"Ken Grimwood - Replay" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grimwood Ken)

work. None of it, not the romance or the passion or the glorious plans. It all went flat, and there's nobody
to blame. That's simply the way it happened.
But of course they'd never do that. That was the main part of the failure, the fact that they seldom
spoke of deeper needs, never broached the tearing sense of incompletion that stood always between
them.
Linda wiped a meaningless, onion-induced tear away with the back of her hand. "Did you hear me,
Jeff?"
"Yes. I heard you."
"What we need," she said, looking in his direction but not quite at him, "is a new shower curtain."
In all likelihood, that was the level of need she'd been about to express over the phone before he
began to die. "тАФa dozen eggs," her sentence probably would have ended, or "тАФa box of coffee filters."
But why was he thinking all this? he wondered. He was dying, for Christ's sake; shouldn't his final
thoughts be of something deeper, more philosophical? Or maybe a fast-speed replay of the highlights of
his life, forty-three years on Betascan. That was what people went through when they drowned, wasn't
it?
This felt like drowning, he thought as the expanded seconds passed: the awful pressure, the hopeless
struggle for breath, the sticky wetness that soaked his body as salt sweat streamed down his forehead
and stung his eyes.
Drowning. Dying. No, shit, no, that was an unreal word, applicable to flowers or pets or other
people. Old people, sick people. Unlucky people.
His face dropped to the desk, right cheek pressing flat against the file folder he'd been about to study
when Linda called. The crack in the paperweight was cavernous before his one open eye: a split in the
world itself, a jagged mirror of the ripping agony inside him. Through the broken glass he could see the
glowing red numerals on the digital clock atop his bookshelf:

1:06 PM OCT 1988

And then there was nothing more to avoid thinking about, because the process of thought had ceased.

Jeff couldn't breathe.
Of course he couldn't breathe; he was dead. But if he was dead, why was he aware of not being able
to breathe? Or of anything, for that matter?
He turned his head away from the bunched-up blanket and breathed. Stale, damp air, full of the smell
of his own perspiration.
So he hadn't died. Somehow, the realization didn't thrill him, just as his earlier assumption of death
had failed to strike him with dread.
Maybe he had secretly welcomed the end of his life. Now it would merely continue as before: the
dissatisfaction, the grinding loss of ambition and hope that had either caused or been caused by the failure
of his marriage, he couldn't remember which anymore.
He shoved the blanket away from his face and kicked at the rumpled sheets. There was music playing
somewhere in the darkened room, barely audible. An oldie: "Da Doo Ron Ron," toy one of those Phil
Spector girl groups.
Jeff groped for a lamp switch, thoroughly disoriented. He was either in a hospital bed recovering from
what had happened in the office, or at home waking from a dream that was worse than usual. His hand
found the bedside lamp, turned it on. He was in a small, messy room, clothes and books strewn on the
floor and piled haphazardly on two adjacent desks and chairs. Neither a hospital nor his and Linda's
bedroom, but familiar, somehow.
A naked, smiling woman stared back at him from a large photograph taped to one wall. A Playboy
centerfold, a vintage one. The buxom brunette lay demurely on her stomach, atop an air mattress at the
afterdeck of a boat, her red-and-white polka-dotted bikini tied to the railing. With her jaunty round