Читать книгу Someday - Дэвид Левитан, Рэйчел Кон, David Levithan - Страница 9

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To stay in a body, you must take that body over.

To take a body over, you must kill the person inside.

It is not an easy thing to do, to assert your own self over the self that exists in the body, to smother it until it is no longer there. But it can be done.

I stare down at the body in the bed. It is rare for me to have done so much damage, so I’m fascinated by the result. The regular response to a dead body is to close its eyes, but I prefer them open. That way I can study what’s missing.

Here is the face I have seen in the mirror for the past few months. Anderson Poole, age fifty-eight. When I look into his eyes, they are only eyes, no more expressive than his dead fingers or his dead nose. The first time this happened, I thought there would be an aftercurrent of life—some element to enable the feeble and the desperate to believe that the spirit that had once been inside was now somewhere else, instead of completely annihilated. But all I see is utter emptiness.

There is no reason for me to be here. At any moment, the hotel management will overrule the DO NOT DISTURB sign and come in to find the reverend in a state far beyond disturbance. He died of natural causes, the inquest will conclude. His mind failed. The rest of the body followed.

Nobody will know I was here. Nobody will know that the mind failed because I cut the wires.

It was time to move on. I was getting bored. Anderson Poole was no longer useful.

I am in a younger body now. A college student who will not be attending class much longer. I feel stronger in this body. More attractive. I like that. Nobody ever looked at Anderson Poole as he walked down the street. It was his position as a reverend that they revered. That was the reason they listened to him.

“You came so close,” I say to him, my new hand closing his left eye, then opening it again. “You almost had him. But you scared him away.”

Poole does not respond; I am not expecting him to.

The phone rings. No doubt the front desk, giving him one last chance.

I have to go soon. I cannot be here when the maid finds him. Screams. Prays. Calls the police.

Nobody will mourn him. He has no family left. He had a few friends, but as I choked off his memories and made his decisions for him, the friends fell away. His death will cause no great disruption in anyone else’s life. I knew this from the start. I am not heartless, after all.

It is important for me to come back and see the body. I don’t have to, and sometimes I can’t. But I try. It’s not to pay respects. The body can’t accept any respects—it’s dead. By seeing what a body looks like without a life inside, I get a sense of what I am, what I bring.

I would like to compare notes on this with someone else like me. I want to sit down with him and discuss the act of being a life without being a body. I want to make my brethren understand the power we have, and how we can use that power. I want my history recorded in someone else’s thoughts.

Poor Anderson Poole. When I started with him, I learned everything there was to know about him. I used that. Then I dismantled it bit by bit. He no longer had his own memories—just the memories I had about him. Now that we are separate, I will make no effort to retain those memories. His life, for all practical purposes, will vanish.

Were I to thank him now, it would be for being so weak, so pliable. I take one last look in his eyes, witness their useless stare.

How vulnerable it makes you, to depend on a body.

How much better to never rely on any single one.