"Mary Rosenblum - Afterimage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenblum Mary)

Daniel wakes up. He stares at me for a second, his face all blurry with booze
and sleep. Then he gets up and his chair falls over. "You're dead," he says. And
then he passes out.

It's so fast, I almost don't catch him. But I do, all off balance, and my feet
slip on the wet floor and I crack my head on the edge of the table on my way
down, and all my muscles go loose. So I land flat with the wind knocked out of
me, and Daniel like a thousand-pound weight on my chest. He twitches and after a
minute gets off, but I'm too busy trying to breathe to care. My head hurts like
a son of a bitch.

"Ian?" His voice sounds thick and weird.

And I should be scared, because Daniel isn't Dicey, but my head hurts too much
to be anything but mad, and when I touch the place where I banged the table, I
feel sticky blood. "Do I sound dead?" I sit up and shove my bloody fingers under
his nose. "Do I look dead? Do I look like I just dug myself out of a fucking
grave?"

"I don't know." He looks like he's going to pass out again. "I watched
them...shovel dirt onto your coffin, man. One day you're here. Then you're
just...gone. A stupid hit and run in front of a Seven Eleven. After you got
clean and everything." He looks away, up at the bottle on the table. "You used
to tell me that nothing really mattered. I guess you were right."

"Stop it." He's really scaring me, now. "You sound like me." I try to make it a
joke, but shivers are running up and down my spine. Because I remember something
-- a car -- shiny red paint and sun on glass. "You used to kick my butt when I
talked like that."

"You're really here?" Daniel starts to touch me, then pulls his hand away.

I grab his shoulders and shake him. "Yeah, I'm here. Snap out of it, man." I
shake him again, hard. Like he used to shake me when I was trying to get off the
needle and thought I couldn't do it anymore. "You hear me? Whatever's going on,
I'm right here, and if I'm dead, nobody told me." But I'm looking into his eyes,
and I'm seeing it there-- that yeah, he watched them bury me. And it comes back
in bits like broken glass on the sidewalk -- car hood, windshield, all coming
too fast. I can almost see the face behind the sunbright glass, and...I remember
how it felt -- the impact. No pain, but it was like I could feel my self getting
knocked right out of my body. My soul, maybe, if you want to call it that. Me,
anyway.

"You remember," Daniel says softly.

"Yeah." The word comes out like a sigh. I let go of him and stare down at the
white rosary of old dead days on my forearms. "Sort of." The car, nothing after.
"How long?" I ask and I hear the tremble in my voice. Because that black hole is
there inside my head and I'm teetering on the brink.