7. the slough. sendai square

The eighth of September. T. is talking, monotonously reading a lecture in the 25th room . We are sitting in the second row. The middle desk is mine, the right one is Ilya's. Two people are between us. I don't know him, but it's like I've seen him somewhere. It is stuffy and the air is sprinkled with ochre and the weight of the asphalt from the windows. A small room filled with naive freshmen. I secretly unzip my pants. I swell day after day, I can't look in the mirror. Drying hair in front of it is torture for me. The smell of burnt hair. I sit and try to draw air into my lungs. There is no air here. Everything was drawn before me. One breath before I inhaled, sixty souls vibrated with their nostrils. Sixty giants are breathing ahead of me. For lack of anything better, I look around, trying not to dwell on the lack of oxygen, my gaze hastily falls on Ilya. The profile swells, distorts. Opacification. Entrails are falling, rolling on the floor. His hands are on me instead. Hair of Ilya's forelock was stuck together and got wet, the drops of sweat constantly flee in the face, in time with the movements inside of me. I like the sound of his moans and his breath, the open mouth of pleasure, the trembling of the body which I feel. The sun entrusts its rays to the wall — it serves as a support. For the first time I dreamed of bodily pleasures in reality. Since then, it has become an obsession. I just wanted to go over and fuck him. Just one step away from the source of lust. Its power stupidly hit the crotch, leaving a flowing somewhere embarrassing liquid. 

The first time I skipped classes, I trudged home after three of them were over to be on time so that the Internet installer didn't have to wait. Although, what is it? No one ever waited for me, so it was always my duty to be on time. Moreover, I could come half an hour or an hour before the appointed time. Frantically making myself more and more nervous because of the possible late arrival, I arrived too early and frantically waited, fidgeting in my thoughts at every step, which I designed and executed, thereby plunging myself into a state of panic. Of course, people are always late to meet someone like me. But there was a tiny possibility that they just had such a nature. Still, I blamed them for being late. Every extra minute made me feel hysterical euphoria. 

Yes. Certainly. I loved it. 

I liked to think that people wipe their asses with me and my time. I knew without their delays that I was miserable, but to feel abused because they are late is what let me feel this euphoria. Holding my breath, I listened - it seemed that I would scream because of tension or ecstasy.

Of course, my haste was in vain this time, too. My mother came to me and could settle all the affairs with the installation without my presence. But from the very beginning, having decided that the University will not give me anything and we will flounder in different layers of the atmosphere, I finally put into action what I wanted — missed the first classes in my life. Yes, it all started from that day. 

The installation was pretty soon finished. It is strange to be on the Internet. To dream so much about it, and to plunge into oblivion suddenly. No need to think about killing time. With the Internet everything is easier - it automatically destroys it, though silently and painlessly. I liked to forget about myself, to conduct endless philosophical dialogues with anonymous (and not quite) interlocutors. Of course, I was not stupid enough to attribute to myself the fabrications that I was full of on the Internet, trying to find a source for self-affirmation. No. I was just killing life that I hated and hoped to continue this killing until the end. 

Almost immediately I began to look for the above-mentioned page in that social network. It happened to be closed. Strange, but a second later my application was accepted. I kept waiting. Just waiting. And it was weird for me, because I didn't know what I was waiting for. Barely a minute later, someone sent me a friend request. Despite the fact that it was not a name, but a mechanical combination of words, I did not have time to read its last characters, yet instantly gained a triumphant knowledge of who it is. 

But it was too early to rejoice. I wanted to play. After all, this is not something specific. My life was worthless, and so was another. Why can't I do with this other man's life as I see fit? I was able to calculate and sophisticatedly detail in almost maniacal manner. I knew that this request of Ilya signed his own verdict. But did I know that he had signed the sentence for me, too? No. That is, I shrugged off the intuitive impulses and started attacking. 

First, I needed proof that it really was him and my concerns about wet fingers on the subway aren't empty, but exist inside us. But the attack was two-faced and the smoke of a desperate man ready to accept salvation from a sympathetic hand spread everywhere. But Ilya didn't know that. He saw what was obvious. He wrote "this is Ilya" in Belarusian, and I started to jump around the room, pushing my hands off the walls and straight up, carrying away the top of the head, shouted something at random. 

The game has began. 

To respond laconically without emotions, to forge all the evidence of ambiguity from the iron of words. But the iron was torn to pieces. I didn't have time to notice how the gaps screamed about my childhood, our commonality, his gaze. I need gaps as much as anything natural. 

You need to run. I need somewhere around forty-five minutes to get to the Red Church, have to change one bus to another at the Institute of Culture. I remember that the final stop is Independence Square it and can be reached directly. 

The city is drowning in the sunset and rain at the bus stop and on. All the way on. The most spread out sunset of my life. Absorbing the moisture floating in the air, he increased the strain. People wanted to shout with delight, the freedom which was absorbed in the soil, inflating the desires. Their and mine nostrils suck in the chests relief from dry days imposed by the Nature. The universal jubilation did not depend on worldly misfortunes, for it was an animal urge that stretched indiscriminately to everyone. 

Passing the Karatkievič Street, I see at the doors of the bus a girl, who looks similar to Luba. She keeps her eyes as wide as possible on me. We ride this way until the end. I laugh inside, repeating her name and asking whether that another girl would look at me this way, would she understand my sense of drowning here and now, when the legs are stuck knee-deep in the slough. I wanted to present this sunset. But not her and not that girl at the entrance, who was staring at me. The realization of this shook like a sunset itself, reflected in every grain of the glass of bus window, it counted every thread of a knitted sweater with a Bordeaux throat, it slid along the satin of the inside of a twenty-year-old orange-red leather jacket. 

What did Ilya do? Could I count on knowing his thoughts, actions, feelings at the moment when I crossed the Karatkievič Street? 

Through the Bahuševič square on the fifty third trolleybus. A few moments before the exit. He looks at the raindrops, does not notice the sunset. Always looking down. Have been waiting for it. Too long. 

There's admixture here. Alien. He doesn't know what. Because of his scrupulous сharacter he will wander in the wilds of thoughts, recollecting. Unknowingly. Bumping into a conversation he had before going out. The stream would gush over his hands in the fifty-third trolleybus, isolated from the other passengers. It's raining. A faint grin induced by the slough and the rain will cover his face. Fifty-third trolleybus has drowned in the slough - view of the theater and the rain. 

Ball shoes made in St. Petersburg are trying not to splash the frame of the sunset in the puddles. I'm afraid of being late. There were traffic jams at the Institute of Culture and my heart was torn out of the bus, to plunge into the eyes and to stay there. Forever. In the slough. 

Everyone is waiting for me, leaning on the battered paint of benches. The first thing I do when I see their silhouettes is finding Ilya. But the prospect hides him from me behind the thuja and it's a bit disarming. No matter how hard I tried imperceptibly to bend my perspective, the figure remained behind the tree and bushes near the benches. There is nothing else to do but to walk to the place and look around the audience to finally make sure that the right eyes are present. I don't even need to look. I feel his gaze on me, catching it. 

Through the arches and shops of tableware, the group drags it feet, everyone tries out the syncopes of their neighbor, we argue jokingly. 

The square seemed strange to me back then. Some ridiculous one-year-old seedlings on the lawns, a naive pile of stones. But there was a bridge and absorbing greenery near. Not having heard the name and not too worried about it, I did not know that these are seedlings of Japanese Sakura. I have always been attracted to Japan and this fact could be interesting. I even knew language a little and had on my account one Japanese woman in love with me, friends, Kobo Abe, Banana Yoshimoto and a hundreds of Japanese performers. Damn it, I knew almost everything about them, but I was a layman, standing at a bench near Sakura seedlings! 

Ilya had the power to keep distance between us. I lamented that the lines of the play were too complicated for me. I couldn't remember anything. The shell of the slough did not tolerate artificial words, rebelled against memorization, rejected it. You stretched out your hands to me, wanted to approach, oblivious. "I don't need help," I answered. We stood on the platform by the fountain. You lowered your hands - I increased the distance between us with decisive steps. As in a dream, we moved into the density, on a bamboo bridge. Unconsciously, I rejoiced to see the flow of a tiny stream guttering beneath it. Tried not to show the feelings of fierce joy. The mixture of green and stone, the twilight darkness of the branches, always has a similar effect on me. So it was back then. And someone spoke and answered, and I waited, watched, wanted more of his glance. To catch it and lower eyes to the stream, unable to resist. I was asked about "Clockwork Orange" - and I arrogantly answered, you grinned at the background, hearing my voice, looking at me. 

Then we left. The trail goes diagonally covered with the cement tiles. Lanterns pointed the way. 

Tomorrow morning we're going to Anusina, we ask Ilya to buy alcohol for this event at the nearby shop. I don't know why. I didn't think about my fear of shopping. Maybe he volunteered himself. I felt good. To walk around warm streeets of Minsk after the rain highlighted by the lanterns and to be inseparable from Ilya. So it seemed to me after several hours of amalgamation of our views. We were one, though we did not walk side by side, but kept an unshakable distance. Each one waited for the other's remark. I talked just a little bit; approaching the Red Church, I reminded myself of my insignificance. I thought that it was just an illusion. However, my legs were stuck to the waist.