"Spider Robinson - Very Bad Deaths" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

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minutes by ferry from North America, and contains a bit over two thousand permanent residents, two
sidewalks, and not a single street light or traffic light. The noisiest thing on it in the middle of a
weeknight is generally an owl, or a cat in love with mine.
Given this unusual tranquility, stillness and peace, this near-perfect opportunity for contemplation and
reflection, naturally I play a lot of music. Jazz and blues CDs, mostly. Sometimes I sing along.
Contemplation needs a little challenge, the way cookies need a little salt.
All things considered, I have an ideal existence for someone of my temperament and tastes.
That night, however, the stillness and quiet were lost on me.
That night nothing, anywhere, had any salt, or any other flavor. I wasn't writing a column, or trying to,
or even trying to dream up an idea for one. I wasn't surfing the web, for either research or amusement. I
wasn't reading. The walls of the office were almost totally obscured by a couple of thousand cherished
books; not one contained a line I wished to reread. I wasn't even listening to music. Nearly 300 CDs lay
within arm's reach; not one of them held a single track I wanted to hear. The telephone hanging on the
wall beside my desk connected me directly to everyone else on the planet; I could think of none who
were any use to me.
I was no longer trying to decide whether to kill myselfтАФonly how and how soon.
A perfect life without Susan in it simply hurt too much to bear. I had been denying that for over a year
now, waiting doggedly for the pain to recede to a tolerable level. By now I knew it was never going to
recede at all, even a little. Maybe there are no good deaths, I don't know. I know Susan had one of the
bad ones.
I estimated I had at most another day or two in me.
It would call for a bit of cunning. The only thing left I could possibly give my son Jesse that he would
accept from me was my life insurance benefitтАФand there was an antisuicide clause. So it would have to
look like an accident. I was going over a short list of three finalist methods, weighing their respective
pluses and minuses, when the knock on the door startled me so badly I backhanded a cup of coffee clear
off the warming plate and onto the floor.
An unexpected knock in the dead of night is alarming even if you have a clean conscienceтАФor so I
imagine. I had my brain do a hasty search for Things This Could Be That Wouldn't Be Catastrophic. By
the time it reported failure, a small pipe and a gray plastic film can had been rendered temporarily
invisible, and I was up out of my chair, halfway to the office door, and my fist was unobtrusively
wrapped around the trackball of my TurboMouse, a solid plastic sphere about the size and weight of a
cueball. I can only wonder what organ directed all these actions, since my brain was fully occupied in
the fruitless search for harmless explanations. Spinal cord, maybe.
Silly, isn't it? I was planning my suicide . . . and ready to kill in self defense. No wonder humans own
the planet.
The knock came again as I reached the door. It was depressingly loud and firm. I could think of perhaps
a dozen acquaintances or neighbors who might conceivably bang on my door in the small hours, but any
of them would have done so softly, apologetically. They are, after all, all Canadians. There was a short
list of maybe four friends who might feel entitled to whang away that assertively at that hour, secure in
the certainty that I would be both awake and willing to fuck off for a while. But for one reason and
another I was fairly certain none of them could be on-island just now.
That left only discouraging possibilities. A raid of some kind. Someone bringing the news that a loved

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