Читать книгу Sky Saw - Blake Butler - Страница 12

In the pockets between shrieking, Person 1180 read aloud. She read the book she’d found wedged among the folds of the long curtain in the hall just after Person 811 left, a date whose definition she could no longer remember, nor did she know why they’d chose to hang the curtain there—the only thing it hid was flat white wall, marred with no windows. The book was the same size of the book that you hold now. The front page had an inscription handwritten to Person 1180 by someone with an illegible signature, in bright blue ink that stung her eyes:

READ THE CHILD THIS BOOK OR HE WILL SUFFER

The text on all the other pages had been printed in a code, or in a strange language she did not recognize—babbly syllables and glyph fonts, planar symbols and number reams—and yet when 1180 passed her eyes over the lines and let her voice go, she felt the syntax easing out. Her reading voice was low and burnt and came up from her linings, something old and rhythmic as it passed. Doing the speaking in this manner juggled color in her lungs and made her woozy, a kind of crystal glass around her face. Whole hours or even days might pass before she noticed she’d been suspended in that method for so long, often even in reading a single line. She did not like this feeling but could not seem to stop it. She’d thrown the book into the flood yards behind the house more times than she could count—she’d buried it, burnt it, sold it, ate it, locked it in a metal cube—and each time the book had appeared again clenched in her arms while she was sleeping. At night the night was loud and seized with lice and there was nothing else to be. Often the lingering feeling of what she’d last read made her want to take actions unimagined, things she knew she did not really want to do and never should, and so for the most part she did not do them, though some nights it was so cold.

After each page, before turning, Person 1180 would lift and hold the book up at the child so he could see it and together they would stare. The text contained no pictures beyond the way the paragraphs all seemed to congregate and blur among each other, rising colors. The child would coo and gosh and try to touch the paper. When she’d not allow him, he would shriek—a splattering mess of voice so loud it traced her brain. And yet she read, and the more she read the more he wanted, and the silence in her ribs. She could feel the hours passing between them in those moments, slapped like batter, and she could not blink or turn away until allowed.