"Dick,_Philip_K._I hope I shall arrive soon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned
that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to get her to give up dealing drugs; I kept
warning her again and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening as we were entering a
restaurant together, Kathy stopped short and said, "I can't go in." Seated in the restaurant was a
police inspector whom I knew. "I have to tell you the truth," Kathy said. "I have a relationship with
him."
Certainly, these are odd coincidences. Perhaps I have precognition. But the mystery becomes
even more perplexing; the next stage totally baffles me. It has for four years.
In 1974 the novel was published by Doubleday. One afternoon I was talking to my priest-I am
an Episcopalian-and I happened to mention to him an important scene near the end of the novel in
which the character Felix Buckman meets a black stranger at an all-night gas station, and they begin
to talk. As I described the scene in more and more detail, my priest became progressively more
agitated. At last he said, "That is a scene from the Book of Acts, from the Bible! In Acts, the person
who meets the black man on the road is named Philip-your name." Father Rasch was so upset by
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the resemblance that he could not even locate the scene in his Bible. "Read Acts," he instructed me.
"And you'll agree. It's the same down to specific details."
I went home and read the scene in Acts. Yes, Father Rasch was right; the scene in my novel was
an obvious retelling of the scene in Acts . . . and I had never read Acts, I must admit. But again the
puzzle became deeper. In Acts, the high Roman official who arrests and interrogates Saint Paul is
named Felix-the same name as my character. And my character Felix Buckman is a high-ranking
police general; in fact, in my novel he holds the same office as Felix in the Book of Acts: the final
authority. There is a conversation in my novel which very closely resembles a conversation between
Felix and Paul.
Well, I decided to try for any further resemblances. The main character in my novel is named
Jason. I got an index to the Bible and looked to see if anyone named Jason appears anywhere in the
Bible. I couldn't remember any. Well, a man named Jason appears once and only once in the Bible.
It is in the Book of Acts. And, as if to plague me further with coincidences, in my novel Jason is
fleeing from the authorities and takes refuge in a person's house, and in Acts the man named Jason
shelters a fugitive from the law in his house-an exact inversion of the situation in my novel, as if the
mysterious Spirit responsible for all this was having a sort of laugh about the whole thing.
Felix, Jason, and the meeting on the road with the black man who is a complete stranger. In Acts,
the disciple Philip baptizes the black man, who then goes away rejoicing. In my novel, Felix
Buckman reaches out to the black stranger for emotional support, because Felix Buckman's sister
has just died and he is falling apart psychologically. The black man stirs up Buckman's spirits and
although Buckman does not go away rejoicing, at least his tears have stopped falling. He had been
flying home, weeping over the death of his sister, and had to reach out to someone, anyone, even a
total stranger. It is an encounter between two strangers on the road which changes the life of one of
them- both in my novel and in Acts. And one final quirk by the mysterious Spirit at work: the name
Felix is the Latin word for "happy." Which I did not know when I wrote the novel.
A careful study of my novel shows that for reasons which I cannot even begin to explain I had
managed to retell several of the basic incidents from a particular book of the Bible, and even had the
right names. What could explain this? That was four years ago that I discovered all this. For four
years I have tried to come up with a theory and I have not. I doubt if I ever will.
But the mystery had not ended there, as I had imagined. Two months ago I was walking up to the
mailbox late at night to mail off a letter, and also to enjoy the sight of Saint Joseph's Church, which
sits opposite my apartment building. I noticed a man loitering suspiciously by a parked car. It looked
as if he was attempting to steal the car, or maybe something from it; as I returned from the mailbox,
the man hid behind a tree. On impulse I walked up to him and asked, "Is anything the matter?"
"I'm out of gas," the man said. "And I have no money."