"Barry N. Malzberg - Understanding Entropy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

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Understanding Entropy
by Barry N. Malzberg
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Copyright (c)1996 Barry N. Malzberg
Originally appeared in "Science Fiction Age" in July 1994

Fictionwise Contemporary
Science Fiction


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SO I GO TO MARTIN DONNER'S bedside in the room they have staked out for
him in Florida, and I ask him the crucial question: If you had known? I say,
if you had known that it would end this way, that you would be dying of a
hundred wounds, of the tuberculosis, of the pneumocystitis, of the parasites
and the kidney breakdown and the hepatitis, the jaundice, the venetium and the
shattering of the pancreas, if you had known that five years after the
positive diagnosis and three years after the first episode of the pneumonia
you would be lying here, 82 pounds, filled with morphine which does not work
anymore -- oh, nothing works but that isn't quite the point is it, they are
trying -- with your lover and your daughters and your wife and the doctors
circling in the outer room and coming in now and then to inspect your reeking
corpus, some of them weeping, others taking your pulse and monitoring your
breathing: if you had known this 15 years ago, Martin Donner, if you had known
everything that would happen to you and that it would end this way, would you
have left your wife and children to their lives and your history and gone out
to Fire Island, Cherry Groves, the baths and the bathhouses and the quick and
the scuffled, the long and the grievous affairs full time, no longer sneaking
it around? Would you if you had known? Or would you have stayed in your
marriage in the suburbs, Martin Donner, and played with your daughters and
watched them grow and claimed your wife with closed eyes in the marriage bed
and nothing more, nothing more because you would never know when the dogs
truly came into the basement and snuffled up the stairs? Oh maybe once a year
you might let some man tend to you with rubber gloves in a bank vault, but
otherwise nothing, nothing, nothing at all? If you could have seen that it
would have ended this way, Martin, what would you have done? Tell me the truth
now. Do you know the truth? Is there any such thing as the truth? Because I
need, I need, I need to know now, it affects my own situation.
He stares at me. He is relatively lucid now, it comes and it goes, in