"Bruce Holland Rogers - Something Like the Sound of Wind in the Trees" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

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6. Insomnia Cure
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When his parents fought, Walter would turn on the old record player in his room and drop the needle
on the empty spot after the last song. Psshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-pop, it went. If he could hear their voices,
he would turn up the volume: PSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-POP.
PSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-POP. Filling the room up with the absence of music.
Thirty years later, after his own divorce, he keeps a record player in his room. Some nights, the
absence of music at full volume is the only thing that will get him to sleep.
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7. The Ultimate Mood Maker
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In the new house, Jerry had trouble sleeping. As he stared at the dark ceiling, listening to Carla
breathe, there were things that weighed on him: The job at the planner's office that had once been his
dream and was now drudgery. The mortgage, which meant-- even with Carla's income-- that he needed
to keep the job. Carla's difficulty conceiving. What if they kept trying and she didn't get pregnant? And
what if she did? Worst of all was the thought of not getting enough sleep, of what it would do to him the
next day. His fear of insomnia sometimes kept him awake all night.
The recorded sailboat sounds were Carla's idea. "The house is too quiet, that's the problem." She
bought the recording from a mail-order company called The Ultimate Mood Maker. They specialized in
recorded waterfalls, rivers, cornfields, and rain forests-- she could have bought a whole library of restful
sounds. But she bought just the sailboat.
It worked wonderfully at first. With the stereophonic waves breaking on the bow, with the gentle
purling of the wake astern, with the occasional luffing of the sails and the creaking of the mast, Jerry felt
the whole house gently rocking him, carrying him away to a place where the job and the mortgage and his
insomnia just didn't matter.
But after fifty minutes, the recording would end and Jerry would be wide awake, staring at the ceiling,
wondering if maybe he should have chosen an adjustable interest rate. After a while, he'd get out of bed,
start the recording again, return to bed, and drift off into another fifty minutes of sleep.
Carla's solution was to buy more copies of the recording and set the stereo for continuous play, and
Jerry finally began to sleep through the night. In fact, he found the sound of the creaking decks and
splashing waves so comforting that he began to leave the recording on all morning. On the days when he
was the last to leave for work, he left it playing so that the sounds of the waves were the first thing he
heard when he came home. Soon Carla, too, was leaving the sailboat sounds playing around the clock.
With the sound always in the background, Jerry sometimes felt, even wide awake at the dinner table, that
he could feel the house gently rocking.
There were hints of the coming transformation, but they were too subtle to be alarming. When a crust
of salt repeatedly formed on the front doorknob during the day, Jerry thought it was curious, but not
inexplicable. After all, it was winter, and there was plenty of salt about on the roads and sidewalks.
When the air inside the house began to smell distinctly of kelp, well, that was surely just a case of
suggestion, Jerry reasoned. If you hear the sound of a sailboat all night long and for much of the day, you
begin to imagine the smell of the sea, just as the feeling that the house gently rocked on the waves was an