"Jack Womack - Audience" - читать интересную книгу автора (Womack Jack)

"But who closed the cafes?"
If the curator knew, perhaps he no longer had reason to tell. He shook his head, and returned his
instrument to his bag. "One day they were there, and the next, they weren't."
He redirected his attentions, undoubtedly anticipating that he would be aware of the subsequent
attraction before I would. The room in which we sat seemed smaller than it was, and felt ever more so
the longer we sat there, but before my vague discomfort hardened into claustrophobia, I took notice of a
bright, pellucid sound overhead; a faint tinkling, a clatter of miniature cymbals. Staring up I saw a mobile
attached to the ceiling, made up of shiny glass shards hanging by threads, clinking together as they twirled
in the candle-warmed air.
"Trams ran throughout the cities," he continued. "A staff protruded from the prow of each car,
above the engine driver's window. Chimes such as those were tied to the end of each staff, and as the
cars raced down the tracks, the wind signalled to those waiting at the next stop ahead, promising that
their patience would be shortly rewarded. On maps, the tramlines were identified by the spectral colours,
and each car's hue matched its line.
"Upon boarding, you dropped your gold token into a black fare box. When it issued your receipt,
the box thanked you, not in words but with a sound truly lost. All I can offer is a description, bearing less
relation to its actuality than a dead lover's lock of hair bears to the head from which it grew." The curator
stood, motioning that I should do the same. "The mechanism's three notes comprised an ascending
diatonic triad, impressing itself into the ear as a chirp rather than a chord, in intonation closer to a
cricket's than to a bird's, yet louder, as if the insect nestled unseen within your clothing while it sang." He
paused. "Can you hear it?" Before I might answer, he went on. "I've saved what could be saved, but so
much was lost. If no one knows a tree falls in the forest, the question shouldn't be did it fall? but, was it
there before it fell?"
We moved into another room as he spoke. There were three tiny windows on our right, admitting
no purer light than might have eked through at sunset, in winter, on a cloudy day. Once more my shoes
slid across a surface of altered texture; the clack of my heels reverberated against the walls with hollow
echoes, and when I glanced down I saw what appeared, in the gloom, as bleached cobblestones, or the
small skulls of babies.
"We rode the Blue Line, going to the seashore. At the beachfront was the spa, which was built of
plum-coloured bricks and had 900 rooms. People came from all around to enjoy the waters. A
promenade encircled the spa, and ran as well down to the dockside. Seashells were used to pave their
walkways, and those of the quays. Travellers inevitably remarked on our city's soundless sea, thinking the
breakers pounded silently against the sand. Throughout the day and into the night the surf went unheard
beneath the footsteps of thousands strolling over the shells. It's curious to realize that the only one of our
sounds visitors recalled, afterwards, was one they never heard.
"Every summer night when the Guildhall's clock struck ten, the Ensemble Pyrotechnique undertook
their most elaborate works on the strand. We'd sit on the public terraces overlooking the ocean and
watch them fire their flowers into heaven. It was on one such night I proposed to my wife. Each year, on
our anniversary, we'd ride the Blue Line to the seashore, each time remembering where we'd been, each
time giving thanks for where we had come, blessing that moment from that time on until there was no time
left."
I'd only imagined the cry of the fare box; now, enveloping myself within the curator's descriptions,
feeling seashells beneath my feet, allowing his recollections to mingle with my own, I heard the fireworks
bursting with the wet pop of flashbulbs exploding in the lamps of old cameras. That a memory of sound
could so intrude into the physical world wasn't surprising in itself; who hasn't heard a fragment of a hated
song and, hours later, still found it there, as impacted as a bean in the ear of a child? What was not so
much unexpected as unnatural was the perceived immediacy of fireworks; of the bitter tang of
gunpowder, of peripheral flashes glimpsed between my horizon and the beamed ceiling's azimuth.
Shutting my eyes, I heard an unseen sea's unheard heartbeat.
"The shells were removed concurrently with the tramlines," the curator said, tapping the floor with