Читать книгу Are We There Yet? - Дэвид Левитан, David Levithan, Рэйчел Кон - Страница 22

AMAZING. DANNY THINKS IT’S AMAZING TO BE MOVING SO FAST WITHOUT feeling movement. To be sitting in an airplane, travelling as fast as he’s ever travelled, and still it feels like he’s in a car, steadier than a train, not even as fast as sliding down a slide. How can this be? Danny wonders. He wants to ask someone. But who can he ask? Elijah, even if he were awake? The girl on Elijah’s shoulder? (Isn’t she a little old for him?) The pilot? No one. There’s no one to tell him how it can feel so slow to go so fast.

The phone is embedded above the fold-down tray. He could make a collect call from above the Atlantic Ocean. He could slip the corporate card into the proper slot and dial any area code around the world. He does it – slips in the card – just to see what the dials are like. Thinking, Wouldn’t it be funny to slip your credit card into the slot, ten thousand miles in the air, and find a rotary phone? But no – just the usual buttons. He can pretend it’s home. Just a local call.

He pauses before dialing. He pauses too long. He pauses long enough to realise that no one comes instantly to mind. He doesn’t have anyone instant. He doesn’t have anyone worth a twenty-dollar-a-minute call.

Quietly, Danny places the phone back in its receiver. He presses a little too hard, and the woman in front of him rustles in her sleep. Danny looks at Elijah. He looks at Elijah’s eyelids and tries to tell whether he’s awake. He used to do that all the time when they were kids. Elijah would be faking sleep – he didn’t want to leave the car, he didn’t want to go to school – and Danny would catch the small, betraying twitches. He would try to point them out to his mom, and Elijah would mysteriously pop out of sleep before Danny could finish his sentence. Their mom would shake her head, more annoyed with Danny’s tattling than with Elijah’s fakery. Or so it seemed to Danny. Back then, and still.

Now Danny concentrates – staring into his brother’s closed eyes. Waiting for one eye to open, to see if anyone’s looking. Waiting for a telltale giggle of breath, or the twitch of an itching finger. Instead, he observes Elijah and the woman both breathing to the same silent measure. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Rise. Fall. Speed and slowness.