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

run out to the coffin, leap up, and hit the man in the head, after which he falls silent for a minute or two
before resuming his agonized plea.

You watch the dogs. They growl at the man in the coffin. When the coffin is past you, you stare at the
back of the man's neck as he tries to rise once again from "death." The large red circle you see there
makes you forget to breathe for a moment.

You turn to the person on your left, a middle aged man as thin as almost everyone else in town.
"What will happen to him?" you ask, hoping he will understand you.

The man leers at you. "Ghost, they will kill him and bury him out in the desert where he won't be found."

"What did he do?" you ask.

The man just stares at you for a moment, as if speaking to a child or an idiot, and then says, "He came
from the outside -- with a familiar."

Your body turns cold. A familiar. The taste of lime. The sudden chance. Perhaps this town does have
something to add to the book. You have never seen a familiar, but an old woman gave you something her
father had once written about familiars. You added it to the book:
The tube of flesh is quite prophetic. The tube of flesh, the umbilical, is inserted at the base of the neck,
although sometimes inserted by mistake toward the top of the head, which can result in unexpected
visions. The umbilical feeds into the central nervous system. The nerves of the familiar's umbilical wind
around the nerves in the person's neck. Above the recipient, the manta ray, the familiar, rises and grows
full with the knowledge of the host. It makes itself larger. It elongates. The subject goes into shock,
convulses, and becomes limp. Motor control passes over to the familiar, creating a moving yet utilitarian
symbiosis. The neck becomes numb. A tingling forms on the tongue, and taste of lime. There is no release
from this. There should be no release from this. Broken out from their slumber, hundreds are initiated at a
time, the tubes glistening and churling in the elision of the steam, the continual need. Thus fitted, all go
forth in their splendid ranks. The eye of the City opens and continues to open, wider and wider, until the
eye is the world.
So it says in the Book of the City, the elusive city, the city that is forever moving across the desert,
powered by...what? The sun? The moon? The stars? The sand? What? Sometimes you despair at how
thoroughly the city has eluded you.



You stand in the crowd for a long time. You let the crowd hide you, although what are you hiding from?
A hurt and a longing rise in your throat. Why should that be? It's not connected to the man who will be
dead soon. No, not him -- another man altogether. For a long, suffocating moment you seem so far away
from your goal, from what you seek, that you want to scream as the man screamed: Give me back the
familiar!

In this filthy, run-down backwater border town with its insultingly enigmatic dome, where people believe
in the ghost of the City and kill men for having familiars -- aren't you as far from the City as you have ever
been? And still, as you turn and survey your fate, does it matter? Would it have been any different
walking through the desert for another week? Would you have been happier out in the Nothing, in the
Nowhere, without human voices to remind you of what human voices sound like?

Once, maybe six months before, you can't remember, a man said to you: "In the desert there are many