Robert Charles Wilson - Divided by Infinity
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2024-12-19
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35 页
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侵权投诉
DIVIDED BY
INFINITY
Robert Charles Wilson
1.
In the year after Lorraine’s death I contemplated suicide six
times. Contemplated it seriously, I mean: six times sat with the fat
bottle of clonazepam within reaching distance, six times failed to
reach for it, betrayed by some instinct for life or disgusted by my
own weakness.
I can’t say I wish I had succeeded, because in all likelihood I
did succeed, on each and every occasion. Six deaths. No, not just
six. An infinite number.
Times six.
There are greater and lesser infinities.
But I didn’t know that then.
I was only sixty years old.
I had lived all my life in the city of Toronto. I worked
thirty-five years as a senior accountant for a Great Lakes cargo
brokerage called Steamships Forwarding, Ltd., and took an early
retirement in 1997, not long before Lorraine was diagnosed with
the pancreatic cancer that killed her the following year. Back then
she worked part-time in a Harbord Street used-book shop called
Finders, a short walk from the university district, in a part of the
city we both loved.
I still loved it, even without Lorraine, though the gloss had
dimmed considerably. I lived there still, in a utility apartment over
an antique store, and I often walked the neighborhood—down
Spadina into the candy-bright intricacies of Chinatown, or west to
Kensington, foreign as a Bengali marketplace, where the smell of
spices and ground coffee mingled with the stink of sun-ripened
fish.
Usually I avoided Harbord Street. My grief was raw enough
without the provocation of the bookstore and its awkward
memories. Today, however, the sky was a radiant blue, and the
smell of spring blossoms and cut grass made the city seem
threatless. I walked east from Kensington with a mesh bag filled
with onions and Havarti cheese, and soon enough found myself on
Harbord Street, which had moved another notch upscale since the
old days, more restaurants now, fewer macrobiotic shops, the palm
readers and bead shops banished for good and all.
But Finders was still there. It was a tar-shingled Victorian
house converted for retail, its hanging sign faded to illegibility. A
three-legged cat slumbered on the cracked concrete stoop.
I went in impulsively, but also because the owner, an old man
by the name of Oscar Ziegler, had sent an elaborate bouquet to
Lorraine’s funeral the previous year, and I felt I owed him some
acknowledgment. According to Lorraine he lived upstairs and
never left the building.
The bookstore hadn’t changed on the inside, either, since the
last time I had seen it. I didn’t know it well (the store was
Lorraine’s turf and as a rule I had left her to it), but there was no
obvious evidence that more than a year had passed since my last
visit. It was the kind of shop with so much musty stock and so few
customers that it could have survived only under the most
generous circumstances—no doubt Ziegler owned the building and
had found a way to finesse his property taxes. The store was not a
labor of love, I suspected, so much as an excuse for Ziegler to
indulge his pack-rat tendencies.
It was a full nest of books. The walls were pineboard shelves,
floor to ceiling. Free-standing shelves divided the small interior
into box canyons and dimly lit hedgerows. The stock was old and,
not that I’m any judge, largely trivial, forgotten jazz-age novels and
belles-lettres, literary flotsam.
I stepped past cardboard boxes from which more books
overflowed, to the rear of the store, where a cash desk had been
wedged against the wall. This was where, for much of the last five
years of her life, Lorraine had spent her weekday afternoons. I
wondered whether book dust was carcinogenic. Maybe she had
been poisoned by the turgid air, by the floating fragments of
ivoried Frank Yerby novels, vagrant molecules of Peyton Place and
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
Someone else sat behind the desk now, a different woman,
younger than Lorraine, though not what anyone would call young.
A baby-boomer in denim overalls and a pair of eyeglasses that
might have better suited the Hubble space telescope.
Shoulder-length hair, gone gray, and an ingratiating smile, though
there was something faintly haunted about the woman.
“Hi,” she said amiably. “Anything I can help you find?”
“Is Oscar Ziegler around?”
Her eyes widened. “Uh, Mr. Ziegler? He’s upstairs, but he
doesn’t usually like to be disturbed. Is he expecting you?”
She seemed astonished at the possibility that Ziegler would be
expecting anyone, or that anyone would want to see Ziegler. Maybe
it was a bad idea. “No,” I said, “I just dropped by on the chance…
you know, my wife used to work here.”
“I see.”
“Please don’t bother him. I’ll just browse for a while.”
“Are you a book collector, or—?”
“Hardly. These days I read the newspaper. The only books
I’ve kept are old paperbacks. Not the sort of thing Mr. Ziegler
would stock.”
“You’d be surprised. Mysteries? Chandler, Hammett, John
Dickson Carr? Because we have some firsts over by the stairs…”
“I used to read some mysteries. Mostly, though, it was science
fiction I liked.”
“Really? You look more like a mystery reader.”
“There’s a look?”
She laughed. “Tell you what. Science fiction? We got a box of
paperbacks in last week. Right over there, under the ladder. Check
it out, and I’ll tell Mr. Ziegler you’re here. Uh—”
“My name is Keller. Bill Keller. My wife was Lorraine.”
She held out her hand. “I’m Deirdre. Just have a look; I’ll be
back in a jiff.”
I wanted to stop her but didn’t know how. She went through a
bead curtain and up a dim flight of stairs while I pulled a leathery
cardboard box onto a chair seat and prepared for some dutiful
time-killing. Certainly I didn’t expect to find anything I wanted,
though I would probably have to buy something as the price of a
courtesy call, especially if Ziegler was coaxed out of his lair to greet
me. But what I had told Deirdre was true; though I had been an
eager reader in my youth, I hadn’t bought more than an occasional
softcover since 1970. Fiction is a young man’s pastime. I had
ceased to be curious about other people’s lives, much less other
worlds.
Still, the box was full of forty-year-old softcover books, Ace
and Ballantine paperbacks mainly, and it was nice to see the covers
again, the Richard Powers abstracts, translucent bubbles on infinite
plains, or Jack Gaughan sketches, angular and insectile. Titles rich
with key words: Time, Space, Worlds, Infinity. Once I had loved
this sort of thing.
And then, amongst these faded jewels, I found something I
did not expect—
And another. And another.
The bead curtain parted and Ziegler entered the room.
He was a bulky man, but he moved with the exaggerated
caution of the frail. A plastic tube emerged from his nose, was
taped to his cheek with a dirty Band-Aid and connected to an
oxygen canister slung from his shoulder. He hadn’t shaved for a
couple of days. He wore what looked like a velveteen frock coat
draped over a T-shirt and a pair of pinstriped pajama bottoms. His
hair, what remained of it, was feathery and white. His skin was the
color of thrift-shop Tupperware.
Despite his appearance, he gave me a wide grin.
“Mr. Ziegler,” I said. “I’m Bill Keller. I don’t know if you
remember—”
He thrust his pudgy hand forward. “Of course! No need to
explain. Terrible about Lorraine. I think of her often.” He turned to
Deirdre, who emerged from the curtain behind him. “Mr. Keller’s
wife…” He drew a labored breath. “Died last year.”
“I’m sorry,” Deirdre said.
“She was… a wonderful woman. Friendly by nature. A joy.
Of course, death isn’t final… we all go on, I believe, each in his
own way…”
There was more of this—enough that I regretted stopping
by—but I couldn’t doubt Ziegler’s sincerity. Despite his
intimidating appearance there was something almost wilfully
childlike about him, a kind of embalmed innocence, if that makes
any sense.
He asked how I had been and what I had been doing. I
answered as cheerfully as I could and refrained from asking after
his own health. His cheeks reddened as he stood, and I wondered if
he shouldn’t be sitting down. But he seemed to be enjoying
himself. He eyed the five slender books I’d brought to the cash
desk.
“Science fiction!” he said. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a
science fiction reader, Mr. Keller.”
(Deirdre glanced at me: Told you so!)
“I haven’t been a steady reader for a long time,” I said. “But I
found some interesting items.”
“The good old stuff,” Ziegler gushed. “The pure quill. Does
it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction
of our youth?”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“There was a time when science seemed so sterile. It didn’t
yield up the wonders we had been led to expect. Only a bleak,
lifeless solar system… half dozen desert worlds, baked or frozen,
take your pick, and the gas giants… great roaring seas of methane
and ammonia…”
I nodded politely.
“But now!” Ziegler exclaimed. “Life on Mars! Oceans under
Europa! Comets plunging into Jupiter—!”
“I see what you mean.”
“And here on Earth—the human genome, cloned animals,
mind-altering drugs! Computer networks! Computer viruses!” He
slapped his thigh. “I have a Teflon hip, if you can imagine such a
thing!”
“Pretty amazing,” I agreed, though I hadn’t thought much
about any of this.
“Back when we read these books, Mr. Keller, when we read
Heinlein or Simak or Edmond Hamilton, we longed to immerse
ourselves in the strange… the outre. And now—well—here we are!”
He smiled breathlessly and summed up his thesis. “Immersed in the
strange. All it takes is time. Just… time. Shall I put these in a bag for
you?”
He bagged the books without looking at them. When I
fumbled out my wallet, he raised his hand.
“No charge. This is for Lorraine. And to thank you for
stopping by.”
I couldn’t argue… and I admit I didn’t want to draw his
attention to the paperbacks, in the petty fear that he might notice
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DIVIDEDBYINFINITY RobertCharlesWilson 1. IntheyearafterLorraine’sdeathIcontemplatedsuicidesixtimes.Contemplateditseriously,Imean:sixtimessatwiththefatbottleofclonazepamwithinreachingdistance,sixtimesfailedtoreachforit,betrayedbysomeinstinctforlifeordisgustedbymyownweakness.Ican’tsayIwishIh...
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分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：35 页
大小：184.93KB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-12-19
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