"Alexander Jablokov - Market Report" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

“We’re working a few things out. A bit of a shakedown period, you might call
it.”
My parents’ entire marriage had been a shakedown period. I was just an
interim project that had somehow become permanent. I swear, all through my
childhood, every morning they had been surprised to see me come down-stairs to
breakfast. Even now, my dad was looking at me as if he wasn’t en-tirely sure who I
was.
“Well, to start with, Dad, I guess the problems Stacy and I have been hav-ing
stem from being in the same profession—”
“You know,” Dad said, “your mother still has the darkest blue eyes I have
ever seen.
“She does have lovely eyes.”
“Cornflower blue, I always thought. Her eyes are cornflower blue.”
Stacy’s eyes were brown, but I guessed my father wasn’t interested in hearing
about that. “Cornflowers are not the flowers on corn.” It had taken me years to
figure that out.
“That’s right.”
“Someone once told me,” I said, “that you can hear corn growing at night. It
grows so fast on hot summer nights. A night like tonight.”
“You need quiet to hear it,” he said. “You don’t like quiet, do you, Bert?” He
was already looking for an argument. “You can’t market quiet.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “There’s an ambient recording you can
buy of corn growing. Cells dividing. Leaves rustling. Bugs, I don’t know, eat-ing the
leaves. That little juicy crunch Call it a grace note.”
“And so you play it over your Home Theater system. With subwoofer, side
speakers, the works? Pour yourself a singlemalt, sit back, relax?”
“You don’t listen to ambient, Dad. You let it wash over you. Through you.
The whole point of modern life is never giving your full attention to any one thing.
That gets boring. So you put the corn in the CD stack with the sound of windblown
sand eroding the Sphinx, snow falling on the Ross Ice Shelf, the relaxing distant
rattle of a horde of lemmings hitting the ocean, pop open your PowerBook to work
some spreadsheets, and put a football game on the giant TV. You’ll get the Oneness
thing happening in no time.”
“Are you getting it?” he asked softly. It wasn’t like his regular voice at all.
“The Oneness. Whatever it is you’re looking for.”
“There was a time when I was so close I could taste it…”
“Bertram! There you are!” Had my mother just come out of the woods? She
was knotting the sash of a fluffy white terrycloth robe, as if she’d just stepped from
the bathroom. Her gray hair was cut close to her scalp. She looked great. She always
had. Even rubbing sleep out of her eyes, her feet bare. She still painted her toenails, I
noticed, and they weren’t even chipped. “Franklin, weren’t you going to go get him
a tent?”
“I was,” my dad said.
She hugged me, then tugged at the sleeve of my jacket. “Isn’t it a little hot for
wool?”
“It’s tropic weight,” I said. “Gaberdine.”
“The tropics have nothing on Illinois in August.” With that last shot, my dad
disappeared into the garage.
“Franklin’s right. Here.” An antique steamer trunk stood on end next to where
the house’s airconditioning unit poked out of the rhododendrons.