"James van Pelt - Parallel Highways" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pelt James Van)

"Dying's the best rest I get," said Jack. "It's a silver lining."

"I don't know why we get sleepy. We don't eat. We don't go to the bathroom. The stupid car never
needs gas!" Debbie said, her voice on the edge. "You know what else? I don't see enough accidents. If
everybody's like us, then there ought to be accidents constantly. There are people all by themselves in
half the cars. Who gives them a rest? But most of the time, traffic's moving. Why is that?"

"Well, if we're logical . . ."

"You're not a scientist anymore! I'm not a student in one of your classes. Nothing's logical about this!"
Debbie's lips paled; her face was so tight.

Jack touched her arm. "It's O.K. It's just conversation."

She took several shaky breaths, then relaxed. For a second, Jack saw in her face a semblance of his wife
the way she was aeons ago, when they climbed in the car and left for the commute. They'd been uptight;
they'd argued; they were late; it was her fault; it was his fault. He'd cut into the traffic viciously. Someone
beeped at them; then they'd settled into the flow, and she'd relaxed, just for a second, like she did just
now.

"Not logic, then," Jack said. "Thinking it through, though. If there are solitary drivers, and they're like us,
then they ought to be crashing left and right, but they don't. So they're not like us."

"I guess we know that."

Jack peered into the car beside them, a shiny, blue Lexus. Inside, a man in a business suit stared straight
ahead. Lots of commuters looked like him, focused in a kind of catatonic way. Locked on the road,
frozen into position as if posing for portraits. Lost in their thoughts, he supposed.

But some of the cars that passed . . . the occupants weren't possible . . . were painful to see. He noticed
that Debbie had quit looking long ago. But how often do we really see the people in the other cars on a
commute? thought Jack. Maybe the highways had always been like that. Maybe I never paid enough
attention. He had a theory that this is the way it had always been: traffic consisted of demons, civilians,
newbies and the damned. Sometimes it was mostly civilians: drivers who got on the highway, went
somewhere and got off, never knowing what drove beside them. Sometimes it was mostly the damned,
like them, who died and lived and kept on driving. Sometime there were newbies: the damned before
they died the first time. And then, there were demons. Jack shuddered thinking about the sunglassed face
looking back at him in the semi's mirror. That driver had known there were there, but he came over
anyway.

Jack said, "We have to sleep, or we'd go insane, and if we were insane, this wouldn't be so bad."

"You're assuming we're being punished."

"It's like the fate of Sisyphus. He pushed that old boulder to the top of the mountain in the Greek
underworld, but it wouldn't stay there. So his curse was to walk after the thing and roll it back up. If he
only had to roll it up, and he could never stop, he'd never have time to think about his sins, but the rock
rolled down, and he'd go after it. The punishment was in the walk down, while he was resting. We have
to sleep so we can wake up and realize again what our task is. It's our walk back to the boulder."