"Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

words are his: Dr. Ressler, leading the way
through winter violence, the snowstorm that
trapped the three of us in a vanished cabin,
laying out all natural history with an ironic
shrug: "What could be simpler?"
I had a hunch it would come now. For a
week, unseasonably cool—brisk, blustery,
more like summer's end than its beginning.
Last night the cold peaked. I slept under a
parfait of wool, the weight required to keep
me under. Giving in to an irrational fear of
courants d'air brought on by too much
literature as a girl, I sealed the apartment. No
one around any longer to object. Excited by
night chill, the signal hidden in temperature,
I fell asleep only by degrees. I lay in the
metal-cold sheets aware of every pore,
unable to keep from remembering.
Something was about to happen. Hurried
lingering, hope, as always, a function of
weather.
I passed through that hybrid state just
short of dream, back to that iridescent
weekend in the woods. The familiar world
overhauled, encased in silver sealant. We
three waded again across the glacial surface:
spectral trees glazed with lapidary. Bird and
squirrel fossils marked the drifts. Snow
obliterated paths, spun power lines into flax,
confected hedgerows, dressed our cabin in
gothic buttresses and finials. I walked
through the transmuted place beside my two
males, one in herringbone, the other in navy
pea. Dr. Ressler walked between Franklin
and me, pointing out astonishments in the
altered world, his features as angular as the
shepherd's wonder from my childhood
creche. The seashell loops of his ears, his
fleshless nose, reddened in the acute cold,
while his lashes doilied with flakes that
beaded across his mat of hair.
We pressed deeper into the snowscape,
the bronchi-passages of a walk-in lung.
Franklin and I placed our hands under each
other's coats, pleading conservation of heat.
In bed, my skin still recorded the year-ago
cold of that boy's fingers against my ribs.
Ressler saw everything: the bark swells of
insect galls, the den entrance punched
through hardened powder. He certainly saw