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

that has taken so much away from you.



He had green eyes and soft lips. He had calloused hands, a fiery red when he returned from work. His
temper could be harsh and quick, but it never lasted. The moodiness in him he tried to keep from you.
Most of the time he hid it well. The good humor, when he had it, he shared with you. It was a good life.




At the edge of town, you encounter the sentinel. He sits in his chair atop a tall tower, impassive and
sand-worn, sun-soaked. An old man, wrinkled and white-bearded. You stand there and look up at him
for a long time. Perhaps you recognize some part of yourself in him. Perhaps you trust him because of it.

The sentinel stares down at you, but you cannot tell if he recognizes you. There is about him an
immutability, as if beneath the coursing red thirst of his flesh, the decaying arteries and veins, the heart that
fights against its own inevitable stoppage, there is nothing but fissured stone. This quality comes out most
vividly in the color of his eyes, which are like gray slate broken by flashes of the blue sky.

"Are you a ghost?" the sentinel asks you. A half smile.

You laugh, shading your eyes against the sun. "A ghost?" There'd be more moisture in a ghost, and more
hope. "I'm a traveler. Just passing through. I'm looking for the City."

You catch a hint of slippage in the sentinel's impassive features, a hint of disappointment at such an
ordinary quest. Half the people of the world seek the City.

"You may enter," the sentinel says, and suddenly his gaze has shifted back to the horizon, and narrowed
and deepened, no doubt due to some ancient binocular technology affixed to his eyes.

The town lies open to you. What will you make of it?



Your father didn't like him, and your mother didn't care. "He's shallow," your father said to you. "He's not
good enough for you." You knew this was not true. He kept his own counsel. He got nervous in large
groups. He didn't like small talk. These were all things that made him seem unapproachable at first. But,
over time, they both grew to love him almost as much as you loved him.

Everyone eventually wanted to like him, even when he was unlikeable. There was something about him --
a presence that had nothing to do with words or mannerisms or the body. It followed him everywhere.
Sometimes now, you think it must have been the presence of the City, the distant breath and heat of it.



In this border town, as the streets and the people on them come into focus, you realize the sentinel's
question was not baseless: you are a ghost. As you reach the outskirts, the sand somehow finer and
looser, you stop for a second, hands on your hips, like a runner who has reached the end of a race. Your
solitude of two weeks has been broken. It is as if you have breached an invisible bubble. It's as if you