Andrey Levkin. Eight Moscow traps

Eight Moscow traps
Andrey Levkin

Publication date: December 9, 2000


N. didn’t understand near Sretenka | K. reached Belorusskaya | Y. and steps on the stairs on Zubovsky | Z. and the maniac at the Park of Culture | W. and the Stone Guest on Povarskaya | E. and around on Sheremetyevskaya | M. and an unknown organ at the Ross Theater. Armies | L. and Moscow magic

1. N. didn’t understand near Sretenka

There’s something wrong at the end of Tsvetnoy Boulevard on the Sadovy side, - N realized. Everything is fine, it’s warm in May, it’s a night evening, but something is wrong.

There was something else here - in the declination of the surroundings, the people, these three dogs, yapping with the mongrels who walked along the boulevard on leashes, on the sidewalk of the metro. And people also changed: this happens when a holiday or even football is over. Everyone has calmed down, but something else keeps them in one sound.

But there was nothing like that between them. There was something else, pulling him into agreement with him - another, making him forget about the rest. It seemed like he was drunk, but N. was sober.

There is a wide boulevard with an alley in the middle: two strips of grass along the gravel between them; the grass still smelled damp. At the dead ends of the grass strips there were two booths, the kind that always sell. Indistinguishable, with the same products, you will never understand why someone would choose one over the other. But they preferred it.

Something was wrong here for N., but it was not a displacement that would be caused by familiar things or substances. Here was something that was caught by chance: taking three or four steps or suddenly taking a breath. Good or bad - you can't understand. Good, yes.

Or is there someone else here besides those who are already visible. Or just the low sound of cars passing along the Garden Overpass, or the rumble of the concrete of the viaduct. But then the noise would be adjusted and would not seem closer or slightly to the side. And it was there like that, making itself felt as a weak release of pressure. It couldn't be an inconspicuous noise: something familiar, like recognizing your clothes in the dark.

The reason could have been a nickel of light crossed between the kiosks - from the doors of each of the kiosks, glittering: from all the cans, bottles with moisture, it fell out of each of the two doors. Or something was buried here, causing light fumes to rise, disturbing: the girls had buried their secrets in the lawn. Or, on granite pedestals - like sphinxes, one opposite the other - two meter-long cast iron vases: high up, and you can’t see what’s inside. But people walked between the stalls as usual, and there was nothing on the gravel. Not a crooked glass ball, a nail, a ruble, not a glare of glass.

N. felt that it began to move along the alley, to leave, and not that it was dragging him along with it, he himself did not want to miss it and joined in by touch.

He walked along the alley, not even making an effort to understand where to go. The gravel was fine, did not click, rustled. Having walked halfway down the boulevard, I turned left into Maly Sukharevsky - and, alas, nothing opened on Maly Sukharevsky. For some reason there were a lot of shop windows selling ceramic tiles. At the door of a building like a school, he saw two girls smoking - but it was just two girls standing and smoking, smelling their hair; the building was the psychology department of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, a couple of windows were shining. Nearby there is a yellow wall, on it, in gleaming green paint or something, it says “Maxim Voronin is a bastard”; again a tile shop.

Here this shadow dried up: N. turned to keep up: or not a shadow, but an indistinct clump of something turned him to the right, into Trubnaya Street, and already there ahead there was a sign for a ceramic tile store, and there was a smell of lime: there was a lot all around repairs.

A shadow or an unusual transparency of the air occasionally revealed itself not even by touch - by the glide of light across it. He either stretched or twisted on turns, or it was N.’s sensations that moved: from walking and from the fact that he was led by this story. Or this is how it is always in the dark - the light stratifies around.

On the left there began to be an alley called “The Last”, but this is a lie, there is again a construction site, behind it there are more alleys. Next is a heavy, elongated oval house on the ground, the Millennium-house, considered the best project in the city a year ago. To the left, all the lanes went up. Steeply from above, window lights hang slightly diagonally.

It was necessary to go around the laureate house - it has elongated windows, there are not many of them on the facade, they are dark. It became necessary to climb the mountain, the climb was called Kolokolnikov Lane.

And there was nothing on the mountain anymore. The ascent hit my body with shortness of breath. N. no longer knew what brought him here, but he reached Sretenka. Sretenka was like Sretenka. It's easier to go back - down.

In the morning, on the way N. stopped by a nickel near the kiosks. There was nothing like that anymore. Another shift arrived at the kiosks, they couldn’t help remember - with their looks, their voices. They were discussing a scandal: the owner gave someone a dressing down, suspecting that the previous shift was trading with leftists at night.

There was nothing at all at the other kiosk. In the shadows next to him stood Dimon - an old boy of about thirty, already in decay. Inside, the assortment indicated that the booths were loaded by different owners, which was already evident in the cans of weak alcohol: they crossed only Ochakovo tonic; in the second shop it was for some reason fifty dollars cheaper.

2. K. reached Belorusskaya

The evening of May 1, closer to night, the day after Easter, was deserted. The bus swayed from Sheremetyevskaya to Belorusskaya, braking emptyly at stops: maybe the driver was German, sometimes he even opened the doors for anyone. The bus was new, white and green, and still smelled of plastic. In it sat a plump cop in a leather jacket, underneath which was a white shirt and tie; strong cop rank. The cop was lecturing a Mongolian or Uighur, a Tuvan, who for some reason handed over (K. didn’t see how or why, he entered later) a can of gas to the cop; The cop taught that this was only for defense, not for attack, otherwise it would take five years (an example was given). “And never use drunkenness,” said the cop, going out among the interiors of Maryina Roshcha, in the first third of the 5th passage, “otherwise they can interpret it in two ways.”

“Thank you for the information,” the Uighur said almost bowing to his back and went to the driver to find out from him whether the bus would get to the metro - the route took him to the City, and no one here knew where it was.

Some kind of individual lenses, collecting with the convexity of their light, melting the surroundings - from all sorts of security lights of many factory buildings in this industrial zone, the shine of tram rails. Therefore, the space was distorted, knocked down, shifted, and from these spots in total it seemed whole and correct. That is, the usual was correct, but this, of the lights, was better.

The first people outside the windows appeared only on Suschevsky Val, at the turn near the Miussky cemetery. It was already possible to understand that this - bypassed - piece of the city in its entirety was a kind of message, the reading of which was ensured by the bus route. In this life, messages stopped coming that looked like at least some birds falling from the sky. They didn’t write to anyone here of their own free will. The little ones walked only inside the zone, which in the absence of letters from nowhere this celestial city became. Celestial: in it it always seems that you are walking along the top of a hill, that is, everything else falls down. And also because the message, the little thing as a set of signs - an idea common in any other places - was impossible here. This city needs to be a space where all messages from all spaces that influence a person will come together, because this is what this city is like.

Therefore, there was the sound of crumbling plaster, that is, some eternal foundations being freed from limestone, because constant likening one to another, cross-references and gossip led to the tying up of all the threads in the world. They don’t write to you because there is nothing left to write about. But there is no seduction through an exaggerated greeting at the end.

In the absence of letters, any memory disappears from nowhere: the film of the soul, which previously enveloped points in space, dissolved in the sky. What remained was a plywood, glued-on memory, and this was bad, because it was made of things that had ceased to exist, but the city views among which they lived remained. A certain substance, in a word, corroded the previously benevolent scheme of K’s life. In a word, a certain substance and force produced non-existence.

New stops did not provide new creatures who would expect to talk to them. The bus route from Sheremetyevskaya to Belorusskaya consisted of two turns to the right and two to the left, alternating. An industrial zone, there was something else there bending to the right, a tunnel near the Savelovsky station. First, a viaduct, a turn, scattered dotted twelve-story buildings among the lawns, then blind streets on all sides, an industrial zone, factories, Sushchevsky Val, wide and illuminated, a tunnel, five-story buildings on the left, behind some ash trees, and on the right - a railway. thread to Belorussky. This news consisted of nothing more than that we would all die, but it was a known message, there must be another, from oblivion, coming every evening: the flag of the country from which this letter would come would be a sheet knocked down.

Non-existence consisted simply of the fact that the space of lights shining into each other every twilight settled on the ground, becoming solid in the morning, and no longer glowed. So around the Belorussky station, where the bus arrived, all this flickering has already settled with houses, stalls and advertisements.

3. Y. and steps on the stairs on Zubovsky

Y. stood by the window on the stairs; smoking was allowed there. Below, still invisible, steps began upward. The steps were slow, this man was reading a newspaper or smoking, Y. suddenly felt as if horror was rising heavily within him. It rose like water in a flood.

A man came out from around the turn of the stairs; he was unfamiliar, although his appearance was ordinary. But the horror did not disappear, it became even worse, it was impossible to understand what exactly was scary about it. Either it is connected with something bad, or precisely because it is not clear what bad it is connected with. Or there was some person similar to him, with whom something painful was connected. Or maybe there was something bad in him himself.

Hardly: about fifty years old, tall, not large, but trained. In a denim suit, in a burgundy T-shirt; glasses, gray hair, mustache. He actually smoked and held a newspaper in his hands, although he did not read it, but simply walked slowly.

The versions that arose when he turned towards the room of the Kultura TV channel were: some bad acquaintance, but forgotten over the years. Y. glanced through all his shame in life, but this person was not found among him. And what kind of shame is this if you have to remember. The versions of a university teacher, a colonel from the camps, a man from the military registration and enlistment office, a surgeon, a boss at some job did not fit. There were many like him, but the essence was something else.

Then in distant childhood: assume that he looks like one of his friends and acquaintances of his parents. There was someone similar there, but he wasn't terrible at all. Then to translate this feeling - if we're messing around with childhood - to looking at an adult figure from less than a meter from the floor - it's the same sound of heavy steps.

Or, if you go down to an unconscious age, to the earliest edge of consciousness, you can remember someone who never entered into any memories from now on: like the corners of the apartment in which he lived after the maternity hospital, but which he did not see in his right mind. What was remembered by this region was something that could be understood, which created a hole in fear. Horror could arise simply from the awareness of the passage of time - but this reaction presupposed reasoning, two or three moves of cause-effect, cause-effect: fear would then arise slowly, and not immediately from steps.

It happened on the landing, in the smoking room on the second floor of the building of the former APN, now RIA-Novosti. Through the window you can see a concrete fence with barbed wire on top. The thorn was not very diligent, and it was not clear which way it was tilted. Who was being guarded: the people in this building or, behind the fence, the Australian embassy? Is this how they protect the kangaroos jumping on the lawn so that they don’t run away? But if you go up a few floors and look at the yard from there, you can see that there are no kangaroos, no kookaburras, no wombats.

He could be from a movie, glimpsed on TV. It could be someone whom you will see again, like the aerial prince of a rapist, a tormentor, a champion of terrible paths and a vain tester of words, whom one must pass without restraint, departing from the earth. But all of this was slipping past, it was impossible to even force myself to agree with anything. The meaning was not given, like the last mushroom on the plate that cannot be picked up. This thought, however, reminded me that a buffet had already opened downstairs.

In general, this building was built as the main press point for the 1980 Olympics. Since then, its insides have preserved the Soviet era of the high point of stagnation. The dining room was spacious, low, brown and poorly lit. On the left is the distribution: the usual Soviet one, with two rotating distribution blocks, with still chopped schnitzels, red sauce and several cash registers. In the buffet, further on, they sold alcohol, buns and - after the dining room closed - salads and hot dishes, which were brought from the restaurant above.

And all these barmaids have remained here since the eighties, having not acquired even approximate capitalist management skills since then. When they came here as girls, they have been working as girls for twenty years. Those who dined with them were all familiar to them, so they behaved freely, regularly getting drunk in the evening. And now they were walking somewhere.

There was no barmaid, a line had formed behind Y., and a man from the stairs was walking down the long empty hall, no longer posing any threat. That is, everything is simple: for a short moment he showed the Soviet fear of strangers climbing the stairs. Before those who irresponsibly build everyone, walking along this work leisurely along all the flights of stairs in the country.

4. Z. and the maniac at the Park of Culture

Above the bushes and benches to the right of the Park Kultury metro station there was a sky that had burned out during the summer day. They stood in groups around the Park Kultury metro station, exit to the ring, opposite the Provision Warehouses. More precisely, they stood on the right as they exited, looking at the Provision Warehouses, already around the right turn, behind the entrance to the metro, a wonderful life began.

There was a street along the overpass, only trolleybuses went along it and few cars, and houses on the side: between them and the street there was a place for passage, a strip of grass, a strip of stalls, a sidewalk along the street along the overpass. On the strip of grass stood bushes of faded lilacs, and the sky hung like a pure lens with their blue-pink worn spots: Friday, it was getting dark, and all the people were standing in the nooks between the stalls and the greenery, drinking beer.

They stood in a crowd and, at first, it seemed senseless that something twitched in Z. and he realized that there must be a maniac in the vicinity who was looking for and wanted to eat... this: there was a hole in all of them, through which this could be done suck out the substance: there was some kind of fatty substance in them, since they were alive and now stood here. That is, they were waiting for someone for whom they were food.

Burnt-out squares near the metro, where people drink beer around booths under a whitish, burnt-out sky near stunted bushes, held together by the coming grace between the bushes of faded lilacs.

In some, this substance was yellow, in others, blue. Thirdly - green, and also varying in density, fat content - and the fat was of different origins, which gave human diversity associated with the joys of a type of defecation or from some forgotten things such as maternal affection. They were only drinking for now, but the fact that they drank without leaving, communicated that this was not enough for them: their bliss was enriched by anticipation. The one who eats them will whistlingly suck out their pink, blue, orange bone marrow or fatty colored substance from other compartments of their bodies: because they belonged to the race of people who bury the body and soul separately - placing the souls in small graves dug with the palm of the hand in clay. Like a bird's nest.

It is clear that a creature or non-creature lives inside a person, but there is someone like that there, that some shifts, like a spring draft or warmth, convey bliss to him, already a person, through this larva. Because bliss is not always, and when and why is not clear.

These creatures, they are small, eyeless, fat as a maggot, colorful. With a short pause, they control their body, thighs, ears, voice. This is the shabby sky inside them.

These are skins, skins, skins, - Z. realized, - not skinheads, but with an emphasis on the second syllable. Not projects or dummies, shells that have the right to be bodies that perform actions. The skins didn’t know: which ones exactly? They would like to resist the maniac or just see him. And all their stories between the stalls, on the small hills near Chudov Lane, they talked about this.

Z. was thinking about how he could drink vodka, there were three options to choose from: the Bulldog cafe under a crumpled green canopy, which that season promised kebab from the heart for 35 rubles, and now next to it there was a green advertisement with the inscription “Where are the guarantees?” A little further to Chudov along the same line of happiness there was another, already off-season cafe, that is, now stuffy. There was also a summer shed, but a police station was attached to the cafe. The third option was to buy vodka in booths. But then you also need to take some crab sticks that are already falling out of your hands.

Music was playing in the Bulldog, someone was singing “Schigivzmievrising”, playing along with his hands falling on the Yamaha. They didn't serve vodka there.

People were having a blast, swaying under the green canopy, feeling something, after which they would start families, where everyone would do something together and, surrounded by an apartment, grow old. Also, the skins mention their body parts with some special meaning - not exactly loving, but even stronger, somehow more intimate: my leg, head, my ear, knee.

Undoubtedly, they wanted a maniac who would suck the pink, blue, and purple marrow out of them. They will smile that their mother has come.

And mother was the sky, worn out during the day, which - graying at the edges - made them all more convex, clearly and distinctly divided them into twos and threes, and from under the awning of the "Bulldog" music about a beauty queen fell out, and everyone was resting, who knows. why the charter?

The joy was that God had left, because - Z. understood - He was accessible to the skins only as suffering, and now they felt good. As for the maniac, he, of course, came, took the last one, and after the bone marrow was freed from the fatty substance, cockroaches crawled out from there, characteristic of the given area and climate, although some glowed with an alien rash.

Z., seeing them crawling away, walked away from the green awning of the cafe and vomited almost near the police stronghold. Of course, his action was not surprising for these places, so if the cops had appeared at the door, they would have treated him with sympathy.

5. W. and Stone Guest on Povarskaya

In May they played a performance in the basement of Povarskaya Street about the arrival of the Stone Guest, and everyone felt bad. The point was that a point would open inside the room, which, over time, would accommodate a person within itself. It will expand into a hole, which - especially in the heat - would be sucked into. Like earthworms inside, into the ground, sliding along the walls of the hole.

The theater on Povarskaya is in the basement, so in the hall, where only a few people can fit, there are windows on top. That is, even the evening light falls from above, which makes it good even when we haven’t started playing. Level with the windows there on the side, opposite the windows, is the second floor, from there towards the end of the performance they sing in Italian. The light falls at an angle of 30 degrees - relative to the plane of the window, the walls are white. The male actors are in white, and the women, actresses L.D. and A.D., are in something colored, but it’s difficult to remember, although one of the critics states that “the colorful Chinese tunics worn over long black dresses are theatrically exquisite Alla Demidova and Lyudmila Drebneva, and costumes in a mixture of different eras by Alexander Anurov, Igor Yatsko, Vladimir Lavrov."

The scenes of "K. Guest" are rearranged, pieces of P.'s poems are embedded in them, the actors pronounce the text, changing roles, the same character is alternately presented by different artists (even in the same phrase). Several actors in one role, which transforms the space of the stage into the space of the text. The word becomes more important than the actors who pronounce it, it seems to materialize, become a new reality - also critics.

There is nothing like what they write about. There is simply a text, parsed into voices, but not in the voices with which they speak in life. There are stories that there is a house where you come, it’s like home - because this house was your home, and then - for some reason you haven’t been there for a long time, it just so happened - you come, but there is a slowdown, like mercury in the blood. Why fear: something prevents you from entering there - and this is because you, who went home there, are no longer going home, but to an apartment to which you have the keys. And you can no longer enter there without wondering where exactly you are going.

These people in white clothes and in colored clothes took for themselves what was your home - words that were well known in sequence one after another, they lost their familiar meaning. And as if it, your meaning, never existed. Moreover, there are white walls everywhere, sunlight from windows at an angle of 60 degrees to the floor, and various glass things.

They first turned the text into voices, so they mixed it up and it again became a text, only now it was no longer calm on paper, but began to eat away in the brain everything that was connected with it. And the actors also looked into the eyes of the audience, and actor A.A. squeezed through the rows, handing out to the women a sheet of paper with a text printed in French about the appearance of a beloved shadow. Words were processed by them into movements: so the alarm clock was impossible until someone composed the phrase “it’s time to get up!” And the movements of their bodies released a substance that destroyed your meaning of these words.

Those stories that fell in the vicinity of this one were also burned out. A washed-out stain, eaten away by bleach, appeared in the brain; The moral was that this story, now played out with W., and with no one else, could not happen.

It was another death, as everyone had already died as fetuses, children, boys and girls. The case ultimately involved a brain corroded by bleach on a washed-out hospital pillow.

So the void turned out to be the densest substance in the world, and in appearance it looked like coal.

6. E. and around on Sheremetyevskaya

Correctness is a hole in the world that you can stick yourself into so that it can be sucked into you. In which you can be almost alone, minus the sounds outside the window and inside the house. Dissolving all connections with the environment, alienating the sources of sounds, at least this. Usually an apartment. In some empty walls, a sofa, table, etc. a little bit of everything, books, yes.

Conservation or vice versa, at such moments something else comes out of a person, that is, someone else is already walking in his skin, he himself becomes something else that cannot be established, there are no witnesses, and the mirror does not count, because it can cut off some changes beyond the capabilities of the mirror. It wasn’t quite like that for E. That is, it was also an apartment, but rented, and there was nothing to be done about the owners, who wanted the apartment to be kept like this, that is, they were sorry to give money for repairs, although if they did not repair, the apartment would begin to rot into decay . Their loggia was covered with an iron grating, and even the gaps between the grating and the railings of the loggia were covered with a net - volleyball or tennis. Birds were supposed to be caught there.

It’s your own space where everything is right. At the same time, the dependence on who decides more here is unclear: who is outside or inside. Who can share it? A person crams into his hole when some small thing of unknown purpose has fallen off in his head. And how exactly it slowed down life processes was difficult to understand, and it is never clear: either this thing fell off, or was discovered.

It was sunny in the kitchen, and the walls were light, and there was almost no furniture or blue glass, this further protected from external noise - some harmless, loud drunks; and trains and electric trains heading to Riga rarely sneaked behind the garages.

The aggression arose from the hubbub from the street. Trains, which rarely passed, could only be a reminder of the possibility of aggression, and electric trains rushed past without disturbing them at all. Another thing is an incomprehensible call on the intercom, and then on the door - in the corridor shared by three apartments. It was unclear how to protect ourselves from this, although it was clear that life around us was going on according to the local rules, which everyone agreed with, although they did not remember them exactly.

How about building a checkpoint that would allow us to survive, and the rest would see that there were still some options. Under the window, three hedgehogs walked through the square; the square was crossed: black, white and red; the horses of the apocalypse passed through the courtyard and disappeared into a hole under the fence of the children's clinic. To the right, on a tall building, on an empty, windowless wall, Moscow State University was written in red, the blue decoding of the letters in Chinese slid down: Medical Center, Gynecology, Urology. Under the windows stood a canary-colored convertible of a gay man, it’s not clear from which floor, the second or something, to which a raspberry-colored convertible with hearts of lettuce and lemon flowers often came to visit.

The horror, if it is true, will always pass through the square and past the mothers and their children - only then will it become known. Then he would no longer touch her, because she was like that, that there was something in her that stopped all mental constructions and patterns. That is, both for herself and in general: if she thought about some kind of scheme, then the scheme was destroyed. That is, it turned out that for her everything that did not have some real, unknown blood was invented, and could not live for long. She stopped this unnecessary life, although not intentionally. And I didn’t even check it on purpose. She didn’t do anything at all: you tell her something, she answers something - indirectly or completely out of place, and then you realize that these words are no longer there: dried up, no longer there.

There was a territory of horror around her: no one could be there - everyone who got there somehow dissolved. She was lonely, and she was worried that they were all disappearing somewhere.

From the outside it might seem that she senses a certain truth, which is the only decency of behavior for her. It followed from this that she had not yet given up this life, believing that it could still be arranged in these alien rules and circumstances.

So some exact line was it - which she tried to catch with the room, clothes, habits: to transfer to external security services instead of not paying attention and just allowing herself to be led by this line. Was she trying to protect something that didn’t require any protection, but how can you risk it? But she is right, because everything in the world happens unnoticed.

Maybe she just needed a photograph in which she would appear as she knows herself.

7. M. and an unknown organ at the Ross Theater. Army

Hot, sunny, very dry. M. sits on the steps of the Soviet Army Theater opposite the concrete wall of the construction site, on this side almost adjacent to the theater. The Soviet Army Theater was built, as is known, in the shape of a star - in plan ("Kaganovich Star"). Accordingly, M. sat on the stairs of one of the star's crotches. Here in front of him was a small, triangular parade ground: with two slits - on the right and on the left.

The one on the right led somewhere towards the trees on the nearby street. The gap on the left led out onto the boulevard, further to the Garden Ring; on it, among the lilac bushes, stood a monument to Suvorov; trees also grew neatly there, and the grass under them was, perhaps, even damp.

For some reason M. was sitting not in the shade, but in the sun, on the steps (wide, tapering upward, three-tiered), the sun was falling from the left and from above. For some reason neither the heat nor the sun tormented him, and something inside him responded favorably to the situation.

“It’s like it’s some kind of organ,” M. reasoned, internally aware of himself. An unknown organ that occurs occasionally. M. could not hold back the height of a strong thought, but alienated from his fate, and tried to make it practical: this organ is something that allows a person to bring different stories together. High and low. It kind of grows when it seems like everything has fallen apart. At the same time, it is unknown where exactly, in what part of a person it will arise this time, which is why it is not clear why it arose. That’s why the consequences are always different.

The surface of the city here was completely scorched, not charred, but quite theatrical, especially the concrete wall in front of my eyes. In the theater, one must think, they were rehearsing. They said that there were five tiers inside, young theater employees lived on the top ones, and no spectator had ever reached there. They're practically drying diapers in the gallery. This is what one of the trainees I knew at this theater said, and then a theater critic. She also said that there is an entrance not only for the car of the Minister of Defense, which leads directly to his box, but also almost a highway suitable for tanks entering the stage - should the performance need them.

Perhaps this entrance was just before where M. was sitting, and now tanks are no longer needed in the theater, so they started building a metro on the site of the secret tunnel, but these details did not bother him, he was thinking about the unknown organ that sometimes gave understand everything.

For example, many people could not understand U., while its features existed most clearly for M. It was because M. now felt the insufficiency of the usual descriptions of human anatomy that he began to compare his hypothesis with the facts of life.

The heat was already beyond stuffiness, imposing a new substance. In addition, the heat did not allow one to feel its edges - that is, it separated these arguments from everything on which they could be hung.

Therefore, M. cautiously suggested that such an additional organ does not have to appear in a person forever, but only happens for a while.

He, the organ, could look like a wrinkled pear, at other moments becoming convex and glittering. Here he was distracted by a newspaper twisting across the asphalt wasteland, which, having flown out from under the trees on the right, dried up with each somersault, became louder and drier, rustled and was about to burst into flames before reaching the steps of the theater.

The birds descended heavily from right to left, plopped down on the platform in front of the steps, crawled into the shadows towards the fence, mechanically pecking at something along the way.

The organ may not have been inserted inside the person, it was moving closer to him, but the sensation from outside became a sensation from within. It could consist of the high walls of the theater, its flat columns, the heat, the edge of invisible poplars to the right and the wall opposite. But what difference does it make where he is, even if it is outside, because what he feels must become caught by something inside.

Someone around the corner set poplar fluff on fire, and the line of fire approached M. along the steps of the theater, built with a pentagonal star.

Then M. felt that he wanted U., and: he wanted her somehow tightly, with strong tension in all his muscles and the whole weight of his body. After a short time, it turns out that U. also wants such closeness. Later it turns out that this act was not a consequence of weather conditions or an accident, it was simply love between them.

8. L. and Moscow magic

Moscow magic is when you find a piece of transformer wire on the sidewalk, twisted into two rings - a figure of eight with rings of slightly different sizes. Copper, soft, twisted wire sticks out from the crosshairs of the rings. It is clear that this was done for some obvious reasons that no one will be able to understand until they find themselves on the Garden Ring near the Provision Warehouses. And now it’s hot and the sun is everywhere.

Thinking about who would put this on the finger, I’m not sure whether it was really there for that purpose or whether it was just small children having fun with something that seemed forbidden to each other.

This thing could not have arisen by chance, that is, without taking into account you personally, because poplar fluff and so on can be accidental in the first days of June. out-of-season beer caps, and if you believe that this item did not take you into account, then there will be no magic. So, someone’s feeling that inflamed someone so that he entered space with this object, changing the space. Having felt the smallness of what life can give if you don’t do this. His magic, alien, is not yours.

Magic that wanted to satisfy the body. Someone was missing something, which is why these rings were twisted. Although this wire could have been twisted for completely different reasons.

Magic is simply when there is a crack from which something happens that does not come out of the shells of known stories. Because here is such a country that everyone can see ten years in advance how it will happen and with whom: who will like it. And you can become one of your own in Moscow only by copulating with something that will erase any of your experience.

If you are a stranger here, you will leave, and your experience will find a place in the brain, and will begin to jingle from there as points of memory. Any point will split into feelings that cannot be recreated. I once had a pillar number 45 or something, where they built to wave flags to Brezhnev, noodles in the dorm sink, book drug dealers near Ivan Fedorov and in Hood Passage. theater Lots more.

Then I left, then - not soon - I returned, and life began to perish: having found myself in a place native to the memory of 25 years ago, the memory - lingering a little for a second, blinking - gave way to the same landscape, but completely different, even if time years coincided. And: there was nothing wrong with you here anymore. But you should understand that this happiness exists now.

When you see places that go from being slightly cloudy in memory to becoming clear to a white penny on the ground, you discover a yellow penny in the past and your own cloudiness, now killed. You were this fog that covered the houses and landscapes. While on duty on the floor, you took noodles out of the holes in the sink, and now you don’t remember how exactly you didn’t want to do it, although you remember that the floor was the 15th.

These points were thrown into the head not even together, making up the city, and not only it: the city in the skull also determined what was already happening anywhere: it grew into the brain, controlling life from there.

The city has become the brain. This is the color of the staircase walls in the house on Nizhnyaya Maslovka (blue), some auditoriums, anything, marked with something understandable (the gesture is usually: hand to the bell, hand under the skirt, hand with noodles from the sink). The brain places further on its streets.

When I returned, an unknown substance began to corrode this life. You will get off at the University, eat a pie with cabbage, or stand in the cold near the subway grate at a stop near the university fence, like the previous one - the terrain of 25 years ago that was your life for twenty years ago has been erased. It was still the same (that near the University had changed, the bus routes had the same numbers), but you were no longer here then, because you are here now. You're back in your brain. Are you out of your mind. Came to my senses.

There is something about this city that erases your memory every day. But you can see from the old women on the subway what kind of children they were - and from them, the children, you can already see the movement throughout their entire lives. This is the loop that will allow you to enter this city. Here you will become your own when you have accepted the local non-existence.

The old people return home along the ring. Something happened to them - it passed, they come back. Well, what can you come up with in life, where even a wire of two rings does not mean anything that cannot be understood.

Or what, go back under your skin and forget about the strings that were drawn to someone and how they curled up in knots? Go under your skin and think that they have managed without you for two thousand years, and they will manage, and you don’t owe anything to anyone. Five minutes, it won't be longer. Here, in the 19th century, a certain prisoner in Butyrki drew a boat on the floor of his cell and sailed away on it to someone.