"Spider Robinson - The Immediate Family" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

Opposites make good companions sometimes.
The reason Irish coffee is the per-fect beverage is that the stimulant and the depressant play tug of
war with your consciousness, thereby stretch-ing and exercising it. Isometric intox-ication, opposed
tensions producing calm at the center, in the eye of the metabolic hurricane. You end up an alert drunk I
suppose speedballsтАФthe cocaine-heroin combination that killed John BelushiтАФmust be a similar
phenomenon, on a more vivid and lethal level. Fear and lust is an-other good, heady mixture of
oppo-sites ... as many have learned in war-zones or hostage situations.
But if you can get hope and pride and serious fear all going at the same time, balanced in roughly
equal por-tions, let me tell you, then you've re-ally got something powerful.
You can turn your head around with a mixture like that, end up spin-ning like a top and paralyzed,
ex-hausted and insomniac, starving and nauseous, running a fine cold sweat. Like a car in neutral, with
the acceler-ator to the floor. It's exhilarating, in a queasy kind of way.
I'm embarrassed to admit I binged on it for days before I realized that was what I was doing, and
then an-other day before I made up my mind to kick it. Finally I admitted to myself that I was being
selfish, that other peoples' hopesтАФand cashтАФwere in-volved in this too. They'd been wait-ing a long
time already. Besides, in a three-way tug of war, the chances of one side suddenly letting go with a loud
snap are doubled.
Hell, I'd already jumped. It was time to open my eyes and see where I was going to land....
So one fine day in May of 1988, I picked up the phone and made the call.
"Hello there, son," he said when they finally tracked him down. "I was just thinking about you. Been
too long. What's the good word?" His voice was strong and clear despite the lousy connection. As
always.
"I think I'm ready," I said.
Short pause. "Say that again. Like you believe it, this time."
I cleared my throat. "Well, I don't know if I'll ever be ready. But I think it's ready. I truly do, Sam.
As ready as it's ever gonna be."
"Why, that's fine! Uh ... want me to come over and take a look? Before youтАФ"
"Thanks. But no, take it all in one dose. Put the word out for me, OK? I open Friday at nine. Just the
immediate family."
"Friday, huh? Appropriate date. We'll all be there. I'm looking forward to it. It's been too awful damn
long. Good luckтАФwups, Code Blue, got to go!" The line was dead.
Friday was two days away. Time for one last binge of conflicting emotions before the balloon went
up....

The thing is, I had accomplished a miracleтАФand I knew in my heart it wasn't good enough.
After two years of careful planning and hard work, I had produced some-thing excellent. I believed
that, and I guess I should have been proud. Oh hell, I guess I was proud. But I was trying to match
something long gone that, in its own back-assward way, had been perfect. And it seemed to me, in those
last couple of days, that the distance on the scale between lousy and excellent is nothing compared to
the distance between excellent and perfect.
There was nothing I could do about it. Perfection exceeded my grasp. I didn't have the tools.
None-theless, I spent those last days like a frustrated cat, trying to bite myself on the small of the back.

My staff was the first to arrive that Friday night, pulling in at about eight, but he didn't count. He'd
already seen the place, under oath of secrecy, be-cause I'd needed his help in finishing it. (If you can't
trust a guy with his background to keep a vow, who can you trust?) But I was glad to see him, and
gladder when he was dressed for work.
It was the sheer familiarity of the sight of him in that getup, I think. So much about this place was
different from the old one, and he was a thread of continuity that I appreciated. Some of those
differences had been driving me crazy.