by Pavel Kostin
“OK, fine, that’s enough… Everything’s fine with me.”
I finish the pasta.
“Fine, mum, I’ve got to dash.”
“Just have some tea.”
“Yeah, I need to run. Thanks. Love you.”
I give her a kiss on the cheek.
Mum fusses around, finds some sweets and a roll somewhere and puts them in a bag.
“Take these, you can have them with your tea tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Mum, I’m off.”
I go out the door. The cold blows into my face.
“But if something happens, son, you’ll call me, right?” She shouts after me. “Don’t suffer in silence. You’re always welcome, OK?”
I say nothing and run down the stairs. I run out of the door. Outside it’s dark and cool. I look round. It doesn’t matter where I go. Night outside. Darkness in my heart.
Somewhere in the yard a bunch of drunks are singing out of tune.
• • •
We’re getting comfortable in a city square. Viktor drops a bottle of coke.
“What the… Lucky it’s got a lid.”
“Alright, now this is eating! Yeah, I only got one burger today!” Torte replies even though no one asked. “I’m on a diet. I need to limit myself. Just one burger and that’s it.”
“Is that a diet?” Viktor asks, curious.
He examines Torte’s meal. A hamburger, two fries and a large coke.
“Interesting diet,” he notes without expression.
“It’s a diet,” Torte retorts confidently. “Of course, it’s a diet. Because without the diet do you know how much I eat?... Oooh… I never get less than two burgers. And sometimes I get three. And when I’m really, really hungry it feels like I could eat ten! And that’s when you get a belly.”
Torte slaps his pudgy ‘six pack’.
“But what’re you going to do, that’s the thing?” he continues. “You can’t not eat! When I’m hungry, I can’t think about anything else! I want to eat! If I eat a lot I get fat. If I don’t eat a lot – I wander round hungry the whole time. It’s some kind of mistake of nature! How can I be hungry and still be getting fat the whole time?”
“You need to burn those calories,” Viktor says. “And you don’t burn them. That’s what happens. It all gets stored away.”
“Then why is it always asking for more?”
“It?”
“My body… I’m always on diets! So, now I’m on a diet, right…” Torte bites off a juicy chunk of hamburger, and barely chewing, continues. “Although quit them the whole time, of course. I can’t last more than a week. You think you’d eat your next door neighbour, you get so hungry. Like last month. I spent a whole month eating only meat. And what happened? In the end, I nearly went mad, went and bought a whole baguette and guzzled it. Can you imagine? A whole baguette just like that. It was just an ordinary baguette, but it was so goddamn tasty! It was bliss…”
Torte rolls his eyes in a reverie.
“You know that’s totally dangerous.”
“Oh it’s dangerous!” Torte agrees readily. “But what’re you going to do? Going hungry is dangerous too. What if I fainted from hunger in the middle of the road?”
“Faint from hunger,” Viktor repeats sceptically, watching Torte devouring his fries.
“Mmhm.”
“Interesting,” Viktor says, “but aren’t you an artist? Street art, graffiti, social protest.”
“Yeah,” Torte says with a full mouth. “So what?!”
“I’ve seen it so many times. It’s a really popular theme in your circles – protesting against fast food. Sort of like, the masses are pigs eating the swill that’s given to them. The nation is enslaved by fast food. Multinational corporations have taken over the whole world and, you know, loads of stuff like that. But really half of them, if not all of them, are constantly shovelling down that exact same fast food. Burgers and coke.”
“Ah come off it,” Torte shakes his head. “Take Linda, she basically, I think, never eats anything at all. Or Max. He’s basically a vegetarian. Max, you’re a vegetarian, right?”
“Nah,” I say. “Where’d you get that from?”
“I just sort of remembered something… So, basically, it’s only me who’s like this. There’s nothing I can do about the way I am. That’s just how my body works. Mm-hm. Hey, have you known Max a long time?”
“A long time,” Viktor says. “About ten years at least.”
“Seriously?” I say. “Who’d have thought it? Ten years! You know what, I don’t even remember. I wish I could remember…”
Strange. I know I’ve known him for a long time. I can’t for the life of me remember how long. I don’t remember us being friends before. When was it?
“For some reason I can’t remember anything,” I say. “Something doesn’t make sense!”
“Did you watch the football yesterday?” Torte asks. “Last night.”
“What football?” Viktor asks with interest.
“You know, the football. Ireland-Andorra. I think. Are you into football, Viktor?”
“Not particularly.”
“What are you into?”
“Well… I’m into photography. I collect old equipment. Lenses.”
“Cool, nice one…”
Tort says nothing, wipes his brow and looks at me.
“You know what,” he says. “Who cares about diets? Come with me, I’m going to get some more. It’s always the way. Let’s go. I’ll get you some ice cream!
Viktor grins. We head off to get seconds.
• • •
A huge park.
Tall trees reaching up into the sky. Hundreds of trees. They’re enormous, with broad, spreading crowns. There are so many trees, and their crowns are so big, that here and there they merge together, forming a thick, heavy canopy over the park.
It’s early, very early in the morning. Wind. It’s overcast and a little misty. The trees, full of luscious wet leaves, rustle in the gusts of wind, and there are so many leaves, and the crowns are so dense, that the sound reminds me of the surf or the thundering of a waterfall.
I’m walking down a narrow avenue, enjoying looking around and breathing in the fresh morning air. The sun’s not too strong. The light struggles to break through the clouds. It’s not bright, but it’s warm. Something’s getting in the way of looking properly, something unusual, but I can’t figure out what it is.
“Hi!” says Lady F.
“Hi,” I reply.
I’m not surprised and I’m pleased to see her.
“How are you?” she asks.
“Great!”
“And what about this place?”
“It’s even better!”
“Really?” Lady F looks surprised.
Her eyelashes tremble. She looks ahead thoughtfully. I stare at her in admiration – as ever she is exquisite and gracious in her white robes. It’s fresh in the park, but she doesn’t seem at all cold.
“Yeah, of course!” I reply. “It’s so… peaceful here.”
“You don’t feel any danger here?”
“Danger?” I look around in surprise. “Erm…”
The avenue we’re walking down goes round the corner. We are surrounded on all sides by trees and sloping hills, you can’t see the horizon. The perspective is strange here… Or is there something up with my eyes? But I’m not scared. Quite the opposite, I feel calm here. I could stay here forever.
“Possibly… There is some danger here,” I say, “but that danger… is only a natural part of this place.”
I look at the sky. Heavy grey clouds seethe and flash with colour, which somehow contradicts how heavy they seem.
“So where are we?” The obvious question sudd
enly comes to mind.
Lady F smiles, confused.
“You don’t know?”
“No…”
“Look carefully!” Lady F says. She tilts her head back and looks up at the grey sky with a strange smile on her face. Her slender neck seems to shine from the inside.
“Is this another riddle, Lady F?” I ask. “Is this a hint?”
“A hint...? I don’t even know. The rules are different here.”
“Here?”
I look around. I start to realise something, but can’t yet figure out what’s going on. It’s like there’s something stopping me seeing properly, stopping me seeing something important.
“Is it bothering you?” Lady F asks with a smile.
“Yeah… I reckon so.”
“Then take it off!” she says.
Confused, I study her face. She’s strange today. I try to follow her suggestion literally: I lift my hand to my eyes and suddenly come across something unusual… something alien. That’s not part of me! Is it some hat or something? Or a mask? I feel it, squeeze it with the palm of my hand and pull it from my face. There in my hand is a strange white mask. Very white.
“Really, it’s white?” Lady F asks. “It’s been well cleaned. Don’t be frightened, it’s just a mask. And your head is safe. ” She laughs.
I smile back at her awkwardly.
It’s like the trees get denser. It starts slowly and barely perceptibly getting darker.
Getting darker? But it’s early in the morning… I go over to one of the trees and put my hand on the bark. It’s rough and moist. I run my palm down it and the bark suddenly starts to change under my fingers, starting to flow, mimicking the contours of my fingers.
What’s going on…? I look inquisitively at Lady F. She looks at me tenderly and sadly.
I inspect carefully the park again.
“Is this your world?” I ask.
“No,” Lady F shakes her head. “It’s your world.”
I start to figure out what’s going on, but I don’t want to believe it.
“Is this a dream?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“And this… this place doesn’t exist?” I don’t care about the answer, I’m just dragging out the time before I have to ask the most terrifying question.
“Well, that is indeed the question…”
“And you? Are you just a dream?”
Dark shadows appear far off in the centre of the avenue. They’re moving towards us. They’re not people. I look questioningly at Lady F. But she’s not there. I turn and look around. She’s not there. She’s gone.
“Lady F?” I cry. “Lady F?!”
I’m overcome with despair. As if to spite me, here in this gloomy, beautiful park, in the fragile material of the dream, I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not; what happened a decade ago and what I’ve only just seen. The shadows are getting closer, I can see them better. They’re black dogs. Big black dogs, but they’re running on their hind legs. A nightmare. It’s just a nightmare. They’ll tear me apart, they’ll kill me, but that’s not important, it’s not at all important, because the most terrifying thing that could happen, that could possibly take place, the most horrific thing, the end of my world, is the fact that I’ve imagined her, that I just saw her in a dream, a second ago, and she won’t exist and she’ll never have existed and nothing will exist…. And I… and I…
“Lady F!” I cry. “Lady F!!!”
The dogs are closer now, I can see their jaws, their yellow teeth, the muscles beneath their fur.
Lady F…. Lady F…
“Wake up…” she whispers tenderly in my ear.
The dream is still alive, still dancing in my mind, but everything’s shifted, I’m forgetting its logic, its feel, it seems distant and insane. I think I was still running with those dogs, travelling somewhere far off, seeing the heavens and emerald walls, in those tiny moments of waking; stupid, stupid rubbish! The most important, the most powerful, the most vital thing for me is that tender ‘wake up’ which I can still hear, clear and real, as if she keeps saying it to me again and again.
Was she a dream?
For now I’m afraid to think, afraid to know the answer to that question, but warmth and joy are already filling me from the inside and horror is stepping back into the shadows.
Time to get up… I’m about to have a delicious stretch and get up when suddenly a last powerful wave of sadness rolls over me, sadness at the magical dream world I’ve lost, the impossible reality of that phantom park. That lost world where anything could happen and Lady F was with me.
• • •
Perfection… What is perfection? Where is the source? How do we know what perfection is? Because the source of this knowledge is not reality. No, no, of course not. Look: you have some ideal picture in your head. Say, that exact same park in autumn, overcast; gentle, very gentle rain, almost a fog. The cawing of the crows and the huge trees reaching up into the sky, the leaves rustling and falling. Thousands, thousands of leaves.
But in reality itself you’ll never get that amazing, unique moment, you won’t be able to experience that impression fully, one hundred per cent. Either the wind’ll be too strong and you’re cold, or there’ll be some alcoholics hanging about shouting, or it’ll be too dirty and slushy, and the next day all the leaves will have dropped. And however close you get to the ideal picture you want, there’ll always be two or three per cent of irritating imperfection, some annoying and inevitable missing of the target.
Why? Because reality is in no hurry to act out the play you’ve written, because reality lives according to its own clunking, clumsy laws for the existence of physical objects, and because you yourself are part of that real world– the animal called ‘human’ – and you’ll never be able to fully absorb and enjoy the charm of the ideal, largely due to hopeless imperfection of your own senses, or even your own physical imperfection.
But I still want it! I still want it! I want to wander by emerald walls in shining palaces, to laugh forever and thrill at the blinding endless sky with all my huge, pure soul, to be ideal, flawless and impeccable, and to smile brightly and sincerely at the equally ideal, perfect creatures around me. Where can this place be, where can it be? Where does this desire come from? Not from reality. This is just a dream! Is this just a dream?
Reality.
I open my eyes.
Darkness. I can’t see anything. Have I gone blind? I blink. No, it’s just very dark here.
Where am I?
I don’t remember anything. I can hear the gurgling of water. It’s some sort of tunnel. It’s dark here and damp and it smells bad.
It was a dream. Only a dream. Right?
I don’t remember how I got here. This is serious. Maybe I got drunk? No, I don’t think so. I can remember yesterday well. And the day before. Me and Mutt and Gray went out into the country. Then I had work. Then home, and then I went to bed. No particular excitements… If you don’t count that dream.
I try to take a look around me. It’s dark. There’s the sound of running water. It’s like an underground chamber. It’s not clear where I should go. Panic builds. What’s happening? Maybe I got hit on the head? I feel for a bump. I seem to be in one piece. No bruises, no blood. My clothes are ripped, that’s all. I can’t think properly in the dark.
I need to get out of here.
My eyes gradually get used to the dark. The stream, if it is a stream, is shackled in concrete banks. I wander downstream.
I rack my brains trying to figure out how I ended up here. Nothing. I check the rest. I’m Max. I’m twenty five. Lady F. Oxana. Viktor. Mum. Seems like I remember everything. Everything apart from how I ended up here.
There’s a cement roof above me. It’s definitely underground. Or… yeah, it’s a
sewer. What the hell is this? No one’ll believe me when I tell them. Maybe it’s better not to tell?
Five minutes pass. Nothing changes. The same murky stream, leading off into the darkness, a cement roof covered in mould, and the impenetrable gloom. Fear starts to grip my heart. I chase it away. I just need to go straight ahead. Just go straight ahead and everything will work out fine.
What if I’m stuck here forever? Or I’ve always been here. And there’s never been anything else. What if I imagined everything? Everything. I’ve got problems with my memory. I don’t know what’s outside this chamber. Or whether anything else even exists. Maybe not. You could imagine that this is all a play. And I’m an actor in it, and it’s scene three, right after the denouement and before the death of some secondary character. I’m in total darkness. I can’t see the dusty set upstage, or the eyes of the audience, or the prompt’s box. All that exists for me is the small circle that I can see and the noise coming from the darkness. And what is real for me? No, that’s the wrong question… I don’t want to get all philosophical about it! Let’s put it this way: how can I tell the difference between what is real and what isn’t? Like now – I’m making my way through a dark underground chamber, or I’m in a play on a dark stage, or I’m just asleep… The only difference between imagination and reality are the thoughts in my head. And what if I stop thinking for a second? Or just… forget? Or maybe I’ve already forgotten?
What if my thoughts are just part of the play? It doesn’t matter… The main thing is that right now all three protagonists exist at the same time and have equal rights... Somewhere there is one Max making his way through a very real underground chamber, a second is walking across a dark stage, listening to the sounds coming from the unseen wings, and a third is actually just sleeping. And all three are different only in the thoughts in their heads, and if I stopped thinking for an instant or lost concentration, all these people would instantly stop being different, they would become a unified whole, they would get mixed up, and they’d forget who was who…
That’s enough. Enough, Max. It’s just that ceiling, the heavy cement ceiling pressing down on you. Although the set isn’t important. The set is just a convention. At any moment in your life you can think… that somewhere there is a person who is exactly the same as you, who has at that moment ended up on the same set… and the only difference between you is the most illusory thing of all – the thoughts in your head. All you have to do is close your eyes… And you don’t know who you’ll be when you open them.