"Charles L. Grant - Glow of Candles, Unicorn's eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

She took me quite literally in hand and showed me what show business was, outside of the school.
For eighteen years, then, I managed a fairly steady and obviously unspectacular living
playing that man over there in the corner talking to the beautiful blonde, and that wounded
trooper crawling through the Martian sandstorm, and that body, and that face, and . . . and.
Until, between takes, I found myself wandering back into theaters that had stages and audiences
and waterfalls and . . . and...
There's nothing to say that would stand alone as a reason. I loved it, that's all. Loved
it, and hated it, because it didn't take long for me to see that something was wrong. Lethally
wrong.

"You're crazy, you know that, Gordon."
"Just get me the jobs, Viv, that's all I ask."
"It takes a special kind of training. I've told you it's not like learning lines from a
holovid script!"
"I'll learn."
"But, Gordon, you'll have to improvise! That's all the whole thing is, except for the
effects. You're given an outline and you bluff your way through it. It takes years to learn it
right."
"I've done it before, you know that. What's the big fuss? You'll get your percentage."
"You don't get it, do you?"
"I'll learn. That's all there is to it."
"You don't get it at all."

There was a wave of nostalgia that had, for the briefest of lightning-lit moments, the old-
style theaters rejuvenated, rejoicing, rehiring actors and producers and directors and

such. Lord, how we tried. But the wave flattened, sad by the time I was making those dream-tapes
for children, nothing was left but the must, the dust, and the drifting in and out.

3

I went into my home: living room, bedroom, alcoves for lav and ovenwall. All in shades of black
and white.
I ate, not tasting, and stared at the Keylofts across the street. I watched a news summary
and discovered the playwrights I had attacked were recovering. Euphemisms abounded, but the
message was the same: person or persons unknown.
God, I wished that hadn't been so bloody damned true.
And fifteen minutes later, Philip and Helena came for a visit and I fed them their eager
rations of stories about my taping day. All the time watching Helena, as though Philip were only a
ghost along for the ride.
"He sounds like an insect I worked for once," Philip said of the director. Philip was
fifteen years older than my own thirty-seven (Helena was four years younger). He enjoyed
reminiscing about the, as he called it, flesh-and-blood theater he had been in, but it was a dream
that he livedHelena told me he had been a minor bit player who seldom had lines and was lucky to
find two weeks' work in fifty. I don't know why, perhaps because of Helena, but he liked me. "An
insect, Gordon. Stamp him out. You won't miss him. I promise you."


file:///G|/rah/Glow%20of%20Candles,%20a%20Unicorn's%20Eye.txt (6 of 17) [2/14/2004 12:18:19 AM]
 file:///G|/rah/Glow%20of%20Candles,%20a%20Unicorn's%20Eye.txt