"Barry N Malzberg - Ready When You Are" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

afternoon of love and the role which he had promised her in the new
trilogy, and Finzie nods at her wisely, distantly, seeking to keep their
relationship private even at this moment of such public triumph.
"Those visions," he says, "those visions which we hold to ourselves in
the clutch of night, those dreams of childhood splendor, it is my earnest
hope that I will bring these dreams, that child to splendor, to the world.
I think the true filmmaker is not only a visionary but a seer, a
reconstructionist who can make the crooked laces straight and the rough
places plain. For that and in that spirit I accept your award." And so he
does. The applause is tumultuous, it beats at him like the wings of a
covey of birds, flushed from the auditorium, flushed from memory. Finzie
can see the camera coming in on dolly, the close-up of his graceful yet
subtly tormented face slowly dissolving then, cracking open in the heat
and light to the face of the kid who might have been. Might not have been.
It is difficult to tell, the past is as fluid, as shapeless as the
present, it seems to shift under his attention just as sometimes during
the conjoinment of love it all slips into the liquefied dark and he must
begin again and again. Finzie, filmmaker to the world, splendid issue and
prince of light, addresses the audience at Cannes clutching his Leaf of
Gold, his sprig of astonishment, attending to the ghostly shrieks and
stammer which lurk at the border of memory.

And still great hours later, still feeling the thrust and urgency of that
applause, a vast and gaping need, an emptiness in the continuum which
pleaded for him alone, the superhero and top director lies in his palatial
bedroom clutching Eve Harlow or Dorothea Harkins (call her what you will,
she remains adoring), watching a tape of his award-winning film on the
videocassette recorder he takes with him everywhere. This film, Thrills
and Wonder in America, traces the odyssey of a young man from Flatbush who
comes to rule the world, first by film and then by American salute: he
ventures into politics, becomes President and the leader of the new world
government. Thrills and Wonder is a metaphor for his own desire, a
subsumed autobiography: Finzie knows the real meaning of all this stuff.
As in Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, huge crowds chant, there are
posed friezes of splendid, beseeching athletes and supporters who usher
the actor to ever greater power while Finzie, superheroic filmmaker and
highly experienced lover of women who in the old days would have passed
him in contempt, looks at his accomplishment in awe. He appears to be
playing the lead role too, and making a splendid job of this. What he has
done is truly remarkable, he thinks: he has through the medium of his art
made the world an adjunct to his obsession. All these actors screaming,
those thousands of extras posturing and saluting and he in control of
every gesture. It goes beyond gesture, beyond metaphor: he has made the
world the paradigm of his desire, his need. Griffith, Reifenstahl, Huston,
Capra: these predecessors tried that as well but he, Finzie, has taken the
obsession to consummation. Here in the splendor of Cannes he has made his
film not an accessory but an empire. Shattered, almost humbled by the
power of his vision, the magnificent and heroic director of the year
reaches for Eve Harlow.
"What do you think?" he says, "Is this as good as it gets or what? How