"Man Who Loved The Faioli, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

to you, I know) possess. This is my life within death. I asked for it
because I feared oblivion. I volunteered to be gravekeeper to the universe,
because in this place there are none to look upon me and be repelled by my
deathlike appearance. This is why I am what I am. Kiss me and end it."

But having taken the form of woman, or perhaps being woman all along,
the Faioli who was called Sythia was curious, and she said, "This place?"
and she touched the spot beneath his left armpit.

With this he vanished from her sight, and with this also, he knew once
again the icy logic that stood apart from emotion. Because of this, he did
not touch upon the critical spot once again.

Instead, he watched her as she sought for him about the place where he
had once lived.

She checked into every closet and adytum, and when she could not
discover a living man, she sobbed once, horribly, as she had on that night
when first he had seen her. Then the wings flickered, flickered, weakly
flickered, back into existence upon her back, and her face dissolved and her
body slowly melted. The tower of sparks that stood before him then vanished,
and later on that crazy night during which he could distinguish distances
and grasp perspectives once again he began looking for her.

And that is the story of John Auden, the only man who ever loved a
Faioli and lived (if you could call it that) to tell of it. No one knows it
better than I.

No cure has ever been found. And I know that he walks the Canyon of the
Dead and considers the bones, sometimes stops by the rock where he met her,
blinks after the moist things that are not there, wonders at the judgment
that he gave.

It is that way, and the moral may be that life (and perhaps love also)
is stronger than that which it contains, but never that which contains it.
But only a Faioli could tell you for sure, and they never come here any
more.

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