"Roger Zelazny - Divine Madness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

and the fountain became a volcano spouting rainbows.
The world was frozen and served up to him under a glass.
...The woman passed back before him and he looked down too soon to see
her face.
The hell was beginning once more, he realized, as the backward-flying
birds passed before.
He gave himself up to it. Let it keep him until he broke, until he was
all used up and there was nothing left.
He waited, there on the bench, watching the slivey toves be brillig, as
the fountain sucked its waters back within itself, drawing them up in a
great arc above the unmoving dolphins, and the boats raced backward over the
pond, and the fence divested itself of stray scraps of paper, as the birds
replaced the candy bar within the red wrapper, bit by crunchy bit.
His thoughts only were inviolate, his body belonged to the retreating
tide.
Eventually, he rose and strolled backwards out of the park.
On the street a boy backed past him, unwhistling snatches of a popular
song.
He backed up the stairs to his apartment, his hangover growing worse
again, undrank his coffee, unshowered, unswallowed his aspirins, and got
into bed, feeling awful.
Let this be it, he decided.
A faintly-remembered nightmare ran in reverse though his mind, giving
it an undeserved happy ending.

It was dark when he awakened.
He was very drunk.
He backed over to the bar and began spitting out his drinks, one by one
into the same glass he had used the night before, and pouring them from the


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glass back into the bottles again. Separating the gin and vermouth was no
trick at all. The liquids leapt into the air as he held the uncorked bottles
above the bar.
And he grew less and less drunk as this went on.
Then he stood before an early Martini and it was 10:07 in the P.M.
There, within the hallucination, he wondered about another hallucination.
Would time loop-the-loop, forward and then backward again, through his
previous seizure?
No.
It was as though it had not happened, had never been.
He continued on back through the evening, undoing things.
He raised the telephone, said "good-bye", untold Murray that he would
not be coming to work again tomorrow, listened a moment, recradled the phone
and looked at it as it rang.
The sun came up in the west and people were backing their cars to work.
He read the weather report and the headlines, folded the evening paper