"Jeff VanderMeer & Cat Rambo - The Surgeon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

The Surgeon’s Tale by Jeff VanderMeer & Cat Rambo
Part I
Down by the docks, you can smell the tide going out—surging from rotted fish, filth, and the briny
sargassum that turns the pilings a mixture of purple and green. I don’t mind the smell; it reminds me of my
youth. From the bungalow on the bay’s edge, I emerge most days to go beach-combing in the sands
beneath the rotted piers. Soft crab skeletons and ghostly sausage wrappers mostly, but a coin or two as
well.

Sometimes I see an old man when I’m hunting, a gangly fellow whose clothes hang loose. As though his
limbs were sticks of chalk, wired together with ulnar ligaments of seaweed, pillowing bursae formed from
the sacs of decaying anemones that clutter on the underside of the pier’s planking.

I worry that the sticks will snap if he steps too far too fast, and he will become past repair, past
preservation, right in front of me. I draw diagrams in the sand flats to show him how he can safeguard
himself with casings over his fragile limbs, the glyphs he should draw on his cuffs to strengthen his wrists.
A thousand things I’ve learned here and at sea. But I don’t talk to him—he will have to figure it out from
my scrawls when he comes upon them. If the sea doesn’t touch them first.

He seems haunted, like a mirror or a window that shows some landscape it’s never known. I’m as old as
he is. I wonder if I look like him. If he too has trouble sleeping at night. And why he chose this patch of
sand to pace and wander.

I will not talk to him. That would be like talking to myself: the surest path to madness.

***

I grew up right here, in my parents’ cottage near the sea. Back then, only a few big ships docked at the
piers and everything was quieter, less intense. My parents were Preservationists, and salt brine the key to
their art. It was even how they met, they liked to tell people. They had entered the same competition—to
keep a pig preserved for as long as possible using only essences from the sea and a single spice.

“It was in the combinations,” my dad would say. “It was in knowing that the sea is not the same place
here, here, or here.”

My mother and father preserved their pigs the longest, and after a tie was declared, they began to see
and learn from each other. They married and had me, and we lived together in the cottage by the sea,
preserving things for people.

I remember that when I went away to medical school, the only thing I missed was the smell of home. In
the student quarters we breathed in drugs and sweat and sometimes piss. The operating theaters, the
halls, the cadaver rooms, all smelled of bitter chemicals. Babies in bottles. Dolphin fetuses. All had the
milky-white look of the exsanguinated — not dreaming or asleep but truly dead.

At home, the smells were different. My father went out daily in the little boat his father had given him as a
young man and brought back a hundred wonderful smells. I remember the sargassum the most, thick and
green and almost smothering, from which dozens of substances could be extracted to aid in
preservations. Then, of course, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, tiny crabs and shrimp, but mostly different
types of water. I don’t know how he did it—or how my mother distilled the essence—but the buckets he
brought back did have different textures and scents. The deep water from out in the bay was somehow
smoother and its smell was solid and strong, like the rind of some exotic fruit. Areas near the shore had