"Robert Charles Wilson - Divided by Infinity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

sign was gone. The door was locked and the space was for lease.
Neither the jeweler downstairs nor the coffee-shop girl next
door remembered the store, its clientele, or Niemand himself.
There was no Niemand in the phone book. Nor could I find
his commercial listing. Not even in my yellow pages at home,
where I had first looked it up.
Or remembered looking it up.
Anomalous experience.
Which constituted proof, of a kind, though Ziegler was right;
it was not transferable. I could convince no one, ultimately, save
myself.


The television news was full of apocalypse that night. A
rumor had swept the Internet that the great gamma-ray burst was
imminent, only days away. No, it was not, scientists insisted, but
they allowed themselves to be drawn by their CNN inquisitors into
hypothetical questions. Would there be any safe place? A half-mile
underground, say, or two, or three? (Probably not, they admitted; or,
We donтАЩt have the full story yet.)
To a man, or woman, they looked unsettled and skittish.
I went to bed knowing she was out there, Lorraine, I mean,
out among the plenitude of worlds and stars. Alone, perhaps, since
I must have died to herтАФinfinities apart, certainly, but enclosed
within the same inconceivably vast multiuniverse, as alike, in our
way, as two snowflakes in an avalanche.
I slept with the pill bottle cradled in my hand.


The trick, I decided, was to abandon the charade, to mean the
act.
 In other words, to swallow twenty or thirty tabletsтАФa more
difficult act than you might imagineтАФand wash them down with a
neat last shot of Glenlivet.


But Deirdre called.
Almost too late.
Not late enough.
I picked up the phone, confused, my hands butting the
receiver like antagonistic parade balloons. I said, or meant to say,
тАЬLorraine?тАЭ
But it was Deirdre, only Deirdre, and before long Deirdre was
shouting in an annoying way. I let the phone drop.
I suppose she called 911.




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