"Zelazny, Roger - DIVINE~2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

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 glass back into the bottles again. Separating the gin
and vermouth was no trick at all. The liquids leapt into the air as
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 and placed it out in the hall.
It was the longest seizure he had ever had, but he did not really
care. He settled himself down within it and watched as the day
unwound itself back to morning.
His hangover returned as the day grew smaller, and it was terrible
when he got into bed again.