"Davis, Jerry - Scuba" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Jerry)

his problems.
Jack knew there was such a thing as ghosts. He could prove
it, he had physical evidence in his wallet. The money in his
wallet, the money he and his wife spent on groceries, it was ghost
money. It was money that wasn't really there.
His wife Peggy, Miss Cameron Cove of 1992, didn't understand.
She saw money in the account, she saw a deposit that was his
paycheck, and she thought they had money and so she would spend
it. She couldn't understand that it was money that was already
spent, already gone. She spent more. He spent more, because he had
no choice; they must continue living. Now checks were bouncing,
bills were going unpaid for months, and still he kept slipping
behind. It was out of control.
Yesterday a nice young woman came into his office and asked
if he were Jack Buchman. He admitted he was --- he felt no reason
to hide anything from her, he took her to be one of his wife's
friends --- and the woman handed him an envelope and rushed out of
his office as if it were about to explode. It was a summons, he
was being sued. His car payments were behind and the finance
company had lost its patience. It would probably be repossessed
any day now.
Jack had an attack right after the woman had left. He felt he
couldn't breathe, like he was literally drowning. He came to his
senses sometime later, found himself on the floor behind his desk.
He had passed out.
It was $60 to see the psychologist. Cash, up front. His
psychologist knew why Jack was having problems and didn't intend
on become one of them (he said). Jack figured he could be telling
the truth, but really he believed that the $60 was more important
to the psychologist than Jack's mental stability.

#

Outside his office window it was as murky as Cameron Reef.
Dirty rain poured down on gray concrete leaving gray streaks on
windows, dissolved traces of the building itself. The rain ate
away at the stone, at the pavement; it ate away at Jack's car,
seven months old and already the paint was faded, oxidized from
the acid in the air. Jack stared at the rain, but in his mind he
was seeing Cameron Reef at 85 fathoms, the deepest dive he'd ever
made. At 85 fathoms the ocean was black, the water cold and murky
with plankton and dead matter that drifted down from the surface
to the cold, motionless bottom. The bottom was gray, soft mud
lumped together in shapes from the subconscious mind --- it looked
like the place your soul goes to when it dies, the soul resting
like a lump of mud next to the other lumps of mud, dead,
featureless, undisturbed for millennia.
It was during that dive that Jack had an attack of nitrogen
narcosis, almost killing him. He hadn't gone diving since. He had
fully intended on going back down --- nothing in his mind was