Insomvita

Oleksandr Dan

Insomvita

Part One

If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you…

Friedrich Nietzsche

Chapter 1

24 December 2011. 03:12 Tatras

A lightly dressed man, shivering from cold, stood on a precipice high over a mountain river. He seemed neither concerned nor scared at being just a half step from the edge of an abyss, since one false move could cost him his life. Rather, his gloomy silence was filled with despair and a readiness to step into the darkness filled with the roaring of the river below.

The black silhouette of the man was set sharply against the blue snow. He stared into the depths of the turbulent steam, as if looking for answers in this black vein of the mountain river.

Suddenly he spread his arms and raised his face to the sky. His lips whispered words of a prayer. Shutting his eyes, he waited for a sign from above. Perhaps a minute passed, but the heavens remained silent. The man sighed deeply, opened his eyes and stared at the winter sky with the look of someone doomed to die. No answer was forthcoming, he realized. The man smiled sadly and let his arms fall to his sides.

Clusters of bright, twinkling stars were scattered across the heavens. Here, at nearly three thousand meters above sea level, far from the bustle of the city, they seemed close enough to pick like strawberries. The silence of the icy night was broken only by the river noisily carrying its waters from somewhere near the peaks of the High Tatras.

Dense spruces covered by the thick blanket of untouched snow loomed over the land, tops aimed at those very stars, like the cover of an old Christmas card. The moonless night concealed the beauty of the mountain slopes, although the grandeur of the raw alpine nature bled through with the light of the stars. It seemed as though modern civilization had never touched this place, and that all these crests of snow and centuries-old spruces stood the same as they had two, three hundred years ago.

“If there is no answer, then the question was wrong,” the voice of the philosophy professor sounded in the man’s mind like a flashback. “To every question, there is only one correct answer, which is the truth.”

“What if there are several answers and they are all correct, and they are essentially versions of the truth?” he had asked, trying to argue with the professor.

“Remember, young man, there can be only one truth, and its versions are mistakes that generate untruth,” the professor had said without even looking at him.

But how do you find it, if the path towards this truth is darker than the blackness of this night? Where do you search, how do you determine the starting point, the thread that will eventually lead you to the truth?

To some, it might have appeared that the man was preparing to commit suicide and was just about to leap. The desire to take a single step and throw himself off the cliff into the abyss of the roaring river was checked only by the instinct of self-preservation, inherent only to a sober mind and the irresistible thirst for life. In a fit of despair, his consciousness tore fragments of the past out of his memory, as if proving the need to continue the search for answers to questions that were rending his heart.

“Could this be a solution? Could one step be all I need to get the answer,” he asked himself while peering into the inky blackness of the ravine.

From the darkness of the night, his memory once again recalled the lecture hall at the university and the voice of his philosophy professor: “What can this last step towards Azrael[1] and eternal slumber solve? Life in general is a directed movement from birth to death, avoided by nobody. The thought of ending one’s own life is driven by the desire to find some ultimate truth, but also doubt in achieving it. After all, the more you crave the ultimate, the more you realize its unattainability. It is these shifts between both extremes that lead to self-ruin.”

The professor paused, scanned the audience with unseeing eyes, took a book from his desk and, after shuffling through some pages, continued: "Sigmund Freud[2], the most renowned psychologist and psychiatrist of his time, even introduced the notion of the 'death drive' or death instincts, since he could not otherwise explain many of the things a human being is capable of inflicting on themselves. The desire for self-destruction, it seems, is in our nature. While all living things struggle to survive, some humans, on the contrary, invest extraordinary energy into ruining their lives completely, sometimes ending them."

The professor put the book aside and, crossing his hands across his chest, and after a small pause addressed the first row of students: “As to what pushes a certain individual to choose the path of self-destruction is a controversial issue that isn't fully understood yet. After all, human beings have been observed and studied closely throughout the millennia, yet they remain underexplored, and something that is difficult to explore and analyze.”

The bell ending the lecture rang and the sound of whispering filled the hall. The professor, however, quickly glanced at his watch and monotonously and firmly continued in a raised voice: “In the paradigm of human history, the circumstances that have led to suicide were as different as the people who chose this path, or, more specifically, such an end to their life. This suggests that there are as many solutions in the classification of the circumstances that lead to suicide as there are people.

"However, could such a step change the circumstances that pushed a person to end their life this way? Could this change those who influenced the circumstances that caused the person to make this decision? Doubtful, as people don’t change, for the most part. They can mimic others or pretend to be better than they are under certain circumstances, and they can conceal their dominant identity, but it will inevitably surface over time, as the deception is short-lived.

"Can this step towards self-destruction change the world around us? Unlikely.” The professor paused again and glanced at the audience. “Life, my dear, will continue as before, but the person unfortunately is no longer its active participant, but most likely a passive observer.”

The man remembered this lecture by the philosophy professor at Charles University in Prague, where he studied law, and often thought about it, seeking the answer to his question when his mind was pushing him towards suicide.

There was one circumstance, however, that nullified this whole theory of a causal relationship with suicide.

What if a person is an outside observer to his own life? What if this person, even without having taken this step, is observing himself from somewhere inside his subconscious, with no power to change anything, supplement or alter himself? What if this observation, regardless of the person’s desire, is hanging over his mind like the Sword of Damocles throughout his entire conscious life? What would this last step change then? And could it change anything at all?

Not far away, a taxi with its engine running stood at the side of the road. The Indian behind the wheel was humming a simple folk melody to loud music and smiling.

“Quite the passenger I picked up today,” he mused. “He paid a thousand euro to get to this destitute, god forsaken mountain village.”

The taxi driver had not wanted to drive here, especially up the winding mountain serpentines on the icy road. But he agreed. And not only because the money was good. The taxi driver had seen how several other drivers rejected the customer’s offer and he felt genuinely sorry for this lonely, tired and lightly dressed man.

Yeah, not sensibly dressed at all, the driver thought, looking at his passenger, as he got in at the railway station.

Indeed, he was dressed strangely for this time of year. A thin cashmere coat, black, carefully ironed trousers, and autumn shoes. A thick, navy scarf twisted several times around his neck. His hair was disheveled and he had three-day stubble. And he carried no bag, which was odd for someone leaving a train station.

The road here was extremely slippery. Wet snow had fallen in the evening and turned the smooth asphalt into solid glass by midnight. The road services had not reached this area yet, and the Indian pondered for a while whether to take the trip, but the passenger paid triple the standard fare, including for the trip back, in advance.

Throughout the ride the passenger silently watched the road through the window. It was instantly clear that he did not want to talk, and the taxi driver shoved an old cassette into the player and switched it on.

A low-key, rhythmic melody to the accompaniment of a tabla[3] poured from the speakers. The Indian with a wide snow-white smile on his tanned faced looked in the rearview mirror at the passenger, but the latter paid no attention to him, immersed as he was in his own thoughts and staring gloomily at the trees covered with a thick layer of snow like a soft blanket, which would appear in the headlights and swiftly disappear again into the solemn darkness of the winter night.

Several kilometers before reaching the village, the passenger asked to stop the car.

"Please, stop here, please," he said hoarsely, looking around. "Right, right…just here. And wait for me, please."

The passenger exited the vehicle and confidently surged through the untouched snow. It was clear that he wasn’t new to this area, because the visibility was no more than a few dozen meters in any direction. When he confidently stepped into deep snowdrifts, the Indian shivered – he hated the cold.

Almost twenty minutes had passed and the Indian decided to leave his taxi and see where the man went.

Fifty meters from the car, the passenger stood silently on the edge of the abyss, not moving, staring into the distance with his hands in his coat pockets.

The Indian returned to the warm car and slammed the door. He looked at the fuel gauge and shook his head, smacking his lips in dissatisfaction.

The passenger continued to stand like a statue over the river, listening to the loud torrent of its dark waters.

Some weirdo I’ve come across, pondered the taxi driver, shrinking from the cold. It’s night out, freezing and snow, and this guy doesn’t seem to care. What can anyone think about in this cold?

The dark figure of the man, like a pagan idol, towered over the ravine. He tried to understand where the first time 'this' had happened to him. It was ‘where’, not ‘when’, because the exact time was embedded in his memory forever. He also remembered the exact place where 'this' had happened, and a hundred times he had thought back to that day in the distant past, trying to understand where 'this' was happening, because knowing the place where everything happened did not give him the answer to the question: in which one of his lives did 'this' happen for the first time.

He had long become used to not having the answer to the question 'where'. He tried to recreate the situation WHERE EXACTLY everything began so many times, but as soon as it seemed that the answer was attainable and the situation was becoming clearer, everything would instantly recede and become even more confusing and incomprehensible. It seemed as if he was climbing barely visible stairs towards the answer, but the stairs never ended, flowing into more steps and then swerving into the opposite direction. Every next step only made things more confusing, the thread was lost, and everything would return to the beginning.

The man was reminded of the work of the paradoxical world of Maurits Cornelis Escher[4] that hung in the hall of the first floor of Les Mondes Office on August Blanc Boulevard in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Instead of the mannequins in the picture, where his memory took him, however, he saw himself mindlessly wandering up and down the ungodly stairs without handrails in a world where the laws of reality appeared not to work, just as in his own life. It seemed that the answer was obvious, but turn the picture ninety degrees and everything again becomes unclear and the answer to the question – further away from the truth.

No, he was not suffering from amnesia or some memory loss, or even its weakening. On the contrary, he extremely enjoyed sifting through his recollections. Sometimes a small memory from faraway childhood would surface as a result of the exercise, become supplemented with a plot, conversations, people and even feelings he had once experienced, and together serve to restore the past up to the smallest detail in his memory.

But this was something different. In his life, the laws of reality had gotten mixed up, and so in order to remain true to himself and not go crazy he had to cling to all the memories, clearly divide his life and control himself and everything that was happening to him. In time, he managed to do just that, although it was extremely hard to live in this kind of fragmented existence.

Far below, struggling through the jumble of boulders, the Vycha River streamed noisily. This small but turbulent river, this place, held many childhood memories. Some thirty years ago, here, he spent his childhood years in the like company of delinquents.

* * *

“Robert, time to go home!” the stern voice of his mother, who stood where the taxi now idled, calling for her son echoed as a memory in his ears and sent a warm wave to his heart. “How many times do I need to call you?! Hurry up! Let’s go home!”

His mother, a short woman with long, raven hair, dressed in a pink dress and white sandals, stood on top of the hill near the road holding a red bike and waited for her son to collect his belongings and come up to her. The wind ruffled her dark curls, while she vainly tried to cover her eyes from the sun and tame her hair disheveled by the rush of wind.

Robert… Said with the emphasis on the final syllable, as the French would pronounce it. Only his mother called him like that. For others he was simply Robbie or Bobba, which Robert really did not like.

Robert would reluctantly but quickly get ready, go to his mom, and together they would go home, carrying the bike together.

This river was almost the only joy in summer for local kids, where they could do something useful and fun: fishing and swimming in its tumultuous waters. In summer the huge boulders perched on both banks of Vycha became watercolor paintings from the dozens of big and small woolen carpets local villagers laundered, leaving them flat against the stones to dry under the scorching rays of midday sun.

The river was small. Some places could be forded by merely stepping on a string of slippery stones. In wider places, deep vortices formed, mostly behind lone boulders. And if the boulder was big, the vortex could run very deep.

In places, thick dry snags stuck out of the river, clinging to the rocks and growing into the brown silt. Bleached white, they resembled mammoth tusks rising over the water. Branches floating downstream from the mountain passes would often become their victims.

Despite the cold, ice had yet to form on the river, continuing to flow in a lively black stream between the thick, snowy white banks of the river.

Robert’s mind took him back to his childhood, when he first crossed the river as an eight-year old boy, wading, and then climbing to the top of a flat boulder warmed by the sun, where he felt very proud of his deed.

Robert pulled out a bottle of vodka from his coat and took a few gulps.

His thoughts slipped further back, immersing him in memories.

The first time it happened was on July 15, 1982.

On that day, Robert’s family gathered at a large table to celebrate his twelfth birthday.

It was a hot summer day and the air smelled of roasting bitumen. The scorching sun melted the road, turning the asphalt into a viscous mass that clung to the rubber of bicycle and car tires and to the soles of shoes. This odor was forever associated in Robert’s memory with the sensations of a hot summer.

There is a big, round, chocolate cake adorned with brown and red cream flowers on the kitchen table. On top of the cake, written in uneven letters, was the inscription: Happy Birthday – 12 years. Robert loved chocolate sponge cakes, but most of all he loved cream roll cakes, which were sold at the store near his house.

Little Robert always asked himself: why do people buy round cakes for a birthday? Why can’t they buy several roll cakes, place them on top of each other and present them to the birthday boy? And without inscriptions – the letters seemed silly, were not tasty for some reason and, in his opinion, totally unnecessary.

That day, Robert got a pair of oversized blue fabric sneakers as a gift. His parents bought almost all his clothes several sizes too large so that he could wear them longer, as his family’s income was low. His father worked from morning to night at a factory as a metal worker, while his mother was a nurse at the local hospital. To make ends meet, both parents had to take side jobs. Still, money was scarce and they lived very simply. Ice-cream and watermelon were the best desserts that were served for dinner on Sunday or for celebrations.

Robert invited only his school friend Jovan to his birthday party. His family usually did not have big, noisy parties to celebrate significant dates.

Quickly devouring the rest of the cake and washing it down with apple juice straight from a three-liter jar, the two friends climbed up into the barn that stood in the shadow of a huge old walnut tree. The roof of the barn was made of tin, and those places that were not protected by the shadow of the tree became as hot as a frying pan under the direct sun, making it impossible to sit there. Nevertheless, the roof was a place where nobody could keep the friends from idling away the hours, casually conversing, singing loudly and dreaming.

“Jovan, look, there are horses floating in the sky,” Robert said suddenly and laughed, pointing at some white clouds.

“Coooool!” Jovan said in languid surprise as he watched the clouds pass, but he suddenly perked up and said, “Let’s guess which animals they resemble. The one who finds the most animals, wins!”

There was, indeed, a huge white cloud in the shape of a floating horse. Its head turned slowly, but the thick mane transformed into the long wide tail of an enormous fish.

“Horse-fish or fish-horse?” said Robert. He squinted at the sun and…

That’s where it all happened.

The blinding sun abruptly caused his eyes to darken. Robert felt light-headed and his ears clogged. He blinked and then glanced around with a look of bewilderment. Next to him sat a stranger. He was telling him something, but Robert couldn’t understand a thing, whether from surprise or the constant ringing in his ears, he could not be certain. In fact, he did not even try to understand the language of the strange boy. It seemed as though he was seeing everything for the first time, everything was odd, unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Robert’s face exhibited genuine surprise.

He did not understand where he was, on whose roof he sat, or what he was doing there. Robert stood up and inspected his clothes. He was stunned – the clothes were new, as was the barn and, ultimately, the whole yard.

Robert could not understand what was happening to him. Everything around him was completely unfamiliar. With eyes wide from bewilderment, Robert looked up at the sky.

There, the horse with a fish tail was still floating proudly with his mane spread across the sky. Rays of sun broke like long threads through it and disappeared again. The horse appeared to be smiling.

The first thought that came to Robert was that he was delirious. He knew that sunstroke could cause a loss of consciousness, but he could not comprehend how such hallucinations could at once seem so real and unreal. His heart was threatening to burst from his chest. A primal fear was starting to overwhelm him.

The boy could not help but think that this was some mysterious, fantastic, but strikingly realistic dream. He kept looking around with an open mouth and wide eyes. He wanted to flee that roof to the ground, and without thinking he took a step. The hot roof burned his bare heel like when he was on the beach in Pattaya several days earlier, where his father had taken him and his mother to see the Gulf of Thailand. The sea had been teeming with jellyfish and Robert accidentally stepped on one.

“Jellyfish. It’s just jellyfish, nothing to worry about,” the doctor had said calmly at the local hospital where the boy was taken with the burning foot. To the child, the word jellyfish meant a sudden stinging pain. The throbbing foot was covered with bright red marks.

It lasted for just a moment. Feeling a sharp pain, Robert squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath.

“Jellyfish! It doesn’t look like a horse-fish at all!” Jovan sat next to him laughing loudly. “Look, Robbie, see – there’s the head and there’s some tentacles. Like the one in our biology textbook."

The snapshots of a distant, hot country disappeared abruptly without a trace, like the surprise Robert’s face bore just a few minutes prior.

Robert smiled at Jovan and looked at the sky.

And yet, it was a horse that was floating in the sky, not a jellyfish, he thought.

Jovan and Robert, two inseparable friends, continued to enjoy looking at the clouds.

Meanwhile, the horse with a long fish tail continued to float across the sky, smiling.

Chapter 2

17 December 2011. 09:03 Geneva, Switzerland (Trevor)

Bright sunlight seeping through a crack in the curtains lit a narrow strip of a wide bed. The rest was covered in darkness. A cell phone on a glass nightstand was persistently ringing. Running water could be heard from the shower. Men’s socks, trousers and women’s underwear were scattered on the floor.

The phone went silent, but soon started ringing again. Trevor, in a bathrobe and with a towel draped over his head, approached the bed and picked it up.

"Good morning, Victor… Sure, in an hour… Thanks."

The line went dead. Amanda’s assistant reminded Trevor about the time of the session.

Trevor dropped the phone and threw open the curtains. Light broke into the room. The windows of the Beau-Rivage Hotel on Lake Geneva revealed a fountain and the snowy mountain peaks of the Swiss Alps. On the bed, snoring softly, a young girl with long dark hair was sleeping. A gray, silk sheet enveloped her naked body like second skin. Breaking his gaze, Trevor recollected the previous evening at the nightclub he frequented whenever he was in Geneva.

Last night the club featured some band that was probably quite popular, judging by the two hundred young people who crowded the stage, singing loudly along with the vocalist to the deafening accompaniment of drums.

The thick blue and yellow beams of projectors caught the faces and hands of the fans in the crowd. Laser chasers were blinding Trevor, so he turned away from the stage and headed to the nearly deserted bar. The young bartender with short, bleached hair and a colorful tattoo took his order and poured a glass of whiskey. A girl sat alone at the other end of the bar, watching Trevor. When their eyes met she smiled and looked down. But then she looked at Trevor again with a tenacious, penetrating, somewhat inquisitive, even defiant look. Trevor slammed down his drink and confidently approached the girl.

In the morning, he could not remember her name, where she was from or what they had talked about at that club. The several glasses of whiskey he had consumed scorched his memories of that night, melting away all that was unnecessary and leaving only fragmented, disconnected shots of their embraces and kisses. Trevor could not remember how they left the nightclub, how they got to the hotel, to his room, but his memory shamelessly continued to show him moments of their lovemaking. Trevor remembered her as passionate, bathed in sweat in his arms, illuminated by a narrow ray of pale moonlight, and he smiled.

“Chloe!” The name of the stranger struck him like a bolt out of the blue. “I think that’s what she called herself? Right, it was Chloe.”

Trevor dressed and opened his wallet. A plastic window revealed an ID with PRESS written in big letters on it. He pulled out four hundred Swiss francs, placed them on the bedside table next to the girl and quickly left the room. Soon, he was outside the hotel on the street.