"Jeff VanderMeer - Three Days in a Border Town" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

Three Days in a Border Town
a novelette
by Jeff VanderMeer
You remember the way he moved across the bedroom in the mornings, with a slow, stumbling stride. His
black hair ruffled and matted and sexy. The sharp line down the middle of his back, the muscles arching
out from it. The taut curve of his ass. The musky smell of him that kissed the sheets. The stutter-step as
he put on his pants, the look back at you to see if you'd noticed his clumsiness. The way he stared at you
sometimes before he left for work.




Day One
When you come out of the desert into the border town, you feel like a wisp of smoke rising up into the
cloudless sky. You're two eyes and a dry tongue. But you can't burn up; you've already passed through
flame on your way to ash. Even the sweat between your breasts is ethereal, otherworldly. Not all the blue
in the sky could moisten you. A mirage has more substance.

The border town, as many of them did, manifested itself to you at the end of a second week in the desert.
It began as a trickle of silver light off imagined metal, a suggestion of a curved sheen. You could have
ignored it as false. You could have taken it for another of the desert's many tricks.

But The Book of the City corrected you, with an entry under "Other Towns":
Often, you will find that these border towns, in unconscious echo of the City, are centered around a metal
dome. This dome may be visible long before the rest of the town. These domes often prove to be the
tops of ancient buildings long since buried beneath the sand.
Drifting closer, the blur of dome comes into focus. It is wide and high and damaged. It reflects the old
building style, conforming to the realities of a lost religion, the metal of its workmanship predating the
arrival of the desert.

Around the dome hunch the sand-and-rock-built houses and other structures of the typical border town.
The buildings are nondescript, yellow-brown, rarely higher than three stories. Here and there, a solitary
gaunt horse, some chickens, a rooting creature that resembles a pig. Above: the sea gulls that have no sea
to return to.

Every border town has given you something: information, a wound, a talisman, a trinket. At one, you
bought the blank book you now call The Book of the City. At another, you discovered much of what
was written in that book. The third had taken a gout of flesh from your left thigh. The fourth had put a
pulsing stone inside of your head. When the City is near, the stone throbs and you feel the ache of a pain
too distant to be of use.

It has been a long time since you felt the pain. You're beginning to think your quest is hopeless.

About the City, your book tells you this:
There is but one City in all the world. Ever it travels across the face of the Earth, both as promise and as
curse. None of us shall but glimpse It from the corner of one eye during our lifetimes. None of us shall
ever fully see the divine, in this life.
It is said that border towns are ghosts of the City. If so, they are faint and tawdry ghosts, for those who
have seen the City know that It has no Equal.
A preacher for a faith foreign to you quoted that from his own holy text, but you can't worship anything