"Levy-EveryDayDifferent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levy Robert J)

outfits and pants with tennis shoes.

Lester went to the men's room and looked at himself in the mirror. He was
attired in full business regalia-- gray pin-striped suit, military stripe tie,
black Oxfords. All was as usual -- except that he had no memory of dressing this
way. He had intended to dress casually, in accord with Mr. Templeton's edict,
but something in his unconscious had obviously balked at the prospect. He had--
trancelike, in robotic fashion -- dressed as for every other day at work.
Staring at himself, he saw a tear well up and brim his eyelid. He wiped it away,
but it was as though he watched a movie of someone else, some other hand, wiping
the tear from someone's else eye.

He went back to his office, unable to meet the gaze of his colleagues, burying
himself in a travel manuscript about distant places and far-off vistas that he
would never see, never know, except in the rather abstract form of repunctuating
someone else's experiences.

At the end of that weekend, on Sunday evening, faced with the prospect of yet
another day at Selvage & Fleischman, Lester drank more than usual. In fact, he
drank himself into a stupor. He sank deeper than ever before into a morass of
self-vilification, a dark, bottomless pit of his own loathing. Bits and pieces
of the latter half of the evening surfaced momentarily into his consciousness,
like grotesque, distended fish from the depths of some alien sea, only to be
again swamped by the black, roiling muck of his despair. He thought of suicide,
but that notion, too, dissolved in his alcohol haze. He raged about his living
room upending chairs and smashing pottery.

What were all these "things" doing here? he asked himself at one point. What was
all this stuff? It didn't make a life. It wasn't living. I am already dead.

Then, as he sank down to the very bottom of his well of misery, which, in
seconds, would give way to unconsciousness, he cried out, over and again, to no
one in particular, to no god, to no person -- to nothing in fact, that he could
see, save the pristine walls of the pristine cage of a life he had constructed
for himself:

Why does it have to be this way? Why is every day the same? Why can't my days be
different?

And, improbably, as he blacked out on the living room floor, he felt a presence,
a hand. Something or someone, had heard his plea, pulled him back from the edge
of complete oblivion, and granted him his Wish.

Monday morning as Lester rode the elevator to the 50th-floor offices of Selvage
& Fleischman, the sudden altitude change kicked his already throbbing hangover
headache onto a new level of pain. He had only a foggy recall of the previous
night, and virtually no memory of how his living room had ended up a shambles.
In too much distress to feel regret, he bulled ahead on instinct alone. Eyes
narrowed against the inevitable glaring office lights, he lurched from the
elevator as the door opened, bumping into Fanshawe from the copy department.