"S. P. Somtow - Absent Thee From Felicity Awhile.." - читать интересную книгу автора (Somtow S. P)

“Well, I will buy you a doughnut then.”
“Oh, all right. A romantic memory,” she added cynically,
“when I’ll be dead by dinner anyway.”
“Huh?”
She came closer. We were almost touching, both leaning
against the grubby counter. “I’m one of the ghosts, you know,” she
said.
“I don’t get it.”
“What do you do every day?”
“My girlfriend walks out on me, then I play a poor third
fiddle to a pretentious British actor in Hamlet.”
“Lucky. In my script, the train crashes into an
eighteen-wheeler 25 miles outside of Philadelphia. Smash!
Everybody dead. And then every morning I find myself at the
station again. I was pretty muddled at first, the aliens never made
any announcements to me while I was lying in the wreckage. So I
do it all over and over again. One day I may even enjoy it.”
It didn’t sink in. “Chocolate covered?” I asked inanely.
“Yeah.”
There was another pause. I realized how much I needed
another person, not Gail, how much I needed someone real…
“We should get to know each other, maybe,” I ventured.
“After it’s all over, maybe we could—”
“No, Joke. Nothing doing. I’m a ghost. I’m not immortal,
don’t you see! The whole deal ignores me completely! I’m dead
already, dead, permanently dead! You don’t get to be part of the
deal if you die sometime during the day, you have to survive
through till midnight, don’t you see?”
“… oh God.” I saw.
“They’ve just left me in the show to make everything as
accurate as can be. I’m an echo. I’m nothing.”
I didn’t say a word. I just grabbed her and kissed her, right
there in the middle of the doughnut stand. She was quite cold, like
marble, like stone.
“Come on,” she said. We found a short-time hotel around the
block; I paid the eight dollars and we clung together urgently,
desperately, for a terribly brief time.
I woke up at around 11 o’clock. Gail stirred uneasily. As I
went through the motions for the thousandth time I was thinking
all the time, this isn’t fair, this isn’t fair. Gail was alive, she was going
to live forever, and she’s just like a machine, she might just as well
be dead. Amy, now, she was dead, but so alive! Then I realized a
terrible truth: Immortality kills! I was very bitter and very angry. I felt
cheated, and the buzzing sounded louder, like a warning, and I
knew then that I was going to try and do something dreadful.
(“They can’t control everything,” wasn’t that what the Kirshna freak
had said?)
I struggled, trying to push myself out of the groove, trying to
change a little bit of one little movement, but always falling back to
the immutable past…