"Barry N. Malzberg - Ready When You Are" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

months for the prestige before she returns to Finzie's palatial,
guarded,
hidden estate in Glendale where she has promised to live with him and
embark upon pre-production. All alone now except for his memories, his
conscience, and his agent is this Finzie who walks slowly along the
beach,
pondering many possibilities and the nature of his destiny. Superguy
Finzie, his Leaf of Gold-winning autobiographical odyssey already
booked
into a thousand theatres worldwide, more thousands to follow: Finzie
sending unanswered and unanswerable messages to the kid in Flatbush who
perished in an apartment building fire in 1963 and whose ashes were
interred with those of his parents in a small mausoleum in the borough
of
Queens. Vanity, Finzie thinks, all is vanity and watches three young
women, glorious in their youth and necessity, gambol on the sands
before
him. None can be older than fourteen and each in her special way has
destroyed him. He is the remnant, he thinks, of their design. "Have you
need of anything?" the bodyguard, detailed by his agent and studio to
keep
him company in these final days asks. "Can I service you anything,
sir?"
Finzie in whose right hand half of our possibilities and all of our
dreams
will soon enough dwell looks at the man absently, his face for the
moment
stripped of pain and pleasure as well, a perfect and inscrutably vacant
frame upon which anything at all could have been inscribed. "Only my
history," Finzie says. "It is a superhero who can survive a fatal fire,
don't you think? How remarkable but I seem to have left my history
behind."
"Ah sir," the bodyguard says with exquisite and poised understanding,
"Ah
sir, it is this lack of history which has given you this power," and
reacting to the sheer and mortifying truth of this observation, Finzie
—

Puts aside the necessary equipment of the auteur, the cape, the mask,
the
special wire, the equations of history and thrall which have given him
such awful if inconsequent power, puts these toys away now as so long
ago
the fire had put away that necessitous part of himself. Finzie puts
aside
the clutter of the superhero because, having transcended fire and
destiny,
he no longer needs to be one, needs the costume no more and leaving a
warning for Eve Harlow and the others that they will have to make do
with