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

betrayals, a terrible bout with hepatitis. Disgraceful venereal conditions. I
don't care, he says, 17 years is a good time. In 17 years here, lying here,
sneaking around, pounding myself into myself, I will be dead, I will have
lolled myself anyway. No, he says, there is no question there is no argument.
I have made my choice. He closes his eyes, smiles, thinking evidently that he
is dreaming. Such dialogues are common inside Martin in this crucial time; he
thinks that he is constructing a worst case venue but is nonetheless being
firm. Yes, he says, I will do this. His breathing, irregular, levels out. As I
withdraw, he thinks that he is making passage into dreamless slumber. As he
wedes he feels, I know, some kind of imminence, and perhaps it is my question,
no less than anything else, which has led him to this resolution. Or perhaps
not. It is difficult to work within such difficult and speculative borders
without being overwhelmed by my own relative helplessness and stupor.

BUT OF COURSE THIS IS IN ONLY PARTIAL quest of verification. I move
through the channels of recorded (and possible) time, asking Martin Donner
this question at various places within the continuum. I discuss this with him
at Cherry Grove in 1978 at a tea dance while he is hanging shyly against the
walls, yes he says, of course it is worth it. I ask him this in 1986 when,
thunderously, the implications of the positive diagnosis beg to come through
to him and he closes his eyes as I make the forced pictures in his head
showing him what it would be like: I don't know, he says, I don't know, I am
in shock, I am in agony here, I can't give you a false or a real answer, can
take no position, how can I tell? Maybe I shouldn't have done it, I don't
know, I don't know. Take the question to him in Chicago two years later, he is
attending a class reunion with his lover, partial remission, he feels in
control of himself, some benignity, perhaps illusory but the moment can be
extended, he feels, as so many other moments have been extended I would have
done it again, he says, knowing what I know, I would have wanted it this way
still, I would not have treated it differently, I would not exchange these
years for anything. Ask him and ask him, up and down the line, sometimes an
enthusiastic, desperate yes, other times more tentative, a no at the end and
tracking back from that no mostly for the six to eight months before this
special, spectacular extended agony; his position then is not fixed any more
than it might have been 20, 30 years ago when Martin refused to respond to the
messages flicking like trap shots from the basement of his sensibilty. Nothing
is sure, nothing is firm. Mostly yes, an occasional no, more no as the end is
approached, but even then at some of the moments in between the moments of the
worst anguish, a soft insistent yes. It is not fixed, nothing is fixed, the
human condition is not fixed. The price we will pay for fully expressing what
we are does seem indeterminate then. It resonates, this confusion, against my
own uncertainty, and I understand then, staring at and through all of this,
that there can be no answers from Martin, none at all. If Martin is the voice
and tensor of all possibility, then there is no possibility, no singularity.
Understanding it does not surprise me but fills me with a desperate and
irreparable weakness; I would not have had it this way, I would have wanted
surer answers. Everyone wants answers if not the answer, even I. I return to
my old antagonist on the desert and hand him the helmet and the simulating
device and the other armaments of our translation, our bargain, our
possibility. I have wrestled and wrestled, I say, I have wrestled you through