LITMIR.BIZ

       “I am not a brave man.”

       Grey McLure started a war.

       In his own words,

       he tells us why.

      Contents

       Cover

       Title page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Epigraph

Plath

ONE

       TWO

       THREE

       FOUR

       FIVE

       SIX

       Back series promotional page

       Praise for the GONE series

       Praise for the BZRK

       ALSO BY MICHAEL GRANT

Plath

      I should destroy this. There’s no such thing as secure data. Once a thing is written it will somehow escape. But I can’t. I never knew my father wrote anything about himself.

      Mr Stern recovered this from a laptop my father once used. A long time ago, now. Or seems a long time ago to me.

      This was his story. Mine, too, though at the time I understood almost nothing of what was happening. But this is how . . . well, it’s at least part of how everything began.

      My father, Grey McLure. Burnofsky. Lear. Even Caligula. It’s all here. And I could trash can it all, wipe it clean. Except that these are my father’s words, and he’s talking about my mother and my brother. And he’s talking about me. And I find now that every word is infinitely precious.

      Soon secrecy won’t matter. Soon very little will matter. But love will matter as long as anything. And I loved my dad.

      I am Plath. My enemies have come to fear that name, and I revel in their dread.

      But once I was just Sadie. Sadie who loved her dad.

ONE

      I am not a brave man.

      I am not well-armored against fear. Fear now rules my world, or perhaps I should say ‘fears’ plural; unless you believe that all fears are only one fear, the big one, the fear of death.

      I don’t believe that. To me, fear is granular. Fear is specific. Each fear has its own smell and taste, its own picture and face.

      The great fear for me now is not death. The great fear is madness. The destruction of a creature smaller than the full stops on this page can drag me down, helpless, like being sucked into a whirlpool.

      I fear that madness. I fear it so badly that I shake from it as I write this.

      The things I have seen. And touched, though not with my own hands.

      We live in a series of comforting illusions, beginning with the illusion that we are a human, a singular, separate and discrete object called a human. We say, “That’s a man,” or, “That’s a woman,” and we mean only the parts that are undeniably human, and not any of the bits and pieces that live on or in that human.

      We are not, any of us, a singular object. We are an ecosystem. We are a Brazilian rainforest of life.

      Some of us may understand this intellectually, we may hear the statistics about how we have more bacterial cells within us than strictly human cells. We may even make a disgusted face when we hear the fact. But that kind of fact? A bit of math? A line of data? That’s nothing to give a sane man sweaty nightmares. That’s nothing to twist his every notion of reality.

      There are facts, and there is truth, and the two are not always quite the same. Facts are dry. The truth is sometimes soaked in blood.

      My wife is dying. Her name is Birgid. Mine is Grey. Grey McLure.

      Our

Скачать книгу