It's Time

by Pavel Kostin

  I need to turn round and look. Turn round and look for one last time. But I can’t. Not a single cell in my stupid body will obey. I can’t turn round, I’ll never be able to. I don’t want to accept this. There’s nothing in my eyes. There are no tears. It’s fine. There’s nothing in this world that’s worth even a single moment’s thought. I want nothing to have ever existed. I want there to be nothingness. I want the triumph of peaceful eternity. Darkness, silence, quiet and the night. I want everything to disappear. That’s what I want. I want the whole world to dissolve in this noise. That’s what I want.

  I open my eyes. I lost consciousness again.

  I kneel by the burned wall. My right hand grips the torch in my pocket. I feel the rustle of cellophane under my left palm. I get out the torch. I point it at the wall. There’s a thudding in my temples. I feel scared and sick. I have to jump, and as soon as I think about it the blood rushes to my head. And there won’t be a pool of water down there. No parachute will open. I feel scared. I feel awful and scared.

  I turn on the torch.

  They’re names. One after another. They’re scratched on randomly, by hand, one on top of another, by different people at different heights. Names and dates. I start to cry.

  “Dima Vasilyev. 12.03.84 – 17.07.09.”

  “Katya Niyazova. 04.07.79 – 17.07.09.”

  “Viktor Petelin. 05.01.91 – 17.07.09.”

  And many, many more names all over the wall. Different people, adults and kids, different names, different ages, and only one thing in common – that one irrevocable, unassailable date. 17.07.09.

  I stand up. I don’t raise the torch. I already know what I’ll see there. I’ve almost remembered. I don’t want to any more, but it’s too late. Now I remember. I know what I’ll see when I raise the beam. I don’t want to. But I have to. I have to remember. It’s time.

  I raise the torch.

  “Tanya Dimitrova. 07.07.1987 – 17.07.09”.

  The torch falls. I am shrouded in darkness, and the world disappears in my fingers which have, unbidden, covered my blinded eyes.

  • • •

  After a while, I don’t know how long, I go to the park. My leg hurts. Looks like its bleeding. I’ve lost a shoe. I was running. It’s light already, very early in the morning. Flowers, there are so many flowers here. I can barely see anything. There are tears in my eyes. All I can do is cry. The huge trees above me weave their crowns together.

  I’m going down the avenue. I’ve walked along it so many times in my dreams. And only once in real life. I walk down the avenue. I know that no black dogs will chase after me. They’re nothing. Just a symbol from my crazy dreams. I wanted to stay in those dreams, but I remembered the real world I lived in.

  I go down the avenue. The sound of the leaves like the surf. The eternal trees above me. They are beautiful, ancient, powerful trees. But this is not a park. I know it’s not a park. I stop myself from thinking it’s not a park, but it’s not a park. I’m nearly there. Stop. I’m there. Now I have to turn round. Behind me and slightly to the left. The icy ray fixes me. Behind me and slightly to the left. Right then. You know the time has come. It’s time, Max.

  I turn round. Polished pink marble. An angel on a black plinth. An angel with her face. And her name below. Tanya Dimitrova. Dates. 07.07.1987 – 17.09.09. And a photo. A photograph of her. A photograph of my Lady F. My Tanya. This isn’t a park. I’ve always known it’s not a park. It’s a cemetery.

  I sit on the little bench opposite.

  “Hi, Max,” she says.

  She’s sitting next to me. She’s the same as ever. Glossy hair. A white toga and a gold belt. Sandals on her bare feet and a bright smile.

  “Hi… Tanya,” I reply.

  It’s hard for me to talk. I’m crying the whole time.

  “Why?” I say. “Why? Why did this happen to us?”

  She says nothing, smiling sadly.

  “I don’t know, Max. These things happen.”

  “Sorry that I haven’t come here for such long time. I’ve been totally lost.”

  “It’s what you had to do, sweetheart.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you were in a bad way.”

  “Is that why I forgot everything?”

  “That’s why you forgot everything. It was still too soon.”

  “Were we together?”

  “Yes. We were together. You painted. You were friends with Ben. We had it pretty good.”

  “You died,” I say. “Tanya, you died, my darling, sweetheart. There was a fire. And Ben carried me out, and you suffocated. Why, why did he carry me out…?”

  “It’s not his fault. It’s not Ben’s fault. I’m telling you, definitely. Absolutely definitely.”

  “I can’t, Tanya, I just can’t…”

  “You can, my love. Now you can, I know it. Back then you couldn’t. That’s why I came to you. But now you can.”

  “What’s next, Tanya?”

  “Next…” she smiles. “Next is whatever you want. How you’re going to live from now on is up to you. But you are going to live, I know it. You don’t need my help any more. You love me, don’t you?”

  “I love you… Very much… With all my heart.” I’m choking on my tears.

  “I love you too, Max. And I really want you to keep on living. You have so much to look forward to! Please never forget that, OK?”

  “Yes...”

  “Great!”

  She puts her hand on my shoulder. Golden sparkles burn my skin. I want them to burn right through it so they stay inside me forever.

  “It’s time for us to say goodbye, Max…”

  “No!”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “I can’t do it without you!”

  “You can. Now you can do anything. I’ll always be with you, you know that.”

  I’m crying, just crying. I no longer exist. All that’s left is tears and endless sorrow for her, my little girl, my one and only, light of my life, gone forever.

  “Come on Max, you’re being a baby! Remember what you used to call me? ‘My Lady Fortune’, remember? I’ll always be with you! Do you believe me?

  I nod. I can’t say anything.

  “Max, I’ll always be with you, I promise! But you need to go. It’s time. You need to go. You need to paint, live, create, love, work. The time has come. It’s time. Go. I love you!”

  She leaves. All that’s left is me. And her, there in my heart.

  • • •

  What am I doing this for? For what?

  I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I don’t want anything.

  I’m walking quickly down the pavement in some estate. My mum lives not far from here. I got here on the bus. My car is sitting outside my mum’s building. Thinking logically, they can’t be looking for me all over the city. But if they are still looking for me, then there’s no point in thinking up plans. They’ll catch me whatever.

  “Hi, Max!”

  I raise my eyes in shock. A strange woman just said hello to me. She looks at me in horror.

  “What happened to your leg?”

  I look down. One of my feet is bare. I’ve lost a shoe. Ages ago. My sock ripped and got lost somewhere. My whole leg is covered in blood. So what? I don’t care. She, it seems, does.

  I don’t say anything back, but hurry up and walk on quickly.

  She anxiously asks another question as I walk away, calls to me, but I’m not listening. Turns out I don’t have a lot of time. I go even quicker, I’m almost running.

  That same building. I hurry up the stairs to the top floor. Ten floors, you get out of breath. The stairs to the roof. I open the hatch.

  I go out.

  The sun hits my eyes, I squint. It’s incredibly
sunny here.

  It seems as if I was here yesterday. I sat right here, on the very edge, swinging my legs and looking down with a stupid smile on my face. I carefully sit down on the edge. This is exactly where I sat then.

  The sun. The bright sun behind my eyelids. It’ll be sunset soon. Just like on that day. It’s all so fresh in my mind. It’s like it was an hour ago. I remember how my mum shouted. It’s like I can still hear her shouting. And the echo. The imperfect echo from the jagged surfaces of the city. Reverberation.

  So what am I doing here?

  I know, don’t I? I’ve always known. Then, and now. The answer’s right there. Somewhere on the other side of my scarlet eyelids, at the point where the rays of the sun meet beneath my skin. Right then. Right!

  I feel a strange tremble all over my body. And the cold. It’s so cold. The wind whistles. My mother’s shouting sounds really weird. Yeah, reverberation. It’s as if another shout is copying it. I know the answer. I need to force myself. Just go back to that day.

  You know, Max. You know. You knew then, and, yes, you know now. You wanted to jump. You were in a bad way. A very bad way. So bad, that it seemed that nothing could ever get better.

  Almost as bad as right now.

  So that’s it. This is the end of my path. There’ll be no more answers. It was all in vain. The real answer is there in the terrifying downwards plunge. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what it’s all been leading to. The long path to the rooftop where it will all end. This is what my ‘path’ was. I don’t know. I really don’t know. My mum is shouting. A strange echo. I can hear it in my ears. Right now. Like it was a minute ago.

  “Lady F… Lady F,” I whisper. “Lady F, I really, really need you. I’m begging you. I miss you so much. I’m completely lost and I don’t know where to find the truth. Help me. Please.”

  Silence.

  She’d disappeared. She no longer exists. I can’t open my eyes. I want to, but I can’t. It’s all so strange. My head is spinning. It’s like I’m on a swing. Up and down. Up and down. Why is everything so strange? Why has the world gone mad?

  She’s not going to come. She’s not going to come, Max. You know that. There’s no point in lying to yourself. She’s not going to come anymore. She’s just a ghost… or… a hallucination. You thought her up. You imagined her. So that she would save you. A simple biological mechanism. Your self-preservation instinct sensed a threat to the organism, flicked the right switch in your brain and a dose of neuromodulators splashed into your bloodstream and… Ta-da! I’d like to introduce you to the wonderful Lady F!

  That’s the whole secret. A hallucination. You invented her so that she would save you. Because you were afraid to die, even with all the pain you felt. Because you’re just a coward, Max. Look the truth in the eye, coward. Because if she’s just a hallucination…

  What have I got left?

  I haven’t got a job. I never really had one, if you think about it. What kind of job is that, being a night watchman? I don’t have a girlfriend anymore. She died. And I couldn’t save her. Oxana? I don’t love you, sorry. I never loved you. And my mum wants to put me in the loony bin. And with good reason.

  Lady F. I used to have Lady F. That’s why I didn’t jump that day. She is just the ghost of my Tanya, my wonderful, radiant, dead Tanya, a mental projection, a mirage, that I invented to calm myself down.

  Now there’s nothing holding me back. I’m free. I’m free to jump. It’s lucky really. Do you remember her? Do you remember, Max? Maybe you need to take just one more step and you’ll disappear from this dirty world and soar above the heavy earth and be united with her in the sun-filled sky above the exhausted city.

  There you go! There’s my sun! You waited for me, my city! It’s time, and I’m taking that step. I’m going to be a part of you, I’ll turn to shards of sunlight on your pavements, to soft mist in the park, to tender morning rain. Here we go!

  I’m glad that I’m going to evaporate. I’ll disappear.

  This is the peace I’ve wanted for so long.

  My mum is shouting. And there’s that the strange echo. It’s me shouting with her. Why am I shouting?

  Because I’m falling. I’ve been falling the whole time. It’s simple, Max. Just don’t look down. But that can’t be. All this time. I remember what she said. I remember very clearly. Not for something, but because of something. That’s what she said.

  “Basically, Max, I don’t like asking ‘what for’. It’s a stupid, pointless question. All the most wonderful things are not done for something, but because of something.”

  “Really? Say there’s an engineer building a dam. What does he build it for? So we can have electricity.”

  Lady F smiles.

  “I’m not going to argue, Max. You’ll think differently later. Which is kind of linked to ‘what for’, by the way.”

  “By the way,” I repeated back at her mechanically.

  After that my hand slipped and she caught me by the arm and held me up. I looked down. It was all very real. The warm concrete. Sunset. My mum shouting below. It was all very real. Like right now. Because you know. You know, Max. Because that was only a few seconds ago. Because there’s no Lady F and there never was one. You invented her. And that means she didn’t catch you.

  Which means you fell, Max.

  That’s your secret. It’s not an echo. It’s you shouting. Open your eyes. Open them.

  No. I can’t.

  • • •

  “Maxim, no… No!”

  A woman threw herself onto the tarmac, broken down in hysterics. There were ugly smears of grey dust on her legs, sticking to her clothes in crumpled blotches.

  “Let’s go,” Sergei muttered. “Let’s go, please. Come on, let’s get up. Move over here. Look away please, nothing to see here. Kirill!” Sergei suddenly roared fiercely. “Get me that effing tranq!”

  The woman didn’t even shudder, but kept writhing around, trying to crawl closer to the edge of the curb, on which there lay a bare leg, twisted the wrong way, a serrated white shard jutting out of the skin.

  “Christ’s sake, Kirill. Get me that tranq, now! Or you’re getting two shifts this weekend, I guarantee it….”

  “Maxim!” The woman suddenly shrieked horribly. “Maxim! No, no, my baby…”

  People started looking out of their windows. A baby girl pulling a bike on a rope stood there with a strange expression on her face, unable to look away. A young woman looked out of the doorway and covered her mouth in shock. A passing car slowed down.

  “Let’s move to one side.” Sergei tried to her drag her away one more time. “Please, madam… Kirill! She’s so strong… Yeah, you keep going,” he waved at a passing car. “Someone take the kid away, I’m begging you. Why’s it always on my shift, eh… Hey, Kirill, have you called the ambulance?”

  “Yep,” Kirill said as he came over.

  “At last,” Sergei wiped the sweat from his brow. “Not a pretty sight. What did he go and do this for? Just a young lad.”

  A white minibus with red crosses on the doors drove slowly into the courtyard. Kirill waved his arms quickly, as if the driver wouldn’t notice the crazy commotion and the crowd that had gathered round.

  “It makes no sense, of course,” Kirill said.

  “Of course,” Sergei said. “But did anything in his life make sense?”

  Did anything actually?

  My social life? My normal day to day functioning? Not very convincing.

  What was my life?

  The ordinary, good, fantastic life of a fantastic guy. The sort of life people can only dream of. What else do I need?

  I had a girlfriend who I loved. I had friends. A job. Basically, everything was good. Peaceful. And then, in one moment, everything disappeared. And I disappeared too. So, was I ever even
there? Did I exist to start with? Maybe not.

  You were just one more good guy, like millions of others. A tiny part of a faceless society, a little cell in the enormous organism of the city, handily linked with other cells just like you by the neurons of societal bonds. When these bonds break, the cell dies. It’s normal. It’s natural. That’s no fault of mine. It’s no one’s fault. It’s biology. It’s inevitable.

  Of course it’s going to be painful for those that are left behind. But what are you going to do about it? The laws of nature are the same for everyone. With the death of the next cell a few more bonds will be broken. But then it will heal. And everything will be forgotten. If the pain is too strong, then another cell will die. So what? By getting rid of defective cells the organism of the city continues to survive, come what may. That’s how it works.

  Leafing through page after page of the diary of my memory, I can say that I don’t see anything exceptional, anything special, anything precious in myself.

  Nothing that makes life worth living.

  Which means that this is the end, my friends.

  Is it time for us to say goodbye? It is. I’m grateful that you’ve listened to me for all this time. Thanks for your attention. Sorry if I’ve let you down.

  Now I remember everything. Everything without exception.

  I see the dull pages of my life turning before my eyes, one after the other.

  My flat. Now I know when I started renting it and for how much. The boring routine of a grey life.

  My job. Hi there, Snowy!

  My friends. They’ll probably take it badly. Sorry. It’s not my fault. Really.