"Bourne-GreatWorks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bourne Mark)

"Waiting for Godot."

"The play? Oh, wait. It's been a while. . .Samuel Beckett. What's this all
about?"

They've had this conversation before. But of course she doesn't remember. "The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

"My favorite poet. Eliot." She looks at him. A shadow of worry, or fear, washes
across her features.

"Jessup." She touches his arm. "What's this all about? Are you all right? You've
been working too hard."

It's pointless. He has explained it all to her before. But "before" is obviously
a relative word. Twice now, he has told Alya everything, every absurd, unfair
detail. But with each theft everything changes. So he tells her again.

For the past year or so, ideas for new stories or poems or novels have poured
into him as if he were a wine glass filled to overflowing. They appear in his
head complete and whole. He merely releases them through his fingers, the way
Mozart envisioned entire symphonies before transcribing them into corporeal
existence on paper. Just last week, when he showed her his latest
work-in-progress, he told her how wonderful it felt to work on a piece that he
knew was something special. Work? The words flow from his fingers as if he were
simply taking dictation. And often, as his body aches with fatigue, tingly inner
voices whisper encouragement and suggestions in his mind. A writer's
subconscious editor at work loud and clear. It used to take weeks just to finish
the first draft of a short story. But now --

"They practically write themselves," he says, laughing, but feeling cold and
frightened all the same.

She listens as he speaks -- again -- of muses and inspired creation. She grows
frightened when his fists beat viciously at the air over his head and he lashes
out at forces he cannot name. Someone, something is helping him create
beautiful, inspired work --prose, poetry, drama. Characters and scenes appear in
his dreams. Faint voices tell him what a fine writer he is. Each new piece is
the most fulfilling work he can imagine. But each time, after he types that
final period, then slumbers in contented exhaustion, something takes his work
from him. And gives it to somebody else.

No matter that somebody lived years or centuries before Jessup was born. It
doesn't even have to be a single person or time on the receiving end. Two of his
fantasies, The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey, are now scattered like seeds
across centuries and continents, sown into the cultural loam of lands and
languages that to him are totally alien. Three days after The Odyssey vanished
from his screen, he discovered a tattered Penguin Classics edition in a
used-book store. It claimed that, as with Gilgamesh, no one really knew how