Vita Nostra

by Sergey

  In the middle of the town square, a tiny spot free of people, a throng of hands lifted and steadied a gigantic iron wheel. Inside the rim, a naked man was strung by his hands and feet. A sharp tip of the axle stuck out of his abdomen, and he was still breathing.

  The glass with the apple juice fell off the table and shattered, drops and shards flying all over the place.

  The wheel started rolling, heavily at first, leaving behind a bloody trail, twitching on every stone on the pavement, nearly falling every second—but the throng of hands held it steady, keeping it from stopping or toppling over.

  The man in the wheel was dying. Perhaps his death would take a long time to come, and when, after a journey along the streets, the wheel would finally be pushed off the cliff—perhaps the man would find relief . . .

  “Sasha? Sasha!”

  She tore her eyes away from the book. Everyone in the dining hall was staring at her. Behind the counter, a young server’s eyes seemed round with panic.

  “Sasha, get ahold of yourself!”

  Kostya stood next to her, broken glass crunching under the heels of his shoes. It appeared he had just let go of the lapel of Sasha’s chic jacket.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, it’s just that you were screaming and moaning out loud. Nothing special.”

  “Collateral damage . . . of the learning process.” Sasha screwed her face into a smile. “Has it ever occurred to you that we live inside a text?”

  “No,” he replied without thinking. “Wait . . . what did you say?”

  Sasha went down to the administrative wing pressing the Textual Module to her chest.

  The receptionist was not there; her knitting was spread over the empty desk. The leather-upholstered door was slightly ajar.

  “Come in, Samokhina.”

  She entered.

  Sterkh was pacing around his office. Portnov was smoking, sitting on a low banquette in the corner of the room. And in front of the desk, one leg thrown over the other, sat Farit Kozhennikov.

  Sasha stumbled over the threshold and nearly dropped her book.

  Sterkh glanced at her over his shoulder. “Come in. Sit down.”

  Slowly, head held high, Sasha walked through the entire office. She sat down in a leather armchair across from Kozhennikov. She saw her own reflection in his mirrored lenses and noted for the first time that the underground office was very, very cold.

  “How do you feel?” Sterkh asked mildly.

  Sasha lifted her chin higher. “What?”

  “How do you feel after everything that happened yesterday?”

  “Fine.”

  Portnov coughed as if choking on the cigarette. Two wisps of smoke escaped out of his nostrils.

  “Very well.” Sterkh nodded. “Then you must learn something about yourself, Alexandra Samokhina. Oleg Borisovich, please go ahead.”

  Portnov put out his cigarette in the bottom of an ashtray, took off his glasses, and slipped them into the breast pocket of his checkered shirt. One of the temples got stuck on a button, and everyone waited about thirty seconds while Portnov struggled to free it.

  Having wrestled down his glasses, Portnov pulled a new cigarette out of the pack and began to knead it with the tips of his fingers. It looked as if his hands were trembling.

  “Without a doubt,” he started, “you, Samokhina, are the strongest and most gifted student in this class. And based on that knowledge, you have clearly decided that you do not have to follow rules. That laws do not apply to you, that you can assign challenges to yourself, and that whatever your professors may say to you deserves at most a condescending smirk.”

  “But I’ve never . . . ,” Sasha began.

  “Be quiet!”

  Portnov continued kneading his cigarette aggressively; crumbs of tobacco fell on the floor. “You are developing with an astounding speed, but your development is erratic, unmanageable, and wildly out of hand. At this point your abilities and the level of your responsibility have come to such a screaming contradiction that we, your professors, must make a decision regarding you. And we will make that decision. That is all I wanted to say.”

  Under Portnov’s penetrating gaze Sasha pulled her head into her shoulders.

  “Now listen to me, Alexandra,” Sterkh began. “Yesterday, for lack of anything better to do, you manifested a highly intricate informational complex . . . it was—ab ovo—Love, as you understand it. You actualized it, transported it into the state of active projection, and then you burned it.

  “But even that was not enough for you. You decided to try my track one after another, and in one hour you worked through the path of development designed for half a year! You are the first student in my experience who’s managed something like that. However, if you had worked through fifty-eight tracks rather than fifty-six, you would have been turned inside out. Literally—it would have led to a mutiny of the matter. Intestines on the outside! Clothes, skin, hair—in a tiny clump. Have you ever turned a dirty sock inside out?”

  “I did not know!” Sasha finally shouted. “You never explained it to me!”

  “You were told enough!” Portnov barked back. “You had enough information to draw conclusions!”

  “Don’t yell at me,” Sasha said softly.

  Portnov narrowed furious eyes. Sterkh stopped for a minute, picked up a glass of water from the table, and shook it, watching a fly lifelessly floating on its surface. He put it back down in resignation.

  “Alexandra, this morning you made yet another jump in your development. An impossible jump judging by my experience—our experience: mine and Oleg Borisovich’s. You were extremely lucky not to perish. But now, now that you have survived, we have to deal with another issue . . .”

  Sterkh halted. His usually pale cheeks flushed. The eyes with tiny pupils stared into Sasha’s face until he blurted, “What the hell made you do this? What are we supposed to do with you now? What are we going to do, when you are completely unmanageable! You are a monkey with a grenade! It is impossible for a biological human being to have access to manifestation before the transformation, before the exam! And it is clear that you still are human, seeing how you behave like one! Like a silly girl! Like a stupid, infantile, irresponsible—”

  He made a visible effort to cut himself off; he placed his hands behind his back and began pacing back and forth along his office. The silence was disturbed only by the sound of his steps, and a bell that rang in the distance, somewhere deep inside the institute building.

  “Why am I unmanageable?” Sasha spoke, trying with all her might to control the trembling in her voice. “Explain to me, I will understand. Here you are insulting me, and you are not even trying to explain. You treat us like animals, like incompetent idiots . . .”

  “Because that is what you are,” Portnov said.

  During all this Kozhennikov remained silent; he gazed at Sasha with a hint of interest.

  “Regarding explanations,” Sterkh began, his soft voice clearly spelling disaster. “Have I told you, Alexandra, that uncontrolled experiments are dangerous and forbidden?”

  “But . . .”

  “Have I, or have I not told you that?”

  “You have!”

  “I have. And you appeared to understand and gave me your word not to do anything above your given assignments. Is this true?”

  “Nikolay Valerievich . . .”

  “Did you give me your word? Or not?”

  “Yes! But I did not understand . . .”

  “You will understand now,” Sterkh promised her ominously. “Oleg Borisovich, this is an exceptional situation. Your ideas?”

  Portnov clicked his lighter, took a drag, exhaled a stream of smoke, and immediately squashed the cigarette into the ashtray. He fished his glasses out of his pocket, placed them on his nose, and gazed at Sasha over his lenses.

  “I know one thing: this girl is not leaving this office until we find a method of controlling her.”

  “And unfortunately this m
ethod must be rather radical,” Sterkh muttered. “Alexandra, we had no choice but to invite your advisor to join us.”

  Kozhennikov sat unmoving, and the direction of his gaze was concealed by his glasses. Sasha cringed.

  “Farit Georgievich,” Sterkh spoke with exaggerated decorum. “The student affairs office is requesting a guarantee that student Alexandra Samokhina abides by the academic rules and regulations of this institute.”

  Silence, long and sonorous, hung in the air. Sasha knew perfectly well that begging was out of the question. The only thing she could do at this point was maintain her dignity as much as was humanly possible. So she gathered her remaining strength and straightened her spine. She was wearing her best suit, and not a single tear spoiled her makeup. For a second she saw herself through their eyes and suddenly recalled the embryonic world writhing in the fire . . .

  The world that she now knew was Love.

  Dark glasses concealed Kozhennikov’s eyes. His invisible—but easily sensed—gaze was directed at Sasha, just as it had been back in that July at a seaside town, on the Street That Led to the Sea. That time, the gaze had ended up leading her to the Institute of Special Technologies.

  Now she wondered if that same gaze might lead her out.

  Sasha looked down.

  “Lessons completed without permission,” Sterkh continued in a soft, colorless voice. “Intentional metamorphosis. Experiments with manifestation of entities. All this I would call a blatant violation of academic regulations.”

  The room was once again eerily quiet. And in this silent room Kozhennikov’s voice was heard for the first time.

  “Nikolay, there is one nuance.”

  “Yes?”

  “I promised the girl not to ask anything impossible of her.”

  Sterkh raised his eyebrows. “What precisely on my list would you consider impossible?”

  “Her development actualizes her identity.” The lamps were reflected in Kozhennikov’s lenses. “She cannot stop if the disc contains several tracks in a row. Give her one track per disc then—it’s not complicated, is it?”

  A pause lingered in the air. Sterkh’s countenance changed; his wings twitched under his jacket, as if trying to unfold immediately.

  Sasha shrank in her chair, wishing for the earth to swallow her up.

  “It’s not complicated, no,” Sterkh’s voice sounded hollow. “It’s just . . . it lacks precedent. I have never had students who were capable of processing ten tracks one after the other. These are the standard learning materials—”

  Kozhennikov cut in. “But shall we presume that we are dealing with a nonstandard case?” he inquired delicately.

  “You are right,” said Sterkh after a short pause.

  “Then it’s settled.” Kozhennikov nodded. “As far as the manifestation of entities . . . Sasha, do you realize what you have done?”

  “It was not on purpose. I didn’t mean to.”

  Portnov choked on his smoke.

  “So are you not aware?”

  “Why not. Sure. I am aware,” Sasha said quietly.

  Sterkh raised his eyes up to the ceiling.

  “Then why did you do it?” Kozhennikov continued his inquiry.

  “By accident.”

  “That’s not enough. What prompted you to do it? What were you thinking about before you picked up the pencil?”

  Sasha swallowed.

  “It is important.” Kozhennikov nodded. “What were you thinking about? Or whom?”

  “About Kostya,” Sasha said. “About Konstantin Kozhennikov.”

  And she bravely met her own reflection in his dark lenses.

  “And feeling emotional, you decided to play with meanings?” Portnov cut in.

  Sasha turned to face him. “Not to play, Oleg Borisovich. I believe it was you who taught me to add symbols. It was you who praised me when everything came together. Have you ever warned me that it was forbidden?”

  “I’d have forbidden you to run over the ceiling if I had known you were capable of that!”

  “I didn’t know either. I simply lived—existed, positioned myself in space, functioned, acted, continued, lasted . . .”

  She caught herself monotonously listing words—each one of them had a fraction of the meaning she needed so desperately, but not a single one of them fit her purpose.

  “I thought so,” Kozhennikov said softly.

  “So then, you are telling me,” Portnov spoke sharply, almost aggressively, “that we cannot expect this girl to cease her games with the informational universe? Just because it means we’re asking for the impossible?”

  “No.” A slight smile touched Kozhennikov’s lips. “We’ve been able to specify a few things, and now our problem has become a bit clearer, and that means it can be solved. Don’t worry.”

  He turned to Sasha.

  “Sasha, I would like to speak to you today. What time will you be done with your classes?”

  She came to her senses at the long table in the large auditorium where general educational lectures were usually held. In front of her was a sheet of paper torn out of a notebook, and Sasha was writing down the following: “At this time aesthetic experience is considered as an experience in value, and is treated within the limits of the philosophy of value.” The auditorium was not full, and the professor kept giving Sasha strange looks.

  Sasha leaned back in her chair. She loved to learn; lectures, even the most boring ones, and formulaic definitions, no matter how confusing, returned her to reality . . .

  To reality in the sense that Sasha understood it.

  The bell rang.

  Not looking at anyone, not speaking with anyone, she returned to her loft. The ashes from the burned paper still lay in the wastebasket. She tidied up the room, gathered the yellow strips of foam off the floor, and took out the trash. She sat by the window; for a long time she watched the green linden trees on Sacco and Vanzetti.

  Whose love was it that she so stupidly, accidentally manifested? Once it became tangible, this love gained a carrier and an object of application—an object and a subject. When Sasha burned it, what happened to these people?

  Her hands fidgeted, searching for something to do. She picked up a pencil, found a pencil sharpener in the desk drawer, and pulled a clean sheet of paper closer to avoid making a mess. She inserted the dull pencil snout into the sharpener, turned it once and then again. The wood shavings fell onto the paper, making a pattern.

  Sasha gathered the shavings into her hand and shook them off into the wastebasket. She wasn’t going to draw anything—she had been forbidden to manifest entities. She was not going to, no, no, no, she was only going to open the Conceptual Activator for just a minute . . .

  Yellow paper, diagrams, columns, numbers: Sasha closed her eyes. A magnificent anthill of meanings with all their levels and associations, vectors, derivatives of multiple degrees, loops, figure eights, lines leading into infinity . . . No, no. Just watch. Just be amazed. Harmony.

  The pencil slid out of the sharpener by itself, pointed as a needle. “Will.” “Creation.” “Word.” What am I doing? Sasha thought in panic, while her entire being, commanding and supple, strengthened and developed by assignments and exercises, loved—existed, positioned itself in space, functioned, acted, continued, lasted . . .

  And then her thoughts ended as well. A jump was completed to the next level, impossible to express in familiar terms. The pencil glided without a break, depicting symbols with an enclosed fourth dimension. Patches of sunlight on water, a small oar—yellow, bright yellow, plastic. It is not yet “Love”; it is a premonition, a forewarning . . .

  The doorbell clanged like a fire alarm.

  Sasha had never had visitors in her loft, and she’d never even heard that deafening ringing; her hand jerked. The pencil broke. In terror Sasha stared at the sheet of paper with a glimmering, nearly completed symbol.

  The doorbell insisted on ringing. Sasha looked out the window and saw downstairs, at the lion-guarded ent
rance, Kozhennikov.

  But not Farit, no. It was Kostya.

  “Your ringing scared me.”

  “Why should you be scared?” Kostya was upstairs now, looking around with suspicion and inhaling. “Did you burn something?”

  “Ah, stuff . . . old papers. Have a seat.”

  Kostya sat down on the edge of a stool. He took another look around, this time more attentively.

  “Nice place. Very different from our rathole.”

  “Are you fighting with your wife?” Sasha blurted out.

  “You’ve been told?” Kostya avoided her eyes.

  “It’s not hard to figure out.” Sasha sighed. “I’d offer you tea, but I’m out of tea leaves. Sorry about that.” He shrugged. After a moment, she asked, “What did you want to tell me?”

  Kostya swayed back and forth, suddenly looking so much like Farit Kozhennikov that Sasha cringed inside.

  “What did they want from you? Why did they want to see you? I saw him—he was there, too.”

  Sasha sighed. Actually, Kostya was the only person with whom she could share everything; well, almost everything. Aside from a few details. So she told him. Kostya listened, anxiously leaning forward, unconsciously playing with a broken pencil.

  “Are you telling me he stood up for you?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what it looked like, though.”

  “‘I’m not asking for the impossible.’ When he sent Lisa out on the street corner, he also was not asking for the impossible.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Everyone does. When he killed my grandmother . . . he also was not asking for the impossible, was he?”

  “He was not. You could have passed the test on the first try. You passed it on the second.”

  Kostya’s eyes turned into glass.

  “But you did pass it,” Sasha mumbled apologetically.