# Unedited Ai-translation 'the roots of my actions' book 4

Никита Александрович Капернаумов

Unedited AI-Translation of the original russian book "Истоки моих поступков" by "Никита Капернаумов"

04 april 2026


For those interested in the author"s personality: a reconstruction of the first thirteen years of life up to 2007. One of the largest childhood autobiographies ever (over half a million words across four books). AI comparisons include Proust, Limonov, Knausgård. Here, however - complete anti-literature, no artistry at all, and consistently very deep psychology.


Nikita Kapernaumov, born 1993, from Saratov. Attended kindergarten and school, played sports, rode a bike, saved money. Unrequited crushes from ages 2-3. At 10-11 - broke down. At 13 - involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation, labelled "schizophrenic," and then 20 years in a room in front of a monitor, consumed by destructive envy of other people"s sexual relationships in youth.


_______________Book 4


___Part 54.

.::.

________________ Autumn 2004. I started seventh grade.

.:::.

Part 54, Text 1. Beginning of the school year and the renovation on Radishcheva - problems with the stove and a lock pick - companionship with Denis at gymnastics - the computer exhibition.

.::::.

I"m so fucking sick of writing this childish autobiography, where because of the yearly sameness I can"t guarantee the chronological accuracy of certain events. Take this school fair at the beginning of the year, for example. It could very well have been the year before. I"m placing it in this one only because in my memory those moments come with the feeling that I was already local.

On the very first school day, maybe instead of the first lessons, in the small back courtyard where once I had a couple of minutes of happiness in informal contact with my then beloved Masha Ermakova, a flea-market-type bustle was organised. Schoolkids and their parents laid out textbooks from previous years on the ground that younger pupils could buy. For some reason Katya Ilyina came up to my assortment with her parents, and they were for some reason considering the textbooks lying there. Maybe she had a younger brother or sister. By then we didn"t give a damn about each other anymore.

What changes there were in the subjects that year I barely remember at all. I think maths split into geometry and algebra. Maybe physics and chemistry appeared too. None of it interested me, and I didn"t study any of those new subjects, while my mother"s control over them was almost nonexistent. I remember some subject called OBZh appeared, and my parents warned that sooner or later we"d be sitting at our desks in gas masks. My father, on the theme of these semi-militarised things, kept telling stories from the army - how they were driven on forced marches and all that. The ultimate test of toughness, he said, was to lie down in a trench, not shit yourself when a tank drove over you, and then pull the pin from a grenade and throw it at that tank. He said he"d done it.

Trenches, and gas masks too, my father couldn"t help remembering at that time for another reason as well. He had taken it upon himself to sort out the utilities in our kennel on Radishcheva, where my mother and I went right after that first school day. Earlier, as I"d said, he hadn"t even wanted to think about fixing the rotten property my mother bought. But now it was as if he"d caught the same enthusiasm that I had in those days, the same feeling of a reboot. Or perhaps the point was that, unlike the previous options we had considered and which my father especially hated, this time we had bought an actual separate flat - and even one with its own entrance.

Water and gas were there, oddly enough, but there was a problem with the sewage. Because of that there was no question of living there yet.

If you ask my mother, she saw another reason why my father suddenly burned with the desire to help. The flat, though registered in my mother"s name and having nothing to do with him legally, was nevertheless a separate flat, and supposedly I could be registered there - otherwise why had my mother bought it, since the gymnasium administration needed registration rather than a deed and a story that we lived here - and that, in turn, could someday open the possibility of some rights to it for the second parent as well - meaning him. When this flat appeared, Grandma Valya was immediately there. So my mother would say that this surge of helpful energy was created not so much by my father, who by himself never really needed anything, but by Grandma Valya fussing on his behalf. In those same first days of September Grandma Valya even sprinkled the walls with water there - consecrating them.

In any case, my father began messing around in that flat in the evenings after work - I"ll return to that later.

On the second or third school day I came to the flat after lessons, ate the sandwiches my mother had brought, and we sat there: there was no point going back to Engels anyway, and soon I had to head to training. Meanwhile my mother was getting worked up about something she had always been a panic-merchant about for as long as I remembered: whether the flat was warm, whether the stove heated properly.

We sat in that tiny kitchen, and she kept pressing her palm to different places on the semicircular body of that monster. It wasn"t heating at all. The flame was burning and everything looked right, and it was completely unclear why the stove wouldn"t warm up.

Leaning her hand against it, my mother stood in silent despair. It was obvious: not even so much the money, but simply the collapse of the whole adventure and the point of this flat. If it turned out you couldn"t actually live here, then my twice-daily trips to Saratov from Engels were still impossible.

I understood the situation and the mood, but couldn"t do anything, so I passed the time sitting on the porch and in the yard in front of the flat.

At the beginning of the past summer I mentioned that I had had urges to steal something. Now, when I"d become disillusioned with bottle collecting and scavenging under kiosks while money was still needed, over the next months a theme of profit-seeking crime would start developing in me. Specifically in those days I became fascinated with lock picks. Sitting on the porch, I was turning a paper clip in my fingers. I straightened it out, bending only the very tip, and while my mother stood there by the stove I decided to stick that clip into the lock of the open door and somehow turn the cylinder.

It got stuck in the lock immediately.

My mother was already on edge, and then I called her and showed her that this shit had happened too. We started pulling at it. But we had to leave soon for our errands. My mother was in full panic. At once an atmosphere very close to the Lev-Kassil kind of domestic drama formed - and for the first time so far away from Lev Kassil Street itself, which felt strange.

My mother was waiting for Uncle Seryozha - they had business to attend to. When he arrived, he came into the yard and yanked the fucking paper clip. It sliced his finger open to blood, but it came out. So that"s how I briefly became a lock breaker.

At training something began happening: I started joining in the boys" conversations. I clicked especially when the topic was GTA or computer hardware, though the latter wasn"t discussed often - everyone else had had computers for ages. These conversations happened during the trampoline part at the beginning of training, when we sat on the bench waiting while someone else jumped.

Gradually that boy Denis began turning more and more in my direction. He was my age, a thick-boned dark-haired bull of a kid who had long been doing flic-flacs and standing backflips, little circles on the mushroom, and I think even swings on the bar in grips without the training loops, with the coach. Always in some basketball vest and shorts. He was extroverted, good-natured and jokey. Once the coach told us about the strictness of American law and that there they can forbid one person to approach another. Denis latched onto it and joked to the boys nearby: "I"ll sue you."

In manner he resembled that Sasha Yemelyanov with whom I had a companionship at the end of my kindergarten years. There was an episode similar to the one with Yemelyanov and the non-Russian kid in Anapa. Denis and I were hanging around the training rings near the exit from the hall, and Mephistopheles was working on those rings. By that time it had turned out that he was a heavy swearer and moderately vindictive. Denis started teasing him with some sort of joke or riddle: "A bird is flying and swearing..."

Mephistopheles got furious and kept jumping down from the rings to try to kick Denis, who was bigger than him.

On the high bar Denis spun swings on his own in the training loops - properly, backwards, with straight legs. I still couldn"t do anything by myself except useless forward swings with crooked legs, and my lower back was starting to ache more often - as if something shot through it. While Denis spun his swings I once stood chatting with a boy named Maxim who was about two years older than me - that happened only once. He did swings too, already in grips apparently. And of course he did flic-flacs and double backflips from the trampoline. He said he"d been training only two years and look what he had already achieved. For a moment that brought me down to earth out of my computer-themed oblivion.

Otherwise Denis and I constantly discussed GTA and other games too, and that became more important to me than the training itself. As always, my conversation partner was the guide.

The theme of computers seemed to be pressing in from everywhere. In the Sports Palace itself, in the big hall - the athletics hall - exhibitions were periodically held. Most often they seemed to be related to agricultural machinery: combine harvesters standing on the square in front of the Sports Palace were a regular sight, and inside the hall there would be stands and lots of men in suits with badges. But in those days in September, still summer-warm and dry, there was an exhibition on the computer theme.

At first I didn"t dare go in, but once Denis and I went down to the medical room to bandage blisters and we peeked in there together, and that morally cleared the path for me to go there alone later. I planned it deliberately and after training went into that hall.

There were computers with Nvidia GeForce cards that I was understanding better and better. A whole bunch of monitors with 3D graphics. Gaming computers with joysticks where you could try them, and boys like the one at the Shmyrkeviches" place were playing there. I grabbed some advertising leaflets and soon left.

Evening Saratov, bustle at the bus stops, kiosks with discs everywhere and computer shops every block. More and more people with mobile phones, the coolest of which could somehow be connected to a computer. Computers were, of course, not only about GTA, escapism and separating from society, but also the opposite - something through which to be part of society, a unifying theme with which people were moving into the future. And I too, for now, still wanted to move into the future.

.:::.

Part 54, Text 2. The beginning of Dire Straits - computer obsessions - parkour obsession - a flip from a ladder onto the ground - about shameful fuck-ups and the fading hope of physical mastery.

.::::.

One of those days another important event in my life happened at home. It was daytime, I was alone, and my mother came back with Uncle Seryozha. They had brought a DVD player.

By then I already understood the wires myself, so we didn"t have to wait a year and a half like with the camcorder and the VCR back in the day, and everything worked immediately. We didn"t have any DVDs, so along with the player they brought the first disc. It was something both my mother and Uncle Seryozha knew. A Dire Straits concert - On the Night. Uncle Seryozha had already watched it. Since it was music, we carried the Kenwood over to the TV as well, and I already knew how to connect it with the RCA cables.

They switched it on. There was that long intro before the first song. Judging by the look of the concert complex we concluded the concert was in the Colosseum. The band"s frontman - Mark Knopfler - looked a bit like Uncle Seryozha, and later, when my mother often put the concert on again, seemingly not only for the music but also to look at Mark Knopfler, I wondered how jealous Uncle Seryozha could have given her such a present.

When the band started playing, it was the first "real" music in our house. Something that, unlike even Aquarium"s Terrarium or the radio in my GTA, which were songs, was about music itself and musical mastery.

But at that moment it didn"t impress me much. As a guitarist - yes: with that fast solo in the first song I immediately considered Mark Knopfler an extremely high-level virtuoso. But the music itself... It was all perfect of course, and soon I picked up and started humming all the melodies. Yet it seemed to me that a band like that must be just one of many. Besides, they seemed kind of unknown. I had never seen them when I looked at the spines of music cassettes and discs. Everywhere there were things like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, which I already suspected were some kind of rock, and I assumed they must be even better than some Dire Straits with that modest half-singing, half-speaking Mark Knopfler. I simply hadn"t yet listened to all those Led Zeppelins and Pink Floyds.

Uncle Seryozha left a couple of tapes and some DVD that didn"t interest me and went home. Dire Straits kept playing.

In the evening my father came home, and he was just as happy about the DVD player and Dire Straits as my mother was. It turned out one of their songs had played at their wedding. That made Dire Straits our main "family" band. We had dinner that evening at the coffee table like on New Year"s Eve, and the concert kept playing on the television. My father said, "Just look how many people came to their concert. And where they"re performing! In the Colosseum! Think about it." In fact the concert was at some other arena, just with a facade like the Colosseum.

With all those unifying elements - that disc, the repairs in the kennel on Radishcheva - those were again days of the "fourfold" (including Murka) Lev-Kassil-style idyll, a domestic family atmosphere like in the times of early childhood beach trips and Niva drives into the mushroom forest.

At the weekend, toward evening when in Engels almost nothing would be open anymore, we had a sudden hope of reviving the old system unit, and my father and I walked around the computer shops. Only the small computer department in the Melody shop on Lev Kassil and Gorky was open. We brought the system unit there for diagnostics. We had to leave it for a day.

I had already been dropping into that department quite often, taking price lists and looking at discs on the rotating rack. Among programs I was interested in 3D Max. Uncle Seryozha said it was a very serious program, for professionals. Cartoons like Finding Nemo were made in it, as I understood, and also all games.

Among the games one strange title attracted me - Far Cry. Every time I went there I stared at that disc and reread the description and system requirements. On the cover there was a brutal guy with a machine gun in a tropical sunny blue lagoon. It looked like the film of the same name, and also like the tropical islands printed on deodorant cans in Grandma Valya"s bathroom when I was little. Like the Bounty advertisement. And like The Last Hero. It was exactly my aesthetic: green, blue and sand colour. I hated darkness and dullness unless there were neon lights like in Vice City. But I still didn"t really know what Far Cry was, and the mention of monsters put me off.

We came back for the system unit the next day. The technician said it was a Pentium I - even worse than my father"s dying Pentium II - and there was no point repairing it.

Several times in early autumn I met either Artyom, or Kozlov, or both of them in turns, and we walked through the now quiet park. We went into the shooting gallery, picked up pellets and fired them. Right in front of the shooting gallery there were brick-and-concrete alcove benches that no one ever sat on because for some reason wooden seats had never been installed on them.

Still full of dopamine from the approaching teenage years in which I imagined myself a physically confident favourite of women, I became obsessed with parkour. I didn"t know that was what it was called. While my companions wandered nearby I couldn"t stop jumping along the backs of those brick benches. I jumped this way and that, but I wasn"t doing anything that any boy with a top grade in PE couldn"t do. Any actual parkour jump there - not even talking about a flip - on those surfaces threatened paralysis and shitting into a bedpan for life.

One day I went to Kozlov"s place and after playing his Mafia and another military shooter where you had to shoot fascists in some dark castle - which didn"t interest me at all - we went out into his yard and climbed around on the garages. Engels courtyards still had a nineties atmosphere.

Then another day Artyom and I wandered through town and reached School No. 33. I did some nonsense on the parallel bars again, but there was also that wave-shaped ladder there. Its lower part was about waist height, and I decided to do a front flip from it like I had done from a ladder at the beach that summer. Only here below was hard ground and grass.

Artyom wandered somewhere nearby while I stood there a long time unable to decide. If you didn"t complete the rotation you"d crash onto your back from a metre and a half and spend the remaining eighty-nine years lying there. If you over-rotated you"d land on your head and neck and then probably that would just be it.

But I was a fucking idiot and jumped.

I landed perfectly upright, as I remember. I climbed back up immediately and did it again, and then again. But on about the third attempt the thing I had feared happened: my soles slipped slightly at the moment of push-off, there was almost no rotation, and I landed straight on my arse from a metre and a half. To my surprise my legs didn"t go numb, but I understood I had simply been lucky that it wasn"t my tailbone or my back.

Another day, like the year before, my mother and I went there in the evening to Aunt Lena, who as usual was the night watchwoman. Not very late though, around seven. While my mother stayed with her, I went out into the yard again. The two of them walked down the corridor of the empty school to the window nearest that sports ground so that while they talked they could watch me jumping.

I did the flips again. There were no falls, but of course I still managed to disgrace myself another way. At one point when I had to crawl under the ladder to the other side, I tried to do it in a nimble Jackie-Chan way with a little jump - and in that jump I smashed my forehead pretty hard into the ladder. Somehow I pretended nothing had happened to avoid embarrassment in front of the mothers at the window. It was exactly the kind of stupid blow two-year-old children give themselves on objects right in front of them.

I was almost in tears with anger that I was trying so hard, had spent two years fucking around with gymnastics, yet these fucking humiliating screw-ups at the level of toddlers followed me everywhere. I had never seen the objects of my envy - those solid guys like the triangular Armenian and the rest - make such ridiculous mistakes. Fuck, how much I pissed myself off.

The mothers left later, but I kept fooling around on that ground. It was already getting dark and overcast, so there were almost no people on the school grounds. Still, the territory was open, and sometimes someone passed along the running track around the football field.

I kept doing flips, especially trying to do them when someone walked closest by. As if I wasn"t doing it deliberately - as if it just happened that way.

And there was one completely idiotic moment: a couple was walking from afar, and I was already tired of doing flips, but I had to do one for them too. While they walked - and they walked slowly - I stood for a minute and a half or two on the edge of the ladder with my arms raised in preparation for the jump. I even looked back at them several times, and they saw.

When they finally came close, I did the flip.

The guy probably understood I had waited for them to show off, and just to react somehow - as if he too were a sportsman and connoisseur of proper manners - he said: "Well, you landed - now hold the landing," and demonstrated a neat upright gymnast"s finishing stance.

It was already agony. None of those shameful achievements gave me any feeling of being a "master of myself," and there was no prize here at all. A prize through physical competence required a completely different level.

If I had been Kuzikyan-Jackie-Chan, I would have come here in summer when groups of teenagers hung around, and started training modestly without any flips. Some bastards would have come up to hassle me, and then I would have done every flip necessary and scattered them in front of their girlfriends. Tails between their legs, they would have fucked off, and the girls would have come up to me, we would have talked and got acquainted. As always I would instantly have fallen in love with one of them and started coming here every evening, and we would have kept meeting. Maybe she would have wanted to learn some tricks too, and I would have spotted her. First physical contact. And two months later she wouldn"t want to go home, and my mother would be staying overnight somewhere at a recreation base, and we would go to my place, and everything would be like in the second half of the music video "Vsyo, chto tebya kasaetsya" by the band Zveri.

That was how it was supposed to be, and it was clear that it wouldn"t be.

.:::.

Part 54 text 3. Outsiderhood in the gymnasium,,, agony with the flip and losing to Yerokin,,, into the woods with the class and Yudina"s strange attention,,, twitchy computer-guy Yevstifeev.

.::::.

I never say anything about school. There was nothing there anyway. I wasn"t hanging out with Guzhik anymore. I wasn"t hanging out with anyone anymore. Just petty little dialogues.

Everyone there had gone nuts over mobile phones - all they did was stare into those tiny screens. Probably there were games on them. I never even looked, so I don"t know for sure. Except in fantasies about some kind of business-image, I didn"t need a mobile phone for shit. None of the adults around me had one yet either - except Uncle Sergey. And neither Kozlov nor Artyom had one, obviously.

I endlessly drew the logo of the V-Rock radio station from Vice City. One lesson, which for some reason took place in the classroom of our original Svetlana Gennadyevna, the teacher wasn"t there yet and everyone was going wild, while I was drawing. Little Makarov turned toward me, saw the logo, and said, "What, played too much Vice or something?"

Yeah. Played too much.

Then one day in computer class we were all sitting there, and for the umpteenth year already we were mindlessly copying into our notebooks some idiotic incomprehensible bullshit, which made me hate the word programming more and more - no matter how obsessed with computers I was at the time - and hate what I imagined it to look like (and I imagined it correctly). I was sitting at a desk with a girl from my class whose name I had written in my student list as "Natasha something." She wasn"t attractive at all, a bit overgrown, a C-student, and in all those years I had maybe exchanged a few dialogues with her. She seemed to come from a not very wealthy family, but as we sat there she said something about a computer at her place and about the internet. I clarified - what, you even have internet?

She said, "Of course."

Holy shit. I was fiercely jealous. Even she had internet. And people like Yerokin and Korolyov obviously did too. I was jealous of everyone just for the fact that they had computers at all. And modern ones, not those first Pentiums where nothing ran. Once upon a time I was the guy who had a computer at home before anyone else. Now I was down there with the most backward ones.

The more I agonized through sports.

It was still warm, and we had a PE class in that small courtyard. I wasn"t doing anything anymore except climbing onto that iron beam - the one where, in that happy episode long ago, Ermakova and Dubinina had tried to slide down - and, gathering as much attention from people around as possible, I did my stupid flip there too.

Zemskov seemed impressed, because he was standing nearby and telling me that his father, or someone, had been a gymnast.

Another classmate didn"t leave my flip unnoticed either - Yerokin. This time (remembering his outrage back in second grade when I either beat him or at least finished neck-and-neck with him in a sprint) I clearly understood that all this pissed him off. Now he even started going up to the teacher shouting, "Look what he"s doing!" - like I should be stopped in case I got injured and the teacher would have to answer for it. The teacher had already begun addressing me, but other kids distracted him.

Seeing that it didn"t work, Yerokin ran to the concrete wall at the dead end of the yard. But no, not to kill himself. He started jumping at it with one foot, trying to get higher and higher, reaching with his hands toward the top. Decided to conquer it. But it was impossible - the wall was at least two and a half meters high - so I lost interest and kept doing flips.

Then Yerokin shouted to everyone.

He was standing on top of that wall.

Holy shit.

Then, as was traditional at the beginning of the year in that gymnasium, the class had to go somewhere, so we went to the woods. With parents. Above the Polytechnic and that big Soviet hospital where I had barely dodged surgery on my dick, higher up in the hills there"s a sanatorium area called October Gorge. That"s where we went.

We all met at the beginning of Shelkovichnaya Street and walked uphill. The atmosphere was friendly, as usual in our class, and I was always walking next to someone from the class, but still, as I said, I didn"t really have any deep connection with anyone anymore - nothing like before, when there were chasing games and endless playful nonsense with Guzhik over Katya - and I remember it actually felt more interesting to fall behind the kids and walk next to my mom.

Maybe I was stuck in childhood too much, and all those playful things I felt were missing were simply no longer for our age. But what was for our age then? Phones? Instead of even playful interest in the opposite sex?

And at the same time there was a strange moment with Anastasia Yudina.

She was a small dark-haired girl with brown eyes and an overall Latin kind of appearance. If you want a more precise visual reference, I"d open Camila Cabello"s "Don"t Go Yet" video. Even temperament-wise she was similar - a bit of a restless little spark.

We were all carrying bags with food for the little campfire hangout, and the road was uphill. For some reason at some point I ended up carrying Yudina"s bag. I was carrying mine and hers, like a mule loaded with packs, while my mom even chuckled at the sight. Anyway, I don"t remember the details anymore, but there was some kind of increased attention toward me from Yudina. To the point where I concluded to myself that she had fallen in love.

Of course that was probably not the case, because after the trip to the woods there wasn"t a trace of that attention. But being the way I was, my whole life - except maybe that one day when the sluggish Elena Zakharova asked me to catch her a lizard, which I didn"t rule out might have been just a pretext - I counted this episode with Yudina as the first time in my life that I had interested a girl.

She was only becoming a girl, of course: they were all about twelve then, and the awkward childlike proportions hadn"t quite left her yet. Considering how quickly everything happened, and with my mom right there watching, I didn"t manage to orient myself at all. If there had been more time and no mom around, maybe I would have tested the waters with Yudina somehow. She was pretty, actually, though I had never really considered brown-eyed girls before. And she had intelligent, sensible manners.

In any case, I was probably completely mistaken.

We sat for two or three hours in some completely unpicturesque clearing. Roasted sausages. Half the time I stayed near my mom. She talked with someone, but it seemed like things were fading out for her too. She had always hated Saratov anyway - she was only there for me.

But I did go up to Yevstifeev. He was the main computer guy in the class. He wasn"t a nerd or a straight-A student, and he didn"t wear glasses. But somehow everyone knew he understood computers best. At some point he had even brought a computer magazine to school.

And the next day at school I went up to him several times again. Now I was specifically asking him about 3D graphics and 3D Max. He answered in his nervous manner, twitchily glancing around like some paranoid lunatic.

It"s incredible that someone like that later grew into a person who, at twenty, tried to cheer me up on the internet while I sat there telling everyone how I was waiting for my mom to die faster so that I could finally kill myself, because I didn"t fucking want to live without sexual relationships. I had everything better than he did - no financial problems, no tyrant stepfathers. None of my parents had died, like Dasha"s, the girl I suffered over at twenty.

An ideal life compared to everyone else.

And that ideal life was completely ruined by a simple biological problem.

Hell inside paradise.

.:::.

Part 54 text 4. Father the ditch-digger on Radishchev,,, the beginning of my obsession with Thermaltake cases,,, pull-up-bar agony - the first and last "suns",,, shit on Radishchev,,, Slava Stallone"s back-handspring and almost the end of my gymnastics.

.::::.

The family atmosphere, meanwhile, was still in the mood of the first three songs of a Dire Straits concert. Music was playing at home, I was still tearing my back apart trying to do a press-to-handstand, and after training I would sometimes get off at Chernyshevskaya and Radishchev and walk up Radishchev to our little shack. There my father was digging a trench across the yard toward the nearest manhole for the sewer line and crawling around in the basement under our apartment, picking through rusted junk that looked a hundred years old already. Then we would walk to Moskovskaya and ride home.

Once I came there and had to help him, so I climbed into the basement with him. From a hole in the rusted water pipes a jet of water was shooting out. The situation was like this: fix one thing, and immediately two new problems appear. My father was losing his temper, swearing already, sometimes theatrically tearing or throwing something in his characteristic way - and that always made me laugh. Sometimes after the evening grind he would go to Baba Valya"s place, while I went back to Engels.

One time he came home with an amazing story: during his basement wanderings he had found some kind of fossilized shell down there. He took it to his museum, and they confirmed it was prehistoric. The shell stayed in the museum. It became a popular family story.

While he was dealing with dirt and shit there, my mom came there to deal with the stove. She had called some stove mason, and he took several thousand rubles - which was a lot - but, according to her, didn"t actually do anything. It turned out the inside of the stove was empty, and properly it should have been lined with special brickwork that would heat up and retain warmth. The prospects for that apartment were shitty.

One evening my parents were there while I was walking to them along Michurina from Moskovskaya, collecting price lists from computer stores on the way. In a fancy nine-story building at 150/154 Michurina, in the semi-basement, there was an Atto store - one of the main computer store chains in those years. In the price list I grabbed there, in the section of computer cases, I saw for the first time some extremely expensive case by Thermaltake.

I went back into the store and asked for a printout about that case. It even had a power supply rated at something significant for those times - four hundred and twenty watts or so. On the black-and-white picture they gave me, it was a model with a front panel shaped like a wave-door. A glass side panel so you could see the guts of the system. They explained that the company had other models with unusual, cool designs too - supposedly even cooler than this primitive wave. And the doors on those cases could even be locked with a key.

None of those cases existed in stores in real life - everything was special order.

I was still basically a kid, and in computers, where hardware constantly becomes obsolete while the case remains the one permanent element, the visual component of my future build suddenly became the most important thing to me, and I became obsessed with having a cool case. I imagined myself in a cozy room, sitting in front of a ЖК monitor with a joystick, the screen showing sunny Vice City where I was doing motorcycle stunts, and next to me stood a system unit in that stylish Thermaltake case.

And suddenly everything else didn"t matter...

Then warm days returned - Indian summer - and it pushed me again to go outside to fight my physical inadequacy.

I came in track pants and gloves to the playground where the children"s area was. There was a sturdy pull-up bar under tall trees by the football field. Nobody was there now, evening was falling, and I hung there alone doing the same primitive things as a year earlier. Then I went somewhere else.

I reached the yard of the building at 10 Volokha Street. That same building which, during my earliest childhood trips to the "pig market," had still been a construction pit. Now it had long been finished, and there were lots of kids there. Even kids from nearby Khrushchyovkas came there.

I started hanging on the bar there too. I swung so much that I tipped forward - meaning I did my forward rotation like in the gym. The bar was solid, so it worked. I was wearing a track jacket, and I even took it off like a badass, and of course everyone watched me. Even though I was doing those rotations with my usual stupid crooked legs.

Then I climbed down and the kids started chatting with me about something, and I dared - on the damp, hard sand between the swings, almost like dirt - to do a running front flip. Something I would never have done without daring and spectators, afraid of under-rotating, smashing my tailbone and never getting up again.

But I landed in a very deep squat.

That was lame. To look cool you had to land at least in a half-squat.

I went home and called my mom to come watch. We came back there together, and I did the rotations again, and later she confirmed that at the top of the movement I looked all hunched and awkward - clearly barely managing it.

Over the next days I did that "sun" on other pull-up bars a few more times, maybe. The athletic spark had returned, and I rode my bicycle through already deserted autumn courtyards searching for bars and spectators. In the final days of my last pull-up-bar push I even rode all the way to the beach - to the bars right by the road going into Saratov, near the building at 6 Trudovaya Street. In Yandex Maps from 2024 you can still see those same old bars there, and even the same autumn - everything covered with fallen leaves like the day I was there, toward evening.

But I didn"t do the "suns" on those bars - they were unreliable. And the lower-back problem I had already mentioned was noticeably interfering: in the most stretched moments or sudden jerks there would be a sharp stab there.

Then came the day when my father had to replace the last drainage pipe on Radishchev - the one running in the corner of the kitchen from the neighbors upstairs - and finish the sewer repairs. I wasn"t there at the moment and arrived later. My parents were wiping the floor with rags, half laughing, half furious. My father said that beforehand he had gone upstairs to the neighbors - lumpens - and asked them not to flush the toilet while he was replacing the pipe. They said they understood. But either they didn"t understand after all, or - more likely - they simply decided to screw over people who were resolving apartment issues, and they did it literally.

My father kept repeating the word "lumpens."

That was how I learned that word.

They fixed the pipe, but it didn"t inspire any enthusiasm.

And then, on the last warm day - probably around Teacher"s Day, October fifth - the gymnasium was preparing for an event on the main square in front of the building. They brought our class outside along with several others, including the parallel class where Slava Stallone was. In the center of the square they had laid down a smooth wooden platform - apparently for break-dancers from the older classes.

While they weren"t there yet, students from our classes could go onto the platform and do whatever they knew how to do.

Nobody knew any break-dance stuff, not even Slava.

But he waved everyone to step aside, ran up - and did a round-off into a back handspring.

With straight arms.

Fuck, I felt so awful that now I"d almost be ready to believe he didn"t just do the round-off back handspring but even added a flip at the end. But the break-dance platform was small, so most likely it was just the handspring and maybe a little jump at the end.

I had seen back handsprings in very early childhood - in some action movies - and there they did them on hard floors. The handspring was the trick most strongly associated with acrobatics, the symbol of real action-movie stunt work, even more than a flip. And in real life I had only seen them in gyms, on soft surfaces.

And now this Slava did it on a hard floor - like in the movies, like in my personal standard of coolness.

I had planned to become the first Jackie Chan in the yard - especially at that age.

But no.

Slava beat me to it. Took my dream.

Right after that outdoor thing we had a shop class. I understood nothing and was in such hell that I wanted to stab my eye socket on a pencil. I sat there jerking off by squeezing my legs. I probably did it several times in a row.

I realized: I would probably have to quit gymnastics.

.:::.

Part 54 text 5. To Baba Valya,,, the cat Dulya,,, the first issue of Igromania,,, depraved porn on Ren-TV,,, the end of Radishchev,,, idyll with Mom under a hidden depression and the beginning of the green armchair,,, hatred of books,,, MTV shows.

.::::.

The rains and greyness began.

In late September and October I stayed overnight at Baba Valya"s a few times. Around the days of the sewer repairs a mottled cat appeared at her place - orange, black and white. She seemed already grown, wasn"t playful, and somehow reminded me either of a cow or of Baba Valya herself. She was pregnant too. Baba Valya said she"d picked her up somewhere on the street in a miserable condition on her way to our little shack on Radishchev, where she"d been going to help.

She called her Dulya. Or Dusya. I didn"t ask again, and with time I became more and more unsure. Much later, even though Baba Valya was an extremely close person to me, I would still be afraid of sounding like an idiot and in twelve years of that cat"s life I would never ask again. But since my father, who liked to fuss over simple words, often called her Dulcinea, and in that form I clearly heard the letter L, it was probably Dulya.

And when I was there then, Baba Valya also told the story with the pipes. My father had bought pipes for that trench - iron ones, incredibly heavy. Plastic technologies probably hadn"t reached our region yet. Somewhere in Zavodskoy he bought them, left them for the moment on the ninth floor, planning to transport them later. But Baba Valya had always been inclined to heroic surprises - like when she used to bring enormous bags of food to my birthday parties when I was little. So she called that old lady friend of hers, Baba Lena, with whom I had once played cards, and the two of them dragged those pipes by trolleybus into the centre - about fifty kilos, she said. She had lived her whole life with that Christian belief that effort would be rewarded.

Most likely Baba Valya was also the one who bought me my first issue of Igromania. The October issue, with some monster-woman on the cover whose face looked like Katya Ilyina"s. Two discs came with it. It was the perfect magazine. For the first few days I ran around with it everywhere. It wasn"t even so much about games as about kindred spirits. I would read it for many months afterwards. Looking now at the articles in that issue, everywhere I recognise places where my vocabulary picked up words and phrases I"ve used ever since.

But the main episode from those nights at Baba Valya"s was this.

We were alone in her living room late in the evening. She was already dozing on the sofa behind me, while I sat in an armchair waiting for the porn on Ren-TV. It started. By the time the naked scenes came on, Baba Valya was already snoring, and I could safely watch without sound. The film was far more depraved than Kozlov"s cassette or anything I had glimpsed before. There was some kind of sex club, and the women - though at that point you wanted to call them girls because of their youth and smooth shaved skin - stood in a row, bent over with their skirts lifted and panties down, and the camera moved along their identical juicy arses with leather dumpling-folds. The sight made my head spin.

I couldn"t take it anymore and risked jerking off right there beside Baba Valya, who could wake up at any moment from another snort of snoring. There was more and more depravity in that film, including someone fucking a woman in the arse in a toilet. I was seeing that for the first time. Until then I had treated the whole phenomenon of anal sex as something half-mythical, thinking that in reality it probably existed only among the most deranged grown men in prison.

Those were the most depraved porn scenes I saw before the internet, and the memory of them is closely tied for me to the first torments of my anal-phobia, which would begin early the next year - so I"ll mention them again there. But for now, although I was already sliding into bodily fixations, those weeks were for me more a kind of broad existential gloom.

I was never again in the apartment on Radishchev. Everything there happened very quickly, and somewhere in early November Mom sold it. She added a bit to the price, though not as much as people who buy apartments for renovation and resale would.

My father, probably downcast like Baba Valya, was no longer living with us again.

With gymnastics I switched to the mode I had inherited from Mom: "it"ll sort itself out." I kept going, but without the third Saturday training, and judging by how few memories I have from the gym at that time, I was skipping some of the main ones too. The end would come in November, but even now in October I don"t remember the two-trips-a-day rides to Saratov anymore.

It seems this was already the time - which I had said would come - when Mom and I would often decide, especially if we overslept after somehow "forgetting" to set the alarm, that I simply wouldn"t go to school at all. I told her about my lower back, and about various other half-invented bullshit, as usual. I supposedly had a serious scoliosis, though of course I couldn"t see it myself, and only Mom kept asking me to stand straight with my back to her and lamenting. And I would keep joking, deliberately twisting crooked, and we"d laugh.

We kept doing homework in the kitchen in the evenings so I wouldn"t fall behind, bickering about little things, but mostly those days are remembered, on the contrary, as an idyll - with the Prichuda cake, jokes, and falling asleep in the same bed with Murka at our feet, talking and laughing for a long time.

And if I"ve got it right, these were the days of the nightly ritual of going out for a Nuts bar. At 20 Freedom Square, a hundred metres from the house, a second Pyatyorochka supermarket had already opened - a small one where you had to leave your bags in lockers and take baskets - and we"d go there to buy a Nuts, a chocolate bar with hazelnuts. That Nuts was running a lottery, and on the inside of the wrapper there were inscriptions you had to check. Every late evening, sometimes right before closing, we would get dressed and walk there специально for it.

And when I wasn"t in the kitchen with Mom, I increasingly settled again into the green armchair in the living room by the end window, with the Kenwood behind me - after the Dire Straits period we had returned it to its place in the wall unit. Dire Straits stayed the soundtrack of warm, almost summer days, but now, given everything, cold melancholy was required - and I switched my Evanescence back on.

Fuck how I hated all those books standing behind me. That fucking War and Peace: yellow pages, a mountain of text, and all - as I thought then - about the fucking Patriotic War, tanks. Parades, memorials, soldiers" cemeteries, old women and funerals. I"m inserting here a paragraph I wrote earlier for another year but didn"t include then. It fits here.

That fucking living room on Lev Kassil Street with its dim light, the TV showing badly, the lack of heating... Evening. While Mom reheats cabbage soup whose barely chewable meat will get stuck in your teeth and everything will hurt, you sit there in a sweater and wool socks in that green armchair and try to get interested in those fucking books which, Father says, you must read - "there"s strength in them." Fuck. And so you pick up that fucking Zoshchenko (that was in sixth grade) and try to get into it... Some play, some fucking character going "ahem-ahem-uhh," supposedly funny, and the scene is just the same kind of evening everyday bullshit the characters are living through... But you close the thing again because it"s simply fucking unnecessary. I don"t fucking need to know anything about the lives of Mitrofanovs and Panfilov Semyonoviches who lived a hundred years ago. Fuck it, I"d rather put on the Spider-Man cassette and watch it again at eleven.

Those bursts of hatred toward books - which haven"t disappeared even now that I"ve become a writer myself and have read War and Peace and other major classics - come from the fact that throughout my childhood I heard from my father, and later read on the internet, about all these people who in childhood devoured books endlessly and supposedly became successful, famous, satisfied in life because of that reading.

Since childhood I tormented myself with questions: why didn"t other people come to hate books the way I did? Compared to what many of them had in everyday life, I lived in paradise. How did it happen that they weren"t driven mad by all that yellow-paged crap and the aching behind your ears when you sit there trying to get interested in something you absolutely don"t need? My ears hurt, I was cold, and what I was reading was completely fucking unnecessary to me. Were all those people masochists or what?

And other questions like that. Why didn"t everyone go insane from their own Lev-Kassil-style life? Why do my classmates tolerate getting up early for school? Why don"t they look like they want to escape into escapism, drawing the V-Rock radio logo? They even joke about the hardships of student life, about the hardships of everyday life, the morning frost - all that. Bastards.

Fuck, I was enduring this life by the last of my strength.

And in the end it would turn out that I was the "defective" one.

I watched TV again. On MTV there was Pimp My Ride, where the rapper Xzibit took some loser"s wreck of a car, sent it to a garage for upgrades, and then returned it pimped out. And it was as if that car had been the only thing missing for the guy to become cool - at the end they"d show little scenes of how his life had transformed.

And in the evenings there was another show. Date My Mom. Or maybe Dismissed. They"d find an even bigger loser, a complete nerd, and, as I remember it, train him to be a macho. In the end they"d arrange a date with a girl, and when he walked her home, if she liked him she would ask: "Do you want to come in?"

There was one episode where the guy was an incredibly strong loser, almost a caricature. His ambitions were Napoleonic: he declared that he wanted to be such a womaniser he"d practically become a pimp. The host said that was nonsense from sperm-toxicosis and the guy simply needed a normal relationship.

Despite my depressive mental collapse and how well I understood that guy, at that time I would still have been horrified if someone had told me that this - and even worse - was my future. Intellectually I always understood my trajectory. But the hope instilled by my parents - especially my father - that nothing bad would happen, that I wasn"t some bastard but a good boy - never disappeared completely from the background.

.:::.

Part 54 text 6. Phone mania among classmates,,, masturbation and bodily fixation,,, the fateful biology lesson about worms,,, the penultimate training during the holidays,,, rented tapes,,, I almost strangled Murka.

.::::.

At the gymnasium, where I showed up only intermittently, I remember the dark corridors of the new wing during breaks and the mass psychosis around mobile phones. Even the last ones who had once been third-tier in the class - Arik, Guzhik - now had mobiles. As if that suddenly made them equal to the rest.

Those were the months of the hype around Night Watch - some strange Russian film with Konstantin Khabensky where there were both cops and vampires, and a song that now played from all the more advanced phones. "Advanced" meant ones with colour screens that could play the actual song. On the first-generation phones, which could only beep and which most people still had, you had to buy melodies - ringtones - by sending paid SMS messages.

Mobiles weren"t just about showing off or games, but about the beginning of that kind of wastefulness too - spending money on some bullshit I simply couldn"t relate to, which made me feel further and further away from my peers.

At home in the afternoons I was alone for long stretches and had already developed the stable habit of lying down and jerking off on the big bed in the small room. Still like a child, without any sophistication: lying on my back, holding my dick with my fingers like a pencil. I was trying hard to pull back the attached foreskin, and there had already been significant progress - the head came out halfway now. I even told Mom about it, bragging that I could now piss without spraying my trousers and the toilet, and she said, "Great!" (she had stopped those sittings beside me in the bathroom after bathing and the requests to "pull the little dick," leaving that topic to me a few years earlier).

But full exposure of the head was still a long way off.

When I jerked off it irritated me if Murka climbed onto the bed at that moment. It also irritated me to jerk off in socks, and in general I always wanted to undress completely, but that was too dangerous. The intercom had a safety feature (or what I thought was a malfunction): it beeped when someone opened the building door with our key. That would give me time to dress (in cold weather I was usually layered like an onion), but you never knew - what if Mom came in with someone else, not using the key?

Apart from those daytime hours alone, there were no other moments to masturbate. We slept together, and she still came into the bathroom when I was bathing.

These were times of frequent anatomical questions for me. I haven"t mentioned it, but since the last New Year, or even earlier, I had had a book on human anatomy packed with illustrations. I had pointed it out myself to Mom in the bookshop on Kirov, and she bought it later. It was from that book that I learned about aortas and all that pulsating vulnerability and fragility of the human body. I constantly opened the illustration of the penis in cross-section, where it was clear it was basically just a sponge, and tormented myself rereading the explanatory text about it filling under high blood pressure with blood.

I had already seen the word clitoris there too, though I didn"t understand what it was, and until almost fifteen I would think it was just another name for the vaginal opening. The word also unpleasantly reminded me of "collector." So whenever I heard clitoris, I remembered that drainage well between Petrovskaya and Telman where once I sank ankle-deep into warm sludge.

And then, in the days before the holidays, there was a biology lesson that became fateful for me. They told us about worms.

So that was what all that lifelong insistence on washing hands before eating had really been about - not etiquette. I sat there stunned, trying in vain to digest the information pouring over me. Beef tapeworm - ten metres! Fuck.

On the page of the textbook there was a diagram of the cycle of parasitic worms in nature. I remembered our fishing trips with my grandfathers in the past, how we approached little rivers near villages where the wet sucking ground was full of deep disgusting holes from cow hooves, and everywhere there was their shit, and how many times I had dropped something there and picked it up, and then taken sandwiches with those same hands for a snack.

That whole place must have been crawling with helminth larvae.

Then the teacher"s explanation reached the main point, and she used words familiar from the clinic posters - enterobiasis, pinworm eggs, faeces. She said: "You scratch yourselves there, then forget and put your fingers in your mouth - and that"s it, you"re infected."

Zhenya Zlotina, a dark-haired overgrown girl, a C-student - who later in life, judging by what I saw on VKontakte, grew into a rather brazen slutty type - didn"t understand either and asked: "Scratch what exactly?" To which Boldyrev, in his usual clever tone and manner, without lifting his head from the textbook, answered: "Your arse."

Fuck...

I went to one training session during the school holidays. It was only in the morning, and there were boys there from the first shift too. That bastard Sukachev-Korovin was there, the one I envied, and he was already doing everything.

In the changing room, while we were dressing, I glanced sideways at his bag with Korol i Shut on it, and Denis, whom I was talking to at that moment, suddenly said: "I"m going to switch to handball anyway." That nasty feeling shot through me - when others somehow progress or move on to something else, while you remain in place, ending up in a group with a new generation, the little kids. Might as well smash your head against the wall.

Outside it was eleven-o"clock sunshine and November chill. Denis lived in Zavodskoy, and I either arranged beforehand by phone or simply decided to drop in on Baba Valya unannounced - I still had my trolleybus pass, so riding around was free anyway - and we went there together. As always, we talked about something computer-related on the way.

Morning roads were fast - ten or fifteen minutes and we arrived. We got off one stop past Baba Valya"s, near Gymnasium No. 34, crossed the road, and I walked with him deeper into the courtyards to his building. I wasn"t in any hurry. I had been in those courtyards twice before - once in very early childhood when a Khrushchyovka collapsed there, and another time when I had walked with Baba Valya to the door of that tireless friend of hers, Baba Lena, who lived there with her alcoholic children and who would never appear in my story again.

There I said goodbye to Denis - and that too was forever.

When I got home, I fell ill for the rest of the holidays. Every evening I sat in the armchair by the window in the living room, with Evanescence playing behind me. Soon I was sitting there during the day too. MTV was on the TV, and in the evenings Mom and I would go out for a Nuts and sometimes rent films for me.

I, Robot.

Night Watch, which Mom and I watched with a Prichuda cake, expecting something special and exciting, but the film turned out to be some strange muddled nonsense.

Uncle Sergey had left that DVD of Asterix and Obelix vs Caesar, but I thought it was something for kids and didn"t watch it. But I did watch the cassette he had brought that same day - the day of Dire Straits - The Italian Job. Again that theme of camaraderie which year after year existed for me only in dreams.

I wasn"t going to gymnastics - supposedly because of illness, though by some point the illness had already passed.

I couldn"t establish even an approximate date when I strangled Murka. But in 2005 I probably wouldn"t have touched her because of my bacillophobia, and 2003 was too early. Somewhere during 2004, in some desperate period of course.

After lunch. Sunny outside. A very Lev-Kassil kind of moment.

Mom wasn"t home. Murka and I were alone. I sat there dissatisfied with everything. Not that I was in some negative affect - rather I was simply empty, unable to see any goal that would make life valuable, which for me has always been the main source of satisfaction. In such moments I always started picking on others and harming them. And besides, I probably hadn"t jerked off for a while. Well - a few days, say because of illness. The "sucking" potential in my loins had built up.

So I started pestering Murka as usual, chasing her all over the apartment.

I described it a couple of times in diaries, but I wasn"t aiming for strict accuracy, so somewhere I wrote that I came first and then went to strangle her. Naturally it was the other way round.

I drove her into the kitchen - under the table or the mustard-coloured armchair - grabbed her and dragged her out. If there had once been some logic to tormenting her, now everything had mixed into a single mess with all my despair of those months and turned simply into this sadistic excitement whose force now demanded more than just scaring and hitting.

Murka tore up my hands, but I sat down with her on the swivel chair and began strangling her on my knees. I was just as out of control and reckless as in those earlier moments when I jerked off by squeezing my legs while sitting at the table with Mom, or during school breaks when people were practically talking to me at the same time. And like when I destroyed the toys I loved most - not in monetary value but emotionally - or smashed things like those skis. I couldn"t be stopped.

That recklessness always seemed to come "from the dick." As always it felt like something was sucking there. But the sensation had nothing to do with sex. It was neurological. Just as productive dopamine and optimism seemed to connect in the back of the body with the rectal area, so destructive adrenaline born from serotonin-deficient despair seemed to connect along the front of the body with the dick.

It had been like that all my life - especially in moments of sadism.

For fifteen or twenty seconds I strangled her, and she stopped struggling. I opened my hands. She slid off my knees, fell onto the parquet under the table, and lay there motionless.

I thought that was the end.

If she hadn"t moved after another ten seconds or so, I probably would have done what I had once long ago planned to do with the heavy hammer we had lying there. But she moved. And I couldn"t bear it anymore - I ran into the small room, sat on the bed and came by squeezing in convulsions.

After that I burst into tears right there on the bed.

Then I went back to Murka. She was sitting already, constantly sticking out her tongue as if trying to lick herself - probably because I had squeezed her throat so hard.

I started hugging her through tears, saying "Sorry" and all the rest.


.:.

___Part 55.

.:::.

Part 55 text 1. The beginning of the November Balabanov-style gloom,,, the end of my gymnastics,,, anatomical depression in the green armchair,,, suicidal urges and childish ideas about the physiology of death.

.::::.

If the day with Murka happened around then, then that must have been the last sunny day of that year that stayed in my memory. After that came weeks of pure Balabanov-style gloom.

I went to the gymnasium for a few of the first days after the holidays. You could feel that the end was close.

On one of those weekdays came my last day of gymnastics. Afternoon shift. It was already dark outside the gym windows. Denis wasn"t at practice. After almost two weeks of illness I apparently didn"t have to do the routine, so I just wandered around the hall on my own, doing whatever I felt like on the free apparatuses. Torturing my wrists doing circles on the pommel mushroom, failing to hold handstands on the low floor parallel bars, uselessly pumping some random muscles. And at the end I practiced vaults with a running start over that signature horse shaped like a tongue. Fuck, every time I remember that horse I instantly get associations with oral sex. Here I am, completely nuts already, sitting here typing all this.

By that day not only the traction of the body in various hangs but even jumping onto the springboard sent sharp pain into my lower back. I did a few vaults, got bored - and left.

I couldn"t allow my mom to suspect that I had some kind of depression. It wasn"t even about shame, like when you cry and show weakness. Well, yes: quitting gymnastics is about weakness. Shame. Defeat. But this was too big a defeat. Not just losing some fight with another kid. For two years, day after day, gymnastics had been the only thing I was obsessed with. And now suddenly I"d just quit and sit in front of the TV? Obvious depression - and not a childish one. Why should my mom see that? She wouldn"t be able to help anyway, she"d only suffer for me. She might even guess about my suicidal moods - and that would be the worst. So it seemed best to smooth the transition somehow, find another interest and plausibly switch to it.

When I got home, I took a notebook, a pen, some kind of board, a book on anatomy - and by placing the board across the armrests I made myself a tabletop and sat down in the green armchair. I decided I would become an anatomy nerd. This was around November fifteenth, after which I"d again be on sick leave for ten days with some gastro nonsense - and not for the last time.

Behind me Evanescence was playing on repeat, the TV was quietly chattering in front of me, and in front of me I now spent long November evenings copying out the names of all those arteries and trying to memorize them. Mom would bring me something to snack on, and I would even eat my main meals right there, putting the plate on the board in front of me. I finally surrendered to that theme from early childhood - the cozy mouse-hole comfort from Tom and Jerry - this sitting in an armchair under a lamp with everything necessary for life within arm"s reach. Now I was drawn more to the minimalism of a hut and a sweater by the fireplace than to the mansions of Santa Barbara or lying on a poolside lounger in nothing but swimming trunks.

Most likely it was during those weeks - when at least every third day included a morning visit to the clinic - that Mom and I discovered the chocolate-covered cookies at the "Skazka" store and from then on, for the next two years of our Lev-Kassil-style life, kept buying them. We called them "binoculars," because they were packed as two stacks of dark brown cookies tightly wrapped in plastic. We would eat them already on the way home, because usually it was after some fasting medical tests. And in the evenings too - with cocoa and "Prichuda" cookies. Mostly they"re associated in my memory with my kingdom in the green armchair.

In the armchair, like in suspended animation, I sat every evening. But during the day... At some point powerful suicidal urges began. Something pushed me out into the street, and several times in a row, getting ready to go out, I was full of the thought: All right, that"s it, now I"m going to kill myself somewhere.

I imagined walking out under that heavy November sky, running up and jumping from the roof of Serebryakova"s building or some other house with a technical floor. I remembered scenes on a technical floor from the sitcom Ostorozhno, Modern-2 and thought that if they could get up there easily, maybe the roof exits were open too. But in the panel buildings - at Grandma Valya"s, Aunt Larisa"s, and in our own building, whenever I"d happened to be upstairs - I always remembered the metal gate locked with a padlock, and I assumed that in those buildings you simply couldn"t get onto the roof.

I had a whole bunch of strange, still childish ideas in general. For example, considering the option of hara-kiri: having seen murders only in movies where they often looked like a single stab in the stomach, I accordingly thought you died from one stab and in a few seconds. Despite my little sessions with the anatomy book, it would take me a long time to understand that the point is hemorrhage. That to be sure you"d basically have to riddle the torso with wounds to get anywhere near a guarantee of death. In that sense I was lucky I didn"t act on my impulse to kill the Kazakh kid back then (which I imagined doing with a single stab), and that I wouldn"t carry out a similar impulse the following year in another future episode. Still, I rejected hara-kiri because of the pain, even if only for a few seconds.

I also had an incorrect childish stereotype about jumping off roofs. I thought you would definitely die even from falling off a three-story building. I imagined you simply hit your head on the asphalt and by some mechanism automatically switched off forever.

Damn, unraveling those memories of my limited understanding of the world back then, I remember that I still believed eating wolfberries was one hundred percent fatal, and that any viper bite was too - despite everything I had read in books. Yes, exactly. I clearly remember how death seemed automatic, and dangers were understood in black-and-white terms. I also thought that if you ran under a car you would definitely die, by the same kind of magical switch-off principle from the impact. And with bullets, I thought one was enough - as long as it hit the head or the body.

I still had this idea that the body was like some electronic device, like a computer, where even a minor mechanical damage to one part causes the entire system to stop working due to a kind of electrical short circuit.

Exactly, exactly. Only the following year - when I would be playing GTA and there would be a Kalashnikov there, and I"d ask my father something about it, and he"d explain that rifles are called rifled because the barrel has grooves inside so the bullet spins and (as he somehow explained to me, or as I understood it) moves zigzagging inside the target"s body - only then would I realize what the real necessary point of cutting and piercing actions on a body in order to kill actually is.

My genuine interest in anatomy lasted only a few days, and after that it remained nothing more than a cover, and the same vacuum formed that I described in the episode about Murka. Mixed with the collapse of my struggle for physical competence, it turned into a level of fucked-upness I had never experienced before in my life.

I put on my gray down jacket, my ugly boots - no longer bothering about any visual image of myself or anything connected with me - and, telling my mom I was going to walk around the shops, went out. While waiting for the elevator I would look at the horizontal windows between the floors and try to figure out if I could climb out through them. No. They were too high.

.:::.

Part 55 text 2. Balabanov-style wandering through November Engels,,, a brief gambling impulse,,, a small bad-kid experience at the market fair,,, the end of the gymnasium and "blood" in my stool.

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Stepping out of the entrance onto the street, however, I immediately lost the suicidal urge: it was overridden by the usual stress of simply being outside. What mattered more was that there were passersby all around, windows from which someone might be looking at me - and other things in that same sociophobic spirit. In that state you couldn"t stay inside yourself. As a result I really did just begin my price-list raids on the computer stores in Engels. Besides "President-Agency" and that department in "Melodiya," there was one at 57 Petrovskaya - a simple local computer shop but with a nice thick price list - and another on Kommunisticheskaya, in an old almost private house at... actually that address doesn"t exist anymore. Opposite the Lazurny shopping center, where once our Niva used to be parked, and even earlier there had been a muddy market there, just like in the first Brother.

Occasionally near the museum I might run into my father, who came here to work every day from Zavodskoy District, and maybe I had already gone inside to see him there for the first time and had already met the women who would appear in the last half-year of my childhood story. That funny guy Sanya Krylov used to drop by the museum - mainly to see my father, though apparently not only him, since although he was the town"s local madman, he was also a valuable finder of historical artifacts. At that time my father was still living at Grandma Valya"s and wasn"t visiting us, though it was already easy to assume that for New Year he would most likely come to us again.

Other than heading toward the market fair, I didn"t know where else to go, so that"s where I wandered. Somewhere along Kommunisticheskaya, past the building where my mom once worked, past the barbershop from my very early childhood, past the passage behind the theaters, across Teatralnaya, stopping to look at phones in the first Euroset store in the city, in Yarik"s building. Then further on. On the left - the bread shop from early childhood that we hadn"t visited in ages, and the entrance to the architecture department where Uncle Sergey had long since stopped working. All of it under a heavy sky, through the slush of the first snow. A car from the road could splash you head to toe from a puddle.

And also there on Kommunisticheskaya, before the Zhiguli café and across from the building where Kozlov and I had once seen Serebryakova, there was something called a pawn shop. Through the windows it looked like an electronics store, and I went in there a couple of times and looked at cassette decks and music centers that were already on their way out. I just didn"t realize it yet and felt their era as if it were still at its peak. At home I therefore made more and more attempts to figure out our music center - recording onto cassettes and what other functions it had. I became obsessively interested in the back side of the music center: all those different connectors, the RCA jacks for the red-and-white plugs. I"ll return to that soon, but first I"ll finish the story about the fair.

At the fair I spent a couple of days picking up coins like the previous year, but then I got fixated near a slot machine at the first fair - the one by the exit from the meat section of the covered market. At first it was supposedly again for the five-kopeck coins that sometimes rolled away unnoticed there, but in fact the real motive was the desire to finally drop coins into the machine myself. For several days I went there waiting for a moment when nobody was around. Finally I got my chance, walked up and dropped in a couple of five-kopeck coins - and about eight came pouring back out. I threw a couple more in, but those were wasted, so I left immediately. Four new five-kopeck coins in about thirty seconds was a very impressive result, and at home I even bragged about it to my mom. Still, somehow I concluded that luck like that would happen much less often than not, and it wasn"t worth doing. So I never went back to play again. Although, given my severe depression, I had every prerequisite for sliding into some kind of gambling addiction.

There was another theme along those lines. I had already mentioned in the summer that I sometimes had urges to steal something. What I actually meant was simpler: I imagined noticing some item that had fallen from a stall, picking it up, and walking away with it. That seemed to me less unacceptable than directly stealing from a stall. During the time I"m describing this idea was especially obsessive, and once I dared to try it. In the first rows of the first fair, where there were stalls with cheap junk like "everything five rubles" and cosmetics, I saw some little bottle under the perfume stall. But as soon as I picked it up, the saleswoman immediately noticed and said, "Let me see that." I had to give it back - doing it in such a way as if I hadn"t intended to walk away with it, though both of us understood perfectly well that if she hadn"t said anything, I would have. And I immediately left the fair.

But in this particular situation I didn"t fall into the anti-social resentment I described earlier in the year - I mean resentment at being perceived as a bad kid. Because at the time I"m describing now, in some moments I was already not entirely against being seen as a bad kid. There will be more of that later.

In general, most of the month passed in this wandering through the cold November Engels, forgetting myself, thinking sometimes about death and sometimes about money, and in the evenings sitting by the Kenwood with Evanescence - which annoyed my mom so much that once she shouted from the kitchen to "turn off that whining already." The slush had already frozen over. My sick leave ended, and I had to go to the gymnasium.

At the gymnasium it was already the end. Two days, maybe - and that was it. The twenty-sixth and the twenty-eighth of November, perhaps.

Picking me up after classes as we walked along Gorky Street, my mom told me the news: "Grandpa is back." Meaning permanently back on Frunze Street, and things with that other woman were over. The joy here wasn"t so much for myself - it was hard to miss that kind of grandfather - but for Grandma. At least she"d come back to life there; she had been like a ghost lately, and in that house you couldn"t help thinking of her whenever MTV played the King and Jester video "The Cursed Old House."

And that evening at home I took a dump, and there seemed to be bloody spots on the turd. I called my mom to show her, and being a hypochondriac she of course declared that it was blood. Who knows whether it was blood or not. But that evening we finally felt that the commuting would stop. Especially since I already had nothing but failing grades, even zeros, and I knew none of the school program anymore and it was impossible to make me study.

When we flushed the toilet, I fell into that typical caricatured male gloom: I"m dying. Being a neurotic who had grown up with a highly neurotic, illness-panicking mother - and therefore a hypochondriac myself, especially preoccupied with bodily things - that state always became particularly dramatic for me. I lay down on the bed in the small room, and my mom lay down beside me in worried silence.

Still, in the spirit of the saying "life hangs by a thread...", partly taking advantage of the moment and partly in genuine drama, I asked her directly at that moment:

"Will we buy a computer?"

She nodded silently.

And on Monday we were planning to go to the clinic.


.:::.

Part 55 Text 3. The End of the Pig Market in My Childhood Story,,, Going on Long Sick Leaves,,, The Beginning of Korol i Shut..

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On the weekend, November 27-28, we went to the kolkhoz-or, as I had called it in early childhood, the "pig" market-and wandered among the stalls. I was fully absorbed in the round kiosks selling audio cassettes. Every display featured the new Korol i Shut album Mutiny on the Ship. Back then, I didn"t know what was new and what was old. Beyond my interest in their music, I was drawn to the cover itself-blue colour scheme, a sort of primitive Petrine aesthetic in both visuals and title. It triggered associations with a cartoon about musketeers from my early childhood and the winter days on Frunze Street. I also lingered at the electronics stalls, checking out portable tape recorders and various cables.

This was my last visit to that market that I remember. I was already growing, soon able to wear clothes off my father"s shoulders and my successful Uncle Vanya"s, who gave my father his barely worn clothes-so I no longer needed the tiny childhood sizes.

I forgot to mention: earlier, probably in spring of that year, driven by a desire to save money, I had gone to trade some of our old clothes at a flea alley in front of the market. At the start of my school years, my mother had a strange hat shaped like Monomakh"s crown-we called it that-except without the cross at the top. It was the only item that interested anyone: some guys asked the price, tried it on, and laughed. The hat eventually went to Frunze-Grandfather would wear it while sitting on a bench near the toilet. And that"s the end of the "pig" market in my childhood story.

On Monday, November 29, we visited a surgeon at the clinic. The notes there, as I now see, mention nothing about blood, only pain-but that was my invention at the time. Nothing actually hurt; yet, as a mild hypochondriac, I was genuinely worried by the suspicion of blood in my stool.

Around November 29-30, my mother and I rented the cassette of Around the World in Eighty Days with Jackie Chan. A fantastic film-it immediately became one of my favourites. In the spirit of infantile "Italians in Russia," where no one ever died or faced real consequences-the hallmark of those SSRS-era comedies I had long reflected on-I watched the tape that evening. The next morning we woke early, supposedly to go to the gymnasium, but for reasons likely tied to my "condition," we stayed home, and I watched it again. That morning, grandma and grandpa arrived with something-probably jam and potatoes, as usual. I never returned to the gymnasium after that.

Korol i Shut, as a theme, developed rapidly and unexpectedly for me. Not long ago, I"d been into "neon" and "noir" Vice City-style hits with synthesiser tones; in September, Dire Straits had passed through as a kind of significant future investment. And now, suddenly, this very Russian, local, "garage-like" melodic rock filled my ears. Later I"d learn it was punk-but I never understood why, since punk was associated with mohawks, marginality, or even sloppiness. The carefully crafted harmonies and memorable melodies of Korol i Shut reminded me only of the best classic rock bands-making me feel even more at odds with adult rock purists I"d meet, both in stores and later online, who dismissed Korol i Shut in favour of some fucking Deep Purples or Yeses.

MTV helped: besides The Cursed House, their November 13 album constantly featured the song Harry"s Revenge. Even now, as a seasoned vivisector of melodic aesthetics, I can pinpoint why the main melody struck me immediately: pentatonic runs, particularly the top note a whole step below the tonic, triggered nostalgic memories of Spider-Man, Mortal Kombat, and countless other past moments where that note appeared prominently. At the time, I analysed nothing-every impression was new. This pentatonic line, like all Korol i Shut hits, mingled with late-autumn gloom, dark sludge, and the first frosts: garages, markets with brown puddles and khachapuri stalls, cassette kiosks, and flying Kirieshki wrappers caught in the icy wind-all that cold, "90s atmosphere tied to the first Brat film and stalls with rocker gear.

Finally free of fucking schoolwork and already exhausted by Evanescence"s wailing, on the last day of November, under a grey midday sky, I deliberately headed toward the Volokh-Telman intersection-like I was going to the market-where a small kiosk sold cassettes and CDs. I bought a Korol i Shut compilation tape.

It was either pure coincidence (the first songs you hear from an artist you fall in love with are somehow perfectly aligned to your taste) or the "first encounter phenomenon." The tape included: Confession of a Vampire, The Forester, The Cursed Old House, Memories of Past Love, I"ll Jump Off a Cliff, Instrument, The Men Ate Meat. That order-both on the tape and in my personal ranking. Only Harry"s Revenge was missing. The first song unexpectedly became my favourite heavy track, only rivalled by one from Vice City. Apart from perhaps the too-simple Instrument, which felt like a bonus track, I classified all songs as hits-just like Evanescence, Grebenshchikov"s Terrarium, or anything from The Lion King. Sadly, no experiment could verify whether I"d have loved another album the same way; and MTV featured other bands-Korni, Umaturman, Tokio Hotel, Zveri-which left no mark. The "first encounter phenomenon" remained unresolved.

.:::.

Part 55 Text 4. Audiophile Obsession and Speaker Experiments,,, Moving to the Small Room,,, Attraction to Post-Soviet Yards with a Rammstein Vibe,,, Scavenging for Speakers,,, Meeting Aunt Lena and the Rammstein Disc.

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For a couple of days-or less-I sat in the green chair under the Kenwood, looping that cassette. Then I got up and went on to experiment with my father"s enormous Amphiton speakers, which had been in the hall forever. I inspected the back: the terminals clearly for wires, similar to those on the Kenwood. Knowing nothing else about audio, I stripped some two-core wire, moved the Kenwood to the big speakers, and plugged it in by chance. Miraculously, it worked-full, strong bass instantly creating the atmosphere of a studio or live stage.

I then plunged into an audiophile obsession. It merged with my recent fixation on cosy nests: the chair, the board as tabletop, spending days there without moving. Now I wanted a proper audiophile nest-speakers close on either side, lying comfortably on the carpet. The cold hall, drafty from the balcony, wouldn"t do, so my mother and I moved the big speakers to my middle room. I arranged them, set up a heater beside me, and lay on the carpet in my own little idyll.

For two days, I stayed there, looping Korol i Shut. Gradually, I noticed the lyrics, discovering the appeal of obscene, primitive words. In The Cursed Old House, that stupid line "I"ve dreamed for so many-many years only of food" could only be mentally replaced with another word. Instrument was clearly about penises, and the line "I led a girl into the shed" resonated with me, having spent my childhood exploring Frunze sheds. My carpet-laying was briefly interrupted by trips to Frunze with my mother. Outside, severe frost had set in. I"ll Jump Off a Cliff strangely tied to my still-fresh personal impulses. One day, I was home alone until evening, nearly falling asleep on the floor while my mother probably went to the gymnasium for documents.

Ah, I remembered why I moved to the middle room: it had a computer desk. I wanted a final setup, imagining connecting the computer via the Kenwood to the massive speakers. I effectively had a complete audio system. I immersed myself in music, humming horror melodies from Slayer, imagining Miami, and even proposing to my mother: "Let"s move to America?"

Then, true to my household"s menagerie era, I begged a small room for my computer and audiophile setup. We moved the large bed to the middle room, and the computer, speakers, green carpet, and my bed to the small room. Immediately, I realised: I could jam multiple wires into the Kenwood terminals-more speakers, more sound. I added our original Kenwood speakers, then remembered other ones I had found outside, scavenged more wires, attached them, and soon had five or six speakers, screwed to the wall. I imagined true surround sound. I also learned to record to cassette via Kenwood. One evening, Bitter End played on Maximum FM-I managed to record most of it. Lying on the carpet, I recalled early gymnastics months-the beginning of the end-our trips to Engel"s yards with pull-up bars, which I now avoided mentally, shaking off the memories like filth, retreating into a three-dimensional sunny America in my mind.

Yet my "garage" Russian aesthetic, forged by Korol i Shut, November, rock, and the "90s, still thrived. I was still drawn to post-Soviet yards-not in the shitty districts like Létka, with Chernobyl vibes, army courtyards, and aunts roaming cemeteries-but in the centre, near school 33. Here, despite the poverty, residents knew a better life. Graffiti everywhere, young people with computers. Far along the school 33 territory, a brick wall bore graffiti reading Rammstein. Rammstein was an uncharted, exciting, dopamine-rich discovery. I was eager to listen. Marilyn Manson was also around; many kiosks displayed his albums with dark covers-clearly not Fabrika Zvyozd.

A few times, I wandered through nearby yards hoping to find discarded TVs for speakers. Screwdriver in hand, I returned home frozen, increasingly disinclined to venture out. New Year approached.

One day, walking the yards with my mother, crossing Petrovskaya near the wholesale store, we ran into Aunt Lena and stopped to chat. She and my mother shared musical interests, and soon we discussed my latest obsessions. Masha, older by a year or two, was also into alternative music. I mentioned Rammstein and Marilyn Manson; Aunt Lena knew them and said Manson wasn"t to their taste.

Not wanting to spend money blindly, and worried it might be too "adult" and how to explain it to my mother, I hadn"t planned to buy Rammstein. But one day, through my mother, Aunt Lena gave me a Rammstein disc-the perfect way to get it-and I could play it freely.

It was a compilation of about ten tracks, mostly hits from Mutter. Its lyrical title track was tolerable even for my mother. My favourite, of course, became Feuer Frei-the most aggressive. I spent weeks on the carpet in the small room, rocking out. I didn"t yet know what the lead singer looked like or anything else about the band.

The melodic synth lines in Feuer Frei and other tracks became closely tied to sunny, frozen Engel"s in the Telman Street area: nine-storey yards, empty courtyards with broken swings, garages, wells, and boiler houses. Truly "industrial," even though I didn"t know that was Rammstein"s genre. I disliked the overly repetitive computerised tracks like Ich Will. Slayer"s Raining Blood, however, felt diverse and perfect, tied with Anthrax"s Madhouse. After tracks like Private Investigation by Dire Straits, I had a personal criterion for perfect songs: multiple guitar solos, developing almost from one genre into another. This pursuit of ideal songs would later cause misunderstanding and rejection by my listeners-degenerates-when I tried to achieve it in adulthood.

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Part 55, Text 5. Valery"s cousin Dima visits and the army..., hopeless attempts to rewrite my life..., audiophile obsession recedes and why..., uncle Seryozha"s TV..., Barsik for Frunza.

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It was already the second half of December, and I was on some endless sick leave, not going to school at all, but still my mum and I would sit in the kitchen with our textbooks, reaching almost "rowanberry-cranberry" states-though nowhere near as desperate as before. Even the slightest shift in her attitude into the mode of an outsider-any sharpness caused by requirements imposed by non-family institutions-would plunge me into that familiar wave of rowanberry-cranberry consciousness.

So it was a familiar and long-awaited feeling of relief when, one afternoon, Dima-my mum"s brother Valery"s son-suddenly came to visit. Dima was around twenty, recently back from the army, and I gathered he had some sort of routine of visiting all his acquaintances and relatives purely from social extroversion. He was soft, modest, and simple, unlike his audacious brother Pasha, which is why mum always favoured him more. He sat in our mustard-coloured armchair in the kitchen, talking about the army. He"d served somewhere in the Far East. His commander-or whoever in the army commands the soldiers-had, as I understood, drafted them into construction work on his private plot; they dug and hauled bricks. Dima said, "Of course, I don"t tell mum about any of this." (His mum is that market vendor, Aunt Marina, who a year ago came over to sleep with a young lover). Then, seeing that we, his unsuspecting audience, showed little initiative in conversation, he wandered into the living room where we kept our music. As I mentioned, he was a music lover. That day, the Kenwood stereo was inexplicably in the living room by the TV; he put it on and listened to a bit of Rammstein. Soon after, he left.

I noted his army stories-at that point I was becoming increasingly determined not to join-but the main trigger that might have made me blow up there wasn"t the exploitation of soldiers, which might have even been a unifying or positive experience-it was the relationships I, a reactive softie, would inevitably have with bastard comrades. Most likely, I was already having the first thoughts of possibly shooting my tormentors and commanding officers in the army, as payback for being trapped in that shitty hell for two whole years. Or, at the very least, killing myself.

Evenings I spent in the green armchair. I had a thick notebook, and I once again suffered in fruitless writerly impulses. I was a hopeless Mark Twain and Hemingway. Adventures, camaraderie. Inspired by the spirit of the film "Brat," the fight for justice, opposition to fucked-up bastards like a market Kazakh. And with a hint of GTA-its dynamic city trips and errands across various parts of town, as I"d imagined that summer. The setting was still summer Engels. In the story, only the beginning existed: some business day where I cycled to meet my gang companions, all the same classmates from the thirty-third grade. Among them, I wasn"t the strongest (that was Yarik), but the chief initiator, the idea guy. I negotiated, united, solved problems. I could descend to menial tasks for the sake of the group. Just like in adulthood, I constantly tried to organise some movement online-assembling a band, rallying like-minded incels to promote our situations collectively. In that notebook, unlike in the future reality, I succeeded. The companions saw value in my initiatives. I would cycle to Tyulenev"s private house on Khalturina Street, slightly past Fyodorov"s, to negotiate. Then ride somewhere else, meet someone along the way. But at this "beginning of something," all my imagination ended. I was completely empty of plots. The last lines, contrasting with the original Danila Bagrov mood, were about how, riding along the bridge sidewalk in Saratov on errands, I thought I"d like to commit some crime. That"s exactly what I wrote. A glimpse of my latent antisociality and the nonconformist streak that appeared, for example, in the Artyom intimidation episode. I was a mix of intolerant outrage at social injustice-Danila Bagrov-and its opposite, since my sense of justice was individually shaped, not textbook moralism like his or Bodrov"s.

By the second half of December, my audiophile and speaker obsession was quickly receding. It"s important to understand: these obsessions, like this one, weren"t intellectual-they were dopamine-driven. Dopamine: instant gratification. If an object offered many opportunities but required too much effort to exploit, forget it. My interest in audio gear and computers would never evolve into technical mastery. Not me. My thing, always, was writing biography or composing music, where satisfaction comes instantly and continuously. Every new sentence or combination of notes immediately fulfilled my intellectual and aesthetic criteria. And these could be reread or replayed forever for a different kind of pleasure. I"ll touch on that pleasure later, when I get into music.

Then, one evening, uncle Seryozha, our main supplier of audio and video equipment, brought a new TV for the kitchen. Small, to fit in the niche above the fridge. Its tiny screen protruded over the plastic lower panel like an adult man"s belly over a belt, and as soon as he left, mum and I joked about how much the TV resembled uncle Seryozha himself. We set it up together. Anything new or better that appeared in the apartment, as well as any of mum"s gifts that suited me, she gave without question. Always had, always will. Critics of our symbiosis noticed this first and hated me all the more. So the TV quickly ended up in my tiny room. But it didn"t even last a few hours-some antenna I tried could catch nothing. So I carried it back to the kitchen. We removed our old black-and-white TV from the niche. Mum had to cook, so I wrestled with it alone. Lifting it, I pressed my forehead against the screen. Miscalculated-hit below the centre of gravity-and the TV slipped, flipping over me. In that fraction of a second, I thought it was the end. I still had a childish belief that old TVs explode like bombs. Unlike in the second "Brat," where Bagrov shot a porn mag. The TV thundered onto the grey tiles. But we were insanely lucky: it landed on plastic, bounced like a ball a few times, and that was it. Don"t know how mum survived with her arrhythmia. And the best part-we tried turning it on, and it worked. Just a crack in the plastic.

It was a horrible blow to my self-esteem. Even though it didn"t break, I felt disciplined by technology. Lately, I"d begun feeling confident with wires and speakers. Take the red pill.

Dad started visiting, but without staying overnight. One time, by arrangement, he brought one of the kittens from grandma Valya, born to the cat Dulsa she"d rescued pregnant. It was meant for Frunza-the previous Barsik had passed or vanished. This one would have the same name. A couple of days it stayed with us. After hissing for a bit, Murka took motherly charge. The kitten was fairly grown but still sought a teat, and Murka"s instincts kicked in. She even tried carrying him around in her mouth; once she jumped off the big bed with him into my middle room"s wardrobe, but he hit the lower drawer and fell. She didn"t really have a functional nipple for him to latch on, so he bit one dry, which shrivelled up. There was even some healing story later. And crucially, at the end of Murka"s life, that very teat would develop some inflammation or even cancer. She"d later give birth to stillborn kittens one year-well after my childhood story. So her life would be absolute hell, not just difficult.

.:::.

Part 55, Text 6. Dad arrives for New Year with a computer..., Yuri Nikitin and my growing antisociality..., fights with parents and suicidal self-isolation in the tiny room..., reading I Live in This Body.

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About a week before New Year, Dad arrived for good, bringing his computer. As I mentioned, it was a crippled thing, barely running anything except Paint and text files. He also brought some boring disks and a book like How to Build a Computer, covering Windows installation to component replacement. Not new, half of it already outdated. I transplanted parts from our old system unit into his, recording a video memo beforehand so I wouldn"t forget which wires went where. When the system booted after my tinkering, those were moments of the highest self-respect. The soundtrack of that time: Rammstein"s Zonen and Engel. No Christmas tree that year.

Fuck, another New Year arrives as I write this. I"ve been writing the ending of 2004 for a whole month. I"m in hell. Masturbating most of the day, licking someone"s underwear, tormenting myself with every perversion, alternately covered in drool or shit, barely washing, then collapsing at the monitor, dehydrated, like after hard labour-unable to write. I wanted nothing but real sexual contact or release of aggressive affect. Unable to get either, I had to discharge through the most depraved and stimulating methods. Huge effort not to break down, to finish this damn autobiography. I"d been writing non-stop for over a year, since first grade, constantly editing earlier text.

In the last days of the year, I sat in my tiny room at the computer. Nothing to do-the machine couldn"t run anything-so I turned to the boring stuff on the disks Dad had brought. He loved art collections, encyclopaedias, all that crap. I hated it, I was sick of it. Life without what"s naturally necessary. I needed exactly what I need now, as I write this.

Among other things was a library by Moshkov. I knew he wasn"t an actor, yet all those holiday days spent reading are tied in my mind to the actor Mashkov from a childhood film-the association was unavoidable. The library was essentially a massive collection of books-pirated, a common thing in those still underdeveloped Internet times. I looked for the only thing I knew: Yuri Nikitin, whose fantasy books drew me in with their covers. Something like Hyperborea or Teeth Wide Open-series, can"t recall exactly. In the last days before New Year, I read this, a couple thousand words per day at most. Just the start of one book. Not bad, just pointless. I couldn"t visualise what I read-if a sword, I pictured Hercules and Xena; if a forest, Mostootryad. Ultimately, I read about reality, the familiar, not a new world-the original goal of reading. Hence my growing hatred for books and people. Reading is laudable, yes. Dad taught me, school taught me, that classmate in May who gave me books confirmed it. Yet still I imagined girls drawn to boys who read. Some beautiful, unattainable A-student leans over at break, asks what you"re reading, a conversation starts, while the rest of the class screeches and babbles about the fucking Matrix, which I thought was all about shooting and superheroes.

A couple of days before New Year, I had a huge argument with my parents. For the first time, both of them at once. I locked myself the fuck in my room, telling them to fuck off. Only left to eat or use the toilet. Suicidal urges returned. Maybe the first time I seriously considered smashing my window and jumping. Later this would become an obsessive fantasy. I again imagined throwing myself off a roof or the tall stadium tower I mentioned long ago.

The obsession with suicidal fantasies was largely a calming mechanism. Over those weeks, it became automatic, staying with me for the next fourteen years. Any problem or flare-up, I soothed myself with thoughts of killing myself-fuck it. Even as hysterical leverage, even before revealing this to anyone. It was impersonal, directed at problems and pain: "Pain, if you annoy me-there won"t be anyone left to annoy." And why fourteen years? Later, homicidal thoughts would mix in-as the youth I suffered through, witnessing sexual satisfaction among peers while being defective, I"d be drawn to discharging affect-suicide would only serve to avoid consequences.

I checked what else Yuri Nikitin had. One book seemed off the beaten track: I Live in This Body. The foreword warned vulnerable readers away, which attracted someone like me. Narration from a person in existential crisis, opening immediately on bodily reality-"I am made of flesh and bone." I, painfully (literally) obsessed with everything corporeal, was hooked. The narrator described his wife"s anatomy, commented with a biologist"s detachment on her weight-good for childbirth, or something. I increased the font, read lying in bed. Fascinating, because it wasn"t escapist; I read intelligent thoughts on reality. One episode: a guy walking along the embankment, some men pull out a drowned man, lower him into the river to let crabs attach before police arrive. Years later, I inserted a similar scene into my dumb song "rgfstg."

So all of 31 December and 1 January, I read. Remaining in self-imposed isolation. Parents sat just outside the door, on green armchairs, by the coffee table, as usual. I languished in my six-metre room, didn"t go out for fireworks or anything. They called and teased, but I resolved to go to the end. "Bastards. Shouldn"t have had me." That"s how angry I was then. Now, seeing them old and sick, I treat them as my people. Back then, young and unscathed, I hated them like everyone else. This was only the beginning.


.:.

___Part 56.

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...............2005 ---------------------------------------------------

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Part 56, Text 1. Fucking psychologists versus what was actually needed..., the Artyoms visit and computers..., visiting Aunt Lena and the Great Uncle..., I lend Artem GTA..., evenings in the green armchairs.

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No psychologists could have helped me then. They would have sent me to psychiatrists, those would have put me on injections, and that would have been the end of it. And that"s exactly what would happen. Less than a year remained before that. Less than a year for something to occur that might have pulled me out and prevented the bad development.

As always, the thing I constantly dreamed and fantasized about at that time was exactly what I actually needed. Informal, living contact with girls I liked, where I could care for someone and be needed. My real problem was the complete loss of a sense of agency and masculinity. When Sima and I crossed Yablochkova Street without a traffic light, where I wasn"t useless and could notice a car she might not see, or when I carried Yudina"s bags-I didn"t give a damn whether I could do a flip or whether I was mastering myself or not. I didn"t care about any insults either. I felt better than at any other moment in my life. Situations like that would have kept me afloat.

But by the beginning of 2005, those moments-the total of maybe ten days of such situations in my life-were over. Later there would be a few dozen more moments like that, but almost all of them would come when I was around thirty, when girls ten or twelve years younger than me agreed to meet and walk with me. By then everything was already too late. Informal, binding situations with girls my own age-the kind I had always wanted-would never happen again.

Psychologists and psychotherapists, of course, would fiercely dispute my claim that helping others would have helped me. At the beginning of fifth grade, in the episode with the boy in School 33, when I said, "the standard behavior of hopelessly suffering empaths: when we cannot save ourselves, we begin saving others," I sounded exactly like a psychotherapist myself. Now, in order to distance myself from those bastards" position, I would specify the thesis differently: "when we cannot save ourselves from circumstances that deprive us of agency, we begin saving others from those same circumstances."

Because the therapists" position is that you must start with yourself. Even if you fed my whole biography up to that point into a neural network along with the paragraph above, it would output exactly that position. It would probably mention the episode of tormenting the cat and other things. I"ve received analyses saying I"m a psychopath and that my empathy and desire for symbiosis with another person are narcissistic-even tyrannical. A patient"s desire to heal through relationships involves another person too. In such cases-especially against the background of aggressive episodes-people in white coats immediately shift the priority from you to the safety of others. And if suppression and injections aren"t the final result, the maximum they"ll offer is psychological bullshit in a vacuum.

"Heal unresolved developmental trauma, work through chronic helplessness, unlearn dysfunctional family scripts, develop healthy empathy, develop healthy autonomy"-all that stuff starts. Relationships with girls are put in the very last place. That same order was outlined by the psychologist I once visited as an adult. That"s how it is with all doctors, and with people in general.

Why I"m writing about this now is because at that time I didn"t know any of it. I was still blissfully ignorant. And I would remain in that bliss until about twenty‑five. By the end of 2004 I completely shut down and stopped telling anyone-except the girls I would later beg online for real contact-anything related to my sexual needs. For years I believed most people would agree with me that what I dreamed of was exactly what I needed.

Only when I was twenty‑five, when desperation had grown so serious that I began seriously thinking about killing someone, when everything became truly grave, and I started telling not only girls but other people-psychologists and others-about my desire for real contact with a girl, and I received the answer that under no circumstances could I have any such contact until I was "treated"-only then did I realize that all that time I had been wrong, and that no one agreed with my view of what I needed.

Meanwhile absolute bastards and real psychopaths were having sex-and nothing happened to them. Discoveries like that only strengthened my desires and solidified the direction of my aggression outward.

On the evening of January first someone came to visit, and Mum reported through the door that "the Artyoms" had arrived. They sat in the living room for a while before I reluctantly came out. The overhead light was off-I remember that clearly-and on TV The Lord of the Rings was playing. Artem sat watching. We talked about films. I felt half dead. Completely crushed, no agency at all.

Artem asked Mum and me, "So, you don"t like it?" It must have been around nine in the evening because Gandalf was already leading them through Caradhras. I had no interest at all.

Artem also had a computer starting up at home-also thanks to his father. As I mentioned earlier, his father lived in some village and, I think, was a teacher-an intelligent man. It seemed he was the one who got Artem into The Lord of the Rings and strategy games.

Then they left, and I went back to my room.

Little by little I started coming out more. I noticed that my notebook with the unfinished story was no longer where I had left it-it was lying by Dad"s armchair. Probably he had read it. I felt embarrassed and hid it, though it was already too late. Fifteen years later I would still find that notebook in his cupboard in Zavodskoy.

My condition was awful. Completely non‑festive. As if I"d been screwed over.

One day Dad"s computer broke. Something typical: it stopped at a black screen with some text. That wasn"t surprising for that machine, and Dad didn"t complain. I tried to revive it, swapping internal parts. Eventually I just amused myself with the discovery that a simple CD with music could be played directly in the computer"s CD‑ROM (it had a headphone jack) without even entering Windows-as long as the computer started. And I started it, for fun, by touching a screwdriver to certain pins on the motherboard inside the open case.

The next day Aunt Lena and Masha came over, and we arranged to visit them. Their private house stood on the outskirts of Engels.

In their living room stood a massive Christmas tree pressing tightly against the low ceiling. Lena and Masha bustled around in their inconvenient kitchen while Mum and I sat by the tree. The walls had vertically striped wallpaper, and I, already obsessed and having read somewhere about such stereotypes, told Mum that people with low libido choose wallpaper like that. Later, when Lena came into the room to set the table, Mum whispered my comment to her.

Toward evening the so‑called Great Uncle arrived-their advanced thirty‑year‑old relative, often discussed by Lena and Mum because of his prolonged search for the perfect bride. His story interested me too, though only partly; it wasn"t a full incel disaster. He looked normal, even solid, and only the pistol hanging from his belt revealed that he was somewhat eccentric.

I had expected he would feel miserable sitting among women and children, and I had imagined that Lena and Masha begged him for discs and updates and he reluctantly dropped them off in passing for five minutes. After all, years were slipping away from him, and here were these simple relatives. But no-he sat calmly and unhurriedly.

We discussed computers, and he understood everything. I talked about top hardware like the Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra. He skeptically evaluated the likelihood of anyone actually buying it and asked me, "Do you know how much it costs?" I knew and answered. He said, "Exactly." The way I answered had the tone of "not that expensive," so he wouldn"t think we were the same sort of poor relatives as Lena and Masha.

In the evening the five of us walked to the lake like before. But it was already dark and bitterly cold, so we didn"t go into the forest-just walked the Great Uncle somewhere and returned to the house to spend the night.

In the morning we were in no hurry and watched films on DVD. I watched some Fast and the Furious. Then partly The Last Samurai, but I got bored. Only the seppuku scene stayed with me-the sword in the belly and then the head cut off. Strange: why stab yourself in the gut if seconds later they cut off your head anyway? As if it were a condition. A kind of self‑destruction squared.

I also think it was there that I saw the brutal Rammstein video Feuer frei! for the first time. The brutality-if you don"t know it-lies in the idea that during a concert a man is killed and falls into the crowd, which tosses him up. But the visuals-fire‑spitting, the grim faces of the musicians, especially the guitarist-and the aggression of the music make it seem, at least to someone with my psyche, that everyone in the hall knows it"s a corpse and mocks it. That fits the leitmotif of my whole story: sleeping when others are awake, dying when others continue living. The shame of having no agency.

That was the last time we visited Aunt Lena.

Dad wasn"t with us those days.

The Artyoms came again. They had a decent computer and asked if I could lend Artem my GTA disc for a while. I gave it very reluctantly. Not because I was greedy or angry that he could already play while I still had nothing to run it on. I was just afraid of scratches and defects. I treated that disc like a sacred object. That whole mentality was already beginning...

We also told them we had watched the film Night Watch. Artem asked, "Is it good?" I remember that trivial detail because years later a girl-the first and only one with whom I had a series of real-life meetings around the age of thirty, and whom I became obsessed with-asked a question in exactly the same tone.

Later we all walked across the square and the snow slides. The conversation constantly returned to computers and games. Walking along Teatralnaya Street, Aunt Tanya asked me, "Do you like strategy games?"-as if she were the one sitting behind Artem"s back the way my mum used to sit behind mine.

That was the last time I rode those snow slides like children do.

I don"t think I visited Grandma Valya during those holidays. Mum and I stayed home again. Dad no longer came.

In the evenings I sat in the dim living room, moving between the two green armchairs, watching MTV. Korn"s trendy video Word Up! was on heavy rotation then; at the end there was a strip‑club scene that fascinated my obsessive teenage mind.

One time, while I was sitting there, the phone rang. Mum came out of the kitchen holding the corded receiver and asked through the corridor, "Ivan Borisovich is calling. He asks if you"re still going to come." I just waved my hand and shook my head.

.:::.

Part 56, Text 2. Return to School No. 33..., buying a computer..., I break my finger.

.::::.

January tenth, as the internet reminds me, was the first school day. Back to School 33-and now until the end.

If I didn"t go the next day because I broke my finger that evening, then I clearly remember the day. Early morning, frost, still dark. Miserable. After Beslan the previous year, adults were no longer allowed inside schools, at least here. A crowd of children before the first lesson in the large dim hall. The massive marble staircase where hundreds of kids climbed to their floors. New Year"s tinsel still hanging everywhere.

Fyodorov and I met and immediately sat together at the same desk. I hadn"t seen him since that summer day when I met him on the square. Most classmates were the same, but a couple of new girls had appeared.

Remember the girl who once ran out of my entrance on Lev Kassil Street and I accidentally pressed my hand against her chest? She appeared in class. I"ll repeat the description: slim, almost model‑like figure, normal face, dark‑blond straight long hair, grey eyes. Though a bit of what I called "kikimora"-a long nose, big eyes. Her name was Nadya, with a simple surname. Temperament: simple and extroverted.

But another girl sat with her-some Yulia. I don"t remember the surname. Nothing special will happen with Nadya, but Yulia will appear later.

Fyodorov immediately started asking me: "Did they buy you a computer?" When I said no, he seemed not to believe it and asked again later, teasing what he imagined was a lie. For several days he kept repeating that question.

And by that evening it was indeed about to become a lie.

Mum and I went to Saratov, and she brought money. It was getting dark around half past four. We walked from Moskovskaya along Volskaya toward Kirov and then down further. At the corner with Sovetskaya, in the Stalin‑era building at 33 Sovetskaya, there was a computer shop I knew from autumn price‑list scouting. By the end of autumn they had started selling Thermaltake cases there, and one of them had become my obsession.

And there it stood: a blue Thermaltake case, even more elaborate than the minimalist one with the wave‑shaped door. It had everything-locks, doors, another plastic door, eight fans with adjustable speed knobs, and most importantly a mesmerizing blue display showing the internal temperature. Several sensors on wires could be attached anywhere inside. On top there was another fan under a plastic cap, plus USB ports. A 420‑watt branded Thermaltake power supply. Tall case with room for extra hard drives and CD‑ROMs. Adjustable stabilizing feet. Naturally a glass side panel to see inside. And inside everything glowed with blue lights.

For me it was heaven, not just a computer case. Not because it was flashy, but because it was the perfect foundation for the future-like the perfect plot of land. Even if you can"t yet build a full house, you should buy the best land first.

We definitely took the case, but I still thought about the components. I had to save money, and I didn"t want the half‑measure of a Pentium 4. I wanted either the top-Athlon FX‑53 and GeForce 6800-or the bare minimum. So I leaned toward what Igromania magazine called "cheap but effective": a Celeron processor and a budget Nvidia graphics card. I knew the minimum system requirements of Far Cry and other demanding games by heart and oriented myself by them.

The shop offered to assemble everything for us.

The only problem: they didn"t have the right RAM. It was already six in the evening and everything closed at seven. I took two and a half thousand rubles from Mum and ran to another computer shop nearby.

Busy city center, rush hour, New Year lights still glowing. Solid quarters around there-new expensive buildings, the main police headquarters nearby. Years later, around my thirties, I would try to persuade a girl who worked there to meet me, and she joked, "Aren"t you afraid I could have you locked in a psychiatric hospital?" Back then, running with two thousand rubles to buy RAM, I still felt part of the environment.

I quickly bought a 512‑megabyte Kingston module, pretending to behave like an adult-as if such memory sticks were everyday things for me.

I returned, handed it to the technicians, and soon they called us into a small room to show the machine booting. They started it up to BIOS; Windows we would install at home. Mum paid about fifteen thousand rubles.

They packed the machine in a huge Thermaltake box. We grabbed it by the side handles and carried it up Volskaya Street. It weighed as much as it cost.

After the traffic light at Sakko and Vanzetti Street there was a casino‑restaurant called Bratislava. Passing its decorative columns, Mum stumbled and hopped-but we didn"t drop the box. We laughed, and it became a family joke: "the hop at Bratislava."

At Kirov Avenue we asked a taxi driver how much to Engels. Five hundred rubles. Too expensive. We decided to walk a bit more and take the bus for twelve.

I"ve actually never taken a taxi in my life.

We got home without incident. The computer waited there.

In excitement I ran into the middle room, didn"t even turn on the light, and started tumbling on the big bed, even doing a handstand-the habit of happier times. Coming down, I misjudged and smashed my big toe.

The pain immediately told me: broken.

Fucking hell. Damn unlucky idiot.

Maybe at the end of this childhood story we"ll count how many times that happened-when we bought something and the same day some accident occurred. Like with Zosia, like with the TV, and so on.


.:::.

Part 56, Text 3. The problem with Windows..., we give the computer to Luchinkin..., we take the computer back..., and the first days of gaming.

.::::.

Well, basically I don"t remember whether I went to school the next day or not. But by the evening of that next day - the one I spent exhausted with the desire to install an operating system on the computer as quickly as possible - Mum and I went to Saratov to buy a Windows disc. Because of the prejudice that in the Engels disc shops we"d end up buying something too pirated. For the time being we did nothing about my finger.

We arrived at Chapayeva and Moskovskaya, to the shop "Elektronika", where we had once bought the pterodactyl, and there was a disc department there that seemed respectable. We bought Windows Professional for about seventy roubles. The seller only cared about making the sale and didn"t say anything.

At home in the evening I started installing it. Everything according to the instructions from my father"s book. Eventually I naturally reached the moment where you have to enter the licence key. And where was I supposed to get that? Fucking hell, here we go.

By then Mum had already fallen asleep, and I sat there until one in the morning trying it in every possible way, thinking I must be misunderstanding something. I did everything exactly according to the instructions, damn it. On top of that all those memories were hitting me - the fallen television, the ruined skis, and the rest. I was in hell.

The next day Uncle Seryozha was called in to help. I"ve never mentioned it before, but in the circle of Engels architects throughout my childhood my mum often spoke about some Luchinkin - along with Kiskin, he had apparently also been the city"s chief architect for a while. I had never seen him, but he was serious and of course worked with computers, knew his way around them, and could help.

At that time he worked very close by - at 14 Lev Kassil Street - in an office building next to my kindergarten. There was also EkonomBank there, where Mum had been saving money. We packed the computer back into its box again, and Uncle Seryozha carried it there to him by himself.

Then came days of frustrated waiting. Some female doctor came to the house about my finger. I was supposed to go and have a cast put on it, but I didn"t want to.

After several days of suffering, the computer could finally be picked up. I worried about it terribly - such an expensive case, and these journeys out of spite. Mum and I went to that building and carried it out to Uncle Seryozha"s car. A sunny snowy midday. Or maybe we carried it home on foot - I don"t remember anymore.

But Uncle Seryozha was with us when I connected the cables in the small room and switched it on. He explained things about our computer based on what Luchinkin had told him about it. He said: five hundred and twelve megabytes of memory - that"s good, but for ArchiCAD and AutoCAD, for example, it would be better to have a gigabyte. Well, obviously.

As for Windows, he said the licence key should have been written on the disc cover, and if not, then it must be in a separate file on the disc itself - which of course you can"t open unless you already have another working computer with an operating system. By that day I had already figured that out myself and was cursing the people who produced the disc for depriving me of the chance to boost my self‑esteem by installing everything on my own.

But one way or another I finally got what I wanted.

Probably in my usual style, I started small - with the discs "Virtual Skipper" and "Wrestling", which were nonsense - saving the main thing for dessert. Except the dessert was with Artem. Damn it.

But I had one more game by then, though I don"t remember how or when we bought it: Doom 3. The most demanding game of those months and at the top of Igromania"s rankings, pushing Far Cry down to second place.

That evening I took some board and tied it to my leg instead of a cast.

The Doom 3 menu greeted me with some heavy intro music, but that was where the positives ended for me. The only good thing was that it ran without serious lag - so the computer was decent. But otherwise... space, gloom, demons. Not my thing at all.

But there was nothing to be done, and we had only just lent GTA to Artem, so it felt awkward to ask for it back immediately. One feature of games at that time was that most of them wouldn"t run without the disc in the drive, and my GTA was exactly like that.

I didn"t go to school at all and spent about ten days sitting over Doom 3 in god mode. God mode means you type in a cheat code and none of the monsters can hurt you, you can pass through doors, and so on. Basically I didn"t really play - I just flew through all the levels.

The final level, as I understood it, took place in hell, because the game"s story was that the spaceship had essentially collided with hell in space. At least that"s how I understood it.

When Doom got boring there were also two Igromania demo discs. But that was all nonsense too. What I really needed was GTA.

But I was far from sitting at games all day long. Mum immediately started limiting my computer time. I was furious about that. What"s the point of limiting anything? Life is already going to hell. Six years - and the army, and then maybe some shooting and suicide. Maybe even sooner if she suddenly dies of a heart attack. Why not live it up now? Of course I didn"t say any of that out loud.

But indirectly, in connection with the reasons behind those limits, I also noticed something: from the very first day of gaming the appearance of my computer case stopped mattering to me. You"re either in reality or in that three‑dimensional world. At least that"s how it is for me.

And together with the case everything else here stopped mattering too - the audio system I had planned, the fact that I"d been wearing the same piss‑stained underwear for ten days, even myself. I could have been legless for all I cared. That"s pretty fucked, of course.

For me, a lot of things basically ended right there. And on those days of deep immersion in games I usually hardly masturbated at all.

.:::.

Part 56, Text 4. Back to school at the end of January..., with the boys in the disc shop and the "Idiot" complex..., the medical‑bureaucratic flywheel of the clinic..., the red‑haired rocker girl from my entrance and others of her type..., The Sims 2 and the impression made by the music.

.::::.

On the twenty‑fourth of January I took off my homemade splint and went to school. Well, Mum made me. Otherwise it sounds as if I wanted to go myself. I wanted never to leave the house again.

Fyodorov continued his stupid questioning. After a few days I finally let him understand that I had a computer. We went after lessons in the direction of the disc shop at 47 Gorky Street - as per the tradition of the previous year. Crossing the still‑narrow two‑lane Telman Street, I asked him where some classmate from the previous year had gone. He theatrically adopted a mournful tone and began telling a story about how that classmate had crossed the road without looking.

In the disc shop there was always the same smell from the neighbouring jewellery and perfume sections. On the display there were more and more new games, and each of them was an entire world - and now they were all available to me for seventy to ninety roubles per disc, or on exchange, which cost forty.

Besides games there were also discs in special gift boxes with other content. Usually encyclopedias or hype things like Night Watch for big money and unclear audiences. One of those discs was The Idiot. I had seen it everywhere all the previous year but had no idea what it was, and only later vaguely understood from my father that it had something to do with some classic book.

Because of that the disc didn"t interest me at all, and I never knew whether it was a game, an encyclopedia or a film.

But one day soon we would walk from lessons exactly the same way with Fyodorov and also with Mitenkov - our Mongoloid‑looking classmate - and this Mitenkov, who was a failing student, would ask the seller something about The Idiot as if he knew about it.

I developed a serious complex about that moment. For two and a half years, until Mum and I finally watched The Idiot during my adolescence (and, by the way, neither of us understood it beyond the first couple of episodes anyway), I would keep remembering that failing student from a provincial school - and the fact that even he, apparently, understood things like Panfil Semenoviches and all those "pray tell" and "if you please", while I, the son of a philologist who had studied at a gymnasium and had always had ambitions of becoming a writer, understood no language except this ultra‑prosaic informal one in which I"m writing this autobiography.

Though there was nothing surprising about it. A failing student is someone who at least knows something. I deliberately didn"t want to know anything. The more you learned, the more you had to learn next - and the harder it became, and therefore the worse. And what I wanted to write about was experience and action, not intellectual bullshit.

Already from the end of the previous year the clinic had been dealing with my arse situation. Blood in the stool and all that crap. There had long since been no suspicions of any blood, but once the medical‑bureaucratic flywheel starts spinning you can"t stop it, so we still had to keep going.

For the time being I was calm about it: no frightening procedures seemed to be looming.

At the same time, starting on the twenty‑fourth, we had to begin going to physiotherapy after school. In the medical records it was called ultraphonophoresis. Lying on a couch with devices attached to me from some useless machine. Probably for my back.

I even have the dates recorded when this would happen: the twenty‑fourth and twenty‑eighth of January; the fourth, sixteenth, seventeenth, twenty‑fourth and twenty‑eighth of February; and the first of March. It annoyed me to waste time on this nonsense when there was a computer at home that I plunged into the moment I had created the appearance for Mum that my homework had been done.

At 9 Telman Street - in a nine‑storey panel building - by that time there was already a large disc shop. Maybe it had been converted from a three‑room flat, because there were several little rooms inside, each with discs on its own theme.

There was one room with gloomy DVDs that had begun to interest me - I suspected it contained some kind of heavy music - but I didn"t yet have a pretext to walk in there when we were there with Mum, and when I was alone even less so. It was quiet and intimate there, and the seller followed you around everywhere, which was nerve‑wracking.

One of the sellers there was the one whom Mum and I later nicknamed Mowgli. A young dark‑haired, dark‑skinned guy, always dressed in black. Later, in my youth, it would turn out that he didn"t just like that scene - he was actually a musician in some local gothic‑metal band. But those times were still far away, and in any case they already belong beyond the bounds of this childhood story.

Anyway, Mum and I bought the game The Sims 2 there. It had just come out and was on my list of games I needed to buy. Two discs. These were the days at the end of January.

But before The Sims I have to introduce another character.

Some young girl also lived in our entrance on Lev Kassil Street - besides that Nadya. Red‑haired: something between Mary Jane and Mavrin, the guitarist from Aria. Later I would see Mavrin on television and associate her with him exactly. I think her name was Marina - I must have found that out somehow.

She was about a year and a half older than me and already growing up quickly. In the sense that she already had a boyfriend. And not just a boyfriend - a rocker. Leather jacket, chain - all that stuff. And most importantly, she herself was informal too. Rocker jacket, those red hairs - as if specifically in the spirit of rock, not just dyed for colour.

From the kitchen window or the middle room I would watch the guy approach the entrance, and soon she would come down and they would hug and go somewhere together. I comforted myself: "No way they"re having sex yet. They don"t even go up to the flat. Maybe in ten years they"ll try." But just to spite me they would sometimes kiss when they met.

There had also long been another rocker‑girl image in my head - Avril Lavigne from her teenage MTV clips. And there was also some Savicheva with the song Vysoko. Not really a rocker girl, but I mean the hair - straight, hanging down.

In short, when I installed The Sims and started creating my Sims in the character editor, the very first thing I did was make the quintessence of those girls. I didn"t yet know anything about goth as a subculture, and the only rocker girl I had really seen was that Marina from my entrance. But I immediately ended up with this dark‑red‑haired goth girl with a spiked choker.

Fuck, I even masturbated to her. Damn, I feel so awful writing this. In twenty fucking years people have had so much sex - so much of what I needed.

In The Sims there was that characteristic intro music, strongly associated in my mind with the first days of my computer, with the soothing design of Windows XP, with the smell of my system unit.

I built houses there, filled them with all sorts of technology. My Sims died quickly. Just like with Doom 3, I wasn"t interested in figuring out the mechanics of the game. The computer was meant for relaxing.

But the main thing I took away from The Sims 2, together with the completed image of the goth girl, was the songs from its metal radio station. All those what I call hit tracks - those six simple pieces - made a huge contribution to shaping my compositional and melodic tastes.

For example, the dark middle section in the track "Monkey Failure". And in "Ride the Speedway" that riff from the middle of the song became one of my favourites in metal - later alongside that riff in "Angel of Death" by Slayer, which also comes in the middle of the song under the verses.

Even before I became interested in composing, those Sims tracks had already given me a taste for that technique - stopping in the middle of a song and switching to something completely different, in another tempo and usually slower and more reflective than what came before.

But the main composition in The Sims 2 was of course "Men"s Fire". Acoustic guitar and then a solo in the spirit of the melody from a HIM hit or Titanic. Of course it has plenty of enthusiastic comments on YouTube. "This song inspired me to become a musician," people write.

Reading that makes me want to cry. None of them were ever disposed of in a psychiatric hospital or spent twenty years living through this kind of hell, fuck.

.:::.

Part 56 Text 5. To the Artyoms and picking up GTA,,, the magic of Vice City,,, Little Havana,,, a morning with "Keep Feeling Fascinations",,, digital rectal exam and the start of analophobia,,, schizotypal concerts at the clinic,,, mom howls for the first time.

.::::.

Finally, Mom and I went to the Artyoms". That was probably the last time we visited them. Their computer stood in the living room, practically on the floor, where once we"d played magicians together. Some strategy game was on the screen, something in the vein of Behind Enemy Lines. By then, Artyom had come to be associated in my mind with boring games and Lord of the Rings, and I realised our interests had diverged. I grabbed my Vice City. Mom talked about it a little, and she recalled the opening scene-the mafiosi sitting around the table-and Aunt Tanya nodded.

As had happened in the past, when we left the Artyoms" late at night, they gathered to see us off. Artyom and I left the yard first, while the moms lingered inside. There was snow everywhere, and we planned a prank-bury me in a snowdrift and let me pop up as they walked by. We buried me, but they just didn"t come, and soon my clothes were soaking through. Artyom walked beside me, equally annoyed. When they finally appeared, only when I stood up did they realise I"d been lying in the snow for ages because of their delay. They weren"t amused-more worried in a motherly way.

We crossed half the icy, dark embankment together, parted ways near the place with the drowned man, and Mom and I continued alone. We probably bought Peculiarity as a big five, like always. When I recall the idylls of those years, it"s these rare-hence unforgettable-winter evenings returning from the Artyoms" that stick in my mind. Now, with the computer at home and GTA in my pocket, it felt like the ultimate homecoming.

Knowing now how to save the game, I quickly advanced through this magical world. Still with cheat codes-always just "codes" to me. I wore out the V-Rock station in the first few days, then played others often. I noticed a Latin-American vibe layered into the game: on the Esperanto radio station, in characters" names and accents, and in districts. One area in the second city-Little Havana-felt like a whole separate GTA Vice City department to me. Completely apart from the glamorous neon districts, skyscrapers, and beaches, yet somehow echoing memories of my childhood, those hot sunny holidays on Frunze, with one-storey streets crowded with poles and wires. Poor towns always had wires overhead. In Vice City, there was also a character-a fat old Black lady, overbearing toward the protagonist in tone and manner. Between that and this, I never wanted to leave the game.

More than Esperanto, though, what stuck to that Central-American, sun-soaked atmosphere was the song by Human League, "Keep Feeling Fascinations." Its ridiculously sunny melody and naïve vocals made me imagine some grown-up, simple-minded women singing it-I pictured Sasha Emelyanov"s mom from childhood-and some idiot men too. I thought it was silly, funny nonsense, yet I never switched it off.

It played one morning in early February, as Mom and I were getting ready for the clinic instead of school. I sat at the computer, hoping for twenty minutes of gameplay before leaving. Outside, the ice was brutal, and I already hated the country I lived in.

At the clinic, walking behind the scenes, the phrase "digital rectal exam" came up. Total nightmare. I thought: that"s it, I can"t take any more clinic stress. We"d mostly stopped going for the "pee stuff" (never fully healed the stings), and I"d had my fill of allergy-related blood draws and intestinal horrors (thanks to my vomit fetish games). And now-fuck-they needed to go up the ass. Damn it.

Even though the surgeon was a man, and it should have been him, not some woman, I immediately linked it with sexuality. Childhood fear of enemas, fear of any intervention in my body, now mixed with the reality of anal sex from that autumn porn film I hadn"t processed yet. The casual way the clinic talked about ass penetration convinced me that these sexual practices weren"t just jokes or porn scenes, and women didn"t fear them. If they did, they were the so-called "volunteers of pain," "volunteers of fear"-which made it even more torturous. Recalling that film alongside reality stirred both hellish arousal and shame for my weak psyche. My heart sank in the clinic corridor as Mom and I waited, the outcome potentially being that exam.

Despite the neutral attitude of doctors and my moms (she also came to the clinic), the exam was a serious separate procedure, scheduled on a special day with prep and application of lubricants. I don"t remember exactly, but at one point, they might"ve been talking about a real colonoscopy with sedatives. I asked Mom later, but she didn"t remember-it wasn"t a notable event for her, though she remembered my previous "pee stings" well. In any case, this marked the start of my whining and pleading with her to cancel it.

Initially, the exam was just "in the air," so to speak, and gradually, with each clinic visit, it became more concrete and threatening. This stretched across February and March.

Every day, my rebellion against all institutional structures-clinic, school, future army, social traditions like marriage-grew. I started showing it at the clinic. Remember how I walked like a cripple at the start of gymnastics? And Gushik, as I described in his intro, theatrically falling and playing the victim? I imitated that. Mix in my earlier freakish behaviour, and it could easily look like a schizotypal personality disorder. Yet I"d never get such a diagnosis. Doctors needed to classify me as psychotic to justify injections. My mom couldn"t tell the difference-she"d trust the doctors. Schizotypal is inconvenient but not psychotic, schizophrenia is psychotic-what I didn"t have but was necessary for long-term neuroleptics due to "danger." Retrospectively, she"d see my behaviour as schizophrenia: "sick from birth. No reason. Nothing to be done. Disabled."

And what I did-so much. I remember theatrically stumbling out of an ultraphonophoresis session, rolling on the dusty corridor floor, grabbing attention. Sometimes I"d drop crude remarks at a doctor"s. Lessons for Mom: how to resist intrusive institutions with me. Sometimes, she sided with me in small ways, so I dared to misbehave and act out. A few years prior, this would have meant a spanking; now I could even curse quietly. Rare spankings remained only for lessons, not behavior.

Then one evening, Mom and I argued. I moved my bed to the smaller room in protest-a first. I added some insults. We turned off the lights and lay down, then heard her whimper. She cried, for the first time like that. I was hit by fear and pity, jumped up, switched the light on, apologised, and hugged her-a rarity. We reconciled wordlessly, and I moved my bed back.

.:::.

Part 56 Text 6. Love Fist,,, Percy and the twins,,, the end of Vice City,,, Mom with Dire Straits,,, Dad gets a phone and the theme of parental sexual jealousy,,, exchanging computer games in class,,, on the Volga with Fyodorov over ice.

.::::.

By then, I was past halfway through Vice City, doing missions involving the fictional in-game rock band Love Fist. Off the computer, I often stared at their GTA-style artwork on a red background inside the disc sleeve. From the game dialogues and voices, I understood Percy was the vocalist of their only two songs. His image began to appeal to me. In my favourite track, Dangerous Bastard, the word "girls" appeared repeatedly; the band"s name spoke for itself, and his drawn appearance-low-rise pants, cropped tank-sealed the eternal underdog vibe. Despite Percy"s feminine appearance and shrill, unmanly vocals (reminiscent of Bitter End, which I once loved), the song"s major melody and mischievous energy made him feel alive, not some shrivelling incel. Over the next months, Dangerous Bastard became my anthem: "You can survive like this. Maybe someone wants someone just like you, not macho types."

His accentuation linked to another theme. Percy, with wide eyes, dark hair, and nose, reminded me of the twins-those two schoolgirls wandering the corridors of School 33. They weren"t Avril Lavigne goths like I"d made in The Sims, nor anyone else. Their style was new, entirely detached from heavy music. I"d described it briefly: feminine, aspiring "socialites" or fashionistas-or rather, simple lovers of handbags, big earrings, and other girly trinkets. Their modesty and quietness, especially in the main hall with their peers, made them seem unreachable overachievers. I was moving the opposite way, becoming a bad boy. Each day, I drifted further from them.

Still unsure if I was in love, they flashed past my eyes nearly every day at school, often on my mind. Together with Percy, these fascinations fed each other.

At school, I kept a low profile. Yet between Fyodorov and me, I voiced disgust at our shitty country, lagging behind my beloved America in everything; at our shitty schooling, modelling poor adulthood like my parents; and at low chairs that hurt my glutes. I"d mentioned it before. The frost, early rises, and fifteen-minute walks across 90s-style garages and courtyards annoyed me.

"Rammstein," never aired much on MTV, suddenly appeared frequently with the Amerika video. We all hummed it at school, especially Fyodor parodying it. Fyodor was teased by the most daring classmates, including girls. He looked harmless but proud. Once, in the toilet, he revealed his huge penis-I realised he might lie to all of us about sex. Later, in his twenties, I found him online: unknown profession, in St Petersburg, with a girlfriend.

By mid-February, I was finishing Vice City missions, and suddenly the credits rolled to almost pure Bitter End two-chord music. I realised it was the end, though I didn"t want to believe it. The next day, classmates confirmed the story missions ended. Only non-narrative missions remained, empty and cutscene-free. For me, it marked the end of an era, my connection to Sima, and more. Yet the final theme"s uplifting third chord hinted at a new search: to identify performers of dozens of in-game radio songs. I didn"t even know Michael Jackson yet-the Russian radio and MTV had neglected classics my entire childhood.

One off-school day, Mom wanted to watch Dire Straits. I brought the Kenwood into the living room; she sat close to the TV. Something in the concert affected her, and she quietly cried all day. I recorded a short GTA clip while she fussed, trying to turn off the computer. That short GTA recording was the last thing I filmed in childhood.

Around 23 February, Dad visited. Aunties at his museum gifted him a Motorola phone-primitive, egg-shaped. Later, evenings were quiet; he typed away, while I wandered bored, making a guess about love texts. Another episode: The Osbournes aired, and I saw Ozzy Osbourne for the first time, not realising he was a dying rock star. His daughter expressed disgust at her parents" sexual life. Both episodes were about themes I"d explore more that summer. Dad soon stopped visiting; I suspected a museum romance with a colleague.

Those weeks, finishing Vice City, mostly for socialising, I asked classmates to lend games. This practice was fading. It seemed everyone had moved past games; only buzzworthy titles like the upcoming GTA: San Andreas were discussed. Everyone had played Need for Speed Underground, Max Payne. Maybe cheap disks made exchanges rare. I felt at the tail end. Classmates didn"t mind lending me games. First, I borrowed Shrek from top student Yezhov. Simple, one evening plus morning after the clinic. I noticed the forest-and-castle fantasy vibe-it clicked. Something Arthurian, with dragons and dungeons. I could"ve liked Lord of the Rings films, but I chased boyish camaraderie. One semi-school day, I walked after lessons with Roma Yefimov-then a C/B student, now a lawyer with a girlfriend or wife. I borrowed some shooters too, maybe from Yezhov. Disposable entertainment for a night or two.

I sought boyish bonding but realised I didn"t need the games; music and nostalgia were my true escape. My past was my main refuge.

The metal ballad from Sims 2, its lullaby-like intro and chord runs, always reminded me of snowy fields and red winter sunsets. Tied to an outing on the Volga with Fyodorov in late February, retracing a year-old ice path from the concrete slope at Stella, walking on frozen snow toward Saratov at sunset. Occasionally others passed, and fisherman"s holes dotted the ice. Nearby, two guys walked, one seemingly stepping into a hole-but likely just slipped.

We reached the island opposite the Soldiers" monument, almost a kilometre. Approaching, reeds obscured the shore, and the scene felt like a winter field in Finland. I didn"t know Finland yet-I"d never studied geography. We reached the island, struggled with tree branches, and found ourselves hundreds of meters from anyone. Then we walked across the ice toward the beach. The ice near the shore was snowless, thawing, a stupid place to linger. By then, Fyodorov and I bored each other, or he had his own plans. I left the ice alone for the beach; he returned elsewhere. I went home. This is the only winter walk I remember, standing out against my usual homebody routine. Yet tied to that guitar riff, I decided the walk was that February, not the year before.

.:.

___Part 57.

.::.

________________I"m 12 years old.

.:::.

Part 57 Text 1. Grandfathers visiting for my birthday... the start of that Yulia"s lewdness and my tyrannical loyalty tests.

.::::.

For my birthday, on the 3rd of March-or the nearest weekend-the grandfathers would come over. They"d sit in the kitchen with my mother while I played Vice City, finishing leftover missions, racing around the city. I"d come out reluctantly to be congratulated, but I told my grandfather the game was about cars, and he could drive if he wanted. He went into the small room, and I showed him how to control it. He tried to drive properly, stopping at traffic lights. By then, I had already forgotten that you were supposed to stop at red lights. Still, he crashed into other cars, and, following a habit from my childhood, he voiced each collision with a "dvzhzh" sound. He didn"t stay long.

At that point, it wasn"t yet a problem for me that someone touched my mouse and keyboard, but over the past month-or more-I had been developing obsessive anxiety about my PC. It sat on the carpeted floor, and through the glass side, especially with the internal lighting, it was already visible just a couple of weeks after purchase how filthy the filters on the two fans were. I occasionally removed the panel to clean them. Increasingly often, I wiped down the case. The obsession was still entirely focused on my system in that expensive blue case, but there was less than a month and a half left until it was fully operational.

At the same time, starting in early March, that girl Yulia-the one I mentioned on January 10th, now sitting with Nadya at the desk opposite Fedorov and me-began turning toward me. Just turning and staying silent, apparently waiting for some move from me that I didn"t make.

They were all thirteen, and the girls were already shapely. This Yulia was already developed as well, and she emphasised it with tight jeans. She was proportional to me in height and size, though slightly thick-boned. By the time I reached adolescence and my wrists had become tiny, she would have surpassed me in arm thickness. Her neck was probably a bit short. Between short-necked and long-necked girls, I always leaned toward the latter, like me. Twins were like that. In short, Yulia wasn"t fragile. She had dark hair, brown eyes, and a face that wouldn"t make it surprising if there was some Armenian ancestor. Her eyes were slightly protruding-but only slightly. That face was why I didn"t even consider her. I always looked at girls as potential long-term companions, and with Yulia, I didn"t want anything like that-except sex, of course. At that moment, it had just begun and felt very foreign-exactly the second type in my classification: lewd. By "lewd," I don"t mean deviant practices or fetishes (though those belong to it), but the state and attitude in which they engage with each other. My writing on the topic is already enormous, so I"ll just copy a piece from the main text with the core definitions:

"...But on the videotape and in the park, as it seemed to me, it was completely different. No one empathized with anyone, no one merged. On the contrary, they seemed to strive to separate as much as possible. They looked for partners they wouldn"t want to pity, with whom they could be themselves. During the day - ordinary people empathizing with each other, but at night - everyone for themselves, even tormenting each other, delaying each other"s orgasm, keeping each other in dissatisfaction."

What I just described about lewd sex already fed my sex-phobic problem, but there was something else-and in the story with this Yulia, it was more important and happening for the first time. First, let me explain why I said earlier this year that I wouldn"t have real contact with girls my age-and now here"s Yulia. I had meant "girls my age I wanted"-for love. That I wanted Yulia sexually-that"s another matter; I had sexual desire for almost everyone under thirty, and I had real-life contact with many of them.

So, the other thing I want to talk about is basically about expressing the desire to get close. In this case-Yulia. Romantic or just as a friend didn"t matter (and she probably primarily wanted friendship anyway-girls aren"t driven by hunger). It"s the theme of "strangers." The problem of this theme. With Yulia, it surfaced for the first time. Even apart from her gender. For the first time, a completely foreign person reached out to me. Clearly with good intentions. She was, naturally, the first to offer me her pen when mine ran out, and so on.

The problem was that I reacted aggressively. I didn"t accept it. In the case of the pen, for example-I took it, accepted the help-but I didn"t value it. Didn"t thank her. I deliberately ignored Yulia"s glances. Not out of indifference or annoyance, but specifically to hurt. Or more precisely-to test, to probe the sincerity of her desire to get close. The prospect of my tests, had the story with Yulia continued that same month, was such that I wouldn"t have stopped until I reached full tyranny-or even destroyed Yulia entirely. That"s how I was. Because I wasn"t prepared for anything less than my mother. And my mother, I was sure, would remain loyal to me no matter the trial. I didn"t want a stranger.

At the same time, I did want a stranger-even needed one-for lewd sex. And for that, Yulia, as a stranger, was perfect. In short, chaos began. In my head, I mean.

.:::.

Part 57 Text 2. Contact with Kozlov resumes... Oleg Nikolaevich hanged himself... discovering Far Cry... to the embankment with Kozlov in the evening.

.::::.

After a long break in meeting up - since the beginning of autumn - Kozlov called me, and I went over to his place. When I came in, before sending me to wash my hands - which by those days, after coming in from outside, I already couldn"t not do on my own - his mum asked whether I had trained at the Engels sports school with Oleg Nikolaevich. Somehow she knew him. I confirmed it. She said he had died. Kozlov clarified: "He hanged himself," - and imitated a hanging man with his tongue sticking out. Kozlov always had a sort of rough, lad-like simplicity in his attitude toward death.

Earlier that autumn, I think he had been playing Hitman, and I had watched him killing someone there in some elaborate way, and he commented on it in his typical style, starting with the word "imagine" and ending that time with: "...and then you die in convulsions." And he thought it was cool. What"s cool about that? I thought back then. What"s cool about Kill Bill and all that sort of thing? That"s memento mori - it should make you not want to live, make you rebel against the structure of the world. But no - the boys found it entertaining. And that was when I still didn"t know that it wasn"t only boys who were entertained by it; girls just didn"t put it on display. Later I"d be shocked. Partly that will even show up near the end of my childhood story.

Those days Kozlov was playing through something I myself was inevitably going to get to, though until now I"d only been held back by some monsters in it: Far Cry. But when he launched the game - and they even had an LCD monitor - I was blown away so much that I stopped caring that there were monsters in it. There was this amazing lush picture of a tropical island, all those ferns I used to love, palm trees, even macaws. The 3D models had that relief texturing everyone had written about in that issue of Igromania. I hadn"t understood then what it meant, and even now when I saw it I didn"t really understand - but I somehow felt it, and it really did make the game different from others.

As far as I could tell, the game"s story didn"t refer to any fucking world history or wars. It had its own autonomous story - some ordinary outsider ending up on a deserted island, Robinson‑Crusoe‑style - where a mad scientist is breeding mutants. If some special‑forces agent had landed on the island instead, it would have been completely different: the hero would belong to some collective, have social backing, and to me, an outsider, that kind of character would never have appealed. The main character is guided across the island by radio by a character called Doyle, and it amused me how Kozlov associated the name with the word doylo.

As I understood it, Oleg Nikolaevich had hanged himself right in the sports hall. When I told Mum at home, she suggested it might have been because he and his wife - also a coach - didn"t have children. As in, because he couldn"t have them. Apparently rumours like that had reached Mum back when she had been training at the gym two years earlier. He was the first person I had known in real life who died.

I met Kozlov several times during March and April, and sooner or later his mum would always send us out to take a walk. And although the walks I"m about to mention also stand out against the homebound atmosphere of those days in my memory, small details make me sure they happened then, not a year earlier.

The first one - we wandered through the park and the embankment still piled with snow after six in the evening. At the same time as Far Cry, and even more enthusiastically, Kozlov was playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, where the hero was an agile trickster running along walls and throwing shurikens. I wasn"t interested in it, but apparently it still stirred up nostalgia for my abandoned fascination with parkour, because while roaming the dark, deserted embankment we climbed onto the structures by the closed-for-winter paid shooting gallery - as if we were trying to jump across something there.

In the end, though, the extreme element wasn"t the jumping but the forbiddenness of the place, and, inspired by the seclusion, I suggested we jerk off there in the frost. I don"t know whether he came, but I did.

The second walk with him - later.

In the next few days I asked around in class for Far Cry. Seryozha Slepukhin gave it to me - a classmate who later became my main and last companion of my childhood. Around those same days he also probably gave me the big lads" hits of the previous years - Need for Speed Underground one and two. Slepukhin was into cars and all those Fast & Furious things: his father had a car repair shop in their house.

Far Cry stuck in my memory not only because of the gameplay but also because of the perfect music theme in the menu. The first notes of the main melody I had already heard in the film Dinosaur, which someone once gave me for New Year. There it plays in the scene with the trek across the desert. Because of that, later in my youth when I started composing music myself, I didn"t think it shameful to begin the main melody of my composition "Vagtnt" with the same sequence of notes.

.:::.

Part 57 Text 3. OCD symptoms... the power supply burned out... the twins at the fair... the Yamami dead end with that Yulia... the Grendel‑like nature of the Yamami dead end... pushing the tests of Yulia to the limit and the last day.

.::::.

The story with that Yulia in class continued - she kept turning around toward me on her chair whenever there was a chance to drift away from the lesson, and I kept freezing her out. You"ve probably noticed how I keep slipping in that objectifying pronoun, as if I don"t consider her a person. But that"s not why - it"s simply because I never learned anything about her at all (she was a bit quiet). Just as she was then, she has remained a stranger to me even now, and that"s why I can"t even call her simply by her name. Nadya, by contrast, was some silly giggler who lived in my building - and that alone made her feel close.

By the end of the story with Yulia - which is already approaching - I"ll explain everything that happened in one piece and finish it with a deeper psychological analysis.

I washed my hands after coming in from outside every time now, as I said, and around then there were probably the first returns to the bathroom to wash them again "just in case", as well as moments when I wiped the mouse and keyboard with a rag whenever I thought I might have touched them with insufficiently washed hands. On the floor of our flat there was often filth and what in our family - when the time comes to classify kinds of dirt - would be called a "wolf pelt", or "little Mishutka", in Mum"s words. That grey hairy dust in the corners when you don"t clean for a long time.

Around the flat I walked in what we called cherevichki, though mine weren"t exactly that. Real cherevichki are leather Old‑Slavic patterned shoes. Mine were patterned too but just ordinary low knitted wool socks, like moccasins, without any sole. Aunt Lyusya had given them to me. So I began thinking about the "wolf pelt" gathering on them and about how I was putting my feet, covered in that crap, near my expensive system unit, the one I was so anxious about.

There was another thing. The previous year I hadn"t cared about it and so hadn"t noticed. In all other schools, when teachers after lessons told us to put the chairs on the desks, that meant turning them upside down and setting them on the tabletop by their seats. But in School No. 33, because of the construction of the low chairs with slanted wooden side pieces, you couldn"t do that. So we placed them straight on their legs. Now I began thinking about that too.

It was already past mid‑March, and I was completely absorbed in games. One morning the PC stubbornly refused to start, and among other things I tried flipping a little red switch on the back of the power supply. When I pressed the power button, there was a bang, smoke came out of the power supply, and the room filled with the smell of burnt self‑esteem. Mum came in, we poked around in the hardware, but it was clear that at least the power supply was definitely dead.

I tried to comfort myself with the thought: Bastards, they could at least have drawn a skull near that switch, or at least my companions could once have told me that computers have a button for depriving yourself of your computer. But it didn"t work. I sank into complete shit.

Again in a suicidal frenzy I wandered around the city, even going to the market fair to look for money and to convince myself once again that I lacked the daring to steal. Everything ran up against that Yamami dead end. I suppose I"ll keep using this term not only for romantic relationships. Whether there or here - in crimes I might get caught committing, and in the case of murder certainly would - there was always the risk that I would deprive my mother of me. After all, in the early raw definition of the psychology of my Yamami dead end in my diaries, I wrote that I felt like my mother"s property. And that was correct. At least that"s how I felt at the time I"m describing.

So while I was prowling angrily through the stalls of the first market fair, seething with the impotence of a petty villain, suddenly coming toward me along the wide trading row were none other than the twins. There was a crowd of people, and it was close to closing time - so everyone kept having to step aside for porters pushing their large platform trolleys. As I passed the twins, who had stopped to look at something on a stall, one of those porters rolled his cart right into the leg of one of them from behind. With a quiet little cry of "Ow‑ow", she half‑collapsed onto the cart, but her sister helped her up.

That "embarrassing" loss of control lowered them slightly in my eyes - in the same kind, gentle way as with Sima back then. I walked on.

No, I still wasn"t in love. Otherwise I would have followed them, of course. They were still only candidates; there were only the first symptoms, like a tiny sting before the big sore throat pain. God, how I miss such moments. None of that can happen anymore - there are no more young girls my age. I wish I could finish writing this fucking autobiography sooner and be free of life.

Naturally, the story with that Yulia also fed into the Yamami dead end. At the root it seemed about the same thing - symbiosis with my mother - but in its nuances, and deep ones at that, the Yamami dead end and that problem with testing were different. From the "testing‑ness" - let"s call it that - I felt bad. And bad not in any other way but in a sadomasochistic one. The same sadomasochistic quality I once described in a note about destroying my own gifts. I called the possibility of destroying a gift "a nuclear button at hand".

Whenever I hurt her - or at least when it seemed to me that I was hurting Yulia - with my ignoring, or later in life when someone tried to get close to me in similar situations and I rejected them, it always hurt me too (the tenderness she and others wanted to give felt like a gift). And that made it even more tempting. Just like when I tormented Murka and couldn"t stop, trapped in that vicious circle. That self‑punishing nuance is what distinguishes the testing from the Yamami dead end.

The Yamami dead end itself - in romantic matters - is something else. At least in one of its variants. It"s about a genuinely hostile attitude toward girls. Almost ordinary misogyny. In that romantic Yamami dead end one wants to hate girls, maim them, and above all return to one"s mother like Grendel and lay their scalps at her feet. Later this year there will be another episode with girls where that Grendel‑like element will be fully illustrated.

But don"t think I was truly tyrannising her. My tests of Yulia were very mild - nothing like the things I later did to people on the internet. There was nothing more tyrannical than ignoring her and showing a bit of ingratitude. For her, meanwhile, not understanding the nature of my behaviour, it must simply have looked like a lack of interest.

And yet, besides suffering from the sadomasochistic pain I created for myself, I wanted sex with her like hell. That"s why in those days I didn"t even switch my attention to the twins - I was occupied with this one. I jerked off whenever Mum wasn"t home, thinking about Yulia. I had even begun imagining loving sex with her. My main fantasy was us cuddling on the big bed in the middle room at my home - in the sunlight of midday, just as in my dream - I"m lying on my back, she"s on top of me, we"re slightly covered by a blanket, and under it I"m inside her. And then my mum comes home, walks into the room and, seeing us smiling but not at all embarrassed, quietly leaves.

A strange fantasy. Why the hell does my mum need to be there? Some obsessive stupidity.

All this crap was happening against the background of both the defeat in my attempt to build up computer‑nerd self‑confidence over the past six months and the stress of the anal issue at the clinic: during March the question was finally being decided - whether I would have the "finger exam" or not. I kept remembering that porn film and marvelled at how physically fearless women were - that scene with the line of asses even looked like readiness for some medical procedure - while I remained the same phobic child when it came to manipulations with genitals or the body in general.

Sexual stressors were everywhere. On Nadya in front I could see red underwear with some playful patterns or frills. Fucking hell. Wearing sexual clothes - does she have someone for them? Fedorov behind her teased her, and she would turn and smack him with a textbook. He was the only one of us who actually spoke to Yulia when she turned around.

Toward the end my tests intensified: I deliberately held conversations with the flamboyant Fedorov about various kinds of paraphilic sex in front of her - just to provoke her disgust. By then I was already spiralling about the whole anal topic.

The peak came when we were discussing something about jerking off, and I - almost the only time addressing her directly - asked: "Do you masturbate?" She slowly turned away with that typical girl"s smile meaning: Oh, what an idiot.

And after lessons, either that day or the next - the last day of the term before a short holiday - all of us, Fedorov, Yulia, and Nadya, walked from the school toward Telman Street, roughly in the direction of my Lev Kassil Street. Outside a heavy snowfall had just come again, quickly melting, and we all made snowballs and threw them. I got soaked through.

Soon afterwards, at home, I fell ill.

.:::.

Part 57 text 4. My father"s crazy humanism,,, Far Cry paradise,,, we get cable TV,,, Aunt Larisa"s Anya goes into gymnastics and goodbye to grandma Valya for a year and a half.

.::::.

Probably still in the last days of March - maybe even a week before those holidays - after spending several days in computerless darkness, I took the risk and moved the power supply from my father"s crippled computer into my system unit. The risk was that his power supply was two‑hundred‑something watts, maybe even one hundred eighty, while my configuration required the standard three hundred - three hundred fifty of those years. The system unit started up. For a while I worried something might happen, but everything was fine, and I decided it would do for now. I wasn"t going to buy a new power supply worse than the original one, and a separate Thermaltake one with higher wattage cost a lot of money.

Before the power supply burned out, I hadn"t even managed to get past the first level in Far Cry, and now I continued. Around those same days my father came over, and I showed him the detailed game world - how even parrots fly around there and how you can shoot them. My father switched on his inner Jesus Christ, commenting on my demonstration: "Why not make a game where you have to save the parrots instead?" Only decades later did I suddenly think about it: save them from what exactly? It somehow echoes my thought about empathic people who suffer without any way out.

Let me remind you: my father spent his whole life being an advocate of that almost crazy humanism. That"s what set him apart from all the men I knew. That"s obviously what my vulnerable mother bonded with him over. And for me especially, only a father like that would have worked - even a slightly rougher one would probably have hurt me (at least if the replacement had happened in the middle of my childhood rather than if he had been different from the start).

Sometimes, later in my adult life, when my mother and I talked about what the ideal man is, we - or at least I, and she didn"t object - going through everyone we knew, still came to the conclusion that ours was the most normal one. Even though, because of traits that grew out of that humanism (or maybe caused it - I don"t feel like digging into that now) - like his hatred of capitalism and other things I once described - as the main pillar of a family trying to survive in the modern world he was completely unfit.

And besides, his devaluing of everything non‑humane - and thereby, in my perception, also the interests and values of my male peers, because there was always violence in them - had, since my earliest years, been my main rationalisation for the contempt toward boys my age that arose in me even without his influence. And that, in turn, pushed me toward outsiderhood.

Anyway, he started coming again and staying with us for a few days at a time. As for the finger examination - a topic that was already fading away in those days anyway - I somehow managed to convince my mother there had long been no reason to investigate my arse anymore. And during our shared discussion my father said: "They"ve already stuck enough things in there."

After lying around with a fever for a while, I went back to not tearing myself away from the computer. Far Cry, together with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and three other games later on, was one of the best escapist moments of my childhood. I didn"t think about girls, or the army, or about myself and my psychological weakness.

My favourite, as I remember, was the third level - where in the middle of a blazing sunny day you race motorboats between tropical islands, mowing down mercenaries, from whom - as I accidentally discovered - you could hide in any fern and comfortably snipe them from there. Then you land on the main island, climb up the mountain with shootouts, enter some tunnel and, it seems, encounter the first signs of mutants - who attack both you and the mercenaries, which fills the game world with the feeling that things are developing there even without you. Then you climb up somewhere high and shoot down a helicopter or something.

After that comes the next level: you have to descend from the mountain far down, and there you can either walk along the slope path or glide down on a hang‑glider. In short - super times. No shooter has ever appealed to me that much since. Half-Life 2 would be great and in some respects even more interesting, but it wouldn"t carry that association with childhood obsessions with the tropics and the magical first months of having a computer.

And then, probably sometime during my two‑week sick leave, at some demanding moment when the graphics were intense, the system unit farted out smoke, the monitor went dark, and I was definitely left without a computer.

Uncle Seryozha"s TV was still running off the old kitchen antenna and showing nothing, but now we finally decided to install cable. The provider was called "Cascade TV". You couldn"t connect fewer than a hundred channels, so suddenly we had a whole pile of channels in the kitchen. I moved in here.

Those days they were burying some Pope, and I watched it, thinking that now something in the world would probably start changing dramatically. But nothing would change. I watched a programme about some slick American con man. They told how, during a bank crime when something went wrong and he realised the police would be called, he dropped to the floor pretending to have a heart attack - and by law, they explained, in America they have to call an ambulance immediately - and when the ambulance arrived before the cops and took him away, he simply jumped out of the vehicle and escaped. And during another prison sentence he started studying yet another field for a future job.

The bit about escaping arrest I watched with great enthusiasm and with the feeling that it was somehow "my theme". More on that later.

But of course I waited for late evening, when my parents would go to bed and I could switch to those channels. It was too obvious though - especially since I turned the sound completely down - and once my mother came out, and I barely managed to switch away. She asked directly: "Are you watching erotica there or what?"

I don"t remember when - later on that same TV, on a music channel, I watched some kind of battle‑style programme. It was Aria versus, if I remember correctly, the pop‑rock group Uma2rman. Aria performed the song Shtil, and my mother, who at that moment was sitting at the table with her papers, even sang along - as if she knew it. That was the first and probably the last time I saw Aria, and they didn"t impress me at all.

Usually when my father came to stay with us, I would go to grandma Valya"s. I might have gone during those days - especially since I now had no computer and there wasn"t much keeping me at home - but I no longer remember. In my memory it feels like the last time I visited her was sometime in autumn or early winter. With grandma Valya we say goodbye for almost a year and a half - until August 2006.

Oh - almost forgot: around those April days I learned that my aunt Larisa"s daughter Anya, my cousin, had been put into gymnastics. Right from kindergarten age. I asked: maybe at least rhythmic gymnastics? No chance - artistic gymnastics, in the very same hall in the Sports Palace where I used to train. And she, being the daughter of short and small‑built parents, was perfect for that sport. Back then I thought to myself: "As if they did it just to spite me."

At the house on Frunze with my grandparents, by the way, I definitely wasn"t visiting anymore, because I have no memory of how that little Barsik we gave them grew up.

.:::.

Part 57 text 5. The last walk with Kozlov who went too far,,, stealth action games,,, that Yulia no longer turns around,,, the beginning of rebellions at school.

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I still wasn"t going to school. I was meeting Kozlov, and these were probably my last meetings with him. Chronologically I"m around the tenth of April now, but this particular walk might have been earlier, because there was still frost outside and no slush.

Once again his mother pushed us out to go for a walk, and we wandered around the streets. In the same spirit as that time with Fyodorov on the ice - we had already bored each other - I somehow provoked Kozlov so that he started chasing me for something. Maybe I threw something at him first and ran. I once arranged the same kind of entertainment with Artyom too, though I never described it - I just don"t remember it well.

But Artyom wasn"t athletic, while Kozlov was a karate guy and taller than me, so it was very adrenaline‑filled to run away from him, because he really could catch me and smack me in some way that would make me cry, even though he wouldn"t have meant it with real malice. We went like that through the whole centre of Engels, the square and the park: me about fifty metres ahead of him, him sometimes gaining on me, sometimes falling behind.

But on the way back, when I was already moving along Khalturnina Street toward my house, he either got fed up with it or simply snapped, and started throwing chunks of ice from the roadside at me. I thought: "What an idiot - what if he hits me and kills me?" It reminded me of Arik long ago, with his disproportionate revenge - a heavy punch for my tiny thrown eraser.

Kozlov didn"t hit me, and we parted without ever coming close to each other. But we still met once or twice more. That was already around the middle of April, when the streets were full of slush and muck.

At that time he had finished the older part of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell and had become obsessed with that genre - stealth action. I watched him play it on his monitor and got very interested too: the same cosy theme of hiding from enemies in the shadows, like I hid in ferns in Far Cry. Plus the theme of jumping from roof to roof - almost parkour.

And that March the new instalment of the series had just come out: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I thought it was pronounced "Chaos teori". When I said it like that in front of Kozlov, he didn"t understand at first, then mocked me and corrected me. He pronounced it "Keos teori".

Back then, while wandering around the streets, I often stopped by a small disc shop in a nine‑storey panel building at 12 Volokha Street. They had cheap game exchanges there - thirty roubles - and I would stand there reading descriptions of games I had nothing to play anymore. One time while I was standing there, Kozlov"s mother came in and asked whether they had Splinter Cell "Keos Teori" - saying it so confidently, as if she played it herself.

Sometimes it felt like my companions" mothers studied what their sons were into. Mine knew nothing about me except that I played some "GTA where you drive cars and shoot like a mafioso". When she remembers that time she says: "you sat there locked in your room." Kozlov had it better (or worse) - their computer stood in the passage hall, and his mother probably sat on the sofa right behind him while he played. No jerking off, no examining some dead 3D characters.

Another time I was standing in that little disc shop by the shelves, and some other boys were hanging around beside me. Suddenly the sellers came up and grabbed one of them: "Take it out." The boy pulled a disc from under his jacket. And the sellers kicked both them and me out together. After that I stayed away for a while so things would cool down.

But somewhere I bought that Splinter Cell with my mother - I thought it was the character"s name. Probably in Saratov. Later I"ll introduce the main disc shops there that I dragged my mother through - they"ll stay in the story until the end of my childhood.

With Kozlov we parted on the topic of waiting for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Everyone was waiting for it then. It had already been out for consoles for half a year, but nobody in my circle had consoles and the discs for them were insanely expensive, so we - PC gamers with pirate discs for a hundred roubles - were waiting for the computer version. It was supposed to come out at the beginning of summer.

On the thirteenth of April we were at the clinic, and a few days later my long sick leave ended.

Strangely enough, I returned to school with good expectations. It seemed to me that Fyodorov, the two girls from the front desk, and I had parted on a good note, and everything could continue in the same spirit - and maybe something would finally happen between me and that Yulia, at least as a first experience.

But no.

She never turned around again.

While the story of compulsive hand‑cleanliness was beginning at home, I also began rebelling at school. Still passively - in an avoidant way. Obsessed now with stealth themes - secrecy, escapes, and in general some kind of invisible criminality - I started imagining how I could escape from school.

As if the Mark‑Twainish mood of the previous spring had returned, only now, besides the spring dopamine, there was a heavy admixture of resentment toward the world as the driving force. The sunshine of the warming spring and the approaching release of San Andreas - for which I would persuade my mother to buy a power supply so I could plunge into its huge game world - filled me with dopamine, while at the same time anger from all my frustrations ate me from inside.

So I would simply skip some lesson and go sit under a staircase. Alone. Once Fyodorov joined me, and for the first time it felt like I was the guide and my companion was the secondary one.

The cleaning lady passed by us on that staircase and went outside through a service door, but she didn"t interfere. I was already ready to tell her to fuck off if she said anything, and even thought of slipping out through that door while it was open and leaving.

Every day I felt like school was a prison for five hours - I hated being under someone, being a subject inside that mild but total institution. By that time I had already seen the film Lock Up with Sylvester Stallone, and again it became one of my obsessions - escaping from prison, like back in the days of third grade.

It felt as if it had inevitably returned, as if the perspective of that story was some unavoidable future written by fate. I mean the idea that I would end up in prison. I genuinely felt that I would end up there. Especially since when the time for the army came, I was planning first not to jump straight into shooting and full‑on darkness but to try simply dodging the draft and not going - and by that time I already knew you could be imprisoned for that. That was another reason I kept thinking about prisons.

And I didn"t know about psychiatric hospitals yet. I mean, I had no idea that no matter how far my emotional criminality, rebellion, or crimes in a fit of affect might go, they could lock me up in a psych ward rather than prison. I thought psychiatric hospitals were only for people who understood absolutely nothing - complete lunatics.

In short, my mind was filled with nothing but negativity.


.:::.

Part 57, Text 6. Hiding Sexualization from Mom,,, OCD Keeps Creeping In,,, The Last Beating from Mom,,, Idyllic Fishing Walks with Mom and the Hook Incident.

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A couple of times Fedorov and I went over to his place. If last year we"d mostly been about games, now it was more about doing things we weren"t supposed to. The first time at his place, we jerked off on the couch in the living room. At the end he stood up and came right on the floor, onto the carpet. Didn"t even bother wiping it up. Just completely bizarre. It was already warm outside, and we"d step out onto the balcony to smoke - their balcony was at the end of their Khrushchev building. That"s probably when I first smoked chocolate-flavored Captain Black - cigarettes I"d occasionally smoke in my youth and early adulthood for the nostalgia of that time, those last moments of getting close to girls my age in real life. Those were the days when I was already waiting to see the twins in the school hallways.

Another time we jerked off lying on his parents" double bed. I showed him how the skin still wouldn"t retract from the head of my penis. He replied with little interest: "Mine"s been retracting for a long time already." We lay on our backs jerking off, and he curled his toes upward. That was the opposite of me - I usually stretched my toes out. I used to jokingly call it "like little Jesus."

Light, still almost transparent hairs were starting to appear on my pubic area. Because of that I no longer amused Mom by swinging my dick around, and I was already growing anxious about how to stop my parents from walking into the bathroom when I was bathing. I said earlier: in 2005 I completely stopped showing any signs that I was growing up and might want sex. My parents would never hear about Yulya or the twins. Sexual topics would remain something I discussed only for the next - my last - year of school with boys my age, and after that only with girls online, and anonymously so it wouldn"t reach my parents. Mostly so it wouldn"t reach Mom.

The reasons I needed to hide it had piled up. I"ve mentioned them throughout this long story. There was the Yamami dead end I"d fallen into at the end of 2004 - a lifelong failure in physical confidence and psychological weakness. There was what I wrote in the original text about masturbating by squeezing my legs together. And there was the sense that Mom was a rival. That last one, actually, was far bigger than the episode where I hit her. On a broader level it was about Mom controlling me, commanding me, deciding my life for me. That theme would become central the next year when the psychiatric hospitalizations started. I"d also begin deliberately performing childishness - a story stretching for years until I was twenty‑five, until, as I"ve said, I decided I"d rather be a killer. And it"s worth noting: even though in that rivalry I was aggressive toward Mom, and in the Yamami dead end I was caring toward her, the two threads still intertwined. I"d keep untangling that knot further in the near future.

Around that time my hand‑washing at home had already become symptomatic. After coming in from outside, I soaped and rinsed twice. I opened the toilet door with my pinky because Murka sat next to it - everything connected to the toilet meant pinworm eggs. I"d already stopped picking Murka up. After taking a dump, I washed my hands twice as well. If I didn"t explain it clearly before, what I"d taken from that biology lesson in autumn was the idea that you could infect yourself - that worm eggs were always in feces. Like: maybe you don"t have worms now, but if you wash your hands badly after shitting and then touch your mouth (and I"d always bitten dried hangnails), you"d swallow the eggs and worms would breed inside you. On top of that whole issue, in those last months I also carried obsessive thoughts - triggered by the finger examination - about anal sex, which, if I were a girl, I"d be terrified of. But they weren"t afraid of that sex, nor of infecting themselves during it with their own shit.

At home I walked strictly in my little shoes so I wouldn"t touch the floor. And I was already having small hysterics about cleanliness. In the second half of April, my father again seemed absent - as if he"d taken off somewhere.

Coming home from that fucking school, I"d immediately switch on some music channel in the kitchen. Around lunchtime they constantly ran a kind of hit parade of the most popular clips, so almost every day they played the newly released video for Keine Lust by Rammstein, where the band, dressed as fat men, shake their heads to an aggressive triplet riff. I hadn"t listened to Feuer frei! or the other songs from that album in a long time - this new clip replaced them all for me.

Once earlier, when Dad was still around and happened to be home at lunchtime, the clip started and I announced - in the same spirit as years ago when we"d lingered in this kitchen to watch an episode of Mortal Kombat: Conquest - that my favorite video was starting. When the heavy part kicked in, I shook my head like the guys in the clip. I was still very much a child.

Another hit from that time I remember was Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day. Around my twenties I even labeled a bunch of rough melodic sketches for choruses and verses in that style as "Green Day-style." I never realized them because I had no idea what to write lyrics about except my masturbation and my wish to die.

Those were days of Lev Kassil idylls with Mom, mixed with her desperate attempts to rehabilitate me academically, or something like that.

The last beating of my life wasn"t so much about viburnum‑rowan branches anymore - it was simply because I"d pissed her off in general. Mom found out I hadn"t studied anything, hadn"t done any homework - I"d gotten failing marks the day before - and with her trademark line, "Well now I"m going to show you," she went straight for the belt. I tried to explain something, but she had no nerves left and started whipping me. I moved from the kitchen into the hallway, and at the turn she struck my dick with the belt so hard that I jumped from the pain, clutching myself there. I ran into my room. I did exaggerate a bit, but it worked - she backed off. Later she asked for forgiveness, and I didn"t forgive her for a long time. In my drafts I even wrote that the evening when she whimpered was the same day as this last beating. But now I"m not sure, so I separated them into different episodes.

In any case, I don"t remember any beatings after that. There would still be yelling, but more and more it would be yelling out of despair rather than punishment.

The idylls were that we went out for walks. In the empty, computerless stretch of time my enthusiasm for fishing returned. We"d take a fishing rod to that little pier from which we used to sail to the recreation base with the Artyoms in summer - and where, up on the dam, a drowned man had once lain. Nearby the slope of the dam down to the water was covered with concrete, and I"d fish from there while Mom sat nearby.

One evening - it must have been early May - I cast the rod and snagged something. Mom screamed. She"d always been unlucky with sharp objects. As a child she"d once gotten stuck on a nail. Then there was the bone incident, then Zosya. Not to mention knives, even though ours were always dull. Later in my youth she almost lost a finger in a meat grinder. The hook had sunk into her finger. We pulled it out and she cried.

Those were the scariest moments for me - when she cried. Especially in childhood, when the situations were actually harsh and it was new to me. Later in my youth I"d grow used to her crying, which she did almost every day simply from her thoughts.


.:.

___Part 58.

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Part 58 text 1. The full beginning of the twins,,, the first solitary surveillance,,, about the unlucky father,, differences between families and stereotypes.

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Another time - on the sixth or seventh of May - we were simply walking along the embankment from the Stele, along the park. Around five in the evening, on a sunny day that was already warm. We had already passed the Soldiers" Monument and were approaching the Brave Ones" Pier. There, by the descent at the edge of the embankment, stood three kids - teenagers. One of them, clutching a branch that stuck out from one of the trees growing along the then‑still un‑concreted slope of the dam, was bouncing up and down - some boy. It was that classmate from my first grade - Seryozha Varanov (who was probably not Varanov at all, but I always thought so because of the association with the cover of his school diary) - whose mother had borrowed ten thousand from us years earlier and never paid back a damn thing. We hadn"t seen him in ages. He was wearing a T‑shirt like a sailor"s shirt - broad white and ginger stripes - fitting his soft, fair‑haired, almost reddish type.

The other two were the twins. They were indulgently waiting for him to finish fooling around, and as we approached, one of them went down onto the pier. Mum and I decided to go down as well. The pier there is a platform on pillars over the water - the one the daredevils jump from in summer - reached by a metal walkway leading off from the dam"s steps. From that walkway someone was fishing at the moment, just with a line, a float and a hook, and the twin who had gone down leaned on the railing and watched for bites below. Mum and I stood somewhere nearby, and soon Seryozha and the second twin came down as well. Mum quietly greeted him. The fish mustn"t be scared away, so the whole scene was almost completely silent. From the walkway people were fishing toward the Saratov side, and on the other side those days everything was covered in weeds. Mum and I stood in place, while the twins behind us circled around a couple of times, changing position. Soon the one who had come down last said to her sister, "Yul, let"s go." Because of that break in the silence I allowed myself to turn my head - and thus, at the same time learning which one was Yulya, I saw them up close and calmly for the first and last time, not in the crowd of the fair and not in school corridors in the flow of people.

To me they practically radiated tenderness and softness. Clearly modest, never swearing, slender, with narrow palms and thin fingers. The one who was hurrying Yulya - or maybe both of them - wore light turtlenecks with small pink patterns, and the collars clung emphasisingly to their long necks. Fuck, how badly I wanted to be in Seryozha"s place.

I don"t know where to insert this. I"ll just write it. There are Australian twin models - Reni and Elisha Herbert. They appear at the beginning of Giulio Cercato"s music video Solid Ground - it has close to a million views on YouTube. There they not only resemble my twins, but the video itself is also done in a beach theme. I listened to it on loop while I was writing that early beach story with my twins. And I should remind you that in 2005 I did not recall my early childhood and did not connect those thirteen‑year‑old twins with the beach sisters from back then. Plus, until adulthood I never even considered that those beach sisters from my early childhood might have been twins.

The trio left the pier, and I, through a hellish desire to follow them, held Mum and myself back on the walkway so I could keep looking at the nonsense below a little longer. Even while the twins were standing beside us I had already formed a plan - to pretend that I had suddenly become interested in fishing from this pier, so that I would have a reason to come here later - and now I had already begun putting it into practice. Soon we also went home. Past the Kalinin monument that used to stand up there above the pier where some little church stands now, past the building with the dumpling place...

While we walked, without even having time properly to process what was happening inside me, I was already - while the iron was hot - working hard on creating the groundwork for paths into this district, into the circles of these people. I hoped Mum might say something about the twins, in the sense that perhaps she knew their parents. The town was small, and she had done projects for loads of people. But no - the twins were absolutely strangers, and there would be no alliance of mums here. Besides fishing, therefore, the main line was that story about Seryozha"s mother"s debt. I kept chewing over that topic, talking about Seryozha and returning again to fishing. I might even have overplayed it, and Mum might have suspected something. But now, twenty years later, I asked her whether she suspected any stories with the twins back then, and she said she didn"t remember any twins at all.

Still, that evening she did remember them - and precisely in the sense I had been trying with all my might to keep from surfacing - because at home she said: "Those girls were eyeing you up." I pretended I hadn"t heard and quickly started talking about something else.

I was simply in euphoria. From the lightness that comes when you admit to yourself that you love someone. It"s like when someone offends you and you sulk at them, then they apologise, and you keep sulking anyway, and it becomes unbearable - and then you forgive them, and suddenly everything feels light. As if all that time - all the last five months, or not even five but the full sixteen months that I had been seeing the twins at School No. 33 - I had been resisting. As if finding flaws in them. Though they themselves were well‑behaved girls, they attended that gopnik‑filled Engels School No. 33. Not connected to sport or music. Completely alien. Almost as if asexual.

And now I didn"t care - and it even became perfect. No debauched sex with them. I couldn"t even imagine them naked. With them it would be me who would be the guide into the world of physical closeness. Everything was again exactly as in my earliest fantasies, which it would turn out had been about them all along.

By this point I could already tell them apart. The one who wasn"t Yulya was slightly smaller and livelier in manner. And there was also the hair. I had already noted a resemblance to that Percy from GTA, and partly that concerned the twins" hairstyle as well. Only with Percy and the rockers of the eighties the hair on top is cut very short, whereas with these girls even the top still drooped. Nevertheless sometimes - especially this non‑Yulya - gathered the hair on top into two little buns, which because of that shortness stuck out of the hair ties like little brushes. In my perception it gave the most fidgety image of a fidget imaginable. Of the two, this second twin was the fidget. Even in adulthood, in her videos, despite the clearly innate modesty of both of them, that playful quality I used to see from afar still remains in her.

But given the psychology of my falling in love, at that time it was Yulya whom I loved. About my height, with her long neck, she walked like a peahen, with no abrupt movements at all, and seemed the more refined of the two. With the non‑Yulya I could imagine sex, but with Yulya almost always only walks and thoughtful caresses.

In those days Father was involved in events at the museum, so he again came by and stayed with us. Mum calls that flickering in our lives "the helicopter pilot." The days were almost summer‑warm, sunny, without school, and with a sort of Levakassil idyll. The day after falling in love with the twins, having invented every possible excuse to plausibly look like someone suddenly seized by a passion for fishing, I gathered my gear in the morning, and besides that it had been agreed with my parents that they would come after Father"s shortened working day to that pier and we would walk along the embankment according to our family tradition.

Of course I didn"t go to any other places first, as I had told my parents - I went straight to the pier. In the morning there were about five old fishermen there, and I, clanging across the metal plates of the iron walkway floor, went to a free place by the railing and cast my line with float and hook and bread. It was around ten in the morning. I kept turning my head to the left: I would have only a few seconds to notice my beloved ones if they appeared at the top of the dam but only glanced down and decided to walk on. The walkway was too low, and you could see only those who came close to the descent.

I stood there about four hours, sometimes pulling up and releasing stinking fish. The twins never came. And then my parents arrived, and I went up.

Father, as always, was carrying his leather briefcase, which set him apart from all the other pedestrians - just like his baseball cap, which he simply couldn"t not wear, otherwise he "felt bald," as he put it. He also wore sunglasses, and they constantly - to Mum"s laughter - fell off him onto the floor in the hallway when he came home and bent down to untie his worn‑out but leather shoes, leather like in his beloved properly organised America.

For Mum and me Father was almost always in the role of a man who is forever getting the short end of the stick, forever unlucky, someone people push around, or some kind of mayonnaise‑reeking oddball. Once - maybe in those days, maybe years earlier - Father silently farted in the kitchen and said, "I clicked," and we went into the hallway. And in the hallway he said, "And here I clicked," and we all went into the living room laughing. Well, those were exactly the kinds of stories that always amused Mum and me: like how he smashed into a pipe, or how he pulled a hair‑clog out of the siphon, how he was always fixing things and scooping out some sort of shit, or how he came at Mum trying to kiss her with a mayonnaise mouth.

On the one hand all that was part of our family code, but on the other - in my perception - it distinguished him, and my whole family, from others to such a degree that I was ashamed of my parents. I assumed that the twins, for example, must have serious and proud parents who don"t pull hair‑clogs out of siphons - or even if they do, they offset it by taking care of themselves, treating their teeth, treating fungal infections. In such families, I imagined, fathers earn money and buy cars, and mothers sit at mirrors and do all sorts of feminine skin‑care rituals. In the twins" family that was exactly how it was - my guess turned out to be right. While with mine there was this sort of post‑Soviet neglect of themselves, stupid rigid habits - like brushing your teeth once a day before breakfast - and standards of living that hadn"t moved on since the early nineties at all.

.:::.

Part 58 text 2. Ninth of May two thousand and five,,, about wounded ego and psychologists,,, the fight with the curly bastard at the Brave Ones" Pier,,, tears and homicidal despair,,, the impossibility of killing and the problem of the Yamami dead end.

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And now - about that fucking ninth of May. It was sunny and even hot, and again under the pretext of fishing I trudged off to the pier in the morning. I went along Teatralnaya, across the square, past the rotunda and through the park. On the square small events were already going on or being prepared, and in the park, along the alley near the shooting gallery, they had set up a field kitchen for those nostalgic for the war. Some sort of barrel with a pipe sticking out of it on wheels - presumably porridge inside.

At the pier there were one or two people fishing at most. On the walkway near me there was no one at all, and I calmly, in a good mood, set about passing the time with my simple tackle.

At some point, fairly soon, two boys came down from the embankment, looking even younger than me. The first was a typical lackey, giggling and backing up the second - already tanned, freckled, with stiff curly dark‑blond hair, wearing a denim jacket, stocky, jackal‑like, with the look of a roaming bully. I understood him immediately.

They stood next to me and immediately made it clear they were toxic scum and looking for a conflict: they started mocking me between themselves, loudly belittling every one of my actions. Then they themselves somehow had a line with a hook and began lowering it into the water too. Maybe someone else had been on the walkway earlier and given it to them. Or they found it. I didn"t even look in their direction. That"s my reaction - to freeze and swallow it until I overflow. Zemskov beating me with a textbook worked on the same principle, and many other episodes in childhood and later in life as well. Meanwhile those bastards had already started swearing. They were fishing without even putting anything on the hook - obviously just loitering beside me.

In short, what happened next: I started a fight, lost, and burst into tears. But first I"ll reason it through.

What options did I have? To remain frozen and keep enduring it - I couldn"t do that: I"m reactive and have what they call a narcissistic injury. To give a clever verbal response without aggression - ideal, but I had no such skill and still don"t: it develops in a fulfilled life, not in hell. To leave - that would hit the trauma. If only there had been someone to leave to - that would have been different. Someone with whom I would be so mutually needed, just as I am, that I wouldn"t give a damn about childish provocations by some street vermin, and I would react only to things that harmed the person for whom I existed. Even if harm to me, through the chain of connections, could harm my person too - still, if after reacting I lost, at least I wouldn"t collapse into despair and shameful tears as I did after what happened next. Because I would be needed as I am, and I would have done everything in my power, fulfilled myself - needed exactly as I am - completely.

In such intensely affect‑laden situations of my ego being wounded I never once thought about Mum, never considered her someone for whose sake it would be worth leaving and preserving myself. Psychologists would probably see in my relationship with Mum - the original attachment trauma - the root of the problem, the root of my narcissistic vulnerability. As in: if throughout my childhood there hadn"t been all her beatings, punishments, aggressive demands, all that Levakassil atmosphere she created, and the placing of the demands of outside institutions - school, clinics - above our loving relationship, then my ego wouldn"t be so fragile, and attacks on it I could survive without needing support in the form of some new person who unconditionally - like a "proper" mother - needed me. I would be, in short, a normal healthy person - the very thing those bastard psychologists mean when, after I say I need someone in order to heal something, they answer: "Absolutely not. No relationships until you become healthy and autonomous." (And the bastards they are also because when I - and sceptics like me - refuse their "treatment" - in quotation marks, because psychologists aren"t trained in medical universities - or even refuse psychotherapists (who at least formally are doctors), since with their insane prices and the obvious fact that unless you"re interacting constantly in real‑life conditions rather than just two one‑hour meetings a week with the therapist it"s a crazy waste of money - they say that therefore we ourselves choose to suffer.)

Anyway, there seemed to be no way out except to discharge aggression physically - maybe I"d manage to win after all. The curly little rot was slightly younger and smaller. Almost like Artyom (and even resembled him: a mixture of Artyom and that snub‑nosed Alyosha from the Saratov gymnastics). Though I remembered that when Artyom and I had trained some wrestling moves a couple of years earlier, he had skilfully - like Kozlov, Mum, and everyone else in life - always managed to throw me.

Taking my line out of the water and hanging it on the railing, I turned to the bastard and said, "You want to get the shit beaten out of you?" I even chose such a cocky wording that afterwards, after losing, it was twice as shameful. The boy turned immediately - looking as if he had been burning with impatience.

The beginning of such fights happens in fractions of a second, and it"s impossible to say who struck first. The whole scuffle lasted six to ten seconds altogether. I landed a couple of blows, but the freckled Engels jackal was releasing his strength at full power and at one moment landed an incredibly hard blow on my ear, and after that, using that classic neck‑grab with which my opponents had knocked me down all through childhood - and whose technique remained unknown to me - he forced me onto my knees on the metal floor of the walkway and kept hitting me - with fists and even somehow with his foot. In positions like that the world flips in your eyes, and I saw upside down how some woman quickly led a child away from us. There were other people on the pier too.

A few seconds had passed from my confident challenge to the bully to the moment when I was already standing there disgracefully, legs splayed, taking blow after blow. The other boy didn"t intervene.

Then we suddenly broke apart without a word. I stood up, didn"t even brush myself off, silently took my line and quickly returned to fishing. They said something like, "Should"ve thrown him in the water."

A few moments passed, and I couldn"t hold it any longer: my face twisted into a pitiful grimace and I burst into tears. I started pulling the line out of the water, but first it snagged down there, then it snagged on that other boy, the lackey, and I threw the fucking line away and walked the fuck out of there. The boy shouted after me, annoyed: "Hey!" - but I didn"t turn around, and I couldn"t see a damn thing through the tears anyway.

And it wasn"t only my oldest and deepest traumas that poured out through my eyes. The way that woman led the child away and, unlike in kindergartens, schools, and especially unlike in my expectations, nobody nearby broke us apart - let alone stood up for me - finally opened my eyes to how the world works. I even imagined that if anyone had stepped in, it wouldn"t have been for me: after all, I was the one who initiated the fight. And of course the main judges were the twins, whom I imagined - and even allowed might really have been there - watching it all from the embankment: my physical disgrace and the way I burst into tears - and how they would have judged me and that boy equally as bastards, fit for orphanages with problem hooligans, and among all of them me as the weakest physically and mentally. I finally came to hate this world, this society - where they always save your life but make it hell - and I understood that I would kill this filth called "people".

Past the fucking Kalinin monument, through the spit‑covered bus and trolleybus terminals - where the Lazurny shopping centre stands now - I walked there crying. Everywhere there was bustle, heat, the atmosphere of a festive day. I saw two roubles on the pavement and picked them up out of habit. I went along Gorky Street to Khalturin, turned there into the courtyard of the white‑brick building number twenty‑three where Mum and I had once looked at a flat, and where we had also gone with Fyodorov a couple of weeks earlier, and from there I went farther - to the abandoned, dug‑up ground behind the technical school. Here, in solitude, I could finally cry properly.

There was constantly a sort of almost magical thinking mixed in: just as with that fair back then - a place foreign to me where I went and immediately got into a fight - it hadn"t been worth me, so vulnerable, going to that fucking pier either - the most alien place to me of all, associated since childhood with the bold and the brave. The place of the twins who were strangers to me, in a district of strangers, with whom there were no "alliances of mums". And that Seryozha - his mother was even in an anti‑alliance with mine: she hadn"t returned the money.

My ear hurt as if I had crashed onto it from a bicycle. I paced across the already weed‑choked, burdock‑sprouting ground and looked for some sharp piece of metal to go back and kill the bastard with. There was nothing except stones and bits of glass.

When I had cried myself out and dried off, I wanted to go home and take a screwdriver, but it was obvious my face was swollen and Mum would realise something had happened.

So I went back toward the square, where crowds had already gathered and various events were going on. In one place people parted and above them flew some radio‑controlled aeroplanes or helicopters. It was almost summer heat, and on braziers along the edge of the square by the park something was grilling. Everything just like in that memory - or maybe dream - at the very beginning of my story ten years earlier. I wandered around there everywhere, and by then I didn"t care about the twins at all anymore - I was only scanning for that bastard.

At some point after lunch I went as far as the fair and saw someone who looked similar - stocky, with the same hair and a denim jacket. Most likely it was him. He was standing near a gaming machine - where else would he be there? In my drafts it says that I immediately left when I saw him.

Toward evening, worrying that maybe my ear had swollen and would give me away to my parents, I went home. Father had already arrived.

In my drafts there"s also a note that at home I did take a screwdriver after all and went out again that evening. I really did go out with my small screwdriver - almost like an awl - and wandered somewhere with the fantasy of driving it into the bastard, but since now I no longer remember whether it was that same day or one of the following, nor how or where or how purposefully I walked with it, I won"t include it in the story of that day as a fact. What definitely happened was that I once again entered the Yamami dead end and only harmed myself by indulging that unrealizable fantasy for several days, or maybe less. Except for the first hours after the fight, filled with raw affect, what I remember about that day and the next few is not anticipation of revenge or strength, but sinking into the despair of impotence.

I only need to clarify one possible misunderstanding: why in moments when my ego was wounded - like the fight - I didn"t think about Mum, didn"t leave for her sake and instead rushed into danger, but with the plan to kill the boy - which was also about defending my ego - I put Mum first and backed off, entering the Yamami dead end. The reason is that, unlike a fight and similar situations full of affect - in which in my naive mind I even hoped I might win and rise in Mum"s eyes - premeditated murder is by definition cold‑blooded, and seeing its consequences in advance I understood that though I would defend my ego, I would do it at the cost of separation from Mum. The same sober foresight existed in the Yamami dead end of trying to get close to strangers: I knew that sooner or later I, a psychologically weakling, would be traumatised by someone"s roughness, and for Mum that would become both confirmation of my defectiveness and a cause of suffering for her because of me.

And now, when there is already so much material, one can see why - as I once mentioned - rivalry with Mum (as it sometimes appeared) and care for her are intertwined, and the Yamami dead end is not quite as bipolar or dichotomous as it seems: I didn"t want to lose to her and appear defective not out of rivalry as such, but so that she would not have to suffer because of me being defective.

In the end (returning to the ninth of May), because of that bond with Mum, from whom I could not allow myself to be separated, because of that dead end, within a few days - and right up until I was twenty‑five, when the despair would become so great that I would begin to consider murder even within the Yamami dead end - all thoughts of killing, except in the context of the army which would stop threatening the next year (and even that context gave no sense of autonomy, since the violence there would be forced from outside), I was forced simply to repress out of myself. And that was the heaviest blow to my sense of dignity.

.:::.

Part 58 text 3. OCD already in full swing,,, my parents illiterate in psychiatry,,, the end of my companionship with Fyodorov,,, the investigation into the twins at school.

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At home I started acting up even more: shouting that no one should touch my computer, that no one should enter the room where it stood - and things like that. Possibly I was already wearing the mega-galoshes for the first time, but to be safe I"ll introduce them into the story in the summer. Mega-galoshes are, briefly, plastic bags on the feet. Around those same days I also developed "surgeon"s hands": always tucked up against my chest so they wouldn"t touch anything, and with the wrists hanging down - like the forelimbs of the bipedal dinosaurs from my childhood books, or some kind of kangaroos. It irritated Father, and in his harmless but nervous tone he kept repeating: "Put your hands down." He said that phrase so many times in his life that sometimes it seems to me I had been tucking my hands in since early childhood. But I"ll trust Mum, who doesn"t confirm that - besides, I tucked my hands in and provoked that phrase from Father throughout my youth as well, which is probably why it feels to me as if it had started in early childhood.

Now I washed for a long time and very thoroughly. I no longer filled the bathtub with water the way I had in childhood - only showers now. I no longer even understood the point: you"re dirty all over, and once you dip into the water you immediately contaminate the whole thing. How are you supposed to wash in it? Stupid. Only useful for soaking and scraping some kind of coating off yourself. By the way, there hadn"t been any pumice on the edge of the bath for a long time, and by then my parents" heels and feet were all overgrown with yellow callus - it disgusted me fiercely. But the main thing was that they had that special towel for their fungal feet, and if I accidentally touched it I absolutely had to wash my hands with hotter water. In general I hardly touched anything unnecessary any more, and if I did touch something I analysed it: had this object been in contact with something filthy, something from the street? If it had - I went straight to wash.

The most dangerous contamination came from the ground outside, and the hallway was the most trafficked place in the flat, and the filth carried from there could reach my mouth in a million ways. In hot weather, to stay away from the windows, Murka would lie in the fucking hallway right among the street shoes. Then she would walk past my system unit, brush the power button with her tail, and later I"d touch that button with my finger and then touch the hangnail on the neighbouring finger with the pad of that finger and chew that hangnail - and I"d infect myself with the egg of a beef tapeworm, which would grow in my stomach to ten metres. I didn"t need that. So I ordered them to make sure the door stayed closed while I was at the fucking school, and I"d raise a scream if there were suspicions someone had entered.

Let me remind you that my parents, who had absolutely never had anything to do with psychiatry, had no idea whatsoever about the nature of my behaviour; they didn"t even know such words as O C D, obsessions, or even the approximate meaning of the word "neurosis" and how it differed from "psychosis". Though, to be fair, Mum knew the word "psychosis" perfectly well - it was in fact her favourite label for any kind of compulsive behaviour, like picking hangnails or anxieties. She constantly used it in conversations with people, and no one ever corrected her, and she didn"t care about any of my explanations; she still uses the word to this day. She also always had some mysterious phrase that supposedly explained all my oddities and calmed her: "out from under the will". "Out from under the will, I tell you - it"s all out from under the will." I ask: "And what exactly do you mean by that?" - "Well, out from under the will. You can"t stop yourself. That"s what the illness is." Later another word will enter her vocabulary - "schizophrenia" - which she will use to label my complicated thoughts and conclusions, of which she only understands that they are not in her favour. In short, the level of old ladies gossiping on a bench by the entrance (which she always openly said she wanted to be - only not by an entrance, but on the ancestral bench on Frunze). And Father, when in my youth I once carefully explained to him the mechanics of my quirks, simply said: "I thought you had voices or something."

I describe all this so that some imaginary researcher of my childhood could imagine who exactly was witnessing my behaviour - and only the first link in the broken telephone through which my story would eventually reach psychiatric case histories.

Doctors themselves, my idiot parents, stupid interlocutors on the internet and later gaslighters would convince me so thoroughly that I was schizophrenic that until the end of my youth I wouldn"t even take an interest in what my quirks actually were. I would only learn the word "O C D" at eighteen, and I would only finally understand that I was not schizophrenic at twenty-five - having spent almost my entire youth devaluing myself under the diagnosis of Soviet degenerates. Therefore one must remember that none of the terminology related to psychology and neuroses that I use in the text, and no understanding of what was happening, existed at the time of the events being described.

On the first day after the holidays I spent the last time close with Fyodorov - we were walking together after lessons along Gorky Street and stopped to stand in the little front garden between house numbers eleven and nine. Secretly I needed that spot in order to watch for the twins: earlier I had already seen them more than once walking after school along Gorky toward the museum. With my OCD disgust I kept remembering how Fyodorov had come on the carpet that time, and you can"t really wash that out of the fibres. The twins never passed. Other classes might have had one more lesson or one fewer. I still hadn"t managed to find out which class they were in.

And in the following days at school I began taking it out on Fyodorov. He was a downtrodden kid - people mocked him, not maliciously but still mocked him. Someone started teasing him again, and I joined in. Soon I was teasing him even on my own, while he snapped back in his odd way, like that twitchy Evstifeev back in the gymnasium. Within a few days Fyodorov and I would part forever. At the beginning of our falling-out he even started flicking boogers at me with his finger when he noticed my disgust.

As I once said, the twins looked a year or a year and a half older than me and clearly were in a higher class - which you could judge first of all by the people they associated with on the first floor in the main hall, where groups gathered during breaks. By contrast, the kids from my class never did that: we were almost always in the same wing, far from the centre of the school and on the top floor, and most importantly - compared with the twins" groups - the people in my class were all some kind of constrained children with peculiarities. I told you: that class where they placed me in School No. 33 was for those kinds. It was unimaginable that any of us - even the one straight-A girl and a few B students - would stand on that first floor so casually talking about something like adults. All that separately created a sense of social difference between me and the twins, in the same spirit as how I imagined the difference in mentality between their parents and mine.

But I needed to establish their class at last. In those times, when I even allowed myself to skip lessons sometimes by hiding under the staircase, I also allowed myself to linger for long periods in toilets or the sparsely populated corridors of the north-west wing of the school. That was my form of rebellion. And now I skipped another lesson specifically to follow the twins. They were based in the most prestigious wing, where it was correspondingly risky to be wandering around during a lesson - the teachers there, according to my observations, were the ones closest to the headmistress"s office, and if they saw someone loitering in the corridors they could easily notice and deal with a truant. And I, though I had already been accustoming Mum to my anti-school tendencies, didn"t want to trouble her unnecessarily. But I still tracked where they went in, and the door to their classroom was open, and I - already after the bell, pretending that I had been delayed in the nearby toilet and was going to my own lesson - even walked past to glance at how they sat. They seemed to be sitting at separate desks.

From the classroom number in the schedule I quickly established everything: they really were one class above me - in the eighth grade, and under some more prestigious letter than mine. And literally that same or the next day, observing them, I made another encouraging discovery: they were in the same class as Aunt Lena"s Masha. Now Mum"s phone calls with Aunt Lena became important: one could at least learn about events in their class. Incidentally, I had never seen Aunt Lena"s Masha in the twins" circles - an observation that, remembering how poor Aunt Lena and Masha were, strengthened my thoughts about class difference yet again.

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Part 58 text 4. Yamamiya-style paranoid surveillance of the twins,,, the first successful surveillance,,, I paranoically helped an old lady while spying,,, the last meeting with Artyom.

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After school I waited until evening and then went out. And I was still - and would remain for the whole of May - in a state of tragic defeat, similar to how it had been in the weeks after quitting gymnastics - only then there had been November gloom and darkness for everyone, while now for everyone else there was sunshine and the approach of summer, and only I had this shameful piece of shit happen to me, which made it feel even more tragic.

Since the pier was now finished for me, I - under some pretext or other, I don"t even remember which - simply went for walks, constantly looking around for three dangerous encounters: the bastard, the twins, and acquaintances of my parents. The bastard is obvious, but the others... well, I was a very cowardly stalker, as I once called myself. Paranoia of OCD purity. Like this: the twins would see me once, see me twice, and the third time they would understand that I was following them. And then the interesting part: they"d tell someone in their class; it would spread among them; Aunt Lena"s Masha would tell Aunt Lena; Aunt Lena would tell my mum. One detail about my appearance - and Mum would understand the story was about me. And if the twins also realised that the one following them was the same boy who had stood near them that day at the pier, then their story would include a description of both me and my mum, and in that case I would probably already be identified through Masha. But the most dangerous thing, of course, would be to be seen and recognised as a pursuer of girls directly by my mum"s acquaintances, whom I might not even notice myself or even know, but who knew me. Mum, by the way, besides Uncle Seryozha (who lived in Saratov), Aunt Lena and maybe occasionally Aunt Tanya - Artyom"s mum - if she happened to meet her in the street, had practically no acquaintances left with whom she maintained any regular or informal contact. But still. Some female doctors from the clinic who might later tell her during an appointment; some parents of classmates who might mention it at a school meeting; teachers. Or those fucking Aunt Marinas and Semyonovs - Mum"s former classmates - or relatives from the Frunze branch of the family. Mum had deliberately not met with those last ones for a hundred years already, but they might run into each other in the street. Just imagine: I"m walking along the embankment, oddly stopping and turning behind corners, clearly waiting something out or hiding from someone. Behind me walks some Semyonova whom I don"t notice, but she recognises me and sees my hiding. She looks ahead and notices the pattern: I"m hiding from two girls. And the next day she happens to meet Mum at a bus stop. And that"s it - fucked. Some employees at Father"s museum, where I had already started dropping by, might know me too, though I hadn"t remembered them. In principle everyone in that damned Engels knew my mum within two handshakes.

For the first time since that day at the pier I saw the twins walking during one of my first outings after the ninth of May. A warm evening stroll, around six, the embankment full of people and all the benches occupied. I was already in different clothes - my beige track jacket, which later became strongly associated in my mind with those evening walks and the heavy residue of my shameful tragedy - and I was walking from the Soldiers" Monument toward the Pier, and the twins were sitting on a bench a little beyond the place with the pull-up bars below. With some other girls, maybe even older ones - young women - and they were all talking and laughing, and one of the twins was standing in front of the seated ones, looking around. I was already about forty metres away when I noticed them - that"s quite close - and I had to stage a little scene as if I had forgotten something before turning back. But right then, by the pull-up bars, a bench became free, and I sat down. I was two benches away from them, and with people sitting between us I could hardly see them properly.

Then they all got up and walked along the embankment in my direction. I didn"t look and pretended to be busy with some thoughts - bending my fingers as if counting something in my head. When they passed, I followed them and shadowed them through their entire walk - apparently as far as the Stella, then through the Luna Park and across the square back - and finally followed them home. Just as I had assumed, they lived a hundred metres from the pier, almost exactly in that old three-storey "House with the Dumpling Shop", as it had been called in the town since Soviet times, because of the canteen-dumpling shop on the ground floor at the corner. Kalinin Street, house three, at what was then the final stop square for buses and trolleybuses. The reason I said "almost exactly" is that they entered the courtyard of that house and turned toward its entrances - yes - but with them into the courtyard went that Garfield Seryozha, who, as I had already long known, lived in the neighbouring private house - Kalinin Street, number five (whose main gate and entrance were from the road side of Kalinin Street) - and it turned out he reached his place through some second gate from the courtyard of the House with the Dumpling Shop. But I didn"t know whether his private house might be divided into two flats - which was quite possible if they were poor and borrowed money - and therefore there was a small chance that the twins lived in the other half of his house, if it existed, rather than in the House with the Dumpling Shop. That still needed to be clarified. In any case, considering how close this Seryozha lived to the twins, there was now nothing surprising in the fact that he knew them and walked with them. Incidentally, because of the incident at the pier, the whole topic of his mother"s debt - which might otherwise have been developed and eventually used as a pretext for visiting that neighbourhood - I naturally had to postpone for the time being.

On another unsuccessful outing I stood very nervously and dangerously (because of the possibility of meeting the bastard) near the Kalinin monument, pretending for Mum"s hypothetical "spies" that I was waiting for someone. Some old lady was trudging along from the bus stops with incredibly heavy bags. She asked me to carry them to some entrance in a five-storey building along the embankment at Volga Bank, house four. On the one hand, at that exact moment it actually legitimised my presence there; on the other hand, if I later walked there with Mum and we ran into that old lady and she recognised me and told Mum I had helped her, I"d have to explain what I was doing in that district. But I carried them anyway, and if I remember correctly she thanked me with something like apples - though I either got rid of them somewhere or didn"t take them at all, since I couldn"t bring them home - again because I wouldn"t be able to explain them to Mum. If I lied that I"d received them somewhere else, and later met the old woman again and she told how and where it had really happened - that would be the end.

And on another day, some weekend, after several months of separation I met with Artyom - the last meeting between us that I remember in my life - and we sat on a bench in the amusement park opposite its entrance, where the ticket booth was. It was sunny but after rain, and there weren"t many people. My twins passed behind the fence along the alley above the shooting gallery, and Artyom and I were just talking about girls, and as a kind of game - sacrificing the rare opportunity to follow the twins in the street (because after my game I couldn"t suggest that Artyom walk with me and choose a route after them) - I said that somewhere nearby at that moment my beloved was present. He looked around and made guesses. Because I had spoken about her in the singular, he didn"t think of them at first. But in the end he pointed at them and asked: "Those ones, maybe?" I of course answered no. After his prank the year before I wasn"t about to reveal such an important secret to him.

So, in short, I couldn"t allow Mum to find out that I wanted girls. If she had found out, then I would have had to be either mentally invulnerable - which I wasn"t - or ready to destroy the girls and "bring her their scalps," which is exactly what, by the age of twenty-five, I would literally become ready to do, and only then finally speak about my sexual torment. But back then, in childhood, that readiness was still far away, and so the exposure of my desire to get close to outsiders was completely unacceptable.

I exchanged messages with Artyom a few times in my youth. He said he had lived some kind of experimental youth - studying here and there, trying this and that - but eventually, as I understood it, settled in the same Engels and, in his own words, by the age of thirty-two was living the life of a skuf in a Groundhog Day. Only a few days later, right after those words, for a moment there appeared on his page a photo in front of the registry office, and there he was with some medical student ten years younger than him.

.:::.

Part 58 text 5. Hatred of school and the system - teasing a sex-disabled kid with sex education - waiting for San Andreas and ordering a power supply - stalking the twins in the amusement park and a desired nightmare.

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At school I had already stopped studying altogether and didn"t listen in lessons at all, and it even surprised me how easily that was let slide. It also demonstrated to me the true essence of the educational system and schools: their main concern isn"t to educate, but that the little citizen shouldn"t disappear - that he should at least keep showing up to lessons and thereby stay in the habit of obeying the state regulators of existence - at minimum for social discipline, and at maximum, in the case of a male, for exploitation later on. Go on then, go on, I thought, let"s see how you manage that with me...

There came a day when, instead of some regular lesson, they were supposed to give us an informational lesson about sex: condoms, HIV - that sort of thing. Before it there was a long break. I was raging furiously: what the fucking hell are they telling children about sex for at all - even teaching them how to do it - if once you learn about it, it becomes such a maddening need, while at the same time there is no mechanism whatsoever guaranteeing that you"ll ever get it? None of that "Let"s be friends? What"s your name?" - like they used to teach back in my kindergarten - meant anything anymore at our age. Only lucky circumstances mattered. I was hanging around with that idiot Alina and various unequal and useless girls who meant nothing to me, while some fucking striped Seryozha was immediately with the twins, and all he had to do was behave a bit more grown-up so they would consider him as a romantic partner. And I was supposed to be afraid of AIDS on top of that? I practically wanted it. But who would even give it to me? And that was only lessons - besides that, they ought to be clearing kissing couples out of parks and banning young people - like that red-haired rocker girl from my building who threw herself around her Romeo"s neck right in front of my eyes - from any romance at all, even approaching each other. They should ban even friendly informal closeness in public - like Seryozha with the twins - so that those who weren"t lucky wouldn"t even understand it for lack of comparison. Double beds should be removed from my sight. Films with love banned, not to mention porn. Bastards, how I already suffered back then - not to mention now!

For some reason the lesson never took place. Everyone couldn"t care less about it, about the topic itself. I noticed that I alone kept bringing the conversation back to it with the people I talked to back then - Slepukhin and a few other passive lads like Mitenkov, Tyulenev and Kolobok Roma Yefimov.

Because for me it was an escapism from the torment over sex, I was the most obsessed of all with the soon-to-be-released San Andreas, which was expected any week now. Slepukhin and I were increasingly separating ourselves from the rest, and we discussed every rumour we could get about the game and its possibilities. It was known that instead of a single city there would be a whole state, all kinds of vehicles and activities, and compared with Vice City - and unlike the real world - there you could actually live.

For that game it was already time for me to do something about my power supply. During the May holidays Mum and I had gone to Saratov a couple of times, checking prices and where we could order one. The best shop I identified was "Sunrise", located at 18 Bolshaya Kazachya Street - such a place that, when during my price-checking and interrogations of the managers (which lasted more than an hour at a time) I stepped out to piss in the yard of the old houses opposite, I was practically behind the Shmyrkevich house.

After mid-May Mum and I went again, and I chose some insanely cool Thermaltake power supply with the model name "Butterfly Pure Power", or something like that - over five hundred watts, with internal lighting and an external panel with knobs for controlling the fan speeds, costing about four thousand, which was very expensive, though it could have been more if I hadn"t conducted a price investigation and we had ordered it just anywhere. "Sunrise" was exactly what you"d call a little back-office outfit - inconspicuous, with non-greedy pricing. It was supposed to arrive in a week.

Meanwhile I went out again to stalk my beauties. Another strolling evening, almost summer in the air. I saw them at the amusement park, in the queue for a ride where people sit in pairs in shells and are spun around in a circle while the shells themselves spin too. With them again was that tomcat - that Seryozha in his ginger striped T-shirt. While they were riding I could hardly look at them properly, because with no cover inside the amusement park territory I had to stand outside and watch through the fence, and along the alley damned people kept walking past - it could easily have been someone who knew my parents. Then the company went to the Ferris wheel, and I ran around the amusement park from the Stela side and entered through the gate near the big Pyatyorochka and the fair. There were trees there, and they shouldn"t be able to see me from above. But then I couldn"t see them in any of the cabins myself, and in the end I lost them, searched for a long time, and found them already walking somewhere outside the amusement park.

In general I ran around a lot there - calculating, planning, disguising myself - right up to little dopamine rushes - and that was the entertaining part of my stalking. Until I was twenty-five I amused myself like that, even showing it in my video diaries, and among my viewers - stupid scum, including girls, which was especially insulting - there was a popular opinion that this was all I wanted, not a relationship.

After that stalking I hardly remember anything clearly. Little moments: how they all bought ice cream at the stall near the stage on the square; how they walked from there towards the rotunda while I immediately ran into the park behind the trees, near the shooting range. Then - or maybe earlier - they stood by the Eternal Flame at the Stela with some other youths, some acquaintances.

And the last moment - I don"t even know whether it"s a memory or a fantasy, a desired nightmare. They were clearly heading home along the embankment - somewhere near the Monument to the Soldiers - and I ran ahead of them around the whole block between the embankment and the bus stops to be closer to their house and witness their final stretch. That block was a passageway, as I"ve said - I had even wanted to buy a shed there for storing bottles - with several exits. I stood in the exit facing the Kalinin monument, where I had once helped an old woman, thinking they would pass there. But they didn"t appear for ages, so I went out to the bus stops to look along the pavement all the way to the museum. No one there either. I decided to cross the block completely, go out by the turnstile onto the embankment and figure out what was going on. But it was as if the moment I entered those narrow, deserted passages inside the block from the bus stops - with my bottle shed there - the twins - already even without Seryozha - came out somewhere straight towards me, and I had no choice but to walk past them in super-stress and then practically run out of the district, paranoically recalling all their glances in my direction during the walk, even allowing that they might have seen my silhouette behind the fence when they were riding the shells, and assuming that now they had definitely realised I was stalking them.

.:::.

Part 58 text 6. The computer revived and a blow to self-esteem from 3ds Max - anticipation of summer with San Andreas - saying goodbye for the summer to the newly begun Slepukhin friendship.

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At last the power supply arrived, and we went to pick it up. At home, in my small room, I connected it - everything worked - and inside the case it began blinking and shimmering in different colours alongside the blue lights that were already there, creating a kind of colour mess that separated in my memory the first months of the computer, when everything had been only blue, into a distinct chapter.

A few days earlier I had swapped some disc for a disc with the program 3ds Max. There was also a tutorial with it, and I tried something, but at some step some incomprehensible bullshit began - what the instructions described simply wasn"t there - and, having no other help and deciding that I must just be stupid - and also remembering Yevstifeyev, who as I understood already knew how to work in that program - I gave up. All my life since then, whenever something didn"t match up with instructions for computer programs, I remember those attempts with 3ds Max in the little room and how I sat there wanting to die.

The need for thorough washing after going outside had already turned walks into torture. There was enough at home too: I began regularly washing things by hand, and also started washing my own dishes, scalding my glass with boiling water - all that sort of thing. And now the computer was working again as well. Of course I spent all my time at it. Slepukhin gave me the game The Chronicles of Riddick - a stealth action game with brutal Vin Diesel - but I remember it together with one summer event: apparently I only installed it for now, while I was busy finishing Far Cry, which, because of its difficulty and length, I would only continue after San Andreas.

The approaching San Andreas felt like New Year in childhood - even better, because not for two weeks but for three sunny months of complete freedom from all that bullshit.

I couldn"t now find in any issue of Igromania a preview of that game anticipating its release, but apparently someone must have brought some other magazine to school, because I remember how we lads stood by the classroom where that failed sex-education lesson had been planned and on some semi-school last day looked at screenshots: that black guy on a BMX, screenshots of the countryside - and we, or at least I, urgently needed the game to appear in shops already. No summer had ever been anticipated like that. Usually the approaching summer (and I"m not even talking about the last two, which had been pure hell because of the constantly expected failures and stress about physical stuff) was associated with hobbies that meant going out into the damned street, trips to nature with all its dangers, trips to the dacha where it would be cold and you"d be hungry and want to go home. But here you would always be at home, and at the same time you would be wherever you wanted in an entire American state, with music and with the ability to change everything, roll back to any moment in the past and live life again until it was perfect.

On the last day of school there was some parents" meeting. Mum understood that I wasn"t studying for shit, but by then she was already pleased just that I was at least socialising at school. She knew about my hanging around with Slepukhin. When I first mentioned him at home she misheard his surname and cracked up over what sounded to her like "Zelepukin", which became another of our shared memories to laugh about. But she realised he was the most normal of my companions - not touchy, not malicious - and for the first time from a full and non-neurotic family. So when on that last day Mum and I were still in the classroom, and Slepukhin specially came in, shouted a final "bye!" to me and left, Mum even nudged me to run after him and get his phone number for the summer. But although I myself wanted to, I didn"t: if he had wanted it too, we would already have exchanged them naturally beforehand.

.:.

___Part 59.

.::.

________________Seventh grade is over. Summer.

.:::.

Part 59 text 1. Media-markets in Saratov - buying San Andreas and the first day of playing - my typology of rock vocalists - San Andreas to the music of The Kelly Family.

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By that time the sales of discs had already reached such a scale that the little disc sections were becoming a thing of the past, and more and more separate shops were appearing instead. In Saratov a whole chain opened called "MediaMarket", and they had two big shops in the centre. One, on Kirov, was absolutely huge, but I"ll describe it in the autumn, when Mum and I start going there often; the other was smaller but packed with discs even more densely. At 87 Volskaya Street - almost where Yablochkova ran into it, right next to the Youth Theatre (by the way, I will never again in my life go to any theatres).

These "MediaMarkets" differed in that, first of all, you had to leave your bags and packages in lockers, and secondly there were players with televisions where you could independently listen to any music or video disc. We didn"t listen to anything yet, because we only went there about my games, and besides, just as once with Rammstein, I simply didn"t yet know how to approach the music sections and begin my search for bands from the Vrok radio station. "There might be things about sex or dying there," and I was with Mum.

One day at the beginning of summer Kozlov phoned and said that San Andreas had already been delivered to the shops and that he had even passed quite a large part of it. With the computer and my hand-washing mania I hadn"t gone outside for the last several days - and had missed it. Mum and I went to Saratov to buy it. A windy and sunny - perfect - summer day. The game was there on Volskaya, and we bought it. Impressively for those times, it was on a DVD disc - because of how much it weighed. In those days there was only an early pirated version - with subtitles made in an automatic translator (and those were complete rubbish back then). But still, in the case of GTA it was better than the licensed versions, because someone, for example, had gone through Vice City with full Russian dubbing, and I pitied them for the inauthentic experience.

At home on that first day of San Andreas, closer to evening, there was some bullshit: both parents were busy with household stuff, and suddenly Mum started nagging that we had to bring potatoes from my grandparents, and for some reason I had to do it. Fuck, I wanted to play so badly. And I fucking went. Through the damned polyclinic, along damned Persidskaya Street. A summer evening, loads of kids on that Persidskaya. At the intersection with Moskovskaya, Sasha Yemelyanov was riding there on his high-speed bike with a shock absorber - which by then I didn"t even want anymore. He hadn"t recognised me for ages.

I remember that I didn"t reach Frunze Street: somewhere around the place where once I had collided on bikes with those rotten little bastards, my grandmother came towards me, handed over the potatoes in their favourite Soviet cloth bag with handles - and I went back. At that intersection with Moskovskaya, by the way, they had finished building and just opened a brick house, which Mum that year went to look at with my grandparents, but Granny whined: "Natasha, where would we get the money?" - even though she had plenty of money and would later share it anyway. If she had just added some then, they could have bought a two-room flat in that house without even selling the Lev Kassil place, and perhaps the whole situation that would come at the end of my childhood story might never have happened. By the way, I don"t even remember visiting my grandparents since the end of last year. Computer.

Finally I"ll be able to move faster with this writing, because times have come in my story when nothing really happened. I just sat and played day after day.

In San Andreas it was already the nineties, and the music was different. A couple of rock radio stations. On one there played a song familiar from Forrest Gump, from the scene where Jenny wants to jump off the balcony. On the other - Radio X - with some half-metal performers but mostly what I would later learn is called alternative rock - there was one song clearly with the same vocalist as in one of my favourites in Vice City. I still didn"t know it was Ozzy Osbourne, even though I already knew him from The Osbournes. My favourite song in the game became the most ominous-sounding one - Helmet"s "Unsung". And there was also "Welcome to the Jungle" with that creaky, lecherous voice of the vocalist who even moans there. Close to that same Percy in Vice City, in that "Dangerous Bastard".

By that point, already in anticipation of the detective-like work that would occupy me for the next half-year identifying the bands from Vice City, I had already divided rock vocalists" voices into types. That voice from "Welcome to the Jungle", for example, went into the type of creaky, "unmanly" voices along with Percy (but specifically in the song "Dangerous Bastard", where he squeals), Megadeth"s "Peace Sells", and a song by Mötley Crüe. I imagined them all exactly like Percy - made-up like women and so on. Which in fact many of them - the glam-rockers - turned out to look like.

Another type was the opposite - the classic masculine rock vocal: the voices from "I Wanna Rock", "Cum On Feel the Noize". In those voices there was that very growl - the "drive", in vocalists" terminology - that I had heard in bold boys since childhood - at the Brave Pier, on the slides and in various boys" team games - and which I myself never had when shouting. In my teens and youth, when in my attempts to catch up with masculinity by composing some fucking songs in my room I would need that growl, it would become for me the "flick-banihop" of vocals: I wouldn"t manage to produce it even after fifteen years of attempts.

Another type was simply clean voices in the spirit of Ozzy Osbourne. For example the voice in "Unsung" sounded similar to Ozzy, and I even allowed that it might be the same performer. I imagined them as some balanced forty-year-old adult men who no longer needed to squeal and attract attention.

There was also the type of "mad, deranged" voices, some kind of Jokers: the songs by Iron Maiden and Tesla. Maybe even Mötley Crüe there as well. In the coming months of identification I would constantly think about all this, building guesses, shuffling those songs from one type to another. A huge amount of life time. And now I"m even writing about it all.

And there was also the type of the most normal vocal: in Anthrax"s "Madhouse" and also in the Love/Hate song "Fist Fury". A young male voice - or rather a guy"s voice. Without strain, without comic effect.

But the voice in Slayer"s "Raining Blood" stood apart - I hadn"t heard anything like it anywhere yet. In terms of image I imagined some kind of butcher there altogether. He probably gave no interviews, lived in a crypt in a cemetery and wanted nothing to do with the world of the living. Compared with him I didn"t seem quite so hopeless.

In general, games - especially GTA - were a gateway into an interest in music. And not only in the in-game music, but also because, in the conditions of what was essentially a mentally disabled life, the life of a recluse within four walls, they served as a visual background for listening to music in general. After all, if you just listen to music staring at a wall you might go mad. But I"m saying that in advance. Playing games just to listen to music would start next year. At the time I"m describing there was only one single instance of it.

Somewhere in the second quarter of my playthrough of San Andreas, when the missions in the countryside began, and I had in general grown bored with the San Andreas soundtrack - which was good but not as striking as in Vice City - I remembered our disc by The Kelly Family, which in my ignorance about styles and even geography seemed to me to be American country music. I began turning it on in the background on the Kenwood, or even copied the files into the special "User Tracks" folder inside the game. For a couple of days I rode around some field there on a mountain bike, making money-earning jumps with my own unique technique, as it seemed to me: after accelerating I would lift the front wheel, lean sideways, and when the bike skidded I would jump to a height that in that San Andreas contradicted the laws of physics, making several horizontal spins.

The Kelly Family after the game radio were real super-hits, every song. As I said, we had a compilation called Gold, and there were covers of famous songs there. It"s hard even to choose which one was my favourite, but probably the sad "Who"ll Come with Me" and the poppy "Once in a While". In some songs one of the younger members of that singing family turns on that same growl - exactly like the shouts of the boys, the kind I never was. It"s unlikely all those kids went to vocal courses to learn some kind of voice splitting. They were simply born predisposed to that feature of the throat and ability.

In short, without hurrying the playthrough I rushed around there under that Kelly Family music through forests, highways and little villages, with all that atmosphere of American trailers, fast-food joints and Harley-Davidsons. As escapism - it was a good time. The parents, suffering from the heat, sat either in the kitchen or the living room, watching all sorts of rubbish on television - it even resembled New Year - and then, unsuccessfully trying to persuade me to go for a walk, went out by themselves - and I finally masturbated.


.:::.

Part 59, Text 2. The End of Nikita Kozlov and San Andreas,,, The Chronicles of Riddick and the Last Call with Guzhik,,, Summer OCD,,, Father"s Compliance and Mother"s Stubbornness,,, First Headphones,,, Reinstalling Windows,,, Recording an Audiotape,,, Broken Monitor.

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In San Andreas, the whole sprawling plot unfolds first in Los Santos, then in the countryside, then in the local San Francisco, then Las Vegas, and finally - back to that Los Santos-Los Angeles for some final showdown. I spent ages at the slot machines in Las Vegas, and I wasn"t in any rush to finish the game. Kozlov called - he"d already beaten it and, basically, spoiled the ending for me: something about a setup by some cop who"d been in contact with you throughout the game. I was talking to him in the kitchen, with Mom and Dad around, and from the innocent little gestures I used while discussing certain points, it could have seemed like I didn"t want to talk about them in front of them. And apparently, that"s how it came across, because Mom, in a cheerful tone, commented: "Yeah, they"re playing pimps there."

As far as I remember, that was my last contact with Kozlov during childhood. We lived just three hundred metres apart throughout our youth, and by the end - practically in neighbouring houses - yet we never saw each other. Only once, when I was nineteen, walking with Mom, we ran into him on the same Petrovskaya Street and briefly talked about my move to Saint Petersburg. He was still the same extroverted, self-confident guy. Later, judging by his VK page, he was in the army, and he had content related to his martial arts. By the way, he had a different surname by then, and even as kids, I always called him "Nekit," just as he called me that, and when I once mentioned his surname, he said he didn"t know any Kozlov. Mom told me that he"d hated that surname since childhood, so they changed it.

A few days later, I finished San Andreas myself. And just like that, June was over. I"d probably fit the whole summer into one chapter. I wasn"t going to meet anyone at all over the summer, and I could go a week without leaving the house - maybe more. What was there to do outside? There was no excuse to hang around the twins" house, and it seemed pointless. All those Cossack bandits were now just on the monitor.

But I still had one last phone contact. It was some sweltering days, and I was sitting there, playing The Chronicles of Riddick. I had no idea what the plot was about, but it started in prison, and for the first time I encountered the whole deal with trading random crap for cigarettes, and the whole frisking, stashing thing - all that crap that would fully hit me the following year. Guzhviev and I had a tradition over the previous two summers to call each other at least once during the three months of holidays. Even though we hadn"t met, we"d spoken last summer - I just didn"t mention it. That was mostly our parents" initiative. So now, even though I had nothing in common with him in those last months before leaving the gymnasium for good, we still had to call, just to tick the box. I don"t remember who called - maybe me. My parents had grown accustomed to my computer reclusiveness, and any display of normalcy was beneficial. I paused Riddick and spoke to Guzhik. We made up topics as we went along, and at some point, the connection dropped. That was it - the end with Guzhik. Mom saw him at the beach, still with his grandmother and mother - even at twenty-five. She said he was covered in acne scars. He never had photos on VK. Around sixteen, he had comments from that same Dubonosov - the idiot aggressor we once ran from with him from a parallel class with Slava Stallone. Later, according to search results, he finished some fancy law academy and became a bankruptcy lawyer. We never exchanged messages again.

I often threw fits at home over hand cleanliness and germs. For my parents, despite the social stigma around it, it was probably easier when I was absorbed in my games. Often, but mostly when it was just me and Mom, we had intense arguments - now on my side - when I stood (as I had throughout childhood) over the bath scrubbing my T-shirts, and she came up behind me with comments. I"d tell her to fuck off, because I was washing the shirts due to her messing with them somehow. She was stubborn about respecting my requests. If I told Dad not to touch something, he didn"t, even if it was inconvenient. He complied. When I told him to wash his hands after being outside, he did it without argument. But Mom couldn"t tolerate that. If she needed to touch something, she would, and when she didn"t, even worse: it annoyed her. To me, it looked like compliance, and she refused to appear compliant. When I insisted on handwashing or other rituals, she - as I perceived it - deliberately didn"t. I"d scream until my voice broke, cry, get headaches, feeling no better than after eating rowan berries.

I even beat Murka over germs - if she entered my room, especially jumping onto my chair. I was desperate to the point of tears, that nothing could be done. During school months, it would get worse. Mom, stubborn as ever, would ignore my prohibitions, enter my room, move the rag I blocked the door with, and when I returned, the door was open, and Murka - by then already terrified of me like a tyrant - would dash between my legs, leaving me in a hellish panic, unsure where she"d been and needing to wipe everything just in case.

And there was probably the annual hot water shutdown in June. It must have been hard, but I don"t remember any fits with kettles or pots - likely thanks to being lost in games and ignoring other activities, which let me not bathe during those days.

July arrived, and I moved my computer to the middle room, while my parents moved their big bed to the small room. That was the final internal move in our apartment on Lev Kassil. Around the same time, I got headphones for the first time. That was a primitive era, our family included. Dad had those Amphiton concert speakers, a turntable, an amplifier, even studio rack gear - reverb and some effects. He even had an electric guitar at Zavodskoy - which I hadn"t mentioned yet - just lying on a shelf by the ceiling all my childhood, untouched. And naturally, Dad had big headphones. So he had a full musician"s setup - all Soviet-style, incompatible with modern tech. None of it was used - even the turntable just sat there.

Anyway, he brought me a simple modern pair of headphones. I put them on for the first time and finally didn"t have to struggle with lowering the volume. I was fed up with adjusting volume at every cinematic game cutscene. In Vice City, there was a straight-up porn scene, and I freaked out thinking maybe Sima and other girls had seen it.

In the middle room, I continued the postponed Far Cry from April. I played for a few days until some glitch forced me to reinstall Windows, losing everything installed, including Far Cry. I think I saved my San Andreas file somehow, because I never replayed it, but I remember first burning discs only a year later - I hadn"t known how before. There were 1MB floppy drives from the 1980s, with special drives for them.

I decided to reinstall Windows myself. Hot, sunny days, and I followed instructions with a pre-prepared licence key. Windows installation took ages back then - about two hours. San Andreas and DVD games took almost as long. Usually, you"d wander the apartment, eat, and do other things. By evening, I"d successfully installed it - which temporarily boosted my self-esteem.

After reinstalling, knowing the computer would break again, I did something smart: I connected the sound card to a Kenwood via cable and recorded the whole Vrok radio station onto a cassette. Soon, almost the same day, the monitor stopped working. I tried everything - useless. Regular monitors were huge, costing around five grand, and LCDs at 1280×1024 - ten grand or more. Dad"s museum salary was barely five grand. Gaming LCDs at Igromania went even higher. I wanted a good LCD straight away - never half-measures. But after the recent PSU mishap, it was too early to ask Mom for another expensive purchase. So I just had to sit back in the green chair again.

.:::.

Part 59, Text 3. Details on OCD Wiping,,, Mega-Galoshes and Why Not Slippers,,, Father "V Rog".

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Murka always lay on the green chairs, and so many people had sat there before. We never used covers over the original cushions. That doesn"t even begin to explain why I would sit there during fits over touching my T-shirts. In school, it would be simpler - I"d focus only on hand cleanliness during the day, and face, with full cleansing at night. But these first months needed a detailed explanation.

Let"s start from the end. I"d only use bleach at twenty-seven. Before that, we never had it at home, and aside from the stuff I"ll mention, I didn"t know what it was. I explained that sperm-fungus stink in school toilets as rotten rags, fungus - hence my disgust, which I"ll describe later.

Alcohol-based tinctures - like calendula from the pharmacy - only entered my life at fourteen, after all psychiatric stories. I"d wipe everything with it until twenty-seven, until dealing with second-hand plumbing required proper sanitation.

This long use of calendula highlights my parents" rigidity. They"d overpay, hunt pharmacies for it, never suggest cheaper bleach. Partly due to their belief - especially Mom"s - that bleach eats hands like acid. That"s why I ignored it for so long. Maybe her personal issues with bleach-related smells mattered too - another story.

Why we didn"t use chair covers - except the mustard one in the kitchen - is unclear. I could have lifted the seat cushion when leaving, saving nerves. Covers only appeared at Grandma Valya"s the following autumn. In green chairs, I simply tortured myself, wiping obsessively with a wet cloth. From a disinfection point of view, useless or even harmful. But OCD, especially at that age, wasn"t about guaranteed sanitation - it was about doing as much as possible in that neurotic frenzy, calming down, and forgetting. I don"t remember the evolution of my OCD quirks clearly. I just wiped, forgot, and listened to music. OCD then wasn"t about intellect. I never had the neat, calculated OCD houses shown in movies.

At some point that summer, mega-galoshes replaced wool shoes and a failed sock system. I call them that from the start, though the name appeared later in autumn when I discovered Megadeth. Earlier, there were "hypershoes." I took all this ironically. Transparent bags weren"t common yet - just ordinary white medium-sized shopping bags with "Thank you for your purchase." Those were the mega-galoshes. I tied the handles like laces; their stiff, crinkly plastic held shape, letting me slip my feet in without touching the bag. Hypershoes were too big; the laces ended too high, causing sweating. Mega-galoshes could have a bigger hole near the floor, and a toe opening, avoiding condensation.

Why not slippers? Harder than bleach. Rubber black flip-flops only appeared in my youth, after psychiatric episodes. Mainly, we didn"t have a home-slipper culture. Parents had worn thin, worn-out slippers, which felt like a protest against wearing indoor shoes. Any normal slippers weren"t suggested, and I"d first wear them at Grandma Valya"s. For the first 1.5 years of my OCD - and even if it sounds like blame, Dad would leave in three months, so mostly Mom - no one suggested improving my OCD hygiene. Mom initially thought: "If he wants to wear bags, let him," but a few months later, school and clinic ladies would talk about psychiatrists - as schizophrenia, beyond household changes. I"d walk around in bags until autumn 2006.

Dad, though not confrontational, was annoyed too. He sometimes responded to my explanations, thinking I had voices - more relevant during the psychiatric period - but at this time, he saw it as mere problematic character. These new fits, though eccentric, seemed just a continuation of my lifelong fussiness and pretentiousness.

First signs of Dad"s impatience appeared in unrelated situations. Sitting in the green chair, I played my cassette with the recorded radio station, turning again to the Vrok logo. That logo had appeared in San Andreas - Las Vegas hotel background with an electric guitar arrow, which I often examined. Approaching my first passport in a year and a half, I thought about using it as my signature. I even wanted to rename myself "Vrok." I mentioned it in the kitchen, and Dad, instead of supporting me, laughed: he heard "v rog" (into the horn). He said: "With a name like that, they"ll give you a horn." It offended me, so I retreated to the living room.

Most signs of his nervousness were either veiled similarly or attempts to make me do something. The only explicit one I"ll mention later.


.:.:.

Part 59, text 4. Amélie-mania and reality with "other people" - watching children"s films - listening to music with parents and alone - the last time on the Volga like in childhood - summer stalking of the twins - masturbation on edge.

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While sitting in that green armchair I developed what I once said would happen - Amélie-mania. Maybe not quite a mania, but I watched it about seven times in a row. Everything there felt close and understandable to me - the OCD traits of the characters and the sexual hints. And above all the romantic fairy-tale: becoming loved by a tender neurotic girl.

God, how fucking desperately I wanted to hug and kiss my Yulia the way they do in the final scenes of the film Amélie. On the neck, behind the ears, on the cheeks. Not on the lips. Into the hair at the back of the head, standing and hugging from behind. And for her to be as vulnerable as Amélie, and for me to take care of her.

I was already beginning to suspect that the twins were delicate only in my fantasies. And, as always in my life when falling in love with girls, I obsessively thought about their male relatives. That was a big anxious splinter ruining everything. I didn"t even want to know about them. There would be no grieving father like Amélie"s. I could only survive someone like that. I wouldn"t even survive someone like my own father. Let alone the kinds of fathers people really had, as I suspected. And there would be some bold courtyard brothers - some Stases, Denises.

All my life I looked at the girls I loved and saw all those males around them. You would have to interact with them anyway. Why the hell did I need them? I was fragile - I wouldn"t manage it. I needed some orphan. Or even better - a sister. As close as possible. I kept coming back to the idea that this was the only kind of girl that could exist in my life. I still remembered Mum"s abortion and how such a sister could have been born but wasn"t. But that was only fantasy - realistically it would have ended in tragedy too.

I spent whole days in the living room and, besides Amélie, rewatched every remotely adult cassette I had: Forrest Gump, Titanic, Chocolat, The Lion King, The Mummy. Even that Disney film Dinosaur - apart from the music I liked there, I felt empathy for the incel lemur character.

I cried easily, so I mostly watched things like Titanic when my parents had left the flat. But sometimes the crying would start even at completely unrelated moments - heroic scenes in adventure films, for instance, or the moment when Forrest runs for the first time.

I also kept endlessly listening to the cassette with Vrok recordings. That squealing song by the band "Love Fist", paranoid that it might somehow reveal my secret stories, I listened to only when alone at home. But songs with masculine-type vocals - things like "I Wanna Rock" (which I jokingly called "Ay vona rak") - I could easily play even when my parents were there. Those were about bikers, about men in denim vests with patches - so masculine that they almost felt asexual.

Listening to Slayer with my parents around, like later listening to the most aggressive bands, was a special case. It was about Grendel-ness. As I said, after that "Day of Defeat" on the ninth of May I soon pushed conscious thoughts of murder aside, but subconsciously the act of playing aggressive music in front of my parents - even obsessively wanting them to see that I was listening to something extremely vicious - carried a promise to them: that one day I would settle the score with this filth, with this fucking society. I would avenge everything I had suffered so that they - my parents - would not pity me for it. And only then would I be able to tell them what I had endured.

There was a paradox there, of course: I couldn"t take revenge on society while my parents were alive - because prison would cause them further suffering - and therefore I could never tell them about the earlier suffering either.

When they weren"t home I listened to the heaviest tracks differently - turning them up even louder and thrashing around in the middle of the room, shaking my head and pretending to play an electric guitar. It"s a pity I never filmed how ridiculous it must have looked - with plastic bags on my feet.

The most acceptable music with parents around remained listening to Dire Straits. I still perceived them as somewhat boring old men and not particularly great composers, thinking that lively metal bands - like the speed-metal group Tesla with their fast guitar solos - easily outdid them.

One time there was so little to do that, after their persuasion, I agreed to go for a walk with my parents. We even dived into the river from a concrete slope. That was my last swim in the childhood part of my life story.

I don"t remember exactly, but that time I might have separated from them under some pretext and walked along the embankment almost to the ill-fated pier, where I sat on a bench waiting for the twins. Because I have a vague memory of sitting there while the twins came down to the embankment near the pier from the direction of the Kalinin monument, and with them there was some adult guy. Then they went back, but I couldn"t follow - which suggests it was summer, because among the crowds going to the beach there could have been the Nespeshny family visiting for the season, and Lidushkina"s mother was a notorious tattler, so it was dangerous for me to suddenly jump up from the bench and show obvious interest in someone.

Until the time of writing this I didn"t know it, but the twins apparently had an older brother about seven years older than them. So that time I probably saw them with him. Maybe I even suspected it back then, which might explain why during those days I was so fixated on my problem with the male relatives of the girls I loved.

That is the first and last memory of actually seeing the twins that summer. There would be more stalking, but none of it productive.

At home, after swimming in the river, I of course washed myself thoroughly and scrubbed hard with a sponge. Because pubic hair had already started appearing, I always sat in the bath on my backside so that if my parents barged in they wouldn"t notice - and I chased them away immediately. Or they would understand and leave.

Masturbating in the bath was never considered. For that I waited until they left the flat for a walk. Then I lay on the large bed in the small room on my back and masturbated without taking off the mega-galoshes: putting them on took time, while my parents could enter the flat in seconds, and the entire corridor leading to the small room was visible from the hallway - it would have looked suspicious if I suddenly came out of the small room in a hurry, which had nothing in it except the bed. I had to finish earlier, and also have time to switch on something like Timon & Pumbaa.

I kept trying to grip my penis in my palm like an adult, but it wasn"t long enough yet, so I still held it like a pencil. There had been major progress with the phimosis. By the end of summer only a tiny edge of skin would remain unseparated.

Pubic hair excited me: I would squeeze the penis between my thighs - like when I used the leg-press method - so it wouldn"t be visible, and stroke myself while looking there, imagining it was a girl. Because of the hair colour I imagined a blonde - Sima.

And once, when my father and I were alone at home and the atmosphere was fairly positive, I - half because I wanted to talk about something adult, and half to indirectly show that I was still a kid - asked him when he first started masturbating.

He said: at sixteen.

.:.

___Part 60.

.:::.

Part 60 Text 1. Dad Hates Cartoons,,, Dad Flies off the Handle,, and My Envy of My Parents" Sex Life.

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Even though Timon and Pumbaa-"the cartoon of my depressions"-was the most childish thing I rewatched those days (and I watched it to tatters), the next episode with Dad, as I recall, still played under the main theme of The Lion King. I was watching closer to evening, and Mom came in from the kitchen and plopped into another chair. At that moment, Dad was passing the little room, and looking at what was on the TV and then at Mom, he twirled his finger at her temple. There you have it-the result of reading Márquez, Borges, and Pelevin: you won"t know a damn thing about the mechanics of real life; what looks stupid will just look stupid. And the fact that he directed this gesture at Mom (I just happened to see it)-that"s about me being Mom"s child. He implied that she should do something about my infantilism, or at the very least, not indulge me with joint watching. As for him, he "has no influence over me" and is just walking by.

Then came that episode when he actually lost it. And this one"s more about me than him. I may not have conveyed it well in my story, but especially starting this year, I felt envy toward my parents for having sex. I never heard a single confirming sound, but it was enough for me that they slept in the same bed. The double bed had, by that point, become a symbol of sexual life and pissed me off as much as couples in parks or the sex shops in Saratov (one of which-the first and main one in the city, on Volskaya and Kiseleva-we always passed with Mom in the spring on our way to Sunrise for discs). So with that motive of envy and anger in my head, and outwardly-under the guise of infantilism and laziness-I once sprawled on their big bed in broad daylight and refused to move an inch. I had been testing their nerves quite effectively lately-refusing to go for a walk, refusing to do anything-and deliberately annoying Dad: curling my surgeon"s hands tighter, mumbling, unable to answer, wandering around the apartment like mold (he called such states "mold," and he also had the word "chvan"," which he evidently derived from "chvanstvovat"," not about lethargy but about arrogance). And now he got furious and tried to drag me off the bed by my legs in my mega-galoshes. He pulled me along with the blanket. Immediately after, they both went somewhere, and I was in a fierce sulk, almost to tears, lying back on the bed, listening to three songs in a row-from Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer.

Psychologists might see an Oedipus complex here-claiming I was jealous of Mom toward Dad. But I think I provided enough material explaining the mechanics of my envy toward other people"s sexual life to avoid getting tangled in dusty Freudian theories. As for teasing Dad-that"s nothing special: I was always aggressively targeting Mom. True, my attacks on Mom were mainly due to provocation, as I perceived them (and therefore so vicious), but with Dad, I picked fights almost like I used to with Murka-just for no reason, just because it annoyed him, and it "spurred me on."

So, at the psychological core of the bed episode, on my side, was envy of their sexual activity, which I could not see in myself in the future. And if you exaggerate the situation, imagine they were openly fucking-to the point that I would want to kill them, I would want to kill both of them. And if Dad were with another woman, I would want to kill him and her too-and even more her (because she would probably seem more "promiscuous" than Mom). So it"s way more complex than some Oedipus complex. But importantly, parental sex-or sex involving at least one of my parents-irritated me more than completely strangers" sex-because with my parents, there was an element of betrayal-a jump to the "other people" side. I needed my parents to suffer with me, to stay family. Even though I hid my suffering from them precisely so they wouldn"t suffer. Dead end in a dead end.

.:::.

Part 60 Text 2. Reading Fowles" The Collector,,, the Origins of Thoughts on Sexual Equality,,, Mom"s "He Already Stinks" and the Last Meeting with the Nespeshnys.

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Soon my parents always went for walks alone, no longer hoping to drag me along. Meanwhile, having already absorbed Amélie years in advance, I picked up something else I had on the theme of romance, now real, unrequited, like mine-John Fowles" The Collector. I decided to read it all the way through. The part narrated by Frederick Clegg-I identified almost completely with him, and so, naturally, I considered, and still consider, him a victim-was easy to grasp. But now I wanted to get into the part from Miranda"s perspective.

I can"t even imagine how stupid it was possible to be, but at twelve, I read it and understood almost nothing. I honestly read the whole text, but I don"t remember retaining even the understanding that Miranda had a romantic interest in that grown artist man. They had no sex, and apparently not even a kiss. Their meetings were dead boring. I would have understood her being in love more if she had not met him at all, only thinking and thinking about him, as she did while meeting.

Meanwhile, she pondered all sorts of utterly unimaginable nonsense about art and Shakespeare. I knew of Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet, but that was it. I was just lucky that those days I had already absorbed Amélie, so my mind floated not through the streets of Engels and familiar reality, but through the streets of that film. So when reading The Collector, I imagined scenes like in Amélie-fairly close to the English urban setting of the story, which helped me form a roughly correct visual idea, unlike other books, like last New Year"s. I knew the story took place in England, but I had no clue what it looked like, not even where the country was (I hadn"t looked at a map for years, except the Western Hemisphere). English teachers, beyond pictures of the damn Big Ben, some bridge, and bug-like taxis, showed us nothing from England. Not even one film (and better a modern one, so it would be interesting to watch). No. Only this way could I get a sense. Like when they showed us a film about Lomonosov, I permanently understood what a boring, icy shithole Saint Petersburg was.

In The Collector, there was still the scene, mentioned both in Clegg"s and Miranda"s parts, where she tries to seduce him while he leads her from the basement to his house. Fowles gives Clegg"s erectile problem without much explanation-I didn"t understand back then that he couldn"t get it up, and the refusal of intimacy was completely mysterious to me-which allowed me to put myself in his place. I remembered how Miranda comforted him: "It"s just sex."

All these abductions are, of course, total bullshit. Miranda would be sex-phobic even if placed in complete dependency. Like, if she killed you during sex, she still couldn"t escape for some reason and would starve to death. Because she would remain "other"-which, to my mind, would be because nature provided her something else, something better. There shouldn"t be other options in nature, let alone better ones. Originally, things were simple: it was just most reasonable, or even necessary for survival, for women to attach to a man. I constantly remember Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun (the hero sets up his home and life, and the wandering woman comes to him herself). Natural dominance, without violence. Even people like me and Clegg, once we had a home and food, could count on some homeless, unadapted woman at least. But of course, with the arrival and development of law, property rights, inheritance-including for women-and other things, this was doomed to end quickly, and a model arose, incomprehensible to people with attachment types like mine with Clegg, in which everyone is equal and no woman depends on a man anymore. And it became entirely unclear-even if you are lucky like Seryozha-neighbor to twins, friends with them, even loved by them-how could you count on closeness and relationships where she could never hurt or betray you? Imagining a family in such conditions, therefore (at least for me personally), immediately sparks the desire to have a child, so in case your partner hurts you, there"s consolation: "Fuck her-I"m with her for the kid," and other pathological crap.

At the time, of course, I didn"t have all these thoughts, but I"m not shy about laying them out here, because the intuitive roots of all these ideas were already present then, and even earlier-for example, the story with that Yulia, and the whole Yamami dead-end-basically all about this.

The Nespeshnys, who actually came, tried to sneak by us and lure us to the beach. More precisely-Lidushka"s mom (Aunt Ira, if I remember correctly) was passing by, rang the intercom, and mine let her in. It was closer to evening, as usual for the Nespeshnys. Dad wasn"t home, and Mom and I had just had a slight tension over my O.K. ER tantrums, but we were already in the process of a truce. Nevertheless, I was sitting in the kitchen in my mega-galoshes, not fully deflated, and made it clear that nobody was needed, not even in the hallway. Mom went to the elevator, and they, having not spoken for a year, briefly exchanged news in quiet voices. Aunt Ira said something. Then I overheard Mom"s phrase: "He already stinks." For her, it was a sign of growing up. She said it with a tone of either pride in me or competitive bragging toward another child"s mother. I didn"t tell anyone-I didn"t know where to put it-in September of last year, approaching the gymnasium, I smelled it in my armpit for the first time, and it smelled like onions. Like some chips-I thought. Disgusting. Later, maybe a few more times I noticed it. But then, with the start of autumn cold and until the time described, I never felt it again. Probably Mom sniffed secretly. But why didn"t she tell me then? Why the hell should I stink? I mention this to show that she, too, might have had some stereotypes. Spoiler: next year, when something like a mustache grows and I suggest maybe I should shave it, she will, after expressing her usual belief that shaved hair grows back even thicker, and I respond dismissively, almost cause a scandal with psychological guilt until I say I won"t shave anything. In general, I write all this to convey: Mom carried a tangle of stereotypes, phobias, and insecurities about the physiological signs of growing up. Combined with my unwillingness to show maturity (Yamami dead-end), and my resistance to control (competition with Mom)-all of it mixed into a mega-tangle of psychological discomfort over these topics with her.

The beach, with my bacillophobia, was no longer considered, so Mom, on the elevator platform, arranged something simpler with her. Their conversation ended with a matchmaking playful hint. Referring to me and Lidushka, someone said: "Maybe something will come of it." I sat there thinking: "What could come of it? I"m already such a mess."

Either that same evening, later, or the next day, at a late hour, the four of us went for a walk. We didn"t go to the embankment but took a long detour-starting almost from Mayakovskaya and Telmana-streets far from the usual strolling areas. I again tried petty tricks to scare and tease Lidushka, and she, as always, fell for it, but midway on Gorky and Petrovskaya, Aunt Ira finally said: "Nikita, stop"-and I stopped. Considering my sensitivity, I probably would have stopped forever and years earlier if she had caught me like that then. Truthfully, all interest in walking with them would have vanished. But now, in any case, this was our last meeting ever.

From Mom"s later stories, I understood that a couple of years later, they moved from their Moscow region to Engels permanently, and Lidushka, though not like Alina, still grew up a bit weird. I never saw her; only Mom met her. Apparently, she even worked. And, I think, she even got pregnant. I never found her on VKontakte.

.:::.

Part 60 Text 3. Going with Mom to collect a debt near the twins" place,,, in the courtyard of the twins" building,,, found a flyer with rock band names,,, first steps in investigating bands on "Vrok".

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It was already full-blown August, probably mid-month. Dad seemed to be on vacation at his museum and hadn"t been living with us for a while, which I remember as the standard Lev Kassil trio period - me, Mom, and Murka. When that happened, Mom and I returned to our own routines, usually practical stuff - money, shopping. This time, it was about money. That goddamn debt from Mom"s Sergey. I decided I had mostly faded from the mind of that asshole who probably still lived in that area, and I could flash by there with Mom, so I finally pushed the debt issue - and off we went. Collecting a debt like real-life debt collectors.

I should note that I wasn"t yet fully sure whether the twins lived in the Dumpling House building, and I allowed for the possibility that Sergey"s private house might hold two families, so they could have been in the other half.

We arrived and rang the main gate from Kalinina Street. A dusty, sunlit summer evening; cars and buses passed by in Saratov. A guy opened the gate. It turned out Sergey had an older brother. He said no one was home but Mom would be back soon. We said we"d wait, and he sat on the porch, and we all waited.

There were little movements of curtains inside, and Mom and I thought someone might be there. Me, I just hoped no one was, so we could linger longer. While Mom stood by the gate outside, I could now - under the guise of scouting the courtyard of Sergey"s house - legally slip into the Dumpling House courtyard.

The feelings were intense - entering the personal, intimate space of my goddesses. It was a nice little courtyard, cozy. Sitting there in the heart of the city, near the bus stops, yet shielded from the traffic by the corner building, with a single-storey private sector ahead, sunlight, and sunset. Plus big trees in the yard. For me, the vibe was like Forrest Gump, the scene with the big tree.

I didn"t have the paranoia I"d had in late May that the twins might already know me - though they could literally see me from some window. Legalising my presence there made a huge difference.

I looked around. A couple of entrances in the Dumpling House, and a back door to that small grocery shop where we used to buy "semki" rolls and where a display of trinkets sat unattended. The building was old, and Sergey"s house - likely housing two families - was also pretty shabby, so I would take some time to even figure out how to feel about the twins. Nearby, a new building was for sale - Lenin Street, house two - and with their civilised manners, handbags, and tidiness, the twins seemed like they should be in a building like that, not these. Still, I got used to it, and some units in the Dumpling House already had plastic windows.

In Sergey"s house, there was no sign of the twins that evening. Neither did they appear from the Dumpling House entrance. My mom and I waited there about an hour and a half. Our debtors never showed.

If they were in the Dumpling House, I couldn"t imagine what their apartment looked like. Eventually, it was easier to picture them in that private house. And so, in the evenings after that day, before bed (as always, after our chatter, laughter, and winding down with Mom, I constantly fantasised about the girls), I formed a fantasy: I, their acquaintance, enter the twins" private house, and only my Yulia is home, asleep. Naked, uncovered. It"s summer, but evening and slightly cool, so even without looking at her breasts or crotch - being conscientious - I carefully cover her with a blanket. I sit nearby, admiring her serene little face as she sleeps. Then she wakes, slightly embarrassed, and I stroke her head and cheeks; we smile, nuzzle, press our faces together, and lie cuddled up.

A couple of times Mom and I walked like that, and Sergey"s mom kept hiding. I finally had a legitimate excuse to be there. Dad could even ride the bus to his museum and later tell Mom he saw me there - I could say I was scouting our debtor. Even if she never repaid, I didn"t care.

On our way, I sometimes steered us past the embankment too. These were literally the last simple childhood walks with Mom in those spots. Later walks on the embankment would happen, but without this same playful purpose.

On one of these walks, near the intersection of Teatralnaya and Kommunisticheskaya, I - unafraid of germs (I"d wash thoroughly afterward) - grabbed a scrap of paper from a bench opposite the main theatre. It was a flyer from some local sect, like Adventists or Jehovah"s Witnesses. Titled "The Devil in Rock Music", it quoted lyrics or interviews where the compilers saw Satanism. There, I first saw the names of major mainstream rock bands of the last thirty years - from Black Sabbath to Slayer. Iron Maiden, WASP, KISS. At least now I knew what counted as rock on the record shelves.

Yet I couldn"t know what counted as heavy rock - the kind I wanted - because one quoted band I already knew from MTV was light rock. Possibly Red Hot Chili Peppers. Not my thing.

One quote by a performer (I later checked - Jimmy Buffett, never listened) went: "My head hurts, my feet stink, and I don"t love Jesus." First, as someone obsessed with the body, I related; second, the mental leap from trivial to profound struck me as hilarious. I"d later use this technique often in lyrics and performance art. It was my logic: start with the mundane, end with grand philosophy. My style.

The flyer also translated band names. I learned Slayer means "killer." I didn"t yet understand English nuance; for me, slayer implied a murderous sense, which I"d keep for years.

This flyer barely helped my investigation of the songs on "Vrok" radio, but it focused my attention on the primary suspect: Iron Maiden. In Vice City"s business district, a rock shop had a poster with Iron Maiden"s signature font and mascot. The band name wasn"t written, but the hint was obvious. The Vrok logo also used a rock-style font. I had already seen Iron Maiden on record spines and near-obsolete cassettes. I wanted to listen but feared adult content.

I asked Mom what she knew. She knew Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC - vinyls from her late "80s college days, listened to by guys. For days, I reread the flyer, imagining the music.

.:::.

Part 60 Text 4. Severe OCD-laundry and tantrums,,, tantrum while sleeping in the chair,,, tearing up a school magazine,,, mattress pissing stunt,,, bathroom meltdown.

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Even though I"d legitimised being in the Dumpling House area, I stopped going. My outdoor excursions were over. I hated how exhausting washing up after being outside was. I was changing and washing clothes daily, even when I hadn"t gone out, and my hands were swelling; Dad was scaring me with "washer"s hands" tales - flesh peeling from bones. I slammed over basins; water from street socks splashed onto my underwear, and I screamed in rage, locked myself in the bathroom, stripped the cursed underwear, washed the socks, tossed the dirty underwear into the basin, washed them, then thought I should clean the basin better before re-washing underwear. I washed the basin and rewash the underwear. Socks dropped on the floor - covered in muck, "slaughterhouse" as I called it - and I whimpered, washing the sock with a full basin for just one. I was soaked in sweat and soap, and had no choice but to take a full bath.

On a fatherless day, I had a brutal tantrum in the bath, stressing Mom; she broke something. Around that time, I remember at least two such incidents. Another would follow later.

In the last days of summer, I set new records for tantrums. Dad returned; they slept together in the small room, I in the middle room. By then, I"d started soiling my room. Wearing megagaloshes, I didn"t care about dust, and Mom, knowing my screams whenever she touched faucets or doors with her dirty germy hands, minimized cleaning frequency, especially in my room. I didn"t clean either, just swept slowly to avoid lifting dust. The middle room was a mess.

My first tantrum occurred one night - either hot water was off, or I had reasons linked to moving my blanket around depending on Dad"s presence - maybe the same envy of my parents" sex life. Whatever, I freaked out, swore, and, hopelessly filthy, went to sleep in the grimy mustard armchair. I watched TV quietly until midnight, trying to exhaust myself into sleep half-sitting - a first. I remembered the grandma from Chocolat saying, "Tonight, I"ll probably sleep in the chair." I stretched onto a stool, half-lying. I was frustrated - couldn"t fathom how people could sleep sitting up and not complain. Even Dad did it.

It became one of my "annoying obsessions" - like not understanding how anyone could stay up two nights in a row, or walk outside in winter without a hat. Girls in films wore skirts in frost! Damn them - a lifetime of torment: crushes, envy.

That night was furious. Waking broken, I became obsessed with understanding why people sleep sitting. Later - likely in the same stretch of late summer days - I kicked a school magazine across the floor and tore it up, caught up in rage; Dad came in and confiscated it, calming me slightly.

Being dirty, I felt alien to myself. Fed up with oscillating between belonging and not, I decided: "I"ll just be filthy." Another night - hot water off or premeditated - I refused to make my bed properly, venting anger: annoyed at the orange kids" mattress that Karik-Valik had pissed on in early childhood. I piled our six plaid pillows on it and lay on them.

Simultaneously, another issue: I had to pee almost constantly - some urological thing that still happens. Sleep interrupted, I"d pee excessively, inexplicably more than I drank. That night, this new irritant added to my general discomfort.

I ran to the toilet a dozen or more times, touched the cursed toilet door, washed my hands (cold or bottled water depending on supply). Then I got tired of washing hands. Already filthy, now with dirty hands I couldn"t put in my mouth to bite cuticles, I got extremely pissed. At some point, instead of going to pee again, lying on the pillows, I dropped my underwear and sprayed urine on the floor. Then bored with that, I spread the pillows, lay on my stomach, dangled my penis into the gap, and peed on the mattress. Finally, exhausted, I fell asleep. That was the tantrum.

Around the same last summer days, perhaps the morning after, there was a bathroom meltdown - hot water this time. I had to wash accumulated dirty clothes, struggled, climbed into the bath still wearing my T-shirt, sat and cried. Parents peeked; I immediately swore at them - my hair was visible, and, in general, they pissed me off. There was also a masturbation issue - I wanted to, but couldn"t due to unpredictability of parents walking in - leaving me in a neurotic, frustrated state, though I did manage to wash.


.:.

___Part 61.

.::.

________________ Autumn 2005. Started eighth grade.

.:::.

Part 61 text 1. Last-year OCD at school, changes in class, a shove in the corridor bringing me to tears, stalking the twins after lessons, by the gate with Slepukhin, the last visit from Aunt Lena with Masha, and my existential crisis.

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My last year at school. And exactly one year left until the end of Lyova Kassil in my story.

Saratov and the gymnasium - that was long behind me, and I moved on to the thirty-third school. Like the one-armed actor in Amélie, whom I once feared I"d become due to a sports injury, I walked on, and for the rest of my school life I would always walk with my left hand in my pocket. That would be my clean hand - for biting hangnails, touching my face, jerking off in the toilet. The right hand, meanwhile, would shake Slepukhin"s hand, touch the damn desks that had chairs stacked on them after lessons, open doors - and everything else.

After tying my laces at home, I took a step into the bathroom right next to the hallway and washed my hands before leaving. I don"t remember exactly how I stepped into the bathroom in shoes. Didn"t I lay a bag down? Did I really step straight onto the floor? Even though I wore massive galoshes, I didn"t need extra germs in the flat. Yet, with my mum, who always forgot things before leaving, all my childhood was basically spent walking around the house in shoes to grab something I"d forgotten. Starting in my youth, I"d ban it, forcing people to take off their shoes or put on bags - but back then, in childhood, it probably went on all the way through that last year at Lyova Kassil, letting me treat the floor like street dirt and walk into the bathroom in shoes.

That last year, we trashed the apartment so badly that it was a complete mess by the end. All because of my tantrums whenever Mum, cleaning with her broken mop hands, touched things, door handles, taps, soap (and my tantrums made sense - she never added any bleach to the mop water).

Fyodorova was no longer in our class or school. Word was he"d gone to some math lyceum in Saratov, often mentioned in my childhood for its super-A students. Later I"d find out that Lyuba Sedneva, from my preschool story, went there in the last grades too, and from my youth correspondence with Boldyrev (who"d get into music, and we"d exchange messages once), he went there too. So there was your Dima Fyodorov, the "failing freak." I"d never see him in person again, though a small episode with him would occur this autumn.

That Yulia was gone too, never to be seen again.

A quiet new kid appeared in class - Ovchinnikov. He already had a small dark mustache, and somehow reminded me of a Black guy from San Andreas, especially if you gave him the same mustache there. The girls whispered among themselves that the new boy already had a mustache. He was always quiet, solitary, but clearly confident.

I shook hands with Slepukhin with my dirty hand, and we sat together.

I liked the layout of our classroom. I"ve mentioned it: on the top floor with large floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out over the bustle and the bus stop in Saratov. Sitting there, gazing out, I thought of America, a normal warm country without Russian-ness, post-Soviet decay, and the icy shit that would hit us in a couple of months. Most of all, I thought of music, the remote guide to that better world - which, as I anticipated, I"d start buying and listening to with Mum in the Media Markets of Saratov.

Then, on the first break, I wandered the main corridors of the school - looking for the twins. In a crowded moment, some older students were walking the opposite way, and one deliberately shoved me with his massive shoulder. Later, when I skipped lessons, and after a series of other truancies there were arguments about why I wasn"t attending, and Mum would be called to school, I"d remember this. I"d paint the shover as an absolute villain and myself as the completely innocent victim, skipping class in protest at having to study among such freaks. In reality, after the shove, my eyes filled with tears and I nearly cried - which I omitted in my explanations - it all started with me, just like at the pier. I was walking and not looking ahead, scanning for the twins. The guy shoved me to make me watch where I was going. I couldn"t bear the disproportionate harshness the world showed my mistakes. I was too sensitive. And once again, it was all because of the girls. This incident, on the very first day, pissed me off so much with this school and society that, alongside skipping lessons, I"d start taking petty revenge and showing off, as I"ll explain further.

In the first days after lessons, if the twins didn"t have a different number of classes, I"d follow them. It was super risky - Mum could be anywhere, especially on Gorky Street, where there were all sorts of government offices. Back then, there were no MFCs yet, and to pay for an apartment, women had to run around separate offices for water, gas, etc., let alone complicated things like land registration. Mum handled all that crap and, by now, made money basically just running errands and filling out documents for people with private houses in the city. She probably didn"t draft blueprints anymore; manual drawing was already idiotic.

Apparently, I used some pretext of investigating our debtor or something else, because I still followed the twins. A couple of times I went there. Pressing on at their final stretch, I risked entering their courtyard right after them, where they vanished - and that convinced me they lived in the House with the Dumpling place. I returned via Gorky Street, then Khalturina. Sunny, almost summer-like days, I remember.

With Slepukhin - my last living companion in life - we started from the first days after lessons going together out the gate opposite the school entrance and stopping there. We"d talk about everything under the sun: GTA and other boyish stuff. Sometimes I needed this to wait for a lesson in the twins" class if they had an extra one. Walking their full route home was pointless, but the first half of September I didn"t miss a chance to watch them at least halfway before turning from Gorky onto my Lyova Kassil.

Aunt Lena came by with Masha once. We sat in the kitchen. Since Masha was a classmate of the twins, I apparently took off my mega-galoshes. Because of classmates like Masha, she and Aunt Lena were the only ones I could let in. I kept waiting for Masha to say something about her class. This was basically my last contact with Aunt Lena and Masha - they wouldn"t appear in my childhood story again. Masha, as I said, listened to rock and went to art school after ninth grade. I"d meet her once at a rock concert two years later, all in combat boots and alternative crap, with green dreads, basically resembling a Korn singer. Later, like Aunt Lena, she"d have stories with loans, debts, and other marginal bullshit. You could feel the futures already - the sense of destinies in advance. The same with the twins and their future (not terrible) - I could feel it back then. And that"s why I had all my existential crises. I saw either army or a miserable broke life if I stayed in school, like my parents - being as unadvanced as them, with companions as guides, and so on... Four years at university, and I"d be some museum employee like Dad, with dumb women, earning shit. Meeting a girl would only happen by chance, like Dad - and then she"d have no reason to stay with me (unless she tied herself with a kid, possible only with a fool, like Mum), and she"d leave for another, as she wanted to be with Uncle Seryozha, not a broke loser. I didn"t want any of that. Army, a desperate breakthrough, and death was better. But even better - somehow leaving for America and a completely different life. That last hope would keep me alive for another year - until the start of my compositional escapism.

.:::.

Part 61 text 2. Lyceum basement with discs, Asterix and Obelix, musical misconceptions, my antisocial freakery at school, the specifics of companionable life with boyish Slepukhin.

.::::.

When I got bored of endlessly following the twins, I started going straight home. Since last year, I no longer went through that courtyard on the left side of the lyceum, exiting at Kozlov"s house, but on the right - through my so-called "rotten passage" - from Telman Street to Zelyony Lane along Telman 3A. Rotten because at the end, on Zelyony Lane, there was the well where the warm mud always stuck to your ankles, stinking of rot.

At the start, near Telman, I always passed a small building, Telman 3B - behind another similar building, closer to the road, where bikes were sold, including the one I"d once wanted. In that building, further from the street, was a basement with two shops - a fabric store Mum visited, and beside it a disc shop with a small window of rocker stuff. I"d sneak in while Mum shopped. The discs were only music - stacks of MP3s and regular albums on the wall with full covers. Two discs stood out - Iron Maiden"s Dance of Death and Death on the Road. They were everywhere, including Media Markets. They now irritated me. Buying them was still far off. "Death," still. There were also MP3s by Kiss. Well... suddenly about sex and moans, like in that San Andreas song? You could even hear them in headphones. This shop would become one of the main places in my story.

There was nothing to do at home. I"ve already recounted the endless tantrums and Murka, whom I occasionally hit out of rage for jumping on my surfaces. "Out of rage." I"m simplifying here - I"d already dissected such things in detail before. The psychology of beating Murka is described at the start of third grade.

Dad, as usual, was absent in early September. I was so bored I decided to watch Asterix & Obelix vs. Caesar: Mission Cleopatra - a DVD from Uncle Seryozha that hadn"t interested me before. On some dull, Lyova-Kassil-type evening, I watched it, and I really liked it. Consider my favourite genre - comedy with heaps of events and characters, where no one dies. Out of boredom, I watched it on repeat. French, with the same one-armed actor from Amélie. Depardieu"s funny line: "Can"t I bark a bit?" Two love lines, both with beauties. For the first time in a long while, maybe ever, I saw Vikings in live scenes, not pictures - this would be literally the main and even only film shaping my visual idea of Vikings by the time I got into music related to them the next year.

The end credits had a hip-hop track with Snoop Dogg. I didn"t really know much, but I understood his thing: saying his name in every track. That"s how I learned his name. He also appears in several tracks in the hip-hop-soaked San Andreas. In the Percy-like rockers" spirit, he seemed the weakest, least masculine rapper. And the track in Cleopatra had his typical synthesiser instrument playing the main melody - like an itchy mosquito in your ear. For a moment, I became interested in Snoop Dogg and that aesthetic. But not for long. There was no present-day me to explain what I liked in things.

For example, spinning the San Andreas opening hip-hop track (with a memorable mosquito-like melody) and the track from Cleopatra, I mistakenly thought that all music with that instrument - e.g., a whole Snoop Dogg album - would be just as catchy. Someone should have explained that it"s not the instrument but the note sequences - specific ones. Instead of spending years sifting through tons of musical crap for some holy grail - which I would, wasting my youth and getting pissed at society - I just needed to get a damn synthesiser, quickly understand the sequences I liked, make perfect things for my taste - and move on with life.

My socially positive companionship with Slepukhin didn"t prevent my separate antisocial line. Skipping lessons, hiding in empty corridors, I even sometimes peed on the floor. My piss accumulated quickly, not only from diuretic attacks but generally, and at school, I peed almost every break. And every time I had to touch that germy toilet door handle. So there - fuck you. (Plus I"d piss on the radiator with its decorative wooden cover, making it harder to clean). No way you could expect me to attend school.

In class, I also started showing off openly. Clowning, making infantile jabs at teachers, whenever asked. Just like my online antics as an adult. A frequent excuse for my tantrums were the damn low chairs in this school, like in kindergarten. I openly said I wouldn"t sit on them, sometimes stood during lessons. I hated Russia, expressed it in every way. Elections were approaching, and the class got diaries with Zhirinovsky on the cover. I doodled horns and fangs on him.

I became the class freak, but not like Fyodorov - piano player, computer nerd, prosocially eccentric - rather antisocial, through infantile perversion. As in adulthood. I don"t recall exact examples now, but I filled my behaviour with sexual references.

Even though girls didn"t approach me, and I no longer shook hands with top student Yezhov or macho Yarik, there was no bullying - the class was very phlegmatic, as I said at the start. They just didn"t respect the quiet, civil me anymore. During PE, the boys once tried to pull my pants down. They probably didn"t get that my freakery involved exposing myself voluntarily, yet my penis was of no interest to anyone. I only regretted they managed to pull down my trousers, not the underwear. There were girls around. (The only problem would be paranoia - if anyone saw, they might tell Mum I already had hair.)

And none of this embarrassed Slepukhin. Especially if you asked Mum, who always noticed such traits in people, he could be called slow. He didn"t have my sharpness, quick movements, fast looks and thought turns, or insight. He was never sad. With him it was always jokes, cars, music, women. Women, not girls. Not romantic or physiologically intimate. If I, the pervert, wanted to sneak into some quiet kid"s vagina, womb, and guts, he"d be content to grope bigger tits or get a blowjob. Standard, straightforward male preferences. He seemingly didn"t even realise I was perverse, treating it as a joke.

Once we stood by the gate after lessons, fantasising about sex, and I led towards perversions. A girl, overwhelmed with lust, would have shat herself, and I"d put her shit into a condom and then fuck her. Slepukhin laughed. We shook hands and went our ways. At that point, I still hadn"t started exploring my own ass, anyway.

.:::.

Part 61, Text 3. Parodies of Pushkin"s poetry... imitating Beavis and Butt-Head.

.::::.

As I"ve already mentioned, during the school year I would bathe in the evenings, but during the day I wore some kind of dirty, "in quotes" clothes and could sit on any chair. In the afternoons, bored to death, I would flop into the mustard-coloured armchair with a collection of Pushkin"s poetry in my hands. The very one where I had once seen the phrase "на одре," and that"s how my mum and I came to call the bed at Baba Klava"s by that word. I also already had, here on Lev Kassil Street, a book of Pushkin"s fairy tales that I"d been read in early childhood back at Frunze. Perhaps in those days my mum and I went there together, and I brought it along for the sake of my new obsession. My obsession was rewriting Pushkin"s poems into a grotesque, perverse form-something I had already felt drawn to when listening to "Korol i Shut."

Probably the first thing I rewrote was The Prophetic Oleg. Then I tackled the main fairy tale of my childhood. Some of the pages survived, and I"ve typed all that nonsense here-you can skim or read through. Something like that famous disaster-film director Tommy Wiseau, but in my case in the genre of poetic parodies. Value? None, except autobiographical-just to remember my level and understanding of words back then. For example, there are lines like "stuck it in the clitoris." That"s because I thought the clitoris was the vaginal opening. And the blowjob references came straight from hanging around with Slepukhin.


Start of insert

Lame Tale of Cheerful Oleg

How the clown dressed backstage, Oleg cheerful,

In the circus the funster wanted to perform,

Today every seat was taken by freaks from various villages,

Though Oleg forgot to learn his part.

He rides in sneakers, clad in Byzantine armour,

Across the round arena on a bald horse.

Suddenly, from the dark wings, a stinky bum approaches,

Humming some song, obedient with bottles on his back,

From the city dump, the main messenger,

Spent his whole life in stinking gutters.

And Oleg approached the drunken old man.

"Tell me, stinking piece of shit,

Can I win in a quick fight?

Which move knocks the enemy out?

Or will I vanish in an hour?

Tell me the whole truth, fear me:

Or you won"t get a horse as a reward."

Bums fear mighty lords so much,

And he could"ve used some edible transport.

His old pus-filled tongue got stuck in his throat,

But the bum was friendly with freebies.

"I don"t know if you"ll last the year,

But I see what"s coming for you, comedian, soon.

Listen to my idle talk:

You"ll win the fight, and they"ll reward you,

Your filth will be glorified,

Your shit will decorate Constantinople,

Moles and worms will obey you,

Even the tsar envies such fate.

By the blue sea, your palace will stand,

No storm will destroy it,

In battle no disaster will touch you,

All spare you, like a freak.

Beneath your thin T-shirt, you know no wounds,

For an invisible bulletproof vest has been given."

Your horse reeks from sweaty labour,

Exudes the scent of horse sweat,

Sometimes airing out when hiding from foes,

Then back to the sweaty grind.

No fleas, no flies can harm it...

But you"ll die, clown, by your horse."

Oleg laughed, just like his horse,

He laughed long, thinking of nothing,

Clapping the saddle in wild glee,

Then slid off the horse, grimacing,

And patted his faithful friend,

Smirking, on the horse"s dumb head.

"Farewell, beast, my pus-filled servant,

Time to part ways,

Go to all four corners,

Or I"ll get creeped out by you.

Go, forget about me,

You two idiots, take the horse away.

Smear it with shit, cover it in filth,

Lead it to the lousy stable,

Don"t bathe it, feed it shit,

Water it with mouldy swamp brew."

The two idiots walked off with the horse,

And Oleg got a cow instead.

Clown Oleg laughed with the others,

At the ring of the intermission bell,

Their noses red as blood-splashed snow,

Twitching, waiting for the next act.

They remembered past days,

Arenas where they had butted heads.

"Where"s the pus-filled faggot?" Oleg laughed,

"Where"s my bald horse?

Not dead? Not as fast?

Still the same dumb and lazy?"

They replied: at the dump, in stinking shit,

His rotting horse sleeps an eternal sleep.

Cheerful Oleg laughed at once,

Cackling: "So why the hell the prophecy?

You old stinking goat!

I"d laugh at your prediction,

If my lousy horse were still carrying me,"

And he asked to lead it to the dump.

Oleg left the yard,

With the clown and merry guests,

And saw-by the Dnieper dump,

Rotting bones stink,

Eaten by rats, dust covering them,

The dampness turns them into rot.

The prince crushed a skull with his heel, laughing,

"Rot away, lonely freak!

Your cheerful master outlived you.

And in the nearby circus

You won"t run the whole ring under me,

And make laughs with your bald head.

Ah, this viper, my doom?

And this crap threatened me with death?"

From the rotting corpse, a graveyard snake hissed,

And in that moment emerged.

Meanwhile, Oleg laughed so hard

He lost his mind and soon died.

Clowns whirled around, everyone laughed,

At Oleg"s cheerful wake,

Prince Igor and Olga lay in bed,

The dead horse stank by the shore,

And the clowns remembered past days,

Arenas where they had butted heads.

Start of second insert

The Tale of Tsar Sultan, his Son, Prince Condom, etc.

Lesbians in the evening

Quietly shat in threes.

"If I were a bird,"

Mused one girl,

"I"d make a nest

For the tsar"s faggot."

"If there were thirty of us sluts,"

Said another,

"I"d shit on all of you at once."

"If I were a tsarina,"

The third girl strained,

"I"d suck that tsar

All day long."

Just as she finished,

The toilet door squeaked,

And in comes the tsar-

The top villain of Russia.

During the conversation,

He urinated behind the fence.

The last speech fit him perfectly:

"Hello, lively girl,

You"re a tsarina,

By September"s end

You must suck for three days.

You two are my girls,

Shit here in the latrine,

And I"ve planned for you

What to do with me.

Shit-cook, be a sex-poser,

You, crow, a stripper."

The tsar went to the jeep: "Fuck!

Off to the palace."

He didn"t bother in the hallway,

Married right there.

Tsar Sultan got drunk on vodka,

And gave it to the tsarina, ugly girl.

Playboy journalists paid the tsar,

Cameras all hooked up,

Laid them on the golden bed,

Stuck a dick in her mouth, forced climax.

Downstairs, a stripper danced on the desk,

Upstairs, the sex-poser strutted.

They weren"t jealous

Of the tsar"s dumb wife.

After sex,

Her belly acted weird,

She suffered on her hole,

Till morning passed her by.

Meanwhile, the heroes

Fought for beer like savages.

Tsar Sultan and wife parted,

Got into his Hummer,

Told her not to cry,

Wished her "don"t die."

While he fought for beer

Fiercely and playfully.

The tsarina"s belly was bare,

And the stork dropped a son with a vagina.

She sent photos via messenger,

To upset the father.

And the poser and stripper

Still wanted sex with the boy,

Told the messenger to strip.

Sent the same text again:

"Stork dropped not a kid, but a dick.

Boy and girl: clitoris, penis, scrotum."

The tsar read: "Fuck!

What crap did the messenger bring?

Freaked out, wanted to eat the messenger.

After valerian, deliver to the lesbian,

Wait for "Yarpiva" shipment,

For a shitty solution."

Messenger travels over the sea,

Throws up,

And the poser, stripper, and stinking oldster

Still want the boy,

And order the messenger stripped.

In his empty bag,

They slipped another page-

The dumb messenger brought the same night the order:

"Waste no time, writes the tsar to his boyars,

Finish the child with a whore tonight."

Nothing to do, the guards,

Feeling shitty,

Old and young,

Came to the bedroom.

Both tied in a condom found in the filth,

Dicks shoved in...

Each climaxed a hundred times.

Thrown into a fish jar,

Tormented, rolled,

And hurled into the Ocean,

Though Sultan didn"t ask.

Shit rain from the sky,

Golden fish piss in the sea,

Clouds across the sky,

Sprats float in the water.

Sometimes laughing, sometimes grimacing,

Tight with the tsarina"s faggot.

Nothing grows there

Day or night.

An hour passed, princess screams.

The invalid urges:

"Your back, my back!

Flexible and free,

Bend where you want,

Just press my ribs.

My chest already hurts.

What are you waiting for?

Grow!"

The back disobeyed:

Immediately curled,

Raised ass high,

And looked like a condom.

Mother and freak saved-

Somebody holds her ass.

But they perish in the fish,

God long abandoned them.

Freak on all fours,

Pressed into the filth,

Pushed with all his might,

Eyes popping,

"What do we do-eh?"

Farted in the bottom-went out.

Fools now free,

See shit in the open field,

Mountains of crap,

Heap of trash,

Condom thought: such a dinner

Was not needed.

Looking for food,

See chewed gum-

Ate it in a snap.

See a rat. Son: "No..."

Mother interrupts: "That"s filth.

Better idea,

See that rotting carcass?

Make a bow-shoot the condoms."

Approaching the carrion,

Find no birds,

Only a puddle:

Someone strangling each other,

Buzzard fights in shit,

Rat eats him, son screams: "Aaah!"

Poor guy thrashes,

Stirs shit, splashes.

Claws spread,

Two incisors sharp,

Flying at that moment-

Hit the rat"s mouth.

Rat vomited in puddle,

Sniper stuck it in clitoris.

Rat sinks in puddle,

Moans humanly.

Wounded buzzard rises,

Seeks revenge,

Beak opened,

Freak finishes it.

Rat babbles:

"You, my freaky saviour,

Crooked rescuer,

I thank you

And give an eagle.

Who are you, I don"t know,

But you"re a loser, got it.

Will pay in rubles,

Or right now in shit.

You didn"t save a rat-

Left a wicked witch alive.

Not kill the eagle-

Killed the red maiden.

Won"t forget you for a year,

Always at the dump.

Go fuck yourself now

And eat the winged one."

Rat slithered into filth,

Prince quickly

Tore the bird"s carcass,

Ate the guts.

Woke up at four,

Transvestite opening eyes,

Disgusted,

Sees a small town.

All dirty, there"s a shop inside.

Pours dirt into a jar,

Throws through rusty window.

Finds mother in shit,

Leads her to town.

Says: "I feel it,

Your ass farted."

Passed the guards,

Climbed the wall-

Signal alarm blares.

OMON surrounds them-

Son soils pants.

Bound silently,

Shoved to the square.

Crowd gathered,

Son climbs the stage,

Screaming, everyone shouts,

He"s crowned, dressed in princely robes,

That day becomes Prince Condom.

World storms rage,

Ship tossed on waves,

Nearly sinks on open sails.

People not surprised,

Binoculars crowd,

On dump island:

See real crap.

City built on the dump,

Rotten sticks for walls,

Shit instead of cement.

Small pier-

They decide to dock,

And see Condom.

Holding noses, approach the freak,

"Selling what? Where going?"

Pimps answer:

"Visited the underworld,

Sold sluts,

Bought well,

Then got orders,

No clue where sent.

Past Rams" Island,

Sluts to Sultan"s bed."

Prince envious:

"Shitty journey, gentlemen,

Let rams eat the sluts,

Arrive to Sultan without them.

Here"s my shit to him."

Guests leave,

Prince waves farewell.

Look-above the filth waters,

Stinking rat swims.

"Ugly freak, crooked,

Why bow your head?

Why sad, loser?"

Says the rat.

Prince answers:

"Jealousy, fuck, eats me,

Cursing bastard,

Want to strangle father!"

Rat: "Woe!

Want to jab him with spear?

Be a mosquito."

Legs kick,

Splashes in filth,

Soaked him to the feet.

Prince laughed,

Ended up with a dick,

Like a mosquito on legs,

Caught guests on wings,

Stung sailor"s armpit.

World tornado rages,

Storm predicts apocalypse...

End of insert.


I brought the fairy tale to school, and Slepukhin would burst out laughing from the very first lines: "Lesbians at night quietly shitting in threes." He was, basically, easy to make laugh, and I, in turn, loved clowning around and seeing the reaction. Once a bubble of snot puffed up from his nose while he laughed, and he continued laughing because of that too. Maybe that"s where I even got the idea for my Prophetic Oleg.

With Slepukhin, and another good-natured joker-Tyulenev-we parodied the background laughter from the cartoon Beavis and Butt-Head. Mostly we mimicked Butt-Head"s laugh, although I was more drawn to the full-on frenzy and madness of Beavis. I think I was probably the only one who actually admired the way either of them acted. The guys laughed at Beavis and Butt-Head like dumbasses, the way dumb people laugh at imbeciles, which these characters were, and nobody, except in laughter, wanted to imitate them. But I wanted to live like that. More precisely, I wanted an outsider companion. The nature of our outsider status would have been different from the imbecility of Beavis and Butt-Head, but we would have been linked by that eternal dopamine-fuelled hope for success. Like the cartoon characters hoped chicks would give it up, or that they"d figure out how to make a lot of money. We"d stoke that hope in each other the same way.

Even before encountering the pervasive, blunt toxicity of the internet as an adult, I had long felt and hated that fucking toxicity with which everyone met any of my endeavours. Try talking to a top student like Yezhov about some of my hobbies-for example, these poetry rewrites-and he"d say: "What"s funny about it? It"s nonsense." Show the poems to Yarik, and he"d say: "What the fuck is this?" Show them to any girl, and they"d avoid me, even though they already did anyway. And with the poems, that"s just the most vivid example. But it was the same with every single other one of my hobbies. Because I was already moving through life marginally, off the path of normal people, and all my interests were, in one way or another, abnormal. So fuck everyone who didn"t understand my path. Better to be with someone like Slepukhin, even if he understood even less, it seemed.

I certainly didn"t show my parents the parodies I was scribbling. In those days, our father was still around, which was already towards the end of September.


.:::.

Part 61 Text 4. Extracurricular idleness and its consequences,,, MTV festival,,, TV days,,, a show about teenage aggression,,, October fifth and father"s departure.

.::::.

I spent a lot of time in front of MTV with the same clips on repeat. There was literally nothing else to do. They often played a cover by some rock band called "Saint Petersburg" of the song "Final Countdown." I can"t find that clip anywhere, as if it never existed, but I clearly remember one guitarist with long blonde hair and a jaw-dropping double-necked guitar. I was already completely obsessed with electric guitars and constantly mimicked playing along while listening to my tracks from "Vrok." At the time, I was especially into Megadeth"s "Peace Sells," and the voice in it, by the way, reminded me of Beavis. On one hand, I was developing a fondness for classic body shapes, like Mark Knopfler"s, but the moment I spotted a V-shaped body somewhere, I immediately wanted one. I might even have picked up my father"s old stinky guitar-but by that time, it was already gone from Lev Kassil.

Complete, utter chaos, of course: how could they not find me something to do? I mean, not even buy a guitar, seeing how much music I consumed. What could come of a child who spends whole days wandering the apartment in plastic bags on his feet? I recall visual chronicles of other childhoods, especially in the West... kids with skateboards, computers, guitars, even drum kits in their rooms. Anything to let the child explore their thing. So many ways life could have developed... My complaint is valid: my parents weren"t marginal drunk tyrants, whose children"s development couldn"t be expected because they didn"t care. They truly valued me. Mom got me into better schools. Dad framed our family photos. But beyond that, it was as if they didn"t know anything at all. There was already a paid "DiCenter" right on our street. A psychiatrist of some sort. One could go there and, without registering anywhere, at least get antidepressants-and I would have stopped washing my hands obsessively and masturbating so much. Of course, now I would refuse such treatment, because anti-neurosis pills don"t fix a shitty life-they suppress the reaction to it, at the cost of a dangerous dependency as the neurosis worsens once the medication stops. But I mention this because at that point in the story, my parents seemed unaware of even this option. Or, just as likely, they were full of intimidating stereotypes-which wasn"t unfounded.

On MTV-and these were the channel"s final days in my story-on the 24th of September, they broadcast a festival where our nonsense and a few invited foreign bands played on Red Square. Korn and Sixty-Nine Eyes. I knew the former from a couple of clips, and the latter had a hit at the time, "Lost Boys," with a melody in the Phrygian mode, which resonated with me-perhaps due to childhood associations with a Mylène Farmer clip. They had even more of that distinctive note for the mode.

The concert aired in the evening. I watched from the hall, from the green seats. Korn played a cover of Pink Floyd"s "Another Brick in the Wall." I thought it was their own song. I was impressed by the combination of that excessive heaviness with such powerful vocals. And all played on just three chords-it was almost a prototype for countless epic choruses in the music I would love at the end of the following year and start composing myself. Sixty-Nine Eyes were interviewed, talking about some small northern country, Finland, which I was hearing about for the first time. They spoke in English, so I thought it was somewhere near America, like Canada. At that time, I didn"t even know English was spoken in Europe, let alone used to compose songs. And since I wasn"t considering the North as a place for another life anyway, I wasn"t even interested in checking a map.

Later, quite late, although I can"t find it on TV listings, it seems the same Saturday another channel showed a concert by our band, Alisa. My parents had gone to the small room to sleep, and Dad knew Alisa and said they were a decent band. They went to bed soon after, and I kept watching to the end. One song seemed to stick with me, but I never identified it. The main impression was just the atmosphere of a rock concert.

The next day, closer to evening, the MTV festival was repeated, and I watched Korn again in the kitchen. This time, as Dad passed by, he pointed out that they were covering Pink Floyd, not playing their own song. I didn"t care about Pink Floyd-because of associations with the pop group Pink, which MTV also played, and because I already knew it meant "pink." Pink didn"t mix with rock for me.

Around that time, Dad also mentioned some Jimi Hendrix and even brought a cassette. Nothing stuck, though I had seen him with a V-shaped guitar. It all felt neither here nor there. In recent years, Dad preferred Bob Marley and Rastafarianism. I understood it was tied to his insane humanism and philosophy of Yeshua.

Shnurov from Leningrad appeared on some entertainment show. He said his favourite band was System of a Down, and they showed a snippet of a video-some weird, heavy stuff.

These entertainment channels also aired movie charts. A horror flick, The Ring Two, was trending. Didn"t interest me. Also, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Because it was unrealistic for a man with such a mess to look normal, I decided the film was comedy-fantasy. One other thing: I wasn"t interested in trends, but because of the "Virgin," I watched clips from the movie in the chart. I didn"t even realize what I was watching. I saw a scene-apparently not from that film-where someone strikes another between the legs to paralyse with pain, but nothing happened, and someone said: "It"s a sock-dick," so he punched the guy wearing the sock in the nose. Also, the sock flared out. Some vulgar fantasy. I thought then, that"s The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Never watched the full film. All this in the kitchen, evenings, over those few days or that weekend in late September.

There was also a news segment on aggressive teens, claiming violent video games made them that way. They showed a clip from GTA Vice City. I thought it was nonsense. Revenge has existed since Pushkin"s tales and even The Lion King. The show was probably tied to some US school shooting (not personal revenge), but I either tuned out or didn"t understand the fuss. At the time, the idea of school attacks by students wasn"t even on anyone"s radar where I lived. There was no Internet for people my age to get stuck on this stuff. No anonymous uncensored chats full of teens critiquing mass shooters for killing too little. Even child suicides were rare news, let alone child murders.

That was truly important, not some bloody GTA. I was a very specific case: my entire youth, besides being fully isolated from the informal social world of peers, I also didn"t care about world events even once I had the Internet. Up to twenty-five, I only thought about killing specific people for revenge. Without examples of mass killings in normal life (not army or ideology-driven like Breivik, whom I only heard of by chance), and inspiration from them, my aggression might have remained purely personally directed.

Those were the last days of our family life on Lev Kassil. Evenings, I showered for forty minutes, kept washing myself obsessively, and threw epic tantrums. Already October. One day, all of us home-including Dad-and I was screaming, Mom smashed a glass of tea in the hallway. Then, on the fifth of October, Teacher"s Day, they were arguing in the kitchen over me, and I sat crying in my dark room, pouting, boiling toward a new meltdown. Soon, Dad, as usual, got ready-and left. I went outside too, knowing nothing at home would happen except some insane fight with Mom, with an unpredictable winner: me or her. If she froze, like then, or smashed all the dishes-I"d shit myself from fear and regret pestering her nerves a hundred times.

It was already dusk. Because of the festivities, there were tons of people downtown near the square, and the square itself was jam-packed like a city day, with concerts on the main stage. In early drafts of the biography, I even thought this was the city day at the end of summer, and only the MTV festival at the end of September clarified the timeline.

I partly used my silent exit from the apartment as a chance to wander legally, look for the twins. I hadn"t been wandering for months. For about an hour and a half, I wandered aimlessly in crowds on the square and nearby streets. Several times I reached the twins" house and went into the yard: drunks everywhere, but I wouldn"t have drawn attention.

Dad won"t appear again in the story for another eleven months.

.:::.

___Part 62.

.:::.

Part 62 Text 1. Grim October Lev Kassil vibes with Mom,,, trips to Frunze,,, buying a monitor temporarily,,, BMX teens in Saratov,,, clinic visits and neuroses,,, intimate daydreams with the twins,,, more on the psychology of love and lewd sex.

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The final Lev Kassil chaos began. I couldn"t stop throwing tantrums, and Mom couldn"t stop losing it-each time in increasingly desperate forms. Once I sat in the kitchen during the day-no longer rowan-berry tension, just pure relational heat-she screamed, went ballistic, stomped down the corridor to the small room, shrieking like hell along the way, and slammed the door to the hall so hard it rattled everything. A dagger-like fear pierced my chest: I had no idea what could happen next. She could stab herself, break the window and jump, or anything else. Maybe even kill me-I didn"t rule it out. The devil himself was there. Later, she lay there, howling; I couldn"t decipher her words, then she coughed up blood, which terrified her more, adding drama, and she howled even more.

It happened more than once. She began threatening to drown herself in the river. Once, twice. Then she actually started getting ready and went. Evening, almost no people in the park or walking areas. I followed, trying to dissuade her. We passed the Stele and turned right onto the embankment. We reached the fishing spot, she sat and wept. Then, as I remember, we "made up," and went to the grandfathers.

Things were tense with Grandma Klava too. When we visited them-now infrequently due to my obsessive cleanliness-the visits often ended in scenes where Grandma Klava cried, trying to work through their eternally strained relationship, while Mom refused to engage, silently stacking jam jars, and we headed home. The moment Mom responded to Grandma"s laments, a fight would break out, explanations, new tears, and attempts at persuasion. To intellectually grasp their tension, I wasn"t mature enough yet, but basically it was clear: it was all affect, decades of it, one vented more often, the other held back.

Regarding my recent changes, Grandma Klava, even more old-school than my parents, surely didn"t consider it medically. Seeing my sharp attitude toward Mom even at their place, she perceived it as mere nastiness, and didn"t scold me because I was her daughter"s son. Grandpa, as always, mostly silent.

It was a golden autumn, and we went to Sunrise, our computer shop on Kazachya Street in Saratov. For a monitor. I lingered, debating-take it or not. A nineteen-inch Samsung SyncMaster 940B. Damn, good, but not final: standard resolution. Pricey too-ten thousand. We bought it anyway. It was light, and we walked along Kazachya to the square, to look around.

At the square, now permanently, near the theatre entrance, trampolines appeared, and new BMXers were jumping. Initially, only grown men on BMXes when we first saw them. Understandable: working, advanced, thus able to order them in Saratov-like Great Uncle style. Now there were youths, almost my age. BMX had arrived in our region, and there was a shop somewhere. Regular sports shops didn"t sell them. But in Saratov, a huge Sportmaster on Chernyshevskaya and Chapaeva existed; I had been once, out of season, and I suspected these kids had bought theirs there during the summer.

It was interesting to check BMXes up close, see how they differed from my "Kross," which I hadn"t even ridden last summer-and it was basically broken. Maybe different wheel diameter. Maybe thicker tire and inner tube. Seemed thicker. I envied these kids. Their friends lingered nearby, girls they chatted with. Their clothes clearly not from a fair or market-fashionable baggy hoodies, sneakers with flat soles and oversized tongues. Everyone had phones. Casual manner. We moved on with Mom to the bus stop-to Engels.

The monitor would stay about ten days. Same as the "President Agency" system unit: I"d suffer through it, realise it was half-measure-and we"d return it, using the two-week return policy.

On October 13, we went to the clinic-there"s a record in the medical file.

-------start excerpt-------

Complaints of frequent headaches after schoolwork, occasional fainting, frequent nighttime urination and urges, opposes collective at school, responds reluctantly to questions, unpleasant breath odor.

-------end excerpt-------

Nightmare. Did I really stink? Sure: never brush the tongue, only one brushing per day before breakfast. Constantly rotting meat. Up to eighteen, I"ll be like this, and all distant relatives in pulpitis. Nobody says shit. Take, for example, the therapist. She wrote it down, documented it. What good does it do and for whom? Only the state. Clinic isn"t about help. It"s about control and support until army age. Slave owners.

Mom, who brushed only once before breakfast all her life, wrecked my teeth throughout childhood-and the coming winter would be the climax, only from treatment. My fainting-someone"s fiction. Never happened.

I had other complaints too. Half-joking, half not. When Mom and I, lying in bed, had talked and laughed, and quieted, I focused on my breathing. I felt I might soon tire of breathing. I said, "Enough, I"m tired of breathing"-exhaled the last and stopped. Neurosis. Mom said, "Checked." We laughed.

I kept thinking of the twins: how we walked together, equal in life experience, how at home a light threesome occurred, in which I was mostly on their level, only slightly behind non-Yulia, more uninhibited (but still gentle and close, so without any slobber, torture, or other depravity). While Yulia might masturbate with a dildo, non-Yulia jumped on my cock while I lay on my back, both with intimate trims. Only non-Yulia had her separate personal life, while my serious relation was with Yulia. With her, imagining sex didn"t really work. Even fantasising required imagining how I"d earn it-and I couldn"t picture proving my manliness. She didn"t hang on my neck with the liveliness of the red-haired girl from my stairwell when her boyfriend came by.

Reminder: the position where the girl just jumps on me, and I do nothing, was imagined because I didn"t know about the clitoris, thinking girls could orgasm from vaginal friction alone. Once I learned to stimulate it, and always included it in fantasies, it wasn"t about selflessness-it was about dragging her toward suffering. I perceived physiological arousal as suffering, the same neurosis. Love sex was about overcoming that suffering together. One had to become a sadist, torment her to ensure she orgasmed properly-and I would too-then we"d lie, smile, kiss, purr.

Fantasies about "lewd" sex-for me entirely about suffering and torment, especially me-would later include practices like "denied orgasm"-horrible, tormenting, tied to those early pains they treated. Since childhood I noticed that incomplete ejaculation drastically raised the odds of those hellish pains. And I-next topic-will never understand men with the same fetish who never went to a psych ward or had OCDs-they live normal lives, don"t remember the origin of the fetish, while I suffer and fantasize. I could"ve been normal. But I have no one. And I had no love intimacy to replace the lewd shit. I hit hell-and I"m going all the way.

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Part 62 Text 2. Continuing antisocial behaviour at school,,, a Kiss album and naïve hopes of socialising through rock music,,, Fyodorov"s vile phone call,,, the armpit in the mirror and Peter‑Pan‑ing before Mum.

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School felt lonely whenever I didn"t see the twins in the corridors, and it made me want to escape even more. But actually running away from school was taboo. There seemed to be an unspoken understanding between Mum and me: it was possible not to study, even to skip lessons while still inside the school building, but if you left the school altogether - that was the next level. The level of real hardened hooligans, the kind who never appeared in Yeralash, who smoked, stole, and ended up in orphanages. Incidentally, apart from those times when I was hanging around with Fyodorov in the spring of that year and the year before, as well as a few occasions in the summer of 2004 that I already described, I didn"t smoke anymore.

In lessons I kept up the same childish mockery I"d mentioned earlier. It was roughly the same thing as when I provoked my father. Irritate the teachers. Only now I was irritating not just them. Once Yarik - that same masculine classmate, a sort of miniature man with whom, in my escapist fantasies long ago, I"d imagined belonging to the same gang - during one of my bouts of showing off in front of a teacher, when she asked me something about the lesson and I stood there mockingly mooing instead of answering, said: "Will someone just shut him up already? Throw him out of the class. What"s he mooing for? Or I"ll throw him out myself." Mum had already been summoned to school, and they had probably already suggested getting my head checked.

Sometimes I went to school, sometimes not. Besides visits to a neurologist on the fourteenth and eighteenth about headaches, fatigue, some sort of "labile condition" and bad behaviour, my medical record also has several entries about ARVI at the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006. I remember the last times doctors came to our home, listened to my chest with a stethoscope, and afterwards I"d wash myself and then start screaming again about the germs from their shoes on the floor, swearing at Mum and pushing her into hysterics in response.

I don"t remember at all what I did on the computer during those ten days with the monitor. Maybe I played demo versions of King Kong and Need for Speed: Most Wanted from the Igromania discs Mum bought me over the summer and autumn. In the end we returned the monitor, as I said.

On the twenty‑fifth of October, passing that little music‑disc shop in the basement on my way home from school, I finally decided to go in and bought Kiss. The complete discography in MP3 on two discs. Our DVD player could play MP3s, so I sat down in the hall in the green armchairs to listen.

At the same time I picked up that Rubik"s Cube I"d got back in early 2004 - I said earlier it would appear in the story later. I actually suspect those sessions with it may have happened a year earlier, when I sat depressed under the Kenwood listening to Evanescence and Korol i Shut, but since emotionally I remember it in this year, I decided to place it here. In any case, sitting in that same green armchair by the end window, while listening to music I twisted that fucking Rubik"s Cube all day long whenever I wasn"t at school. Incidentally, I had no progress with it then and never would. I could assemble two sides - and that was it. Hundreds of times over a month and a half I assembled those two sides.

As for Kiss... it turned out to be nothing like what I wanted. Much lighter rock than what played in GTA Vice City. And almost the least appealing vocal style to me - that Ozzy‑Osbourne‑type voice that made me imagine "forty‑year‑old men." Worse - though "Cum On Feel the Noize" with that kind of voice was one of the songs I hummed most in those weeks - was the super‑masculine rock vocal like Twisted Sister. The Rubik"s Cube was therefore almost certainly this year: without a parallel activity I wouldn"t have endured listening through Kiss. But I honestly listened to the whole discography. There were a couple of memorable songs on the classic albums, including the one that appeared in GTA San Andreas. Then near the end suddenly an album started playing that sounded completely different - as if it were a different band. Carnival of Souls, their grunge album. That one had genuinely heavy guitars, like I wanted, and interesting riffs. My favourite track was "Rain." It"s the only Kiss album I later revisited in my youth.

So with Kiss everything was clear. But buying the disc wasn"t pointless: it marked the beginning of my audiophile digging into "archival" metal music. Because unlike Evanescence, Kish, or Rammstein promoted on television, you couldn"t just stumble upon Kiss or Iron Maiden anymore. You had to dig deliberately. And it gave me a dopamine rush: I thought I"d study all those bands, become an expert, and on that basis find like‑minded people - socialisation. I remembered scenes in the rock shop from the film Brother, imagined how people in such shops already knew me too, how I"d wait with others for a new album from some band - and that would unite us and lead me to meeting some girl. Fuck, I was such an idiot.

One evening someone started calling our phone and saying nothing. We"d hang up, but it rang again immediately. Our phone was still the old kind, so you couldn"t see the caller"s number. Sometimes I answered, sometimes Mum. Then the caller started grunting. Soon there were moans too, and it became obvious he was masturbating. The only person who could be doing that was Fyodorov. His voice gave him away even in the moaning.

I realised at once: it was revenge for how I"d bullied him at the end of May. The revenge lay in the fact that, having perceptively understood during our companionship that discussing sex with Mum was a living nightmare for me, he created a situation where I"d be forced to confront the topic with her. I had to keep the receiver pressed tight to my ear so Mum wouldn"t hear the idiot"s moans, pretending something funny was happening. And in case she did hear and realised someone was jerking off, I had to act as though I had no idea what it meant.

She already knew it was Fyodorov - I stupidly voiced that guess - and the problem wasn"t just that the topic of sex might arise, forcing me to play the perfectly naïve Peter Pan so she wouldn"t suspect I even knew what masturbation was. There was also the implication that if Fyodorov was doing this, then back when I hung around with him we must have talked about sex too. Maybe she"d even guess we"d masturbated together.

That fucking Fyodorov. The way I bullied him and the way he took revenge were two completely different things. My bullying was personal, one‑sided teasing. Fyodorov dragged others into the conflict - or rather, reported me upward. That"s the prototype of the scum I"d later meet in adulthood, when bastards would write complaints about me, report me, and so on. The very reason I"ve always hated authority. For me, bringing authority or superiors into a conflict with an ordinary person was just as taboo as running away from school. And that"s why when, around thirty, I myself did exactly that sort of thing - for example reporting some girl from the internet to her mother - it was a sign to me that, breaking such taboos, I was already capable even of final homicidal aggression against fucking people.

I tried with all my might to maintain the image of Peter Pan in front of Mum. When we were in a good mood we had various little jokes. One of them came from a moment when she once leaned her head out of a doorway - either drying her hair after bathing or something - and I said she looked as if she had hanged herself there. After that she sometimes repeated the joke: she"d freeze in the same pose from around the corner where I could see her, and I"d pretend to be scared and shout - and we"d laugh.

Once we woke up, and I got up first and went to the bathroom. I thought Mum was still in bed. Standing before the mirror, I lifted my arm to look under my armpit - or maybe smell it - something I had literally never done before. Then I glance down the corridor - and there"s Mum, head poking from the doorway of the small room in that same joke pose, but clearly watching me and seeing that I"m examining my armpit. And that was adult behaviour. Almost the same as if she had caught me masturbating. I pretended to laugh at the joke, but I was shocked.

That"s why it ended up being the "yamamiy dead end," not "yamamin." When I later coined this neologism in adulthood, I deliberately infantilised it with that ending. In those adult years, still living with Mum and trying to play Peter Pan in every possible way, I had a habit of adding that ending to possessive adjectives. Originally I"d started using it after turning the phrase "thou shalt not kill" into the noun "kill" for my expression do ubiya ("to the point of killing": e.g., "I feel like shit to the point of killing," or "sexual frustration to the point of killing"). Later, following the pattern of words like rybiy ("fish‑like"), I attached that ending to other possessives: "Grandma‑Klava‑iy crying," "Aunt‑Larisa‑iy apartment." Deliberate silliness, to remain a little boy in Mum"s eyes.

To fix the concept, I"ll insert here a concise definition generated by a neural network based on my texts:

Yamamiy dead end.

A psychological state in which a person becomes stuck between deep attachment to the mother, internal prohibitions on fulfilling their own desires, and an inability to build healthy relationships with others, especially romantic ones. Any act of defending one"s dignity, showing autonomy or strength - actions that might have serious consequences - is neutralised in advance by anticipating the mother"s suffering and the threat of losing connection with her.

At the same time there is a drive to appear before the mother as ignorant, uninformed, infantile - unaware of sex, uninterested in adult life or separation. Aggression arising in this structure may paradoxically be directed toward the mother herself - not as hostility, but as a defensive manoeuvre intended to shift her attention away from the child"s suffering.

The result is repression of radical ways of asserting one"s dignity, refusal to grow up and realise oneself, weakening of self‑worth, and the formation of a persistent emotional and psychosexual conflict.

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Part 62 Text 3. The grandparents get into an accident,,, stalking the twins with binoculars,,, a lifelong problem entering apartment blocks,,, meeting Tyulenev,,, an unpleasant aftertaste from the Serebryakovs.

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Another evening there was a story that also began with phone calls. This time Grandma Klava was trying to reach us, but Mum didn"t want to talk to her. Lately there had been a lot of that tension between them I described earlier. We stopped answering. The calls stopped, but soon Grandma Klava arrived with Grandpa by car. She said she"d thought something had happened. She needed that whole dramatic gesture. But they also brought jam and potatoes from the cellar.

They left again. It was around nine in the evening. After some time someone rang our intercom and said the grandparents had had an accident not far from our house - where Lev Kassil Street meets Freedom Square Street. We rushed to get dressed. Mum kept repeating in panic: "That stupid goat!" - blaming Grandma for her dramatic visit that had led to this.

It was about one hundred and fifty metres away. We ran there. Our white Zhiguli stood in the middle of Freedom Square Street, not badly damaged. Grandpa silently inspected the car while Grandma sat inside frozen like a mannequin. If Mum - who inherited her nervous temperament from Grandma - was trembling and stammering even in that situation, then Grandma was beyond words. Nearby lay a motorcycle and a small puddle of blood. The motorcyclist had already been taken away by ambulance. They said there had also been a girl with him. A young couple. I immediately remembered "Romeo" and Marina from my building.

Grandma kept sitting there like a mannequin while Mum spoke with the traffic police. Something had to be fetched from home, so they sent me. Almost for the first time in my life being useful in a serious adult situation, I ran back as if racing Erokin in PE class. It was idiotic: what I needed to bring wasn"t even that urgent. I could have tripped and humiliated myself for life. I returned completely out of breath.

Gradually Grandma loosened up and started speaking, and the commotion subsided. But it was only the beginning for Grandpa: he would be taken for examinations and all the rest. The car had to be moved somewhere too, so we took some things from it, including Grandpa"s large binoculars that happened to be there. Mum went with him, and I was left to myself.

So I went walking. I told Mum I"d take a little walk. The main thing was that nobody was paying attention to me and Mum would definitely be elsewhere. I took the binoculars and went to the twins" house. From the empty darkness - thanks to that evening"s events - I watched both from the Kalinin monument side and from the bus stops. But all the windows in the building were curtained. Nothing visible. I went home.

The next morning after the accident Mum again went out dealing with Grandpa"s situation, and I was free. It was either the early November holidays or a weekend, or perhaps I was on sick leave. It was already frosty.

I had once desperately wanted binoculars like Grandpa"s when I dreamed about Amazon expeditions as a child, so pretending I wanted to wander with them was easy. Mum didn"t care anyway.

A sunny day. I wandered the square, the park, the deserted icy embankment. Scanning the distance with the binoculars, hoping to spot my favourite pair. They weren"t there. At the end I had the idea of sneaking into that ten‑storey building - 23 Khalturina Street - the one near which I had cried after the fight on the pier, and watching through the stairwell windows in case the twins walked along Gorky Street. Even better would have been getting up to the technical floor and looking from there. I even went into the yard. But no - I didn"t have the nerve even to enter the entrance hall.

That shyness about entering apartment buildings with other people - what if they chased me out like some little vagrant - first appearing perhaps a year earlier when I"d planned to commit suicide from a roof, became an obvious lifelong problem. Over the years it would grow to absurd extremes: first when, as a young man, I tried buying and selling old vinyl records, living in a city of Khrushchyovkas and attic storage spaces - I missed the perfect gold mine because I never managed to enter a single building to distribute my ads; then at eighteen, again wanting to jump from a roof because of sexual frustration, I tried persuading people on local forums to open intercom doors for me under various pretexts, and they"d guess everything and just say I was crazy; at twenty‑five, when I returned to Saratov just to watch my Dasha through a telescope, I spent the whole summer unable to enter the right building with anyone, only posting notices saying "Will buy a key to this entrance," and people called thinking I was a thief; and a few years later, again wanting to throw myself off a roof, I degraded myself so far over this social cowardice that, inspired by the fact that all my life if anyone wanted to meet me it was almost always gay men rather than girls, I posted online: "Will suck dick for a key to a high‑rise entrance," and people still replied: "Who the fuck needs you, you thirty‑year‑old loser? Pay money if you want to suck."

Mum spent many days dealing with the accident. With the binoculars or without them - the main thing was that Mum was definitely busy elsewhere - I went wandering only once more. It was during the second half of the school day. I didn"t meet the twins again, but walking along the embankment I ran into Tyulenev. He said he was skipping music school. That immediately raised him twice in my eyes. First, it turned out that though he was a poor student in school, he was still a "proper" child - he attended music school like the top pupils. Unlike me, a total idler. And second, he was independent from his parents enough to allow himself the level of autonomy of skipping - something I could only dream about. We talked for about ten seconds and went our separate ways.

The investigation into the accident was not going in Grandpa"s favour, and witnesses were needed. Mum very vaguely knew the mother of that Serebryakova I had once been in love with and who had shown no interest in me. Their windows in that brick nine‑storey building should have faced the accident site. And for me it was always about girls, so I went with Mum, hoping to see Serebryakova at least. We entered the building, climbed to their floor. Her mother opened the door, but as soon as Mum explained the situation she immediately refused to get involved. We left with an unpleasant aftertaste.

In short, according to traffic rules Grandpa was ultimately considered at fault, and it ended with an obligation to pay compensation, which began being deducted from his pension - the only thing he had in life besides the car registered in his name. I don"t know what happened to the girl, but the motorcyclist ended up disabled. Though, incidentally, I never really gloated over things like that - even if I pretended to. That belonged to my taboos. An accident, misfortune - that"s my enemy too. Just like authority with its institutional punitive systems. The only tragedies I can imagine gloating over are those I myself will cause.

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Part 62 Text 4. A companionable crush with Slepukhin,,, Slepukhin into rock too,,, the start of trips to Saratov for music,,, to the university library,,, November rock‑music hopes in Saratov,,, an electronics shop and assorted frustrations.

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Because Slepukhin and I were almost always together during breaks, and because I was "suspiciously" always drawn to the ground floor and the main hall, I was forced to explain that I was in love and was watching a girl from another class there. Of course I didn"t specify who. But Slepukhin wasn"t like Artyom, who probably wouldn"t have rested until he"d found out exactly which girl it was, and soon we stopped returning to the topic of my secret.

At the same time - I can"t remember exactly how - another theme appeared: a second, "companionable" crush. Perhaps Slepukhin started it in response to mine. And he had no need to keep secrets. Just like the twins, from a class one year older, there were two girls - or rather young women already - who walked through the school corridors. Compared with the twins, who were naturally very slim, these two already had proper curves and everything. Slepukhin had become typically boyishly fixated on one of them. Later we found out her name was, I think, Vlada. Fair‑haired, grey‑eyed, solidly built but in moderation. The female version of Slepukhin, basically. Usually in a denim shirt.

And why I call it a "companionable crush" is because, for company, I "fell in love" with Vlada"s friend. Anya - we"d learn her name later. She was taller than Vlada, fine‑boned, and usually wore a tight white top. I don"t remember the colour of her eyes, but she was a dyed blonde, and all her hair was in tiny curls. "Like instant noodles," Slepukhin joked.

So we began following them. The story with them would last two or three months, and at first we didn"t reveal ourselves to them. Gradually I chose to tail them rather than the twins. There were no prospects with either pair anyway, so the only thing left was the adventure of it, and these were at least something new. Sooner or later we could reveal ourselves to them, and then it would become even more interesting. And what about the fact that it might get back to Mum - the yamamiy dead end? I"ll come back to that later.

Besides the fact that, unlike the rest of our classmates, he had at least some romantic tendencies, Slepukhin was also similar to me in musical taste: he leaned toward rock. Before we parted at the school gate I"d tell him about my process of identifying bands from Vrok, about that sheet "The Devil in Rock Music," about how I"d bought Kiss and missed the mark, and that in the end I needed to try Iron Maiden - clearly heavy metal and the band that most caught the eye. For the sake of a dose of their discs I would go down into that basement every time on the way home from school. But I felt sorry for the eighty or hundred roubles one disc cost, just for a single album.

It was getting close to mid‑November. With Mum, an era of trips to Saratov to disc shops was approaching - mostly for music. Usually we"d set out closer to evening, when it was already dark. Other stops at first would be electronics shops, where I still couldn"t decide which monitor I would eventually buy.

But it all began with trips to the university library at the corner of Moskovskaya and Universitetskaya Streets - next to the English gymnasium where I had once tried and failed to get in. Before that we"d spent about an hour in some bookshop where I stood reading a book called The History of Rock, and Mum, watching my investigations, suggested going to that library. I didn"t even know it was open to everyone. The library was in an old building with heavy doors, a kind of Harry‑Potter atmosphere and all that. A round main hall, as I remember. The reading room was on the second floor, also round. You had to choose books through a catalogue - by then probably already on computers - and they would bring them to you.

There was an oppressive feeling from my almost subversive pretence, created by hiding my truth and the predetermined mutual hostility I felt toward that place. I mean, the women who worked there had no idea who I was, how much I hated their fucking academicism, the fucking state system they represented. They probably thought I was some excellent pupil who, whatever he took an interest in - even rock music - did it intelligently.

They brought out some books, and I sat there reading until late. From that point on, all the classic heavy‑metal bands would forever be associated in my mind with that stretch of Moskovskaya Street, that November evening in Saratov. On Moskovskaya and at the nearby bus stops you could often meet metalheads in leather jackets, combat boots, and other rock‑style gear. By my observation, all that would disappear quickly by about 2008-2009. I had arrived almost at the very end, though I didn"t realise it - just as a year earlier, when I"d been fascinated with audio equipment and tape decks and thought that period was the peak of the era.

Now remembering it makes me both nauseous and sad about the lost time, but then that rocker subculture impressed and inspired me almost at the level of life"s meaning. It was about socialisation and hope of meeting a girl.

We went to that library a couple of times. From there we walked along Moskovskaya to Chapaeva Street, where on the ground floor of a large building, in a corridor‑type passage with exits at both ends, there was a cluster of little stalls selling various goods - mostly small electronics and discs. That was where we had bought the Windows disc earlier in the year and where other episodes had happened. Essentially a mini‑market where each stallholder brought the goods from Moscow themselves. I think by that time the shopping centre, once called "Elektronika" in Soviet times, had already been renamed "Moskva." It would become a place I visited often, especially a year later, though I can"t remember many specific moments now.

But Mum and I also often went through another door in that same building, where there was a bright, civilised appliance shop in a large hall - with refrigerators and everything else. "Archipelago," I think it was called. I used to look at the displays of digital cameras, camcorders, voice recorders, players. There were already plenty of them, people were buying them, and Mum and I didn"t even have mobile phones. It wasn"t that we needed any of it or couldn"t afford it - the point was that we didn"t need it, and that was what distinguished us from other people.

The envy wasn"t for the devices but for the fact that people had something to use them for. They had things to photograph, to film, to listen to on players, and someone to talk to on the phone. As for the players specifically - I mean, people weren"t buying them for just a few discs and one cassette. They already knew all the bands they wanted to listen to, unlike me, whose relationship with music consisted of years‑long detective work identifying bands rather than actually listening to music.

I didn"t yet know that music was mostly useless bullshit - just endless chewing gum, at least for me - and that those adventures of identifying it had been more valuable than the music itself.

A few steps up in that shop there was a department with computers. At the entrance there were almost metal detectors, because with so many laptops in that small space the total value of goods there was higher than in the rest of the shop combined. A serious laptop was something we definitely couldn"t afford - not because Mum didn"t have the money, but because the task of moving away from Lev Kassil to proper housing was still unresolved and outweighed everything else.

And of course the televisions in the main hall were expensive too. The ratio of old bulky sets to new flat ones in those shops was already about one to one. Only the flat ones back then were mostly based on some plasma technology. They were literally called "plasma" televisions. They cost as much as cars.

One model being sold there was the same one that had hung on the wall in that huge MediaMarkt on Kirov Street - which I haven"t described yet. On it they were showing a film with Vin Diesel - Riddick. I"d never watched it. I stood there imagining how I would sit in front of such a television, play my games, and be cool like Great Uncle. But then I remembered that Great Uncle still sat in front of it alone - and that wasn"t worth thirty thousand. And besides, computer games were already losing their original magic for me: I"d played two GTA games, roughly understood how games were built, and saw that they weren"t infinite at all. Just theatre. Disposable.

I"ll talk about the big MediaMarkt more fully later.

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___Part 63.

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Part 63 Text 1. Uncle Sergey and his musical prophecy,,, the beginning of the leaflet‑poster job,,, fantasies of a real bicycle life,,, a second job option,,, posting leaflets until frostbite,,, my bitter end as a leaflet poster.

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It was the twenties of November. As usual when Father wasn"t around, Uncle Sergey often appeared. Not so much in our flat as in childhood - because of the mess and my obsession with cleanliness - but rather in the sense that he sometimes drove us somewhere. Often, in the era of trips to Saratov for discs, if it was daytime he would drop us there. Mum would ask me, "Shall we go to Saratov?" - and in anticipation of some new musical discovery I would immediately get ready, and half an hour later we were already at MediaMarkt. Because of his connections Mum may have asked him for help in the story with Grandpa"s accident. And once he was driving us somewhere in Engels, maybe to the grandparents. When we passed School No. 1, Mum mentioned my digging into heavy metal, and he responded with a kind prophecy: well, that"s for now, but when I grew up and had romance in my life, I"d start wanting calm melodic music.

Knowing the trajectory of my life better than he did, I couldn"t see that happening, and again - as in the library - I felt that unpleasant sense of a predetermined discord. Only here, because Uncle Sergey was almost a close person for Mum and therefore for me - and even shared some tastes with me (Fowles, Amélie, Dire Straits) - there was also resentment for his sake. Like how I had felt sorry for the "teachers of kindness" after the fight with the fair‑ground Kazakh. Only here it wasn"t pity for him but resentment on his behalf. Here it would be I who let him down - by not fulfilling expectations - rather than someone else. That was how I felt then, when I still looked at my character and traits through a moral lens and considered them a flaw. Just as Uncle Sergey did, or Grandma Klava.

This was also the time when, according to Mum, hearing about my behaviour he sometimes suggested sending me to an orphanage. Though, to be fair to him, he himself had spent part of his childhood in one - in his case because of poverty - and didn"t perceive it as absolute cruelty. And also, as a mix of his temper and concern for Mum, he was prone to suggesting radical solutions in moments of anger. For instance, when my father let Mum down in the early years and she told Uncle Sergey, he once said, "Shall I hire some thugs to shoot him?" His suggestion about the orphanage for me was probably made in the same kind of reactive states. In any case, as events at the beginning of the next year would show, his judgement of my situation wasn"t entirely moralistic.

Near School No. 1 in Engels there were some errands in a building at 137 Telmana Street - a late‑Soviet four‑storey building with rectangular corridors forming loops on each floor, and small offices along them. I can"t even say now who had business there. Several storylines were mixed together in those days. But I suspect that building was connected to the part‑time job idea that had just begun for me.

While agonising over the choice of a monitor and even considering second‑hand options, I was leafing through a large classifieds newspaper - something like From Hand to Hand - and there I came across advertisements for part‑time work for all ages. Posting leaflets. Yes, that must have been it. I called one of them, and I had to come to some office in that building.

Mum came with me, though she didn"t go inside - she had some business nearby in a government office dealing with subsidies, and afterwards we were to meet. I don"t remember any concrete result from that visit except that when I came out I was burning with excitement about earning money, in that dopaminergic way I call it. From that elevated part of Engels where the building stood you could see the whole November stretch of Telmana Street with trolleybuses and buses heading to Saratov, and in the distance the blue outline of Saratov itself.

Whenever I looked at Saratov from the upper part of Engels - from Polygraphicheskaya Street - especially in grey autumn weather like that, it always filled me with dopamine about the future, about interesting prospects and developments. There would be a lot of that feeling a year later. I"m writing this whole biography just to authentically return to those times and live them again - that apex of childish hopes and illusions.

Around the same time I had - or perhaps rediscovered - a thick Sportmaster catalogue from the summer of 2003, and I spent a lot of time thinking about the BMX bicycles in it. Now that was reinforced by the inspiration of San Andreas, which featured BMX riding, and above all by those teenagers on BMX bikes I"d seen on the square in Saratov. I again imagined myself as a purposeful figure on two wheels - but now without fantasies of missions, gangs, or friends. Just a real scenario: solitary rides from house to house posting leaflets, with music in a player.

Simple? Of course not. In that fantasy I already had the bike and everything else I needed - so naturally my interest in leaflet posting arose from the prospect of legally riding to the twins" house. As Mum and I walked down Telmana Street from that building, that was all I thought about: a metallic‑coloured BMX, a backpack full of leaflets, and me rolling up to the House with the dumpling shop...

That evening I sat again over the newspaper. I had to call again. These moments I remember clearly. I must not have made the first call in front of Mum either, and now again I waited until she left. Why? Because I might mumble or say something stupid, they"d answer rudely, and it would hurt me. And if Mum were nearby she"d hear the conversation and see my reaction. My standard reaction in such situations was a fool"s smile masking hurt and the urge to cry. But since with Mum, who knew me, that wouldn"t work, I would have had no way to redirect her attention or defend my wounded ego except aggression - staged or real - and there was no one else besides her to direct it at. That"s the yamamiy dead end.

This time the agency was very close to our house - at 8 Freedom Square Street, near the Palace of Pioneers, opposite the old Rodina cinema. A small wooden house with a gate and porch. A tiny office in what were basically the entrance hall. A couple of workers. Mum sometimes came here to make photocopies. It was either a travel agency or some kind of advertising firm. I was told to come the next day to collect the leaflets.

Judging by the weather, it must have been Saturday, 26 November. They handed me a fairly heavy stack of leaflets, marked out the district and the block to start with, and told me to stick them on the doors of apartment entrances - in those years that was normal; all doors were covered in notices. When one of them, who lived there, walked around and saw their leaflets, I could come back and get paid.

So I set off. I left part of the leaflets at home, took my cheapest watery transparent glue, and went to catch a minibus. It was about half past three. The complete opposite end of the city from the twins: a district called "The Living and the Dead," Khrushchyovka blocks along Polygraphicheskaya Street starting from house 49, and toward School No. 1. I described that district earlier in the backstory about Mum"s childhood - the first flat she had with Grandpa before Lev Kassil had been in one of those houses.

Light snow was falling, and it was a classic dry Engels frost. A reddish sunset was already beginning over Saratov when I entered the courtyard of house 49 and began posting.

I kept remembering Mum"s stories that these Khrushchyovkas had originally been built over a cemetery, and how they"d found bones in the dug‑up earth as children. The place still felt utterly Soviet: heating pipes wrapped in rags, tights hanging from balconies, the smell of fried potatoes drifting from windows, Saturday television sounds, and some entrance doors still made of wood.

I immediately thought about America. What were people doing there at that moment? Yes, there were ghettos and backwaters there too - gloomy places like in Brother 2. But here it was all potatoes, five‑metre kitchens, Gazmanov...

Then I remembered Oleg Nikolaevich, who must have lived somewhere around here, since he had once walked from the stadium in this direction. I remembered how my stomach used to tighten already when passing these houses on the way to gymnastics. I moved through the courtyards from entrance to entrance. The glue spilled over my fingers. I remembered how once we had walked through similar Khrushchyovka courtyards with Mum, Aunt Lyusya and the rest of the family on the way to the cemetery in a surreal crowd of old men and women in headscarves.

By house 55 - the one where Mum and I had once bought that huge stupid black bicycle in a strange trance - I wasn"t remembering anything anymore, and it was the last house where I posted a leaflet. There were hundreds of leaflets, but I"d been told to put only one on each door, and after sticking about thirty in that whole block I realised I would have to cover the entire eastern Engels to finish the job for some ridiculous payment. A whole bottle of glue was already almost gone. But the main thing was the frost.

Beyond the "Living and the Dead" block, in the direction of School No. 1, there was a block with garages and industrial buildings. From the back I slipped into some deserted recess to piss. I could barely unzip my fly and pull out my dick - my fingers felt nothing. Then I took the bag with the leaflets, swung it a couple of times, and hurled it as far as I could onto the roof of some building.

From that district it was impossible to leave easily. I"d never been able to figure out where those blue‑and‑white 284 buses came from or where they stopped, so for about seven minutes I angrily trudged through the courtyards of nine‑storey buildings toward a bus stop I knew on Stroiteley Avenue near house 3, where a trolleybus definitely ran - and trolleybuses all went to the centre.

At home there was some panic about my fingers. In my ICQ history a couple of years later there"s even a message where I told someone we"d called an ambulance. That was clearly an exaggeration; in reality we just spent ten minutes hypochondriacally worrying and then my fingers started moving again - and that was that.

The next day, pretending to Mum that I was a tough nut, I took the remaining leaflets to the House with the dumpling shop, entered the courtyard, and stuck one on each of the two entrances. At the back door of the grocery store a truck was unloading, and I couldn"t linger longer than the few seconds needed to stick them up - I wouldn"t have had any explanation for the loaders about why I was still there. Afterwards I even tried using the leaflets to wipe my arse, but they were too glossy - useless even for that.

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Part 63 text 2. Iron Maiden and November hopes of socialisation through rock music,,, the big MediaMarkt on Kirova,,, buying Megadeth.

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After the frostbite I was ill for a week. On the second of December we went to the clinic with my temperature already almost gone. When I came back to school on the fifth and Slepukhin and I started talking about music again, he said that, by the way, he"d gone to that basement shop and bought that disc - and he pronounced some incomprehensible name, something like "Iren Miden". None of us knew any English. Even I at first thought it was read as "Iron Maidan". Once I realised he meant Iron Maiden, I asked, "So what"s it like?" - and he said it was so‑so. I felt guilty, since it was my talks that had inspired him to buy it. But he said that these Iron Maiden were in Vice City - one of the songs on the disc turned out to be from the game. I asked him for it, and he brought me the disc the next day.

At home I sat down in the green armchair close to the DVD player. The disc was Death on the Road. Slepukhin had missed slightly - out of the two discs in the shop he"d taken this stupid live album. The one where Bruce Dickinson, already forty‑five, jumps around the stage like a monkey, naturally gets out of breath, and it"s impossible to listen to. Lots of old songs I was never going to love from them. The new ones sounded and were performed badly. In the end I didn"t even listen through to the song that would soon become my favourite in those days - "Brave New World". Or rather, from that point onward I only skimmed each track for a few seconds, just trying to find the song from GTA. But all the songs were unfamiliar.

And now Slepukhin was also saying that Metallica played in Vice City. I was thrown into ever new confusions, so I asked him to bring the soundtrack from his copy of Vice City - maybe there was some discrepancy. It wasn"t hard for him to burn it onto a disc, and I still didn"t have a computer anyway, so I wouldn"t have been able to install the game itself.

Around those same days after school I would switch on some music channel in the kitchen, where they played clips based on SMS voting, and quite often, to my surprise, people voted for Iron Maiden with their old videos, like "Run to the Hills". It didn"t grab me.

Slepukhin brought the disc. It turned out that in the copy of GTA Vice City he had, the soundtrack was somehow completely different. The songs were even in MP3 files with names, so Slepukhin actually knew what was what. For some reason he hadn"t been able to tell me earlier. Basically, we"d misunderstood each other before because of that homemade soundtrack in his version.

But the selection of songs he had wasn"t any worse - in fact I singled out these ones in particular: Iron Maiden - "Brave New World", Metallica - "The Unforgiven", Guns N" Roses - "You Could Be Mine".

For ever those three songs became associated in my mind with November and with those initial naïve hopes of socialisation through rock music. Back when I didn"t yet know what a pile of shit - not a life - was waiting ahead. What a divergence there would be between me and other people in perceiving the same things. That I didn"t unite with people - I separated from them. And what frustration with bands would gradually come as well.

By that day Uncle Seryozha had given us a simple DVD player for the kitchen, and for some reason I would bring those songs there to play them. The intro of "Brave New World" would start - where you can clearly hear the word "love" and things like that - and Mum would say, "At least try to understand what they"re singing about." On the disc there was also that song "Welcome to the Jungle", I think, which of course I only listened to alone, and right at the beginning my oversexed brain heard not "God" but "girls". And in "You Could Be Mine" there was the same minor‑mode Phrygian feel that I"d once heard as a child in that "autumn" Mylène Farmer video with the twins, and that"s another reason why that song is associated for me with grey autumn.

And Metallica"s "The Unforgiven", with its solo sounding - because of the reverberation of a "small" space - as if it had been recorded in the chamber hall of some Palace of Pioneers, became associated for me with the image of rock musicians that I"d had since childhood: some long‑haired blokes walking along dirty streets, owning no cars, performing in assembly halls of youth centres or who‑knows‑where, for a couple of dozen people, unnecessary to anyone except a handful of connoisseurs, unhappy and misanthropic, like me. When a year later I"d start discovering reality, see all those concerts of theirs with hundreds of thousands of people, and later still - already after the childhood story - watch documentaries and learn that they were all practically billionaires, and married since youth - only then would that comforting stereotype finally collapse for me. That"s the main reason I mentioned the frustration with bands. But for now that was still far away, and at least for another year it would still be a kind of magical time.

My Rubik"s Cube was falling apart - it kept breaking into little cubes and I had to put them back in. On the green armchair there was frankly nothing left to do, and in the next few days it was time to buy a monitor. I was leaning towards a cheap heavy seventeen‑inch piece of crap.

But first there was the purchase at the big MediaMarkt.

It was right in the bustle of the Kirov pedestrian avenue - house fourteen. A Soviet ten‑storey residential block with the first floor raised for some large shop of its era, and now the era was discs. As you entered, just like in the MediaMarkt on Volskaya, you had to put your bags into lockers. And then a big bright hall began, with rows of shelves full of discs. On the left, by the big windows looking onto the crowded pedestrian avenue, were computer games. On the right - films. Films were the most numerous - both to buy and to rent. And in the far half was the music. I would wander there for almost hours, guessing what band might be from Vice City. Somehow I may already have asked the consultants at least the basics - like that Michael Jackson was on the soundtrack. Just like on Volskaya, every disc that wasn"t sealed with licensing stickers could be listened to in a player. There were several of them along the windows, on little tables that were still slightly too high for me.

I tried all sorts of things: Black Sabbath, Motörhead, Metallica - their first album. Around those same days on Volskaya, where I also usually dragged Mum while we were in Saratov, I tried Metallica"s DVD concert with a symphony orchestra, and neither that nor the first album grabbed me at all, so I put Metallica aside for many months. There were a couple of random successes - Twisted Sister with their hit, and the band Alcatrazz with their song "God Blessed Video". But the first one, where I risked turning on the video clips, I urgently switched off as soon as I"d identified the song, because of the inexplicable clownish make‑up of the musicians. And with the second one the song was in a major key, not among my favourites. I needed minor, or dzhyzh‑dzhyzh‑dzhyzh.

Next to Metallica there often stood something called Megadeth, which had also been in that sectarian leaflet - so I tried it. I took an MP3 disc. It was already late - and Mum, as usual, was sitting on the windowsill. And then on the second album the familiar bass intro from one of my favourite songs finally started playing. We immediately bought that discography on two discs and went home.

At home, with Megadeth playing and at some point the Rubik"s Cube finally completely falling apart in my hands, those were the last days of my life in the green armchair. The first album didn"t grab me, but the second - from 1986 - finally became my first truly old‑school album and, because of the almost comically aggressive music and the singer"s voice creating the image of a young hooliganish grumbler in whom I recognised myself, it inspired me to want to become a musician someday. Mentally, in all sorts of intonations, that vocalist among everyone I knew sounded closest to what I felt I myself might become. I just didn"t know which of the four band members in the photo on the cover was the singer: the cool‑looking curly one or the most pathetic one in a kolkhoz‑style plaid shirt. When later it turned out it was the pathetic one - that inspired me even more. After that album I didn"t even hurry to move further through the discography yet and just sat listening to it on repeat. Especially the first track, "Devil"s Island", and my favourite "Peace Sells", although the opening one - "Wake Up Dead" - was already pushing it aside.

And on some nearby day we went to Sunrise to buy a monitor. Again I spent ages thinking there, thinking and wandering around the shop as if it were already my home, while Mum, having already taken off her coat, waited - and in the end I decided to take what I"d planned: a seventeen‑inch Samsung piece of crap, saving Mum"s money for discs. I could have bought it a couple of months earlier and already had the computer.

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Part 63 text 3. Discs from Slepukhin,,, confessing to the "whores",, and about Grendel‑hood.

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Despite the fact that because of my total refusal to study, the scandals I caused over cleanliness, and the way things were heading towards the psychiatric ward, by the approaching New Year Mum would be wishing herself dead from cancer and all that - I myself remember the rest of that year as feeling fairly positive. That was thanks to the computer being restored and the active companionship with Slepukhin.

He gave me another disc with video clips. There was a clip by the band Pain - "Shut Your Mouth". The frontman looked like the classic metal musician from my stereotype - sickly‑looking, thin. The music impressed me, but because the band used a synthesiser I didn"t get into them: by that point a live set of instruments and the absence of electronics had become a very important criterion for me when getting into new bands. Then there was Manowar - a band whose name I"d been seeing on the spines of discs in shops for about a year and a half already. There was their most famous pompous clip on the rocks with guitars, and that evening and the whole night my stomach felt nauseous - for the first time in a long while for real, not pretending just to avoid going to school.

Also on the disc were two of the most famous Prodigy clips, including the one with the debauched imagery about whoring around. For Slepukhin that was probably almost the maximum erotic stuff he had, and he also didn"t have the internet, I think. I mean, otherwise I"d surely have found out what he had and begged him for some porn - at least some photos. Another thing Slepukhin had of that sort was some Rammstein clip, which was not just vulgar but also shocking to me with the same shock I"d felt when in GTA Vice City there was a scene with porn and I couldn"t process the fact that girls who had played that game must have seen all that too and therefore also knew about sex. And in the Rammstein clip there was that Till Lindemann with some giant penis right on stage in front of the crowd, beating their keyboardist nerd on the arse with it, and then from that cock he sprays foam all over the crowd. And yet girls like that young rocker girl from my building could easily listen to Rammstein and go to their concerts. Had they really seen all that, understood what it meant, knew about sex? Did they already have body hair? Did they masturbate? And how did they feel about all this? Didn"t they have anxieties connected with it?

At some point someone - I think the Mongoloid‑looking Mitenkov - who knew about our surveillance of those two girls I told about last month, was sent by us to them to tell them about us. It happened somewhere on the main staircase, and we were standing not far away. Their reaction was, of course, uninterested but not angry. As soon as they looked at us - we immediately ran off cowardly. And we continued behaving roughly the same way. We would walk up behind them in the corridor as close as possible, and then when they suddenly turned around we"d immediately bolt. Like that time long ago with Guzhik and the two older girls, only now more brazen. Back then the girls themselves chased after us, while from these we only wished for that - but they had no desire to chase anyone, and at least Slepukhin"s Vlada was already smaller than us. But we didn"t just act infantile like that - of course we also fantasised about them sexually.

I had read somewhere that in a cool room girls" nipples get hard, and I told Slepukhin about it, and he started dreaming about how he"d bring his Vlada home, where he had an air conditioner, and deliberately make it cooler there.

But the main memory connected with this whole episode is about how I related to those girls - or rather how I pretended to relate to them. After we had confessed to them, the question arose of how to explain it to Mum if somehow, through some paranoid chain of events, information about this story reached her, even though it had been initiated by Slepukhin and I was only participating alongside him. The safest thing, as it always seemed to me in such situations, was to tell Mum first, immediately. And I told her - that we were "chasing whores". That"s exactly what I called them - and I kept calling them that in front of Mum afterwards. More than that, at school I also had to act as if I had a crude, loutish interest in those girls, at the very least. Because through paranoid chains any school thing could reach Mum. It was important to insure myself and be innocent in my innocence in front of all witnesses.

And so I called them whores even when talking with Slepukhin, and he - as if for some reason it suited him too - also started calling them that. I mean between us and other companions of ours. We didn"t insult those girls, of course.

Besides that, afraid that Mum might still suspect that I had a tender erotic interest in girls - meaning that in fantasies I surrender, merge with another person, and then they could abandon me and destroy me - I began talking about them even obsessively, and more and more crudely. I wanted to look like a complete maniac, to prove that I"d be ready to smash their skulls if anything happened. It got to the point where she said, "Don"t say "whores"." That cooled me down and stopped the escalation. Otherwise I might even have moved on to real aggression toward those girls - well, at least verbal, for example.

And now, using Mum"s remark as justification for myself, it became unnecessary to tell her about those girls any more. That"s the kind of fucked‑up nonsense it was.

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Part 63, Text 4. Anatomical tortures with the penis,,, mom saw an erection,,, masturbating in the middle room,,, depraved masturbation with a finger in the ass,,, summarising the topic of depravity.

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Somewhere during that autumn I kept stretching, stretching, and finally the last adhesions between the foreskin and the glans of my penis separated. I didn"t mention it separately before, so now I can put it all together about the penis... And not just the penis... And I just thought: my penis, so grotesquely bent downward when erect, could have taken that shape not only because I always wore it pressed down by my swim trunks, pressed with my hands to calm it, and due to those squeezes during masturbation, but also because of the skin adhesion to the glans. If I remember correctly, the adhesion was mostly on the underside. And this attached skin kept pulling my perpetually erect penis down at the tip. In the end, my penis in erection looks as if the frenulum is too short and drags the glans down. Considering the vein running along the top, I can"t even imagine missionary sex with face-to-face kissing, because then that already grotesquely pointed penis would press the upper part against the pubic bone - which would be terrible for me: I"d imagine that fucking vein being compressed. Damn, I have nothing but problems.

Anyway, one day that autumn, the foreskin came off, and there was a little smegma, which I could wash away from then on, and it would never appear except during psychiatric hospital stays. And I saw, for the first time, that hideous, Alien-movie-like glans. When I"d written about that film (remind you, the part titled "Resurrection"), I had already linked it to various anatomical horrors. The sight of my penis gave roughly the same feeling. I also now clearly understood that there was no bone, not even a muscle, and the penis was just a fucking blood-filled sac. And my worst nightmare, on the level of beheading or severed arteries, was the thought of what would happen if I stuck a needle in it while erect. I can barely type this - it twists me up entirely. Some people fear spiders; I fear this. But this was exactly what tormented me when I masturbated. When I say "tormented" in this context, it can be translated as "aroused."

Once, in December - around the middle, since we were getting ready for bed, and in the middle room a Megadeth album from the nineties was playing - mom asked: "Is it standing up?" I said: "No." Mom said: "Strange. It always stood up in childhood." Realising my lie was too obvious, I added: "Well, sometimes it gets bigger, sometimes smaller - and it sort of pulses."

Then - I don"t know how long after, maybe already in the new year - a waking nightmare happened. In the small room at night, there was always a faint light from the lamps along L"va Kassil, and accustomed eyes could see everything clearly enough. I slept farther from the window. And then, in the middle of the night, I woke and lay in half-sleep. Usually, when waking like that, I would get up to pee, maybe I would have gone now too. But then I felt my penis, standing hard through my worn-out underwear, and that the blanket had slipped off me. Fuck. But it was night - mom must be asleep. I reached to cover up. And I almost had, and then her hand stopped me for a couple of seconds. I looked at her like: "What"s up?" She obviously stopped to make sure she hadn"t imagined it. It turned out she wasn"t asleep either. Fuck, I lay like Lenin, probably covered in red blotches, my whole body burning with shock. Maybe even my heart could be heard. "So that"s it. Wanted to sleep with mom? Here you go," - I blamed myself silently... Of course, I didn"t go pee, and somehow managed to fall asleep. And neither in the morning nor ever after did we mention it.

The bathroom door had a latch, and my parents always locked themselves in, but I don"t remember, in our whole L"va Kassil life, mom ever letting me lock it. And you couldn"t rule out the risk of her suddenly barging in: something starts burning in the kitchen, the tap isn"t working for some reason - and of course she"d storm into the bathroom, ignoring everything. Masturbating was therefore very risky.

I masturbated in the afternoon in the middle room, sitting at the computer on my swivel chair with wheels. Most days, mom was at home, and I waited for her to at least lie down for a nap. I just wanted to undress. Fuck, my pants and sweater pissed me off. And the plastic bags on my legs. I wanted at least to see my stomach. I often got aroused on my own - even without anyone alive around. I pulled my pants down a bit, lifted the sweater. Then I"d hear the bed creak, and I had five seconds before she might pass by the room, which was closed, but she could still come in - her wardrobe was right there. In those seconds I had to stand up, pull my pants back up, tuck in the sweater, all without a sound, without rustling the bags. Getting up from our chair makes a loud pop. Fuck, hell. I was drenched in shock.

Other times, sitting and masturbating... the door would suddenly fling open... Almost a heart attack. You turn - and there"s Murka"s head. Now I had to go close it - which would wake mom from her nap, leaving me with a sucking torment for who knows how long. So sometimes I had to masturbate the old-fashioned way - by squeezing my legs - just to survive.

And when mom left, it started... Slepukhin had given a recorded disc with random stuff, including images with naughty jokes and pranks. One picture was famous - the joke with predatory teeth in the labia. That was the only photo of genitals in the whole set. Sometimes even at it... I remember like it was yesterday... There were also a dozen semi-erotic photos of just beautiful girls. One of them, by the way, was Kristanna Loken - the actress from "Mortal Kombat", though I didn"t recognize her, just felt something familiar. Another was fully nude, lying on the couch on her stomach, nothing visible. But fuck, the back, the protruding velvet ass and legs. How I wanted to caress and kiss her neck, where her hair was flung, dive into that hair. Then there were a couple other girls, clothed but overtly depraved, with sexually confident looks. They seemed like women to me, and I didn"t yet know whether I"d address them informally or formally. A dyed blonde holding her breast in a bra... Her gaze exposed me. What neck? Who do you think you are, boy? I want to caress her back, make my beloved shine with happiness, and smile at each other. Who are you to smile back? For what? For being scared of everything? Lie down. Now it"ll feel good. No, no, please, I"m scared. But I got off the chair, lay on my stomach - and pulled down pants and underwear. Please, don"t... Quiet... It doesn"t hurt... No... I spit on my fingers and brought them to my anus... I looked at her, she looked at me, she saw me trembling, my chest all blotched... My chest all blotched, I"m so scared... Please forgive me... Quiet, be still... Enjoy... And she inserted her middle finger into me, just as I"d feared since early childhood, as I"d feared a year ago... My mind flashed through scenes of depraved sex in the toilet... They could do it - I could do it... I would earn praise from this strict young lady... Lubrication flowed continuously from my penis, dripping, hitting the fucking floor with my knee, and I would have to wash my pants, and explain to mom why... If she came, I wouldn"t have time to wash my finger, get rid of red blotches on my neck, wipe the slime off the floor... I would have spread it to the corridor with the bags... With her sniffing superpower, mom would instantly smell the finger as I went to the bathroom... I was insanely at risk... But the corrupting beauty moved her finger back and forth, like when you poop... I told her that... Like I"m pooping... Yeah, nothing shameful... I poop too... Relax... And torment the dick... Slowly, barely touching... My neck muscles already trembling from strain - holding it suspended... It would hurt later... The imagined scenario shifted constantly: sometimes penetrated by her, sometimes by myself - under her frightening yet sweetly irresistible compulsion... I turned on the chair, ass to her, asking if I was doing it right... Yes... And she stroked me on sensitive buttocks, balls, inner thighs... I couldn"t bear the tickling, clamped my knees... Flirting with my fear of exposed glans and all this topic, I stretched the skin as much as possible, watching under the chair as my swollen, blood-engorged, reddened penis hung fully exposed and vulnerable, a long thread of slime stretching to the floor... I can"t do this anymore, let me cum... A little more... Just a bit more pleasure... My finger is probably in shit... I"m so ashamed, forgive me... It"s okay, go deeper... Oh god... So warm and soft... You can speed up, I allow... You"re great... Thank you... God, I can"t anymore... You"re so good... You"re my good one... You"re so beautiful, I love you... And I, not having breathed for the last twenty seconds, looking plaintively at the smug face of my tormentor, exhaled with a real, unposed moan the last air, and white clots shot from my penis in uncontrolled spurts onto the chair legs, while my anus pulsed, squeezing the finger I was removing, and it felt like pooping in front of my tormentor.

After that, feeling like a completely different person, I quickly closed the picture on the screen and rushed to wash my finger, which often really was in shit. I washed it several times, recalling my old belief that you could get worms even from your own shit. Then I wiped my ass and ran to clean up the semen, especially once I realised that dissolved and turned transparent, it smelled particularly strong, and mom would sniff it out. I didn"t yet have toilet paper or wipes - that would come only in adolescence. I always needed to go to the toilet, and there was no legal reason to take a bit of paper with me.

After orgasm, as I said, I immediately felt like "another person", and, like after OKER wipes, never analysed what I had done in childhood.

Obviously, anal masturbation came from fear of medical procedures. And no spankings, for example - though mom spanked me all childhood - ever aroused me. And those strict girls in fantasies were never truly humiliating; if they devalued, it was always objectively - for real facts and my inadequacy as an adult - and most scenarios had that soothing tone, lexicon, and manners. Like when you were little, when they took blood from your finger, and so on.

There was also another level of depravity I mentioned in the gastroscopy episode, where in the fantasy they almost crushed my arteries, and I nearly died. But at that time, hand masturbation didn"t appeal - it would be simply inadequate: not about sex, but pure fear of losing everything. And when thinking about those things (which, with growing up and becoming accustomed to the phenomenon of death, happened less often), extreme neurosis to orgasm played out, and I would masturbate by squeezing my legs. That way I could finish faster - even in ten to fifteen seconds.


.:::.

Part 63 Text 5. Diving into Megadeth,,, last memories of companionship crush with Slepukhin,,, year-end with games,,, Mom"s depressive line and her decision to rot, yet live.

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On the Megadeth disc, there were several clips from their "Rude Awakening" concert, including "Wake Up Dead," "In My Darkest Hour," and "Dread and the Fugitive Mind." These became my favourite songs. Although, apart from the first album, in the whole discography I had (up to The World Needs a Hero) there wasn"t a single song I didn"t like. But in the first weeks, I only listened up to Youthanasia-I"d stop there until summer. From it, naturally, I loved the most balladic "A Tout le Monde," and I even played it on the Kenwood speakers, as if casually showing Mom I wasn"t just into mindless thrash.

Dave Mustaine-the band"s leader, with his face already shrivelling at that concert-looked, ignoring the curls, like some Uncle Tolya Fatyushkin from my early childhood, or Chikatilo, or Oleg Nikolaevich. A typical dry old man, with eyebrows like some Mordvin from our Volga region. I even imagined he stank like livestock in that denim vest. All these associations made him feel close, like the people on the monitor were here with us, not in another world you couldn"t reach unless you were a gold-medal student. I hated Russia more and more-this prison of fate.

My hands, from washing in the cold, had become like a Russian drunkard"s-swollen and cracked to blood. Strange that Slepukhin didn"t notice. And he noticed almost nothing.

Some schoolgirls, maybe even the twins, wore fluffy fur boots-"unyts." Slepukhin"s Vlada wore those. I remembered the word "Vikings." Slepukhin laughed at my name, and we cracked up at the sight of his Vlada in those "Vikings."

On one of the last or second-to-last school days of the year, sunny and lazy, when studying seemed pointless, and teachers were absent for whole lessons, and our class, like many others, just messed around, Slepukhin, maybe Mitenkov, and I went searching for our two girls-maybe wandering the half-empty corridors. We actually found them and followed. I don"t recall exactly how, but it ended with us getting some initiative: they started teasing us while moving toward the toilets. In the end, I was trapped there with them, and the idiots held the door. I was overwhelmed and, not knowing what to say, said: "They"re going to kill me." Anya said: "We need you, why would we kill you?" I think they were smoking, maybe not. They reminded me of good students.

After school, Slepukhin and I trailed them again, they entered the arch into the yard of the nearest house to school-Telman, six-and Anya went into some entrance; Vlada... I don"t remember where she went. This was the last memory of them, though we kept trailing them out of habit into the new year.

In the last days of the year, I went to some shop and got the game FEAR-in autumn Igromania praised it for a breakthrough in graphics and physics, but it required a powerful computer. It barely ran, but I played one evening and turned it off.

During a disc trip to Saratov with Mom, probably just before New Year, late on a cold evening, we bought a licensed, fully Russian-dubbed copy of the cursed Far Cry I"d never beaten. Finally, the perfect disc. I was still a kid: that 300-ruble piece of plastic with licensing marks mattered, though I could get the pirated version for half. I"d start it by the end of the holidays, after playing Need for Speed: Most Wanted-the pirated version from that small shop in Engels, where some boys tried to steal a disc and I got kicked out with them.

Time segments like these allowed me to finally accelerate this cursed biography, paralyzed for one and a half years, while all my life savings, invested in complete shit, had lost a third of their value.

For Mom, as I said, it was a very depressive New Year. No tree, no salads, nothing. Mom sat in the hall and said, when I approached: "I wished for cancer in the New Year." I don"t mention it, but my washing caused regular scandals, my tantrums with swearing and hatred at her, and she yelled back when I hated her most. All that emotion vanishes quickly, so specific episodes are hard to recall. At least it seems (reading back) that autumn and December were almost idyllic. But no, there was a lot of hell, and it would get worse. I got used to Mom sometimes sitting and crying-a thing she never did before, or hid better. By this time, she already had a jaw-face problem that would last decades. Everything done at that one expensive clinic in Saratov, mentioned once in first grade, was ruined by leftover tools in nearly all her tooth roots. By now something had rotted and spread into her jaw, needing almost litigation for compensation-a total mess. But it wasn"t even that which stopped her-it was her arrhythmia. That night, when she saw me with a hard-on, she woke due to attacks. And now the surgeries she needed-extracting all teeth and drilling the jaw-required general anaesthesia. Doctors said she might not survive anaesthesia with her arrhythmia. She also remembered anaesthesia as some horror. Plus her lifelong distrust of doctors and bad luck. In the end, she seemed to have chosen to rot, and by then was accepting this choice. Just as after gymnastics, I was coming to terms with being a psycho-physical weakling.


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___Part 64.

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...............2006---------------------------------------------------

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Part 64 Text 1. Paradise of escapism through games and music,,, first thoughts on composing,,, petty school episodes,,, obsession with Lamborghinis and the sunny Eighties America.

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Dad didn"t call.

After finishing Most Wanted, which got me slightly hooked on cars, I, as I said, dove into Far Cry. My favourite level became the one called "Uprising," I think. It"s that one, early, cloudy morning, driving along the shore where huge mutants stroll about, and they"ve got bazooka-arms, from whose shots you can barely dodge, and they can hit you even from far away. You have to pick them off from a distance with a sniper rifle, hiding in the bushes.

That level stuck with me because it was already during the first days of school-well, for me, not really school, because Mom and I went to the clinic for some random bullshit of mine, mostly still gastrotomy stuff and scoliosis. And once again, that magical, blissful feeling came over me: going to the clinic in the morning-no school in sight, rushing back to the computer, and losing myself in oblivion from the world. But it was less now-less of that feeling-because the magic of escapism was already fading, as I said. And there was something else too. A year ago, and even earlier, it had been proper childhood. Youth felt so far away. But now it was approaching... the time when someone starts getting happy (satisfied in the need for intimate closeness)-and, as you grow up, more often-and someone else... who knows what the fuck at all. Something had to be done.

I closed the games and watched Megadeth videos. Wake Up Dead, that part in the middle with the repeating riff. For the first time, I thought about composing. I didn"t know how to realise it, how to approach it. I constantly mimicked the riffs with my voice-my "dzh-dzh-dzh"-and fantasised about somehow getting a mic and trying to record sketches of my riffs that way. I didn"t know, of course, that a repeating heavy motif is called a "riff." And I still had no clue about the physics of producing deep, heavy notes on a guitar. I"d watch where the Megadeth guitarists placed their hands on the fretboard, and it looked like the simple chords my dad played-but only they got that powerful, controlled, staccato sound, not the backyard, muddy crap. Damn, I don"t want to sound accusatory, but my dad"s playing was so unimpressive that it literally put me off picking up the guitar back then.

At school, I told Slepukhin about Megadeth and gave him the discs. There"s that clip where Mustaine spits during his vocal strains, and I told Slepukhin to laugh his ass off, which he later said he did.

At some point, I told the trustworthy, decent Slepukhin, the one I"d been observing in the corridors. As I said, you could flip him off, and he"d crack up. He also laughed at the twins: to him, with their slightly backward ears and longish noses, they looked like rats. He started calling them that. But it wasn"t cruel, and I didn"t mind.

I still always walked with my left hand in my pocket, and my hands, from constant washing, drying, and frost, were, as I said, swollen and cracking to blood, and no cream helped. Once I sat at my desk, and a neutral classmate, Tsyganov, noticed my hands-and drew someone else"s attention too-and said, "Look, his hands are always all red"-and something else. I didn"t react, and their attention didn"t bother me. My hands may have been red, but at least I wasn"t catching any shit like them, pigs, climbing onto chairs with their feet and then sitting on them. I even memorised which chairs people had stood on like that, so I couldn"t sit on them. And I kept wondering how the twins, looking so clean, could lean on those desks where chairs were set upside down on the legs? Sometimes there were really disgusting hairs wrapped around the legs-didn"t they see that or what?

Exchanging discs had gotten really cheap, so I swapped something in that little shop at Volokh for a disc with a car encyclopedia. With it, I learned that H2 Hummers, which Mom and I occasionally saw in Saratov, especially near the conservatory where rich kids liked to park and show off, were converted military vehicles. But my favourite cars, ever since Vice City, were Lamborghinis. The main Lambos in my Vice City Modern Mod were the Diablo (totally unreal, since the Diablo came out in "90, and the game is set in "86) and another one, only spawnable with a cheat code. I found the whole evolution of Lamborghinis in the catalogue and found that other one. It turned out to be older than the Diablo, seemingly from the mid-"80s. This model triggered childhood associations. To some extent, it reminded me of the series Knight Rider, but I probably saw it even earlier, somewhere in Miami Vice. My early TV childhood, I remind you, is heavily associated with America of the curly-haired era, with all those sports cars. The sunlight in the living room hit just right when I lounged by the TV, so even in winter on a sunny day, let alone summer, I felt like I was really in the place where these films played on TV. I was so impressed that, back then, I felt like I"d truly grown up in that sunny Eighties America, with palms, sports cars, and men in white jackets and trousers.

But Slepukhin gave me another disc: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. I didn"t play long, but, considering that, unlike Undergrounds or the autumn Most Wanted, this one had sunny European landscapes, I was struck again by the same impressions as in childhood. And, sort of realising that this wasn"t America, I understood for the first time that Europe exists, and it"s not bad there, and it"s always sunny. I was blown away by our fucking icy crap. I hated waking up early, hated the goosebumps, the fucking cold, and the need to go somewhere when all I wanted was to collapse back into bed. I had hated this since early childhood, and it threw me into anti-social disarray that nobody else seemed to hate it as much as I did. And the fact that, unlike others, I had no visible chance to leave Russia because I hadn"t found myself in education only multiplied my anger.

Fuck, at school I was already cursing like this in front of teachers. Once, as usual, I wasn"t planning to sit on a low or shitty chair and stood around, distracting classmates and clowning, and some teacher went off for Corvalol. Soon the story with psychiatrists would start, but first-let"s stick to a few other things.

This was all the second half of January. Maybe closer to the end.

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Part 64 Text 2. Trips to MediaMarkets and Mom"s preferences,,, Led Zeppelin in the kitchen,,, Lev Kassil-style chaos in the kitchen,,, formalin porridge.

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Mom and I went to MediaMarkets at least once a week. By the way, apart from school and gymnastics, I had never gone to Saratov alone before age fourteen. I probably could have gone to MediaMarket alone at that time. But I didn"t even want to. Partly because of infantile sentimentality, Mom"s idyll, and partly because these trips were fundamentally about company. Who else would I hang out with outside school? And Mom had the money. At the start of 2006, I gave her my maybe four to five thousand rubles to keep in the bank. She explained that it would earn interest, and I liked the idea. Also, Mom of that Sergei, the twins" neighbour, came by and repaid a significant portion of her debt, promising to give the rest later. Trips to the House with the dumpling shop were a thing of the past. In any case, I hardly ever left home, except for school, the clinic, and these trips to Saratov"s MediaMarkets.

In the MediaMarkets, where Mom had to sit for an hour or more while I browsed, she started looking at what was there for her. At first, there was a DVD of some post-Soviet chick flick, Winter Cherry, though I might be confusing the timeline-it could have been a year and a half later, after the childhood events. Anyway, Mom didn"t watch any new releases, no action films at all, gravitating instead toward civilised, everyday dramas or moderately complex TV series. She avoided pure tragedies, stories with cruel or dumb characters, with some foreign mentality, or set in the distant past-or conversely, the super-modern present-and certainly nothing intellectually highbrow. Not that she watched those granny-level Russian Channel 24 soaps with formulaic scripts either. But also not things like Jane Austen or War and Peace. Hard to find examples of her taste beyond Winter Cherry. Not Forrest Gump, not Amélie, nothing like that. Even the series Two Fates, with its sex and suicide, was not for her. She never held a book outside of medicine, health, or law codes. For the past few years, as I write this, she just keeps watching the same sort of First Channel series hundreds of times (not the most old-fashioned, but far from the intellectual brutality of mainstream Western shows). About female shuttle traders and entrepreneurs. She says she doesn"t follow the plot, just watches the people. Because she isn"t interested. I"ve mentioned this before. Her passivity, lack of initiative, and detachment from trends explain this. Who was she with all her life? Childhood-gone. A few years at university, a few years working, then with my backward father, with me, and occasionally Uncle Sergei. And everyone, dad, Uncle Sergei, even me in my youth, thought she was dumb. Well, she was, and she half-jokingly admitted her "stupidity." She couldn"t even manage a computer or a cell phone by the time I"m writing this. But of course, this wasn"t stupidity-it was the result of traumatic development, compounded by adult reality and a series of events. Had she delved into her life as I did, one could see how one thing led to another, and how, say, Grandma Klava"s disgust with her diapers led to her never learning, over twenty years of using a cell phone, that the green handset means call and the red means hang up. My obsessions might not compare to her autobiography, written in my style.

I needed to explain all this to give a clearer picture of who represented me during 2006, when I was most vulnerable to the system and its elimination mechanisms.

Soon she also started exploring music. She kept asking the store assistant about Led Zeppelin. At the time, I thought she really knew her stuff. In fact, she was just recalling music from her youth on vinyl. And more with the same feeling she watched old films-with nostalgia.

She also asked about some Depeche Mode. All this in the MediaMarket on Volskaya. The assistant was bored, so he brought the Depeche Mode disc and played it, and Mom stood there with headphones. I browsed my shelves, just randomly looking at tracklists, trying to figure out from the song titles if it sounded like GTA stuff, if it could be interesting at all. I wanted to listen to so much, but all the problems I"ve mentioned persisted, plus I might pick some crap, the assistant would notice, and I"d be embarrassed.

Meanwhile, as I later realised, Mom was only looking for one song by Depeche Mode. She turned it off and shared her impression: "Well, it was fine, but when the guy with the earring sang-I just had to turn it off." The assistant found this hilarious. "Had to turn it off" became a little family joke between Mom and me.

And once, near the end, on Volskaya, we picked up an MP3 disc of Led Zeppelin and a DVD of their clips, starting with Immigrant Song live on an open stage, then recordings in a closed hall. Now it played in our kitchen. Mom still fussed over papers on the table for work, usually sitting with her back to the TV. But sometimes she"d watch, amused by Robert Plant, waving his hand like some pondering philosopher.

I spent a lot of time in the kitchen too-either to watch and laugh with Mom, or under her coercion: she"d been trying for a year to get me to at least wash the dishes, especially when I"d get worked up and then sink into long computer sessions. The whole thing: if she"s on edge, I shouldn"t be amusing myself and must do something. I hated it, and at first, almost to tears. At first, because of the scolding element, her "stranger" regime-yeah, then it was tear-inducing. Now I hated washing dishes even more for the tactile feeling, for the grease, for the anxious urge to wash my hands of it, which I had to do constantly anyway. But the main hateful factor remained: I was doing it against my will.

Mom also seemed to start having freak-outs about cooking. Like, the fridge was empty except for some huge pot of soup, which was already tiresome, and it was impossible to get her to make something more edible-she was in a bad mood and went to bed. I would then scavenge for some crackers. This was the era of instant porridge, and in our wall drawer was one packet-with some raspberry stuff. From Baba Valya"s old broadcasts. Out of hunger, I opened it, and a nasty smell came out. Even somewhat artificial. Mom sniffed it and talked about margarine, then formalin. I focused on the latter. Formalin, in her stories, was linked to disgusting funerals in her childhood. Some special substance somehow associated with coffins and corpses.

From this formalin porridge began the main phase of my death-phobia-whose climax would come next autumn. With my OCD about cleanliness, anxiety, and just the pubertal mind, it was a perfect storm. And on the TV, Immigrant Song played, and for a second, among the Seventies youth crowd, they showed a girl sitting on a guy"s shoulders, letting loose. For some-this is joy, satisfaction, a beginning. For others-Lev Kassil-style decay and withering.

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Part 64 text 3. Chapaeva Street and the café "Uley",,, Dire Straits discs and the illusion of an old‑fart harbour,,, Slepukhin - not a kindred spirit,,, the school launches psychiatric disposal,,, not a mummy"s boy,, but in the yamamya dead end,,, called to the psychologist.

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In Saratov my mum and I also walked along February‑cold Chapaeva Street up to the intersection with Sovetskaya. Chapaeva is the second busy street in the city after Moskovskaya, crossing it - with buses and traffic jams. At that intersection with Sovetskaya there was the café "Uley". It had a somewhat old‑fashioned interior, and over the course of my childhood my mum and I had gone in there a few times, and that time was the last. As had been our custom since early childhood when we occasionally went into cafés like that, we mostly took the cheapest things - like French fries, which for us were already a delicacy anyway, and then some little piece of meat to share between the two of us. Meanwhile the menu had various items with names like "Hearty meat julienne with mushrooms and cheese", which for us only turned into ironic reminders of our thrift. By then I too was fully getting into the theme of saving - or rather, I was the one cultivating it in our household. Better to save and have at least some hope of leaving someday for a country of palms and skyscrapers than to eat hearty julienne once a week and live in this freezing shit forever.

After that we were again in MediaMarkt, and we bought Dire Straits - the discography on MP3 and a DVD with the videos. For the first time I heard the song that, as my parents said, had played at their wedding - "Sultans of Swing". It hadn"t been at that concert. On the DVD with the videos it was first - the very first in the discography - and even there Mark Knopfler already looked wrinkled and grown‑up. It gave the impression he had never been young at all. In the later videos, like "Romeo and Juliet" and "Calling Elvis", to my surprise there were young people. Before that I had the impression that the only young people at that concert had been the ones in the front rows - just there for support - and otherwise Dire Straits was music for people the age of my parents or Uncle Seryozha - old farts. That was partly why I had managed to fall in love with Dire Straits: I thought it would become a "safe harbour" for me, without carefree and happy peers. But it turned out - no, it was perfectly youth‑friendly, and its listeners chew gum, and in almost every video there are hints of sex. Fucking hell. Fuck.

But I kept listening to them anyway. My favourites among those songs I was hearing for the first time became "So Far Away" and "Lady Writer" - especially the second one, of course. Apart from the music, I liked it precisely for that "old‑fart harbour": stupid youth probably didn"t care about women writers (I imagined the song was about that). But I would have liked them. Some Jane Austen. Like Anya from Frunze from my childhood. In case I"m explaining badly: that"s how badly I actually wanted a depraved slut. And I was still lucky that everything existed for me on the level of black‑and‑white stereotypes. In fact I was still very lucky in general, and I"m describing the happiest time. I"m typing this on the road - in a situation where couples are boarding the train around me, and in those couples the girls, beauties unimaginable back in those years, combine both the intelligent aura of Jane Austen and at the same time the brazenness of whores - and all of that is happening when I"m already long past thirty, while they still have fifteen years of youth ahead of them. Of course that 2006 is simply paradise compared with what I"m living now.

I told Slepukhin about Dire Straits and that the intro from their "Money for Nothing" used to play in the TV programme Avtodrom, with car‑sale ads - which they must surely have had on at his place on television. But when I gave him the disc and it turned out that all the other songs weren"t hard rock but "musical philology", Slepukhin was disappointed. He talked about his own discovery - AC/DC. "Man, you know how they work those guitars!" That band didn"t interest me at all - nothing powerful could possibly come from some runts from the land of kangaroos, and when I put their disc on in MediaMarkt and realised it was boring classic rock, and next to Megadeth it was nothing at all, everything finally became clear to me about Slepukhin too: not a kindred spirit.

By then it was already unclear whether I even went to school for the lessons (and often only part of them) or just to chat with Slepukhin and hurry back home to the computer. I no longer carried anything with me except my diary with the doodled‑over Zhirinovsky on it - or maybe I had stopped carrying even that. Around that time I tormented the teachers so much that they finally sent me to the headmistress. She asked me something there. Later they also called my mum in properly. That was when I recalled being shoved in the corridor by some older pupils on the first day of that school year. I voiced some aggressive, vengeful motives there as well. As for the scribbled‑over diary - my mum, who in reality didn"t care about any parties at all, later told me: "I told them we actually support United Russia - and they shut up."

Not even mentioning what would happen soon, when everyone would start - and quite successfully - convincing her that I had schizophrenia and was ill, she already, as I"ve said, considered me a victim - mostly because of her own fault, as she believed, but also often because of the crude, insensitive pressure of the surrounding world - and so for a long time I had had the feeling not merely of being a mummy"s boy, but almost the opposite. Or rather, some kind of perverted mummy"s boy.

For example, when during those conversations with the school women, supposedly scolding me together with them, my mum would say: "Do you understand you can"t behave like that?" - I read it as "you did everything right." And when she forbade me to do something aggressive in order to restore my sense of dignity, I felt that she only said that, while in reality she would have been proud if I had done it. Only she would have been proud if it had succeeded, of course - and I saw that it wouldn"t succeed, that I wouldn"t live up to her inner hopes and would only make things worse - and that was why I didn"t do it. I already talked about that after the episode with the fight at the pier. From the outside, though, it looked as if I was a mummy"s boy, and that I didn"t do bold things because my mum wouldn"t let me.

Meanwhile, someone like me was of no use to the state system, and the school women were already launching the disposal process. The next day I was called out of class to the school psychologist"s office. A typical young representative of that useless profession. At some point one of her questions was: "Do you like any girl at school?" Remembering at once two or even three, I of course shook my head - though later, when telling the boys about it, I joked that I could have answered: "I like you." It would have been true, and at the same time - as a way of neutralising the yamamya dead end - disguised as my usual mockery.

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Part 64 text 4. Genital anxieties,,, escapism with Half‑Life 2,,, the game "The Movies",,, suicidal hysteria with a hammer,,, hysteria with the kitchen table and about female theatrical tricks.

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At home I was sticking my finger up my arse all the time, and once - and that was when my mum was at home - I jerked off secretly in the usual way, and suddenly under the skin of my penis I felt what seemed like some kind of ring. I got scared shitless, still not fully understanding the anatomy and thinking that some sort of circular cartilage had detached and that surgery would be needed to put it back. What if the surgeons - already a hellish prospect - knew about this and explained to my mum that the ring comes loose from wanking? For about two hours I sat there not daring to touch my cock, shrivelled from fear to the size of a clitoris, until my mum went out and I figured out that it was simply the foreskin itself folded around in a ring when it rubbed against the dry glans.

Another anatomical puzzle constantly tormented me: how can the foreskin move so far along the penis? The skin on the arm or elsewhere sits almost tight. But the cavernous body of the penis inside that skin is like something in a sack. And I hate that looseness, that unreliability - all those scrotums and membranes. All of it reminds me of the fragility of human anatomy, and it torments me.

During those same days something even scarier happened one evening when I was bathing. From the kitchen my mum was already shouting spitefully that I should finish and get out, but I wanted to jerk off so badly that I also finally decided on something I had been eyeing for the whole last week with growing excitement: the nearly used‑up bar of soap that had turned almost into a little stick - to shove it up my arse. I had never put anything inside myself except a finger. And so, with my heart pounding - from the risk that my mum might lose her temper and burst in, from the fear of a foreign object in my arse, and from not knowing what would happen - I began. I pushed it deeper and deeper, without preparation and without sparing my hole, while my cock was leaking and seemed almost ready to burst with blood - which was horrible. But soon enough it naturally started burning. And from the burning the anus started twitching - and then it almost sucked the soap in. In shock I quickly shat it out and, without even finishing jerking off, rinsed off and got out, still suffering from the burning for a while afterwards. If I had lost it in there, how would I have explained to my mum where it had gone? I couldn"t possibly have worn it down completely in the forty minutes I spent washing. What a fucking nightmare.

Slepukhin gave me an old game called Driver 3, where, like in GTA, you could move around as a character through a virtual Miami. For several days in a row after school and the frost I would come home and immediately switch it on to transport myself to my favourite city and country.

And then, on another trip to Saratov, in MediaMarkt on Volskaya, besides my mum"s last musical purchase of those months - an MP3 disc of the Eagles for the sake of that one famous song - I spotted and we bought the game that had been praised all the previous year in Igromania: Half‑Life 2, with full Russian voice acting and a nicely printed DVD insert (that mattered to me - with a badly printed sheet I wouldn"t have bought it). With that game one can roll another twelve days of biography.

By then I didn"t give a shit about school anymore, or even about the pointless twins and Slepukhin. Often my mum and I decided I simply wouldn"t go anywhere, and she herself would go off somewhere, and I wouldn"t even rush to masturbate - I would just keep sitting there passing level after level of the game, feeling as if I were in the paradise of escapism. As always, I especially liked the levels set outdoors, like in Far Cry, in daylight. The ones where you drive along the coast in a car and then cross some huge bridge, shoot a crossbow - all that sort of thing. I only completed Half‑Life once, and it"s strongly associated for me with that middle of February.

With Half‑Life, all the games that had seemed important had already been replayed, and around the twentieth I picked up in MediaMarkt the only second‑tier thing that interested me at all - The Movies, a film‑studio simulator. You had to develop the studio in strategy mode, and along the way - according to its capabilities - you could shoot films from a set of adjustable scenes. You could also upload the film files to a shared database and for the judgement of the whole world on the internet - connecting to which I was thinking about more and more back then. I named the studio "Love Fist". The strategy part of the game was a bit boring, but to develop the studio"s capabilities to the maximum, over the following days and events - judging by the surviving saves - I would be doing exactly that.

And then, when at some point I had to go again either to school or to the clinic, and I was already completely fucking fed up with everything, I threw a monstrous tantrum. I even tied a hammer to my hand, sat down on the big bed in the small room, and told my mum I"d smash the fucking window and jump out, especially if the pressure continued. It was a frosty sunny day, and everything looked just like ten years earlier on that first day of kindergarten. Only the trees in the little front garden below were now tall, and of course I knew I probably wouldn"t jump - because I"d only cripple myself.

My mum walked around in hysteria - first with her usual pressure and demands, and then already in despair. Uncle Seryozha was called, and he came into the small room and also talked to me about something, but I kept sitting there with the hammer and threatening suicide. Soon he realised it was useless and began leading my mum away while she was still trying to beg me about something in despair. He kept repeating to her: "He"s ill." Soon they left. I thought she would come back and give me some sort of thrashing, and so I didn"t even dare turn on the computer and entertain myself. But later she returned in silent resignation.

And the next day, again during the day, there was more pressure from my mum. She demanded I do something or other - or, as I call it, "switched to the enemy"s side". Meaning that in talking to me she was proceeding not from my position and not even from her own, but from the position of other people - all those fucking school women and other scum representing the system that doesn"t give a shit about us. I was sitting in the mustard‑coloured armchair in the kitchen. And my mum went into enemy mode so thoroughly that I again - with an even more advanced boundary of what was permitted - flew into a rage, jumped up and, despite the sugar bowl and other things standing on it, began pushing the kitchen table at her. Everything fell off it, and my mum almost screamed - in that characteristic female panic.

In my life I encountered that kind of panic three times. After the psychiatric wards, when I would still rage for some time, once I went at Baba Klava in a similar way, and she too - just seconds after being cheeky - immediately changed and, even collapsing theatrically onto the bed, began yelling something like: "They"re killing me, help!" And the third time - much lighter and more playful, but still reminding me of the same pattern - happened when I was thirty with a girl who behaved like a little slut, who came about a dozen times to sit with me in my flat out of pity and for the money I gave her. She was the only one with whom I had more than one or two meetings, and with whom I fell in love for several years. She too was hysterical and inclined toward humiliation and devaluation, disguising it as naive teasing - poking a finger into my ribs and that sort of childish taunting. One time I got bolder and moved to reciprocal touch - I tried to grab her and tickle her (almost the greatest physical closeness I ever had). And then she too, in the spirit of my mum and Baba Klava, instantly changed and began acting out female helplessness and panic.


.:::.

Part 64 text 5. To the psychiatrist at the polyclinic,,, psychological overload to "Lady Writer",,, the illusion of friends and the delusion of unity,,, mum"s panic about being put on the psychiatric register,,, briefing before the commission,,, to the Engels psychiatric hospital.

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For those on whom psychologists work - when they"re staff psychologists - they"re of course not useless: they exist so that an organisation can legally dump a troublesome person into the zone of responsibility of psychiatrists. In the end, sometime in early March, my stupid mum and I trudged off to the polyclinic and went into the psychiatrist"s office. There some post‑Soviet woman talked to me for about five minutes, maximum, and then I apparently went out and sat in the corridor while mum stayed inside. Later she would say that the doctor had understood everything straight away and told her that people like me shoot their own in the army. At that moment I myself wasn"t thinking about killing anyone.

At home in those days mum was in the darkest sort of resignation. Now when she pressed on me it was no longer with a call to improve, but with the message that things for us were completely terrible - practically the end of life. One evening in the kitchen she piled on so much that when she, with her sick head, went off to lie down and cry, and I stood washing the dishes, I started crying too. Even though from her lamentations it followed that the problems began with me, I nevertheless knew that the problems had begun with the system - its fucking kindergartens, schools, and the approaching military obligation - and so I cried out of pity for the two of us, while all that scum outside our flat, outside our family, I hated.

On the television Dire Straits videos were playing; at that moment it was "Lady Writer", and I - according to that tendency of mine mentioned long ago, when at the peak of the worst states, some vicious kalina‑ryabina moments, while mum would go off to the room for the belt, I would, against the moment, put on a smile of happiness on a tear‑stained face or even perform a little dance - paused for a moment from the dishes and accompanied some Mark‑Knopfler guitar flourish with a shake of my head. It seemed that if those sequences of notes resonated with me like that, if they "understood" me so well, then their author would understand me too.

This theme - perceiving various strangers, musicians like that whom I was into, as my friends, as people who understood me - would stay with me for many years. Or more precisely, it wasn"t even about that, but about my mistaken perception of friends as close people. In my diaries I called it the "delusion of unity". Suppose this Mark Knopfler is my friend. And he even understands me. But he"s just a friend. Yet in childhood and for many years afterwards, as I said, I imagined such imaginary friends as truly close people. As if he not only understood me but would even be ready to die for me. Like parents. But of course he wouldn"t. The people close to him are others - his own family - and those are the ones he would die for, not me. What"s more, he isn"t merely not my friend - he"s even my enemy. Because I didn"t fully understand that I wasn"t simply being rejected, but isolated from others - the laws were being enforced. And laws and prohibitions are never built around the state of the subject. They"re built around protecting third parties. And any friends are third parties. If I were such a walking powder‑keg in a school where my friend"s children studied, he - like all the other enemies - would also want me isolated.

And then, on some nearby day, mum finally explained the seriousness of it: because of that visit to the psychiatrist"s office I had been put on the psychiatric register, and now my life would be complete shit unless we somehow got me taken off it. Only for mum the "shit" consisted not so much in the resulting restrictions of rights and discrimination of being labelled mentally ill, but in the almost fantastical stereotypes she had about psychiatric hospitals. She said psychiatrists could inject a person with drugs that would make him follow their instructions like a robot. She described criminal scenarios in which the doctors would take away from me - meaning from her - everything connected with housing and money, and then, once I was a used‑up patient, they would simply give me an injection from which I would never wake up, and nothing would stop those killers because no one cares what some schizophrenic in that human rubbish heap dies of.

I thought it was fantasy, paranoia - but each time I expressed disbelief and mum only became more anxious, I too began to feel more and more that the matter was serious.

If mum was panicking like that then, perhaps they had already immediately put me under so‑called "active dispensary observation", which obliged them to bring me to the psychiatric hospital and give injections, with consequences up to forced hospitalisation if ignored - which really did mean the control of my person passing to the doctors and, accordingly, the beginning of the end.

With the help of that same Uncle Seryozha and his connections, mum managed to organise a commission to review my diagnosis. The day before, we sat in the kitchen during the day while she instructed me how I should answer the doctors. Some of the answers sounded implausible to me, and I began to object, but she immediately used the kalina‑ryabina shock technique - a sudden electric shout with a slap of the hand on the table: "Did you understand what I said?!" It had been a long time since she used that move, and it instantly threw me back into that agentless childhood, and my eyes filled with tears.

The next morning we went.

Frost and sunshine. The Engels psychiatric hospital - a couple of buildings with the typical architecture of a Soviet chunk of shit - stood beyond my grandparents" place, closer to the city cemetery, in a private‑housing district, one block from the Volga. They called me into the office, apparently even without mum, and I sat there lying according to the instructions about how I had absolutely no complaints or reactive impulses. In fact I had no complaints - but in psychiatry, at least in the context of the diagnosis they were fitting me into, "complaints" don"t mean the subject"s internal states, again, but his claims against the surrounding world, while internal states are considered primarily as evidence that such claims exist. Neither then nor later did anyone particularly care about my hand‑washing - already an autonomous neurotic story. Though to be safe I had been instructed to refute that too - almost with a little staged demonstration, as if I dropped something on the floor there and immediately picked it up without hesitation.

.:.

___Part 65.

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________________I am 13 years old.

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Part 65 text 1. I pressed on mum"s sore spot,,, taken off the psychiatric register,, but already doomed,,, we buy the GTA Anthology disc,,, we buy a modem for the internet,,, a computer technician comes to the house.

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I had already passed thirteen. Like the last New Year - we didn"t celebrate it. But we were at my grandparents", and it was probably for the eighth of March - to congratulate grandma. It was evening. Mum and I were sitting on the main green sofa in the hall while my grandparents were packing something for us to take home. And at that moment some discord happened between me and mum. We were talking about something and again - either she switched to the enemy"s side, or rather simply reminded me that she decides what I will do. That she"s the commander.

At that time she was also in the middle of a problem with her jaw - sinus inflammation caused by badly treated teeth. And sitting beside her, in a feeling of humiliation and anger from her words, I suddenly pressed my finger directly onto the sore place in her cheek. It was practically a violation of that very taboo of mine - using someone else"s misfortune to finish them off - about which the previous autumn I had said that, unlike scum, I never did such things. Of course I do - but only like this, in a strong affect, as at that moment on the sofa when I was in hellish humiliation and anger. Like when I once grabbed a wasp. Or when I smashed Zemskova. Or when I couldn"t hold back and turned toward that bastard on the pier. When I say I don"t break the taboo, I mean in the normal state - cold, calculating. But I"m still a living person, especially one with heightened reactivity.

Mum didn"t care about the difference between my states and that it was an affective outburst rather than hatred living inside me - she perceived such aggression as the latter. Other people from outside interpreted my attitude to mum just as shortsightedly. Later, when the main psychiatric‑hospital stories begin and doctors write case histories based on my father"s side of the family, the first thing mentioned there will be "hatred toward the mother". But those aggressive flashes would have happened toward any provoking person.

For the moment, though, regarding the accidental psychiatric register, we had success, and I was taken off it. On the wave of that positivity - and specifically those dark prospects with the psychiatric hospital now having passed - mum developed some joking sayings. She would say: "Better I"ll kill you myself." She said it jokingly, even leaning her shoulder against me while we rode the minibus either to the psychiatric hospital the second time, when she needed to go in there for something, or simply to my grandparents" in those days. "I gave birth to you - I"ll kill you too." And she elaborated the phrase: "I"ll pin you to the floor with my knee and strangle you."

And my grandfather, according to mum, when discussing this whole matter back on Frunze, at some moment in that psychiatric year - maybe during the days of that first episode when we had still got away with it - said that under no circumstances should one get involved with psychiatric hospitals.

There are no records from a psychiatrist in my medical file. Only from a neurologist. Especially in April - I"ll talk about that later. But in the file there are many entries dated March about gastrointestinal issues and scoliosis. It confirms my memory of that month as a time when I hardly went to school anymore.

Judging by the notes, there was some ultrasound almost every few days. It was as if mum had realised that in any case I needed to avoid the army - and therefore every possible reason had to be developed to the maximum. At the very least there had to be grounds for me not to go to school while she searched for a way to transfer me to home schooling. A short visit to some office in the polyclinic at a comfortable ten or eleven in the morning I went to with much more willingness than half a day in that fucking zoo.

But as I said, the post‑Soviet scumbags and idiots still managed to instil in mum the conviction that I was schizophrenic. And in her understanding a schizophrenic was, I remind you, an incurable invalid predetermined by some genetic misfortune, with incomprehensible motives of deviant behaviour. She continued blaming herself (for the tyrannical moments in her upbringing of me), but now she blamed herself specifically for having triggered this supposedly predetermined congenital illness rather than having developed it. Never in her life would she come to understand that the deviations from normality in me were not awakened but developed because of external pressure. And as for the fact that she had no understanding that schizophrenia is a psychosis, and that she didn"t even correctly understand what psychosis means in principle - believing that my hand‑washing and aggressiveness were themselves psychosis - I"ve already talked about that.

In her vocabulary the previously rare word "shyzgara" now appeared more often. Though again with warm irony - like when she also called Murka "little nutcase". And on another trip to MediaMarkt on Volskaya she was curious about the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo"s Nest. But we never bought it.

Meanwhile there on Volskaya I saw a DVD called GTA Anthology, double‑sided. It had all the parts of the game and a lot of other material. I could say "content" now, but I prefer not to: such anglicisms for me are associated with the slang of internet scum - the youth online whom I hate.

At the same time as that disc, or on a neighbouring trip, we also bought a DVD with Windows and a bundle of software. It would become my main disc from which I installed Windows and programmes for another ten years. Winamp was there - the popular music player of those times, with an equaliser, stylish design, and a playlist attractively green on a black background. When I listened to music in it I felt like a professional music listener. There were also programmes for burning discs.

Meanwhile, for several months already, words like "Rambler", "double‑you double‑you double‑you", "mail", "modem", "provider" and others connected with the internet had been creeping into my attention from all sides.

After another visit to MediaMarkt on Volskaya, and then my usual stop in the yard of the corner building at Kazachya 41, where I always pissed, mum and I went to Sunrise. And there we bought that dial‑up modem. That fucking internet, fuck.

But in those days the fuss only began with buying the modem. Somehow the internet through it was extracted from the wired line of the home telephone. I don"t even remember what it looked like technically - where which wires went. The connection was established by entering somewhere the login and password from internet cards that had to be bought either in the same kiosks that sold newspapers and condoms, or at the telephone exchange itself, which in Engels stood on Volokha on the way to the collective‑farm market - I"ve already mentioned it. The limit of internet megabytes or connection time depended on the capacity of those cards. All of it was a dark forest to me, and I didn"t even have ambitions to try myself - I was immediately ready to call a technician.

We called a technician from an advert in the newspaper. Before he came we probably washed the middle room on Lev Kassil Street for the last time in my life, and I prepared a place by the computer, resigned myself to having to disinfect everything afterwards, and also - as if to present myself to the technician as a proper lad - I put on the desktop the famous Vice City promo picture from the GTA Anthology disc, where a beautiful brunette in a swimsuit holds a cocktail glass. The one that never actually appears in the game.

In the evening a slightly chubby bespectacled guy about thirty came - and sat down to work. Mum, as always, hovered nearby. He connected things, checked them, installed programmes. He said Windows has the tendency to get quickly clogged with all sorts of junk, and really it should be reinstalled every two months. He must have updated something connected with Windows. Because there was a long pause waiting for some installation, during which the three of us sat talking about something. Mum made some teasing remark about the picture on the desktop. I immediately said it had installed itself automatically from the GTA disc. The technician, the bastard, understood I was lying and also teased: "With the internet pictures like that with women will be installing themselves all the time - by themselves." He even emphasised the last words with quotation‑mark intonation. I giggled along, but I wanted to sink into the floor.

Then mum went to the kitchen while the installation kept going. As I already said - in those times of turtle speeds - the technician got up and began pacing around the middle room while waiting.

Finally something finished installing, and with the internet card we had bought beforehand we made a test connection. For the first time on my monitor some website opened - maybe Google. It felt like we had connected to the whole world without leaving that stupid room. I didn"t yet know what a cursed palantír it was - or even something worse.

While I was already sitting there typing the sacred queries meaningful to me - "bands on the Vrok radio station" - the technician stepped into the kitchen and, as mum later said, asked for "a little tea". She always retold this with a special ironic tone, repeating her refusal to him: "Oh, go on." Apparently implying that the technician had tried to get acquainted.

The technician left.

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Part 65 Text 2. First time going into the fucking internet,,, the list of songs from Vrok,,, disappointment with song themes,,, I buy Slayer and find the main song,,, freeriding under Megadeth and envy of Mustaine.

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I chose the pay‑per‑minute internet cards. One hour cost fifteen rubles - the price of a single metro ride in Moscow. The tariff was divided into daytime and nighttime, and fifteen rubles was probably the night rate. Because I remember that insane rush caused by saving money and the super‑concentration on what was happening on the screen so as not to waste a single paid second. It was like in that experiment where, in the middle of a football match, a man in a gorilla costume runs onto the field for a while - and afterward not a single player can remember it.

I found the list of bands and songs from the Vrok radio station that very first evening. In fact, it seems that this was why I connected the internet in the first place, because after two or three connections I wouldn"t go online again until summer.

But having the list of bands and songs didn"t mean I now knew exactly which song was which. I had already opened Megadeth and could guess which song on the station was Iron Maiden"s "Two Minutes to Midnight", but I still had to identify the Anthrax and Slayer ones, which, as I mentioned, I had believed to be a single song because they blended together. The list only narrowed the search radius down to them - I still had to listen.

First thing, in the big MediaMarkt, I grabbed a disc with Iron Maiden videos and put on "Two Minutes...". I was only just beginning to notice that the themes of songs in musical groups weren"t black‑and‑white - not simply either about love or about misanthropy - but that there was also a huge gray zone with songs on all sorts of other boring subjects. Megadeth, judging by the covers, seemed to have a lot of those.

But with Megadeth - since the music wasn"t melancholy (except for "A Tout le Monde" and maybe a couple others) - almost all my attention went to the ornate guitar work and to one other thing I"ll talk about someday later. Meanwhile, the classically minor‑key melodic songs like "Two Minutes to Midnight" always put me in one particular state, which I once described long ago in the main episodes about the film Titanic. There too there was that minor composition - the benchmark for the type of music I"m talking about.

In short, it"s about something personal, usually an introverted state. The state of experiencing a personal problem (even if it"s separation from someone). That "Two Minutes to Midnight", despite its fast tempo, in my expectations should have been about something like that. The singer should have been at the center, only barely connected to something broadly social. But judging by the video, it turned out to be nothing like that at all. Politics, war...

I physically hated politics, war, and history: they caused a dragging pain under my ears (I mentioned it once in that rant about my hatred of books). That can also be counted as part of the gradual disappointment in bands that I talked about at the end of last year. But at that point I was still very far from any real disappointment.

While I stood there cycling through the videos, the table next to me was more interesting: some guy there was watching what looked like a semi‑erotic movie. Mom was standing next to me, and because of the music in my headphones I misjudged how loudly I was speaking and said to her, "Look what he turned on." The man nervously turned his monitor away.

Then I grabbed an MP3 disc of Slayer, played a couple of the first songs, realized it was aggressive metal, and that somewhere on it had to be that same aggressive song from Vrok - and we bought it and went home. On the cover of the pirate disc there was a small photo of the band from the nineties, and they looked like some kind of wrestlers.

I had a mountain of things to do. I needed to listen to Slayer and also deal with the huge pile of stuff on the GTA anthology disc - it had GTA III, various modified versions of Vice City, tons of car models, and even a program where you could make your own modifications - even write missions. For me that translated as "create your own world."

In short, a whole fucking avalanche. I mean the same way as in early childhood, when I approached unexplored closets full of stuff - from sheer anticipation of interesting things I"d often suddenly feel the urge and run to take a shit. On that dopamine wave I didn"t even feel like jerking off in those days.

GTA III - the previous part before Vice City, which for some reason I had never thought of playing before, with an entire pseudo‑New York to explore and lots of nice references to later games - I played for the first several days after buying the disc and until the Slayer purchase.

Now, after getting back from yet another clinic appointment that morning, I came home, installed some GTA Vice City "Zombie Apocalypse" mod, and got ready to play while listening to Slayer albums one after another.

First I deliberately put on the song "Raining Blood", which should have been the one I expected - but to my surprise there was something like an outro with rain noise instead of the song. Well, I thought, then the song must be somewhere else.

I sat there mowing down zombies in that zombie apocalypse - first under the first album, then under the main second one, at first not even paying attention to the vicious coolness of the opening track "Angel of Death". And now the album was almost finished, the rainy outro started playing, and I already thought I wouldn"t get my main song and that something had gone wrong.

But soon it started.

Without the Anthrax part - so they were separate songs after all. But the main thing for me was to find out the performer of that aggressive part. And immediately there was that rare feeling of sacred discovery - finding something you had searched for for a very long time, the completion of some long quest.

The feeling: "Well, that"s it. And now what? What am I supposed to do now?"

Until the end of March, distracted only by trips to the clinic (which I openly rebelled against, making Mom open every door for me there, messing with the doctors - and so on), I sat mostly escaping into pointless freeriding in GTA, occasionally escaping with the game The Movies.

I installed some modified Vice City from that disc where there were ramps on the main beach, and I just jumped on a dirt bike on those ramps all day - most often under Megadeth albums from the nineties.

I remember listening to the song "Dawn Patrol" and, because of the unusually low voice for Mustaine - usually sounding like a cat being dragged by the balls - thinking that it wasn"t him singing. I couldn"t imagine him as masculine and confident; I thought he was red in every sense of the word.

Now I can"t even turn on Megadeth to maybe awaken more memories. That band is associated with a girl with whom I had the only free humiliating sexual encounter of my life at thirty. She didn"t want me at all. She was sixteen and had been having sex with boys her age since she was thirteen, and after the single meeting with me she even told me about them in chats.

And she was a fan of Dave Mustaine - as a man, I mean. Someone whom, with all his antisociality and drugs since youth, nobody ever disposed of through psychiatric hospitals - who simply, fuck, got lucky and managed to do what he did. And became desirable to nymphomaniacs like that.

By the way, from March twentieth I found one altered image saved - that same girl from the Slepukhin collection lying on a couch with a velvet back and her butt showing. I stuck a dagger in her back and drew spreading blood.

.:::.

Part 65 Text 3. Approaching The Elder Scrolls through Xbox,,, the "screw you, scraping" episode,,, release through neurology,,, I buy Oblivion and the first day of playing,,, returning from the clinic back to the game.

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My last issue of Igromania magazine was December 2005. After that I didn"t want them anymore and we stopped buying them.

In those last issues, even though the magazine was about computer games, they were already heavily anticipating the new generation of game consoles - PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The Xbox had already gone on sale at the end of 2005. These consoles were more powerful than the computers of that time, with lots of functions, the ability to connect to the internet, and everything else. And advanced games usually came out on consoles earlier than on computers.

The Xbox, with its green button, was associated with the color green itself - with naturalness - with things I liked. All of this somehow mixed together in my mind, even reaching the point last year where I wanted to buy such a console. And at that time it still required a modern expensive TV.

But that combination was too expensive, so in the end I limited myself to watching video presentations on the Igromania discs from exhibitions where they demonstrated the Xbox and how those ultra‑modern games played on it.

New games no longer interested me much, but I kept rewatching the Xbox presentations. Because of my interest in novelty and that green color association, I suddenly noticed The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion - some demanding game that seemed to take place either in forests (hence the color association) or in medieval villages, and the new Xbox was recommended for playing it comfortably and without lag.

It had just appeared in MediaMarkt stores. The preview had been in the August issue of Igromania, and now I reread the article, still not fully understanding what it was, while on the Igromania disc the video demo looked like something almost fantastical.

With a huge, almost infinite freedom of action in the virtual world, you could, for example, talk to people who had their own lives in those medieval towns, go into forests and caves, and the whole thing felt like some kind of fairy tale. I didn"t yet realize that the music playing in the background contributed a lot to that feeling.

This game became the only one I now thought about buying.

During another trip to the clinic we again had to go to that office on the first floor at the western end of the corridor - for a scraping test. Another anal humiliation, and the worst part was those risks again: although in recent years I went in alone, when I pulled down my pants someone could open the door - and Mom from the corridor could see my pubic hair.

I was already completely fed up with all this. And near that office there was an exit to the stairs, and I just darted there. I ran away.

When I was a little kid, when I was stubborn or crying, Mom could suddenly grab me by the arm or even by the scruff of the neck and yank me in the direction she needed. So now, on a subconscious level, I still had that fear she would run after me. I hurried up to the crowded third floor of sadism, looked down to check she wasn"t coming up, and then went down another staircase.

It was predictable from my side and therefore kind of stupid, but since she wasn"t coming after me I decided she had given up. Especially knowing her in recent years - it was more in her style not to solve the problem in the moment but instead give me some kind of psychological dressing‑down at home with her super‑gloomy despair.

Because of my OCD bullshit I probably didn"t even leave my jacket in the cloakroom anymore, so I only had to run down the stairs and out of the clinic.

I went home - it was still around ten in the morning - left a note on the table saying "Screw you, scraping", and went to school to atone for my crime. I arrived in the middle of some lesson and stood for a while on the first floor by a window in the corridor, thinking about prison‑escape themes.

At home later there was no dressing‑down, and that was the end of the gastro theme in my story.

As I said, that whole March clinic period was about Mom trying to secure my exemption from school. And I don"t know whether because of that escape or not, but from the end of the month all entries in my medical file become neurological. There are notes from the 30th and 31st: "neurosis‑like states," some "vegetative‑vascular dystonia." "Individual learning program recommended."

Mom says she gave the doctor a thousand rubles so she would write that about individual learning. In reality there was no individual learning - I just didn"t have to go to school anymore. They wrote that it would be from April 1 until the end of the school year.

On April fifth, in the first half of the day, Uncle Seryozha came to pick us up, and Mom, as usual, suggested a trip to Saratov. We went to the big MediaMarkt. Sunny, early spring already melting.

Oblivion was a hit and stood there in multiple copies.

And I bought it.

When creating my character, I named him Vrok and made him a long‑haired brown‑haired Imperial. The whole first day it was unclear whether the game was good or not - everything was still in the dungeon. But immediately that theme of collecting things attracted me: coins, items from chests, things taken from goblins you killed, or just picked up from tables.

I played until late evening and climbed out of the sewer when it was already time to shut down. It was night there too, and everywhere around there was that lush swaying greenery from the screenshots that had originally hooked me.

I quickly killed a couple of crabs near the ruins of a fort on the island opposite the exit, swam to the shore of the mainland, reached a road and walked left along it. I came across some three‑way fight on the road - something like bandits versus forest wolves, and then an imperial guard passing by joins in, and the bandits accidentally hit him and he starts killing them too.

Closer to midnight in the real world, my last save was in Roxey Inn - a travelers" tavern - and that was it.

In the morning I had to go to the clinic. It was quick, and I came back alone while Mom went on errands. Around ten o"clock.

By morning I had already sunk into a strong craving for this new game, but when I returned home I didn"t hurry to sit at the computer - I savored the anticipation.

The previous day I hadn"t even managed to disinfect the DVD case, so now I brought it into the living room where it was sunny, placed it on the green armchair - remembering all my depressions here, eating chocolate cookies and twisting the Rubik"s cube - and started wiping it.

First the top side. Then I took the case by the edges and wiped the other side. I placed it on the armrest - a surface of medium cleanliness, also so the edges of the case hung in the air - and went to wash my dirty fingers.

When I finished washing, I came back, picked up the case directly by the flat surfaces (that"s why I had placed it like that), wiped the area that had touched the armrest, and then separately the edges.

Only then did the case finally pass into the category of household objects.


.:::.

Part 65 Text 4. First full day with Oblivion,,, inns along the way,,, Chorrol,,, Kvatch,,, childhood associations,,, Conan-esque concept,,, attempts and disappointment in finding similar games.

.::::.

So now I had settled in. I left that Roxey inn and went further. By then, it was already dawning. The village of Aleswell, inhabited by invisible, enchanted residents. Everything was still unclear about this game. But the view of what, as I"d later learn, was the Imperial City was already impressive. Misty morning. I would remember that first day in that world, that foggy atmosphere, for many years to come. I didn"t yet know that everything in this game was also a kind of "theatre," limited by the developers" predetermined possibilities. That you couldn"t actually talk to anyone - only use pre-set questions - and all those NPCs mostly repeated the same lines, voiced by the same seventeen actors - one for each race and gender. But the first days, even weeks, were pure magic again - like it had been with GTA. Only here, in The Elder Scrolls, there was that "tranquil" feeling, a mixture of landscapes, music, and in-game lore and myth expressed through ruined forts, mentions of gods and past heroes in townsfolk chatter, and so on... Everywhere were green meadows, some oaks - pure English countryside. And the heavy mist (which, by the way, also reminded me of the earliest episodes of my own story) was partly caused by my initial graphics settings, where I had almost minimal draw distance - to lighten the load on my computer and play without lag. Had my computer been stronger, my impression of Oblivion might have been slightly different. But, as I already noted, and as probably everyone would agree, half of the fairy-tale atmosphere was due to the music. I wouldn"t consciously notice it for a while, nor develop a fascination with that kind of music for at least a year. At that time, I was still entirely into heavy metal.

I entered the inn near the bridge to the Imperial City, wandered the surroundings, and then, as the game"s plot required, headed into the city of Chorrol, which I had seen in a video review. On the auto-translation of my pirated disc, and as I pronounced it for years, it was spelled "Chorrol." I had the original English audio, which I understood not a word of, and as I recall, the item names were untouched - from wolf pelts to various swords and wizard staves. I remember seeing the familiar word "iron" in the name of a club and the simplest swords from day one. That"s how I started getting used to fantasy terms: "sword" (which I pronounced like it was spelled), "arrow," "staff," "sorcerer," "dungeon," "summon," and countless others from the very first days. Only the subtitles, quest texts, and loading screen labels were translated into Russian gibberish. One line made me laugh: "When your fatigue is low, find what bed sleeps in." I hardly understood anything, so that summer I reinstalled the game fully in English.

On the way to Chorrol, in that dense, purely European forest, there were bandits, and approaching the city there was also a small skirmish with someone, plus the bow business - I was trying to shoot either a deer or a bear. It all reminded me of some Conan or Hercules from childhood, only in a proper, comfortable form - without the harshness of real people, without real people at all, and without physically unpleasant stuff, like the sweaty chest of that Hercules actor. No Zen warrior kings to fall in love with and remember real life. Everything was pure - just what I needed, the toy-like quality I had chased in all my past escapism - from Ken in Kids" World and the desire to assemble a Barbie-scale universe to adventure stories where everything was bright, safe, and comfortable, like in the game.

Outside Chorrol"s walls was a chapel, and nearby a mansion where the plot sent me - to meet Brother Joffrey. In that house, as in the inns along the way, I first heard, bit by bit, the city"s most "fairy-tale" music. Then I fully entered Chorrol, and the entire medieval Gothic city atmosphere began. I wandered the shops and guilds, or - my favourite, thanks to a still-strong attraction to stealth - I crept at night through homes, cellars, and the main castle"s storerooms, moving in shadows past rare guards, stealing amulets, arrows, or at least fruits and dried herbs from barrels, which, as I soon discovered, could be used to brew alchemy potions. And in the background, Jeremy Soule"s magical music played - and truly, this game would mean nothing, would get boring in half a day, without him.

Except for the days in the upcoming November, when virtuality might feel completely boundless, these early Oblivion days were the peak of escapism in my life.

After two days of thieving in Chorrol under the magical lilt of harp and cymbals, on April 7 I rode out on a story mission to Kvatch, to find Martin, the emperor"s illegitimate son, unaware of his lineage, now a priest. Kvatch had been overrun by Oblivion demons. Before Martin agreed to leave, we had to sneak into the besieged castle with some knights to rescue, I think, a count - or, if you failed, at least grab his ring for proof.

Everywhere were things evoking childhood. Like the ruined Gothic chapel, reminiscent either of some cartoon or King Arthur himself; or the crypt below, haunted by ghosts like in old horror movies; even demons included dinosaurs - an intuitively odd choice for a medieval fantasy, but it hit me perfectly, referencing my childhood obsession. The main association on the journey to Kvatch was with the Conan movie. Though I"d only seen it a couple of times - in the background - the clubs, fur boots, hunter clothes, and, of course, big swords all contributed. The landscapes around the city weren"t green forests anymore, but autumnal, almost steppe-like. That reminded me even of the real world from my childhood - the Saratov hills, or spots where I"d gone fishing with my grandfather in autumn. Mountains on the horizon in the game mirrored those Saratov hills, visible from the far side of Engels. I remembered the word "barbarians" - and finally conceptualized the entire cold, autumnal, fur-wrapped "Conan" aesthetic and associative chain. I even told my mother: "I"ll go fight with the barbarians."

After Kvatch, on Saturday the 8th, I returned to Chorrol for burglary and alchemy, stockpiled some money, and soon headed toward the Imperial City, recalling my first day there, wandering near the main port, getting caught up in some pirate story, and then - for a long while - entering the Imperial City itself.

A few days into the game, my mother and I went to Saratov again, visiting Uncle Seryozha. I asked a store assistant at MediaMarkt if there were any games like Oblivion, thinking I had missed an entire genre, not yet realising that Oblivion was far more advanced than anything else. The young clerk silently led me to Morrowind, the previous part of The Elder Scrolls, and said it was better. But I had already handled the disc, seen screenshots with huge mushrooms and elves on outdated graphics - and it wasn"t at all what had impressed me in Oblivion.

Later in April, I"d also go to a small disc shop in Engels on Voloha Street, pick up a simple old RPG, play a couple of hours, and switch it off - my last attempt to find a game like Oblivion. From gaming history, I still remembered that a Gothic 3 might be at Oblivion"s level, but it wouldn"t come out until year-end. At that point, I didn"t even know what "Gothic" was - hadn"t isolated Catholic architecture or medieval features as recognised traits of these games. For me, it was all just villages, castles, and knights - and I thought it was like that for everyone.

.:::.

Part 65 Text 5. Lying in day hospital in the neurology ward,,, no one sees the neurosis,,, psychologist and my sense of living smarter than wage slaves,,, blissful time of still not wanting to compose.

.::::.

Meanwhile, in the real world - as if required by the school exemption my mother had secured - I had to attend day hospital at the children"s hospital near our home. In the neurology department. Because, besides my neurosis-like states, I also had "headaches," "fatigue," various asthenias and dystonias - all the usual girly crap.

On April 10 we started going there for a few hours each day. To the far wing that overlooked the ward where, before fifth grade, I had lain with the Kazakh shaman bastard. At the end of that wing was a window with nurses changing clothes, and I first saw bare breasts there, crying from humiliation and homesickness.

They assigned me a bed, and my mother and I sat down. Soon the chief doctor arrived - a young man about five years younger than my mother. And he immediately ruined everything. He spoke to me not like a patient, but like a hooligan: "If it weren"t for your mother, I"d just wallop you." Normal? I partly understood he had overstepped, so I just swelled up under my eyes, didn"t cry, and my mother later confirmed, as an adult, that he was some kind of subpar doctor who later left medicine for city administration. At the time, I didn"t realise it was better to get a beating than face the kind of petty psychiatric hypocrisy I"d encounter six months later - for life.

Still, they prescribed some phenazepam, glycine. I barely knew what that was. Something else too, linked to neurology and migraines. I shared the doctor"s handwritten notes online - nothing about antidepressants. In fact, my mother later explained that doctors had told her antidepressants were contraindicated - supposedly not for schizophrenics. By then, everyone unofficially considered me schizophrenic, except the strict "whip" doctor. In general, total absurdity. I"d already mentioned, and would mention again, how my classic neurosis was seemingly invisible.

At twenty-five, I briefly saw a psychiatrist and told him my state - constantly frustrated and crying over a youth without sex - and after three weeks on an antidepressant he prescribed, I immediately lost the ability to cry, feel nostalgia, or regret, and my erections vanished. Essentially, my entire personality foundation blew away overnight, leaving me as nothing. If, in childhood, doctors truly aimed to "treat" me (to turn me into nothing), they logically should have prescribed classic neurosis-targeting antidepressants - not some benzo crap, and later, in autumn, neuroleptics. But by then, they didn"t care: I had explosive tendencies and was already doomed in the Russian system as a "dangerous" psychotic. This neurological treatment was just for show, playtime.

Then the preschool-level nonsense started. We went for a couple of days to the main wing, even the same floor I had been on before fifth grade, near the toilet - which was a little taste of freedom. Mid-April, morning sun streaming into the corridor, I lived in paradise, eager to return to Oblivion, where I played from dawn till night, long past my mother"s limits.

We"d sit and wait, then the psychologist-speech therapist would arrive with her little tests, asking me to solve imbecilic puzzles, choose pictures, colours, and so on. It would have humiliated me to hell, but I pushed it aside with thoughts of my virtual life. All those damn doctors, with their forms and paper routines, could never understand the paradise I lived in compared to them, even though, of course, they knew more. But were they happy? Could they enjoy harvesting lavender under the evening sun near Skingrad, anticipating a potion that lets you sneak past castle guards into vampire dungeons full of adventure? They called me crazy for choosing this over their shitty weekday lives waking at seven. They were the crazy ones. Idiots.

This psychologist was a lively adult woman, not at all like my shy, deferential, chocolate-bribing mother. She was joking, but gentle, and knowing my rebellious streak and eternal refusal to waste time outside home, explained: "As they say, without a piece of paper, you"re just crap." My mother laughed, commenting something like: "Oh, well, we usually put it softer."

Basically, to avoid school, I had to attend this hospital a little - so I did. One time they did a procedure with a helmet or suction cups scanning my head. A couple of times there was acupuncture, supposedly for nerves. But it would have been much better if I had stayed home, clean, and unbothered. They couldn"t just leave me alone. Until evening wash, I sat at home, dirty, escaping my mortal body through the game.

Lucky Jeremy Soule: the music carried the game, the game carried the music. Within weeks, I was saturated with it for life. It was bliss: I had no idea the fateful story I was about to stumble into - about composing. In a few months, it would start, becoming, besides ultimate escapism, my last and only hope for socialisation for life. And it would become utterly destructive - socially, psychologically, technically, physically, addiction-wise, financially, endlessly negative.

.:.

___Part 66.

.:::.

Part 66 text 1. Rare visits to school and the fading of the twins,,, a bicycle day with the boys from class.

.::::.

Over the past few weeks I must have shown up at school a few times after all and talked with the boys about games, because when I was there one day at the end of April, Tyulenev turned around from the front desk and asked me, "So what are you playing there?"

I answered, and he asked, "And what"s it about?"

I said, "Ah, just kings falling out with each other."

He reacted with that laugh of ours, like Butt‑Head"s, and turned back round to his desk.

In the years after school, the things I remembered longest were moments and conversations somehow connected with sex or with something disturbing. Now almost nothing comes to mind. Once there was a rumour going around that Yarik, the class repeater who was fourteen, had already fucked someone. I told Mum about it at home, and she said, "So what?"

I also remember a conversation with Slepukhin - he was telling me about cannabis. Said it grew right next to his house, and he"d tried smoking it with some neighbour boy. "Made me feel like I was gonna puke," he said, in his usual upbeat tone, laughing - and that dissonance is exactly why the story stuck with me: for me, vomiting was a huge phobia and therefore also a sex fetish, and the idea of it being something cheerful simply didn"t fit together in my head.

And in the same spirit, once Tyulenev was telling us how he and the boys had seen a drowned man up close. Describing the corpse - "The ears - blue as hell" - Tyulenev sounded delighted, as if he were talking about apples ripening in a garden.

As for the twins, that story was almost completely over. Well, I still loved them - ever since the days of Ilyina, or maybe even Yermakova, I"d always needed to have some kind of love figure to imagine myself with when I closed my eyes before sleep - but there were no more unfulfilled plans connected with them.

Sometime in April Mum and I, for some reason, were walking diagonally across the square toward the fair, and the twins came walking straight toward us and passed right by. I was terrified Mum might somehow suspect something and say something, but nothing happened. Apart from one more encounter - later in the autumn - there would be no further meetings with the twins for the rest of my childhood story.

At the neurological hospital during the last couple of days I sometimes spent a few hours there without Mum, and there was a group of some strange kids, mostly older girls. One of them was a bit chubby and looked like the rapper Ice Cube from my film Anaconda - she also always wore a bandana. Bald. Whether just assuming it or knowing for sure, Mum explained that she had cancer.

At one point the doctors sent us children on a long walk from the back building to the main one through some narrow internal passage, and that girl led everyone. I didn"t talk to them and was bored, and when there was a winding corridor with a sloping floor I theatrically pretended I"d lost my balance and slammed into the corner.

That girl laughed - and genuinely.

Which only made it sadder.

By the twenty‑third of April I"d already played Oblivion for at least a hundred and thirty hours.

Sometime in the twenties, after collecting my clothes from the cloakroom located there - like in that other children"s hospital where I"d once stayed - in a basement with green walls, Mum and I walked out of the place for the last time.

From the twenty‑sixth to the twenty‑ninth I stayed home with a fever.

On the last day before the May holidays I went to school, and in the second half of the day there was some kind of non‑academic activity planned in the yard by the football pitch. I can"t remember what exactly it was about, but somehow it involved bicycles as well. I wanted to take part, and like everyone else I went home for lunch, then pulled my old Cross out of the vestibule, somehow revived it, pumped up the tyres - and rode off. It was already a hot day, warm enough for a T‑shirt.

There was that spring feeling I once wrote about, and it always hit me even more crazily when I was doing something like riding a bicycle for the first time that year. Being outside - the very place where all the fantasy scenarios of socialisation and closeness with someone desired took place - and having at least some control over the vehicle beneath me specifically clouded the mind and plunged me into the illusion that the fantasy was already unfolding.

I rode up to the football field, and gradually most of the other boys from class gathered there. Slepukhin had a simple but fast full‑size bike. Whatever the event was supposed to be, it either lasted ridiculously short or got cancelled entirely, and in the end everyone could already head off. Only me, Slepukhin, Mitenkov and, I think, Tyulenev stayed. And we rode off toward the town centre.

On the way I kept recalling various pathetic half‑tricks I"d once tried and steered us toward places where you could jump something. We rode through the park and then along the dam almost to the beach and back.

And on the way back, near the place where in early childhood - on the way to the beach - there used to be a tennis court on the left under the dam (or maybe it was still there), there lay a concrete slab with a sharp drop of almost a metre onto sand. In previous years I"d often thought about trying to jump from it but never did, because I"d decided the pedals would bend, or the wheel would warp, or a spoke would fly out and stick into my eye - and fuck that.

Now I came there again.

And again I didn"t do it.

But Slepukhin did. He didn"t prepare or measure the height - he just slowly rolled up to the edge and, without even thinking to pull up on the handlebars, immediately dove front‑wheel first, smashed his face into the sand, and then his bike somersaulted over him.

After that we all rode to his house. As I remember, the address was 93 Krivaya Street. About a kilometre from Thirty‑Third School, in the private‑house district. I"d never been there before. There was a simple cottage, an open garage, and in the garage there was what in our town was called an STO - probably "service station". Slepukhin"s father worked on cars there, like I"d mentioned before.

We didn"t go inside anywhere; we just stood nearby, and some local boys who knew Slepukhin joined us. Maybe his mum brought out something to snack on - she was kind like that. And after that, around seven in the evening, the whole big pack of us boys on bicycles rode back to the square.

It had grown cooler already, but I was fine in my tracksuit jacket. The boys gradually peeled off and rode home, and those of us who remained started riding around separately, each on his own.

And by the rotunda - the main entrance to the park with the columns - stood our classmate Maria Charikova, the one who once silently gave me those books. She seemed to be waiting for someone. And soon some guy actually came up to her and even handed her a flower.

So she was already seeing someone...

And she"s only a year older than me...

Nice...

Meanwhile here I am bouncing around on my little bicycle off a ramp, and my last conversation with a girl - with Sima, in the summer of 2004 - is drifting further and further into the past, and how anything new could even happen is impossible to imagine.

After a few minutes the remaining boys and I split up and rode home. I had to wash a lot and clean up, and there was dirt all over the floor in the hallway and corridor from messing around with the bike at lunchtime.

Hammers, little knives, screwdrivers were lying everywhere.

.:::.

Part 66 text 2. The beginning of the bicycle obsession,,, trip to Third Dachnaya,,, bicycle classifications,,, trip to the square and cocky teenagers,,, watching The 9th Company at my grandparents".

.::::.

But after that day with the bicycles, the desire for a serious bike flared up inside me again - along with hope. With a serious bike I"d finally stop being afraid it would fall apart, I"d be able to try jumping from real heights and all that...

And maybe it would work. Maybe something would finally click. And life would sort itself out, and my Charikova would be waiting for me in the park in the evenings.

That scene of their meeting wouldn"t leave my head.

We went to the Saratov Sportmaster - at 94 Chernyshevskaya Street, a three‑storey shop, insanely expensive, for rich people - and the summer range of bicycles was already there, but for now only the most basic ones. But they told us that Saratov had long had another serious sports shop called Trial‑Sport, only it was somewhere in "Third Dachnaya" - a district at the other end of Saratov that had barely appeared in my biography before. It"s between the Sennoy Market and that super‑remote district "Ninth Dachnaya", where I was apparently conceived when my parents were drunk.

Those "Dachnaya" districts - the usual gloom of Khrushchyovka blocks and panel buildings - stretch along the Saratov hills, and apparently that"s exactly where all the mountain‑biking scene happens.

There were several trips connected with bicycles, and I no longer remember exactly how it went, but it"s possible we went to that district the same day after Sportmaster, because we were there by evening. We didn"t know the address of the shop and had come just to scout the area. I needed to get there because my madness about bicycles was growing like a snowball.

We got off somewhere around that then completely unfamiliar "Third Dachnaya" - a hectic place with bus terminals, road junctions and bridges - and walked into the hills. After a couple of blocks of large apartment buildings and garages, the private‑house sector began, and soon the mountain itself. The sun was already setting behind the hill with the forest park on top, but it was dry and already warm, and there were quite a few people walking around.

We walked along the slope toward the city centre. I kept thinking that just around the next bend we"d suddenly see some jumps for bicycle tricks. But we saw nothing and simply wandered around - and then left.

The only thing I took away from it was the understanding that once again I had bad starting conditions in yet another obsession: I lived fifteen kilometres from here, in shitty Engels, where the closest thing to a mountain was the ten‑metre incline of Frunze Street near my grandparents", and everywhere else in the city and its surroundings there was nothing higher or more rugged - just steppe. And I had never seen a single person in the city riding a proper advanced bike, not even a BMX.

Fuck - these failures and this envy toward people who live right next to their passion and in conditions favourable for succeeding at it have fucked me over my entire life. Might as well just drop dead from a heart attack - even without achieving any of the things I plan - rather than sit here remembering all this shit against the backdrop of a life that ended up wasted.

We came home, and I kept studying that same old Sportmaster catalogue. Mountain bikes were roughly divided into the following categories (from the simplest to the most extreme): recreational, cross‑country, enduro, freeride, and downhill.

Naturally I stared at the downhill bikes. They always had a rear suspension with huge travel and a massive front fork with those two tubes extending all the way up to the handlebars, which made the bike look like a motorcycle.

Freeride bikes - also powerful and meant for jumps, but often without rear suspension - were called "hardtails". In the Sportmaster catalogue the coolest bikes like that were from the company Kona. The dollar cost around thirty roubles then, and the downhill model cost two thousand dollars. Sixty thousand roubles.

If three years later my father would buy a running Soviet "kopeika" car for twenty thousand roubles, then for the price of that downhill Kona at the time you could have bought a used foreign car.

As I often did in childhood when I coveted something material, I drew that very Kona at home - with a sharpened pencil, with lots of detail - in my usual style.

I could already feel that Mum might actually splurge on an expensive bicycle, but I also had to know my limits - because in our symbiosis her money felt like my money - so I understood that if an epoch‑making purchase did happen, it would most likely be a freeride bike: they cost half as much as downhill ones.

Later we were again at the Saratov square near those ramps where the BMX riders were already fully in action, and this year there were even more of them. I watched again how they seemed to rise upward against the laws of physics, doing bunny hops, and how confident they were because of their agility and ability. And how somewhere nearby - supposedly because they hadn"t found a better spot, though in reality obviously just to be closer to those guys - some teenage girls were always hanging around. And along those alleys - near the eternal flame opposite the theatre entrance, where the ramps stood - beautiful girls drifted past like swans. Straight backs, impeccably groomed.

Besides the teenage BMX riders, there were again cyclists from the category of "young men". One of them had a trials bike - the kind with big wheels but no gears and even no saddle, where what you mostly do is balance on the back wheel. I might be mistaken, but I think it was them that Mum approached and asked for the exact address of that Trial‑Sport. It turned out that all the extreme‑riding enthusiasts in Saratov mostly bought their bikes there rather than in the insanely expensive Sportmaster.

We"d have to set aside a separate day - and go.

On the ninth of May Mum and I went to my grandparents". All four of us were sitting in the living room, and at half past seven in the evening Channel One started the film The 9th Company - the one everyone had been talking about not long before when it came out. We were all watching it for the first time.

For me, that theme of voluntarily marching toward death immediately hit hard. And also those moments where all the soldiers take turns fucking the same woman. They were all drenched in sweat, and imagining how it mixed together on that woman as she passed from one of them to another, I couldn"t imagine even touching her, let alone having sex like that - just for the sake of ticking a box - which for me was completely pointless and solved nothing.

Watching the sex scenes in front of Mum and the adults was awkward, but worse came later. At one point one of the characters - a Kazakh - spits out some sarcastic line with the word wank. That bold modern kind of film genre was still something new, and my grandparents were watching with interest. Grandma Klava smirked at the line.

And because an adult had smirked at something in a film I was watching with them, in order to behave in line with my usual pattern in such situations I had to react somehow too. In that split second I had to resolve a dilemma: either smirk as well - which would confirm that I knew what wanking meant - or play the fool, but then the adults might explain what wanking meant, and I"d be forcibly dragged out of my Peter‑Pan‑hood.

I chose the second option - smiling, I asked, "What?"

No one answered me. The scene in the film moved on quickly anyway - everyone had to keep watching.

Once again I managed to stay a child in front of Mum.

In the summer regular internet would start appearing little by little, and so the time I"m describing was the last few weeks of that old world for me.

A world in which, essentially, no places existed except your immediate habitat; in which discovering something new for yourself was rare; in which you were often bored, and the most people you ever communicated with was maybe two.

.:::.

Part 66 text 3. Trip to "Trial‑Sport",,, an insecure choice of bicycle and the purchase.

.::::.

The next day we went to Trial‑Sport. From Sennoy Market toward all those Dachnaya districts runs a big road - Prospekt Pyatidesyat Let Oktyabrya - with every kind of transport on it. On the left are residential blocks, and on the right - and a bit lower down from the road - factories and various non‑residential buildings. Just before Third Dachnaya, on the right, in the building at number 104 - that"s where Trial‑Sport is. It"s still there even now. You go up the stairs to the second floor and enter a big hall.

Right away that sports‑shop smell of rubber tyres from the countless bicycles standing packed in tight rows. Moments like that always fill me with what I"d call a "sad envy". Not "finally I"ve discovered this shop", but "have others already beaten me to it?"

Was I not the first. Was it not me who started having sex first, but Yarik; was it not me who did a back‑flip first, but Slava Stallone; was it not me who mastered 3D Max first... And even if in life I do do something first, it still doesn"t save me. For every one thing where I"m ahead, there"s a whole planet"s population ahead of me in something else.

Mum and I walked past the BMX bikes and the mountain cross‑country ones. In Trial‑Sport the bikes were from different brands: Norco, GT, Jamis. There were insanely expensive downhill models too, but they all had air rear suspension anyway, and for me the appearance mattered - I liked it when there was an impressive big spring there. So we soon moved away from the downhill row and came up to the freeride hardtails.

There was an exciting bike from Norco - with a triangular or even almost inward‑quadrangular frame geometry. Probably no one actually calls it that, so I"ll explain: when I say a "triangular frame", I mean the top line - from the handlebars to the centre of the rear wheel - is completely straight. And if it"s inward‑quadrangular, that means the junction of the lines from the handlebars and from the rear‑wheel centre sits even lower under the saddle, forming a fourth internal corner.

Visually that reminded me of how some people - like my companion Guzhik, or many girls (usually the ones I found most sexually attractive) - have elbows that bend backwards. As I"ve mentioned, seeing that torments me - with the same anatomical anxiety as, say, my fear of blood pressure, or the thought that if you stuck a needle into the glans during an erection, a jet of blood would shoot out like in Kill Bill. Fuck.

But back to the bicycle... Looking at that Norco, I was also remembering that many of the boys at the square had BMX bikes from that brand. That bike - that model - instantly became associated in my mind with uninhibited teenagers, with their girlfriends whose arms bent that way, with their big fashionable sneakers or skate shoes with flat soles. Maybe some cheeky earring in the boys" ears. Everything I didn"t have and that was exactly the opposite of me - everything I wasn"t.

And so I immediately understood I wouldn"t be able to - it wasn"t mine. I mean the bike. Even though it was dark green, and the brand name started with my favourite letter.

I felt jealous and inwardly furious that those cocky teenagers had something that seemed like it ought, first of all, to be associated with me, to belong to me. I also imagined how, being like that - swearing, spitting, communicating with each other in relaxed lads" manners - many of them nevertheless studied at school, meaning they actually did all the assignments I hadn"t even opened for ages, understood what "serfdom" was and all that incomprehensible bullshit from history class, and went to music school like Tyulenev. I was even ready to admit that that bastard from the pier a year ago might have been a straight‑A student.

Next to the Norco stood another bike: Jamis Komodo 3.0. Matte brown colour. The frame leaned slightly toward a standard quadrangle, but you could still see it was close to the freeride triangle, and it had the same massive tyres, disc brakes like the Norco, and a powerful fork. At the same time the frame was even thicker than the Norco"s, the whole bike heavier - and it cost more.

With a bike like that - from a brand not fashionable among those teenagers - I"d demonstratively separate myself from them, while still being even stronger, more valuable. I"d be like Clint Eastwood in westerns - a lone wolf, gazing perceptively from the edge of a cliff at all that damn youthful swagger and seeing further ahead.

A consultant came up to us - a quiet, balanced man, slightly younger than Mum - and the three of us stood there chatting for an hour and a half, maybe two. Sometimes about that bike, sometimes not even about sport at all. Mum and I mentioned our observation that in Engels nobody rode bikes like these, that our town was backward, but the consultant said with some puzzlement that the most expensive bikes they"d sold had actually been bought by people from Engels.

Probably rich people from elite cottages, I thought - and we don"t see them because they ride here in Saratov anyway, bringing their bikes on their jeeps.

In the spirit of "Should we buy a helmet?" we asked pointless questions just to stall and mentally digest the price of the bike: thirty‑three thousand roubles. A used car.

But evening was approaching - and eventually we went to the checkout. We bought a helmet the same colour as the bike. Again, you could buy a cool one - fully closed like a motorcyclist"s - or a pathetic one - just a normal top helmet like a hat, in which I looked like an idiot. But the big one didn"t make much sense yet, given that it wasn"t even clear where I"d ride the bike, so we took the pathetic one.

While we were paying, our bike was rolled away so they could give it a final check and pump up the tyres. Then we went outside.

.:::.

Part 66 text 4. Riding the bicycle back to Engels,,, past the Saratov square,,, the bridge and a punctured tyre,,, struggling with the bike at home almost to hysteria.

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Already knowing myself as Pierre Richard in The ComDads - a born unlucky idiot - I didn"t rush to accelerate or jump. I simply rode calmly, getting used to the hand brakes - I was dealing with them for the first time. Even with them you had to be careful: with just two fingers you could lock the front wheel completely - and at speed flip over the handlebars.

We moved along the pavement of that avenue toward the city centre - me on the bicycle, Mum walking. Now it"s impossible to remember all this without tears. She kept buying me one thing after another, trying me in one pursuit after another, hoping somewhere there would finally be success and I"d have a normal life. And that in the end I"d become a separate adult person, and she"d be able to return to a life for herself - a life she"d lost, through her own foolishness and through the assurances of my idiot father that everything would be fine, delighted at the chance to obtain some crucial proof of masculine normality, without thinking about what, given all his other uselessness and lack of prospects, it would mean for others - when she gave birth to such a torment.

Before reaching Sennoy Market we turned onto Stepan Razin Street - a quiet street leading to Moskovskaya, one block from the railway station. When we were crossing Razin and Kutyakova, passing the house of Dasha - then still unknown to me - on dreams about whom I"d waste ten years of my youth, we decided that I would ride to Engels alone while Mum took the bus there. And I rode off.

Now alone, switching into a mountain gear - also new for me - I tried riding on the back wheel, something I"d attempted the summer before last on the Cross without progress. That gearing clearly made it easier to keep trying on the new bike.

On the square I rode past, the self‑confident youths were riding as usual. I didn"t turn in there: the ramps were for BMX jumps, not for a bike like mine, and in any case with my skill level any jumping was as far away as the Moon.

I even imagined in detail how everything would look if I did jump: Mum, passing by the square and thinking I might have turned there, would look over and see a crowd and my brown bicycle lying to the side. She"d get off at the stop, run over, and I"d be lying there with my head in a puddle of blood that had run out of my ear, and she"d panic and beg those teenagers in their fashionable low‑slung jeans to call an ambulance on their mobiles, and whichever one of them was the biggest alpha would slowly dial the number with one hand while holding a cigarette in the other. Then the ambulance would drive onto the square, and everyone - even the huge statue of Lenin standing there - would point at the two of us, and nobody would help, because there"d be nothing to help with.

That"s how the world works. Some people die outright - and they get pointed at too, discussed, and forgotten. Nobody needs you except your parents.

I rode along all of Moskovskaya Street, turned left, turned right - and finally came out onto the bridge. On the bridge I rode along the right side. Ever since that accident back in my gymnastics days - the one with the trolleybuses - the streetlights were still only on one side, nothing had been repaired; in many places the pavement had been torn up and you had to ride over rough concrete slabs - and between those slabs there were gaping holes through which you could see the Volga far below.

Well, I rode and rode. Three kilometres, remember.

Sometimes the mountain gears helped - like on the uphill sections - but the wind was straight in my face, and riding was still torture. And then, closer to Engels, where the bridge sloped downward one last time and I was riding faster, there was a wide gap between the slabs ahead. Earlier during the trip I"d already tried jumping a few times - it usually went like on the Cross - and this time too I sped up, expecting to hop over it.

But the gap was so wide that even a whole person, if they jumped straight down into it, could fall through.

I noticed the jagged concrete edge of the next slab too late. My rear wheel landed right on it - and all that remained was to listen for several seconds to the long pssssssssh and stop.

Buses and cars drove past, everyone seeing my humiliation as I got off the bike, quickly checked that it was over, and immediately began pushing the bicycle forward on foot - as if everything was fine, just an ordinary situation.

I don"t remember exactly, but I think Mum and I met at the first stop after the bridge. I was, of course, performing my anger - blaming the fucking bridge, saying there were nasty sharp bits of metal there. I don"t think I even said it happened because of the jump.

We approached our building from the Petrovskaya side, already walking along the entrances, when a man was in the garages to the right. Either Mum knew him, or - the way she easily approaches people with requests - she just started talking to him, and he agreed to help us patch the inner tube the next day.

I don"t remember when exactly - maybe on the way back from Trial‑Sport, maybe the next morning - we bought a set of hex keys needed for this modern bicycle. Back then, at least where we lived, hex bolts were something new. Around the same time we also bought a pump with a handle for two hands that you stand on with your feet while pumping - before that I"d had a small hand pump all my life.

And so, starting from the evening of the purchase day and then from the very morning of the next day, we had this grim, hysterical struggle over that bicycle. It lay on the living‑room floor, and I kept approaching it from one side and then the other - and couldn"t undo a single fucking thing.

As usual I again felt like throwing something, smashing something, bursting into tears. But that reaction had already become such a habitual option for me that, for variety"s sake, I kept fighting instead. My eyelids kept swelling with frustration after failing with one bolt after another, or with some puzzle involving the damned gear system I"d only encountered for the first time in my life a few hours earlier.

As always, I stripped some thread somewhere, and the moment was close when I"d finally smash something in rage. But eventually I somehow removed the wheel, somehow we took out the tube and went to the man. He fixed it, we thanked him, and went back to wrestle the tube and wheel into place again.

Several more hours. Dirt all over the flat, like when I used to keep a terrarium.

In memory that struggle with the bicycle on the living‑room floor - with the feeling I was about to explode - seems like an entire week, and I"m surprised we managed to do it all in a single day. But I rely on exact markers - the ninth of May with The 9th Company on TV, the note in my medical record mentioning the eleventh, and the fact that the bicycle was ready by evening - and it seems everything lines up.

.:::.

Part 66 text 5. First ride and the disgraceful broken arm,,, the last trip to Sportmaster and about bike tours in Europe,,, breaking the arm again and the cast,,, escapism in Oblivion and the future rift with other escapists.

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I put on the helmet and we went out. I always took the Cross bicycle down in the lift by standing it upright and squeezing myself into the corner, holding the handlebars with both hands. But with the new bike - which barely fit into the lift by itself - I couldn"t stand like that anymore. I had to stand beside it and hold it by the frame or even the fork - and those are the dirtiest parts, so it was basically impossible not to get my hands dirty. Right at the very start of the ride. It pissed me off to hell.

The sun was already setting, and while Mum was walking somewhere, I only rode around the park and down to the embankment, and then we came back to the square. We were moving toward the main stage (about human height, as I mentioned.) There were two long wooden ramps leading up to it, and now they were placed side by side, both leading to the centre of the stage. I rode up, rode around up there - and then started going down those ramps.

Where they met tightly together, they didn"t match in height by a few centimetres, and right at the end of the descent I drifted sideways toward the higher one. But a wheel simply won"t climb even a small ledge at a shallow angle. And that was it. After a hard landing on my arm, the world flipped over - several times even - and there I was lying on the asphalt in full view of the whole square, writhing in pain, with that characteristic shift in priorities where the bicycle suddenly becomes secondary, while Mum, with a kind of staged cold‑blooded calm, was only walking around the bike, assessing the damage - as if by doing that, by not rushing to me and amplifying the drama of the scene, she might somehow rescue me from the humiliation. Though the main humiliation - or rather the feeling of not having lived up to expectations - was, as always, in front of her.

If I remember correctly, some people did come over and asked whether help was needed, which only added fuel to the spectacle.

The bicycle survived, but after I came to my senses we trudged home. The bone near my wrist in my thin little arm hurt, and riding was obviously over. At home I kept repeating that it was probably just a sprain. But Mum, inclined to assume the worst immediately, said it was a fracture. Of course I also knew it was a fracture: I had once broken a finger just while buying a computer - and now a whole bicycle for thirty‑three thousand rubles - and it"s only a sprain?

Probably the next day we went to Sportmaster again - the last time in my life - and bought me branded Kona cycling gloves with suede inserts, expensive ones. At home I kept taking them off and putting them on again. And I kept studying the bicycle catalogue from Trial Sport, savouring the fact that I finally had everything needed to become a professional mountain biker.

Also - though I can"t remember during which of those two or three trips to Sportmaster it happened - the topic of special mountain‑bike tours abroad came up there. The shop must have had some promotional brochures. That was the first time I ever even brushed against the idea of travelling abroad. Some France, some forests and the Alps... I knew it was somewhere in our hemisphere, but I had to clarify... And the Alps - in what sense? I thought the Alps were nothing but snow. But in the pictures there were lush coniferous forests, like in Oblivion. In any case it was completely beyond our means and just a dream, and first I had to start riding here at least - but my arm was aching more and more, and after that ride I never went out again. I sat at home playing Oblivion.

The strength of what Oblivion meant to me as escapism is probably best illustrated by the fact that - even now, in my thirties - I could literally write book after book about what I did in that game, and it would be more pleasant and interesting to me than recalling and describing anything from real life, including even the happiest moments, like those few meetings with the visiting girl who never ended up loving me. I deliberately didn"t complete the main storyline in the game and instead did minor things, so even in the second month there was still that magical feeling of a horizonless virtual life.

And just like in that passage from the end of last year - where I talked about the ruined orgasm and B‑D‑S‑M, where I said I couldn"t understand why others with the same inclinations, with the same psychological root as mine, had somehow completely avoided any O‑C‑D, psychiatry, and the fate of becoming a socially discarded person - in this matter of escapism I would come to the exact same kind of rift with the "people like me".

There is a whole layer of people and communities devoted to such virtual worlds - where there are entire encyclopaedias about them, where people write and publish exactly those kinds of fan‑fiction books that I could have written, draw pictures of characters and locations, and so on. But throughout my youth and early adulthood I came to such places connected with The Elder Scrolls on the internet thousands of times - and I never fit there at all.

First of all, I don"t know and have absolutely no desire to understand the virtual world. I couldn"t care less about the plot, let alone the lore. People actually study it, distinguish different kinds of elves, argue about things. I said earlier that the game impressed me with its internal mythology. But for me it was enough just that some mythology existed - that was all. I only needed the association with childhood, with Hercules, with Conan. Because not knowing something is precisely the main association with childhood. As a child you don"t know anything yet - and that"s where the magic lies.

I saw nothing like these thoughts in those communities. On the contrary, those communities proved by their very existence that their participants were completely unlike me.

And secondly - and this is what connects it with the BDSM topic - I didn"t see a single person who perceived this whole thing as a tragedy. Meaning the urge toward this escapism. Someone who had ended up in the same life‑shaped mess - the same social trash heap, the same psychiatric ward - because of a rebellion against reality with its schools, armies and obligations that prevent you from burying yourself in virtuality. There wasn"t a single rebel there. And just like the BDSM people, all of them - even more than ordinary people who aren"t into escapism at all - called me sick. But all of that came later, already during youth, even toward its end. For now - ignorance and paradise.

One hundred and ninety‑two hours of gameplay by the twenty‑sixth of May, according to the surviving save file.

.:::.

Part 66 text 6. To the disc shop and Slayer"s bloody concert,,, Dire Straits against the background of metal,,, the penultimate meeting with Slepukhin,,, the end of my schooling.

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When I wasn"t playing Oblivion, I now listened to Slayer a lot, and sometime in the twenties of the month Mum and I went out to the disc shop on Telmana Street, number nine - the one where a year and a half earlier we had bought The Sims 2 and where there was a corner with display cases full of grim DVD discs with concert videos - a very large selection. By now I already knew a lot of the names at least. There was Iron Maiden, Megadeth, and Anthrax (which I had long wanted to try). I would have liked to take that entire display case, but each of those pirated discs cost one hundred and fifty rubles, so I had to save money.

The shop assistant came over - the one Mum and I already called Mowgli between ourselves. He still had some chains on his belt, a black T‑shirt, and, I think, a piercing in his eyebrow. Mum didn"t particularly like him, by the way. He asked whether we needed any help, and I, to maintain the image of someone who knew the subject, asked some questions, and at one point pointed to a disc by the band Sixty‑Nine Eyes - and when it was mentioned, unlike with the thrash‑metal bands, Mowgli actually brightened up, which made it clear that he himself wasn"t really into the heavy evil stuff. He"d be more into something like The Rasmus, HIM - that sort of thing.

Meanwhile on the television in the main hall, where he had now gone back, something aggressive and even screaming was playing - but complete crap - Children of Bodom, as I would later realise when I learned about that band and remembered what I had seen then. There was that Laiho in his camouflage trousers with a guitar shaped like an arrow, shouting something over blasting drums and some distorted guitar mush in which, as I stood there looking at the discs, I couldn"t hear anything catchy at all.

But from the very beginning in the shop I had been looking at one disc with Slayer on the spine - and now I finally decided to ask Mowgli to play it. It was the concert Still Reigning. In the tracklist, to my surprise, there were only songs from the album that was my absolute favourite, the one with that Vice City song on it. Mowgli started the disc, and there I was basically seeing these metalheads for the first time. I still didn"t know the reality yet, and of course at that time I wouldn"t have called them metalheads. For me all of it was still serious, and I imagined them as serious misanthropic people capable of murder and things like that.

So I didn"t watch for long and said we"d take it. Mum, meanwhile, kept livening up the atmosphere with comments, starting conversations - she just wanted me to socialise, even if only with this Mowgli, even if only over this pounding music. We left the air‑conditioned coolness of the shop and walked home.

Naturally I started watching that concert on repeat, and it became my favourite; I wanted even more to live in America, and I was impressed by both the bald Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman with his classic guitar shape, and the way they hacked away side by side at my favourite riff in metal music in Angel of Death - and everything else too. The only thing that bothered my eye was how, when they got drenched in fake blood at the end of the concert, the vocalist Tom Araya, with his hair plastered down, looked like some watermelon‑selling Caucasian guy from the market.

That disc is strongly associated for me with the beginning of that summer and with a fairly tangible desire to get an electric guitar already, figure out how that heavy sound is made, and all the rest. And in those days I also often rewatched that main Dire Straits concert, and melodically I was very impressed by the solo of the second guitarist in the song Money for Nothing - it had the perfect set of notes. As did all the music across that whole concert from beginning to end. The more I would listen to metal mush - Slayer, Anthrax the next month, and especially occasionally hearing some garbage like Children of Bodom - the more I would appreciate Dire Straits, which not so long ago had seemed like ordinary music. Years later I would realise that I never heard a single concert even remotely close in quality. Not a single shitty note in that whole show. Could this also be a phenomenon of the first listening?

In the last few days I was still attending school, and Slepukhin and I even had our first and last walk from school to my home after classes - he wanted to see the place, and I wanted to show him the Slayer concert. The house was messy, and we went into the kitchen in our shoes, where I put the disc into the player. He asked me to lend it to him, but I - as if foreseeing the hassle of getting the disc back because the holidays were coming (though really, because of my fanaticism at that time I was simply afraid for the disc) - refused.

But Slepukhin"s birthday was coming up in the first days of June, and it was being considered that I might go to it. That was the last meeting I still had ahead of me with Slepukhin.

And with that the eighth grade - and the last school year of my life - came to an end.

.:.

___Part 67.

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________________Eighth grade over. Summer.

.:::.

Part 67 Text 1. Hatred of school and groups due to narcissism, summer OCD and fear of funerals, birthday and the end of Slepukhin.

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It might seem that I hated school because of the difficulties it caused me-my OCD, my hatred of getting up early, or how school was tainted from the very first grades by homework punishments. But that"s all bullshit. I hated school because I was nobody there. The only times I didn"t hate it-and even liked it-were in second grade and the first half of third, when I felt like an exceptional person. When I sat at the front desk with the top student and my crush, when lessons were easy and I still got good grades. Learn a Pushkin poem, recite it at the board, get a five-plus-and you sit down next to Ermakova, and everyone practically applauds you. What a feeling. But then everything started getting harder, and with my growing incomprehension of why education was necessary, I began to fall behind. Then Katya Ilyina"s dislike. Then the humiliation from a fight with Zemskov. Then two years of suffering with gymnastics, hoping to be noticed for my physical ability. The result-total failure. And finally, moving to the thirty-third school, where-after a few positive patches under the mentorship of advanced Fedorov, and also the first months of seventh grade when I was new again and that Yulia paid attention to me-I completely dissolved among its two thousand students, became a ghost.

I didn"t even hate the system itself. I even love the army, the idea of strength. I just want to be Napoleon there, nothing less. This might sound like classic insanity, but it"s actually the opposite: the problem is that I don"t feel like Napoleon. I"m Napoleon only at home, with my parents. It all started in kindergarten. After almost idyllic early years-except for my mother"s vermicelli soups-when I was the centre of the world, in kindergarten I became one of many, and the humiliation began. Constant, background humiliation. Kosarev, Zemskov, the pier-active humiliation. Background humiliation-being ignored by everyone else.

Online, with its endless people among whom I dissolved to nothing, my narcissistic affect is so strong that I literally feel pain in my chest just entering a big forum or online community. I enter a huge chat-and I immediately start lashing out at these bastards. I hold no grudge against them. It"s just the affect. It was always like that-even in childhood, it will happen again. The same somatic narcissistic pain in the chest occurs wherever youth gathers-in the street, in transport.

While second grade and early third were the best times in school, from all my time in institutions, the memories I"m most nostalgic for are of the clinic, especially the early years (due to misunderstanding its "systemic" nature), despite all the blood, excrement, and tears shed there. There, I felt most like the centre of the world.

Back in June 2006, by the way, Mom and I went to the clinic a couple of times. Next time I"d be there only once-summer of the following year-after which I"d be assigned to the adult clinic, and Engel"s clinic on Persidskaya Street, my "second home," would end forever for me.

I might be off by a year, but at the start of summer, Mom and I went to the dental clinic for some nonsense. I have a note from a year later mentioning that I went there during my bacillophobia, and a post-Soviet grandmother stuck her greasy hands in my mouth after chicken, and I suffered. But I"m sure that in those first days of summer we walked past that dental clinic, and at the intersection of Petrovskaya and Volokha there was a billboard for The Da Vinci Code. I had no idea what it was about and couldn"t care less. A year later, when I finally watched it, it became one of my favourite films.

Early summer, I remember strong heat and the typical Engel"s dust, which, when lifted by gusts of wind, got into my hair, under my T-shirt, and onto my bacillus-ridden body. Returning home, I had to bathe completely. I couldn"t do it like in winter: just take off a sweater, all clean underneath. Now it was like last summer-every time I left the house, a full wash was necessary.

I hated this Engel"s, and Russia, to hell. I imagined that in America I"d live like a normal person, not caring about germs. Thanks to sterile computer games, it seemed like there were no germs in America. But here there were shitty manhole covers, pipes wrapped in bits of glass wool, fucking trash bins reeking of rot, where people could throw dead snakes, meat scraps, or some Orthodox funeral rags. Funeral buses with black stripes endlessly drove the streets. Cadaveric fluids could drip from a coffin onto the floor of the bus, seep through it, and the fucking dust from the street would rise and hit my body, my lips. At home, I constantly yelled and argued with Mom, forcing her to pour water on my hands from damn bottles when the supply was off, which annoyed her. Sometimes she stopped, and I yelled to continue-losing my sense of cleanliness, having to wash again-so more water was wasted than needed. I hated her for giving birth to me in fucking Russia with this damn Orthodox funeral madness.

Slepukhin"s birthday was in early June. He called me, and I went. I was already without a cast (I think I removed it myself), but it was too soon for cycling. That birthday visit was a very good day, and I remembered it in detail for many years.

They didn"t have some grand cottage-maybe a wooden house with a brick facade-but everything was well set up. A large TV hung there-the exact plasma model I once wanted.

A couple of other boys came-both normal, not nasty. In his small boys" room, he had a simple LCD monitor on a corner desk. His rather cute, young mother brought us plates of food and lemonade, and we sat at the computer. I don"t recall if we played games: we probably just watched a film-first one, then another. The second, only memorable one, was 2 Fast 2 Furious, which had a scene with a car stunt on two wheels. But the gathering didn"t last long-four hours max-then I left. And that was basically it for memories.

Slepukhin"s features and expressions reminded me of the guy from Eric Prydz"s Call on Me music video-a 2004 dance hit. Most episodes I wrote under that track. Interestingly, the lead dancer reminded me of our classmate Darya Leventsova. I didn"t like any of our female classmates: as I said before, almost all were overgrown kids, and my feelings were tied to a desire to protect and control. I couldn"t feel that for someone superior to me.

With Slepukhin, we said goodbye. I never saw him in person again. I talked to him briefly online the following summer. He asked, "What"s up with the rats?"-as if guessing something might be off with me. He also mentioned the thrash metal band Overkill, quite a silly one. That"s how I knew he still liked heavy music. Later, around eighteen, his page had photos in a provincial, teenage-boy style-by some local youth car, like a "nine," naturally tuned. Alongside him was a slim girl-similar "Engel"s-style" posing around cars. I easily imagined her riding Slepukhin and joyfully enacting all the things he dreamed of during breaks. It hurt me deeply, because it was a time when I desperately tried to convince myself that peers weren"t having sex yet.

.:::.

Part 67 Text 2. Anthrax, three summer rides on the new bicycle.

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Someone else who resembled a classmate-the guitarist from Anthrax. Around 7 June, Mom and I went to MediaMarket, where I put on the DVD of this band-though it was a concert from when they had a different vocalist. With that vocalist, it didn"t sound like thrash at all, and I was baffled. Still, I decided it was worth it, and we bought their MP3 discography on two discs. Like with Megadeth, the disc had the "Got the Time" video clip, which I immediately liked for its mischievous, boyish vibe, and I watched it repeatedly. The bald guitarist, Scott Ian-the founder-looked a bit like Yarik.

I saw Yarik several times in summer 2008 or 2009 during my series of bike rides. He always skated in the square. Once he rode holding a girl in his arms-they fell hard on the asphalt, clearly hurting her tailbone, in front of the stands.

I started listening to Anthrax. Until then, no band was perfect for me: in Megadeth, Dave Mustaine had that funny straining vocal; in Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson was too short-haired and there were many songs I disliked, even though I hadn"t fully listened to any album; Mark Knopfler was old and not metal; Ozzy Osbourne-walking corpse. Only Slayer was close to ideal, if not for Tom Araya, whose Latin-American vibe ruined the dark image.

Anthrax: some half-dwarf second guitarist, and the vocalist an Indian. Whatever. The album with the voice-track "Madhouse" was good. I especially liked "Medusa"-close to my musical mentality: minor tonality, weight, like the tracks from Sims soundtrack. Yet Anthrax had a special vibe. The disc even had a biography-I learned they were from New York. By then, New York was no longer among my favourite cities: it represented what it truly was-cold concrete America. Thus, Anthrax"s music felt slightly cold. But I still listened to it, probably for a week straight-it became the main soundtrack for the days I resumed riding my new bike.

First ride with Mom in the forest near Mostootryad. She walked alongside, as usual. We didn"t go deep-just the initial part with small hills, three metres high max. No jumps to attempt; I improvised fun from one small rise, launching slightly. I didn"t fall. I got fixated on the chain clinking on the frame with each jump-paint could chip-so I taped it at home.

Next ride, I went alone after a couple of days" break. My computer sleep schedule was already floating; some days I went to bed early and woke at six or earlier. I rode to the square and park, attempted a bunny hop over the three long steps at the Stella. Quickly got bored. I kept trying the bunny hop. A guy, maybe two years older, approached. He had a BMX and claimed he could show me. He said, "Here, hold this so I don"t ride off," gave me his phone. Silly, but I gave him the bike. He actually did the bunny hop and tried to explain. I failed. He left.

After lunch, I rode again. Back at the Stella, I tried more. Near the concrete slope, a crowd gathered; cops arrived. They were recovering a drowned man. I watched from afar while a green UAZ "Bukhanka" drove from the park to the embankment. Mom came, walked along the dam to some older men. I continued riding elsewhere, avoiding the road around that damn UAZ, whose wheels were in cadaveric fluids. I"d roll the bike into the middle room and touch the wheels when pumping them.

Another early morning, I set off for Mostootryad, intending to go deep into the forest, hoping for more small hills. Mom was still asleep. Without any water, wearing helmet and gloves, I quietly left. Day promised to be sunny and hot.

No city maps, no idea of terrain or distances. I rode straight through the forest along Sazanka Lake, emerging onto some road-Lesokombinatskaya Street. Asphalt, occasional trucks. I went left, along the forest, hoping for a path into it. No pedestrians, just trucks. Asphalt ended in a kilometre. Sand replaced the ground. Left, a forest wall, possibly swampy; right, a slope to boat stations and tourist bases, all fenced. Kamaz trucks grew bigger; soon roadworks began. Cycling was impossible-I pushed the bike. Sun beat down; I was thirsty, thought I might die. I rested on a scenic shore, watched a snake slither into water. Sand hills rose behind. Likely, children could get buried here. I stayed back, then returned to the road.

After almost two more kilometres, traffic noise emerged-I reached Volzhsky Prospect, heading south toward Gagarin landing site. Turned right, cycled home quickly. Fifteen kilometres that day, five walked on that damn road around the forest.

That was my last proper ride on the new bike that year. It had been worth it.

.:::.

Part 67, Text 3. The little rock shop on Telman Street and the fat salesman, heavy metal purchases, shaved my head, funeral at the entrance.

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It was already mid-June, and for a couple of days in a row, Mom and I wandered through my musical obsessions again. First, we went to that little rock shop in the basement on Telman Street. We"d been there more than once, and there were two salesmen; for the one we saw most often, Mom and I had already given him a nickname: "Moth." He was about twenty-five, a bit scruffy, always tired, and quiet.

But those days, the other salesman was there-a fat, bearded guy with very long reddish hair. Definitely a veteran rocker. Only a year later would I find out he was even a musician-the singer and leader of a local old hard-rock/punk band called "Cro-Magnon." And only the next year would I learn that he had actually owned the shop, selling off leftover stock from some old, famous store he ran in Saratov. By then, nobody really wanted that stock anymore.

He was about Mom"s age, so while I stood there looking at what they had-old domestic heavy-metal magazines back then-she even chatted with him about something. Just as usual, filling the time and creating a friendly atmosphere for me. My voice was already breaking, so sometimes I struggled to ask questions. The magazines were cheap, so we bought them. I spent the next couple of days reading them. They were early "90s issues, not glossy, very underground, with no adverts at all-just long articles and interviews. There was stuff about Megadeth and all sorts of other bands. That"s probably where I first learned about the "death metal" style and the band Death. I had no idea what it actually was, only imagined it was the heaviest thing ever-maybe even better than Slayer.

The next day, Mom and I went to Saratov to buy discs. On the way, I kept reading those magazines, and there was an article about some Iron Maiden member"s solo career with the line: "But the album turned out shitty." I showed Mom just to make her laugh.

That day-or those days-we bought a Slayer DVD concert, War at the Warfield. I played it on loop. My routine had fully shifted to classic recluse mode: sitting quietly until morning and only going to bed when Mom woke up.

I was scruffy, and one evening Mom and I went to the hairdresser in our building from the street side. Inspired by Kerry King and wanting to feel more connected to my obsession, I shaved my head. A small taste of adulthood: Mom wouldn"t have allowed that before. I looked awful, but I no longer cared about worldly hopes; my body and appearance didn"t matter-I"d already dropped out of society, and there was no one to show myself to.

Then, closer to June 20, I looked out the window-and there was a funeral at our entrance. On the bench sat a coffin with a doll-like face inside, surrounded by a bunch of old women with flowers. A PAZ bus had its rear hatch open, and the smell of gasoline reached our floor. That smell had become my association with funerals. I slammed the window shut, washed myself sweating, and yelled at Mom not to cross a certain line with her street shoes, made her wash her hands immediately after coming in, and even opened the bathroom door and the tap for her. Whatever disaster was happening in there, I"d already blocked it out.

I"ll explain the psychology of this necro-bacillophobia properly in autumn, when the key bits come up. There"s more than just neurotic affect-there"s a psychological underpinning. That"s why I often call it funeral phobia, ignoring the "bacillus" part.

I wouldn"t leave the apartment on Lev Kassil Street until August 18, and then only at the end of August for good.

.:::.

Part 67, Text 4. Films in The Movies, drenched in Slayer, stereotypes, late-night computer sessions in the dark, peeing on the floor, masturbating in bed next to Mom.

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I won"t mention the minor stuff: from May 13, I have a simple film made in The Movies. Set to the intro of Slayer"s "Captor of Sin" with a crazy solo-a minute-long nonsense about a soldier shooting a fascist and running into a cabin for some strategically important document. The game"s film plots were dictated by preset scenes, which could only be minimally edited and placed in different settings.

By June 26, I was finishing my fun with the game, having spent the last couple of days on a six-minute mini-film called Cursed Land. Four deserters hijack a military ship to avoid serving in Vietnam, heading for Miami. The main guy is Nick, the woman is Michelle, then Karl, and the scapegoat Tom, who drives while the others have fun. The soundtrack had three songs, starting with Megadeth"s Peace Sells. In the first scene, the first three dream of a luxurious future in Miami, teasing Tom as he fiddles with the ship controls. The language and jokes were crude, in the style of my Pushkin rewrites from a year ago. Nick even says that after he sleeps with some whores, he"ll bend Tom over and "blanch" him. Despite the name, Nick dies in the end like everyone else, so I didn"t identify with him.

Michelle"s plotline revolves around washing, mirroring my real-life routine. She constantly nags about needing a bath, curlers still in her hair.

The ship collides with something. Nick berates Tom, but Tom just shrugs. Nick suspects Tom deliberately caused the crash to avoid work in Miami. Looking out the window, Tom reports they"ve hit some jungle. Anthrax"s Madhouse kicks in, and the four are now in the jungle discussing what to do. Nick and Tom decide to scout the area, sneaking through a forest full of graves and skulls, tossing ironic curses. Every line is neurotic tragicomedy.

Meanwhile, Karl chats with Michelle, who never shuts up about the bath, then goes to pee behind a tree. A zombie sneaks up on him. Michelle, having waited long enough, calls for Karl; he emerges with a green-headed monster, lunges at her, and she stabs him, lamenting in despair at having killed a comrade-all the while oblivious, leaning against a tombstone.

Nick and Tom return at the screams, asking what happened. Michelle explains, and Tom, a jokester in the style of Slepukhin, cracks up at the details of Karl peeing, his lamp-head, and Michelle"s bacillophobia. Nick points out that Karl had all their money-thirty cents. This pisses him off, and he tells Tom, responsible for everything, that if the money isn"t found on the body, he"s screwed.

They go to the dead, and seeing Karl turned monster, Nick just mutters, "Fuck." No money is found; Nick tells Tom he"s in trouble. Monsters come out of the forest, one kills Michelle, who manages to scream, "Fuck, Nick..." They even have guns. Tom is happy that Nick might finally get killed. The zombies shoot Nick, who falls. Tom realises he"s alone and begs the green-transforming Nick not to die, calls for Michelle. The camera shows Michelle: lying in a bra, curlers in, already covered in fur-turning into a werewolf. Nick simply says to Tom, "Drop dead," and dies.

Slayer"s Raining Blood plays. Tom faces the approaching zombie horde, including Michelle and Karl. After one last shot of Tom, the credits roll over the Slayer carnage. That was it for the game.

I constantly listened to Slayer. In my memory, the 1990 album on repeat, and the 2001 album, which I liked just as much, with lyrics I now roughly understood. Even though the DVDs had some behind-the-scenes footage showing the musicians had families and normal lives, I still floated in my stereotype. Watching the last disc"s pre-concert clips with a kid doing rock gestures on camera-even younger than me-I felt the same torment I"d felt realizing girls my age had seen Vice City porn, and it didn"t bother them, but I, a weakling, had some issues with it.

I sat at my monitor in the dark. Mom often stayed up in the kitchen until two a.m. My room was a sauna, and I drank a lot. When I drink a lot, I pee a lot. And then the kidney-urinary thing kicked in-the same as a year before: urine building every five minutes. I can"t hold it-I need to relieve myself. I need to feel completely comfortable. I can"t savour happiness otherwise. I was happy those days-free from any obligations for the first time in my life.

Going to the bathroom-opening all those damn doors, flushing, washing hands-was torture. When Mom went to bed, there was the added problem of rustling my mega-galoshes. So I ended up just getting up and peeing on the floor by the computer. I had a special spot a step from my chair. Linoleum underneath, no big deal: in the heat it dried quickly; if we ever wanted to clean the apartment, we"d soak it, wipe it, done. By now, the whole apartment was what I called a "slaughterhouse"-mess on the floor. We hadn"t cleaned in months, at least not my room. We no longer sat in the living room, and I didn"t even move beyond my computer. Big bed in a small room, toilet, bathroom, and my computer spot-that was my whole world now. I think I ate at the computer. I would give anything to go back to that paradise. Its core was reassurance: only a few overgrown kids, like Charikova and Yarik, had satisfaction from live intimacy; the rest of my peers sat pretty much like me, lost in escapism.

Since I stayed up while Mom slept, there was no problem masturbating. But I remember at least one episode lying in bed closer to morning, next to Mom. I had to masturbate while she was there. In the last days, as I fell asleep, I was obsessed with fantasies of torturing Alina from Frunze on that inverted rusty boat at Persidskaya Street-but now we were older and knew about sex-and I still masturbated to her. I lay on my side, turned away, silently rubbing my slippery, jelly-like cock under the blanket, constantly afraid Mom was pretending to be asleep, but actually hearing or feeling micro-movements from the mattress, guessing everything. When I came, fearing any moan or twitch, I deliberately turned over. I probably masturbated for some time before that, so there wouldn"t be too much semen, which could smell. That way, a little could be wiped in my hands, without pulling them from under the blanket, until dry.

Thanks to all this constant masturbation, I never had wet dreams. Otherwise, with uncontrolled moans during orgasm on waking (as happened twice in my life later), I would have definitely revealed what was on my mind, rather than just computer games and metal music.

.:::.

Part 67, Text 5. The Early Internet, Mountain Biking Sites, First Online Interactions, and the "Narcissistic Shot"

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I still haven"t finished Oblivion and only booted it up now and then, but mostly I was screwing around with GTA - pulling stunts in Vice City, saving the best replays, hating Russia, and so on. Eventually, I felt the need to go online, to read about ways to get out.

Mom bought an internet card, and on the 30th - maybe the 29th - I logged on for the first time that summer. I had to be frugal, so I saved pages like crazy and only read them after disconnecting. I started going online almost every night, and Mom kept buying card after card. On the 30th I"d downloaded something about Miami real estate. I understood nothing and didn"t yet know about translators, and soon I just ended up on extreme mountain biking websites - mostly Canadian - and sat there, mesmerized, imagining myself in that country, how I"d live and ride there. For the first couple of months, the internet still held that magical "Palantír feeling" - a sense of connection to the entire world. There was a super-dopamine rush when I connected, then the aforementioned concentrated frenzy of a couple of hours of surfing, and after disconnecting - the feeling of being thrust back into this shitty reality. Later, during the psych-ward months, logging onto the internet would feel similar to my parents visiting me there.

Around July 1st, I set up an email - "vrok @ inbox dot ru." Newsletters started flooding in immediately, and for a while I read them, fooling myself into thinking people were really thinking about me. "Vrok" was also in the logo of my little film studio in The Movies, and I combined it with a bloody satanic pentagram in the background.

On July 3rd, I registered on North Shore Mountain Biking - a Western Canadian forum for that style of riding. The tracks there were unique: hand-built, twisty wooden paths elevated high, with narrow bridges three metres off the ground. I knew, of course, that I"d never do anything like that - afraid of falling on my neck, unsure of the structures" safety - and the riding itself didn"t captivate me. What drew me to the North Shore sites and photos was the setting: lush green mountain forests, rocks poking through the moss - a Conan-and-Oblivion vibe. Russia had no landscapes like that, at least near the big cities. Fuck, how I hated Russia, especially fucking Saratov, and even more so Engels.

Around the same time, I found a Saratov extreme-riding forum. It existed, but it was basically two or three "maestros" who barely posted; if they did, everyone worshipped them. Mostly, average local riders chatted about stuff unrelated to biking, with unimpressive profile photos showing almost no jumps. I realized their "downhill" riding was basically just sliding down Saratov hills at speed along trails. That didn"t impress me. I wanted big dirt jumps, to fly. I remembered a TV clip from earlier that year: a kid nearly my age, on a bike like mine, under a coach, doing dirt-jump tricks in a Moscow park - and giving an interview. That"s what had initially impressed me and what I was looking for.

More than hoping anyone would actually help, I wanted to join the community of lucky people from a normal country and feel like I could speak English. So on July 7th, I posted on the Canadian forum: "Training me, plz, do bunnyhop (I from Russia and speak English very bad) Thanks."

The next night, when I loaded the thread, I felt my first "narcissistic shot," the classic jolt I"d feel for twenty years whenever I saw a reply or comment on something I"d written. It"s like a literal shot in the chest - somatic pain - from the default expectation of being devalued. In my case, it instantly triggered extreme aggression, the "hit" mode - the urge to punch someone in the face, like I did with Zemskova, without even knowing whether I"d actually been devalued. And if it really was devaluation - fuck - there"s no one online to hit.

That effect, reinforced over years - especially from 2010 on, when the internet, in my observation, went feral (or I became an adult and no longer got age-based slack) - and the flood of devaluation aimed at me, eventually matured into a state where, entering group spaces like chats, I would immediately start picking fights, skipping straight to the inevitable jab at my ego and conflict. I called a person in that hyperreactive state an "amygdaloid" - from the amygdala, the brain area for stress and aggression.

At that time, the few replies on the forum were harmless, one- or two-sentence tips. Then they chatted among themselves for a couple of pages, which I didn"t understand. Someone posted a photo about learning bunnyhops.

I also asked: "Say me, plz, zis is real to jump bunnyhop on my bike (MTB hardtail - Jamis Komodo - sixteen kilos) when my weight - thirty-five kilos (thirteen years)? And thank you for photo."

Someone said it was possible.

.:::.

___Part 68.

.:::.

Part 68, Text 1. GTA Mods, My Own Island in Vice City, Metallica"s Black Album, First Visits to Porn Sites, and Sex-Phobia

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During the day - from about three or four in the afternoon, when I woke, until night - I explored escapes from reality through modding - creating modifications - for GTA. I"d mentioned the program before. By trial and error, I got to the point where I could replace textures. On the internet, after amusing myself in the first days by downloading and installing car models - all kinds of H2 Hummers for San Andreas - I apparently found some tips and progressed in the program. Ideally, as I said, I wanted to create full missions - a virtual life with events - but that would require actual programming, which I couldn"t do. For now, I learned to make locations. Over a few days in mid-summer, by copying existing 3D landscape models - rocks, trees, and so on - I created a mini-island and even populated it with pedestrians. I did this in Vice City. The island was in the sea southeast of the main landmass, near the lighthouse, and I watched everything from the idyllic shore at sunrise. There were little bridges, deck chairs - the works, a full resort vibe.

Those days are also tied to another thing. Somehow I had Metallica"s Black Album in MP3, probably from Slepukhin. I already had tons of music, and I"d been looping favourites endlessly. I only got to this Metallica album now. Besides the already beloved "The Unforgiven," I was blown away by "Sad But True." Suddenly, it seemed I"d found the perfect band - perfect everything, from solos to vocals. But for some reason - maybe because of the jarring cowboy-style "hey-hey-hey" hi-hat hits in the dark metal - I didn"t loop the whole album, and it"s forever tied to my days on the Vice City island. After that, I only played three favourites - the two mentioned and "Enter Sandman." And even though I"d seen symphonic concert footage before, I hadn"t fully realized that Metallica"s frontman was also blond. All those blondes - Hannemans, the red-haired Mastein, and others - because of my long-standing self-hatred for my own blondness, didn"t signal leadership to me. I expected badass dark-haired frontmen, like Marty Friedman. This stereotype would take another year to break, sometimes reinforced - as with Death later. I hadn"t seen the faces of that band yet.

On the night of the 15th, I visited porn sites for the first time. I already knew those sites were prime virus traps, so I was scared shitless. What if a pussy pops up full-screen and I can"t get it off? But I took the risk, even around 11:30 p.m. (the night rate started at 11), when Mom was still awake. I remember that evening exactly. I even turned on the light - some insurance in case a pussy took over the screen - at least the room wouldn"t glow pink like if I"d been in the dark, so Mom wouldn"t see that talking colour under my door.

Between the 3rd and 22nd of July, I saved only about thirty photos - that"s how short my visits were. All low-resolution crap. But it was enough. There were suckings, boob-masturbation, and teen-style photos - school skirts. There was a slim girl sitting on a huge fat man. But the main torment was photos of girls jerking men off. It felt like a medical procedure. Total trust, no fear, was required. Yet this was already somewhere between depravity - the worst kind, when I was forced to strip and present my ass to a strict woman - and loving sex, with someone I actually liked and would trust completely, wanting variety, like her jerking me off. But I couldn"t imagine trusting even a loved one - and that tortured me. I could easily picture deceiving her, touching her, all the romantic initiative I"d dreamed of back in the episode with Alina at BabValya"s dacha. But I couldn"t imagine her doing anything to me.

The torment wasn"t just the phobia, but also the envy it generated toward girls, that unlike me - shaking, weak, helpless - they so easily spread their legs, allowed themselves to be touched and used in all sorts of ways. Nature practically designed them for that passive, weak position. Seeing a liberated girl, eyes closed, moaning with a grimace of pain - as if from penetration - made me want to smash everything. I needed real experience to cure my fear of women touching my cock, getting at my genitals. Intuitively, I knew prostitutes were no option. For money, they"d even ride a 200-kg fat guy. I needed a repeat of what happened at two years old: a woman approaching my cock on her own, exposing the tip - and ideally I couldn"t escape, I"d be tied, even in a scenario with a girlfriend. If love means trusting someone entirely, I couldn"t fully love. I needed a girl to love me - and, while I was still stubborn, train me to her. I was phobic - just imagining a girl going in to kiss me made my head spin. A stranger"s face coming toward mine, to do something physical, felt like a doctor.

None of this would ever happen in life. That one free encounter at thirty with a minor - she didn"t even want me. We ended up raping each other in turns. She spent two hours psychologically pushing me to do something with her. And when I finally started, her reaction showed she hadn"t actually wanted it, and I had to ask her to jerk me off - which she did with almost overt reluctance.

.:::.

Part 68, Text 2. Metallibrary and Metalland, Team Modding for GTA, Last Month in Lva Kassil, Apartment Showings, and Post-Sale Prospects

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From the 16th onward, in my modding escapism, I started planning metalhead black T-shirts with band logos and stuff. I spent nights browsing metal music sites, inspired by the merch they were advertising. During those nights, I downloaded Megadeth and Slayer lyrics, listened almost exclusively to these two bands, and even found translations. All of this was on Metallibrary - a heavy-metal encyclopedia site with a dark-red, blood-soaked design. I also found the Russian forum Metalland.net, which was black-themed. Loads of users there, and it seemed like huge metal scenes were thriving in some big cities. People in metal boots and leather jackets met in underground passages, swapped discs, let someone else try their headphones - like that junkie in the first Brother movie. Then everyone would meet at a concert or house show and discuss an upcoming album release.

I went to the Slayer site, full of creepy-style images - promoting a new album, like the last God Hates Us All, apparently again about dissatisfaction with Jesus Christ. They"d had a five-year break, and the album was supposed to drop in August. I imagined myself with some acquaintances in a big city, waiting for the album, like we once waited for San Andreas, then meeting up to trade rumours about a possible Russian tour of our idols. I hadn"t yet realized that no one actually met up anymore; everything now existed only on these damn forums. Big cities already had high-speed internet and file-sharing networks, making physical discs obsolete. Even stores were becoming a thing of the past.

Around the 25th, frequenting the San Andreas modding site, I responded to a call for people to join a modding team. On the 25th, I emailed the organiser: Dmitriy Ashmarin - an eighteen-year-old from Vladimir, which I didn"t even know where it was. His nickname was Chester. Like me (I didn"t even have a digital photo), I"d never met him. Probably, if you Googled his name and city, you"d find his page on Odnoklassniki - a PC user with a hockey-player jawline. In our first exchange, he told me to install ICQ, explained what it was, and that"s how our finger-typing dialogue began, continuing to this day.

He was confident but not hostile, patient with me - a kid five years younger - and things went smoothly. Besides him, the modding team had no one else yet. We started working together on what we knew, though he didn"t really know much either, and in some areas I even surpassed him. Especially in what I excel at to this day - long, repetitive work, like when I manually exported huge amounts of textures from Oblivion. I could do that from morning till night for days on end. Chester, living an ordinary life, strolling after work and only getting to the computer late, couldn"t have done anything like that. If his goal demanded it, he"d simply have refused. For him, modding was basically a "whatever," but for me, it was a chance to evolve into a game developer and, ultimately, build another life.

Also, unlike him, I was making early progress in motion animation in the ill-fated 3D Max.

We messaged each other at night, rushing due to my frugality, discussing things, exchanging files. I sent him pre-written messages. I"ll copy some here later. For the first two weeks, we talked almost exclusively about this, occasionally veering off to other games. Once, I praised Oblivion, and he asked: "What"s in Oblivion that isn"t in Gothic?" He was a fan of the latter. Considering Gothic 3 hadn"t yet released, he probably referred to pre-release reviews.

Behind me, so to speak, I remember almost nothing of what was happening. No events in the apartment, no conversations with Mom. My schedule was so out of whack that I"d go to bed after she"d already woken and sleep till evening.

But somehow, the apartment sale had to start - showings, that is. It began in August. Apart from the eventual buyers, I remember only a woman of maybe fifty-five with some neurological disorder - limping, barely able to speak. During conversations, it turned out she knew my father - she had worked at the library when he had his art-supplies stand there. That"s the kind of people Dad was alongside. In the museum where he later worked, at least one employee was similarly mentally affected. I"ll go through the museum staff in time.

About five times people came to view. They apparently didn"t remove shoes due to the dirt, though I might exaggerate; Mom probably cleaned the main paths. I don"t remember what I wore instead of the mega-galoshes or how I hid them. Maybe I didn"t hide them at all. I didn"t resist the showings - I also wanted the old, shitty apartment sold, associated with a failed real life. Across the street on Petrovskaya, a new ten-storey brick building had been rising for months - not yet finished or inhabited. Two hundred metres from us - visible from our windows over the Khrushchyovkas. Mom said she was considering a new apartment there. I wasn"t very interested in what the place was like or the prices, but I knew Lva Kassil"s price well; I could even conduct a showing alone, describe it in realtor jargon, sell it myself. I cared only about getting rid of the filthy old apartment. Anything new would be an escape into music and virtuality.

I wasn"t consciously thinking about this; I described an intuitive, subconscious process. My conscious attention was almost entirely on computer work.

Feeling that the sale might happen soon, Mom explored options. I asked her later, and we pieced it together. Lva Kassil was listed at 800,000, but open to negotiation. Mom had another 500,000 in savings. A two-room flat on Zelyony Lane, thirteen - the one visible from our windows - cost a million. Times were simple; you could go straight to the construction company director. He was in Lva Kassil, in the building with a bank and where the first Windows had been installed on my system in a blue Thermaltake case. The company sold flats in old buildings, and for Mom"s budget offered a studio in the new Zelyony Lane building plus another studio in a semi-old building - essentially so I could have separate housing. But Mom, seeing my O-K-R state as schizophrenia and disability, and considering my still-dependent age (I couldn"t even boil eggs), deemed this unrealistic.

She also went to Saratov, to the intersection of Moskovskaya and Michurina - there, quiet streets near the Glebuchy Ravine had a new development, almost enough for a studio. It was to be an elite building in a perfect location - near the "Lipki" area and the city centre. But none of these options, including the studio, had finished renovations. And how would one live in a studio? Mom in the kitchen, me in a room, like Bab Valya with Dad in Zavodskoy. Realistically, only the two-room flat on Zelyony Lane was feasible - enough budget for renovations. Until Lva Kassil sold, these were just theoretical options.

We continued waiting for a buyer, and I continued my nocturnal rituals - music, internet, and modding.

.:::.

Part 68, Text 3. First Poetry, Shame About Ambitions, Six August Poems, and Wearing Out Megadeth

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It"s time to include in this autobiography the things I find most shameful: namely, the song lyrics I wrote. For a reader, it probably makes little difference whether they"re reading my narrative of events or my poetry. But for me, the difference is huge. In the narratives, I don"t moralise with the decisions or conclusions I describe. My poems and songs of that time, on the other hand, are full of moralising and preaching.

In terms of form and content, everything was inspired by Slayer lyrics and, later in the autumn, by that "Death" band, whose lyrics carried a high philosophical tone; the religious themes came from Slayer, and the "good triumphs over evil" theme came from my father. But that only covers the content and form. Psychologically, the real root of why I was drawn to this was my natural narcissism. Through these texts, I elevated myself above an imagined audience. The impulse was not to teach, but to exalt myself. Hence, the execution was artificial. I was venturing into areas I didn"t understand - literature, moralising. I was an affective antisocial, the opposite of a preacher. Even in my very first text, the protagonist is a killer, in the first person. My nature broke through immediately. But then, as a child, when writing these texts - and episodically later, in adolescence - I didn"t understand any of this. I didn"t realise I wasn"t with other people. Now it"s unbearably embarrassing to recall all those ambitions and my self-importance as a person, supposedly part of society and even outstanding.

-------start excerpt-------

Written on the night of 7th August.

The Price of Blood

I run down the empty road, calling on God for help as I go,

Cruel death pursues me, and I probably won"t escape.

I"m vile, I lied, stole, killed, and took the souls of the dead,

But the gods have turned, they will destroy me, the moment has come.

If I stop now - hellfire will burn me,

My body will vanish, leaving only my evil spirit as memory in the world.

They will smirk above me and shit on my grave, but when I die,

I will feel wild, eternal pain - I will burn in hell.

I try to hide; in the distance, a city is visible, and I run there immediately,

Spirits, ghosts, devils pursue me; even the devil threatened me with death.

I reach the city, run into the square, dark, no one around.

I knock on someone"s door - no one"s home, no lights in the windows.

I run, stumble, fall face-first into black mud.

I am scared and ashamed - I don"t want to die or burn in hell.

I recall my life - how I killed innocents with my knife,

Raped, beat, tortured, crippled, and took souls afterward.

A brutal killer, I couldn"t bear it, ashamed, I began to sob.

I got on my knees and loudly, as best I could, called on the Lord.

Thunder exploded in reply, and suddenly rain poured like blood.

I remembered that blood - from those I had recently killed.

Numb, I fell into the pool of blood, fell asleep. In the dream, a message came:

"You will live, but you are nobody, a piece of meat - this is your punishment."

I lay on the ground, covered in blood, rain washing over me,

I am vile, disgusting, a son-of-a-bitch, a killer - and I knew it.

When I came to, I saw people, ...living people!, the sun bright again,

But now I"m not considered human - and that is the price of blood.

-------end excerpt-------

The second poem is even worse. Because of the repeated "we," I can"t reread it in full. It concerns my fear of death - I call it "necrophobia," due to a strong mix with fear of the physical, which I generally term "funerophobia."

-------start excerpt-------

Written on the early night of 8th August.

We Will All Die

We all live in fear - we just hide it - we all don"t want to die.

We pray in the morning, wish for health, try not to lose life.

We guard our lives, parents, loved ones, children, try to preserve them.

Yet we don"t know when, how, or who will leave this world.

Death is avoided in speech, treated as intimate,

Not discussed in society, though it"s the world"s main problem.

No one escapes - all are equal before death,

Neither money, bribes, nor kind words help anyone.

Pray to God, beg him - you will still die someday.

You will never know what it"s like - only then you will understand.

Your soul evaporates; your body remains still forever,

No more smiles, no anger, no emotional expression.

You must lie for three days; the next, you begin to decay,

Unhappy relatives buy a coffin and carry you to be buried.

You"ll be buried; all disperse, crying, return home to sleep.

Inside the coffin, worms will crawl, slowly devouring you.

But the human"s essence is not the body - the soul, already lost,

Meaning you never knew grief or pain of your relatives.

They suffer, hoping you"re nearby, alive and well,

But you"re far, buried, surrounded by decayed corpses.

Mother and child, lovers, brother and sister, husband and wife -

They live for each other, needing no one else.

Death is evil, the vilest spawn of hell.

Still, we will all die someday - we must protect each other.

-------end excerpt-------

I also recently found four more short poems.

-------start excerpt-------

Vicious Bitch (8th August)

You"re vile, you"re dirty, selling pleasure, bitch,

Where are you running? You"ll die soon, give me your hands,

You"ll lose them, can"t take your money,

You can give some to orphaned children,

But you"ll never, never give it to anyone else,

You"ll advertise yourself with it and sell yourself again.

-------end excerpt-------

-------start excerpt-------

Lost Time (10th August, 4 a.m.)

You empty people, pieces of rotting meat,

You make laws, obey them,

Work for the government, earn pennies,

Write textbooks, teach them in schools,

Study half your life, all educated,

But it"s invisible - you"re savages,

You steal, kill each other without cause,

You"re all idiots, pieces of shit,

Spending money on porn,

Buying Kama Sutra books, hiring prostitutes,

You work for all that, for all this crap,

You kill animals, bastards,

Dress in their skin, wear their furs,

While they have brains, much more,

Than in your empty goat skulls.

You"re vile beasts, rotten freaks, hard-hearted scum, yeah!

Shitty creatures, you value money,

Not friends, children, or family - just this shitty cash!

You kill, steal, forge, deceive for it,

You hoard it all your life, waste it on crap,

You gorge, drink, fuck, catch diseases,

But you"re dumb fools, unaware,

That one day it will all become worthless,

Not money, gold, food, or fucked-up bitches,

Not other crap - nobody will need it at all.

And when that comes - you, pieces of shit, will understand why.

You"ll open your rotten mouths - but too late, the reckoning comes!

You"ll regret how you, empty freaks, wasted your precious time!

-------end excerpt-------

-------start excerpt-------

Cursed World (words written 6th August 2006, 6 p.m. - 7:30 p.m., by Nik Kapernau)

In this cursed world we all live,

We believe in God, we sing prayers,

For the world"s prosperity, for goodness,

But however much we sing - evil remains!

Bastards, people humiliate each other,

Lie, condemn, jail, screw over,

Cowardly, beasts, pulling tricks -

They profit and forget you.

Thieves breed like rats in basements -

Wherever you look - they"re everywhere: stations,

Stores, streets, even your own home,

Taking everything, forgetting themselves.

For money, they"ll kill anyone you want,

Whether you wish it or not.

If someone has already paid for you,

Consider your life over!

In this shitty world we live,

We believe in a goat god, we sing prayers,

For the world"s prosperity, for goodness,

But however much we sing... evil remains!

For money, they"ll kill anyone you want,

Whether you wish it or not.

If someone has already paid for you,

You may consider your life already spent!!!

Nooo!!!

Fuck this cursed, bitchy world!!!

Cursed world!... Cursed world!

Cursed world, cursed world!

Cursed world, cursed world!

Cursed world, cursed world!

Rotten world, cursed world!

Fucked world, cursed world!

Rotten, bitchy, miserable, cursed!!!

Yeah!!!

-------end excerpt-------

-------start excerpt-------

Bastards (7th August)

Bastards, scum stole from me,

My passport was in the bag - they took it.

Left without money, I sit on a bench,

Should I go home to my poor family?

I don"t know - my parents are starving,

I just lost all my money.

I went to the tavern and got drunk in the hole,

Some bastard there started hassling me,

Harassing, fucking bitch,

Asked for five bucks for a beer,

If I didn"t give it, he promised to beat me.

I thought - having lost everything,

I rushed to find my knife in my pocket,

But the bastard noticed it,

Marked me immediately.

I stabbed back in the face,

And the bastard slid off the table to the floor,

Twitching a bit like a psycho,

Blood splattered, then he suddenly went silent.

Everyone in the hall was watching me,

I thought of stabbing myself with the knife,

But then security ran over, tied my hands, and shoved me into a car.

It was my first time seeing a prison,

Surrounded by bandits - and I was drunk.

A couple of hours later, after some sleep, I started sobering up,

And, confused, began saying a prayer.

I wondered why I had ended up there,

Defending myself from that bitch in the bar.

-------end excerpt-------

In August, I wrote only these six poems.

I continued to listen to Megadeth obsessively. One night I went through the lyrics of the 1986 album, especially captivated by the ironically tense song I"m Not Superstitious and the song about the maniacal ripper - specifically its opening, a prose monologue of the protagonist complaining he got up on the wrong side of the bed, asking "What the fuck is this?" This Mustaine mischief, even grumpiness, felt very close to me - as I said.

I also remember days when I had an early morning meal, running around the area of the main save point in San Fierro in GTA: San Andreas, looping late Megadeth albums, particularly The World Needs a Hero, the last on my MP3 disc. My favourite remained Youthanasia - the most melodic in their discography, with a cover of green meadows and a fantasy sky, evoking strong feelings. It reminded me of childhood, Frunze, sunsets, King Arthur, fantasy paintings in my father"s shop. I didn"t care for lyrics or meanings - only associations with the past, as always. In the end, Youthanasia became, in a sense, the music of my childhood, as if I had always listened to it.

.:::.

Part 68, Text 4. Peak period of team modding for GTA - surviving messages as memory.

.::::.

From 5 August, I have a saved text for Chester in which I mention something about animation. In those first days of August, I was making a somersault animation for GTA: San Andreas. I replaced the normal jump with it. Now both the main character you control and the various members of your gang, when running and trying to jump onto something, performed these somersaults.

At the same time, I was working on a mod that stuffed the grounds of the "Vrok" hotel in Las Venturas with deckchairs, exercise machines, and all sorts of useless crap. A huge waste of time.

In the first days of August, Chester announced that he had found another person for our team. His nickname was "Vampire." He was a young guy, about a year older than me. I still have a short chat with him from 13 August, and it"s valuable because, prompted by him, we immediately started talking not about games, but about ourselves. I mentioned that I was going into the ninth grade. I hadn"t realised yet that my schooling was basically over. Even my mother probably didn"t know. She didn"t know exactly how things would unfold.

At the end, Vampire wrote a few lines that stuck with me:

-------start of insert-------

okay not now, my boss (beast) just wants to show off, said go sleep already. probably won"t see you tomorrow, I"m going to the dacha with my friends and girls so... you know

-------end of insert-------

Below, I"ve copied various surviving messages with Chester from around 8 August on mods. You can skim them - their value is purely as a memory of the last days in that apartment. I"ve preserved spelling and almost everything else, including shorthand and notes in brackets - that"s how I wrote then.

-------start of insert-------

Hi!

Okay, let"s get straight to it. I"m sending you what I"ve done for our Vrok hotel - install it and try flying with a jetpack over the pool, or jump into the pool from the diving board, or just move quickly around the inner courtyard - the game sometimes crashes when there are too many objects, but I removed half, though crashes still happen, especially in the spots I noted.

I installed the Opera browser - all glitches disappeared, the speed is insane, so I might not answer your questions promptly - I"m busy downloading all the programs needed for making GTA mods. All questions, I already sent what I wrote, so don"t mind if I stray from the topic. Everything I download is for our benefit.

I figured out the textures - replaced some (kept most of yours), I inserted black text (from Vice) for the hotel itself - it even looks better than the light ones (I tweaked them more). Almost everything else I handled too - replaced most of it, but the hotel itself still leaves room for improvement (Vice text was smudged).

I won"t send you these textures because several programs are downloading at once (don"t want to lose speed - 5 kb/s). And I don"t need anything from you now either!

About Vampire - where did you find him? Apparently, he"s only learning to create models, there was no talk of converting speech (I asked him), I gave him the task - make a guitar (I thought of the mod - you pushed me towards it), I"ll make the animation of the guy shaking his head, and we"ll either replace it or insert it into the game as a new weapon (non-lethal) - then the mod will be awesome.

We"ll do the animation together if you learn, if not - you"ll draw the texture on the back of the guitar - I already have the front (sent to Vampire as a reference). Draw some pattern on the back (overlay a picture or, better, the band Slayer"s name - they play my favourite song), I sent their images along, if you don"t know how to spell the band name (in form, of course). I"ll send it now. Wait...

If Vampire doesn"t make the guitar (and we"d hate to lose the mod), either he or you and I will have to make it ourselves (takes time to learn). My problem - I don"t know how to make a saved model accept a texture, in short - I don"t know how to "texture" it, though in Max I can apply everything needed, but I don"t know how to save it.

By the way, I learned that GTA uses one of the most complex animation methods - skeletal animation. There are simpler methods, but the engine apparently only accepts this one, so if you want to learn - you"ll suffer. I still don"t know much.

-------end of insert-------

On 5 August, I talked to Chester about games - waiting for GTA IV and saving up for a PlayStation 3 for its release.

6 August - main day we discussed Gothic III - I said: "I love the Middle Ages." I already knew the word somehow. Probably not from school - more likely from articles about Oblivion and Gothic.

On 7 August, my messages were:

-------start of insert-------

Right now, I"m being eaten alive by some flies and mosquitoes!!!!!!!

No, but in the slum house in the photo I showed,

but nearby that damn Volga flows - so the mosquitoes!

Old horrible house, I"ll soon move to a new one in about twenty days. No phone there, and the house isn"t even handed over yet, so I probably won"t appear online during this time... (about two weeks)

Then school starts, and I"ll be online less at night, but I"ll connect via your megabit internet and everything will be fine!

-------end of insert-------

Someone was already planning to buy our apartment, but I think the first buyers didn"t work out, and the final buyers would come in the next days.

That same night, Chester wrote that he was making electronic house music and sent me some of his stuff - I was thrilled. He also mentioned that the words were made with a talking program. Probably "Balabolka," which I now use to listen to this autobiography text while editing. Back then, I didn"t understand what it was and didn"t get to know the program until 2022, losing years - sometimes wasting weeks recording texts in my own voice to listen without the computer. Nightmare, how much life wasted not knowing something right in front of the monitor.

Then, after discussing Chester"s tracks, this dialogue followed. I deleted half the messages - we discussed romance and mods at the same time.

-------start of insert-------

Vrok:

Damn, I don"t even really know how to play guitar, only songs (composed in two hours) with all sorts of bad content. Of course, I listened! I can"t play anything, it"s all by ear!

I compose ballads too (I like a girl and write about her)

Chester:

gu-gu, well done!

Vrok:

Yeah... don"t know how to confess...

Chester:

Say it... She knows you?

Vrok:

That"s the thing... almost not.

Chester:

Well, get to know her, approach, invite her somewhere, what"s there to be afraid of!

Chester (not waiting for my reply):

Did you go already?

Vrok:

How could I - I"m in a different class, and this year I"m moving to another school. Already getting ready!!

Chester:

So approach, why drag it?

Fine, do as you wish!

Vrok:

All night I think of her! Outside I try this and that, get closer, don"t know how...

Enough soul‑spilling, I"ll cry now!

All night... only think...

Chester (end of dialogue):

Good luck in love, good night!!!

Vrok:

So not good night...

Bye!

Thoughts only of her, and all that...

-------end of insert-------

I had many awkward word choices back then: "soul-spilling," "unleashed."

I don"t even know which ballads I meant or which school I planned to transfer to. The messages from childhood and early youth contain a lot of fiction. The ballads might have been an intro to the romance topic I wanted to discuss. The school transfer - dramatic flair. But in reality, it was about the twins.

On one of the following days, Chester said he was at the computer with his girlfriend. Later he said she wanted to talk to me, and I messaged her for a while - she gave some advice on romantic self-confidence, which of course couldn"t really help.

On the 13th, I looked at electric guitars online.

Around that date, the final buyers of the apartment were probably arriving.

On the 15th, 16th, and even 19th of August, I downloaded porn photos again, and an encyclopedic article about the structure of the vagina. Still, I didn"t grasp what the clitoris was.

On the 18th, I left the apartment for the first time in two months. Probably related to what I"m about to tell. Otherwise, I"d have stayed there. We went to Saratov, and in the shopping centre at Chapaeva and Moskovskaya - which I mentioned would appear a lot in the last months of this story - already a big Megadeth fan, I bought a DVD of that concert, some clips of which were on my MP3 disc. Then at Media Markt on Volskaya, we bought Iron Maiden"s discography on two discs. That night, on the Metalend forum, where I was probably already registered, I wrote:

-------start of insert-------

Can anyone help? I bought the concert recording "Rude Awakening" today, on one DVD, and for some reason, some songs, including "À Tout Le Monde" (my favourite), can only be played from the "Underground Video" menu, and are recorded on black-and-white film. Can anyone explain why, if this is correct, or do I have a pirated disc?

-------end of insert-------

I would watch this concert for a very long time, and I"ll mention it again.

.:::.

Part 68, Text 5. The Finale - L"va Kassili, Father"s Return, Packing with Iron Maiden, Moving Furniture, Departure to Saratov.

.::::.

And now - the finale of L"va Kassili.

The buyers were from the town of Marks. That"s about fifty kilometres up the Volga on the Engels side. They commuted to Engels for work every day. They had an adopted child from an orphanage. In that context, it probably meant they took him for money and social status. Survivalists, basically.

Mom and I sat with them in our kitchen, finalising everything. They haggled up to 770. In the end - we agreed. I had a say too, and when the man, happy with the outcome, asked something at the end, he even looked to me for approval, like one does with an adult.

After agreeing with us on the next steps, they left.

We had to move out by the end of August. We were selling the apartment unfurnished, leaving only the old long wardrobe in the hallway.

Some items required special handling: the wall unit in the living room had to be dismantled, the pull-up bar in the middle room taken down, and the piano removed. But these were minor reasons why Mom called my people in Zavodskoy. The handover of our new apartment, where we were supposed to move, was delayed, plus renovations were needed, and the main reason for reuniting with Dad was my temporary living situation. Mom could have gone to my grandparents or anywhere, but she knew I, having spent two months without leaving the house, couldn"t handle a private house with cats, galoshes, and no bathtub. Sure, we could have rented, but I was showing signs that I wouldn"t manage even that. And why couldn"t Dad take his son in temporarily and help improve his living conditions? Even now, at thirty, Mom keeps saying: "You were needed by him, not me," so back then, especially considering how I argued and hated her during fits of rage, she naturally made decisions about me through that lens.

She tells me it was Baba Valya who picked up the phone. Baba Valya again. It was just like in my backstory - that whole feeling Mom had, as if she"d married Baba Valya.

Almost everyone came from Zavodskoy: Baba Valya, Aunt Larisa, Dad, and Ivan. Ivan drove them and, businesslike, waited downstairs in the car while Baba Valya and Aunt Larisa stood briefly in our place. It looked like Mom had long forbidden Dad to see me, and they"d all missed me and felt sorry for him, and now Mom had finally forgiven him, so they all came for reconciliation. Everyone was in a buoyant mood, like at a birthday. They stood in the hall, but Aunt Larisa peeked into my room and, seeing the new bike, asked: "Riding it?" I nodded. Later, when the conversation touched on my quirks about cleanliness and my mega-galoshes, which I probably had on, Baba Valya, always keen to optimise, said: "Well, that"s just character changing for now," meaning puberty.

It was agreed that, for the time being, I could definitely stay in Zavodskoy while our new apartment was being prepared.

Based on Mom"s usual reasoning in such situations (remember the kennel-like apartment on Radishchev), it"s fair to assume the subtle reason for the visitors" cheerfulness was hope that Mom would give Dad another chance, that through helping us she"d warm to him, take him into the new apartment - and he"d be with us again, importantly, as head of the family. And Mom would add: "Only Baba Valya and Larisa needed this, your guy didn"t care."

And they left, while Dad moved in for the last few days.

As for Dad returning - I"ve described his comings and goings before. They never varied by time apart. He was always in a super-friendly mood when he came home. So my greeting was always the same. He just returned, as usual.

In the last days, while we packed, I started listening to Iron Maiden"s discography, but didn"t find anything interesting on the early albums, so I played Brave New World on loop. The first three songs, especially the title track, were familiar and always carried the feeling of that grey autumn and November hopes for socialisation through metal. Also, I was using Winamp with the old green-on-black interface, orange sliders, grey panels - autumn colours everywhere - so the album became even more autumnal.

There was one more thing. The fourth song, "Blood Brothers," with its folkish motifs, suddenly triggered nostalgia for the already-past, though not distant, early days of playing Oblivion. Specifically: the city of Corrol, its green surroundings, and that quest with two brothers, also in green medieval shirts. The whole album became tied to brothers, big swords, medieval times, flooded fort dungeons, flying imps, ivy over stone walls - the whole vibe. Though summer wasn"t over yet, it became my "autumnal medieval album." And of course, the soundtrack for the last days at L"va Kassili.

I mummified my bike in cellophane. Big blue bags appeared out of nowhere - we packed everything in them, especially me. Who knew - maybe the Gazelle we"d use had previously transported coffins or other contagions, and where could my stuff have been during at least a month"s wait for the new apartment? I protected the bike most carefully - the most expensive and the main link to reality. The computer, after saying goodbye to Chester and arranging to reconnect as soon as possible, was also packed meticulously. Quick setup elsewhere was impossible - it was wrapped in multiple layers of cellophane and tape.

The delayed handover of the new building at that damn 13 Green Lane complicated and determined a lot. Our main furniture wouldn"t fit at Grandpa"s place on Frunze, so a solution was needed. The construction director was cooperative and offered Mom to store the piano in his warehouse - no arguing there. For other items, a solution was found in the same building at 16 L"va Kassili, two doors from ours: the family of that girl Lyuba Sedneva, who went to the English gymnasium with me in first grade, rented out a two-room apartment - either their old one or her grandmother"s.

All our legendary chairs went straight to Grandpa"s sheds, along with rugs, junk, my childhood stuff and books, including the Pushkin ones with inserted obscene poetry sheets - they"d stay over the cellar for nineteen years. And Murka also went to Frunze (really "went," not just temporarily - a sad story). The wall unit, no longer needed (all books were Dad"s and he planned to take them to Zavodskoy), was requested by Mom"s cousin Valera. After I moved, he"d arrive and, parents say, take it apart with a single screwdriver.

The main items - our Soviet kitchen set, sink, kitchen table, fridge, chairs, big bed, my modernish wardrobe and desk, appliances, computer desk, pull-up bar - were moved to Natasha"s apartment. That"s what we called Lyuba"s mom"s place. I never actually saw Lyuba in person again.

For the move between entrances, Dad brought his partner Sanya Krylov - that funny, non-masculine oddball. He was strong and very helpful. On hot days, he"d sit in the mustard-coloured chair while Mom served tea.

I didn"t leave the apartment, just packed. The next day, I had to leave with my things, so I postponed washing - Baba Valya"s ninth floor never had hot water, and it would be a torture. Everyone knew this. But the last days had a good mood. School trips were out of the question - the main task was leaving L"va Kassili. That"s the kind of autumn I liked. Real autumn. Music. Endless nostalgia for something past. And a new chapter of life. A feeling of moving forward into the past.

On the last evening, computer packed and with nothing else to do, I sat in the kitchen watching a music channel. There was Rammstein"s Benzin clip. Not impressive.

In the morning, I washed, we waited for a Gazelle, and started lowering my cellophaned stuff. Sunny day. Dad opened the bacillus-laden doors, and I carried my heavy bike over the ground - didn"t want the wheels touching the floor or asphalt: a coffin with a dead body had been there in early summer.

The Gazelle was a passenger, not cargo, but I didn"t have much stuff, so we loaded in and drove off. I think it was the 29th of August.

.:::.

___Part 69.

.:::.

Part 69, Text 1. Arrival in Zavodskoy on the Ninth, Trip to Local MediaMarkt, Guns N" Roses, Piano Incident at L"va Kassili, About Dad.

.::::.

Around noon, we arrived at Baba Valya"s building and began moving things in. I constantly supervised where Dad put my "mummies," how to hold them, from which side. He didn"t wash his hands after tying shoelaces. My own hands were already filthy from the moving, making touching my stuff more difficult. Finally, we locked up, and Dad immediately drove the same Gazelle back to Engels - the largest items still had to be moved. Sunny, as I said, still cool in the morning; overall, the vibe was like packing for a long trip, almost happiness. Only now the hustle was theirs, and I just moved to Baba Valya"s and started sitting here.

Everything was prepared for me: new slippers, chair covers - things L"va Kassili never had - and the living room door now closed against cats. Besides Dulci, there was her growing daughter Asya - orange-dark-white-spotted like her mother. Nervous, and I wouldn"t get along with her.

Baba Valya had a year and a half of stories saved up, and she told them endlessly. These were the last months of my childhood"s defining ability to focus and get into her tales. Later, in adolescence and early adulthood, when I stayed here, she"d talk endlessly, and due to my constant internal suffering from lack of sex, I wouldn"t manage it anymore.

We placed the bike by the window behind the TV. My activities here would be TV and DVD player - anything, including MP3s. Dad, after a year"s rest, had some discs; one was the same Dire Straits video collection we had. Baba Valya, not realising I"d seen it too, asked to play it - to watch "Sultans of Swing." They often watched it, nostalgic; and for her, the young Mark Knopfler reminded her of Dad in youth, which amused her.

As usual during visits, day one meant delicious meals and sweets. From day two, it was simpler. Though Baba Valya brought some "Miracle Milk" or Kit-Kat bar every day. Kit-Kat would become the main taste association for the following months.

The first days were calm. I messed with my bacilli, but not maliciously. On day two, not yet self-isolated over washing with pots, I went out with someone"s money to the nearest MediaMarkt. Five minutes on foot, 26 Enthusiasts Avenue - main busy road with buses, trolleys, minibuses. On the way, I noticed a problem: at building 28, a damn funeral agency. Not extreme - not like "Ritual," nothing open-casket; nearby gates had hearses. More like a peripheral branch of a major agency - not only funerals but elder affairs. Still: anyone entering could easily have been around corpses minutes before. I couldn"t drop anything; if my shoelaces fell to the pavement, I"d be in serious trouble.

MediaMarkt was small but well-stocked with discs, especially my stuff. For me, a Megadeth fan, almost their whole discography was there - remasters of all classic albums, thick booklets with lyrics and photos. Ninety rubles each (pirate, but perfect print). Pocket money required. I decided to buy something long wanted - Guns N" Roses "92 concert, two DVDs.

At home, I sat watching. The concert was in Japan; modest Japanese sat on small chairs while Axel Rose screamed hoarsely. I liked it anyway - melodies, backing singers, memorable songs - I watched it on loop for the next few days.

When Mom and Dad freed the apartment, I could only contact them on Dad"s mobile. His ringtone was Flight of the Bumblebee. At the time, Dad was always installing museum exhibits, sawing boards, nearly the only man keeping the wooden part of the museum running; he got many calls - the tune became tied to those months.

In early September, they came here together on the ninth. Mom says Dad suggested it. She could have stayed in Natasha"s apartment - big bed, all amenities - or gone to Frunze to the grandparents, especially since Murka was there, like a secondary child. But she came here. How to live four in a one-room flat? They slept on the floor, I on the sofa, Baba Valya with cats in the kitchen, as always.

Dad, sitting in his chair, a man who marks life changes with a solemn talk or toast, said: "We sold L"va Kassili." He"d probably been there with Mom when she moved the money, feeling part of the process, a man deciding. In my youth, helping me move things and contributing financially, he loved the "we," like a key participant. I always took his manner seriously, and he still seemed like a man and support, though Mom found it comical - he never had a real "man"s job," lived with his mother in a one-room flat, never attempted to move out.

On the night of the final move, the piano incident happened. Dad, on the last day, moved it to the elevator landing temporarily, then he and Mom went to Natasha"s. The decision to leave the piano in the hallway was his; Mom suggested another way. That evening, our buyers came to the apartment. They knew where Mom and Dad went. Soon, angry knocking at Natasha"s - the male buyer furious - the suspended ceiling lacked foam inserts; Mom had taken them, though they were part of renovation. He almost hit her; Dad calmed him. They promised to return the foam. He also demanded the kitchen sink, but Mom couldn"t give it - the cupboard was part of the set. He left. Next morning, someone called my parents - piano pushed down the stairs overnight; people thought the building exploded. Between sixth and fifth floors, boards lay. Dad promised to compensate Mom for the piano. This wasn"t the first incident - in early childhood, he"d broken a toilet. Later, he"d crack the bike frame. He always said he"d compensate separately "from the first paycheck," but never did. Meanwhile, he gave small amounts for family expenses; ask him "Where"s the compensation?" and he"d say, "I always gave money."


.::.

________________Autumn 2006.

.:::.

Part 69 text 2. Sitting around the apartment and small episodes,,, no school at all,,, weekends with my parents in the apartment,,, suicidal tendencies while studying English.

.::::.

During the day everyone from the ninth floor would leave for their errands, and I"d sit there alone. I masturbated constantly, and I also developed a compulsion to touch my anus. Hair had started growing there, and the compulsion came from touching something that, to the touch, I imagined should be the same as it was for girls my age. Afterwards I had to wash my fingers because I was afraid of infecting myself with worms. Sometimes the obsession was so strong that I would reach into my underwear from behind even while standing in the kitchen talking with adults, especially when I was alone with Baba Valya, who was always cooking something there with her back turned to me.

Whether at home or at her job at the Shmyrkeviches", she always had the TV or radio on and knew all the news. On the evening of September fourth she said that Steve Irwin had died - that famous host from Animal Planet who often played in the background on Aunt Larisa"s TV. At the time I thought the stingray had killed him with some kind of electric discharge. For me Steve Irwin was always associated with Bruce Dickinson - the face, and that same exaggerated extroversion and theatricality. And Steve Irwin"s wife looked like Aunt Larisa.

Once Baba Valya asked me, "So what about school?" - apparently my parents hadn"t told her the details yet. I myself didn"t care what was going on there. I was still formally attached to School No. 33, but my mother had arranged "home schooling" status for me. In the medical file there are certificates and some kind of signed consent from my father. It was already a mess of paperwork, but later my parents often remembered, when explaining the psychiatric stories, that during those weeks the child welfare authorities kept calling them, asking what was going on with me. For my mother this was a huge stress: there is nothing she fears more than the state machine. My father was the same (except that his fear usually didn"t infect me the way my mother"s did - his rather amused me). I"ve written about this many times.

In general there was tension between my parents, especially my mother, under whose guardianship I was, and those fucking state services demanding either that I complete school assignments or that there be a medical explanation for why I wasn"t studying. Nine years of school are mandatory in our country. Meanwhile my mother somehow kept negotiating and dodging them. Officially I was registered as living with my grandparents on Frunze Street.

Gradually I was already starting to have my episodes. Besides the bacillophobia - or rather alongside it - my neurosis was also affected by my mother getting back together with my father, or at least something that looked like a reunion. Aunt Larisa had suggested they sometimes come stay the night at their place, and they did. I have no idea where they even slept there, by the way. I don"t even know how Aunt Larisa, Ivan, and Anya themselves lived in that two‑room apartment. Anya surely couldn"t have slept in the same room with her parents - and there wouldn"t have been space anyway. So maybe Larisa and Ivan slept on the sofa in the living room and Anya in the bedroom. Or the other way around. But now my parents were there too. Anyway, my jealousy about my parents" sex life returned (though in reality, as my mother later said, by then they hadn"t had anything for a long time).

Later, while checking my bicycle and blowing dust off it, I for some reason started cutting the cellophane wrapping off it with a razor blade - and soon discovered a scratch from that same blade on the main thick tube of the frame. I threw a hysterical fit, blamed the whole world for it, especially my father (for some reason most of it was connected with him), and got extremely worked up.

The next day, on the weekend, when I was again refusing to go out for a walk like the previous summer, basically shutting myself in, my parents came back from outside and my father had brought a DVD from the MediaMarkt rental - a film about extreme mountain biking. It had all those beautiful videos with jumps and extreme downhill riding from scenic mountains. Because it was still thirty degrees outside, my parents were lying on the floor under a fan, while I sat behind them on the couch. On their days off they didn"t really go anywhere either: there"s nowhere to walk in Zavodskoy, and I refused to go out - even just to the store.

The next day they were lying on the floor again while I put on Guns N" Roses, already knowing which parts to skip to (for example "Welcome to the Jungle" because of the moaning). Out of that whole mostly guitar mess my mother liked the melody from The Godfather that the guitarist plays in his solo there. My father meanwhile made fun of Axl Rose"s outfit - those tight boxer shorts. He also said Axl had Jesus Christ on his T‑shirt. I hadn"t even noticed. It was a good time then: I didn"t dig into all those fucking symbols, all that garbage. In the things I liked, there was only what I liked them for.

I asked my mother, who went into Engels for work, to stop by that shop on Telmana Street - the one where "Mowgli" is - and buy the Iron Maiden concert DVD Rock in Rio. I remembered they had it there. That concert had many songs from my favorite album of theirs. I even wrote down the title for her. It was there, and she brought it back, but the print quality of the paper insert on the case was obviously pirated - you could barely read a single letter. All evening I twisted in a dilemma whether to keep the disc or not, and eventually I said to take it back to the store, using that same right to return goods that we had already learned about from previous experiences.

The stress came from the feeling that these bold product returns were ruining our relationship with the sellers, and I didn"t want that - I only wanted to exercise my right, that"s all.

Eventually I did go out with my parents to the MediaMarkt on Enthusiastov. In the row with metal CDs there was always some band called Suicidal Tendencies, and I kept wanting to listen to it in the store"s player but never actually did. That day I bought the album of Dave Mustaine"s solo project. It didn"t stick in my memory. But I also immediately bought my favorite album Youthanasia. That finally kicked off both my buying spree of Megadeth discs and the desire to make my own music.

The booklets had the lyrics - as I said, English - and on some rainy day soon after I rode into the center of Saratov to meet my parents, and we went into the "Knizhny Mir" bookstore at Volskaya and Kirov. They bought me a small English dictionary. At the very beginning there was a grammar reference, and I tried to get into it, but that quickly - after about three days - ended in my own suicidal tendencies: no matter how hard I tried, just like all the years in school, I absolutely could not grasp the grammatical mechanisms of that fucking language.

But English was necessary in order to understand - and therefore be "together with" - the musicians I listened to, and also at least for the illusion that someday I might move to America, where everything I was interested in existed.

.:::.

Part 69 text 3. Disc shops on Kazachya Street with my mother,,, interest in death metal,,, Megadeth fanaticism,,, sitting with a guitar composing my first riff,,, depression from the lack of prospects.

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This was a series of trips into the city, and another day I went out again and met my mother there. We were in the small MediaMarkt on Kazachya Street, number 103. The selection was pretty lousy, but they were selling Megadeth"s 2004 album for eighty rubles, so I bought it. In my opinion that album turned out to be crap, and that in turn only fueled my desire to make music myself - I felt that in my own discography there would never be such weak, non‑hit records.

Kazachya 103 is the neighboring building to another house belonging to that Dasha I used to chase in my youth. I have a lot of stalker‑style video recordings around that address. By coincidence, that whole stretch of Kazachya Street from there to Chapaeva would later become significant in my story.

I never went into that MediaMarkt again. Two hundred meters away, closer to Rakhova, in the Stalin‑era building at Kazachya 100, in the next doorway from the sex shop "Point G" that tortured me psychologically, there was another disc store. It had tons of MP3 discs with metal. They had the discography of the band Death - some kind of licensed edition - with that distinctive image from their album Leprosy on the cover. But I still hadn"t listened to them and didn"t dare buy it yet.

Later I met my mother near the MediaMarkt on Volskaya, and after that we went into another little disc shop right on Kirov Avenue, in building number forty. In the front room a young guy sat there who had a lot of metal discs and actually knew what he was talking about. This time I immediately saw a collector"s DVD - actually two discs - Arsenal of Megadeth, a compilation of all their videos plus various interviews. We bought it right away, and then I stood there chatting with the seller. My mother would always go further inside the shop and look at shoes while I stayed talking.

I asked the seller what this style called death metal actually was. He explained something and named the main bands. He mentioned Death itself. We also talked about Iron Maiden, and he expressed an opinion similar to one I already had - that their best albums started around the year 2000. And he probably informed me that they were about to release a new album.

At home I spent a couple of days watching those DVDs of my then‑favorite band on repeat. There were videos of Dave Mustaine skydiving, stories about his drug addiction, about how he later became a karate practitioner and family man, and just scenes of what everything looked like over there in America. How they recorded in some plywood studios while fooling around and joking, and then suddenly - boom - they"d fly to the other side of the country for some top‑level photoshoot. Basically it became clear that things were going quite well for them, not at all like my stereotype of metalheads as useless misanthropes.

And then the time came for that Soviet electric guitar that had been lying here on the ninth floor throughout my entire childhood, which I mentioned the summer before last and said it would appear in the story. The guitar belonged to someone else - not my father - it had simply been lying here all these years for some reason. He got it out for me, tuned it, and I sat down to try.

By then I was thinking about guitars nonstop and had already made it clear that I saw myself as a guitarist in the future. As if people choose instruments by weight and convenience, my father described the downsides of electric guitars and pointed out that they were heavy. Of course he didn"t like any heavy rock - no distortion - all that, to him, was mainly associated with youthful maximalism, stupidity, and roughness. He preferred reggae, Bob Marley.

But I started plucking the strings. My father had a book called Electric Guitar for Dummies. Besides the classification of guitars, where I also learned the names of the main brands, there were some chord diagrams, and immediately I had that usual beginner thing with the fingertips hurting during the first week until they hardened. Nothing impressive came out - the most important barre chords (where you press all the strings with your index finger) required more strength than I had.

But I realized that the main thing in those chords was what was pressed on the thickest strings. And at concerts I had seen metal guitarists seeming to press mostly those anyway, so I started fooling around, strumming only the bass strings. Soon I got even lazier and just plucked two thick strings, pressing them not in a fifth but in a fourth with a single finger.

For several days in a row I sat with that guitar, composing and playing the same riff over and over with small variations in a syncopated rhythm across three frets - the tonic, a semitone above it, and a whole tone below - something like a Phrygian mode. Later it would become the basis of my first song "Road to Hell", and in adulthood the basis of the track "Nortas".

On some days Baba Valya would go over to Larisa"s. I sat in the living room strumming my little compositions while my parents sat in the kitchen, and overall the atmosphere was actually good - you wouldn"t think that just a month later I"d end up in a psychiatric hospital.

By that time I was practically acquiring a new Megadeth disc almost every day. I collected all the classic albums of the nineties - up to Cryptic Writings, which I liked quite a lot for its melodicism. I would sit there looking at photos of those cool Megadeth guys in the booklets and want to be like them, live in their country, be born there, and know English from the start.

It was a mixture of powerful inspiration - especially from the first results in composing - and hellish, suicidal despair and frustration over the way my life was developing, promising nothing even remotely close to what I wanted. With such a pace of development, with such starting conditions, I would have to spend years just grinding English with tutors to reach, by the age of eighteen, only the level of an American schoolkid. And then the army would grab me for two years.

Once again, just like a year earlier in this autobiography when I wandered around the apartment in giant galoshes with nothing to do because there was no computer, I now notice how abandoned I was by the adults around me - left completely to myself. And I compare that to the people I wanted to be like.

A year had passed, and only now had I picked up a guitar. And not even plugged in yet (that would have to wait another four months). I just sat there day after day strumming with no progress. My father could at least have shown me how to position my fingers correctly for a power chord. Would Jeremy Soule"s mother - a music teacher - have just walked past watching her son waste time on something going nowhere?

He was lucky. Vangelis was lucky. All of them were lucky - someone worked with them. And Jeremy Soule, even though he also ended badly as far as I know, still spent his youth in a kind of narcissistic paradise.

But I had to do everything myself, one tiny step every six months, every decade. Of course in the end I only made my first serious compositions in 2024, when everyone was already making music and nobody needed me anymore.

It was as if my parents" only task had been simply to raise me like a plant. I put more blame on my father. For him it was enough that I didn"t cause trouble, that in the evening there would be a family gathering in the kitchen with the four of us, in peace and friendship, where he would make some toast, drink, and then we would all move to the living room to watch TV before going to bed early so he could get up in the morning and go to his job at the museum with the women there, for whom he had "golden hands".

That was his idyll.

And I kept ruining it with my endless hysterics about cleanliness. Which in reality weren"t about cleanliness at all - they were about this whole sense of being doomed to a life like his, which I didn"t want.

It wasn"t a masculine life at all, and nobody except idiots would have needed me if I became like that. My father constantly told stories about how all the women at his work were helpless nutcases who couldn"t do anything without him, and although consciously at the time I still perceived him as a real man, subconsciously - given everything I"ve said, and the complete absence of any real masculine stressors in those stories - they went straight into my mental "shame archive" and painted a miserable picture of my own future.


.:::.

Part 69, Text 4. OCD-hysteria on the ninth floor and the penalty system,,, the new apartment is delayed,,, trip to Frunze and the peculiar easing of OCD fussiness,,, when visiting.

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I can"t remember any specific meltdowns. They were just constant, background noise. I was running a system of punishments and fines with my parents. Let them pay up: I didn"t ask for this shitty life. Everyone already knew my rules - when to wash hands after being outside, which of my clothes could be touched and where to put them, what to do if you had to grab the handle of a room door after touching a wallet full of germy money. Sometimes, especially Mom, would say she"d washed her hands when I knew full well she hadn"t. For ignoring my cleanliness rules, for all that lying and dismissing me, I assigned penalty points, and after a certain number, the offender was obligated to buy me a simple ninety-ruble disc. Baba Valya"s slip-ups went on Dad"s tab; I didn"t go after her directly. And if, during this unnecessary life of mine, some major misfortune hit - like toilet water splashing onto my ass - requiring a full bath with a couple of large pots of boiling water that simmered for half an hour while I suffered the agony of losing that half-hour of life, plus another half-hour to actually bathe - that was a one-hundred-and-sixty-ruble DVD disc.

Sometimes Baba Valya would do something on her own that I hadn"t asked for and cause problems. Like, while I was asleep, she"d iron my T-shirts - and unbeknownst to me, while she was ironing, cats would dart across them onto the windowsill (they were always jumping from the kitchen table to the sill) and I"d have to wash the entire stack she"d just ironed. I felt sorry for Baba Valya"s effort, which made me even more worked up - triggering that ancient process of sadomasochism. I could have forgiven her, believed her that no cats ran across the clothes. But no - I was compelled to escalate things, push it to the max, to the boil - to "pop" and stop torturing me.

Dad would huff and pay obediently, while controlling Mom was, as always, impossible. At times, to express my hatred, on top of swearing, I even started spitting at her. She remembers this constantly. She also says I pulled faces at her. I don"t remember; probably she means I bared my teeth out of spite. She also thinks I hated her the most. But I hated them both equally - just differently, given their different reactions, the way I dealt with them.

I would also judge my own behaviour by the fact that soon after those days of me strumming that non-fatherly guitar, it vanished and never appeared again. Dad supposedly said it was time to give it back to whoever it belonged to. But it"s too strange that it suddenly had to be returned precisely in those days, after all these years. I now suspect that in reality, Dad simply took it somewhere, or actually returned it to its owner, because my tantrums and bitterness made it clear I could break it.

There was nothing to do, but I didn"t unpack the computer: why settle in and arrange my things, which would spark fights here, if, week after week, as everyone hoped, our new house would be ready, and after a quick renovation, we"d move in?

But nothing moved: the house couldn"t be delivered because of gas connection issues (heating there relied on individual gas boilers), and only from October would the construction manager accommodate the owners, allowing them to enter for renovations during the day without heating. There"d be no gas until the New Year. It turned out to be a long story.

Mom started spending nights at the Frunze apartment with the grandparents. Or at Natasha"s flat - I don"t know.

But once, apparently on September 23rd - according to the weather records, it was hot like summer - for some reason, Dad and I went from Zavodskoy to Frunze. The trip usually takes an hour and a half, and we were travelling closer to evening, but during the transfer from bus 90 to 284, we stopped at MediaMarkt on Volskaya. There, a new Slayer album was on the shelves - so we bought it immediately. And then we continued.

We arrived at Frunze around sunset. Everything was the same hustle and bustle as in childhood: neighbours on the bench, the gate open because people were constantly coming and going. Grandpa with his garage and car. Maybe even that evening cow procession (though no, the grass was no longer green). But we went inside, into the kitchen, and I sat on a stool without taking off my shoes, not leaning on anything, keeping my hands and the disc on my knees so I wouldn"t accidentally knock anything over. Then, out from under the stool from the living room, Murka appeared. Having not seen her longer than ever in my life, I was hit with sentimental affection and instinctively petted her, forgetting all the worms and germs she carried.

I have to say, aside from sentimentality and feelings, this ease with which I ignored the dirt was strongly helped by another trait of mine: I get noticeably less freaked out by filth when I"m a guest, especially among friendly people in friendly places. I trust more - meaning, I assume things are clean. I noticed this many times later in life, when entering a friendly person"s house to buy something second-hand, needing to touch things. And usually I didn"t disinfect purchases from such people. But in hostile or alien places - hospitals, psych wards, or just the street - I was disgusted by everything to the max. And of course, I"m extremely pedantic and obsessive where I live permanently. There, I have full control. That"s why the first days at Baba Valya"s were easy - I still felt like a guest, only gradually sliding into "home" mode. As a guest, I can live almost like everyone else. Both poles of this contextual bipolarity would appear fully in the coming weeks of the story.

After sitting with the grandparents for half an hour, Dad and I drove back to Saratov.

.:::.

Part 69, Text 5. Dad starts his heart theatrics,,, I buy the band Vasp,,, anal masturbation and water consumption,,, watching Megadeth again,,, Mylène Farmer videos and autumnal Phrygian associations.

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In the mornings, I now listened to Slayer on repeat. Baba Valya still had that black portable cassette player, which could double as speakers, so I played through it. Of the whole album, I liked only the first track and "Skeleton Christ." I remember Baba Valya, especially on her days off when she was home, getting noticeably annoyed that all I did all day was amuse myself while everyone else had work and business. That"s also why I still hadn"t touched the computer - that would"ve been too much.

But mainly, she suffered for Dad, for Sashenka. Around the 20th of the month, he started his heart theatricals. He didn"t say anything, just huffed and acted out, mimicking and gesturing as if everything was unbearable and he was a martyr - well, whenever I fined him for germs. He"d pout, building tension inside. That needed noticing and pity, adjusting how one interacted with him. But I changed nothing and pressed on. At that point, complaints were no longer for me, but for the aunts nearby. He began clutching his heart. For some reason, it was at the back, under the shoulder blade. Mom, after spending some days with the grandparents, returned to spend the night and also witnessed these scenes. She constantly remembers how sometimes he grabbed from the wrong side. And whom he complained to - well, Baba Valya and Larisa, whom he sometimes visited. This whole theme develops further.

Meanwhile, one day I met Mom again on Kirov Street, and we went into the big MediaMarkt and came out with the MP3 discography of the band Vasp. Not related to G.T.A. or anything else, but it had long been irritating me in stores, and I wanted to figure it out. At home, I settled in to listen. I always kept my hand on the remote, already suspecting from the covers and song titles that the frontman was obsessively love-struck. That intrigued me even more. After Megadeth, the songs were simple, but still nothing.

The night after buying it, I argued with my parents, booted them from the living room, and Baba Valya came in to sleep on the floor while they fussed in the kitchen. I didn"t even check on them to see what it looked like. One of them may have gone to Larisa - I don"t know. Simultaneously, I had a quiet fit - I had no intention of sleeping, fed up with going to bed at ten. In the middle of the night, I got up and, at super-low volume (no headphones), played Vasp by the TV. I liked the song "Love Machine." The frontman in the pictures reminded me of Baba Valya when she was younger, with the same hair chaos and similar eyes. Those cheesy three-chord pop songs with loads of echo, like "Wild Child," threw me back to the "90s, when I used to go with Baba Valya to the dacha or her sanatorium.

In the morning, after that stupid night, she said she liked one of the "things" that had played at night. I wasn"t advanced enough yet to call them "songs." I still liked three-chord tracks - I was far from burdened with the thought that they had little value, because you could write a million on the fly and all would be hits, triggering associations, but it"s just like jerking off by hand over and over: cheap, always safe - but pathological and crippled. Not a real event, not a real girl. Only supplementary to the real.

Until we moved from the ninth floor ten days later, I often listened to the first track from The Headless Children - in the verse, it still resembled my very first guitar composition. I didn"t listen to any more Vasp after that album.

Hot water in that cursed Baba Valya house appeared sporadically, and then, with the shower running, I couldn"t resist masturbating - and, of course, with a finger in my ass. Meanwhile, Baba Valya was very annoyed by the water consumption I caused. Any excuse was used to get Mom to take me somewhere. I also now used my toothbrush in the bath - handle-side in - and when it inevitably got filthy, I had to wash it five times, wasting tons of soap. I also noticed that in hot water, semen coagulates like boiled egg whites, impossible to dissolve, hard to collect. Luckily, there was never a strainer in their drain, so it all washed away immediately - and, strangely, never clogged.

Everything involving the bath and toilet was exhausting. Baba Valya, for example, would dump the cat litter into the toilet, then wash it over the bath, and then I"d have to clean all the handles, doors, and anything she touched.

I don"t recall watching Lev Kassil discs in September - they were probably still tightly packed, and I thought I"d wait until the final move to unpack them. Now, I"d clearly grown impatient - I unpacked and got out Megadeth"s Rude Awakening. I watched it for a couple of days. Darkness came early, and typical autumn evenings brought gloom outside the window and in the flat. Yet sometimes, if I didn"t overthink, everything revived, and Dad even made a comment about the Megadeth drummer, laughing at Mustaine as if he were giving birth to his singing. Those days, I loved the melodic, elaborately extended solo improvisation of "She-Wolf." I generally loved everything associated with "she." Iron Maiden. Lady Reiter. Medusa.

One night, not wanting to sleep, I drifted into the kitchen. Baba Valya was usually asleep with the TV and lamp on - she"d switch them off after the first snore. Same this time - TV still on, and I sat by it. Their flat had a basic cable package with a music channel. At low volume, I watched two new Mylène Farmer videos - the one where she undresses, and "Fuck Them All." The first song was brand new, audible even outside, and despite its major melody, it strongly evokes that autumn for me. "Fuck Them All" carried the familiar Phrygian melody from the first video, with matching atmosphere and landscapes. I"ve mentioned before that since childhood, that musical mode associated with that clip evoked autumn, fields, dim sun low on the horizon. Now, a new association crept in - "gothic." I"ll explain in the next sections. Gothic, for me, was less about style, more about time - medieval. And that, in turn, was about Oblivion. All those autumn and winter landscapes were not random but part of that medieval-esque virtual world. This will come to the forefront in my story exactly a month later.

.:::.

Part 69, Text 6. First encounter with black metal and other second-tier subgenres... obsession with "gothic"... Amatory and related topics... Marilyn Manson... imagining a darkly perverse gothic concept for my project and its music video.

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Somehow - probably thanks to Baba Valya, who brought me a Kit-Kat or some newspaper to amuse myself every day despite my mood - I ended up with a teenage, almost childlike magazine - maybe the same kind of "Klassny" one Baba Valya used to get me as a kid - and in it there was an article about Cradle of Filth and their, as I now realise, then-new album with the green cover. At the time it seemed completely inappropriate for the age group. When I listened to them later, they would turn out to be one of the shittiest bands I ever heard, but then I was in the magic of not knowing. That article was the first time I saw the words "black metal." I had no idea what it sounded like, but I understood it was a "second-tier" subgenre of metal - not thrash, not heavy, not eighties, but something newer, underground, colder, darker.

In the MediaMarket on Volskaya, there were two spinning racks full of discs with grim covers in the style of Cradle of Filth. Already, in that same magical ignorance, I suspected that all of it was metal, and specifically the segment where the perfect bands would be. No warm bluesy notes, no ridiculous vocals, no late-Maiden religiosity - just darkness, murder, and heavy atonal riffs - exactly what matched my developing worldview. At the same time, that underground vibe tied even more strongly to my "November hopes" - imagining the shaggy leather-jacketed metalhead crowd and social life. Bipolarity: I was moving toward the darkness of wolfish isolation - yet hoping to find company there.

While I spent whole days on the couch, I noticed and started taking a book from my father"s shelf - either a book with, or entirely about, Gothic architecture. This was riding on the wave of waiting for Gothic III - partly inspired by my growing interest in darkness and the medieval after Oblivion, mostly "vicarious socialisation." By that I mean keeping up with the same games, films, albums as others, following the same media, and feeling "with people." A sort of delusional unity. But it kept me in a relatively light, human-loving state for many years.

The book was full of Gothic castles, cathedrals, round rose windows, vaults, and the rest. Even my mother, given her architectural background, sometimes sat at my feet (others were only allowed to sit at the foot of my bed or behind the sheet) and looked too. This is another example of how I obsess over things. Now it"s castles and Gothic. I flip through books on the topic. But would this lead me to deep study? Would I become an architect like my mother? No. I didn"t even read what was written. Only looked at pictures. I wasn"t interested in the content, just the associative feelings. That"s how it"s been with all my interests: never the substance, only the emotional associations. That"s why I envied professional musicians not as a whole, but in tiny details. I couldn"t and didn"t want to compose on demand, without personal associations. What"s the point? For me, it would just be work. And them? They care about making music itself, not chasing escapist feelings - plus they get paid. That"s what I could logically envy, but I can"t, because it excludes what mattered more to me.

On that music channel on TV, they sometimes played heavy artists. Amatory"s "Black-and-White Days" video appeared more than once. The lead singer was super confident, his face a mix of Bodrov and my childhood friend Artyom. I felt he was everything I wasn"t: ladies" favourite, straight-A student, moralistic - and more. The lyrics he sang with all his dramatic gesturing made no sense to me - and I envied that too. I had no conflict with him; he was on TV, yet I couldn"t help imagining clashing with him, getting my ass kicked, and crying as usual. He had dyed dark hair in an emo cut - the same I had already noticed on teenagers in spring on BMX bikes, and on the guy who showed me bunny hops that summer in the square. The haircut immediately signified confident teens, which I would never be. The video also had a young woman - supposedly one of the characters" girlfriends (all apparently metalheads) - but she looked like a typical girl from Engels Park, not a metalhead. And I noticed the apartment in the video: I expected some shitty Russian metalhead basement, but no - a nice, even wealthy-looking modern flat.

I still didn"t know what second-tier metal subgenres sounded like, and I assumed the powerful-sounding music in that Amatory song was death metal.

Then one evening they aired Marilyn Manson"s "This Is the New Shit." It was satirical, as is usual with millionaire musicians" dark aggression, but I didn"t know that yet - I just noticed the dark image and sexualised visuals. Manson licked a woman"s feet.

All this - the gothic fascination, dark musical tastes, breaking stereotypes, frustration - shaped the concept for my own creative project at the time. First, I invented the project name: "Death Gothic," mindlessly mashing together the two words dominating my mind. The font had to be Gothic, with sharp edges and faux-bloody drips. I sat drawing logo samples. Then, inspired by Manson and the vampire photo shoots of Cradle of Filth, I imagined a music video for a future hit. The music would be super-angry - like Slayer, 2001. But the key was the visuals. Long black hair (never to be cut), super-dark like Manson, and no censorship in the video. A castle setting, like that film "Subspecies - Bloodstone" that Gujik once gave me, which I threw out on my mother"s orders. Stone walls, candles. And I fuck a girl on a chain with a collar while she kneels and cries. I perform some cruel, mocking lyrics, maybe in the style of Megadeth"s "Dawn Patrol" - derisive, taunting. But I don"t cum - cumming is losing. I would pull out and stab her vagina with a dagger (the "dagger" from Oblivion). Why? For nothing. Because I"m useless to her. Destroy what you want and it doesn"t belong to you. I catch her like a Faulz collector, but instead of hoping she"ll love me, I mock and destroy immediately. Then, as she bleeds internally and externally, I"d show a close-up of her face, eyes, and last moments of consciousness. Later, as an adult, I fantasised about filming a prostitute dying up close - never seen it in murder videos. I believed showing death should be up close, as with suffering of loved ones, like a bound crying child witnessing their mother killed. In the pier episode, I said I repressed thoughts of murder for years. True - I didn"t dwell on them. What exists now are just fantasies.

.:::.

Part 69, Text 7. Behind-the-scenes of the nine-storey... retreat to Natasha"s flat in Engels via Uncle Valera.

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All the first days of October, I argued with everyone, but especially with Mom (so it seemed to her), and from a certain day she started staying in Engels every night. Meanwhile, everything got dark, my sleep schedule was totally fucked, and the nine-storeys - those who needed to wake up for work - were struggling. We called the father-and-Baba-Valya combo the "nine-storeys," and Larisa too - she had her ninth floor there. I hadn"t seen Larisa or her Anya for weeks. I knew Baba Valya sometimes picked up Anya from kindergarten nearby, but she never entered that flat in September or early October.

Dad went to Larisa"s. There were mysteries: he disappeared, and quiet Baba Valya muttered that he"d been taken by ambulance. When at home, they closed themselves in the kitchen behind the glass door, he smoking by the open window. Stress made him smoke. They made calls - probably to Larisa, who was in charge. Baba Valya"s flat was on her. Dad, by the way, was officially registered in Larisa"s two-room flat, the one opposite Baba Valya.

On the last evening, I got dirty again, stressed them both out, and issued Dad some fine. It was around nine. I hadn"t spoken to them the last couple of evenings. Then Dad announced we"d go together to Engels, to Mom"s flat - driven by none other than Mom"s brother, Uncle Valera. I hadn"t seen him for two or three years. Except for recently picking up our Kaselli bookshelf, he hadn"t been part of our lives. And suddenly - from one end of Engels to the far end of Saratov - he"s coming for us. Very strange.

I asked Mom what that was about. She doesn"t even remember my move to Uncle Valera. She says the nine-storeys were planning to commit me to a psychiatric hospital those days. Pure backstage, and according to her, the main line was guardianship-and-housing, devised by Larisa - the most competent in such matters. The nine-storeys, using all complications, my supposed dislike of her, and the fact she no longer stayed here - pretending to care by institutionalising me - wanted to claim me under their guardianship, to make some stake in the new flat Mom bought. Strange that she doesn"t remember my arrival at Uncle Valera. Either there was backstage on her side, or she genuinely didn"t know who picked us up, maybe Dad called Valera.

This was around October 9th, maybe 10th. Maybe they couldn"t tolerate me until the 13th (my supposed institutionalisation). Only certain: the nine-storeys wanted to commit me to the hospital no matter what.

Valera arrived and rang. Dad and I got dressed and went out. I didn"t ask anything, didn"t even think to take my discs. Valera"s son Dima drove - a lifelong military driver after the army. Dad and I sat in the back.

.:.

___Part 70.

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Part 70 Text 1. Arrival at Natasha"s apartment, psychology of funerophobia, panic attack triggered by thoughts of funerals.

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We stepped out into our yard on Lva Kassilya Street, and the Valeras drove off. The entrance we needed was in the middle of the building. The apartment was on the third floor. My father unlocked the door, and we went in. Mom was there. The windows faced Lva Kassilya Street itself. The layout was like our sold three-room flat, only this was a two-room place with no small room. The middle room was filled with our furniture, except for the large bed and the coffee table. The big bed was in the far part of the living room, away from the balcony window, and between it and the balcony was the apartment"s own sofa, plus our coffee table with the small TV. The TV wasn"t actually connected-it just sat there. Along the far wall of the living room was a typical post-Soviet wall unit. My pull-up bar was still lying along it on the floor. The apartment was fully Soviet-style-I imagined people carrying out dead old ladies from flats like this all our life on Lva Kassilya.

The middle room didn"t feel like the place where my contemporary Lyuba had spent her childhood. In fact, we had only once, when I was five or six, visited Lyuba"s home, which was on some high floor and very different. And this apartment, facing the opposite dark side, was definitely her granny"s, and she had surely died here. After all the lies my parents had fed me recently, and after seeing how it was often easier for them to deal with a fine than take me seriously, I didn"t care about their assurances that nobody had died here. I had no clue how I was going to be in this apartment. The toilet was half a metre wide, like in our sold flat-I wouldn"t even be able to enter it without scraping the walls. I remembered my mom telling me, years ago, how she"d visited a flat in Saratov with a repairman, and they were told a corpse had lain there; even the repairman advised against taking it, even if disinfected. The old lady in this flat could have lain here for a while before the Sednevs returned from a trip south. Then they would have washed the floors-the corpse puddle-and poured it all into the toilet. The splashing from the toilet would hit the walls, and now I was supposed to wipe myself on those walls. Screw that. I wasn"t even going to touch the faucet. I"d call my parents to turn the water on and off. I"d pee in the bath. I couldn"t undress here either. Our coat rack was in the way, but... whatever. It was impossible for me. And this was for a long time-it was already clear I"d been expelled from Zavodskoy.

Naturally, without taking off my shoes, I went to the kitchen, spread a bag on a classic Soviet stool-just like the ones they put coffins on by the entrance-and sat down. It was nearly night, and I had to sleep. Mom, seemingly feeding me while insisting on multiple cleanliness requirements, then went to the big bed, where I was supposed to lie too, but I had no intention. Father, not having eaten either on the ninth floor or here since our arrival, had already gone to lie down on the sofa in the living room, in the dark. Only the kitchen light remained on, and I sat on the stool. The apartment was steeped in gloomy silence.

Funerophobia wasn"t just a neurotic affect; it was also linked to oppressive themes-specifically, the fear of the death of loved ones, my parents. Essentially, the painful part of obsessing over death revolved around this. Fear of my own death had always been sublimated into hobbies: snakes, extreme sports, metal music. There was no pain there. But fear of a coffin at home couldn"t be worked through.

In early childhood, when I first toyed with the thought of my parents dying, there were no associations with physical symbols. It was simple: a parent dies, I jump out the window. But throughout school years-with funerals in the yard, buses, and so on-this fear accumulated a whole bunch of symbols. Even entrances became symbolic, even apartments, even these stools.

In a normal OCD (school environment) with worms and disease, fear was standard-fear for oneself and one"s life. But in funerophobia, the corpse toxins were just a pretext. I didn"t even know what it was, how one could be infected, or what would happen. I just didn"t want to touch death itself.

The classic panic attack-with full somatic overload-had happened to me only once in life: after a couple of days of extreme stress, tremors for several minutes, impossible to stop. That was in adulthood. The closest thing to that that night in Natasha"s kitchen was me sitting there, having overloaded my mind with thoughts of dying, of the UAZ van and stretchers, the funeral service, the ruffles on the coffin, and my mother"s doll-like face inside before I"d never see her again. Thoughts came that something might fall in the middle room, and I"d die of a heart attack-and so on. Eventually, I couldn"t even look towards the hallway-what if someone turned into the kitchen? It could be the dead old lady, or some changed version of my parents-but not real and alive.

Tormented in this hell, with sore buttocks from the stool and exhaustion, as I recall until the eastern sky brightened, I finally went to the living room and lay on the bed in my clothes-actually, just leaning back from a seated position on the edge, leaving my legs on the floor. The next evening, when my father would speak, he called this "Spartan style." Later in life, when I slept like this again out of obsession with cleanliness and knew who Spartans were, he explained that they were made to sleep like this to wake up constantly from discomfort and suffer. He told many such unreliable (or read from uncatalogued sources) stories over his life, and I"ve mentioned a few. For instance, he said that a stool in Ukrainian is called a "podsrialnik." Or he used to call me joking names in early childhood-Ench, Bichuganets, Eximbator. In my adulthood, he said these came from folk epics and obscure Soviet cartoons. I can"t find confirmation of most of these names on Google.

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Part 70 Text 2. A day in Natasha"s apartment, obsession over germs, father brings rock tapes, evening toilet journey to the embankment.

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I woke at noon, and only Mom was home-or she had just returned, which woke me. I was still lying with my legs on the floor, numb and aching. I wanted to get further onto the bed or at least take off my boots, but I had to think about Mom: I was in street clothes-jeans I"d sat in on grimy bus seats in September, a tracksuit top from the previous evening"s unpleasant work car-and Mom, although cluttered, was familiar, preparing food. Categorising her as a "stranger bummer" by dirtying her bed further wasn"t in my interest. And even if it weren"t about that, where would I wash the sheets afterward? Not in that bath where they had washed the granny for the last time.

Where Mom went those days was our new apartment. As I said, the construction company director had allowed owners to enter during the day for renovation work. In our entrance, in another flat, Mom found a team of hack workers led by a big-nosed man named Sasha. He will appear briefly in the story. There were partitions and screed, but the walls needed plastering and puttying, and a small redesign was required-to combine the bathrooms. I myself still hadn"t even been near our new house.

There were no activities in the apartment I now sat in, but we had our Kenwood, a DVD player, and a VCR. All were already on the coffee table in the living room. There were cords to connect them. I don"t recall connecting or playing my own tapes. I don"t remember what I did that first day.

Memory begins in the evening. Not as gloomy as yesterday, my father returned after work late in the dark and brought something: video tapes with music. He had been to that disc store on Telmana where Mowgli worked; they were clearing out unwanted tapes, and Dad grabbed two or three cheaply. I sat on the bed with Mom while he connected the VCR and plugged the cords, now playing the tapes: Deep Purple-a known concert. "Smoke on the Water"-he knew the song and said it was a globally recognised hit. After advanced metal music, it wasn"t impressive, of course. I was no longer as uncommunicative, but my paranoid disgust with the apartment was still strong.

While watching, I felt the urge to poop. I hovered near the toilet, considering trying to squeeze in and do it there, but the risk of splashing or touching the wall was too high, with catastrophic consequences. I decided to go to the park instead. It was past ten. I grabbed a roll of paper; my parents opened the door, and I went out. It was dry, not cold, and I was still in my tracksuit top. I knew there weren"t many bushes in the park, and with the weather, people might be sitting on benches, so I went straight to the steps by the embankment at the Monument to the Soldiers near the museum. I went into the bushes where I once had a bottle stash and near which I had cut my leg on glass. I struggled a bit with wiping in the dark-dirty paper, or maybe enough already-and returned. I walked along Gorky Street; opposite the library, two cops were escorting an alcoholic by the elbows-probably their little police kiosk, right at the museum entrance.

This toilet trip had a hidden motive too-the same as in previous years when I tried to linger in the summer park at night: a sex-phobic curiosity about nightlife. The twin girls were nearby. Perhaps I"d see something. I didn"t. I only gained material for a song lyric in the future.

At home, Dad watched a Doors tape. They had well-known hits too. I still walked around in my boots, and that night, not quite due to funerophobia but because of a disrupted routine, I again went for a night vigil on the stool. Dad, having already lost the mood restored by the cassette evening, seemed unable to sleep and kept going out to the balcony to smoke. Mom recalled that his hand even went numb. In quotes, probably.

Most likely, the day described above was 10th October.

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Part 70 Text 3. Trip to Saratov for Mötley Crüe, father on the balcony, introduction to Pink Floyd, and later hatred of them born from loneliness.

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The next day, Mom and I went to MediaMarkt in Saratov. We bought a DVD of Mötley Crüe music videos. We could have watched it in the DVD player (though after "Girls, Girls, Girls" it became clear there wasn"t much point). I was still collecting the remaining artists from the WICE-City Vrock list.

On our way back that evening, for some reason we walked along the street side, and there, on the balcony of our third-floor apartment, was Dad, smoking. We spoke briefly, and he got into a theatrical mood, spreading his arms wide as if making a triumphant gesture to cheering crowds from a podium.

He brought new tapes-one of them was Pink Floyd, a relatively modern concert. I didn"t like it at all. Firstly, it was dark, and I dislike concerts in darkness. We were already sitting in the living room without lights, for some reason, as if there had been no bulbs in those days, and it felt uncomfortable. Then there were laser shows and snippets of strange films. The frontman looked unpleasant, more like a drill salesman than a musician. And in front of a huge crowd, the stage looked like a castle rather than a proper stage. Too much visual spectacle for what? For nonsense. Mark Knopfler"s solos and songs were unique; I called it "musical philology"-skilled conversation in melodic languages. Pink Floyd, by contrast, was sheer graphomania: repeating chord sequences and monotonous sleepy pentatonics on the solo guitar. Later, in my youth, reselling vinyl and seeing how everyone idolised Pink Floyd, I ranted online, claiming their hits weren"t worth a single song by Korol i Shut, especially arranged with similar instruments and extended improvisations. I got banned, considered an idiot, and developed strong hatred for classic rock listeners and people in general. But it was all from loneliness-if I"d had a girlfriend, I wouldn"t have cared about Pink Floyd or forum people.

For the third day, before the psychiatric visit (if it happened), two memories remain. First, waking up still in my Spartan pose, checking that the apartment was empty, and lying back to masturbate. There was already a risk of a noticeable erection even while asleep, despite the tight jeans-I wasn"t covered. Second, during the day, I visited the music store at 35 Gorky Street. This was the store-or rather, the first-floor hall with multiple departments, a photo studio in an inner room we visited with Mom and Granny Klava just before my earliest remembered New Year. In the main hall, there was always the music section, still with some discs. I remember being there with Dad, looking at a Scorpions disc, unsure if it was rock, and he confirmed it was. Probably a year earlier, before his vacation, or maybe two years ago-when even just seeing a Scorpions disc made me high on dopamine from rock in general. Now, it was the electric guitars on display that thrilled me. They sparkled in the light, though all were "uncool" Fender-style-except one, standard body, blue. I imagined a rock-musician future: work, creation, social contribution. It was a magical ignorance of how much of this was worthless crap that only worked with luck. Take the local salesperson (I"ll meet him later in the childhood story): he"d been a guitarist, had done it all, lived in a Khrushchyovka across the street, needed nobody but the guitars.

On his display lay a catalogue. There were Gibson guitars, including a Flying V, but I noticed the next one-an Explorer, also sharp-edged, like Megadeth"s second guitarist"s in the "Rude Awakening" concert. I didn"t want the Flying V-it was common-but I desired the Explorer. Just looked and wanted-it cost as much as my bike, plus amps, pedals, and I knew nothing. So I left.

I still refused to engage with Natasha"s apartment and the life where I couldn"t undress or take off my shoes. The evening of the twelfth remained tense; Dad kept going out to smoke, and I sat in the kitchen, sulking, until the early hours before going to bed.

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Part 70 Text 4. October 13 - heading to the psych hospital with Ivan for a CT scan.

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Morning of October 13 arrived. It was Friday-a maximally autumnal grey day, colder than the previous ones. Still in my boots with legs on the floor, my parents woke me early and said we"d go to a hospital in Saratov for a head CT scan. They"d let me sleep as long as possible, having woken up long before. No breakfast-going straight there. They said Uncle Ivan would come pick us up. In my groggy state, I got up while Dad sat on the balcony, cigarette in hand, in a suffering performance.

After transferring to Uncle Valera"s car, and considering the recent parental fuss over me, Uncle Ivan"s arrival didn"t seem strange. I finally got up, peed, and we went out, three of us. I told my parents it would cost at least a ninety-ruble disc.

Uncle Ivan waited in the car on the same patch under the windows of our sold flat where Uncle Sergey, Grandpa, and we parked our Niva. Ivan, my parents" contemporary, had long been director of a cellophane bag factory and had a solid black foreign car, probably an Audi. He was alone; Dad sat front, Mom and I in the back. Off we went-Lva Kassilya, then straight onto Khalturina, along Gorky past the twins, to the beach. After the beach, just past the Banny Lake, was a petrol station; Ivan looped around to refuel. It was around nine or later, no traffic. Everyone was silent; only the radio played.

In Saratov, we followed the same route as to the gymnasium-Michurina, then turning onto Chernyshevskaya to Zavodskoy. After industrial-zone turns and the bridge, suddenly Metallica"s "The Unforgiven" played. I glanced at Mom; she looked appropriate for the situation-me, ill, being driven for a scan. Ivan switched the station within half a minute. By the way, in my youth, he had a VK page listing "Dolphin" as favourite music. That Dolphin was cited and listened to by Dasha from my youth and other girls I liked-people from the "I"ll never become like that" segment. I never understood their fascination, or any of their Dolphins. Dolphin, for example, isn"t about music, nor seemingly about emotions-maybe about meanings, or feelings, but impossible to discern without high intellect and sociological knowledge. I still can"t understand most of the lyrics of bands I listened to, e.g., "The Unforgiven" and almost all Megadeth songs. I"ve hinted throughout that my comprehension of intellectual artistic texts is paralysed, let alone ability to write my own. In later childhood parts, this became the main reason for my failing self-esteem and halted creative development; instead, I descended to childish toilet-themed texts about excrement and perversions, and prose like this self-documenting autobiography.

But all that crap was still ahead. I went in fairly good mood; even that short clip of "The Unforgiven," strongly tied to autumn, fit the scenery outside perfectly. On the right were leaf-strewn, deserted squares, all very grey, as I"d said.

Turning onto Penza Street near Granny Valya"s house, a little past the stop, Granny Valya herself appeared; we stopped, she joined us, and we drove on. One surprise followed another-kept in the dark about everything. Just like early childhood, when going somewhere meant ending up in some penis-mutilation scenario. Granny Valya gave me a Kit-Kat. As usual, lively, with the manners of a toastmaster, though due to businesslike Ivan, no one wanted to disturb her-silence in the car continued.

For the CT scan, I imagined the procedure: once again, like the neurological hospital last spring, they"d attach suction cups to my head and scan me. I thought we"d do it and perhaps return immediately with Ivan, maybe even to Granny Valya, where there would be a nice breakfast, and I could at least take my discs to Engels (or better, stay there altogether).

Ivan knew the route-Mom later explained that Larisa once had some minor issues, and he drove her there. But they probably didn"t go to a free dump, but to some paid appointments.

After the Sharik market, we turned left, and soon it became clear we were following the same path as to Granny Valya"s dacha. Travel by car here was fast. We got onto Astrakhan Highway, turned left uphill. Private houses appeared below on the right, with autumn hills beyond. I"d never driven this road in autumn before. In the distance, it looked like Oblivion, a hilly city district akin to Kvatch. We drove a paved road with power lines, petrol stations, and garages alongside. Crossed a railway bridge. To the right, some funeral-related scene-memory shows wreaths on fences, but likely just a banner for funeral services, perhaps one wreath for a D.T.P. Very quickly after the bridge, we turned right off the highway onto a narrow road along garages, then through trees-a wild stretch. On the left, the hill continued; on the right, below the valley with private houses and all of Saratov, even Engels. After almost a kilometre, the road ended at a barrier, and we entered the grounds of a large hospital. By then, Mom had explained we were going to the main regional psychiatric hospital.

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___Part 70

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Part 70 Text 5. Altynka, entering the hospital grounds, being led into a building on the hill.

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In Saratov, the regional psychiatric hospital is called Altynka, named after the local hill, Altynnaya. Along the road we drove, minibuses from central Saratov run, and when they pass this barrier, they stop at a small local terminus. Ahead, further up the hill, were other buildings, and somewhere higher, rising above the dense trees across the grounds, was a thick brick chimney. Near the stop we reached was a large two-storey building-on the map, House 50, Building 3. Like most of the buildings here, it was an old early-20th-century brick structure with high ceilings, tall windows, and a crumbling façade.

We immediately got out with my parents and climbed the steps to the high first floor to clarify something. Ivan waited below. But my people were apparently told we needed another building, so we got back in the car and drove deeper into the grounds, toward the chimney, which in my mind was already nothing less than a crematorium.

Soon, on the left was a relatively picturesque pond, and on the right and below, another pond, overgrown with reeds. The road between the ponds ended at a small Orthodox church and another perpendicular road leading left uphill to the chimney, and right somewhere downhill. For me, Orthodox churches immediately evoke funerals. We turned right and soon arrived at a small building, with various cars and police around. House 50, Building 9. I got out with Mom and Dad. Surrounded by all this mortuary gloom, and knowing I had to undergo some procedure here, I was furious and demanding. There wasn"t even a CD or DVD-this was full-on hell for being brought to this filth.

The three of us went inside. We had to wait for someone. I didn"t even know how to express my hatred for this place, so I just stood, spitting on the walls, the chairs-almost on my parents too. They sat with glum faces. A man in a white coat appeared, and we went into an office. He quickly asked me some questions, and I quickly played the madman: naming myself Jesus and God, claiming hatred for everything-parents, him-and cursing everyone. They sent us to another building. As we left, Dad said something to Ivan in the car, and he drove off somewhere. I assumed he"d return.

Mom, Dad, Granny Valya, and I walked back uphill toward the mortuary, then further toward the huge chimney. My rage was limitless-I felt as if walking through a rotten cemetery. Where was a hospital, in the conventional sense, with offices, doctors, diagnostic equipment? What the hell kind of equipment could exist in a hilly area with all these serpentine roads?

We reached almost to the chimney, which stood among brush and undergrowth on the slope, clearly abandoned (though that didn"t erase its crematory past). From the main road under tall trees, a stepped pedestrian path climbed to a small old building. Silence, only cawing crows above. It looked almost like a forest or a sanatorium-but it was complete crap. Mom tried to entertain me, showing things, but I just wanted to get the CT done and leave: I knew that after the suction cups and all that crap in such a vile place, I"d need to bathe and wash thoroughly-and in Natasha"s apartment, that would be sheer hell.

We climbed to the small building: House 50, Building 8. It was single-storey, with a wooden porch and entryway like a private house; only further back was the old brick. We had to ring the doorbell. Some nurses let us in, and we entered the vestibule. I inhaled the local musty smell for the first time-more on that later. Left was a door to an office; right, a door to another room; straight ahead, a short corridor with chairs and another door beyond. I had to undress. Granny Valya had brought slippers and home clothes for me. I tried to control who touched my down jacket and other items during the procedure, giving instructions; everyone agreed. But the nurse told me to follow her into the room on the right, and I had to go. There were scales-I had to weigh myself. In my song about this day, I say "they took my weight"-apparently that"s not proper phrasing, but I always said it that way. For me, weight, shit, blood-all part of the medical procedure where you"re just material being examined, so wording was uniform.

Then we returned to the vestibule; my parents gave me some things in a bag, and I bared my teeth at them to avoid them touching my street clothes. I followed the nurse to the door at the end of the small corridor with chairs. She unlocked it with a strange large key, and we entered a room, where she closed the door behind us.

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Part 70 Text 6. Inside the ward, sleeping and unruly disabled children, instinctive panic tremor.

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The room was small, resembling a kindergarten assembly hall. Empty. The main section was to our left-carpeted, with a piano, and two or three windows on the far wall. Outside the windows were bars. The lights were off. On the right, along the wall, was a row of benches, then an open door, with light and children"s voices spilling out, and a nurse sitting on a chair in the doorway. The nurses wore blue-green uniforms. I always called them nurses, though most were just dumb orderlies; only a couple actually administered injections. At the end of the room were two more doors and a wooden staircase of about five steps leading to a corridor.

Past the room with children, we went up the stairs to that corridor, which had wards on both sides. There were no doors on the wards; each had five or six beds pressed together, a couple of nightstands, and nothing else. I put my bag in a nightstand as instructed and we returned. I had to enter the children"s room.

The room was about fifteen square metres, with around thirty children of both sexes. No room to move; I stood just behind the orderly at the doorway. My guide left, and I stood waiting. The children were about five to ten years old; none matched my height or apparent age. On the right were benches and a table, fully occupied. Ahead, right, a cupboard, two windows on the far wall, and a small tube TV showing some channel. It resembled a kindergarten-but only briefly. Half the children lay on the carpet, seemingly asleep. The others-unlike a kindergarten-engaged in counterproductive chaos. Few played with the toys; most fought or conflicted. Unlike kindergarten, orderlies didn"t intervene, sometimes provoking conflicts or mocking complaints. I noticed soon that there was no sensible reason for their disputes-all children were simply insane. All awake children seemed to have ADHD, compounded by severe developmental delays. I realised I couldn"t converse with anyone. After this, only I and the nurses existed for me. Bars on the windows reinforced the sense of containment.

I mentioned panic attacks with somatic manifestations. My adult full-body tremor was preceded by a weaker version; next strongest was the kitchen funeral-phobia episode. Third, the episode in this small room began. Intellectually, I knew I was here for a CT and would be called soon. These children, as in the neurological hospital, were probably brought for day procedures, returning home in the evening. The beds were for rest between procedures, or similar. But instinctively, I felt total terror. My knees shook, teeth chattered, and a knot formed in my solar plexus, like in kindergarten. The tremor wasn"t visible externally but, if it counts as a panic attack, it was that. It would recur every time I was brought here or to other psychiatric hospitals, and, crucially, now that I perceived it as normal, I knew the same tremor had occurred every morning in kindergarten, early school days, playgrounds, and other early-childhood institutions. In this room, mid-morning, I didn"t connect it to stress, assuming it was hunger and cold.

A particularly unruly boy, about ten and taller than most, with ears sticking out and a perpetually angry face-exactly like the famous "Drezi and Kazi" photo-walked from child to child, provoking them, while a nurse repeatedly yelled, "Maniac!" I asked when the CT would happen and where my parents were, expecting the usual kindergarten/school response: someone would acknowledge my question, check, ask questions. There was none. I felt like empty space.

A clock on the wall showed I had been there at least an hour. I sat at the freed end of a bench.


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___Part 70

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Part 70 Text 7. Going to the doctor for a consultation, back to the children"s room, lunch, darkness, no hope for a CT, dinner and care packages.

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Sometimes I held my breath, tensed, and froze-and then I didn"t tremble. But as soon as I relaxed, the shaking returned, unstoppable. The boys sitting on the floor were playing some strange game with paper cubes. Then the door with the lock slammed open, another nurse appeared, and told me to follow her. Finally. I instantly erased all the children from my mind, and the tremor eased.

We passed again through the door with the strange lock into the vestibule of the building-and I noticed that in her hand it wasn"t a key at all, just a door handle removed from a door, which she inserted into a square slot and turned. My parents were no longer in the vestibule. She led me through another door-to the doctors" office. There were just two desks with chairs, and a woman sat behind one.

For many years before I sought out the doctors, I imagined she was very young, maybe twenty-five to twenty-seven. Judging by a photograph and her years at this eighth children"s ward, she was almost certainly Ekaterina Vyacheslavovna Karabanova-the search engine confirmed it-roughly my mother"s age. Dark hair, a kind-looking face.

Sitting there, I didn"t dare act up. She didn"t ask for my story-it was clear she already knew everything from my parents. She didn"t even cross-check anything. What my parents told her was fact. She asked the standard questions-probably about voices and visions. I had none, so I answered honestly. But, not yet realising I was in deep trouble, I didn"t withhold anything about the black depressive shit I"d been in for years, didn"t deny aggressive outbursts toward my parents, insisted that everything was filthy and infected, and said I wanted to live in America. To appear friendly, she eventually steered the conversation to rock music, mentioning a band she liked. A few days ago, while digging through Motley Crue and the glam-rock scene in Vice City, I had been thinking a lot about Quiet Riot (with their hit "Cum on Feel the Noize"), and I thought she had mentioned them. I sat with her for about fifteen minutes. And-fucking hell-she led me back to the children"s room.

My chest tightened even more. I tried not to notice or memorise anything happening, but I couldn"t take my eyes off the TV, which no one but the orderly was watching, and so I found myself glancing at the little disabled children. They were still fighting and playing their obsessive game with the paper cubes, tossing them slightly and slapping their hands under them, seeing what landed on top to "win." I watched the time. Here was another difference from kindergarten: there, I wanted the clock to move faster. Here, the longer it dragged, the more illusory the CT became, and the worse the sense of crap.

Pots clattered; the cafeteria smell spread; a door opened, and Granny in green announced lunch. You could also use the local toilet-another door. I didn"t care about germs and went in-it felt like a prison cell, with no cubicle doors.

In the small cafeteria, trays of familiar kindergarten-grade crap were laid out; I ate some soup. In the middle, a plate of bread stood out-huge chunks, treated as a delicacy by the kids. The mix of cafeteria smells with the old building gave the place a pervasive, cloying stench. I also noticed that all doors had no handles; the nurses carried handles like the one used by the first nurse, which fit all doors.

After tea, a nurse stood near the exit; everyone had to take pills. I was given something and swallowed it. Mouths were almost never checked. We were then herded back into the small room.

Being Friday, by about three o"clock I realised this was probably the last chance for a procedure-though my solar plexus ached, and there were clearly no machines in this building. Soon I understood: there would be no CT today. I accepted that it had gone wrong and that we"d come another day. Again, like in kindergarten, I just waited for the end of the day, when someone would surely come for me. Why weren"t my parents there? I thought they had gone to a local visitors" cafeteria, or maybe to Granny Valya"s, but hours passed with no one, and my chest grew heavier. Outside the barred window, darkness fell. Nothing was visible but a concrete fence and the hill beyond. This was the far edge of Saratov and of this fucking hospital grounds. A board game lay on the floor; the children tried to figure it out. Something about cities-they guessed, but no one succeeded, though the answer, Las Vegas, was obvious. I suddenly realised these kids had no parents or home. The nightmare deepened.

With no one coming for me, time should have dragged, but instead it flew. In the large hall, the bell had rung a couple of times earlier, presumably signalling arrivals from outside. I waited for it.

From five o"clock, a phrase lodged in my head: "I did nothing wrong," and I repeated it like a mantra.

At six, all the children were sent back to the cafeteria. I thought it was a delayed afternoon snack, but there was a full second meal-porridge and bread. Outside it was dark. As the kids sat, the orderlies brought bags and called names.

From the cursed "Capernaums," my chest always jumped-at school, sometimes in fear of scolding, sometimes in "shock hope" that my mother had come to take me from this place. Now, it was like the second, but worse than the first. The bag was large-like the big toy bag I had on my first day at kindergarten, which I cried over. This one had food: cookies, juice boxes, Granny Valya"s homemade cutlets. It smelled exactly like a gift bag from New Year. I was in shock. There was probably a note from Granny Valya, but now nothing commented on what was happening.

When the cafeteria ended and bags were taken, we were herded back to the room. I sat on the bench. I could have cried long ago, but shock blocked all reflexes. Paralysis.

.:::.

Part 70 Text 8. Paralysis and sense of abandonment, overthinking and justifying in despair, everyone led to wards, end of day in sobbing.

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By now, the main corridor had not calmed down like during the day-there was constant bustle, like when shifts changed in the children"s hospital I stayed in as a kid. That, along with the wards, confirmed this was a 24-hour facility-children lived here, not just came for day care.

I had never spent a night away from home without my parents, except those six days in a children"s hospital. I"d lived with my mother my whole life, slept in the same bed. Summer camps, the army, anything isolating me from home and Mom were lifelong fears. In that hospital, the children were normal, staff listened, and Mom was three hundred metres away; I knew what was happening. Now, a nightmare unfolded before me.

I probably confirmed my fears by observing some children: we"d be put here to sleep. Given that these children clearly had no parents, I realised this was just containment, not treatment. Apart from pills, there was nothing. I had seen scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo"s Nest: circle discussions, talking with the insane. If it were a hospital, there would at least be therapy or machines-helmets with wires for brain stimulation, like the CT I came for. Here was just a shelter, an orphanage for disabled children. And I, not disabled, was thrown in as punishment or because there was nowhere else for me.

I tried to justify myself. I hadn"t done anything truly bad. Sure, I fantasised about murder, even planned it once, but I never killed anyone and never intended to since that day at the pier. Why be deprived of freedom? My parents couldn"t have reported me for verbal aggression and spitting. This punishment made no sense. Was I isolated to save me from myself? If I wanted to, I could"ve jumped off a balcony a hundred times. My parents couldn"t have believed I would actually do it. In the last days, I hadn"t shown suicidal behaviour, except for the hammer episode at Lev Kassil, which was a one-off. Why else? For not studying? I"d have gone to school if Mom forced me-threats, punishments, deprivation-but since last winter, all that stopped. We sold Lev Kassil; I couldn"t go to school anyway, and without registration at Granny Valya"s apartment, I couldn"t be enrolled. Since moving to Natasha"s, no one made me go anywhere. My sensible parents couldn"t have sent me here with good intentions. Surely, if I cried here now, the helplessness would imprint on me for life, erasing control and causing countless negative consequences. Alternatively, my parents could have been taking me to a CT, but some state mechanism ran independently and took me. I didn"t even know if I could take the pills here. Maybe I was truly a captive, taken from my parents, and the pills would do what Mom had warned.

A storm of conjectures raged, but the fact remained-I sat among the mentally disabled behind bars, twenty kilometres from home, and it was clearly bedtime.

By about eight, the order came to leave the room. Outside, near the stairway to the upper corridor, a nurse sent everyone to the toilet, then up the stairs to the wards.

My chest and face ached from rising tears. I stood at the bottom almost to the last moment, then, when called to go up, tried again to understand what was happening-again no answer. The nurse oversaw a herd of children, yelling at one, then another. I asked for my mother, but I was treated as nonexistent. Wiping my first tears, I went up. In the corridor, the distributing nurse confirmed I was to go to the bed near the nightstand with my things. I couldn"t see her through my tears. Other boys sat on adjacent beds, and judging by their voices and movements, they felt at home. I wept silently-an enormous outpouring, like in the worst moments of my life: the pier, Zemskov, and similar. The boys were waiting for pills. A nurse walked from bed to bed with a tray. I asked for my parents again, but she ignored me, only telling us to take the pills. No one cared that I was crying. I took the pill given. She told everyone to lie down and left. I lay down, fully sobbing, without removing anything. The boys muttered nonsense about why I hadn"t taken off my socks and what I would masturbate with. Considering the next day I would cry even harder, I realised they hadn"t given me the injection that was always administered on the first day in psych hospitals. As noted, I don"t understand all the pharmacological shit, but I believe this was the Aminazin shot. It doesn"t matter; it"s given in the first days to obliterate memory and emotional reflexes. For several days, you wander from bed to toilet like waking from sleep at home, barely conscious. I don"t remember if they gave it here. But, drenched in tears and snot, I fell asleep almost before the lights went out.


.:::.

Part 70 Text 9. Wake-up, breakdown on the stairs, Mum arrives - another breakdown.

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When I woke up, the usual disgusting morning hospital bustle was already going on in the corridor - noise, children walking around. I crawled out of the ward and immediately asked the orderly chasing kids around if I could call my parents. Instead of answering, she led me into a room further down the corridor. There were a couple of sinks and a bathtub. Several kids were brushing their teeth over the tub at once. Somewhere there were labelled cups with toothbrushes, and I was supposed to take mine.

The toothbrush in my cup wasn"t new and wasn"t mine - not from the ninth floor, not from Engels. If it had been passed along by my parents, then in reality it could have been Granny Valya"s, which my father had grabbed by mistake. I stood there with it for show, put it back, and left. My solar plexus was already sagging again. Then a sharp neurological pain shot through my chest.

Partly remembering that show where a con artist slipped away from the police by faking a heart attack, partly thinking about my father"s recent one, but mostly because of my usual hypochondriac fear that something might actually be wrong with me, I went back to the orderly and said something was wrong with my heart. After her same careless reaction as before, tears started flowing again.

And then things went completely off the rails. The crowded corridor between the wards had emptied - everyone was already in the cafeteria - and I somehow got stuck by that staircase and had been crying there in a daze for twenty minutes, now no longer holding back my voice. Back then I didn"t yet know that my Granny Klava had the exact same habit during hysterics: clutching the wooden handrail at the start of the crying fit, hanging onto it, and slowly sliding down. That"s exactly what I did. By now I had already slid down almost to the bottom. Then I let go and ended up on the floor.

Under my face there was an actual puddle of tears and snot, and I was crying either in a praying pose or almost lying on my side - exactly like Granny Klava, as I would later see in my youth. No one came over or touched me, and it felt as if there was no one else in the hall where I was lying, though I didn"t even look around. I was near the toilets there.

I had probably been in that hysterical fit for half an hour already - together with my first day at kindergarten, the harshest in my life - when finally some orderly, returning from the visitors" vestibule, came up and said that my mum was on her way. They must have called her on the phone in the doctor"s office.

After that everyone moved back to the small room, and I continued crying there with a slightly weaker sobbing rhythm. A nurse came in and handed out pills. The television was on again, and the kids were lying or sitting on the floor wherever there was space. I hadn"t eaten breakfast.

Closer to noon, when I had no tears left and was just sitting inside a shell staring at one point, the bell rang at the entrance from outside. One of the orderlies went to check, then came back and told me my mum had arrived. I went with her to the visitors" vestibule.

I had been wrong that there were no tears left. The moment I saw my mum she disappeared behind a wall of tears, and for at least five minutes I couldn"t stop crying or say anything because of the spasms and choking. We sat side by side on the small chairs there, and I cried into her shoulder. She had come in her ginger-coloured sheepskin coat, which she took off and set aside, and with the same ginger leather handbag.

She said, "I won"t leave you here." She said the people from the nine-storey building had deceived her, set everything up. The whole trip had been initiated by them. They told her we were only going to get a scan done, and she had believed it like an idiot - she realised what had happened only after I had already gone inside.

When I finally became capable of speaking, the first thing I blurted out through tears - abandoning my childish Peter Pan façade - was that the boys here masturbated into their socks, as if that were somehow crucial information. The psych ward had also ruined the image I had carefully maintained in front of my mum for years: the innocent boy who knew nothing about masturbation.

Mum had brought food, and after calming down a bit I started eating. She always tried to cheer me up, joked around, but every time I started to laugh I immediately burst into tears again. I kept remembering Rose laughing through tears on the raft in Titanic, only my situation was far worse. I could start crying again in the middle of a conversation or just while listening to her. These reactions would always happen during these visits. Only the tears themselves usually lasted just the first day after confinement - because later, as even in this first time, the pills would start working and completely suppress the physical expression of emotions, leaving only the mental part, which became an inner hell with no way to release it.

.:::.

Part 70 Text 10. Explanations of the background, I fall ill, neuroleptics suppress emotions, agreement to take me home on Tuesday.

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Later, sometime the next year, Mum told me that before this first visit - when she had planned to take me home immediately if possible - my father had knelt down at home and begged her not to do it. That was why she came alone: he was against it. And besides, so much had been invested in this plan. Most of it wasn"t even their doing - Larisa had been the main organiser. My father had never even been able to handle a trip to the clinic without Granny Valya. Ivan the businessman wouldn"t have driven that far without Larisa asking him, and she, who was supposedly so shy around him that she wouldn"t even dare fart in his presence - as Granny Valya once told me, she would get up at night and go to the bathroom for that - must have been deeply convinced this was necessary. There was probably that whole guardianship-housing theory behind it.

But I didn"t want to unravel any of that backstage intrigue right then. What mattered was when I could get out. I couldn"t simply leave - I needed the doctor"s permission, and it was Saturday now, so she wouldn"t be there until Monday. The thought of staying two more days terrified me, and any hint of hesitation from Mum about whether she could take me home immediately made me start crying again. But she said she would come every day and stay as long as they allowed, and that she would get me out no matter what.

We sat there for an hour or an hour and a half until lunch approached and the nurses said I had to go inside but could come out again afterwards. During all the time I was here - and even in the following days - not a single other child had visitors (and over the following months there would be barely a dozen such cases). Once they saw that I had a mum and wasn"t an abandoned child, the nurses and orderlies seemed to treat me somewhat differently, and that alone made things a little easier - the same dynamic as in kindergarten, early school, or the playground.

Throughout the afternoon I felt growing weakness and a nasty rawness in my throat, and by evening the chills began. After lunch and pills we either sat together until evening, or she came back again later. If it was the second option, she must have wandered around Saratov for hours - there was no point driving two hours back to Engels. She stirred up a fuss about me being sick, and we parted until the next day. Already shivering, feverish, and in that familiar childhood state I called "wavelike sighing" after crying, they led me to bed and started treating me.

The next day I stayed in bed with a fever. During the day you weren"t allowed to lie in bed unless you were ill - that"s why the neuroleptic-sedated kids slept on the carpet on the floor. During my later stays they would let everyone out into the large hall with the piano, and I would hardly ever enter that small room again. But this time the heating probably hadn"t been switched on yet, so everyone was crammed there to avoid drafts.

That Sunday Mum came again. Even with a fever I went out to see her. For warmth she spread her sheepskin coat on the chair and wrapped me in it. Already certain I would get the hell out of here soon, I felt bad about her coat - I didn"t want it rubbing against all this fucking filth here, these fucking chairs, and I didn"t want the trousers I had worn inside this fucking place - even lying on the floor in that hysterical fit - to touch the fur. A sheepskin coat isn"t some synthetic jacket you can just wash. You can"t wash those fucking bacilli out of fur. And where would you even do it - not in the bathtub at Natasha"s flat. But those worries existed only at the level of thoughts; in terms of will and action I couldn"t dwell on them - I was already heavily sedated with neuroleptics and burning with fever.

And every time I went out to see Mum I still felt the same urge to break down crying, but each time it became harder because the pills were turning me into a vegetable. Neuroleptics are a prison for emotions. And they were definitely neuroleptics, because they had diagnosed me, of course, with childhood schizophrenia.

On Monday Mum came again, probably twice. In the morning I went to speak with that doctor, Ekaterina Vyacheslavovna. Standard questions - how I felt, and so on. According to the plan we had agreed on, I answered everything with: "Fine." Mum arranged to take me home under her responsibility. But I still probably had a fever on Monday, so we decided we would leave on Tuesday.

Every time I sat with Mum it felt like a paradise of calm, but each time I returned from the visitors" vestibule back inside and the door closed behind me, the same nightmare anxiety returned, along with the urge to cry. Those were the most destructive sensations for my sense of agency I have ever experienced.

.:.

___Part 71.

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Part 71 text 1. Returning from Altynka,,, sleep and forgetting acrobatic ambitions,,, the clumsy tech-user complex,,, fear of the punitive psychiatric hospital,,, destructive treatment,,, escapist solipsism.

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The minibus from Altynka goes straight to the city centre, all the way to Moskovskaya, and my mum and I got there and transferred to the 284 to Engels. We returned to Natasha"s apartment. Dad didn"t show up that evening. He"d just... disappeared, sulking because everything with the nine-storey buildings hadn"t gone the way he wanted. Beyond not being able to tolerate me anymore, he really did think I was schizophrenic, and probably seriously believed that the psychiatric hospital would "fix me." That favourite word of the clueless in this field - "fix." He couldn"t imagine that the hospital would traumatise me and make me even angrier, because he didn"t really live with me. That"s why he"s a "father" and not a "dad." He wouldn"t be around for almost two weeks.

The negativity of the past few days had far exceeded my fear of death, and I"d reached its peak, so in this apartment I felt lighter. I was still feverish, and on tablets, and not making a fuss about my filth (which now reached far above my mum"s bed), I stripped off, lay down on the big bed, and continued to be sick there. Mum brought me tablets, tea with jam, food in bed - just like when I was a child. And I fell asleep.

That night I dreamt I had my own house, and in it a little gym of my own, with an acrobatic track like in the Engels gymnastics hall - springs inside, green felt on top. I woke up still thinking about it, imagining returning to gymnastics, coming back - after two years of escapism - to the real world and living in a physical body. Mum, already awake, came and sat beside the bed, and I told her I wanted an acrobatic track. After a few shock-filled days, I was very sentimental, and so I sounded as serious as when I had once dreamed of a bicycle, a computer - as if I really had a new enclosure - and at such moments Mum usually said something implying she might make it happen. But this time she just listened in silence and left. By the time I got up, I had forgotten about it myself.

After that, only once - after I was over thirty, writing parts of this gymnastics story and watching YouTube - did the desire to close that gestalt in acrobatics return: to finally learn to do a standing backflip. I"d seen videos of even fifty-year-old men doing it. But then I imagined myself having done it - and it was worse: the skill was pointless, and there was nowhere to go with it. Better to forget.

I don"t know exactly when it appeared - but after the psychiatric hospital, Mum already had a mobile phone. A simple button Nokia. Dad had bought it for her at some point earlier. I"d only held a mobile once - Slepukhin had lent me his in class about a year and a half ago. I was curious, wanted to explore it, but, like Dad"s, I didn"t dare touch it. It seemed to me that my parents, especially poor Dad, who had paid for their phones, remembering how I ruined things and gadgets in my hands, would say: "Just be careful" or even forbid me to touch it - and that would open that wound in my self-respect all over again.

I hadn"t shat since that day at the embankment - the longest stretch in my life. So at lunch the following day, post-psychiatric stay, I finally shat. Stripped down, I squeezed into the tiny toilet and, without closing the door, laid down a huge log. All of this - shitting in this apartment, undressing, hanging up my puffer coat, not throwing a fit that might disturb the neighbour - I was only capable of because of fear. That"s precisely why psychiatry feels punitive to me. As logical as it might be that they isolate me for peace, not punishment, when I"m released, I restrain my aggression solely out of fear of going back into isolation. While that isolation makes me miserable, for me, that is punishment.

But I had to bathe. There was hot water, so I put on some of Mum"s slippers and got into the bath. Even that was a huge concession under fear - water still splashed from the bottom of the tub, and I ground my teeth. And in this was the same destructive effect of the hospital and its suppression, the deprivation of my agency. Before the hospital, when I controlled everything, I more or less felt myself in my body, physical, even losing in gymnastics, cycling, and everything bodily. But under fear, forced now to "accept" the bacilli - or rather, the lack of control over my body and what was happening to it - I was utterly destroyed as a physical object. That"s why the six months of hospital that began would feel so magical to me. In that state, escapism was not desire, but necessity, and I would find it.

For now, without music, my own discs, or a computer - anything to escape into - I threw myself into theories I had come to on my own. Maybe I was inspired by some line from a song lyric, I can"t remember. I concluded: "The world doesn"t exist. Everything is a product of imagination." Solipsism. Mum and I were planning to go to Saratov, and I was already shod, walking and telling her all this. She still entertained it, commenting: "But how, you"re here, you can feel yourself if you pinch yourself." But I held my ground. She often recalls those monologues - for her, the clearest examples of my supposed schizophrenia. I, not knowing what to argue or develop, oscillated between whether or not to consider myself God in this paradigm.

I should note, in all the six months of the hospital and later visits to psychiatric wards in my youth, not once did anyone utter the words "obsessive-compulsive disorder," "OCD." I first stumbled upon them online myself after turning eighteen, and only then learned Mum didn"t know either. During those six hospital months, the only word you ever heard was "schizophrenia."

Probably thanks to Uncle Seryozha, because in those days he drove Mum a lot, at least halfway to Saratov, we went again to Altynka to see the doctor. She supposedly prescribed pills that were meant to be taken, but naturally I didn"t want to become a vegetable, and Mum couldn"t force me. Even though she considered me schizophrenic, she always had a realistic attitude toward neuroleptics: better not to live than to live like that. She had seen what state they induced. She also, by the way, first noticed another trait of mine in confinement: usually my sharp, aggressive, joking voice changed in the hospital and for some time after release into a whiny one. In those days, as I recovered from shock, it returned to normal.

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Part 71 text 2. Autumn Iron Maiden and their new album,,, buying three cassettes: Guns N" Roses,, Anthrax and W.A.S.P.,,, escapism via past associations,,, going to an internet café in Saratov.

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Those first trips to Altynka, with its still autumnal forest and scenery, I strongly associate with Iron Maiden. Especially the song "Wasting Love" - though I don"t know where I could have heard it then; it"s not even on "Rock in Rio" to remember from there. Most likely, "Wasting Love" got mixed in at the end of my adolescence, when I also listened to their "Fear of the Dark," also in autumn. Iron Maiden will forever remain an autumn band for me.

And during this period of the story, it was time for their then-new album. Mum and I returned from Altynka to central Saratov, and by evening, when it was dark, we went into MediaMarkt on Volskaya. The album was on the shelves in several copies, and we bought it.

Late that night, in the atmosphere of our former idyllic returns from Saratov to the old apartment - with some tasty dinner, some kind of whimsical cake, and me impatient to play the new disc - I sat in the living room, where we"d already screwed in a light bulb, and put the disc on the Kenwood. At first, I didn"t really get into the album - so much that when Mum came from the kitchen and said, "Well, it"s boring," I agreed and we turned it off to play something else - but gradually it became one of my greatest inspirations. The songs were long, multi-part, with plenty of solos, and no stupid filler in any of them. It was exactly what I had been heading toward. Imagining my own music, I pictured lengthy ten-minute compositions, and for months I"d been noticing song lengths in the bands I listened to - three-to-four-minute poppy songs were a turn-off.

I got to know this album better over the following days, and now any few seconds from it instantly transport me back to Natasha"s apartment and that pre-November period - as I call it - which, since that year, became synonymous with the anticipation of change, usually in the form of escapist trips into the past. Also, in parts of this album, for example the third track, there"s that same "Mylene Farmer" Phrygian melodicism, like in "Lost Boys" by Sixty-Nine Eyes - it also immediately evokes autumn anticipation of returning home from the cold.

The next day Mum and I went to Telman to the CD shop with the seller Mowgli. I sensed that besides the classic rock cassettes Dad had brought, there were also metal cassettes. I was right. We went there a couple of times and bought two or three cassettes each visit.

The first were videos of Guns N" Roses, W.A.S.P., and an Anthrax concert with an unpronounceable title, "Oidivnikufezin." I finally listened to Guns N" Roses songs properly. The clip for my favourite, "You Could Be Mine," already associated with autumn for a year, now overall, turned out to include clips from "Terminator 2." I tried to remember the rock concert scene in the film but couldn"t. I"d watched that "Terminator" a couple of times with my grandfathers and Mum on Frunze, around first-second grade, and both times not from the start. It was important for me to establish nostalgic associations, to dig something out from the past, so I analysed everything, wondering if I could have heard any of the bands I now knew and listened to in early childhood. I could count the memories on one hand. Especially I wondered who the metalheads were shown for a few seconds on TV with my grandfathers about eight years before, and then the next morning Mum and I walked home while my grandfathers went to a boring vote. There was a guitarist with white hair, maybe Jeff Hanneman from Slayer. They didn"t even play music, just showed the video.

Yet "You Could Be Mine" still felt familiar melodically, because, as I said before, one riff had the same Mylene Farmer-esque melodicism as in her clip with the twins. I immediately transported myself to that lonely stalker walk to my beloved Dinara"s area, as I walked along the empty embankment, and to our visits to the grandfathers on first weekends and the second-grade holidays, not to mention winter holidays, when after sledding with Alina I sat in front of the TV watching that Mylene Farmer clip, and also Conan films.

I was also struck by the clip for "November Rain," where the long-haired rocker Axl Rose marries a normal girl in a lavish wedding. My stereotype of scruffy, pointless metalheads kept collapsing.

Anthrax and their concert were old and very true to thrash metal - the musicians in shorts, sneakers, with guitars plastered with stickers. All songs were more or less well played, and I watched it on repeat for two days, more than any other cassette.

Of all the heavy metal bands, W.A.S.P., due to their classic, just-right vocals and foolproof three-chord song structure, had the most dramatic ballads. Like "Sleeping in the Fire." And that"s exactly what I was most drawn to, basically. The frontman reminded me of Xena from my childhood TV series - another association with the past. I watched their clip with candles before heading out with Mum to Saratov.

We went wandering through MediaMarkts, and I also wanted to find an internet café and catch up with my summer internet friend on mod-building - it had already been two months since I disappeared from him, though I"d said I"d only be away a couple of weeks.

We found the internet café on Kirov Avenue, number twenty-three. It was my first time in an internet café. We paid, I figured it out, and logged into my email. I don"t remember if there were any messages from Chester. I apologised in writing, explaining that getting back to the computer had taken longer than expected. After all, I had volunteered for his mod-building team and suddenly vanished. This was serious for me. Then, while Mum waited, I browsed metal-music sites, reading song translations on Metalibrary. There I saw a banner for a W.A.S.P. concert in Moscow, scheduled for 11 November. I started carrying that idea in my head - to attend a concert of a band from the other side of the world I listened to. A real metal concert, as in my fantasies about socialising around this interest. Even if no one my age would be there, I was sure. But going was impossible - I didn"t even know what Moscow was or how to navigate it alone.

Mum and I also walked to that CD shop on Kazachya, next to the sex shop. There, I looked again at that MP3 discography of Death, and the others.

.:::.

Part 71, Text 3. Bathing with Hysterics Again,,, Mom"s Frightening Religious Flairs and Suicidal Outburst,,, Last Visit to the Thirty-Third School,,, Mom"s Silent Treatment,,, Farewell-School Gesture by Ripping Up Textbooks.

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That evening, I apparently had to take a full bath again. By then I had more or less recovered from the neuroleptics and my paralyzing fear, but once I stepped in, I was consumed by aggressive rage. Something splashed on me, something went wrong, I knocked or dropped something in the bath-and I unleashed my anger on Mom. Having gotten used, over the past ten days, to the absence of my meltdowns and hoping they wouldn"t happen, Mom mirrored my aggression. She fell into the same state she had a year ago, when my antics had her yelling, smashing things, and then threatening to drown herself. By now, an icon had appeared in Natasha"s apartment. Most likely, Mom had gone to church, and someone had given it to her.

Not wanting-or perhaps unable-to grasp what was happening with me, and having no one both significant to her and reasonably smart to advise her, she assumed I was simply a disabled person with incurable psychoses, as the doctors told her. Being uneducated, she had no choice but to turn to the people everyone mentally unstable goes to. Her churchgoing was probably further inspired by my father and Granny Valya, who were even more devout (more on them later). Throughout her life, in serious moments-like my abortion or my behavioural issues-Mom had gone to priests. Even during my youth, she often recalled something a priest told her. Usually, she didn"t dwell on the prayer nonsense, but on the vaguely psychological advice.

But in those first desperate stages, she terrified me with her faith-based gibberish. That evening, when our argument escalated, she yelled from the kitchen in her classic, electrified Lev Kassil-style screeches across the entire building. My heart sank to my stomach, and I quieted down in the bath. But as I left, she continued her hysteria-and now it morphed into a terrifyingly religious form. She stood before the icon, sobbing, mumbling something. For me, it was pure horror-it closely mirrored my fear of "altered parents." I tried to bring her back to reality, but she ignored me, still speaking to the image. I went back to cleaning in the bath; another mishap occurred, and, as usual, I cursed violently. Then I looked up: Mom had crawled into the corridor on her knees, approached the bath, and begged me to stop. I was utterly terrified and spent a long time calming her.

Later-whether the same night or the following evening-I cursed and grumbled in the bath again. Mom responded with those piercing, electric shrieks, then said, "I can"t take this anymore, I"m going to slit my wrists," and headed to the kitchen. Pausing briefly, I managed to reach her only as she stood by the stove holding our white kitchen knife. I grabbed her and pushed the knife away, then took it from her. She was in such anguish she would have rather cut herself than not. This wasn"t theatrical; she truly feared I might not reach her in time or take her seriously.

All this coincided with calls from social services. By that time, they probably weren"t even sure I existed, because Mom told them I wasn"t at my registered address on Frunze. For her, each call was a mini-heart attack, given her fear of all controlling government agencies.

For some reason, I had to go to the Thirty-Third School, so the next day we went. I went straight to our classroom on the top floor, the wing facing the bus stops in Saratov. I don"t remember seeing Slepukhin, and no one approached me. It felt like a long break, because everyone was rampaging in the classroom, and I sat there for about fifteen minutes while Mom spoke with some administrators. Eventually, they called me, and we left. I never returned to that school. On the way, we bought more music tapes.

Mom brought some textbooks from the school and insisted I at least try some exercises. I refused, and we argued fiercely again. My obsessions over dirt or cleanliness mixed into the conflict-sometimes I"d forbid her from lying on the bed in clothes or unwashed-and eventually, she moved to the sofa. Later, by Lev Kassil habit, I attempted to reconcile. The lights were off, we lay down, and I repeatedly called out, "Mom," "come on, Mom," "okay, I"m sorry," "are we friends?" even making increasingly ironic comments like, "I"ve already forgotten why we argued." She wouldn"t relent. She replied, "I"m not here," "Ask the wall," "That"s for the wall." That night, she never came out of it.

The next day, she spoke to me about the textbooks one last time-then left. I had no idea what reaction to expect when she returned and I hadn"t touched the assignments. If I"d played my tapes while she was back, it would have been either a fight or total silence. I was furious. Why should I touch those damn textbooks and wash my hands afterward, risking problems from a single stray splash in the filthy bath where Mom had been washing outdoor boots? I hadn"t done a single assignment in over a year and didn"t understand the point of school at all.

So I sat down and tore the textbooks apart. I made my ultimate farewell-school gesture, scattering pages throughout the apartment. One by one, I ripped them, crumpled them, and threw them on the floor. I probably spent an hour doing this, filling the corridor from the living room to the kitchen with shredded pages. When Mom returned, she understood immediately and never demanded I study again. I don"t remember who cleaned up all that torn mess from the bacillus-laden, filthy floor.

.:::.

Part 71, Text 4. Metallica,, Hetfield and Fiancé Sasha with the Nose,, Approaching Move from This Apartment and Renovations in the New One,,, Walking Through Music Stores and Imagining Socialization,,, Mom on a Date,,, Shitty Bands,,, Sleeping Together with Dad Before the Move.

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The last two tapes we bought were a concert by Quiet Riot and Metallica"s 2003 show, "Rock am Ring."

Quiet Riot-a modern gig in a small club-was ridiculous: earsplitting distorted guitars and sloppy execution. I only listened to my favourite track and never played it again.

Metallica, however, I watched over a couple of evenings. I finally saw Hetfield fully: his scarred cheek, cap, and low-slung guitar. Some moments of certain songs were decent. Without understanding English, I guessed from Hetfield"s interactions with the crowd that Metallica was for "decent, kind" people, with humane values-not maniacal, God-bothering Slayer, or Megadeth with its personally self-important stance. Two of the Metallica guys were short-haired family men with traditional values.

Around the same time, Mom was involved with the nosey foreman she had found for the renovations in our new apartment. He was trying to charm her, and she reported this at home. One evening, sitting on the bed watching Metallica, I asked Mom, "Would you marry him?" meaning Hetfield. She said he was fine.

The time to vacate Natasha"s apartment was approaching-Natasha herself demanded it. The new apartment had no heating, making it uninhabitable, and we couldn"t keep living in Natasha"s forever. At least we could start moving things, as Sasha and his crew had finished plastering. They had botched it badly: plaster smeared unevenly across walls, two-centimeter deviations. Mom didn"t notice yet, and she had no one competent to consult. This botched work, combined with other scams by tradesmen, cemented her lifelong pessimism and learned helplessness in home renovation. From then on, final renovations were impossible. At Zelyony Lane, we"d live with dusty, unfinished walls, open sockets, and for a whole year even rolled-up linoleum in the hallway due to a leaking pipe we wouldn"t fix for fear of more damage.

Contacts with Dad resumed amid the upcoming move. In those last days in Natasha"s apartment, Mom and I went almost daily to Saratov, to record stores. I probably visited Dad"s museum because at one point a DVD of "Arsenal of Megadeth" appeared in Natasha"s apartment-he likely brought it from the ninth floor. That evening, I watched it with Mom, explaining, without knowing English fully, that one of the band members-the drummer, looking like the wolf from "Nu, pogodi!"-had already died.

I went to the rock music basement on Telmana. The long-haired, chubby clerk, speaking to a friend, said he only liked Iron Maiden"s first album with a different singer, not Bruce Dickinson. I had sampled that album at summer"s end and hated that voice. So I realised the clerk favoured manly classic rock I disliked. The basement had rock magazines from the early 2000s, listing hundreds of unknown bands whose albums were unavailable except in expensive MediaMarket displays in Saratov. I suspected correctly: these were second-tier underground metal bands. I didn"t buy the magazine, just leafed through it.

In those days, alongside the Megadeth disc, I asked Dad for a kids" magazine covering Cradle of Filth, which also listed second-tier metal bands with new releases in black-, gothic-, and death-metal. I hadn"t even heard these yet. In the thrash section, besides Holy Moses, was Exodus. Unlike most others, their latest disc was on normal pirated shelves, so I could just take it and listen.

All those magazines, bands, and my imagined gatherings of long-haired guys in camo pants with goth girls forever tied to the gray autumn street of Gorky in Engels.

Imagining all this (though none of it really existed), I walked from the basement through the music shop on Gorky and Lev Kassil to check out guitars again. The blue guitar was still there, with a classic electric body shape. I was drawn to it the same way I had been to my bike at Trial-Sport. Fashionable bikes, stylish guitars, bold shapes-let others have that. I would have something untrendy in form, but in substance, like Jeff Hanneman, and as I composed, it would rival or surpass the best.

Yet electric guitars weren"t my main concern yet; we didn"t even know where we"d live soon.

Most likely on the 29th, Sunday, Mom went on her first real date ever-with the repairman Sasha. He invited her to a café 100 metres from our building, at 13 Lev Kassil Street. I wasn"t twisted by it, not sex-phobic, and I didn"t feel jealous. It had long been clear Mom wouldn"t get close to any man: too many problems at home; no time for romance. Certainly not a repairman.

These were the very last days of October. Mom and I went to Saratov, to the Kazachya record store, and I picked up one MP3 after another, eventually choosing Destruction. Crap, what else? I spent a whole day listening through their discography, finding only one-and-a-half tracks bearable-"Visual Discretion" on the last album, and "Live Without Sense" on an early album, catching my attention for its solo and title. The MP3 was from the popular pirate metal disc series with simple black-and-white designs; the back had tiny album cover images. Destruction had aggressive, vividly illustrated covers-like all the expensive underground metal albums. I realised that among flashy covers, there might be little actually listenable music. That explained why the big four thrash-Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax-dominated the underground. I was just starting to explore this, and had more to try.

On the evening of the 30th, Dad may have come by to wait for Mom and discuss something. I was listening to an old Wrock tape, with an Ozzy Osbourne song. During the solo, Dad on the sofa said, "Their guitarist is really good." I told him about my plan to attend a band concert in Moscow; he reacted, "That"s quite a plan!" Throughout my youth, he always treated distant travel plans skeptically. Even Mom was more supportive. Dad had always been indecisive-he never went to study cinema in another city as a youth, wasted his dream, surrounded by women.

On the 31st or 1st, Mom and I returned to the Kazachya store. I bought Testament"s discography-also second-tier thrash like Exodus. Their first couple of albums were decent; I remembered "Over the Wall" and "Alone in the Dark," though the latter sounded less serious due to an Eastern melody reminiscent of the Asterix and Obelix movie credits. I didn"t get to listen to Testament fully-we started packing.

By 1st November, I sketched the Slayer logo at Dad"s work on his antiquated computer. On the 2nd, he came to stay overnight with us-the next morning a Gazelle van would move our furniture to Zelyony Lane. As usual, I bathed at the last possible moment, unaware of my next chance. At some point, while the three of us were together, Mom mentioned in passing that Sasha, the repairman, had proposed. She said it lightly, as if not all hope was lost. He ended up with nothing. My Sasha couldn"t care less.


.:.


___Part 72.

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Part 72, Text 1. Moving things to Zelyony Lane - the rock basement shop and metal cassettes - buying a cassette player - I buy Asfix, Chroming Rose, and Báthory.

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Around eleven o"clock, a Gazelle truck arrived, and the unloading of our stuff and furniture began. My father had taken time off work and was hauling things with the driver and his assistant. I didn"t worry too much - my main stuff was still at Zavodskoy. I carried a few things myself and loaded them into the truck. All of this was happening near that boiler house with the sign "Sektor Gaza" and the playground where I"d never played with anyone my entire childhood, except that one time the hockey kids roughed me up.

It was dry now after the recent rain, about ten degrees, sometimes sunny, sometimes grey, yet again, like the day I moved to Granny Valya, there was that exhilarating feeling of change, of life being renewed. I was even humming the latest Iron Maiden. Everything went into the Gazelle except, for some reason, my blue pull-up bar - maybe it didn"t fit, or something else. It stayed behind in Natasha"s apartment, and later my mother would tell me she once saw it on the balcony while passing by. My father had already left with the Gazelle crew, and my mother and I walked after them. As I mentioned before, the new house at 13 Zelyony Lane was only two or three hundred meters away.

There was no lift, so we carried everything up to the seventh floor ourselves. My grandparents were there too, probably to collect some things for their own car. I entered our new apartment for the first time. Lots of people - my adults, workers, movers - a flurry of activity, the smell of fresh renovation and compounds. The layout was familiar: bathroom to the right, kitchen with a balcony ahead, and two rooms to the left. The hallway with the column in the middle was about ten metres long, and all the rooms were large, especially the living room - twenty-four metres. My grandfather paced there silently, hands behind his back. White walls, plenty of light, high ceilings. A fleeting thought crossed my mind - this room would be perfect for a roundoff-flack-salto. Overall, the apartment left a good impression. In the evening, we had no choice but to head to Frunze to visit my grandparents.

My father went back to work, and my mother and I went to Natasha"s apartment. She still needed to clean the floors. Soon I left and went shopping. I stepped out onto Petrovskaya, where my second kindergarten was, crossed the street, and went along the Gniloy Passage to that rock music basement on Telmana Street. That day, Mol was there. In the far end of the vertical display, a whole section of audio cassettes appeared - several tall stacks. They all had identical spines - same label, different bands. Except for one, all were unfamiliar, clearly "the ones," because first, the single familiar one was Death, and second, each spine had a tiny picture of the album cover, all colourful like the CDs on that stand in Saratov. Each also had the album"s year, mostly from the "90s. Best of all, they were only twenty rubles each. Damn it, and I was now without a Kenwood.

I walked out, pondering along the Gniloy Passage back to Petrovskaya, then turned left through the "90s-style courtyard" to the shop at 47 Gorky, where I used to go with Fedorov to check out games. That section always sold various players. I wanted to see the prices. They were already cheap - the cassette era was over. Then I walked to Lev Kassil, house number one - the "Melodiya" store, also carrying these players and small electronics. Here, they were even cheaper - barely 180 rubles, just over a DVD. Confident my parents would give me the money so I wouldn"t wander endlessly, I headed home. Using my mother"s phone, I started begging my father. He said he"d give me the money, and we arranged when I"d meet him near the museum.

I had lunch and went out around three. As I remember, he met me on the street, even walking a bit toward me along Gorky - back then I hadn"t yet established myself as a familiar visitor at his workplace, so he came out. I immediately got extra money from him for headphones, batteries, and three cassettes. That evening, we agreed to meet and go to Frunze together. To make up for not being able to host me in his Zavodskoy flat (though he wasn"t there anyway), my father decided to share the hardship of living with my grandparents.

I went to "Melodiya" and bought the cheapest player and batteries. The headphones weren"t good, so I decided to check them at 47 Gorky. First, though, I returned to the cassette basement. It was past four and already getting dark. I walked from Lev Kassil to Petrovskaya through the block - garages, Nikita Kozlov"s building (we probably wouldn"t even stop to chat if we met), then past the wholesale store, through the Gniloy Passage again - down to the basement.

I had to choose what to buy, without picking some crap and embarrassing myself in front of Mol. People usually came to this basement for DVDs, pop music, or remixes, so the rock section didn"t shrink much. Mol, as the seller, still knew his stock. I didn"t want to pick Death the first time - I already knew that would be safe. Maybe something else would be even better? There were so many bands, arranged alphabetically.

I decided based on the cover thumbnails, band names, and the years. My favourite number was six, and 1996 seemed more appealing. I picked from that year. Among the alphabetically early bands was an aggressive-looking name, Asfix, with the album "God Cries" - some brutal, godless Slayer-style stuff, I guessed. Then, from the third letter of the alphabet, a nice name - Chroming Rose, album "New World," cover showing a floating island in clouds with a yellow palette. I"d take it, even if it was from "95.

By the basement window near the ceiling, darkness was already visible outside, and the busy Telmana Street sounded with buses carrying the work slaves back from Saratov. The evening bustle, returning home, forgetting the hellish day of shitty reality - I needed escapism, a kind of fairy tale. The Báthory cassette cover, "Blood on Ice," looked like that kind of story. The blue palette fit the snowy, moonlit darkness, not total black, but that "illuminated" dark, like winter evening walks. Like near Bruma in Oblivion at night. The cover was the prettiest of all there. When I asked Mol to get me these cassettes, I saw the Báthory artwork - a collection of all characters from some story, like my childhood "concentrate pictures" - and I knew I had to have it. I handed over sixty rubles and left.

.:::.

Part 72, Text 2. Listening to music outdoors for the first time - Chroming Rose - on the embankment with cassettes and parents - heading to grandparents.

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Past the lyceum and evening bus stops, I walked again to 47 Gorky - for headphones. I asked for the cheapest black earbuds. I could check them immediately. I inserted the Báthory cassette I had high hopes for, but there was almost no sound - just a dull background hiss. Thinking it might be the headphones, I told the clerk and let her listen. She listened with one ear and asked, "Are you sure there"s music on this tape?" Unsure, I grabbed another - Chroming Rose. Inside the paper insert was a band photo - four shaggy men. I put it in the player, and finally a lively metal song kicked in. The headphones worked, and I stepped outside the store.

For the first time in my life, I was outside with music. I didn"t need a home - even better that it was outdoors. I was especially happy that the music, at least on this tape, was proper metal, exactly what I wanted. I hadn"t even clarified with Mol what it was - I bought it as if I knew.

I walked to the corner of Gorky and Petrovskaya. Long ago, on that corner, we rented videocassettes, hunted for Pepsi bottle-top prizes, and once Lidushka"s mom caught me - I never scared her again. Now it was a November evening, buses from Saratov were running, all my shitty schools and studies were behind me, and for the first time, life offered an inspiring perspective. Our apartment would be finished, they"d buy me an electric guitar, I"d become a metal composer, find my people, create albums like the one I was listening to, release them on cassettes - and there was time for it all. At ten, I had almost a whole life ahead. Compared to the age of the shaggy musicians, probably the same as my parents, it was like having two lifetimes in front of me. No need to rush. That"s how I thought back then, not knowing ages, appearances, or that at the age of most musicians on the recordings I was listening to, I was only six to ten - and even ten years in that empty future life would fly by in a year. I was blissfully happy.

From that intersection, I could have headed toward my father, but it was barely six, so I walked toward our new house - my mother should have been there and leaving around that time. I walked along the mud-soaked Petrovskaya, yet felt like I was in a recording studio with the musicians I was listening to. For the first time, I didn"t care about the filth and surroundings.

After the first Chroming Rose song, which I didn"t take seriously because of some supposedly joking words in the chorus, they launched into some incredible ballads. The vocals resembled Guns N" Roses, even better - higher, almost unreal, yet powerful. Rhythm guitars were sharp, unlike Guns N" Roses" mushy hard rock backing.

Reaching our new house, still lacking an intercom or anything, I wandered a bit waiting for my mother, didn"t see her, and left. I crossed Petrovskaya by Nikita Kozlov"s house, went through the passage again, then onto Gorky. The cheap earbuds weren"t very good - no rubber tips, just plastic - so walking along the noisy street, I could hear almost nothing and turned them off. My father met me again near the museum, already walking toward me. My mother hadn"t arrived. I gave him the change from the player purchase, stood briefly with him by the flowerbeds, and said I"d go to the embankment to sit quietly on a bench. I went up by the Soldiers" Monument and sat on the first bench to the left. Few people were around, only evening streetlights glowing. I inserted another cassette - Asfix. It was brutal screaming metal, like what I had heard in Sims 2. At that moment, I didn"t like Asfix - it seemed like nonsense.

Then my parents joined me on the embankment, and we headed toward my grandparents, past the Stela, the amusement park, and the Children"s Park - onto Persidskaya. I put Chroming Rose back in and listened to it all the way. I wondered where the band came from, what their world looked like. Along our path, only old wooden courtyards, grandmothers in scarves, dogs barking from under gates, and mud so deep you couldn"t avoid stepping in it, since not every street had a lamp.


.:::.

Part 72, Text 3. Arriving at Frunza at my grandparents"... detachment from the body... Asfix... dinner at the table... beginning of Báthory and associations, hypnagogic listening to the album Blood on Ice.

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We arrived at my grandparents". I was a guest, so I didn"t make a fuss about cleanliness, didn"t bother with rituals. I may even have gone barefoot. I would sit on the sofa and chairs that the cats-who went outside-jumped onto. But it wasn"t just the mechanism I"d mentioned before, linked to the friendliness of the people whose home I was in; it was also a simple surrender to the situation. Now it wasn"t fear of the psych ward-it was just the reality of it. In my own apartment, where I would have full control, obsessing over cleanliness was impossible. I was in a state of detachment from the body, complete escapism from tangible reality. For instance (imagine a fantastic scenario), if someone had suddenly suggested I physically be with a girl-say, just to dance-such an offer would have been like an alarm clock going off. I would have snapped out of my escapist haze, started thinking about my body, panicked, washed, yelled at any clumsy touches against filth. I would have immediately needed total control over my body. But at that moment, it was as if I didn"t exist. I was in the music I listened to, and in the dreams it created. I had said it before-these would be magical days and times.

The cabbage soup was already cooked, and Grandma Klava was preparing dinner. Given the number of people-five of us plus Murka and Barsik-it was planned as usual, in the hall at the central main table. The same table around which, in my early childhood, I played tag with adults. Everything here was exactly the same. Fatjushkina might have even sat on her chair in the passage to the hall-it was Friday evening, after all, and Field of Wonders was on.

After washing my hands, I sat on the sofa with someone else and listened to Asfix again. One type of music that would later become my favourite is music that seems ridiculous on first listen. Asfix had riffs so pompously brutal, with such sharp stops, that it almost felt comical. Not to mention the vocals, which, despite all the screaming, sounded completely unserious, like self-parody. I wanted to laugh along with the performers at what they"d recorded and turn it off-but not for good. This album is considered the band"s worst, and despite the band being famous, there isn"t a single live performance of these songs on YouTube. Yet I played it periodically throughout my life, and never found anything like it in the sea of death-metal trash I would listen to that coming winter. The "first heard music" phenomenon?

The cassettes in that series displayed in the rock basement had the lyrics printed on the paper inserts in microscopic font. Chroming Rose had theirs too. With Asfix, as expected-or so I thought, given that I knew fewer than two hundred English words-the lyrics were full of attacks on the Christian faith.

But Grandma Klava and Mum had already set the plates, and we all sat down to eat. As always since childhood, I sat on the side facing the TV, which was tuned to Channel One. I probably took a break from the player. After eating, I returned to the sofa and put in Báthory. The title was strange, and it was completely unclear what to expect-if anything would even start on the tape. Then, after some goat bleating and random shouts, it began.

From the first choruses, it was battles by castle walls on some maximally grey, foggy day. The castle wasn"t even Gothic, more like an older fort, like the forts in Oblivion. Lots of riders with lances and banners on poles. Foot soldiers with swords. Chainmail, shields. The terrain was hilly, with large moss-covered boulders here and there. Late autumn, almost winter, though some grass still remained. Not quite morning, not quite evening. Everything mixed together: Conan, Oblivion and the surroundings of Kvatch and Corrol, King Arthur, November in Frunza. I immediately understood that the choruses created this atmosphere. On this album, the choruses are distinguished by bass lines created with an octaver down from some original recording, producing deep notes impossible to sing powerfully by voice. That"s why they sound so fantastical. The main vocal had a special echo, spreading sideways, as if sung in the rocks-like in Boris Vallejo"s paintings. Everything here had the atmosphere of the fantasy art I"d seen since my earliest years, even from those in my father"s shop.

A completely unusual song for any band I"d heard, accompanied by acoustic guitar.

But I put off listening for now: the TV was noisy, the adults were noisy, and it was time for tea, soon to bed. A cosy lie-down on the bed in the small room by the hot radiator, under the wall rug, would come later. I was already old enough that I wouldn"t be sent to the bed in Grandma"s middle room. My parents" sofa was set up in the hall, a metre from my grandfather on his sofa.

I went to the toilet and lay down. Behind the closed door to my room, with its frosted glass panels, the light still glowed-I went to bed even before the adults. It would be like this the following nights. For perhaps the first time in my life, I wanted to get to bed as quickly as possible. Nothing else was needed-no visuals. I reduced myself to closed eyes.

Báthory had not a single blues note, not a shred of mega-death chromatics. No American or Californian influence. Everything was about the forest, about the Middle Ages-I called it "Gothic" that evening and the days that followed. A sacred atmosphere, like in Oblivion. It felt like it was all about cults, secret guilds, some lost, stolen sword to retrieve from an underground shrine. A vine-covered arched entrance to a dungeon deep in the forest, with a millennia-old cracked stone statue nearby and fire braziers, maintained as if by otherworldly forces. Torches, cloaks, witchcraft, mysticism, antiquity. Everything straight out of Oblivion. With all these elements, I would imagine a fictional reality I wanted to create and live in through my songs-my lifelong obsession ever since. I would never invent plots or fictional worlds; I would only suffer from the sense that the world exists, that it could be brought to life. But for many years, I couldn"t understand that I was not feeling the world itself, but memories. It was simply nostalgia for my first times in Oblivion, first reading of King Arthur, first viewings of a Mylène Farmer video. There is no virtual life, really. Nostalgia mistaken for some "reality."

Basically, I don"t think about all this now. It"s just a mental focus. No more peculiar than losing yourself over the sight of a crack in the skin between your legs. You can give in to it, but you must know it"s an illusion, and not chase phantoms. I didn"t know this then, and as a result, listening to that album and recalling those memories only brought tears: tears of nostalgia for the nostalgia itself, and regret that it was all nothing.

After a long day, I even fell asleep with music in my ears-in a hypnagogic state. Everything fell into place so that day would become fateful.


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Part 72, Text 4. November morning... leaving Frunza for the centre... taking the cassette with Vrok... heading to Saratov.

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The morning was very grey-just like the first impression of Báthory yesterday. Dad was already gone; he could go to his museum any day, and he had left, even on this 4th of November-a holiday. I sat on a stool in the kitchen, keeping the music on in my headphones, looking at the cassette cover. In my youth, during bipolar struggles of hope and disappointment over songwriting, I would reach a point of despair that meant I would have to make only instrumental music, so I chose landscape-inspired names for my musical projects-one of them was November Morning. That morning brought a nostalgic echo. The reason the band felt "Gothic" also had a visual component: the digraph in the middle of the word. The cross of the "T." In the morning, I imagined not castle battles, but some field at the edge of the forest, with dark, creaking bare branches and crows perched on them.

Mum and I had breakfast, got dressed, and stepped into almost exactly what I imagined. Behind the front garden stood Uncle Seryozha"s car. I must have been listening to the song "The Sword," because I"ve always associated it with leaving Frunza"s November mud for civilisation in the distance. Sitting in the car, I think I turned off the player-it clashed with the radio-but I was still fidgeting with cassettes in my hands.

Since the night before, I imagined what the band looked like. Some small, dark concert club. Musicians with long, light hair, like that band Pain in their video Shut Your Mouth. I already felt the band wasn"t from America. In the booklets for Chroming Rose, Asfix, and even Báthory, there was no mention anywhere of "The United States." For Chroming Rose, it said "Germany." Why Germany, when the vocalist sings perfect English? Maybe I translated "Sweden" for Báthory, but probably not. I"d heard of that country only a handful of times in my life, had no associations with it, didn"t know where it was or what it looked like, let alone how to spell it in English. Everything was like those childhood "crap cabinets"-a lot to discover.

We drove around our Frunza block as usual, exited via Poligraficheskaya by the morgue, and continued. We immediately turned onto Nesterov towards the centre. The road lined with wreaths, memories of Grandma telling how in the "90s someone blew up a car here. A favourite road of the funeral buses. After Pushkin Street, on the left an unpleasant orphanage or boarding school, on the right a church. There was a driveway to it from Nesterov, and as we drove past, a funeral bus entered, apparently with people inside. I thought they were taking someone for a service. There was a small church aside from the main one. I wasn"t so phobic of funerals yet; these observations just added to the unpleasant associations with the real world. The darker everything was, the more magical my music-created world felt.

We were basically heading to Natasha"s apartment-Mum had some final checks, then had to deliver the keys to Saratov, where she worked that day. But I wanted to grab the cassette with my Vrok, left in the Kenwood in the new apartment. There was electricity, I could connect it and take it. Mum asked me to go there first.

We arrived and went in. There were repairmen. I connected the player, took out the cassette, and we left immediately.

If I remember correctly, Mum went to Natasha"s apartment alone, while I, eager, separated and went to the basement while nearby.

In the basement, there was another display with around thirty discs-obviously from "those metal bands," but now on sale for sixty rubles instead of one hundred eighty like on Volskaya in Saratov. There were Báthory discs. The band logo on the spines was classic Gothic letters, not the hybrid style of my cassette. I asked Mol if they had more Báthory cassettes or other similar Gothic metal. He said, "Báthory? That"s black metal." There were no more cassettes; only discs. That"s how I learned it wasn"t Gothic metal. I still doubted it was even black metal. I hadn"t listened to black metal yet, but I associated it with vampires and necrophilia, while the uplifting, fairy-tale songs of Blood on Ice, and especially the acoustic ballads, didn"t fit that. Left puzzled, I planned to come back with money to get a Death cassette. I left.

At Natasha"s apartment, I put Vrok in the player briefly, but soon switched back to yesterday"s Chroming Rose. While Mum fussed about the apartment, I stood in the hallway listening to these nobody-hitmakers. This band is one of countless examples of how to be better than the mainstream-even with a history of concerts and global fame, yet just a few years after the band"s end, utterly forgotten. In the VK community I created for them, over twenty years, there were only a hundred members, and almost no plays on Last.fm.

Uncle Seryozha drove up again, and we left Natasha"s apartment for the last time.


.:::.

Part 72, Text 5. We hand the keys to Natasha... about my parents" work... the big MediaMarkt... reading about Bathory in an internet café... not gothic but Viking metal... the Nordlands on Volskaya... the climax of my November metalhead hopes and illusions.

.::::.

I had my player on the whole time - "Forty Nights, Forty Days" was playing - and we were riding along Khalturina Street, where once I"d fucked around trying to ride on the back wheel, dreamed of becoming an important member of some gang, and even earlier first learned about jerking off. Now I remembered all that as filthy, finally‑finished past, while ahead of me there was a new life - the future of a metal musician. Either I"d bury myself in music completely and sex would simply become unnecessary, or - a small spark of hope, considering my enthusiasm - there would be success, and everything else would sort itself out.

In Saratov we stopped at the intersection of Moskovskaya and Sobornaya - right by the maternity hospital where I was born.

Mom had arranged things with Uncle Seryozha, so we got out, crossed Sobornaya, and there it was right away: that gray Soviet ten‑story building where you walk down a corridor with endless offices on both sides. I went in with Mom and even went upstairs while she went looking for Natasha. Later, when reconstructing all this, I actually looked up the Sednevs. That Natasha, it turned out, was the director of some organization, and on their website her daughter Lyuba is listed as deputy director. As I write this now, I keep running into this theme everywhere - parents handing their work down to their children. My parents had nothing they could plug me into. And I hated their work. My father"s museum job felt like the absolute worst possible future - I"ve said that already. Better the army and death than that. And Mom didn"t even register as a fully functioning working adult - she depended almost entirely on Uncle Seryozha. At this stage of the story, by the way, all her landscaping orders had finally dried up. She says the last one was in September - that"s why she"d been travelling from Zavodskoy. By this November she was about to slide into floor‑scrubbing and a depressive nightmare that years later would turn into wandering around trash bins.

We handed over the keys and headed toward the big MediaMarkt on Kirova, across the square. The day felt rainy, a drizzle hanging in the air.

Inside the big MediaMarkt, as always, it was bright and hectic. There were already discs with the game Gothic III. That word kept spinning in my head endlessly. There was also a clearance basket in the hall - discs with cracked cases or something like that. And there, for forty rubles, was Exodus - the band listed under "thrash metal" in the October magazine. I listened on the store player - it really was savage pounding - and we bought it. Then we left and went to an internet café.

After replying to some letter from my correspondent about modding - a topic rapidly losing importance for me - I started searching information about the thing that actually mattered now. Bathory turned out to be from Sweden, and on Metallibrary the style was listed as "black/heavy metal," somewhere else "thrash." Strange, unclear. The band had existed since "83, fifteen albums, lots of reviews. Multifaceted, even kind of cult. But all the photos showed the same guy under the stage name Quorthon. That"s how I perceived him - a guy. That photo of him in a baseball cap. And he was only thirty there. That age felt like an eternity away.

I skimmed translations of the lyrics from the album on my cassette. I already knew the word "sword," as I pronounced it, and from the rest I could more or less guess everything was about fantasy heroics. Which it was. But there was no time to read closely - I was drowning in information - and after the paid hour was up we left.

We kept walking along Kirova toward the MediaMarkt on Volskaya. But on the way we stopped by that same guy with the discs where I"d bought "Arsenal of Megadeth" in September. I asked him about Bathory, and now he confused things even more. He said it was "Viking metal." Well, shit. Some totally exotic category now. But thinking back to what I knew about Vikings, and matching that with the simple fur armor in Oblivion, I saw the connection.

We went on. Meanwhile I listened to the cassette with Vrock. Civilization and modern city noise didn"t suit Bathory. Bathory required Frunze - silence, horizon landscapes.

Back then in MediaMarkt I constantly ran into Dream Theater discs, and also Kamelot. Somehow I was always lucky: I never bought them and never wasted my time. Already recognizing Bathory"s logo, I was flipping through the ninety‑ruble pirate CDs on Volskaya when suddenly I stumbled right onto Bathory - a disc with a dark cover and a night sky. I put it into the store player, and it turned out to be total garbage. I put it back. Never listened to that album again in my life. Then I went over to the rotating racks with the licensed CDs, and there were both Nordland albums - which I pronounced "Nordland," instead of the more correct "Nordland." The style of the shadows and clouds reminded me of the Blood on Ice cover, and the back artwork was perfect: a photo of a green mossy fern forest in the mountains, like in Conan, Oblivion, and that "North Shore" mountain biking of mine. I felt these must be proper albums, with clean vocals. But I couldn"t overcome my shyness and didn"t ask the clerk to take them out so I could listen. We couldn"t have bought them anyway - everything there cost 180 rubles. I only noticed that many of the discs on that stand, including those Nordlands, were released by a label called IronD. Associatively it sounded good - Iron Maiden, Oblivion, Bathory - it instantly became my favorite label.

In short, Bathory was some very strange band. Either the lineup kept changing along with the style, or something like that.

For me those moments were the peak of all those metalhead illusions and dopamine. I was in the very center of Saratov, in a bright store with gray November outside, standing before the most important CD rack of my life, and from that entire rack I now had some kind of connection to one of the truest metal bands imaginable. In the internet café I"d even seen a photo of Quorthon in camo pants, probably. This was the band everyone must be writing about in those magazines; the band whose albums people wait for in rock basements all over the world. They"ve got thrash, they"ve got crap, and they"ve got heroic sing‑along escapism. Where the hell is all this - where is Sweden? It felt like I"d already been there. Sweden, which I"d never even heard about in my whole life, must be some equally shitty gray country somewhere near ours, only there they speak English. And when does Bathory release a new album so people can freak out and feel part of some movement? A movement I myself would sooner or later join - as a creator, not just a consumer.

By the way, everywhere I now asked for a DVD with some Bathory concert, but everywhere people just shrugged.

In the end we walked from Kirova onto Gorky, crossed the square back to the Engels stop, and left - Mom still had to meet the repair guys at the new apartment.

.:::.

Part 72, Text 6. Back to Engels and I buy Death"s Leprosy... at my grandparents" the batteries die... The 9th Company and a new level of Peter‑Pan‑ism... the "NKT‑SM" scene in the film... Baba Klava"s bombing stories.

.::::.

In Engels we got off at Telman and Gorky, agreed to meet near the new building, and Mom went through the Gniloy passage toward the apartment while I headed to the basement shop. And finally I bought a cassette of Death - the album Leprosy. 1988.

I came out, walked around the house for a while, waiting for Mom. Then we went out onto Volokha and headed toward Freedom Square. I"d already put the new cassette in, but the evening was noisy - cars everywhere - and on that album the old‑school drum cymbals stick out so much that in my headphones I could barely make anything out. From the first couple of songs the music seemed dark and strange. Hard to tell - better than Slayer or worse. The solos seemed more technical. But the backing was simpler and peculiar. Rarely those muted, articulated notes typical of thrash metal. Mostly just buzzing. I didn"t yet know how that was played - just picking one note endlessly, like on a balalaika - but now at least I"d heard it and decided that must be what defines death metal. Which was actually true, except I didn"t yet know that another defining feature was exactly that kind of vocal. I thought it was some special quirk of this band. The singer sounded like he was vomiting. In short, it was strange, and I needed to listen more, but across from the Pioneer Palace we ran into my father - he was walking toward us - and I turned off the player.

Right there in building number twelve - next to the one where a year earlier I"d taken flyers to paste around and then just threw them the hell away - there was a small shop selling construction materials or plumbing supplies. It was open and Mom had to go in. As I remember, that same long‑nosed Sasha, the repairman, was there. We didn"t stay long and left. At the traffic light we crossed to the old Rodina cinema and squeezed into one of those typical minibuses of the time where you couldn"t stand upright and the seats were usually all taken anyway, and rode down Nesterov Street toward my grandparents". We got off shortly after the mosque. Places I hadn"t been in a thousand years - not since my Engels gymnastics days. I used to walk past here from practice.

We crossed dangerous Nesterov Street, covered with roadside wreaths, and went along Podgornaya to Persidskaya - streets I"d walked maybe twice in my life - a whole kingdom of mud, barking dogs behind fences, and rare streetlights - and got back to my grandparents".

On the couch I kept listening to Death for a while, then when it got boring switched to the Vrock cassette - but suddenly the playback stopped. Soon my father explained that the batteries were dead. I was left without music. I hadn"t expected it to happen so fast. And the batteries cost almost thirty rubles. What, thirty rubles a day? That"s two rides on the Moscow metro. Dad suggested heating them on the radiator - they might work a little longer. And there were also things called rechargeable batteries - basically the same batteries but you could recharge them in a special device.

We ate again at the table in the living room.

Because of National Unity Day - or maybe just by coincidence - on the STS channel, which always came in well there and where as a kid I used to watch Xena: Warrior Princess or even Hercules, the film The 9th Company started at nine. We were still sitting at dinner when Dad, flipping channels, landed on it. He"d probably already seen it, because when I said "Oh, leave it," he replied, "Nah, it"s a heavy film." But he left it on.

By now that line with the word "jerk off" didn"t matter anymore. Not only because a few incidents had already made it clear that I knew about it, but also for another reason. Being recently taken to the psych ward and stripped of agency - the sense of control over my own fate, even over where I was physically located, like a full‑fledged person who hadn"t committed any crime - had not only finally destroyed my Peter‑Pan image of someone innocent about sexual desire (since in a sobbing breakdown there I"d blurted out the whole story about jerking off into socks, clearly revealing that I knew how it was done and probably had tried it myself and knew why people do it), but at the same time it helped me reach an even more convenient version of Peter‑Pan‑hood that I maintained for Mom in my Yama‑Yama dead end: I now had no claim to any sexual life whatsoever.

Put simply: before, the problem was that if she realized I knew about masturbation, she might suspect I also had desire for other girls - and therefore the possibility of actual relations. But now what desire, what relations? Who would need me, a schizophrenic? I believed I was schizophrenic. I really did wash my hands like a maniac, had fits of aggression and hysterics. Of course I was sick. Not like everyone else. No sexual life anymore. Only in the most distant dreams - if someday I became a famous metal musician, maybe in another country, in that same Sweden, starting a new life far from my parents at the age of forty like Quorthon in that baseball‑cap photo - maybe then there would be a sexual life. But in the foreseeable future I was now even less agentic than a child. I"d been taken out of the psych ward under signature, they could call me back any time, and I had to keep visiting and behave well so the doctor wouldn"t recommend locking me up again. That isn"t life. In that system I was finished. So jerk off or don"t jerk off - either way I wasn"t subjecting Mom to any separation from me.

But there was another moment in The 9th Company. Also incompatible with my Yama‑Yama state, only even more serious. A classic "NKT‑SM" moment - "an uncomfortable topic with Mom," as I call it in my terminology. In the firefight someone gets shot, his comrades drag him into cover, blood already coming from his mouth, he"s clearly almost done, and someone tries to calm him: "Yeah, it hurts." Before the psych ward this would have been hard to watch with my parents, especially with Mom - I didn"t want her seeing something like that. She"d imagine me dying there. Now the news that I was exempt from the army hadn"t officially circulated in the family yet, but we all already felt certain I wouldn"t be sent to any real war, so watching with Mom was a bit easier. But that phrase in that scene still remained for me a sign of the ultimate cruelty - not the cruelty of the person saying it, but the cruelty of the world"s design. Words like "Yeah, it hurts, just endure it" are what parents say to you in early childhood. And here the same words are said when you"re dying. I imagined myself there - it would be hell. Dying, remembering Mom soothing me after a finger‑prick at the clinic, her years of care and attachment reduced to some routine impersonal act by a stranger. And that was the world I lived in! The world billions of people love and happily exist in. I hated people for that. People were like my father, who would just switch the channel. And the more I wanted to get the hell out of this world.

When the soldiers of the ninth company were all killed and the film ended, Baba Klava started telling stories. About 1942. About her, her brother Tolya, and their mother - Baba Shura. About the dugout that once stood somewhere in that yard, and about how Baba Shura used to bring leftovers from the hospital on the other side of Polygraphicheskaya Street. While writing this I reminded Mom of it, and she said these were Baba Klava"s famous stories. They were always about having nothing to eat - almost boiling broomsticks for food. About how the Germans came to bomb the railway bridge and factories in the city, and how six‑year‑old Baba Klava and Uncle Tolya sat hidden in the dugout, and when after explosions the windows shattered they were afraid burglars were breaking into the house. Somewhere nearby in a garden they once found a severed head after a blast.

In the middle of the story Baba Klava started crying. At that moment my father let out a tired "oh," clearly unwilling to sink into that atmosphere, and went outside to piss before bed, leaving Baba Klava to finish the story for Mom and me. Granddad stepped away too. Dad surprised me - leaving halfway through looked disrespectful. But maybe he"d already heard all this before and knew Baba Klava remembered that he had.

And later I lay down in my little nest of escapism by the radiator, put the warmed batteries back into the player, and they gave me a bit more Bathory. By then I roughly remembered where everything was and rewound to the song "The Lake." Knowing the meaning of the word, I imagined that small mountain lake in Oblivion, somewhere in the mountains near Chorrol - and of course the mountain pond on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital on Altynka.

That whole day with Bathory followed the same stage I"d once had with the twins before the day I stood next to them on the pier.


.:.

___Part 73.

.:::.

Part 73 Text 1. Riding into the centre in the morning and to Dad"s museum,,, into Dad"s office and the loo,,, new grey bag.

.::::.

In the morning Dad went off to his museum again, and he was waiting for me there. There was nothing to do on Frunze anyway, and I still wanted to wander around with my player and drop by the rock basement - so I headed into the centre.

I don"t remember if I was with Mum or alone. I took the bus along Poligraficheskaya. Right off the road, the slope begins, and as I wrote a year ago in this story - and even before - behind the private houses was that same view that always filled me with all sorts of hope - stretching out into the distance, over Saratov. From the height of the bus, I could see all of November Engels below: grey to the point of black. After the "living and dead" block, closer to Telmana - a funeral home in the yard of one of those private houses. Didn"t care.

I got off at Telmana near the lyceum and went straight to the basement. I probably bought something else, but I only remember the Megadeth album - Peace Sells. I"d spotted it there - a recorded tape, I mean a DIY one - and I just wanted to listen to something familiar on the street. I was still thinking about the Bathory discs. I"d bought batteries on Gorky, forty-seven, apparently, because I immediately put Megadeth on.

It was November fifth, and the first snow was falling. I walked along Gorky toward the museum.

Now I"d entered the foyer. At the entrance there was always an old lady-guard, and from this day on she would tell some passing employee to call Dad - and he"d come out. Apart from a scrawny guy and some other old worker, all the staff were women, and the other men in the museum were only various outside crews who were always fixing or installing something. When Dad came out with his sleeves rolled up, in work clothes and sometimes even sweating, he seemed like one of those men and impressed me so much that I didn"t even care that all his salary could barely cover my music purchases. He"d never earned enough for a car in his life (that "Kopeyka" for twenty thousand I mentioned - that"s money he"d get after the apartment split) - a total shitshow.

We went into the left part of the museum, toward the Saratov bus stop - through the hall with armour, urns, spears and such.

Then we turned into a service corridor, with about six rooms and several offices. At the end was the toilet, full of huge cockroaches - I always went in there, struggling with my clean-hand obsession: using my pinkies to pull the door and latch it, lifting the toilet seat with paper or even my foot if it was down, yet still managing to pee on the edge, wiping it with paper, occasionally brushing my finger on the bowl and washing my hands multiple times with the scarce soap, flushing, and then moving the latch and exiting using paper because I knew the cleaning lady went crazy touching everything with her filthy hands. Often it was tricky to leave because someone was already waiting in the corridor, and I had to not reveal my whole ritual with the papers. Most of the time - not just here, but anywhere - if someone hovered over me, I chose to leave "dirty," just so they could finish their business and bugger off, then I"d come back, wash my hands properly, and do everything clean.

Dad"s spot was in a large office with a few desks for the women, who hardly ever sat still and were always moving around. The place smelled of paper, wood, parquet. It was bright everywhere because November, and outside the window it looked like evening all day. The windows faced the courtyard. Here Dad had his ancient computer, as I mentioned.

He gave me a new grey flat bag with a shoulder strap, bearing the logo of the organisation "Rubin," connected to marine technology. Either the museum staff had been gifted items from this organisation that day, or it came from a man named Vitaly Gavrilovich, who held a working-class post in the city art gallery on the square. He had ties to Kronstadt and the naval world, and Dad kept talking about him those days. I put all my tapes, the Exodus disc, and my player in this bag. I"d carry it around until spring - well, when I was free, I mean.

.:::.

Part 73 Text 2. In the office and various things about Dad"s work,,, about Dad"s creative style,,, the "Yapapi" nuance.

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That day seemed like a day off, but parts of the museum ran every day, especially on weekends, and some women were always bustling about. The museum"s main serious work wasn"t the exhibits and taxidermy, which everyone had long since seen, but state grant projects. Besides sawing boards and screwing plywood podiums for displays, Dad, listed as a research associate, actively participated in these projects - mostly on the literary side, where he applied his unique style, which I"ll get to later. During my visits in November, a project related to the Volga was always on the radar: Saratov Lake: Sacred Geography - you can find it online. They"d apparently already published a book and were now working with leftover material. After projects, the museum had various updates, and after the latest one, they got a computer and a digital camera. The computer was in Dad"s office. Women approached it and poked at it even that day.

I once said I"d tell about the women in the museum, but my memory betrayed me again. I recall sitting in that office, but no one specific. Except one - the woman I"d seen in the early days when I first came to Dad in 2004-2005, and who, when he got a mobile phone and texted people at our place, I naively and jealously suspected might be having an affair. A woman his age, an archaeologist, the only one in the team who still had any youthfulness. She was at the computer, and Dad would tell me about her from time to time. She was penniless, a single mother, a survivor with a son - almost as troubled as me.

These visits to Dad"s museum are now associated in my memory with a phrase he often used to encourage me during my upcoming months in the psych ward, where he himself would commit me: "All rockers have spent time in psych wards." At some point, after work or when we went out for pies at the grocery in the Dumpling House, we talked about this, and he first said it. Back then, it really did cheer me up.

I apologise for dumping everything unsorted. I could, of course, describe every museum detail in order, but that would be excessive and unnecessary. For my story, Dad"s museum matters only because I visited about ten times during that magical, irreversible November. And later, when these days became past and tied to my obsession with Bathory and my ironclad decision to become a musician, knowing Quorthon"s story, they became almost my own analogue of Quorthon"s history. Quorthon was closely tied to his father, or whichever uncle-producer called "Boss." Like me, by the biographical material, Quorthon went to work for his Boss at the studio, making strategic decisions about Bathory"s future. With Dad and me, as I"ll tell later, it would be the same - discussing plans, teamwork. Only Quorthon"s was all about music, serious music, whereas ours was about other things, more dreamlike, and combined with my parallel psych-ward storyline, would lean toward art-house. But the similarity to Quorthon"s story exists, and that"s why these museum visits are important - they require at least a messy sketch of associations and memories.

While Dad was elsewhere in the museum sawing away, I sat at his computer listening to Exodus. Despite the songs" monotony and simplicity, and the singer"s artificially aggressive vocals, Exodus was pretty good - a perfect modern metal sound. Listening, I felt connected to all those bands, those metal magazines, the sense of a "bold" future. Not with escapist songs, but like this.

Then Dad would come in, sit, theatrically sigh after his physical work - drawn to creative things. He"d open a folder of drawings to show me something. He was learning to draw with basic Paint in his Windows 98. His drawing was linked to literary work. But it was unique: not sentimental, not to evoke emotion. Some kind of schemes, puzzles, codes. Not complex - visually like geometric surrealism, but simple when explained. These were illustrations for his articles. In his texts, for instance, at a certain point, real mathematical equations appear. The story about the Dumpling House is like that - starts with narration, ends with a coefficient. So while I dissect psychology in everyday life, Dad breaks the everyday into visual abstractions and arithmetic metaphors.

Here"s a brief verdict from a neural network I fed some of his texts to:

-------start of excerpt-------

Volga myth-maker and humanitarian poet-geographer. Sees the Volga and its surroundings as a living, sacred organism and turns local reality into myths. His texts combine irony and deep love for place and people, and his critique of modernisation sounds like quiet longing and a call to an "open heart." His writing is a mix of regional studies, folklore, magical realism, and field diary - reads like Borges and Márquez.

-------end of excerpt-------

I never saw him tackle heavy topics. With those, he was always in the spirit of the previous evening with The Ninth Company. I"d noted these tender tendencies before. Before he arrived, listening to Exodus, I drew the Death logo, of course closing it immediately, and when we finished looking at his abstractions to keep the Paint-drawing theme, I started simple drawings - a man with a dog, a black cat. I always tried to preserve, as much as possible, a good mood for him and Mum, the carefree, light atmosphere, so much that one could invent the term Yapapi.

.:.

___Part 73.

.:::.

Part 73 Text 3. Buying Dark Tranquillity,,, on dumb music and the absurdity of screaming vocals in metal bands

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After lunch I swiped another forty rubles from him and, going to the loo again - just to make sure no lingering drops would ruin my idyllic trudge through the chill - I headed back to the basement. As I remember, I continued alphabetically and bought Dark Tranquillity: two tapes at once - The Gallery and Projector. Beyond the reassuringly underground-metal name, the first tape caught me again with its cover, stylistically reminiscent of Bathory. I didn"t yet know it was the same artist behind all of their artwork. I"ve always been drawn to deep shadows - I"d sketched them in my own drawings as a child, and in computer games, starting with Far Cry, I"d always noticed how light played across the textures. With my purchase, I headed back to the museum.

By this time, November outside had turned slushy and Scandinavian, and although I didn"t yet know that all these Dark Tranquillity and most of the bands on those tapes were from northern Europe, I somehow intuitively felt that I was in the same "place" as them. Since yesterday, a transformation was underway in me: the once coveted sunny, palm-and-Hawaiian-shirt aesthetic had receded in favour of this northern essence. And this shift wasn"t knowledge-based - it was musical.

But as for the music itself and Dark Tranquillity - this was where disappointment in my metal discoveries began. The first song on The Gallery was melodically catchy, and it stayed with me as one of the main soundtrack tracks for the day, along with some other impressive music. But after that, it all went downhill. No other sequence of notes grabbed me. And the vocals - a whole different story. All the "screaming bands," as I called them, I"d heard before had a purpose. The vocalist in Asphyx screamed to the max - their goal was to shred the vocal cords. Chuck Schuldiner in Death coughed and gagged in tune with lyrics about bodily decay, as I judged from the cover and song titles. Tom Araya in Slayer had to convey a hard stance of hate, and in Exodus the goal was to copy Slayer, but the singer strained too much, which betrayed the constructed nature of the aggression.

But in Dark Tranquillity"s screamo, like in countless other bands I"d listen to later, I saw no purpose at all. The hyper-straining scream sounded staged, with no real aggression. Tom Araya sounded angry, aggressive, serious - and didn"t strain. Most importantly, with music aiming for melody and harmony, as in these melodic-death-metal bands, aggression is impossible. Melody and harmony are order. Minor melodic tones produce a post-affect: melancholic calm, resignation, reworked into a musical-aesthetic form. You have to choose: either you"ve processed your affect and don"t scream, or you"re still in hell, screaming and wanting to destroy - but then skip the order, give us atonal riffs, hellish, expectation-breaking brutality. Doing both is unnatural.

And I imagined the musicians I listened to as forty-year-old men. Had I known they were under twenty-five with still-childlike brains, I might have cut them some slack, though even at thirteen I understood the unnaturalness. I thought they were all grown men. If they didn"t see the unnaturalness, didn"t grasp the obvious - then they were idiots. That was exactly how I came to regard such bands, and their listeners, from day one. And such bands probably made up seventy percent of all the "journal" non-mainstream metal I began exploring. Within a few years - or even by that time, though I didn"t know it without the Internet - many of these bands, Dark Tranquillity and the awful Children of Bodom included, would become fully mainstream. What I said about Pink Floyd was mere foreplay compared to how much I would come to hate such bands and have conflicts online. I was doomed. But in that November - there was still the magic of not knowing how it would all go.

.:::.

Part 73 Text 4. To another wing of the museum,,, photographing in the ancient halls,,, visiting the old men,,, with Bathory by the radiator and why it"s not a metal band,,, obsession in ignorance and "autism"

.::::.

I sat again, drawing childish nonsense at Dad"s computer, listening to this or that. Those drawings survived.

After grabbing pies at the twins" house, we had a light lunch, and he went back to work. He was sawing in the workshop in another wing of the museum, facing the courtyard. He had a custom-built machine for cutting wood for stretcher frames - I should have mentioned that long ago. There was also a workbench where he cut boards for the museum. When sweaty - that was where he came from. There was a toilet too, and with another old worker, they"d installed a shower there and boasted about it. When bored with the computer, which held nothing, I would go to his wing. You had to navigate a small labyrinth of military-themed displays. Near the workshop was a stand with a Maxim machine gun on wheels, like some kind of cannon. There was also a display of domestic life in a log house with a stove - the podium all wooden, and Dad was proud of how artificially aged the wood looked. A strict supervisor wandered around, but even she addressed him as "Sasha," appreciating his work - and he savoured it all.

Regarding stretcher frames, I hadn"t mentioned: in the main foyer, Dad had a section behind glass, displaying leftover paintings from his old shop, stretcher frames, and frame samples. People could enter, call him, and place orders. He could make stretcher frames himself, while frame orders went to a familiar workshop in Saratov. In essence, he combined two low-income jobs - museum work and the painting section.

In those small utility rooms in that wing, various useless junk was stored, including vinyl records. From my first visit that month, Dad had a gag: throwing records into the Volga from the dam. That day we finally planned to do it, picking out some Lenin speeches. There was irony in all this for Dad, but I barely understood. I knew Russia once had the Soviet era, Lenin was a big figure - that was all. I had no historical knowledge, nor of the world. I couldn"t tell Italy from Spain, didn"t know the white streaks in the sky were planes - all that.

By the end of the workday, I was pacing the empty corridor between the toilet and Dad"s main office with my player, making a last attempt to find something worthwhile in Dark Tranquillity"s crap. But before we started packing up, someone arrived with the museum"s digital camera, and Dad and I decided to take photos. I wore a light sweater, blue jeans, and my summer 150-ruble market sneakers, which I loved for their cheapness. The first photo was in the hall with spears, urns, shards of ancient pottery, and some hero"s helmet with chainmail, not visible behind Dad. As a child, during my dinosaur phase, I first looked at all these skulls, fossils, and ancient warrior artefacts, and when thinking about Hercules, Conan, this place gave me a sense of connection to all those legends, what I first called "my mythologies." This Engels museum - even more than the Saratov one, linked to old Saratov and academicism - was my only connection to real antiquity. Back then I didn"t care for antiquity, but now, with Bathory and Oblivion, it became important, and from the surrounding details, like the shards, I built in my mind the concept of the whole direction. And this direction, despite what I"d learned in recent days, I still called "Gothic."

The second photo was in the hall of taxidermied birds, and we started packing up.

On the embankment, by the Soldiers" Monument, I threw the first record. Then, looking around, Dad threw his. Almost no one was on the embankment. It was dark, you couldn"t see where they landed, and I kept thinking about how they"d lie there for a thousand years, like the sunken plastic bottles. We walked to the old men on foot.

Dad and I talked a lot, and I already asked questions about Gothic.

That evening I probably played him Bathory"s Man of Iron. He approved, clearly had thoughts on this music. I intended to continue discussing this direction with him in the coming days. Mum, meanwhile, seemed to notice that from that evening I appeared especially close to him.

Later, we all played cards on the sofa. Someone sat on a chair. And again - dinner at the table.

Finally, I lay again by the radiator with Bathory. By then The Lake had become my favourite song. Usually inclined to detailed, overstuffed, complex compositions, in the case of the fully escapist Blood on Ice - which, had I composed it, would have been solely for myself, to immerse in virtual plots rather than communicate to the world - I approved of monotone compositions with repeatedly narrated verses. I still didn"t admit to myself that this was already my favourite metal band. Because for me, it wasn"t a metal band. Megadeth wasn"t a metal band either - it was a separate world of associations. Same with Iron Maiden. New bands like Dark Tranquillity - unclear. My favourite "real-world" metal band I"d still call Slayer or Exodus. The real world - only hatred, expressed in clear, articulate complaints, like riffs in thrash metal.

That night I had spare batteries, and my sleep schedule had shifted to night, so I lay long, listening, rewinding. I got hooked on the solo in "Gates of Thunder of Wind and Rain." The whole song consistently brought back the best moments in forests and mountains west of Korolla. I couldn"t wait to get to the computer, study these things, translate lyrics, see how Bathory"s album connected with games and other "Gothic" matters. These things weren"t separate for me yet. I didn"t know there was a Conan universe, a The Elder Scrolls universe, and mythologies separately. I thought it was all about one thing. And I hadn"t realised that Bathory"s album plot was Conan-based. I hadn"t seen Conan yet. I knew nothing, hadn"t explored. I only felt memories and nostalgia, and thought I was already somewhere. I was in nothing. I was out. Autistic.

Clicking the player buttons, I again fetched BabKlava lying behind the door on my bed, and had to go pee again before forcing myself to sleep.

.:::.

Part 73, Text 5. Into the city with Dad... card business idea... essentially a union of two solitudes... the end of the last weekend day.

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Monday, 6th November, stuck in my memory as a very "weekend-y" day. Dad didn"t have to work either. I slept until around 10:30, then lay there sorting through Báthory texts-or rather, trying to guess what they were about. "Man of Iron." I figured Quorton probably meant "man with an iron core" (the word core in that sense was often used by Dad-he"d picked it up from some Sylvester Stallone movie). But I thought the construction "man of iron" was some sort of neologism. I also thought the crackling at the start of the track was interference on my cassette. Outside, snow was already falling in earnest and not melting. The garden was frozen, the sheds too, and Mukhtar was barking as always-the Gavelov dog from my childhood. And at some point, or maybe another night, Murka would jump onto the bed and lie at my feet. I hadn"t washed my feet for almost four days.

The day was bright with the sun peeking through clouds, flooding the house. Dad suggested we go into the city-he could visit the museum and tinker with something there anyway. I just wanted to wander and talk about Gothic, or more precisely, everything I put into that word.

I don"t remember exactly how we got to the centre. We might have walked, but considering how often I"d later remember Polygraphicheskaya Street near the first school, we probably took a minibus-Polygraphicheskaya, Telmana, then Mayakovskaya-to the final stop at the fair. I still remember stepping off at that terminal onto the square: the afternoon sun felt already like evening, the square dusted with a thin layer of snow. By the stage, old ladies always sold something, and Dad-forever worried my feet would be cold, insisting I wear a second pair of trousers-picked me some woollen socks.

With the snow and the low sun, the day felt extremely Gothic. Back in late September, I"d already said that all this tied into Gothic for me. Walking to the museum, then sitting there at the computer with that primitive Paint-like we were five-year-olds, not in 2007 but in the nineties, sitting at a computer for the first time-we discussed Gothic aesthetics, visual imagery, antiquity, though today it was framed in terms of converting it into money.

Dad had spent his life trying to find himself in craft-"hands-on work," as he called it-that could bring income: paintings in his distinctive style, figurines, odd and avant-garde trinkets, oddly shaped little books, origami... and within a month he"d want to run workshops on the craft. Nothing brought him money except the paintings. I needed money desperately, so I shared his business enthusiasm, and the very first thing we dreamed up-dreamed, not executed-was Gothic-themed playing cards, with images along those lines. Like the way porn-themed cards were sold in kiosks.

But digging deeper, the core of the idea wasn"t business, nor an interest in card games-apart from the ones we"d played on the sofa at Grandpa"s, we had no real connection-nor even in card aesthetics, or Gothic itself. It was an illusion: that if we made these Gothic decks, the people who bought them would be our people. We were looking for kindred spirits. Put simply: we were lonely. Two useless eccentrics, essentially. Dad-with his avant-garde and Borges-and me-with my personal autistic escapism. And now we"d found each other. Just the two of us, but it was something.

All we did was talk about the cards, the design, installing Photoshop, making sketches, sending them to a publisher, and seeing our decks replace those crude porn cards in kiosks. Dad despised all things tawdry and sexual, and I, with my hopeless sexual life, shared that sentiment and theatrically shamed all such things-even though deep down, more than any cards or Gothic imagery, I"d have liked a fling or at least to glance at those porn cards.

We didn"t spend long at the museum; we left around 3:30 p.m. and hopped on a trolleybus to the first school. Back then, the nearest "Pyaterochka" to Frunze was on the ground floor of that big ten-storey building at Engels Avenue 2-full of those typical nineties mini-markets inside buildings. There, with Grandpa and Alina, I bought my second copy of The Lion King.

After Pyaterochka, I was freezing, so with the funeral agency and a "landscape of anticipation" to the left, we hurried along Polygraphicheskaya to Frunze.

That evening, Dad and I resumed our card dreams and discussed music in small doses. Ballads like "Man of Iron" he called "ethnic," maybe even using the word folk. The next day was work: Mom and I had to go 25 km out to the psychiatric clinic to see a doctor, a dreaded chore, like going back to school. I fucking didn"t want to go anywhere, especially under threat.

I went to sleep with music again, probably staying awake even longer that night, tormented by the fact I couldn"t switch cassettes without disturbing the hyper-sensitive Baba Klava. This would be the last night at Frunze for the childhood part of the story.

I marvelled at how lucky I"d been to buy those three cassettes-Asfix, Chroming Rose, and Báthory-on that first day. Musically and thematically, they covered my three main motifs: aggression, melancholy, escapism. Negative affect, processing it, and running from it all.

Describing those "cassette" Báthory November days was the hardest part of the autobiography. I had assumed for twenty years that the day of buying the three cassettes was 3rd November. But I wasn"t sure. I"d avoided writing about these pivotal days for twenty years due to uncertainty. Now the time had come-life had collapsed, big money gone-and I still didn"t know: maybe it started 2nd November. I did a whole detective job: checking files, museum sketches, sequence of info. When Mol said Báthory wasn"t Gothic metal but Viking metal, that episode had to be before the trip to Saratov. I thought I said "Gothic metal" buying Death"s tape, meaning Viking metal would be the next day. So Mom and I must"ve gone to Saratov twice, implying everything began 2nd November. I found Dad"s drawings: one modified at half past one on 2nd November. If moving day was the 2nd, he"d still be at the museum then. My main anchor was understanding how short memory stretches feel much longer-like the day I hysterically swapped the camera on the new bike, which felt like a week until other markers corrected it. I revised, changed on the fly, almost wanted to write to Lyuba Sedneva. It was hell. Eventually, I settled on the shorter version, which dictated how Mom and I got from Frunze to Saratov on 7th November, though it still feels like the bus trip with Death could"ve been another day. Uncle Seryozha drove us straight to Saratov on the 7th.

.:::.

Part 73, Text 6. Leaving Frunze with Mom... hunting a minibus to Altynka and arguing... hatred of the system and other stuff... Mom talking to Baba Valya at the pond... I stay with the nine-storey.

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7th November began with the slightly forgotten atmosphere of unpleasant school prep after a holiday. Uncle Seryozha came for us again. By the time we left the gate, it was probably close to noon. My usual grey bag held my player and all my music. We circled the Frunze block, went onto Polygraphicheskaya, then Nesterov-into the centre, like that November morning. Only now, after the "funeral" entry into the church grounds, Uncle Seryozha stopped at the Children"s Park. This was also a stop for the minibus we"d taken two days ago toward Grandpa"s. Mom had to go to a hardware store, and Uncle Seryozha left. We hadn"t been dropped off here in years; the last memory was summer "97, when Mom brought me and handed me to Baba Valya. Funny that today would be another handoff to her.

While Mom shopped, I crossed Nesterov and paced by the "Rodina" entrance. As always, a funeral PAZ bus passed-bright red, almost crimson, with a black stripe. I kept thinking of Death, but my batteries had died.

When Mom came out, for some reason Uncle Seryozha couldn"t take us to Saratov, so we had to take a bus. I arranged to meet her at the museum stop in Saratov, then hurried via Lev Kassil to a shop for batteries. They had rechargeables, but the price was almost the same as the player itself.

At the museum stop, Mom was already there; we got on and I turned on Death.

In Saratov, we needed the long minibus to Altynka, boarding at the final stop to secure seats. Back then, it was route eighty-something; the final stop was on a parallel street below Moskovskaya-Kutjakov or even Zarubin. Mom didn"t know exactly, so we went to Chapaev along Moskovskaya, then walked searching for the stop.

Here, a fight broke out between Mom and me, straight from our fiercest Lev Kassil-style arguments. I resisted the fucking system: school, lessons, tests, now these psychiatric appointments where I was registered. Mom panicked at the consequences of disobedience: social services, fines, losing the flat, money... She used psychological pressure, hinting she"d "disown" me and I"d end up in the clinic: "Do you want me to arrange that? I will." Her gaze threatened. She switched into an alien persona, siding with the enemy-the fucking system-which had a lever on her and through her, on me. I"d described this in spanking episodes in first grade. Underlying her manipulations was her lifelong grievance: she didn"t need a child; she would"ve lived better alone. She"d always told me she regretted linking with my father, whom she also deemed insane, a "schizophrenic" like me but unregistered. She cursed Baba Valya for not warning her that Dad was ill, and that his early eccentric, unserious acts weren"t jokes; she shouldn"t have had a kid with him.

Streams of water ran down the streets; the snow had turned into muddy filth. Finally, we boarded a minibus. I sat at the very back, by the rear window. The route went along the lower street to Radishchev, then up Moskovskaya, past the square, to Bolshaya Kazachya, looping near my gymnasium-or maybe going further along Kazachya over the hill via the polytechnic. The trip felt eternal.

Most of the conflict continued in the minibus. I probably swore at Mom heavily; she had to respond, continuing manipulations that had driven me crazy in early-year episodes, like the time I sat with a hammer on Lev Kassil to smash a window and escape, or pushed a table at her. Now I knew what awaited if I lost control, so I stayed as subdued as possible. I was already crying, probably triggered by a passenger"s remark. I wasn"t remembering events exactly, just the sensation-like after the fight at the pier, seeing myself through others" eyes-or like the neurologist saying he"d have hit me if Mom hadn"t been there. Passengers often blamed me. In youth and adulthood, I argued with Mom in public; strangers would meddle. Once, after swearing at a man, he even struck me. Fucking moralists, vigilantes, Robin Hoods-all of them. Their effect: making me murderous.

That morning, Dad was at the museum, creating. A drawing at 10 a.m.-Pink Wolf in Paint-clearly a visual metaphor for some parable. Around noon, Mom called from the minibus, pulling him back to reality. I pressed my forehead to the window, snot streaming down my sleeve, still not ready to hurt anyone, playing the freakish part of the "park department freak behaviour," leaving my snot untidied for theatricality. Mom told Dad over the phone: "Get a taxi and come; he"s done here." Dad explained he couldn"t leave work, but Mom didn"t care-she wanted to settle who would take responsibility for me. She noticed my recent closeness with Dad over the last two days. She always remembered how I loved going to Baba Valya, how food was tastier and the atmosphere better there.

We got to Altynka, silently went to the doctor in that fucking children"s building on the hill. Early snow lay everywhere; the place reminded me of Bruma from Oblivion. The scenic fire pond, with willows bending into it, hadn"t frozen; combined with falling snow, it felt like Báthory"s The Lake. But the atmosphere was poisoned by the Orthodox church twenty metres away; I"d always avoided water near Orthodox sites, going back to childhood, due to Mom"s warnings about cemeteries.

Walking back from the building to the pond, Baba Valya approached: Dad had presumably called her to handle Mom. They stopped by the pond, talking. I didn"t listen, moving to the edge, where ducks swam. A tree leaned over the water; I climbed its lower branches, mimicking parkour stunts, remembering stealth-action escapes from my imagination. Mom spoke with Baba Valya for about fifteen minutes.

And then the three of us walked to the bus stop, got on the minibus, and set off. We rode in silence, but when we were already approaching Penzenskaya in Zavodsky, Mom said I had to decide: either go to Engels and live with her, or get off with them. I didn"t want to live on Frunze without a shower or a computer-so I got off with Baba Valya.


.:.

___Part 74.

.:::.

Part 74, Text 1. Returning to the ninth floor... unpacking the computer... the local nightly routine... on having reached the peak of importance in my autobiography.

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Mom left on the minibus, and Baba Valya and I walked across the traffic lights toward the building. Just then, coming from the city, Dad arrived and got off at the stop. It was around 4:30 p.m.-he had left work early after all. Baba Valya went home, and Dad and I went out for evening food. But first, I dragged him into the local Media Markt-I hadn"t been there for ages. I immediately snatched a ninety-ruble Megadeth CD, Rust in Peace. That was the last Megadeth album I ever bought.

Then we went shopping for groceries. The "Pyaterochka" chain either didn"t exist yet in this area or, in these nine-storey districts, small local shops still prevailed-they never quite went full chain back then. These little stores, within a hundred metres of the building, had absurdly high prices. They stocked mostly items like Krakow sausage or wieners-which were already expensive. And all this despite Dad"s meagre earnings-about eight thousand rubles a month-plus forty rubles per day just for trips to Engels. That was Dad in a nutshell: he preferred more expensive minibuses over buses, loved buying unnecessary extra t-shirts, socks, trousers, and so on. How someone could live in a one-room flat with his mother at forty, not save a kopeck, and still not economise was always completely incomprehensible to me-totally opposite to Mom"s and my mentality.

We went into a grocery store across from their building. Once, Dad and I had bought me a wrestling game disc there, which I never played. That day we picked up sausage, mineral water, beer or wine for Dad"s dinner, dried squid, and a KitKat for me-a standard selection for the nine-storey kids in the remainder of my childhood story. Another frequent shop of theirs was right at the corner by the traffic lights, even more expensive. And a third was halfway to the "Sharik" market. These were the shops we would always visit from then on.

I hadn"t been at Baba Valya"s for a month, and now it felt like my first time there in ages. As always, she fussed in the kitchen, preparing a special dinner to mark my arrival. I stayed in the living room unpacking my computer: we all understood that I would stay with them for now. Especially with Dad and me obsessed with our card design business idea. We placed the computer by the wall near the balcony door.

Maybe I haven"t explained enough: for me, what I meant by "Gothic" wasn"t just medieval Gothic, or even early medieval Viking stuff-it included antiquity in general. Fur armour, scenes from the first Conan film I remembered from childhood, and whatever was in some desert-they were all Gothic to me. Ultimately, even primal, prehistoric times counted as Gothic. And that would always be the case. Later, when I studied it more in my early teens, I realised I was drawn to things you couldn"t quite define: medieval, but also barbaric pre-Common Era times. Not because I was particularly fascinated-I was just chasing memories: Conan, that blue children"s Bible from my youth, where everyone walked barefoot in illustrations. That first evening, as I began sketching card designs, I used primitive cave art images I found on my computer. And that, to me, was Gothic.

Dad was enthusiastic, but as soon as Baba Valya called us to the table, eating immediately became paramount. There was always a bottle of beer or wine, as I mentioned, a toast, and her constant advice to bite garlic to stay healthy. I always sat on Baba Valya"s small sofa, Dad faced the window with his back to the fridge and TV, and she stayed at the stove. Space was tight, so when she needed the fridge, Dad would turn and fetch things himself. Then, while the kettle slowly boiled and she washed the dishes, we returned to the living room, and I, still burning with enthusiasm, could sit up all night doing something, while Dad slouched in the armchair, exhausted from work, beer, and the day"s heaviness (and life with me would bring many such hard days). So all our business ideas remained mere conversation. Occasionally on weekends we approached them more seriously, but daily chores always came first-market trips, home needs, laundry, and in the evening, especially on weekends, beer and some biathlon on TV. That"s roughly how life went. On the ninth floor, I never even saw him read books. We slept together on the unfolded sofa; he usually went first, picking up his Borges in bed, but ten minutes later it lay on his chest, and he was out cold.

Our card design idea would live another day-then an endless other life would begin.

From this point on, the events in my life became less important than what came before. If I could choose the period of life to relive, I would pick the following: the days I bought a computer at the President Agency and played GTA: Vice City in early 2004, first impressions of the radio stations, all the synthy sounds when pressing menu buttons; the days I bought and listened to Korol i Shut in late 2004; the days of playing Vice City again on my final computer in early 2005, when I loved Keep Filling Fascination and the atmosphere of Little Havana; any childhood moment watching Dire Straits" On the Night concert; first weeks of Oblivion under Jeremy Soule; listening to Iron Maiden"s new album in October 2006; and the days with Báthory and Chroming Rose cassettes.

There would be much more escapism in life, thanks to music, but each time it would increasingly be shadowed by the understanding that none of what I feel is real. What I feel is mere nostalgia, not events. There is no other life, nothing happens. A kind of reverse solipsism. The only reality is this world; the imagined other world does not exist. And that is far sadder than if it simply weren"t there.

But the main point of my biography is not nostalgia-it"s explanatory. Those who read it-if they do-will primarily want to understand why nothing was ever done to me. So, with minimal introspection and atmospheric description, I will conclude the childhood story.

.:::.

Part 74, Text 2. To the museum with Dad... about Sanya Krylov... seven minutes with Alina at Baba Valya"s... Dan Swanö... Gothic III.

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Thinking I might annoy Baba Valya or get up to mischief in the flat, Dad didn"t want to risk it, so I started going to work with him. That was clearly the reason, though I don"t remember realising it at the time-I also had my own interest in going to Engels, to that rock basement. Remembering the boredom of sitting in his office in front of an empty computer, and the long, tedious hour-and-a-half one-way journey, it"s hard to imagine I would have preferred wasting whole days there instead of staying home at the computer.

When we left the building, he lit a cigarette, and I finally asked why. He said something like: "Life"s become hard." And added, I think, "Once it settles down, I"ll quit."

In Engels, I went to the rock basement and bought Báthory"s Twilight of the Gods. I only listened once-then never again-not because it was bad, but because such melancholic, long music required a different situation, not an office with aunties.

At the museum, Dad had Sanya Krylov stop by-an oddball who helped move furniture into Natasha"s flat. He dabbled in who-knows-what, collected junk, loved old ladies" flats, as Dad told it. I"d see him a few more times in my youth, at Dad"s workspace. Two years later, in that same small room with frames and canvases where Dad let him work alone, he"d sell someone a viper"s poison, and the cops would swoop in. He wasn"t jailed, just barred from the museum. Dad commented: "What a kid!" By then, Mom, having visited the Engels theatre, already knew he sang in the local choir-his eunuch-like pitch. Krylov"s end came in 2012-a fatal knife fight in a kitchen. There are articles online. A man living with his mother, dirt poor, yet with a sex life, informal socialisation, adventures. Meanwhile, I had money, lived alone, and had nothing except the prospect of a lifetime in a psychiatric institution or suicide.

Evening, returning from Engels and transferring at Chapaev, we went into every shop along the way. At Detsky Mir, on the first floor, for purely aesthetic reasons, we bought two decks of standard playing cards. By this point, the three-day card odyssey was essentially over.

At Media Markt, in the expensive disc section of my favourite licensed company, IronD, was a disc by Death Angel, with perfect black-and-red artwork, perfect logo, perfect everything. But I was too shy to ask the clerk to fetch it to listen.

On 9th November, I was home, backing up my computer"s content-I needed to reinstall Windows. Baba Valya had guests: Alina"s grandmother from the dacha, and Alina herself. I hadn"t seen her since summer 2004, maybe 2003. This was, apart from an eighteen-year-old prostitute, my last informal peer contact ever. While the women were in the kitchen, she came into the living room and sat down. I barely looked at her-I was at the computer, and it would"ve been strange to turn away. She came simply to see what I was doing. To show I was immersed in metal, I played Slayer"s Angel of Death. To my surprise, she said she knew it. Maybe she really did; she was a bit tomboyish. She stayed about seven minutes, then left. I never saw her again.

Before moving in with them, Dad had installed a pull-up bar in the hallway. Despite lost fitness, I still met the standard. I played Oblivion again, searching for the most Gothic location. For me, Gothic landscapes were primarily fields, like in Mylène Farmer imagery-but Oblivion has hardly any fields, mostly huge boulders scattered everywhere. The purest open space was on the east bank of the river south of the Imperial City. I lowered the draw distance in graphics settings to hide the edges, and that"s how I felt Gothic. I completed the main quest line.

Showing the game to Dad, a man of wood, he greatly appreciated the interiors and old objects. Our card design idea began to include textures and models from the game. Copyright and intellectual property didn"t exist for us. And anyway, we knew our ideas wouldn"t reach a serious stage-we both understood, quietly living the illusion. He moved the chair closer, and we sat watching the game while I showed him new models and interiors. Then I"d turn, and he"d be asleep.

The next day-back to Engels. The basement clerk wasn"t Mol, but a grown man, fat, whom I briefly discussed bands with. Regarding Iron Maiden-he liked only their first album. On cassettes, he liked only Dan Swanö"s Moontower. I trusted him and bought it. When I started listening, I almost immediately stopped-again the screaming vocals. Musically, there was something to listen to, just progressive metal I wasn"t ready for.

This was my only memorable contact with the fat clerk that autumn. In summer next year, I"d interact with him about ten times. His name was Igor Kharlamov; he died in 2017. Though Mol was there in those main days, the memory of this autumn is more tied to the fat rocker.

In the evening, transferring in Saratov, Dad and I went to the big Media Markt and bought Gothic III. At home, I installed it-it ran, but my computer couldn"t handle it. Early in the game there"s a fight with orcs, lots of chaos, one frame per second. Seeing the orcs didn"t frustrate me much, but the menu music was excellent. I don"t recall precisely which track, but I remember the main "Vista Point" theme. For me, the music was the most important. I"d return to play Gothic for a few days on my new computer next summer.

.:::.

Part 74, Text 3. North - a new favourite aesthetic, at home about my and my father"s tastes, the band Melnitsa, the start of frustration at Europe"s inaccessibility, Celtic folk and Ritchie Blackmore.

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By the end of that week, I finally admitted to myself: I now love the North. I no longer needed America, Miami, or anything else in that line. I even preferred the grey, the grime, our own shitty reality. I remembered trips on the minibus to Altynka, the depressing outskirts of Saratov and the hills - and that had now become my favourite aesthetic. All thanks to Bathory"s Blood on Ice, which entered my life at the very moment I was immersed in this greyness, forever linking itself to it. This was a pivotal moment in my story, and I could now unpack it over several paragraphs, but I was saving time, and besides, it would end up being about all the same things as before - Novembri, Bathory, Oblivion, gothic stuff, and my metalhead hopes. My metalhead hopes - in the sense that I might socialise through this - were still strong, but they would start to fade slowly in the coming days, when I finally got online and listened to more "true" metal bands, only to find that they were all rubbish.

Apparently, by Saturday we went again with my father to MediaMarkt near home. CDs were gradually getting cheaper, and there was a Metallica concert from around their 1991 album for about a hundred rubles. It had all those Sad But True tracks and others from that album, and Hetfield still had long hair. With that vocal, appearance, and precise sound, Metallica could have been perfect - if not for the heap of filler songs from their earlier albums. My father didn"t like all that metal, and I tried to listen through headphones, but once he said: "No, well, Metallica and all that I, of course, respect." He probably hadn"t listened to them even once; he just said it so I"d feel him as a companion. I, in turn, often pretended to approve of some of his tastes, though in reality I was bored stiff.

He constantly talked about literature, Hemingway, Dostoevsky. He said Dostoevsky wrote for money, chaotically, never finishing sentences, leaving them half-done. I imagined pages full of ellipses after broken phrases. I don"t know if it"s true - I only read Crime and Punishment.

I probably mention this late, but during my childhood, discussing my father"s philology degree, he said that with it, he could have worked as a Russian language and literature teacher in some village school. Since that wasn"t much of a career prospect, he worked outside his specialty, mostly with his hands.

One evening, I had a sharp, as I called it, "pain in my dick" - that old, untreated problem of burning between my balls and my arse - and for the first time, I poured hot water into a plastic bottle and tucked it between my legs, even under my arse, which eased the burning a bit while it lasted its hellish twenty minutes. Baba Valya fussed and made herbal infusions, which I drank just to avoid upsetting her. She liked reading horoscopes and, before going out, prayed to some matron on an icon. My father had a cross dangling on his chest his whole life.

We continued discussing gothic stuff. He talked about the Templars, and I said, "That"s like in my game." I didn"t understand anything. In Oblivion there were no Templars, only Tamriel - the continent in that universe. Only a year later would I start grasping the lore of The Elder Scrolls, and the disappointment for the fantasy would begin.

Soon, my father and I shifted from the visual and historical side of gothic - for which I still lacked sufficient background - to what truly interested both of us: music. More precisely, folk music. My father said my Bathory leaned towards folk.

It started with the band Melnitsa. My father had a CD, and we played it. He said he"d been listening to them all the previous year, and he especially liked the song Doroga Sna ("The Road of Dreams"). After all the "Who"s to blame that you"re tired" and other songs he strummed during my childhood, I already knew that he - like me - liked all that pentatonic stuff. Doroga Sna - an acoustic guitar and flute piece - hooked me too, but I immediately pictured the singer as a person biographically, and I disliked her instantly. Why? Well, biographically. Why should I know about a full, successful life? Just to feel my own tragedies more painfully? Especially in context of what comes next.

Sometimes I played two Bathory acoustic tracks from Blood on Ice on that black tape recorder for us, and once I also played some ballads by the band VASP, expecting my father"s approving reaction. But he explained that those ballads were different - not ethnic.

Then he started telling me about melodies he"d strummed during my childhood, like the folk The Unquiet Grave, whose monotonous performance on Lev Kassil used to drive him nuts. He said it came from a cassette called Celtic Guitar, which he had since the nineties. It was entirely instrumental music, similar to Melnitsa, but more guitar-driven. He explained it all fell under "Celtic folk." If I was searching for castles, knights, and King Arthur stuff, I should go in that direction. He talked about England. My own memories of real England were fragmentary - just a few TV shots of green marshlands, grey castles, and pervasive mist. He said, "That"s England." And it was exactly what I needed, because it felt like the shores around the Imperial City from my magical first day in the game. I finally looked up England on the map. Not very close, let"s say. I also checked Sweden - across the sea from Russia, though a bit nearer. From Saratov, it was basically as far as another world. No wonder even in Sweden they spoke English. And judging by what my father said, they had no connection to Russia. I immediately thought: "Here we go again." I had just accepted leaving Miami, Megadeth, and America behind, thinking I"d finally found myself, and a normal life would begin. I was proud of my "acceptance of the North" - it would make me less frustrated, less anxious, less of a pain to those close to me. I thought: cold, crap, and fog - it must be somewhere nearby. And then, curse it, the same old problem.

My father kept frustrating me. He said the Celtic musician on that cassette was Ritchie Blackmore, the guitarist from Deep Purple - the same one whose tape he once brought to Natasha"s apartment - which also had Smoke on the Water. Blackmore, apparently, got tired of rock and moved into Celtic folk. I never heard that cassette - he didn"t have it anymore. But I recall that because of a pirated release in the nineties, it was actually not Blackmore"s album, but fingerstyle guitarist Greg Joy"s. I would discover it and get hooked almost as much as on Bathory, the following summer - and that would become the true beginning of my folk obsession.

For now, my father and I thought it was Blackmore, and he mentioned that there was a DVD of a concert in disc stores, and we planned to get it in a few days.

.:::.

Part 74, Text 4. In the museum, I write heroic text, the ideal of fatherhood, buying Bathory discography, Emperor, Saratov musician shops, discovering Gorbushka, connecting to the internet.

.::::.

On Monday the thirteenth, we were at the museum again from morning - I was drawing and saved a still life in Paint. It must have been the day of dry frost, snow, and low sun when I went to the basement at lunch. I had now bought Bathory"s Destroyer of Worlds. The first track, Lake of Fire, was strongly linked in my memory to sitting in my father"s office. But beyond the first two songs, I didn"t listen to the album back then. Only in 2008 would I return to it, by which time Bathory had long been my main band.

Most associated with my museum sessions was listening to Exodus, which I think my father even had at work. In particular, Shades to Think, with three perfect riffs, mid-tempo (after Bathory I leaned toward slower music), and a flawless solo. My black-and-green Winamp player played the track, and I fiddled with the equaliser to make it sound heavier.

That week, I went to the museum with my father four days straight - from the 13th to the 16th.

The next day, the 14th, I drew again and started writing. A super-naïve text was to the tune of Blood on Ice, only the protagonist had a family: three kids and a wife. Then an evil force from the North destroyed the idyll, and now I had to venture into dark lands and fight the black adversary. Soon I would record it with a microphone, already translated by an automatic English translator, and I would quote it more fully, though I hadn"t preserved the original Russian.

In my heroic tales, I was always the father - the standard family man. This was inspired by my family, specifically my father. Despite his practical uselessness and his trips "under the skirt" to Baba Valya, even secretly arranging to send me to the mental hospital, morally and theoretically he was my model of fatherhood. On the everyday family level - all those early trips to the beach, the cinema, the park (though mostly once), or how he helped my mother carry heavy bags and do other unpleasant chores, always considerate of her state and respectful - he showed himself as a truly adequate man. Imagining my own relationship with a girlfriend, I always pictured myself the same way, and it infuriated me that, unlike selfish bastards who made women miserable, I had nothing, sitting alone in my room decade after decade. I"ve explored this side of myself many times before - my need to care, etc. - so I"ll move on.

In the evening, we threw vinyl one last time from the snowy dam and headed along Gorky Street to the rock basement - I wanted to finally buy a Bathory MP3 disc, and also get a bus stop near the lyceum early, so seats would still be free. I listened to my player. Crossing Halturina, opposite the library, twin girls passed us. I had my favourite solo from Gods of Thunder, of Wind and of Rain in my ears. That was the last time I saw the twins in person before seeing them one last time on a bus three years later. In this childhood story there will be a couple more memories of them, and I will make the traditional farewell there.

The compilers of the Bathory MP3 disc had chosen the cover art poorly - a zombie from the computer game Doom 3. At home, I started skimming through the albums. There were no memorable compilations or Quorthon"s solo albums. Nordlands were the latest - 2002 and 2003. No new ones yet, I thought. These Nordlands sounded particularly strange - buzzing guitars, super-saturated electric guitar turned to mush. Yet the songs were serious, not Bathory"s heavy metal, with creative melodic and riff ideas. It required proper time and focus to listen. Meanwhile, my father nagged that Baba Valya had set the table and I should come before it cooled. I fully listened only to Ring of Gold. It was a very special atmosphere, absolute escapism even from other metal.

The next day I went from the museum to the basement again. Only Blood Fire Death remained from Bathory there, but I had already briefly listened to it at home and realised it was something between the messy album I"d heard at MediaMarkt and epic choral albums, so I didn"t rush to buy it. I bought two cassettes starting with "E": Enslaved - Blodhemn, attracted by the cover showing a shore, a drakkar, and a sword. It had stupid oral nonsense instead of music, and I turned it off after five minutes. The second cassette, which I had high hopes for based on cover and title, was Emperor - In the Nightside Eclipse. That was the album by musicians so young I was only six, or younger, when it came out. Later I would pick out proper melodies, and it was a solid album, but at that moment, I couldn"t even hear or understand anything. Super-fast hammering, echo overload, some distant croaking vocals, and lyrics I couldn"t make sense of - that"s black metal. But the album created a dark, wintry atmosphere.

It was time to introduce a few music stores in Saratov. First, Soundcity - 118 Moskovskaya. A small hall with guitars and everything else. My father and I had visited it several times.

That evening, I went to Saratov alone, ahead of my father. We planned to meet on Rakhova to check a CD shop on Kazachya. I went further, almost to the station, and entered a music shop on 157 Moskovskaya. There were some older guys, naturally, and I asked a question about a guitar to the seller. One of the guys helped explain. I heard the word "Ibanez" for the first time. That guy would later become someone I"d trade a few records and other music stuff with in youth. He was from Engels, the far edge of the city, had a garage, and was generally a dealer of all sorts of junk.

Also on 29 Moskovskaya - intersection with Michurina, near the embankment - there was another, larger and probably main store, Muztorg. We had been there on one of the museum trips when we didn"t make it to Chapaev. I drove my father there to check disc shops; it was faster to reach Zavodskoy via Chernyshevskaya. Muztorg had plenty of Ibanez guitars, with a sad, long-haired rocker-looking seller. In total, Moskovskaya had at least three specialized music shops, which, combined with old associations of metalheads and gig posters on the thick round posts I once mentioned, made the street very "musician-y."

Meeting my father on Rakhova, we visited the CD shop near the sex shop, then walked Kazachya to Chapaev. On the corner, Rakhova 132, we entered a grocery - one of those expensive ones. Then further down Kazachya, at the end of a nine-storey block, first floor, 59 Kazachya, was a stepped entrance, and my father said this was "Gorbushka." In Saratov, it seemed just a nickname after the Moscow place. I had never been inside, though my mother and I had passed by many times.

Inside were a couple of small rooms with counters and sellers. Most were computer programs and games, but one stall was music, even rock music. The counter had MP3 discs, and behind the seller on the wall were licensed albums. The seller was a dark-haired, bespectacled guy, around twenty-four. Most MP3s were from the label that had Anthrax, the lousy Destruction, and Testament - you could exchange MP3s for 30 rubles. The bands were so numerous it was overwhelming. We didn"t stay long. Definitely a place we"d return to.

Sitting by the right window in the 90th bus, crawling slowly through Saratov to Zavodskoy, I listened to Emperor - high-frequency noise, really. I fell asleep there. Outside was all that dark blue gloom, like on the cassette cover I"d listened to.

At home on the 15th, we connected to the internet for the first time. Via phone, like in Engels, using an internet card. We quickly started looking up things of interest. My father wanted to hear the famous song by The Animals - House of the Rising Sun. Pentatonic, too. I saved Megadeth pictures and lyrics. But internet time that day was short.

.:::.

Part 74, Text 5. Crappy pagan metal, online acquaintance with a Muscovite, learning that Quorthon was already dead, Blackmore"s Night, first encounter with the audio program Sonar 4.

.::::.

On the sixteenth, I went to the museum for the last time. On the way back, we stopped by Gorbushka. Following the salesperson"s advice, I started with the band Butterfly Temple. At home, I realised it was a domestic band. Grinding, screaming nonsense - it finally made me understand that "pagan metal," as the style was called, was always this shitty, no matter that they tended to use flutes and stuff. The only thing I liked was their reworking of the melody from In the Hall of the Mountain King. But the disc could be swapped for thirty rubles, so whatever.

Dad and I reconnected to the internet. I registered on Metallibrary. I saved some pictures of Megadeth, Slayer, Tesla, and song lyrics. This shows I wasn"t rushing with Bathory. Bathory needed a separate block of time. I could also hunt for pictures and make tweaks for the last sparks of enthusiasm.

I logged into ICQ again and chatted with Chester. He said he"d found another guy who"d even made some kind of car model. I messaged him - his name was Andrei, about a year and a half older than me, from Moscow. I envied him a little for how well he handled 3D Max, but soon we were talking about bands. His favourite was In Extremo - folk metal. A few days later, I tried sending him Bathory.

He was a very friendly guy, and I"d keep in touch with him until I was twenty, even meeting him twice in Moscow. At that point, though, we only chatted for a couple of days; our "main" communication - if finger-tapping counts - would start in the summer of 2007. He turned out to be the kind of person who had all sorts of incredible, so-called "Moscow" experiences in life. For example, he had a bagpipe, and his father had been killed by thugs or something like that. He was also a closed-off tuberculosis patient, and bisexual. All of this felt very advanced, non-provincial, to me.

Incidentally, only by the end of my youth would I realise that gay people, bisexuals, and pedophiles who latched onto me and whom I interacted with, shared friendliness toward me as a common trait - and for me, the value of such contacts, even memories of Andrei, would fade, associated as they were with my "main" November.

As for Chester, I only exchanged messages with him once the next year - he wrote to me himself, and somewhat unfriendly. That"s a typical example of my heterosexual correspondent. Fuck that, I thought, wishing I"d known all this back then.

Dad had a microphone for his DVD player. On the morning of the seventeenth, we connected it to the computer. He went to work, BabValya wasn"t home, and I made my first recordings. I just came up with riffs using my voice, imitating the sound of a heavy guitar with my "dj‑dj‑dj."

Probably that evening, I read a long Bathory story and learned that Quorthon was already dead. I still hoped I might find something equivalent to Bathory, or even better, so I hadn"t fully grasped the significance of this information. Nothing else would compare, and Bathory was the only thing that could have fulfilled that dream I imagined - waiting for their new album, which would even feel like a purpose in life. I hadn"t yet understood that even if something similar to Bathory existed in every way, it still wouldn"t be Bathory, not November 3rd, 2006, not the trip to Saratov from Frunze. It was a childish, foolish illusion that on one hand inspired me for years ahead, but on the other hand just took those years away. Now I sit by the busted basin, the same Blood on Ice in my headphones, and nothing has changed, except that then youth was far ahead, and now - far behind.

Probably on the evening of November 17th, Dad himself bought Blackmore"s Night at the MediaMarket near home. By the weekend morning, the disc was already there, and we watched it from bed on the sofa. It was a well-known DVD, with clips and also videos of Blackmore in a castle with a woman who could be his daughter. Dad said, "His wife is certainly a beauty." The instrumental piece Memmingen on acoustic guitar was familiar from the old Saratov TV channel, Vtoraya Sadovaya. And the song Second Chance strongly evokes that time for me.

Dad would have many more moments in life where he admired women"s beauty like that, and I always felt awkward for him - knowing that none of them could ever be his. Still, he"s my dad. Not shameful, just painful. Like for myself. We aren"t to blame for being who we are, for doing what we shouldn"t, and missing out on what we want.

After two weeks of wandering, I got an ingrown toenail on my big toe. It even swelled, and at some point it discharged pus. That day, I used it as an excuse to stay home while Dad went to Gorbushka alone. BabValya wasn"t home, and I recorded all kinds of crap into the microphone again. I recorded one of my August poems, Filthy World, in an aggressive spoken-word style. Good thing that embarrassment can"t go here - it was really humiliating.

That evening Dad came back, bringing a disc with audio software. He said the salesperson told him that if we figured it out, we"d become serious guys. I already had Adobe Audition on the disc I bought in spring, as well as Sound Forge, but Dad brought Sonar 4. That"s the program I"d use to record music all the way until 2020. It was old even then. But I wouldn"t get to it properly for about a year and a half. For now, I just opened it, clicked around, tried to find the promised virtual instruments, reached the piano roll and instrument selection, but there was no sound. Remembering my 3D Max incompetence, on that depressing note - or rather, complete silence - I closed the program. I was so close to making music properly back then, not like the newbie way I"d start next year with Guitar Pro. I might have been calmer, maybe even avoided a stint in the psych ward. Probably just an undetermined audio driver. For years I"d wrestle with these dead-end, inexplicable problems. Everyone else would be recording music, and I"d still be stuck wondering why I had no sound or couldn"t install any virtual instrument plugins. Around 2019, after nine years lost to obsession with Dasha and depression, I"d rediscover YouTube, where Russian tutorials would cover other programs that still wouldn"t work for my tasks. One disaster feeding into another. A vicious circle, impossible to break without outside help - which didn"t appear until 2024, when some altruistic guy explained in a few days what I couldn"t understand for eighteen years. By then, the train of opportunity had long gone to hell.


.:.

___Part 75.

.:::.

Part 75, Text 1. First online crush - the goth Neanta, her musical tastes in general, more about discs, drawing a gothic city, depraved goth girls in cemeteries.

.::::.

On the evening of November 18th, when Dad had polished off two or three cans of beer and was already dozing off, I went online and found a site of diaries belonging to Russian goths. Mostly girls. Black hair, black clothes, wandering around cemeteries - all the usual. Most were Muscovites, and there was a photo from a meetup with forty people. I immediately picked the prettiest - nicknamed "Neanta."

In real life - Tatiana, from Mytishchi, about sixteen. To me she seemed adult and strict. Grey eyes, light hair if it weren"t dyed black. Exactly like the one I"d once created in The Sims 2.

Fuck, I"m too lazy to describe all this. I"d spent years getting here, and now such apathy. After the Bathory days, nothing really mattered. Had I mattered in her memory, some girl who mattered to me, my own memory of her might have been precious. But as it was - it was all nothing. All these Neantas, Dashas - just pieces of meat, scum like everyone else. Fucking strangers, fucking girls I was supposed to fuck by nature, but society had organised things by my birth so that I couldn"t. Fuck, how I wanted to be the guy Neanta fucked first.

She was very socially active; her posts were full of encounters with other nonconformists in cafés and parks. In photos from October, when I was crying in the psych ward, she had exactly what I imagined in my metalhead fantasies - some Izmailovo, a leaf-strewn forest park, black leather clothing, camouflage trousers on the guys. Only there was something that didn"t fit: everyone had beer and cigarettes. In a few photos, Neanta, who in her gentle domestic snapshots seemed the nicest, was sprawled drunk on the ground, lifted by scruffy adult men in biker jackets. It looked as sleazy as if it were porn, those men fucking her. "Some low life," I thought, getting aroused. I hadn"t seen anything like that even in the late hours in Engels Park. And, as usual, I imagined how my dad would hate all this if he saw it.

Posts right after were defensive - "I"m not like that."

-------insert start-------

Rode the metro today...Next to me stood an ordinary "metalhead" guy, tall, plump (beer belly), hair tied up but messy, wearing a worn-out leather jacket and Megadeth t-shirt, looking at me askance thinking I was just another pretentious goth loser) if only he knew my player had good old Iron Maiden, that I"m no "goth" and all that...People only see what they see)...Anyway, today"s mood was calm, peaceful and a little romantic) Weekend plans...Eh, can"t think at all...Had coffee with milk, warm, nice) Love this feeling)

-------insert end-------

I didn"t yet know that the closing parenthesis she used almost every sentence meant a smile. Had I known, she might not have seemed so strict. She reminded me exactly of what Dasha would later seem like.

Her favourite bands included In Flames, Tiamat, and other Scandinavian bands from the "90s and early "00s, which, when I finally listened to them all, would turn out to be total crap. I don"t know what Iron Maiden meant to her. Probably the same as to Dasha. Dasha from my youth, who didn"t listen to rock at all, had one Iron Maiden song in her playlist - some utterly stupid track from one of their failed pre-2000 albums. This Neanta, if you looked at her Iron Maiden and Megadeth tracks, probably listened to the same crap, not the songs I valued. I"d constantly verify this in the years to come with different people. Even if they liked the same songs, it was for a different reason, not what I valued. Can"t be the same. Otherwise, I"d value In Flames.

No socialisation based on musical taste would work. Everyone"s tastes are different, even for the same band. The bond over loving the same thing - if you dig deeper, it"s for different reasons - was insufficient. For others, that level was enough; I sought a "kindred" person, not the shallow crap. I was doomed.

Next morning, I searched the internet for Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky for Dad - his favourite writer alongside Márquez and others, twisted in their own way. When Dad left, I saved Neanta"s photos. I found a site where many goth girls were photographed in cemeteries - Moscow and St Petersburg Catholic cemeteries. I even saved a picture from Petersburg: by then I"d realised the coldest shit in our country is there. But, due to my crush on Neanta - as I"d come to call it - Moscow and Mytishchi became my top priority. That evening, I planned to save more cemetery goths when Dad was asleep.

We went to Gorbushka again. Basically, almost every free day until year-end we"d be buying discs, and later too. Dad probably spent all his spare money on this. Not that it would have been used better elsewhere.

Those days, we also had a Windows Vista disc - for some reason - and a disc with an English self-teacher and translator. The self-teacher didn"t work, but in the translator I immediately started translating my embarrassing song lyrics into an even more awkward English version, replacing my naive original lines in my mother tongue, making my lyrics less shameful. Also, there was a disc with the game The Guild - medieval, castles. I fiddled for half an hour, not impressed by the music.

At some point, I drew in "my" style - lots of detail: a gothic city with a castle, like the Skingrad castle in Oblivion, various houses, churches with crosses; all enclosed by walls like in games; city gates, a bridge over a moat, and a river. On the other side - a rural suburb: gardens, vineyards, stables. Across the river, a boat ferry runs from a pier by small gates in the city wall near a church inside, presumably a mortuary. Everything planned, all about death. The ferry docks, and right there - a cemetery. The cemetery had an interior church, funerals, an empty grave, and above it a rope with a noose hanging from a tree. On a distant hill - a windmill.

Late that evening, when Dad was asleep, I looked at and saved goth girls. Unlike Neanta, who - with her modest posts and face similar to mine and my relatives - felt familiar, someone I primarily wanted to befriend, these goth girls were unlike me, completely alien, about depravity, and above all - death, and my humiliation before them. At some point, I masturbated while Dad faced the wall, but these goths were almost entirely non-sexual. I was basically doing the leg-clench thing. They weren"t even the strict woman who once fingered me. They were the others - "Nelly and Mia" - who flirted with death, pressed my arteries, and so on. They themselves feared nothing. They climbed into tombs. They embodied death.

.:::.

Part 75, Text 2. The week before the psych ward and staying home... recording shameful song lyrics on the microphone.

.::::.

I had one week left before the psych ward, if anyone cares.

From the 20th, Monday, the frost hit - minus ten - and with "Gorbushka" opening, there was no way I could be dragged to any Engels. Until April, I"d only visit there twice. And I wouldn"t buy a single cassette anymore.

Every day that week, I"d go to bed later and wake up later. Dad would leave while I was still asleep, and Baba Valya usually left before I got up too, so I"d wake up closer to noon, eat the breakfast she"d prepared - all sorts of cold hot sandwiches, battered chicken - and sit at my palantír.

Well, it was only a palantír for a few minutes - just to quickly load some song lyrics or translations - and then I"d immediately disconnect from the internet to save time. Most of the time, especially during the day, it became my creative workspace. That"s probably when I first started recording in Adobe Audition, not just the primitive Windows sound recorder. On the recordings from those days, there"s no reverb yet. That effect would appear in my recordings during the winter.

By "recordings," of course, I mean total newbie crap on that karaoke microphone, which also had contact issues and crackled. I still hit the notes badly.

By that day, I already had a melody for the text to the tune of "Blood on Ice." Eighteen years later, I"d use it in the track "RGFSTG."

Here"s that shame, further mangled by auto-translation into English:

-------start of insert-------

Long after mountain go the still ice cold lands, I take my way to the north,

On brave stallion, in heavy steel armour, and with my long iron sword,

I travelling more that mount in the still green forest, my house far behind,

There my family, there my wife, with our three little childs.

I lived in country all things will good, but one evil destroyed all.

Once upon a time there was battle many people was deads and all my country was fall.

I was there one of the men who can go to free foami and avence irritate for blood,

This evil escapes in cold snow of cold lands in reign of Gods Wind and Snow

Long after high mountain I can not stop because I now must go.

-------end of insert-------

Below, I"ll copy the real burning shame - not just a mess. Actually, the first one, "Lost Lifes," already starts with an error in the title, and because of the shittiest auto-translation there"s no point copying it here. In short, it"s about misanthropy, about wanting to destroy certain bastards who, to me (and still are), were almost everyone. I only composed it, never recorded it.

The second, "Holiday of Pain," in Russian - is a truly sadistic, misogynistic text, the first of many I"d write. I probably had the idea since my "Death Gothic" days, when, inspired by a Marilyn Manson image, I imagined a video clip on the ninth floor with a girl being killed. But I only finalized this text in the last two days - especially on Monday before recording - inspired by the goth girls in cemeteries I"d observed on the weekend. They crushed me, humiliated me in real life because they weren"t afraid of death, sex, vomiting, or being without their mothers; they weren"t neurotic girls biting their fingers to the bone, and they weren"t interested in me either. I had to drag them with me - through a very shameful, destabilising dying - into disgrace, so I wouldn"t be alone in it. My recitative there is with a gasping, childish voice - extremely shameful. Listening to it makes me want to whip that version of myself. The boy wasn"t even there.

The third text, "Spirit of Dead," I just remembered: I wrote it on paper in Russian back in September and only on November 21 typed it out and immediately translated it into the language of the ideal world. Inspired, of course, by Megadeth"s "Wake Up Dead," which I"d already read translations of in summer but still translated as "wake the dead." My articles were bad then, and the title already had a mistake. The text shows my obsession with castles and Gothic aesthetics. I"ll paste it here in a quick neural-net translation to Russian.

-------start of insert-------

Holiday of Pain

Suffering, blood, torment - this is the holiday of pain, girl. Do you want to suffer?

Screams, moans, the sound of cutting tools. Do you want to cry?

Take off your clothes, bare your young body to the hellish tortures!

For this is the holiday of pain, you will scream, there is no place for pleasure here!

Step barefoot into the coals of the fire, scream with your sweet little voice!

Lie on the bloody table and let your body be cut!

Your tender neck, your young chest, your soft belly - you will moan in pain!

You will enter the iron maiden - look at the world one last time.

Then there will be nothing to see, you are doomed, consider your life ended, you won"t get out of there,

Until the executioners hear that you beg for death, until your pain reaches its limit.

Dozens of knives, already in your body, you screamed, you cry, you are ready for everything...

To go free, to walk on a green meadow,

With a smile on your face, barefoot on a flowery path,

In a white dress, black hair loose,

They fly like air, light and straight with the wind streams.

Enjoying the rays of warm sun and the coolness of the July night.

You walk carefree, relaxed, without thinking of the life around you.

And not about torture, not about torment, not about painful death

And that it will happen to you you don"t even guess!

Holiday of Pain! You will suffer!

Holiday of Pain! You will scream!

Holiday of Pain! Submit to hellish torment!

Holiday of Pain! There is no place for pleasure here!

Aaaaaaaah!!!!

Blood flows! You beg to end this agony,

Death! You beg to be given death! It"s the best you can wish yourself,

You are placed on the sacrificial table,

Your hideous body, in your garment of scraps of skin!

The executioner comes to you, a knife in hand,

You moan in pain, you want to die.

But instead of stabbing your heart,

He cuts open one of the arteries on your neck!

Yessss!

Slow death! You won"t die soon,

Until all your blood flows out,

Blood gushes from your mouth, your whole face is in blood,

You can"t think of anything, your consciousness clouds.

Death will come soon, hellish torment behind,

Eternal rest awaits you ahead!

The last breath on this fucking earth,

The heart stopped, the blood ceased to flow,

Your body will be burned, but the instruments are used,

Unfortunate lives will die,

Holiday of Pain, there is no pleasure here!

Holiday of Pain, only hellish torment here!

-------end of insert-------

-------start of insert-------

Spirit of Dead

I can"t sleep tonight.

Everywhere I hear rustling.

A little candle gives light.

I ask: "Who"s here?"

Silence answers.

I am alone in this part of the castle.

Is there a killer here? But it makes no sense.

Suddenly I notice dust on the floor -

Seems like someone passed.

But the window is open, and it was just the wind.

My head starts to ache.

My fear grows stronger.

I don"t know who dwells in the dark rooms of the castle,

But I think it"s the spirit... of the dead.

I get up and go to the door, but it"s locked for some reason.

I try to call the guards, but I can"t shout, and the rustling grows louder.

I don"t know what to do: I run to the window, but can"t jump down.

Fear robs me of reason. Oh God, no!

Spirit of the Dead!

-------end of insert-------

.:::.

Part 75, Text 3. Thoughts about Neante and the story "Death-Ward"... various miscellany about "Blood on Ice"... went to the psych ward, doubt I took pills... sleep until evening, Aunt Larisina"s Anya visiting.

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On the 20th and 21st, I again downloaded photos of Neante and read her posts. Her page also listed her ICQ number, and I was figuring out what pretext I could write her under.

Meanwhile, back to the same topic of musical tastes I mentioned in Neante"s introduction, I read a story on a metalhead site. It was called "Girl," but the root "dev" was spelled with the English word "death." The story focused on a young man who listened to classic rock, Pink Floyd, trying to meet a girl who listened to death metal and didn"t acknowledge his tastes. I only remember the ending. After she rejected him for a while, she was lightly hit by a car. From the hospital, she called him, said she listened to his Pink Floyd on the player and liked it, and invited him to visit. And he, buying flowers, went happily.

I never found that story again. But I remembered it because I noticed how much of an idiot that guy was. He was happy thinking she loved his Pink Floyd for the same reason he did - but he never checked. Stupid, damn it. And if all he cared about was that she just loved his Pink Floyd, no matter why - well, that"s just pick-up artist logic, all about getting laid.

But I myself was and would remain an idiot for many years - thinking one could love something with someone for the same reason. Impossible. Origins of taste differ. Everyone in this world is a stranger in this regard, even parents and closest people. But kinship binds you to parents and close ones, while with strangers, the only way to connect over tastes is for pick-up artists and superficial "primates" - those who don"t need deep compatibility. I had the same "delusion of unity" from birth - "unity on all levels" - and that shaped my notions of closeness, expectations, and needs.

One escapist evening, I sat analysing the text, translation, and prose inserts of "Blood on Ice." I mean, in the original release, besides song lyrics, there were prose stories before each track. My cassette booklet didn"t have them. I read it all on "Metalibrary," the site with the red background. I sat in front of the monitor in the dark, hoping the nine-storey folks wouldn"t come home from work too soon, but they did, and tension started. They were annoyed I spent so much time at home.

I listened to the first true-black albums of Bathory, trying to love them, but couldn"t.

At some point, on a very old but still active Bathory fan site, I found a link to a metal album in a hyper-stretched style like "Blood on Ice." The review said the vocalist recited a saga from the very first second to the last without pauses. Considering the text"s endlessness, the lyrics took tens of pages and looked like a dense poetic block, like some Beowulf saga. I even managed to hear a snippet online. Music and vocals sucked, but the idea impressed. I didn"t remember or save the link, and I"ve never been able to identify that album or band since - as if it were a dream.

I also looked up the band "Death Angel." They turned out to be thrash, and at the time of their first album, one member was only fourteen.

In lyrics of bands like Bathory, in Viking metal, the word "Odin" appeared constantly. I didn"t immediately know it was a god"s name - had to ask my dad. I didn"t yet know how to search online, didn"t know Wikipedia.

One day midweek, we went with Baba Valya to the psych ward to see the doctor. I had to wake up early and wasn"t rested. While getting ready, I sat online trying to download a song by the thrash band Exumer, but the internet was slow, and I didn"t manage.

The minibus stop was at the traffic light, right by the building, as I said. I hated this duty to go so much, but as long as I could spend whole days on my own stuff at home, I endured.

I can"t guarantee I didn"t take any pills at all. I definitely wasn"t in a neuroleptic vegetable state, and I was angry and masturbating, even with a toothbrush up my ass, but at the same time I don"t remember really jerking off like on Lev Kassil or even in September. Most importantly, I don"t remember seeking porn. Except for this "Holiday of Pain," I was already writing plenty of song lyrics and exploring non-sexual things. These texts I"d write during the week in the psych ward. It would upset me if I learned that in fact I did take pills after that October psych ward, only they weren"t neuroleptics, so I didn"t protest - and all this November immersion in escapism, including Bathory and "accepting northern shit," could have been the result of that artificial state. The fact that I didn"t seek porn is really strange. Anyway, the next year I stopped taking pills entirely, and the escapism shift didn"t disappear. It existed even before these times - when I first played Oblivion. Although then I did take some benzo-stuff, as I wrote. And earlier, during "Little Havana," "King and Jester," the very first days of Vice City. Bottom line: escapism was never strictly tied to pills. In adulthood, I had plenty of escapist moments without pills, and I masturbated and was sentimental. But if I did take pills that November, they could"ve strengthened the escapist tendencies. It would even be convenient to assume I took them: the escapism gave me nothing, pills only wrecked life and made me disabled. More reasons to hate the system that did this shit.

I don"t remember ever staying up until dawn those days, so the day I slept until evening was almost certainly the same day as the morning trip to the fucking psych ward. We returned, and I went back to sleep.

And in the evening, around five, when it was already dark outside, I woke to noises in the hallway: Baba Valya was home, and with her was Aunt Larisina"s Anya. She had picked her up from kindergarten and came in - the first time during my stay. Baba Valya was tipsy: I"d gone to the psych ward, but since I"d now slept until evening, it was clear my schedule was fucked. And the nine-storey folks hated it - they had to go to work. Meanwhile, in that familiar childhood state of vulnerability and nervousness after a daytime nap, almost seven-year-old but still childishly bold Anya came straight into the room; Baba Valya told her: "See, this is how we sleep until evening."

Anya still didn"t speak. At least, that"s how I remember. In the months I spent there, I"d seen her five or seven times, and I don"t remember a single phrase from her. She didn"t address me, though maybe she whispered to Larisa or Baba Valya. Either way, she had some oddness: at four or five, she didn"t speak at all during my visits, and the internet notes that"s abnormal.

As I once said, right after I broke down in gymnastics, Anya was sent to the same Palace of Sports and same hall. She was learning, making progress, drawn to standing on her hands or doing flips - just like me. Baba Valya, oblivious, poured fuel on my fire - "Show how you can do it." "Well done, well done," I watched and commented too.

While Baba Valya was in the kitchen making my breakfast, I didn"t rush off the sofa, lying with the cassette player in headphones. Listening to Bathory and humming melodies. Anya played nearby, then climbed onto the raised back of the sofa and lay there, dangling an arm. She couldn"t hear me listening, and I probably wasn"t hitting notes in my humming. She just watched me. I didn"t know what to do. Give her a headphone? She was crazy; she might yank it and break it. Besides, we were basically enemies: I"d scared her endlessly in childhood, like Lidushka. I listened and hummed "Man of Iron." Then she hit me with her hand, immediately slid off, and ran to the kitchen. Seven years minus one month. She reminded me of young Quorton in his early photos.

Then Larisa came for her, and they left.

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Part 75 Text 4. To Gorbushka for "Emperor" and "In Flames",,, wrote to Neanta and the narcissistic incel hell.

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A couple of times during the weekdays that week, my dad and I went to Gorbushka - I"d come into the centre in the evenings, and we"d meet there. While we were there, a guy at another stall, across the aisle, asked the clerk at my metal-music section - the spectacled one: "So, which band are you planning to go see?" The spectacled guy, apparently, was going to a concert. With a tone mocking the pomposity of the name, he replied: "Oblivion Machines." My dad remembered that name - it amused him - and he"d recall it often afterwards.

I can"t reconstruct the purchases in detail, but I definitely grabbed the discographies of "Emperor" and "In Flames", and maybe also "Carpathian Forest" and later - at the MediaMarkt near home - a Machine Head DVD. The last two were just money down the drain. As for the first... well, "Emperor" still basically felt like crap to me at the time, but it mesmerised me with the blue album cover, and the promo photos in the Norwegian forests were in the same vein, and I had already heard the song "Witches" Sabbath" from the demo album, where it sounded more mystical. One evening, when only the taciturn Baba Valya was home and dad wasn"t around, I sat in the dark in front of the monitor, reading lyrics, looping "Witches" Sabbath" - and I"d do the same on other days. The disc also had articles about the band"s biography and Norwegian black metal in general, and that"s where I learned all the stories about church burnings and some musician stabbing someone in a homophobic incident - exactly like the future end of Sanya Krylov.

As for "In Flames", bought because of Neanta, only the song "Embody the Invisible" had a catchy melody, but the singer, a stupid, lucky, Sweden-based degenerate, screamed over the almost major-key melody with his melodic-death growl - and I couldn"t listen without rage. God, it pissed me off that a beauty like Neanta listened to that shitty fucking shitshow. I loved the fantasy of us cuddled up, listening to something melodic, like that "Men"s Fire" track from The Sims 2, all tender between us. Even if the real Neanta liked melodic stuff too, the ballads, it didn"t matter - she could go fuck herself if she also liked screaming shit. Girls just shouldn"t like screaming bands. In my case, this rule was rooted in the same envy I had of bold girls. Like when girls aren"t afraid to fuck, not afraid to work as prostitutes, not afraid to work in morgues, whatever. Same with music - not afraid to listen to aggressive bands, figuratively speaking. The thought was: if girls listen to that, they could be aggressive themselves. They could hurt me, and I"d cry. A girl should always be tender and weak, and only I, the man, should be strong and sometimes aggressive, when protection is needed.

Finally, I decided to write to her despite everything. Chats on ICQ didn"t save, but I remembered the gist. It was evening, though for me, lunch was just approaching. By habit, without considering what age people looked, I assumed she was an eighteen-year-old adult girl, because I started addressing her formally - with respect, and so on. And, as always, lacking any superiority or necessity, I wrote under some dumb pretext - asking her to recommend some bands - or even dumber - asking about one of the bands she had listed among her favourites. After sending the first message, I couldn"t bear to look at the monitor and paced around the room. As an adult, when I first or after a long time wrote to someone important - mostly girls - I would, in moments of unbearable tension, hit myself on the forehead, looking like classic psych ward antics, when schizophrenics try to smash the voices bugging them out of their heads. For me, it was always that somatic narcissistic hell, where you want to physically expel it from your body. Sometimes I just jerked, like in an epileptic seizure.

Anyway, she replied. Neutral, as usual. We exchanged a couple dozen messages. She immediately realised a kid was writing and just answered the questions. Just like Dasha, except Dasha hadn"t replied for weeks, only read messages. Neanta, by the way, looked like Dasha in a couple of photos.

I told her my favourite song was Báthory"s "The Lake", and from thrash metal - Slayer"s "Angel of Death". She said, "Well, of course." Not seeing any interest in chatting, I said something like, "Okay, won"t bother you, thanks for replying" - and that was the end of our first exchange.

The next day, also in the evening, I couldn"t resist again, and, trying to understand her interests and what Gothic metal even was, I asked which Gothic metal band she liked most among the ones I knew, listing them - "Tristania", "Sirenia", and "Lacrimosa". She said, "Mmm, probably Tristania." Then I asked something else. And then I got so bold that I asked yet another question. She then said, "What am I, an encyclopedia?" By that time, already using emojis, I sent a sort of now supposedly friendly apology, ending with "rofl". She sent "rofl" back. I usually, in moments like that, don"t even respond as myself, don"t hear what"s being said (and these dramas often happen while I"m simultaneously talking with adults in another room). Red patches appeared on my chest, in the very chest itself - neither pain nor nausea exactly.

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Part 75 Text 5. Going into the centre alone, buying Tristania and another WASP in miserable loser mode,,, about dad"s rose-coloured world,,, buying a DVD-ROM,,, Munsorrow and Finland,,, late November 2006.

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The next day, Saturday the twenty-fifth, I went into the centre alone and walked down my disc-strewn Bolshaya Kazachya. It was a bit warmer than the previous days. To Gorbushka-shitplace, then to that shop by the sex store. The leper from the cover of "Death" was still staring at me - I should"ve grabbed that discography at Gorbushka long ago on exchange. Maybe I even took it that day. Can"t reconstruct - I bought tons of bands, of course couldn"t listen to everything, just dumped MP3s on the computer, which was already running out of space.

In that little shop, I also found the Tristania discography and bought it. Bloody waste of money! Just like that - eighty rubles gone. Then I went to Chapaeva and Moskovskaya and before heading home, popped into that first-floor trading space with discs. There, a DVD by WASP caught my eye; I asked the clerk to show it. He got up from his chair, handed it over, and sat back down. The disc was total crap - super pirated: smeared cover, printed on a busted printer, the whole deal. And yet - one hundred and twenty rubles. But after all those Neantas, I was in a miserable loser haze - and I bought the damn thing. Hard to refuse - asking the clerk to get up a second time would be awkward. Purchases like that had happened before and would happen endlessly in the future - but especially in years when Dasha ignored me, I"d walk with my gaze glued to the ground. I don"t recall noticing it at the time, but I was clearly in that state, or at least its prototype.

The WASP disc wasn"t just crap - the concert was filmed with an amateur cam. It was in Moscow. It would"ve been completely surreal if it had been the very concert I wanted to attend. But no - it was from 2004.

"Tristania" was an attractive word, plus a band from Norway - the perfect snowy country I had only learned about days ago thanks to "Emperor". I hoped to hear something musically elegant. But, predictably, it was fucking screeching over a standard set of notes. Realising this, I now mercilessly ran through song after song. I listened on speakers at the lowest volume, and when a track with acoustic guitar, maybe even a violin, came on, I turned it up. Dad, picking at his heel, watched TV in the living room, and we exchanged comments about what I was listening to; he asked, "All the songs like that?" "Yep, all of them." He had no idea what shit I was wallowing in.

He wanted house gigs, intellectual "Grebenshchikov-style" with ethnic instruments, guitarists who were kind-intellectuals like Mark Knopfler, or at least Bob Marley, B.B. King. In my youth, before I fully and forever quit informal socialising, I"d gone once a week for a year to rehearse with a black metal band. He literally asked, "So, what are you singing about? That all hardships will be overcome, and peace and love will come - right?" He was floating in his own rose-tinted reality. What peace and love, when he even had a smoke himself?

My CD-ROM wouldn"t burn DVDs, and my hard drive was already stuffed with music. I needed a DVD writer to record all this onto proper discs. And the exchange DVDs could be burned and kept.

The next day, Sunday, dad and I went to that computer shop "Sunrise" on Kazachya. It was slushy, grey. First we also stopped by the corner computer shop at Volskaya and Kazachya, where we"d never bought anything. At Sunrise, we bought a DVD writer, and I took price lists to study at home. They already had the modern generation of dual-core AMD processors.

From Sunrise, we also went to Gorbushka. Most likely I grabbed the band Munsorrow that day. It was listed as Viking metal, and I hoped it would at least be melodic ballad metal, like Báthory. But no, degenerates screamed again, now Finnish. Finland, as I realised with my growing metal obsession, was not in the American hemisphere but just nearby. I wondered how that could be: right next to Russia - and a completely different world, English language (most bands there screamed in English, and the Finnish in Munsorrow song titles I took as deliberate exoticism). I still didn"t know they spoke their own language, English was just easier to learn and more necessary there. I basically didn"t yet grasp the root differences between our country and Europe. No Orthodoxy there, no Soviet past.

Munsorrow grabbed me with the song "Taistelu Pohjolasta", which I"d search for again in two weeks to re-listen.

That Sunday, to try recording on a blank disc right away, we also exchanged a DVD of the game "Dark Messiah of Might and Magic". It didn"t run on my system, but I recorded it successfully and would play next summer, once I updated my computer.

The month wasn"t over yet, but that"s basically it for late November 2006. I still checked Neanta"s page in winter, but nothing would come of it. I"d found her when she was over thirty, just a regular woman travelling with a guy to warm countries and posting photos. She hadn"t ballooned - rather, lean, normal. I wrote to her, and she called that informal youth foolish, even said she was embarrassed about it.

I have a fantasy in the vein of the last scene of Titanic. All the faces of that November - Quorton, Neanta, the fat guy from the rock basement. And all the metal with clean vocals and hooks, and I record my albums with serious songs alongside Quorton, we do some collabs, release on cassettes. And Neanta loves exactly that, for the same reasons as me - and that"s why she"s with me.

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___Part 76.

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Part 76 text 1. Reconstructing the causes of the hysterical breakdown on the twenty‑seventh of November,,, taken away in a straitjacket,,, brought to Altynka.

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Well yes, quite generously the artificial intelligence - to which, when I finished, I fed the November sections - even within the context of the whole story up to that point piled a bunch of psychotic diagnoses onto me. People do the same. Only people hardly know or think about the causes at all; they judge solely by the outward manifestations of the affect.

On Monday morning, the twenty‑seventh of November, I was supposed to go to the madhouse again. I can"t remember exactly how it all started. I don"t ask the nine‑storey ones about the whole story from back then. With them I keep up the pretence that everything was correct. That I was acting up back then, that I was "ill and needed to be taken in for treatment". But the reality is completely different. And if I were to voice that reality, I would have had to part ways with the nine‑storey ones forever after those events. And I couldn"t do that - they still remained necessary to me as relatives.

I"ll show the reader how I reconstruct the events. I have one saved file from the eleventh of December - the first time I was home, when they let me out to wash. And I remember exactly that by that day I had already been lying there for two weeks. Consequently, the nine‑storey ones handed me over on the twenty‑seventh of November for sure, at the latest the twenty‑eighth. And there"s a receipt from the twenty‑sixth of November for buying a DVD‑ROM. I remember that evening with the DVD‑ROM well - quite ordinary: father in the living room, and I was leafing through a price list from "Sunrise". The evenings of the days before that - with Tristania, with In Flames - were also fairly ordinary. I hadn"t done any celandine‑treatment or practised any system of punishments for a long time already. I just washed my hands, of course, and stayed at the computer later and later into the night. And although babValya was getting drunk, and I had a big inner problem because of Neanta, there had been no escalation in the days before the twenty‑seventh. Quite idyllic evenings with father overall, companionable conversations. And suddenly a suicidal hysterical scene with a screwdriver on Monday? Too abrupt.

There were also these details: father, who normally left for work early in the morning, was at home that morning, and it was already light (about ten o"clock), and when the orderlies arrived I distinctly remember the feeling: "The system will inevitably get what it wants one way or another - no matter how you resist." So the whole issue there definitely was that I had to go to the madhouse. My doubt now is only about the nuance: whether it was just a visit to the doctor - or whether the nine‑storey ones had made it clear that I would have to stay there, that is, be admitted. From all the mentioned details - like the fact that father deliberately stayed home - I conclude that it was most likely exactly that: I was supposed to be hospitalised. Meaning they didn"t hand me over that day for some specific hysterical incident - like the one with the screwdriver I"ll describe next - but that it had been planned in principle, and simply because of my refusal and the resulting scene it became compulsory.

Anyway, at first I was at the computer, and father, standing in the doorway to the living room, was saying something, while I was saying I"d fucking throw myself off the balcony. He kept going in and out, trying to persuade me to get ready. Then I took a screwdriver and sat down on the sofa. I was fucking sick of everyone. From the hallway they stood there demanding things from me, already talking about calling an ambulance. I understood that some kind of shit was coming and didn"t know what to do, and I even slammed that screwdriver into the sofa - stabbed it straight through. I sat there in anger, despair, and eventually I was already shaking. And twenty minutes later the intercom rang, someone opened the door downstairs, voices were heard, and the door to the living room opened - men in overalls.

I was in a hell of helplessness, the feeling of betrayal by the nine‑storey ones, and fear of Altynka. They probably asked me to put the screwdriver down, and I did. Then one of them took my arm, and the grip was such that I definitely wouldn"t have broken free anymore. Then babValya dressed me while the man kept holding me. When I had put on my jacket (or maybe just a jumper), the man unfolded some kind of canvas garment and I had to put it on. Well, I realised it was a straitjacket. By then I was almost as tall as father.

I was in the state that rape victims describe. (Only now, in the news these days as I write this, when a girl - a victim of violence who developed PTSD from it and is planning euthanasia - people from all over the world are coming to try to stop her, while in my case they only want more of that violence.)

It was as if I wasn"t even there, because it was impossible to imagine that this was happening to me. My arms were pulled around my torso and the long sleeves were tied behind my back. Then they led me to the lift. When we opened the entrance door, outside there was a young woman, some kind of fancy type in a fur coat. The man leading me theatrically let her go in first, stepping aside with me. Like someone stepping aside with a dog on a leash so that the lady in the fur coat could pass calmly without any inconvenience.

At Altynka they drove us straight to the children"s building, bypassing the admissions one where various police and cars usually hang around. The next time they bring me there we"ll go there first, but this time apparently there was no admissions routine because I was already listed there as a patient, or on day treatment.

The corridor with the wards that I described from the first days in the madhouse ended at a distant service exit to the street. As I remember, they led me straight there, while father and babValya went around the building and entered through the front porch to the doctor. The stale stench of the ward hit my head at once and filled me with horror. That"s why I wasn"t crying yet - in madhouses my tears always come after the horror.

After that I don"t remember how exactly, but in the end there was a scene where I was in that visitors" lobby where my mother had come to see me back then, and now this doctor - Ekaterina Vyacheslavovna - came out there to look at me and speak with me. With her kind tone - which made it even more humiliating - she said something like, "Well then?", which implied: "So? Had enough of showing off?" But in that situation my state was far from feeling anger toward her. I asked, "Where are father and babValya?" She said, "What about father and babValya? They"re sitting in the office crying." And they led me back inside, and that day I didn"t see my people again.

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Part 76 text 2. Background hatred of psychiatry,,, mother didn"t find out,,, visits from the nine‑storey ones.

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I don"t remember the injection, though surely there was one this time. I cried until I was dehydrated, but nothing could be done, and I no longer dared any pleading hysterics like that time on the floor by the stairs. And I had absolutely no fucking idea how long I was going to be here now. I hoped they would take me out the next day, or at most in the next few days, although even spending a single night here was already a nightmare. The kindergarten‑like knot of fear and devastation in my chest literally hurt. Just yesterday I was sitting at my computer and was free - and now I was behind bars with disabled children, real patients - and fuck knows for what.

Mother smashed dishes, tried to drown herself. Father raised his voice when he was unhappy about something and could also throw things in a fit. That bastard at the pier mocked me, provoked me, committed absolute evil. I remembered plenty of situations in life where children did aggressive things and were dangerous to others, and adults behaved darkly and bizarrely - like my mother with her suicidal performances - and none of them were punished with isolation, none of them were separated from society. Only me, fuck"s sake - and in a madhouse at that.

Why does some boy who stabs with a screwdriver the person who humiliated him get sent to a penal colony and not to a madhouse like me? Because I didn"t stab anyone, I only expressed the intention? If I had stabbed someone they"d still have brought me here - I already knew that. It was all because for the system I was already a schizophrenic, a lunatic - like those people in the Anthrax video "Madhouse" who lash out for no reason.

No one saw that I was humiliated by a whole pile of things: that I was humiliated by this status of a patient, that Neanta had some guys while I was needed by no one, that I had sat at home either by the television or by the computer for as long as I could remember, and obviously would sit like that until the end of my days. Seven minutes with that Alina recently - not counting that Yulia almost two years earlier whom I myself had brushed off, and some trivial thing back in the gymnasium with that Anastasia Yudina - had been my first live contact with the opposite sex for more than two years, after Sima in the summer of two thousand four.

And I had lived since the age of two with the dream of live contact with the opposite sex. I was a fan of their faces, their expressions. I wanted to look at them, not sneak glances when they passed by on the street. And with every month, while others were getting closer to that, I was getting further from it. They thought I was angry just like that, without humiliation - simply because I had some delusional processes in my head.

I was no longer an ordinary person for the system. And that turned the situation into an absolute thriller. There were no laws that would protect me. I was now entirely in the hands of the woman in the white coat, who kept asking about voices as if she suspected I had them after all. She never asked about my childhood, or about anything that conditioned my behaviour. No one ever knew about the twins, about the anal perversions "before strict aunties", about what I felt when I saw goth girls in cemeteries. They didn"t even try to dig any of those hidden problems out of me. All of it was of no interest to anyone here, had no significance to anyone in this place. They saw simply some illness defined by indicators that only they understood and could see. I couldn"t prove anything to them - we were thinking on completely different levels.

And the main thing is that the screwdriver and the suicidal hysterics at home might not even have happened if they had simply fucked off with this madhouse and its obligations. Why the hell did I have to go here at all? For washing my hands? For staying up at night? Fucking bastards.

But any reproaches and anger of mine toward the nine‑storey ones were immediately silenced by the understanding that they were also the only ones who could get me out of here. So all the thoughts I"ve just described flashed only for fractions of a second, while the rest of the time there was panic, a false admission to myself that I was ill (fuck knows with what), that I had behaved badly, that I agreed to correct myself, agreed to go to this madhouse even for a whole day if needed - as long as I wouldn"t be locked in it, wouldn"t be under the doctors" total control.

I started repeating various mantras. It"s impossible now to remember exactly which ones. Things like: "I swear I won"t do it again." I imagined how at the first meeting I would burst into tears, ask forgiveness, beg them to take me away from here.

Mother later said that she called the nine‑storey ones throughout December, but they answered briefly that everything was bad, and that was it. She didn"t know they had put me in there. She herself plunged into scrubbing floors, began wearing everything grey, fainted in front of the Palace of Pioneers - things like that. But there"s no time to write a whole book about her. Artificial intelligence often notes that I don"t develop the other characters in my story well enough. But they should develop themselves, the way I develop myself. How would I know their motives? I sketched their short biography and something about their motivation - beyond that it would already become fiction. And I"d rather at least clean the fiction out of the texts about myself; I"m in no position to expand other people"s stories.

Anyway, the nine‑storey ones began visiting me. Most likely babValya came already the next day during the day, or maybe both of them if father got time off work. It"s unlikely they came only in the evening. The neuroleptics hadn"t yet fully killed my ability to cry, and I wept there and begged them to take me away, exactly as I had imagined I would, while they tried to calm me as best they could, inventing things like maybe the doctor would say something tomorrow, maybe things would be decided, maybe by the weekend they would take me out.

The word "weekend" pierced me with horror and pain. What weekend? Did that mean I had to lie here for four more days? And I immediately burst into tears. I couldn"t even think that they might be making things up or lying - otherwise I would have gone mad. I believed everything they said. The worst was when they used words like "maybe", "we"ll see", "we"ll talk to the doctor", which reminded me that they weren"t the ones deciding.

From the fear those words caused, the food I sat eating in tears would come back up. They brought whole bags of food - the obligatory Kit‑Kat, dried squid, babValya"s Italian‑style spaghetti, chicken in batter, mineral water, bananas, juices, flavoured milk drinks. Almost a New Year"s holiday diet. Father and babValya still carried the smell of frost - those days it was minus fifteen. We sat on those chairs in the visitors" lobby.

They tried as much as possible to calm me, and when we parted they said goodbye for a long time. First they took me back behind that foul door and closed it, and only afterwards did the orderly let them out to the street, so I never saw them leave. When I was with them it was almost like being at home, and even for a few moments when I returned inside - while I was still holding the bag of food and thinking that the orderly who had escorted them out was still mentally with them. But as soon as she took the bag to put the food in the fridge and began dealing with routine matters not concerning me - that connection with my relatives through her instantly vanished, and I instantly returned to the state of crushing hopelessness.

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Part 76 text 3. A bit about the children and Mamyak,,, morning calls to the doctor,,, memories of the medication.

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This time, as I said, the children had already been let out of that small room into the big hall with the piano. Now some of them slept on the carpet there. There was a scene that terrified me back then: one boy was sleeping with his eyes open. They were only slightly shut, but he was definitely asleep - you could tell from his posture and the total lack of reaction to anything around him. And these same boys who slept like that - they would just drop off suddenly. One moment they"d be fighting and fooling around like usual, playing with their blocks, and the next you look over - and he"s already out cold on the floor.

Almost all the kids here were the same ones as a month earlier, only this time there seemed to be even more of them. More than thirty in the ward. The most permanent resident, it seemed to me, was the one whom last time I"d thought the orderly was calling a "maniac". Now I heard more clearly, and it turned out it wasn"t "maniac" but "Mamyak" - that was his surname. Given his aggressiveness and his constant scowl, plus his ears sticking out, the coincidence felt surreal. The orderly kept reminding him about how they"d put him "on ties", as they called it. That meant being strapped to the bed.

"Want to go on ties again?" she"d threaten him constantly.

And he"d answer: "What about him?" - pointing at some kid he"d just punched in the face.

The orderly also asked him how long he"d been here. Apparently even she found it impressive - she probably hadn"t worked there that long herself. He couldn"t really count and answer, and other kids answered for him, and it was something like a year and a half. By then I wasn"t even surprised - I understood that however long he"d been here, he"d effectively been "lying somewhere" even longer - probably his whole life between orphanages and psych wards. Though in Mamyak"s case, actually, I must have been mistaken, because he was one of the few kids someone came to visit once while I was sitting in that entrance hall with one of my relatives. As I said before, during my two months there people came to visit anyone maybe ten times in total.

Almost every day they called me to the doctor, and on one of the first days I asked when I"d be released. The doctor immediately crushed the hope:

"Well, let"s say you stay a week, and then we"ll see?"

I already remembered that you had to agree with everything and admit that you were ill and needed treatment, so although in reality I wanted to burst into tears, I nodded as if I not only agreed but even saw the necessity myself.

Another time I asked about driving licences. So what now - would I never be able to drive a car? The doctor, it turns out, lied to me, because she answered like this:

"Well, you won"t be able to become a pilot," - and she added some other profession - "but you probably weren"t dreaming of becoming one anyway."

Within the next few weeks I"d come to realise on my own that I wouldn"t be allowed to drive anything at all, even though her answer had made it sound possible.

In general, this doctor - even though she was a typical post‑Soviet psychiatrist and there"s even some review of her online from a teenage anorexic girl who"d been treated in this ward and whom she"d, in that classic post‑Soviet way, put on antipsychotics - seemed to see less schizophrenia in me than the doctors who appear later in the story. Those ones treated me like a total idiot and constantly asked whether I heard voices. I mean on a personal level, not the official one.

On the official, professional level she of course did the same as the others later - wrote "schizophrenia" in my file and prescribed heavy antipsychotics that turned me into a complete vegetable. I"d pass out at eight in the evening and sleep till eight in the morning, and after two days, as I said earlier, I could neither cry nor even really get hard anymore.

Though with my dick everything there was complicated. Just like with tears and sentimentality. I don"t even want to sort out what affected what - I don"t even know exactly which drugs they gave me. The only thing I know for sure is that they stuffed me with risperidone or Rispolept, and after two weeks - or maybe even earlier - the standard system, apparently (because the same thing happened later in the adult ward) - they started giving it to me as depot injections.

And I know for sure they didn"t give me antidepressants - that"s what they later told my mother, as I already mentioned. The doctors explained that schizophrenics aren"t supposed to take them.

At the same time they were handing me whole fistfuls of colourful pills during the period I"m describing. Even later in the adult ward, when they hospitalised me for aggression, there were only three kinds of pills. So theoretically among all those tablets back in childhood there might actually have been an antidepressant. I know exactly what antidepressants do: your dick simply doesn"t work at all, and there"s no sentimentality either - I once tried them for a couple of weeks as an adult just to see.

But here it was the opposite. Back then, in childhood, despite the whole handful of pills, when I masturbated I could still come, though very rarely. In the adult ward, when they were suppressing me with nothing but Rispolept and I definitely wasn"t taking antidepressants, I couldn"t come at all, and later for a while I couldn"t even get hard.

I also have a theory that the ability to orgasm depended less on Rispolept and more on stress. During the adult hospitalisation and afterwards the fear was extreme. In childhood, when they later let me go home and I felt safe again, the stress was lower - and that"s when I was masturbating and able to finish.

Fuck it - there"s no point analysing it. The only thing you can say for sure is that Rispolept and antipsychotics definitely suppress libido to some degree in my case.

But the main thing they do is turn you into a vegetable, incapable of emotions. And in the end your inner experiences pile up, stagnate, and start expressing themselves as intellectual - and rather low‑intelligence - reflections and ideas that begin to resemble symptoms of schizophrenia. Because normally those experiences don"t exist in the form of thoughts and theories - they come out as emotions.

Maybe I"ll find song lyrics where this becomes visible.

In practice it turns out that drugs "for schizophrenia" create in any person exactly what textbooks describe as schizophrenic symptoms. They also create the ground for autistic‑type interests, which I mentioned in the previous part, and socially maladaptive tendencies. And over time all this allows doctors to diagnose schizophrenia more and more convincingly.

Together with those other nasty tricks - like how after a few days I couldn"t cry anymore and looked to my parents as if I"d accepted everything - and so on.

Just fucking monsters.

.:::.

Part 76 text 4. Constant pain in the chest all day,,, about different kinds of pain at different hours,,, radio and sleep in a defenceless posture,,, release after two weeks.

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Not a single minute on Altynka did I spend without pain in my chest. And every hour hurt in its own way.

In the mornings there was always a mild trembling, like the first time I"d ended up there. After sleep the state is the most vulnerable. Even in normal life it"s similar for me: the first minutes after waking up are horrible. That isn"t connected with the children"s ward or any trauma from it - just noting that my mental state after sleep has always been the most anxious. And back then, waking up in that real hell - even more so.

Then came breakfast with some dairy crap. That brought back the old knot of dread from kindergarten lunches. The children"s ward differed from the adult one in that you were allowed to eat food brought from outside even for breakfast, and also for lunch - especially in my case, relatively privileged. Most others hardly had any food parcels at all - I just remembered that detail.

But that"s a sad topic; now about the frightening one.

At some point - maybe during my last hospital stay rather than this one - one orderly who knew my parents less than the others got furious that I ate only the food from parcels and ordered me to eat my semolina porridge. I somehow, in terror and without breathing through my nose, touched the spoon to my lips a few times - that was it. And at one point she almost shouted at me like she did at the others.

Fuck, how badly I want some beautiful girl to force‑feed me semolina while I"m tied up and jerk me off.

Around ten in the morning came the terror of waiting to be called to the doctor. The terror of hearing once again that I"d have to stay longer - "and then we"ll see". And she did say exactly that, many times.

These hopes and disappointments repeating day after day drove me to absolute despair. For her it cost nothing to add another week; for me that meant another week of continuous pain.

Sometimes, after being skipped - meaning when she didn"t call me in on some day - or after another weekend (this relates more to the later stay, when it lasted two months), you"d think that maybe during those two days the doctor had forgotten her plan of keeping you here, softened, and would say that on such‑and‑such a day you"d be released.

But no - sometimes even worse. A blunt "not yet" when I asked whether I could expect release in the next few days.

At the beginning doctors give more hope; later they shut you down more and more directly. It"s like running after a departing train. You lose speed, and it only accelerates.

I"ve already talked about the moments of being taken back behind that filthy door and the pain and despair there.

Then, if it was a day without Bab‑Valya"s daytime visit, came the hell of the long hours stretching like eternity. I stood by the windows in the big hall and, already switched off by the antipsychotics, cried dry tears watching tits land on the outer windowsill behind the bars.

Ahead were the trees of the local forest park. Through them you could see that chimney - "the crematorium" - and maybe a bit of the road leading from the pond up to the very top part of the grounds. And that was all you could see.

But the windows faced the sunny side (Saratov gets plenty of sun even in winter) and roughly toward the city, somewhere out there beyond those trees, and I spent almost all my time there.

Once I tapped on the glass to the birds, and an orderly immediately shouted:

"Step away from the windows."

Orderlies reacted whenever someone tried to interact with the outside world - probably for the same reason devices with internet access aren"t allowed in psych wards.

But still, when Bab‑Valya visited during the day, after we said goodbye I"d go to the window, and she"d stand outside for a while waving to me.

Along the road from the pond upward - besides ambulances heading to the adult buildings - horses pulling carts carried enamel buckets of food from some central psychiatric‑hospital kitchen. To our building they brought the buckets to the back service entrance at the end of the corridor, knocked from outside, and the pre‑lunch bustle would start.

One orderly made sure all the kids stayed away from the corridor while others opened the door and the driver passed them the buckets.

Lunch was a small relief. But immediately after came the de‑agentifying forced ritual with pills - a hypocritical piece of filth where everything was supposedly cheerful and when you swallowed them they said "good job", though everyone knew that if you refused you"d end up in restraints, the drugs would be injected anyway, and your stay would be extended - indefinitely if they wanted.

There was no quiet hour for some reason (even the adult ward had one). Kids who wanted to sleep just lay on the floor like corpses. I would have liked to sleep during the day to fast‑forward time, but I couldn"t - just as later in the adult ward, even when you were supposed to sleep during the day, I never could. Even though I was half‑asleep like a zombie and later, when I was free but still on antipsychotics, I often fell asleep during the day.

It was the stress of captivity there that kept me awake. And the fear that my parents might come while I was asleep and no one would wake me.

So I wandered around the hall from corner to corner, constantly going to check the clock in the little room, and it felt like time had stopped.

And another thing I hadn"t mentioned yet - in the far corner of the big hall, on a shelf attached to the wall, there were icons. I would have a relationship with them during the next stay. I would come to believe. During this one I hadn"t yet.

Then it started getting dark and I began waiting for the bell from outside - my father"s visits were a small piece of home every evening.

After the meeting with him - back into hell again, into the routine state filled with echoes of that same nightmare I had experienced the very first evening here.

The first time this hadn"t happened, but now at night they placed metal buckets in the wards for urinating.

One day they drew blood from a vein right there in the ward. Just some routine procedure, apparently - they did exactly the same thing at about the same point in the adult wards too. Once it would have been terrifying; now it was nothing compared with everything else I was enduring there.

I kept walking around singing songs from that past autumn, especially Man of Iron - it reminded me most of my father and therefore of home.

Sometime during the second week Bab‑Valya bought me a small radio, and it was allowed inside. For some reason a cassette player wasn"t. I don"t remember listening to it very much - probably it was already close to the end of the second week. And since I knew how quickly batteries ran out, I tried to save them.

After lights‑out I lay in bed with headphones listening to that radio. I always lay on my side, curled up like someone beaten down. Not once in the entire time in the hospital did I lie on my stomach - that position had always meant confidence and a feeling of full control. Psychologically I simply couldn"t lie like that anymore, except during injections that later started.

I also rarely tucked the blanket under my legs the way I always did at home - an old habit from childhood to feel more cocooned.

Slipping into the nightly kind of suspended animation, I found a station that played less pop music. And already on the first evening, while the chaos of putting the kids to bed was still going on and the boys in the neighbouring beds were still messing around, I caught a Metallica song - probably the same The Unforgiven. I turned it up louder.

Some boys seemed to be saying something to me.

"Why are they bothering me?" I thought.

Then the orderly came in - I pulled one earphone out - and told me to turn it down. I"d already realised myself: the damned headphone plug hadn"t been pushed in all the way, and the music had been playing from the little speaker too.

But they didn"t take the radio away.

On the eighth of December, when I"d been there almost two weeks, the doctor said she would let me go home on Monday to wash.

I sat in front of her pretending I didn"t care - for the sake of the image that I believed treatment was necessary and could even do without time at home - but inside I was thinking:

You bitch, why not right now? What difference will those fucking three days make?

I didn"t yet know that they had regulations, and that their daily question "How do you feel?" wasn"t only to check whether the patient had been broken - meaning he didn"t complain and didn"t ask to go free - but also because pills and injections can cause side effects. Some people get tremors, some drool, and so on. The doctor needs time to see whether that happens.

Though maybe I"m still naïve, and given how they dumped me there this time, it was simply that the nine‑storey relatives weren"t in any hurry to take me back.

Somehow I lived until Monday. Bab‑Valya came, and we started packing up. My psychiatric‑hospital slippers were left in the local locker opposite the chairs in the visitors" hallway. I"d be back tomorrow anyway.

The doctor came out and gave Bab‑Valya instructions about how and when I should take my pills. And to me, like to a child whose sweets are being rationed even though everyone knows he won"t keep the limit, she said:

"Wash your hands no more than five times a day."

We went out and walked to the minibus stop. The hills on the way home were already covered with snow, and I kept thinking how now I loved all that - Uncle Quorthon, being wrapped up in a пуховик with a player and another life in an imaginary world - rather than something like Miami Beach and being carefree in this real one.

.:::.

Part 76 Text 5. Back in the Civilian World,,, Second Release,,, About the Veg-State,,, Not Knowing What to Write and Shameful Pseudo-Philosophy.

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At home - there was always that striking, almost alien quiet and calm of "civilian life" after days in the psych wards. The feeling of freedom as a privilege, a gift, was immediately replaced by a sense of entitlement to it, and I instantly felt helplessly angry inside that I would have to go back.

In the bathroom, I jerked off with a toothbrush in my glasses. I don"t remember any anorgasmia back then, despite the injections. But of course, I masturbated very rarely. At that time, I didn"t yet know it was because of the meds.

At the computer, I sat in neuroleptic stupor, and all I could do was, for some reason, download a massive list of metal bands from Metallibrary, then drive cars around Vice City, doing stunts.

On that first free evening, when my father came, we went to MediaMarkt and rented the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks, which I had once watched with my grandfather, and Les Grandes Vacances with Louis de Funès. I hadn"t told anyone, but in the last years of my childhood I had developed an interest in Louis de Funès films - I liked his persona even more than Pierre Richard. Always grumbling and dissatisfied - that felt closer to me. The very first movie of his I watched and loved as a kid was Le Corniaud (or literally Up the Tree), where he gives a lift to a young couple, and, as I remembered, their happiness enraged him, and he sped off and flew off a cliff, while they landed in a tree and got stuck there. The fact that on this day of freedom from the ward I chose a comedy was no accident - my state wasn"t for anything serious, I needed quick escapism while it was possible. But I couldn"t even finish watching and fell asleep early from the neuroleptics. The nine-floor staff, probably, were overjoyed - they would have preferred I just slept all the time.

In the end, I burned these discs in the morning, and we were preparing to return to the ward.

From my last trips to Gorbushka I had the band Risk. So, while we were packing, I listened to the track Living in Chaos, which has since been very strongly associated with those psych-ward days. A strange band, whose lyrics, as I gathered from the covers, were about animals.

And off we went.

More releases were coming up, but exactly when - unclear.

They let me bring a pencil and notebook into the ward. I hoped I could write some texts there, but in reality, as soon as I was back inside, concentrating on anything was impossible, and I wrote nothing. Plus, the problem of composing texts was already clearly visible. I had nothing to say and no one to say it to. But that"s a story for another time, all at once.

Another day, Baba Valya visited, and I argued with her. It was somehow related to her not trying to speed up my release. I even chased her out and told the orderly that the visit was over. But immediately, as soon as I was back on the other side of the door, the terror of abandonment returned, and I hurried to the ward where I was already allowed to go, grabbed my notebook and pencil, wrote in big letters "Sorry", and ran to the window - I could even cry now - and Baba Valya was there, and I showed her the note, and she nodded forgivingly.

Side effects from these fucking pills began - I couldn"t piss. My bladder filled to bursting, but the process wouldn"t start. I approached the chamber pot many times at night in the ward, trying. The horror of realizing that there were no doctors here even in the daytime, let alone at night - only these fucking stupid orderlies, who couldn"t help if something went wrong and would probably not even believe there was a problem. And we were on the edge of the city, far from hospitals. What if my bladder had burst or something like that? Fucking bastards. Somehow I managed to piss, but the problem lasted for a week.

I stayed in the ward on the twelfth and thirteenth, and then the doctor let me out again - for the fourteenth, fifteenth, and, because the next two days were the weekend - for those too. She asked if I was happy - a full two extra days of freedom. After the weekend, the psych ward was supposed to resume for me in day-stay mode.

We left, I think, with my father early in the morning, and at the already frozen pond by the local church, for some reason, there was a funeral bus. My premonition about death in this place hadn"t been wrong. Father drove me home and went to work.

The vegetable state in the ward feels normal and is barely noticeable there, but at home it hit me squarely. As I said, at home I could nap during the day, sit mindlessly listening to music that didn"t stir any emotions, and I had no desire to watch Les Grandes Vacances or any other films. And in that recent episode of my first freedom trip and the minibus ride with a view of the mountains, I wasn"t exaggerating when I said I remembered loving all that: the emotional part of my love for that aesthetic was dulled along with everything else. What remained was mainly nostalgia. And nostalgia - that"s about emotions. And they were suppressed by the neuroleptics.

As I said, during one of those last trips to Gorbushka I already had the discography of the band Death, and I was now listening to everything except the album Leprosy. From the first horror-themed album I liked only Zombie Ritual, and from the next album at first I didn"t like a single track except Suicide Machine, though I didn"t listen past that track yet. The disc also had videos - The Philosopher and a live performance of Spirit Crusher, which I watched once and no more. But I read the lyrics of the band, and even without understanding a single line in translation, I fixated on the philosophical, didactic tone of the texts, as I mentioned in the first episode about my own writing in August. I imagined Chuck Schuldiner with a skull-splitting brain: I already knew he had died, and imagined his brain cancer was from too many thoughts.

In short, not yet realising that I wanted to write escapist lyrics in the spirit of Blood on Ice, and that it was not the time for aggressive texts about killing girls - I was now afraid even of aggressive emotions, let alone expressing them - I decided to write in the spirit of that Schuldiner-like philosophy. And since my mind was absolutely empty, I had no choice but to take words from Death translations like mind, truth, and simply dumbly assemble them into sentences. Somehow I even managed to slip in phrases with some meaning, like reality does not exist, because mostly it was what, if I had seen meaning in it myself, could safely be called schizophasia, like cold draws the future. What the fuck is that? I didn"t understand myself, but I would need to mouth these words in the songs I"d start as soon as I got an electric guitar and figured out how to record.

I wrote more than one text in this spirit, and there was even more nonsense, but I found only one short one. The original Russian version is lost, so I translated this Power of Reason back into Russian via AI almost literally, and it roughly corresponds to the original.

-------begin insert-------

Power of Reason.

So hard to find truth in his soul.

Does not care for his mind.

To understand why you exist.

Parallel with life and death.

Kingdom of death.

Thoughts consume the mind.

Control over oneself is lost.

Life and death.

Cold draws the future,

Generates the power of reason,

Continues to seek figurative rains.

To destroy it completely.

The world ceases to exist.

Taste for life is lost.

Existence becomes empty.

The meaning of life disappears.

Time ceases to have

Its true significance.

In a moment of heavy suffering

There is no consolation.

Kingdom of death.

Thoughts consume the mind.

Control over oneself is lost.

Life and death.

The mind refuses

To recognise reality.

Consciousness is vague.

Reality does not exist.

-------end insert-------

.:::.

Part 76 Text 6. Bought an Acoustic Guitar,,, Small Episodes at Home,,, Music of Those Days,,, Porn,,,

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In the evening, I probably went downtown, met my father, and we went to Gorbushka. I picked up some new bands.

For him, this was now, on the contrary, a good time: in the evening he took a beer, I had a Kit-Kat and some squid, and after dinner in our local idyll - with his toasts to peace and love in the whole world, and the now positive Baba Valya, pouring me extra helpings as I gained weight - we sat in the living room, discussing records, Gorbushka, reminiscing about Oblivion of Machines, childhood pranks, as if none of the last few days had happened.

Trying to find inspiration for song lyrics, I came across Raymond Moody"s Life After Life. I remember nothing from it except that, as I understood then, there is no life after death, and the light at the end of the tunnel and all that is just hallucinations. My father also knew the book from somewhere, and it seemed it was through him that I even found it.

I am very lazy to describe those artificial, post-pill weeks of my life. I value artificial states and their products the least.

Apparently, on Friday evening the fifteenth, I went downtown to my father again, met him at Chapaeva and Moskovskaya, and we went to the shop Sound City: my father had decided to buy me a guitar. An acoustic, the cheapest one, with steel strings. We picked some black one. Father tried it, played, and we took it. Around two thousand rubles. By my calculations then, it was his first expensive purchase for me in his life (relative to his monthly income).

About that electric guitar, kept by my father all his life, I already mentioned, and his own stinky onion guitar had long been somewhere not at home, so since September I hadn"t held any guitar. And now finally at home, with this new black one, I remembered all my September melodies and riffs and that very evening recorded something. I don"t remember any feeling of joy. Joy, at least for me, is the anticipation of desired future events. This is, by the way, why prostitutes cannot bring any satisfaction beyond a few seconds of physical pleasure - there"s no anticipation of anything beyond. And anticipation is about dopamine. With the dopamine system blocked by neuroleptics back then, I was as far from that feeling as ever. That"s why recalling those days is boring. It was just emptiness. Fortunately, I didn"t get acquainted with any important music in those days and didn"t study any significant topic.

On Saturday morning we had already rented Mark Knopfler"s concert A Night in London. I wasn"t impressed then. Nothing would have impressed me.

What other bands did I have in those days? I mentioned Risk and Death... Also Whiplash. Songs One Thousand Times and No One"s Idol. I drove around Vice City to them on some following days before returning to the ward.

Then absolutely shitty screaming bands Protector and Sinister. Also among the screamy bands there was Dismember - I only liked the song Override of the Overthere. Something like Asphyx. I was looking for the satanic, and I even read about this band that its members belong to a satanic church. I didn"t even know what a satanic church was.

Ah, and I also got the black metal band Carpathian Forest and spent more than one evening trying to hear anything appealing. These attempts to find anything valuable in metal crap turned into a neurosis, like the one I had long ago when a Pokémon anime aired on TV - when I even jerked off with leg compression at the thought that this shit was being recorded into my memory. At least with black metal, it was just noise and didn"t record, but the compulsion to put it on and waste my life on this shit remained and still remains. For example, when recalling episodes with In Flames, I played their music again trying to hear anything worthwhile - and couldn"t, and it would have been better to listen to normal music one more time.

One evening in those days, while my father was gone or had gone to the store, and Baba Valya was savouring our little triple idyll with me obedient and my father relieved, she sat with me in the living room, and I showed her something on the monitor. Earlier that day, she had, as usual, worked herself to exhaustion in the kitchen cooking and handling a ton of other chores, and now she sort of sat behind me in the chair, dozing. Taking advantage of her state and at the same time wanting a companion for watching - like if I were sitting with an acquaintance - I went into the porn folder on my computer and opened pictures of pussies. Baba Valya, half-asleep, made noises, like she was impressed. She could, however, pretend to sleep, just so I would open more and she could see what I had.

I only recently said that I didn"t seek porn back then, but now I remember that it was exactly during those days that I found and downloaded the first lesbian video I had ever seen. One licked another"s anus - I saw this for the first time, and if it weren"t for the neuroleptic fog in my mind, I would have gone into a strong neurotic panic, since I always thought that touching the anal area orally would inevitably infect you with worms.

And in some of those days, I still managed to squeeze out a more or less coherent text. I don"t remember the theme, but it was naively moralistic and about good, and mostly it was for my father. When he also sat in the chair by the computer, I read him this poem, and he asked if it was really written by me. And he said everything in it was correct.

.:::.

Part 76 Text 7. Saratov Forum and the Sarrock Forum,,, hated memories of forum life,,, the failed concert outing with my father, trips for injections to Aunt Marina.

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On the eighteenth, I have guitar recordings, but at the same time we were supposed to go to that fucking day ward. They gave me injections there, more often than in adulthood, when they were prescribed maybe once a month, or at most once every two weeks. Back then, in childhood, it was almost twice a week. So I started going for those, and there was also a setup so that soon my neighbour from the dacha-Aunt Marina, the one whose little house we spent a night in on some scorching summer night in 2003, and whom I said would appear at the end of the story-could give me injections. I haven"t seen her since.

That day-December eighteenth-I also registered on the general Saratov forum, which had a music section. There wasn"t much activity left, and people were talking about something called Sarrock. I would soon figure out that it was the Saratov rock forum, and almost everyone had migrated there.

I don"t remember what I did on the nineteenth... Maybe I spent the whole day in the psych ward again.

From the twentieth, I again have guitar recordings. I was probably already visiting Sarrock. Stupid forum, stupid crowd... No one discussed any Bathory, not even any dumb screaming Scandinavian metal, or even the American thrash quartet. There was some Lumen trending, some "alternative" - that"s what the style was called. Or punk. And the forum was full of chatter in the "Flame" and "Flood" sections-about some bullshit. I hoped to see nerds, people deeply invested in constructing interesting compositions, exchanging opinions on how things sounded best... So many people, we could have created some super music. Composed a perfect thirty-minute piece, like Munsorrow did, only without the screaming and bullshit. The forum had maybe fifty regulars, many clearly musicians, and each could have taken a part, focused on it, and perfected it. And if not nerd-composers, then at the very least I hoped to find genuinely dark, aggressive misanthropes from Saratov, like Slayer musicians in my stereotype. They would engage in sincere discussions about the meaninglessness of life, their refusal to engage with the system, staying home. And each misanthrope-naturally, like me, who made gloomy music the meaning of life-would post a soundtrack for their inner darkness, composed themselves or existing brutal tracks like Slayer"s "Payback" or something. But none of that existed. "Lol." "Rofl." Discussions about beer and other shit I didn"t get, clearly not what I expected. At the time, though, I was still in illusions, far from the disappointment I convey now.

As far as I understood, there were maybe one or two groups in all of Saratov playing evil metal. There were some clubs, some "Magic" place somewhere downtown. Standard concerts had a lineup of a few bands, each playing two or three songs. One of the few thrash-death-metal bands was called Eternal Hate, and they were planning to play the upcoming weekend at this "Magic." I didn"t yet realise what shit it would be and thought it was worth attending. I brought it up with my father, and we planned to go.

During those days I discovered a shock-content site, "Deadhouse." I was obsessed with death and searched for photos of corpses. Like Metallibrary, Deadhouse was decked in red. There were brains oozing, dismemberment. My blood phobia and sensitivity to blood pressure made it hard to watch, but I mostly looked for pictures of corpses in coffins. That was what terrified me most-the inevitable, coming death. I browsed the site, somehow staying awake despite my drowsiness, after my father had gone to bed. Later, I would also discover "rotten dot com," in the same vein.

On the twenty-third, I created a thread on the Saratov general forum in the rock section asking where in Saratov I could buy the Bathory album Blood on Ice on CD. I didn"t actually need the album; I just wanted to attract attention and find like-minded people. The main person engaging in metal discussions was some Jester. He even knew Bathory. A few others were familiar with the genre. There was also Dmitry Poretsky, under the nickname Drummer-the leader of the band Scepter, according to his signature. Light heavy metal about good. He would promote it for decades. Jester gravitated to heavier styles, and I would later learn he played in a bunch of Saratov bands on multiple instruments, looking like some Finn-blond, long-haired, solid-boned. Sort of a frontman for the band Kopriklaani.

I feel nauseated just recalling all those bands, all those faces, nicknames, fucking forums. It all represents the most frustrating waste of time. I would have liked to be a young entrepreneur, have a girlfriend, and then, once I had enough money to live off passive income (which I actually achieved), retire around twenty-eight, so to speak, and spend the rest of my life making music for myself and close people, for my girlfriend who also loved this music, living modestly in a cottage, with an apartment in the city and a couple of others to rent out, not needing or wanting any internet socialising, or socialising at all, because we wouldn"t need to look for like-minded people, or talk to any Jesters. We"d have each other, and we could interact with smart people by reading their books-not with these fucking degenerates, damn it. Fuck, I hate how my youth and early adulthood went, and I hate all those people. I didn"t need any of them, and there weren"t even any attractive girls. Of all the Moscow gothesses, I only liked Neanta; of all Engels, only the twins. And what chance did I have of being interesting to them in the whole world? I never understood, and still don"t, how people meet and form romantic pairs. Only at birthdays, like my parents did. But how lucky must you be to meet someone who interests you at a birthday? My parents were cosmically lucky.

I don"t remember the exact date of that concert, and there"s no trace of those forums to verify. Most likely, it was the evening of Saturday, December twenty-third. The club was somewhere near the embankment downtown, at the intersection of Michurina and a street called Babushkin Vzvoz. I didn"t have the exact address then, and in any case, we had no map to know which non-residential building was which. We went out on Chernyshevskaya and Babushkin Vzvoz. The streets were sloped, and beneath the snow was ice. I immediately, shamefully, slipped on my side. It was already dark, and we were running late. We climbed Michurina and passed 156A, which could have been the club, but there wasn"t a single person around. The next summer I would learn that it was Magic. The building had no windows; the bar was apparently upstairs, the small concert hall in the basement. After the bouncer let everyone in, he would close the door to that idiotic building like a bunker, and even if drums were banging inside, they wouldn"t be heard. In summer, when I entered and breathed in, there was a specific stinking smoke smell, worse than the psych ward, and while everyone laughed and had fun, I just hated it, fucking hated it.

We went further with my father past a big building, on the ground floor of which was a computer store where I had once learned about Thermaltake cases. Then we climbed Kirova, visiting still-operating CD stores. I was even glad we missed the concert, because even with decent music, there would still have been screaming vocals-not Metallica-and my father wouldn"t have understood that.

That same evening, either while on Kirova or the next day, we were at Gorbushka. We rented Need for Speed-some new Most Wanted add-on. My computer couldn"t handle it.

We also went again to the first-floor shops on Moskovskaya and Chapaeva, after which I often relieved myself in some weird passage to the courtyard of that big building. One time, while doing so, a resident came out to his car and rudely scolded me. I said, "What?" He said, "Dick over the shoulder."

And maybe on Sunday, we went for the first time to Aunt Marina for my injection. She lived in a big apartment in one of the new buildings at 4 Kavkazskaya, built in front of Aunt Larisa"s house, ending that old childhood game between Baba Valya and Aunt Larisa of switching lights on and off to wink at each other. Marina was around forty or younger, already a grandmother. The apartment had a children"s room, but her daughter and granddaughter were always absent. Over the last week and holidays, my father and I went to her place for this fucking injection three times.

On Monday the twenty-fifth, I posted an ad on the Saratov general forum about exchanging music on CDs. Partly to save money, partly to find my people. Not exactly my people, but a couple of interested people showed up.

That evening, probably also the twenty-fifth, my father and I went to MediaMarket and rented Peter Jackson"s King Kong. I didn"t even finish the comedic first half-I fell asleep from the neuroleptic.

Fuck, I think that"s it. I have no desire to relive anything further.

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Part 76 Text 8. The first three months of 2007,,, and finally about the main thing.

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About the remaining episodes of that year - how we visited Aunt Larisa and I weighed myself on her scales and everyone was happy that I was putting on weight (on the neuroleptics); how for some reason I installed Vice City on the laptop there; how Baba Valya and I picked Anya up from kindergarten one freezing evening, and there was that same stench - exactly like in the nightmare days of my own kindergarten ten years earlier - and I was listening to Chroming Rose on my player; how I kept getting deeper into the band Death, especially their last album; and how I wrote a couple of song lyrics about the nightmare of imprisonment in captivity - I simply don"t have the resources anymore to describe all that.

In the first days of the year I met with my mother and we bought me an electric guitar. I recorded various angry misanthropic thrash metal songs about killing both scoundrels and girls, uploaded them to Sarrock, and there was plenty of narcissistic hell there, because of course not everyone praised me. One day, in very heavy fog, my father and I went up to Altynka for an appointment, and then walked back from there through the hills, and he even took photos of me with the museum camera - but all the photos disappeared except one. I posted an announcement about forming a metal band and once met some lad about it, and in January I met three more times with people near Gorbushka to exchange music CDs. They were twenty‑year‑old guys, or even older. I would only come to writing my own melodic music in the summer, once I more or less understood how it worked. For now, realising that besides Bathory I was unlikely to find any proper bands in metal for myself, from January onward I just kept exploring and absorbing their other albums, especially the first Nordland.

I started looking for online odd jobs and posted an ad on the Saratov forum. Some bloke brought me a stack of blank discs and gave me work sitting there copying some single disc. There was some bullshit on it, completely meaningless, and most likely something illegal hidden in it.

I began protesting against taking the pills and going for injections, and my sentimentality started returning. There were once again grey days thick with escapism, and I sat there writing a northern‑landscape lyric under Bathory"s Twilight of the Gods. That was already close to February. But overall I was already clearly seeing that lyrics just weren"t working for me at all, and those landscape ones were not what I needed. I needed life, events, adventures. I was fucking sick of not living. Every day you wake up, look at the monitor - nobody praises you there, and even if they do, who gives a shit - there"s no use in it. I said this once before when I got second place at the Engels gymnastics competition. Words are nothing. So you sit there plinking on the guitar all day, then go to sleep, and the next day it"s the same again. While your peers are having their first contacts with the opposite sex.

I"d grown brazen and aggressive again, and one day I even kicked my father in the back while we were going down the stairs, and spat at him again.

I had rare phone calls with my mother, but since I lived with my father, the social services must have been calling him to ask about me. In those days he and Baba Valya enrolled me in some evening school near the city centre on Astrakhanskaya Street. It was actually during the daytime, and we went there once... I sat through several lessons among some grown teenage degenerates and came back alone. Then we went again, but I lost my temper on the bus, got off, and went home. Baba Valya stopped speaking again.

Besides Bathory, another soundtrack to those freezing last days of freedom could be the black‑metal album Halls of Frozen North by Catamenia - very high‑quality, sinister and melodic northern music, which would have been perfect if not for the idiot screaming vocals.

On the third of February I woke up in a very bad mood. I was sick to death of this life, I was home alone, and I smashed various things. Twenty minutes later Baba Valya suddenly came in, and with her were orderlies. Either it was another coincidence, or our neighbour Aunt Sveta called Baba Valya and reported the banging in the flat, because when they took me out again tied up, she was peeking out there.

At the psychiatric hospital they first brought me to the admissions building, then a large orderly led me by a strap to my children"s ward, with Baba Valya walking beside us. In the ward three people roughly stripped me, and although I had done nothing violent they tied me to the bed. I was probably tied there until morning, and they even fed me with a spoon.

In the morning my mother arrived and brought Murka wrapped in a blanket. I cried there hard. Baba Valya was there too and later asked why she had brought the cat. She didn"t know that my mother, Murka and I were, in a way, our own little family.

I lay in Altynka for a month without leaving. There were small episodes there one could dwell on - like a night with a hundred awakenings that seemed to last a whole week (another side effect); a boy who cried almost like I did (the only other one I ever saw crying in all the psychiatric wards); a mute girl who ate faeces; and above all a bedridden living organism resembling the monstrous mutant at the end of my film Alien: Resurrection, whom they brought into the ward in a box, set on the floor in the hall and left lying there inside it - and he was fourteen years old, they said. But I don"t want to describe all that anymore.

My mother tried to get me out, but they wouldn"t allow it. There was already another doctor there - an old heavy woman, a genuine Soviet piece of shit - and she even drove my mother out. I was in such despair there that I hid from the orderlies behind the piano in the hall and smashed my head against the wall, trying to die just so I wouldn"t have to stay there. When during another visit my father again disappointed me about the chances of release, I began smashing my head against the wall again, but some neurological spasm seized my sides, and my father thought I was having some kind of epileptic fit. He called the orderlies and they took me back to the ward.

At that time he was heavily into Orthodoxy, and he slipped me a small cross hidden in a sweet so the orderlies wouldn"t see it. Baba Valya also bought me an icon of Saint Nikita, and there in the psych wards I became fully religious. I prayed, that is, for them to release me. I kept remembering the phrase: "There are no atheists in the trenches."

After a month my mother begged them at least to transfer me to the psychiatric ward of the Second City Hospital, closer to the city centre. They transported me there by ambulance. There were adults there, mostly people avoiding the army or seeking disability status, and the older ones because of delirium tremens. I started smoking there. For my birthday they let me out for a day, and Baba Klava and my grandfather came to Baba Valya"s flat in Zavodskoy for the first and last time, along with my mother, maybe with Murka again. Anya was there too, and Aunt Larisa. It was a strange friendly gathering, although a month later my mother and all the nine‑storey people would gather again there and say what we really thought about each other, and separate completely - my mother from them, especially from Aunt Larisa. My father gave me a disc player, which they soon allowed me to have in the hospital.

For the eighth of March, besides a congratulatory poem for my mother, I also remembered the twins and asked my father what one gives a girl. He asked what her name was. He asked it as if I were actually in contact with her, as if in real life. What fucking contact, if since August I had been sitting either in a flat or in psychiatric wards.

Most likely the nine‑storey people really had some plan and kept me in the psychiatric hospitals that long for the sake of disability status and everything that followed. In that second hospital they declared me a full‑blown schizophrenic, and the doctor there probably thought I heard voices because she constantly asked about them. My mother still remembers that doctor telling her that I had "unfortunately genuine schizophrenia".

From that second hospital a medical student once took me by the arm with a firm grip, without warning or consent, and led me to the nearby medical university, near my old gymnasium, where I stood for a couple of minutes in front of a whole lecture hall as an example of a classic schizophrenic. In the hospital some associate professor also spoke with my mother and me - half‑asleep and bearded like Leo Tolstoy - and he too declared me schizophrenic, and some other doctor planned to send my blood to Moscow for some research.

The months I spent under psychiatric supervision - from mid‑October 2006 to April 2007 - were enough to obtain disability status and a pension.

By the end of March they allowed me to go on walks around the city with my mother, and we walked through the already thawing centre of Saratov to buy discs from that licensed stand on Volskaya Street. According to my mother we also went into the café Uley, where I fell asleep from the neuroleptics. She says I sat there calling everyone around idiots for wasting their lives on study and work - voluntarily subjecting themselves to stress every day. Despite all the injections and the neuroleptic fog, I hated the system more and more and saw no point in education. "So where exactly is the treatment?" I thought. If my unwillingness to study is a disease and schizophrenia (as my mother always believed, and I believed it too then, knowing nothing about psychiatry), then why don"t I start seeing meaning in studying? I"m taking pills, they"re treating me with injections. I still didn"t understand that these drugs remove moods, not a worldview shaped by a whole life of circumstances, including those moods. I was also curious how any values or aspirations could arise at all while on neuroleptics. Meanwhile, as my mother remembers, Aunt Larisa"s Ivan came into that café Uley. There - an example of a successful person without education. And by the way, he didn"t even greet us.

All that nightmare, with which I endure my confinement in the madhouse, which I described, went on for all those two months without interruption - but especially, of course, the first one, at Altynka.

At the beginning of April my mother finally took me out of that second psychiatric hospital - first to Frunze, where I again threw hysterics and hated everyone, and then, two or three weeks later, I moved alone into our new flat on Zelyony Lane in Engels. In June my mother moved there as well. Murka stayed forever on Frunze. My father and I never again lived all together as a family. My certificate for the compulsory nine years of schooling in our country - he bought it for me at that evening school. And with that all dynamic events in my life essentially ended forever, and since then I"ve been sitting in my hell of sexual frustration at the monitor in my room - that"s it. If my mother hadn"t taken me to live with her and I had remained with the nine‑storey people, they would obviously have kept handing me over like that, and eventually, besides disability status, would have declared me legally incompetent - and finally sent me to a psychiatric institution. My mother herself says that"s exactly what would have happened.


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