"Goonan, Kathleen Ann - The String" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goonan Kathleen Ann)

Instead, he was a tangled skein, caught by a tree limb, utterly twisted, never
to be free. He was himself that odd, unknotted yet inextricably tangled entity,
one end loose in birth and the other in death, and this strange passage called
life was an immense and tangled surprise, one which all the thought and effort
in the world, every effort which time would afford him, could not unravel. There
were certain givens in this equation, that was all.
And yet he could see, as he lay there in the dark, that this knot, this
amazement of himself, was composed of points. Point after point after point,
spilling into infinity, uncountable. Whether a myriad of intersecting planes
made soft and malleable beneath his questing fingers or a fluid, graceful line,
each point glowed, glowed so strongly in the dark so he was surprised that the
string of which he was composed did not light the room. He expected at any
moment that a nimbus would surround him, or the bed on which he lay. Or it might
come from the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the thin lace curtains, the heavy
old furniture his mother had polished for years of his life. Anywhere.
Everywhere. He was absorbed into the infinite number of points he had become,
every single one a nexus he knew he would never understand.
But he discovered that he could move them around.
And then, it was as if the string was free at every point, that each point had
an infinitesimal gap between it and the next, and impulse flew from point to
point like neurons firing, only his entire body was free and loose, releasing
information, pure intelligence which was not really him, into some dark,
fathomless void, and he was fully, sharply awake.
He rose from bed and went downstairs. He didn't even have to turn on the light
to do that; forty years of navigating the house had removed every surprise.
The string, when he flipped on the kitchen light, was still lying forlorn in the
corner, just a dirty string tied to two knives.
He walked over, picked it up, and sat at the table. And as he worked on it once
more, the pain drained from him. And every point on the string began to glow.
He knew he wouldn't stop again.
#
It was two weeks before they were sure that the medicine was adjusted correctly
and they let Jessica go home. She was going to be all right. It was just so new,
that sometimes they overshot. A lot of fine tuning to be done, the doctors said.
When Anita came home the next day after work, she looked happy and troubled at
the same time.
"What's up?" he asked.
"It's kind of strange," she said. "I've been offered a fellowship by a committee
at Harvard. I told them it must be a mistake, that I never applied, and they
said that they simply considered the people they thought were the best in the
field and deliberated until they came to a conclusion. Dan, I'm stunned."
"You knew you were good," he said. "That's wonderful. So what's wrong?"
She went into the living room and sat down. "I've been meaning to tell you for
some time, Dan, but I'm such a coward."
"What is it?" he asked, feeling the chilling inevitability of the moment, when
he would have to let all his hopes and dreams and plans diverge from what was
going to happen.
For Anita.
"I'm just not happy with you," she said. "But it was easier to stay together
than not. Everything is so--settled, here. And I guess I felt guilty