"Greg Egan - Closer (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

both points of view.
It was a very peculiar reminiscence. Almost everything seemed at once vaguely
surprising and utterly familiar - like an extended attack of deja vu. It's not
that they'd often set out deliberately to deceive each other about anything
substantial, but all the tiny white lies, all the concealed trivial resentments,
all the necessary, laudable, essential, loving deceptions, that had kept them
together in spite of their differences, filled my head with a strange haze of
confusion and disillusionment.
It wasn't in any sense a conversation; I was no multiple personality. Sian and
Michael simply weren't there - to justify, to explain, to deceive each other all
over again, with the best intentions. Perhaps I should have attempted to do all
this on their behalf, but I was constantly unsure of my role, unable to decide
on a position. So I lay there, paralysed by symmetry, and let their memories
flow.
After that, the time passed so quickly that I never had a chance to break the
mirror.
We tried to stay together.
We lasted a week.
Bentley had made - as the law required - snapshots of our jewels prior to the
experiment. We could have gone back to them - and then had him explain to us why
- but self-deception is only an easy choice if you make it in time.
We couldn't forgive each other, because there was nothing to forgive. Neither
of us had done a single thing that the other could fail to understand, and
sympathise with, completely.
We knew each other too well, that's all. Detail after tiny fucking microscopic


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detail. It wasn't that the truth hurt; it didn't, any longer. It numbed us. It
smothered us. We didn't know each other as we knew ourselves; it was worse than
that. In the self, the details blur in the very processes of thought; mental
self-dissection is possible, but it takes great effort to sustain. Our mutual
dissection took no effort at all; it was the natural state into which we fell in
each other's presence. Our surfaces had been stripped away, but not to reveal a
glimpse of the soul. All we could see beneath the skin were the cogs, spinning.
And I knew, now, that what Sian had always wanted most in a lover was the
alien, the unknowable, the mysterious, the opaque. The whole point, for her, of
being with someone else was the sense of confronting otherness. Without it, she
believed, you might as well be talking to yourself.
I found that I now shared this view (a change whose precise origins I didn't
much want to think about . . . but then, I'd always known she had the stronger
personality, I should have guessed that something would rub off).
Together, we might as well have been alone, so we had no choice but to part.
Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.