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Люциус Шепард: Eternity and Other Stories

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Люциус Шепард Eternity and Other Stories

Eternity and Other Stories: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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SEVEN GLOBE-SPANNING TALES THAT DEFY REALITY “Lucius Shepard’s stories a jungles — densely alive, sometimes mysterious, often gorgeous, and always dangerous.” — Katerine Dunn, author of Geek Love

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Bobby doesn’t look at Alicia as he tells her all this, speaking in a rushed, anxious delivery. When he’s done he knocks back his drink, darts a glance at her to gauge her reaction, and says, “I had this friend in high school got into crystal meth. It fried his brain. He started having delusions. The government was fucking with his mind. They knew he was in contact with beings from a higher plane. Shit like that. He had this whole complex view of reality as conspiracy, and when he told me about it, it was like he was apologizing for telling me. He could sense his own damage, but he had to get it out because he couldn’t quite believe he was crazy. That’s how I feel. Like I’m missing some piece of myself.”

“I know,” Alicia says. “I feel that way, too. That’s why I come here. To try and figure out what’s missing… where I am with all this.”

She looks at him inquiringly, and Bobby, unburdened now, finds he has nothing worth saying. But he wants to say something, because he wants her to talk to him, and though he’s not sure why he wants this or what more he might want, he’s so confused by the things he’s confessed and also by the ordinary confusions that attend every consequential exchange between men and women. Though he’s not sure of anything, he wants whatever is happening to move forward.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Oh, yeah. Sure. This isn’t terminal fucked-uppedness. ’Least I don’t think it is.”

She appears to be reassessing him. “Why do you put yourself through it?”

“The job? Because I’m qualified. I worked for FEMA the last coupla summers.”

Two of the yuppie couples have huddled around the jukebox, and their first selection, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” begins its tense, grinding push. Pineo dances on his barstool, his torso twisting back and forth, fists tight against his chest, a parody—Bobby knows—that’s aimed at the couples, meant as an insult. Brooding over his bourbon, Mazurek is a graying, thick-bodied troll turned to stone.

“I’m taking my masters in philosophy,” Bobby says. “It’s finally beginning to seem relevant.”

He intends this as humor, but Alicia doesn’t react to it as such. Her eyes are brimming. She swivels on her stool, knee pressing against his hip, and puts a hand on his wrist.

“I’m afraid,” she says. “You think that’s all this is? Just fear. Just an inability to cope.”

He’s not certain he understands her, but he says, “Maybe that’s all.” It feels so natural when she loops her arms about him and buries her face in the crook of his neck, he doesn’t think anything of it. His hand goes to her waist. He wants to turn toward her, to deepen the embrace, but is afraid that will alarm her, and as they cling together, he becomes insecure with the contact, unclear as to what he should do with it. Her pulse hits against his palm, her breath warms his skin. The articulation of her ribs, the soft swell of a hip, the presence of a breast an inch above the tip of his thumb, all her heated specificity both daunts and tempts him. Doubt concerning their mental well-being creeps in. Is this an instance of healing or a freak scene? Are they two very different people who have connected on a level new to both of them, or are they emotional burn-outs who aren’t even talking about the same subject and have misapprehended mild sexual attraction for a moment of truth? Just how much difference is there between those conditions? She pulls him closer. Her legs are still crossed, and her right knee slides into his lap, her shoeless foot pushing against his waist. She whispers something, words he can’t make out. An assurance, maybe. Her lips brush his cheek, then she pulls back and offers a smile he takes for an expression of regret.

“I don’t get it,” she says. “I have this feeling…” She shakes her head as if rejecting an errant notion.

“What?”

She holds a hand up beside her face as she speaks and waggles it, a blitheness of gesture that her expression does not reflect. “I shouldn’t be saying this to someone I met in a bar, and I don’t mean it the way you might think. But it’s—I have a feeling you can help me. Do something for me.”

“Talking helps.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. That doesn’t seem right.” Thoughtful, she stirs her drink; then a sidelong glance. “There must be something some philosopher said that’s pertinent to the moment.”

“Predisposition fathers all logics, even those disposed to deny it.”

“Who said that?”

“I did… in a paper I wrote on Gorgias. The father of sophistry. He claimed that nothing can be known, and if anything could be known, it wasn’t worth knowing.”

“Well,” says Alicia, “I guess that explains everything.”

“I don’t know about that. I only got a B on the paper.”

One of the couples begins to dance, the man, who is still wearing his overcoat, flapping his elbows, making slow-motion swoops, while the woman stands rooted, her hips undulating in a fishlike rhythm. Pineo’s parody was more graceful. Watching them, Bobby imagines the bar a cave, the other patrons with matted hair, dressed in skins. Headlights slice across the window with the suddenness of a meteor flashing past in the primitive night. The song ends, the couple’s friends applaud them as they head for the group table. But when the opening riff of the Hendrix version of “All Along The Watchtower” blasts from the speakers, they start dancing again and the other couples join them, drinks in hand. The women toss their hair and shake their breasts; the men hump the air. A clumsy tribe on drugs.

The bar environment no longer works for Bobby. Too much unrelieved confusion. He hunches his shoulders against the noise, the happy jabber, and has a momentary conviction that this is not his true reaction, that a little scrap of black negativity perched between his shoulder blades, its claws buried in his spine, has folded its gargoyle wings, and he has reacted to the movement like a puppet. As he stands Alicia reaches out and squeezes his hand. “See you tomorrow?”

“No doubt,” he says, wondering if he will—he believes she’ll go home and chastise herself for permitting this partial intimacy, this unprophylactic intrusion into her stainless career-driven life. She’ll stop coming to the bar and seek redemption in a night school business course designed to flesh out her resumé. One lonely Sunday afternoon a few weeks hence, he’ll provide the animating fantasy for a battery-powered orgasm.

He digs in his wallet for a five, a tip for Roman, and catches Pineo looking at him with unalloyed hostility. The kind of look your great enemy might send your way right before pumping a couple of shells into his shotgun. Pineo lets his double-barreled stare linger a few beats, then turns away to a deep consideration of his beer glass, his neck turtled, his head down. It appears that he and Mazurek have been overwhelmed by identical enchantments.

• • •

Bobby wakes up a few minutes before he’s due at work. He calls the job, warns them he’ll be late, then lies back and contemplates the large orange and brown water stain that has transformed the ceiling into a terrain map. This thing with Alicia… it’s sick, he thinks. They’re not going to fuck—that much is clear. And not just because she said so. He can’t see himself going to her place, furnishings courtesy of The Sharper Image and Pottery Barn, nor can he picture her in this dump, and neither of them has displayed the urge for immediacy that would send them to a hotel. It’s ridiculous, unwieldy. They’re screwing around is all. Mind fucking on some perverted soul level. She’s sad because she’s drinking to be sad because she’s afraid that what she does not feel is actually a feeling. Typical postmodern Manhattan bullshit. Grief as a form of self-involvement. And now he’s part of that. What he’s doing with her may be even more perverse, but he has no desire to scrutinize his motives—that would only amplify the perversity. Better simply to let it play out and be done. These are strange days in the city. Men and women seeking intricate solace for intricate guilt. Guilt over the fact that they do not embody the magnificent sadness of politicians and the brooding sympathy of anchorpersons, that their grief is a flawed posture, streaked with the banal, with thoughts of sex and football, cable bills and job security. He still has things he needs, for whatever reason, to tell her. Tonight he’ll confide in her, and she will do what she must. Their mutual despondency, a wrap in four acts.

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