passing resemblance to his brother Pedro, the drawn
cheekbones, the fiery black eyes, the anger that pins him, helpless: a
priest hearing a confession, a vessel to be filled.
"Do you know what they have done to me?"
"I don't know what you mean."
Gabriel is not a member of the secret police, but he has at times come to
a cell at the wrong time and seen things that have made him retrace his
steps while thinking desperately about the current football scores and his
country's chances in the 1998 World Cup. A door left open. A shriek,
abruptly cut off. Blood under the fingernails.
D'Souza's hand snakes out from between the bars. He clutches Gabriel's
wrist so hard it throbs. Gabriel smells the blood and filth on D'Souza,
feels the sticky cool softness of D'Souza's nail-less thumb against his
palm. He struggles, wrenches away from that touch, backpedals out of
reach, confronted with a rage accumulated not over years but days.
"I must shit where I eat and I eat nothing because what they feed me is
less than nothing. They come at all hours, without warning, with electric
cattleprods. They beat me. They have torn my fingernails out. They have
attached electric wires--"
"Shut up!"
"--to my scrotum and stuck needles up my penis. They have tried to make me
confess to crimes I haven't committed, never committed....They are
tireless and well-fed and confident, and I am none of these things. I was
a painter before they took me. Now I am nothing."
"I said to shut up!"
But Gabriel does not pull out his nightstick or walk away from the cell.
His lack of action mystifies him. He cannot understand why he finds it so
difficult to breathe.