"Charles de Lint - Spirits in the Wires" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

story grows clearer and more pertinent as you add and take away words, molding its final shape.
Not surprisingly, my shadow proved to be the opposite of who I am in so many ways. Bolder, wiser, with a
better memory and a penchant for dressing up with costumes, masks, or simply formal wear. A cocktail dress
in a raspberry patch. A green man mask in a winter field. She’s short, where I’m tall. Dark-skinned, where
I’m light. Red-haired, where mine’s dark. A girl to my boy, and now a woman as I’m a man.
If she has a name, she’s never told me it. If she has an existence outside the times we’re together, she has yet
to divulge it either. Naturally, I’m curious about where she goes, but she doesn’t like being asked questions
and I’ve learned not to press her, because when I do, she simply goes away.
Sometimes I worry about her existence. I get anxieties about schizophrenia and carefully study myself for
other symptoms. But if she’s a delusion, it’s singular, and otherwise I seem to be as normal as anyone else,
which is to say, confused by the barrage of input and stimuli with which the modern world besets us, and
trying to make do. Who was it that said she’s always trying to understand the big picture, but the trouble is,
the picture just keeps getting bigger? Ani DiFranco. I think.
Mostly I don’t get too analytical about it—something I picked up from her, I suppose, since left to my own
devices, I can worry the smallest detail to death.
We have long conversations, usually late at night, when the badgering clouds swallow the stars and the
darkness is most profound. Most of the time I can’t see her, but I can hear her voice. I like to think we’re
friends; even if we don’t agree about details, we can usually find common ground on how we’d like things to
be.




FIRST MEETING




file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/de%20Lint,%20Charles%20-%20Spirits%20in%20the%20Wires%20(v1.0).html (4 of 346)8-12-2006 23:50:50
SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint




Don’t make of us
more than what we are,
she said.
We hold no great secret…


—SASKIA MADDING,
“Arabesque” (Moths and Wasps, 1997)




Christiana Tree
“I feel as if I should know you,” Saskia Madding says as she approaches my chair.
She’s been darting glances in my direction from across the café for about fifteen minutes
now and I was wondering when she’d finally come over.