Nikto | Flatmates

The tapestry upholstery of the sofa tickled unpleasantly the thin fresh leather, swollen from being in the gradually cooling water for too long. He could not recreate its pattern in his mind's eye. It was sand, maroon and grey spots, German houses and windmills, it seemed, but he was not sure. The defect in perception was unnerving. In his work, inattention was equivalent to professional incompetence. But he was officially recognized as professionally incompetent. It was so fair that cruelty and mercy merged into a single cadaver on a sheet of unbleached paper with a medical commission's conclusion. The FSB and the Army are flawlessly debugged mechanisms. And in good mechanisms, damaged parts are immediately replaced. "Health category "D", unfit for military service." "We inform you of the need to vacate the service apartment within 7 calendar days." "Report to the local mental hospital within 10 calendar days." He had almost lost the ability to experience emotions, but he couldn't help but respond to this vulgar irony with a wry smile. The movement of his muscles shifted his facial nerves, and the disfigured flesh responded with pain and numbness. The army had returned him exactly where they had taken him from, to a small apartment on the outskirts of a provincial town, as soon as he ceased to be useful. He had always been happy with his life and what he had. The FSB generously and carefully looked after its assets. He had simply ceased to be an asset and had become a burden. A veteran of a shadow war, an invalid on a state pension. This had not yet been formalized, but slipped through in the disinterested tone of the doctors, in the tired negligence of the nurses. They had not fought for him, they had written him off. He forced himself to leave the bath when the water had cooled for the third time, and the gas water heater had begun to malfunction. But moving the senseless, swollen body from the cold water to the rumpled bed was the only thing he had the strength for. Now he simply listened to the sensations in this biological machine, which after so many years of faithful service suddenly began to feel completely alien. Like a trophy weapon, from which you never know what to expect. He felt a draft on his still damp shoulders, from which his skin was covered in small goosebumps. He felt thousands of thin synthetic threads of the sofa upholstery, which had frayed over many years and was now sending an unreasonable number of nerve impulses across the area of ​​​​an acid burn under his knee. He felt a lump of a bunched sheet under his lower back and a corner of a prickly woolen blanket under his left thigh. None of the sensations were pleasant, but they all gave an idea of ​​​​his position in space. That he was alive, that he existed and felt his body, that right now he was not in pain. A doctor with pale fish eyes from a Moscow hospital said something about "grounding." But it felt too pathetic to be a real therapeutic practice. The roar of a car skidding in the snow, which had been trying to turn around in the yard for ten minutes, distracted him from this imitation of self-help. It was the only distinct sound resonating in the wide space of the yard, bouncing off the brick walls, tin canopies, and the frosty trunks of bare trees. The crows did not caw, the wild dogs in the garage cooperative were silent. When he woke up just two hours ago, he heard the rustling of wadded trousers. Children were returning home from school. A couple more hours would pass, and all the useful people involved in the life of society would begin to return from work. But now it was quiet. Every living creature understood the need to conserve strength and remain silent in this terrible frost. Only some idiot from the taxi service had first climbed onto the snow-covered driveway and was now trying to get out. The sound, like liquid ether, filled the entire space of the room immersed in semi-darkness, buried itself in the green foliage of the birches printed on the wallpaper, clinked with crystal that no one needed anymore in the wardrobe that had sagged with time, and slid between the plastic fragments of the interior thread curtain. People's faces, sealed in decorative porcelain plates and heavy wooden frames, resembled photo ceramics from old tombstones. All of them had long ceased to exist in the real world, had rotted to dust, including the face of a sixteen-year-old boy in a cadet uniform. But they remained on the walls, faded and motionless. There were photographs on the walls, there was crystal and porcelain on the glass shelves of the closet. There was lacquered furniture and a dusty carpet on the wall that once muffled the sounds of overly noisy neighbors. There were birch trees on the wallpaper, there were embossed frames around the switches and sockets, there were garlands of plastic tubes in the doorway. But all of this seemed faded, like archive photographs. He looked at the wall, and after 30 seconds he could not remember how many birches there were on it. Disabled. He remembered this apartment differently. He remembered the sunbeams on the walls, remembered the impact of raindrops on the concrete floor of the balcony and the smell of ozone. He remembered endless holidays, uncles, aunts, cousins. How his mother dressed up to meet guests and how she, in tears, saw his father off on business trips. He also remembered the "funeral notice" for his father. No one cried for him in the hallway cramped with coats and fur coats. And no one would receive a funeral notice. His mother was not happy, and he did not want to pass this melancholy on to another woman, like a relay baton of the world's grief of every woman who lost her heart in the millstones of the military machine. And here he was. Washing his face in the morning with ice water, rubbing his inflamed eyes with snow from the windowsill. Walking through the deserted park to the quiet hospital buildings. His mother had walked the same road, past the same century-old pines, after his father had been brought in a zinc coffin. 15 years was not a long time, maybe the psychiatrist who had treated her was still seeing patients. In any case, it did not matter. He did not remember the name of the doctor, only shame for his mother, who had been broken by grief. Andrei winced again. Never say never about prison or poverty... Late in the evening, when there were no people on the street at all because of the frost, he sometimes found the strength to leave this brick fortress. Past the grocery store where Aunt Nadya worked. To the nearest supermarket with a self-checkout, a kilometer through snow-covered courtyards. It was a small price to pay for not having to take off the scarf from your face and not having contact with people beyond what was vitally necessary. Now the years of service seemed like an illusion, a dream that had passed, leaving behind pain in a crushed body and nightmares in the depths of a sick mind. Life returned to where it began, but seemed to have faded. Deprived of all colors, smells and tastes, volume and texture. It resembled a synthetic canvas with evergreen trees covering a technical booth in a park. Go to the clinic. See a psychiatrist, see a cardiologist, see a surgeon, don't miss massage and psychotherapy sessions, take your pills on time. If you believe the records in clerical language from electronic medical documents, this is at least Group 3 disability. If you believe that he is still able to overcome 9 flights of stairs, get to the clinic knee-deep in snow and not even kill anyone there, then he has a chance to return to service. He is used to trusting himself, not documents. He is not used to giving up, neither in the basement covered in his blood, nor in his cold parental home. If he can no longer use his head, he will learn to use his broken arms to good effect. The pain in fresh scars irritated him, insomnia and tingling in the heart irritated him, constant memory lapses and loss of the sense of his own body irritated him. But all this could be worked with. He fought because he saw no other options. What irritated him even more was the idiot in the taxi. After fifteen minutes of noise and fuss, he finally left. Overcoming his dizziness, Andrei rose from the sofa. He fastened the damp, cold sheet around his waist more out of habit than necessity to hide his nakedness. He inherited only 1/2 share of the apartment, but he did not know who the second owner of the apartment was. When he arrived, it seemed empty for more than 10 years. So in his decomposition, he was completely left to his own devices. But even if someone else lived in the apartment, the whole mutilated body should have been hidden, and not just parts of it. Out of compassion for someone else's psyche. Walking barefoot across the cold wooden floor with peeling paint and putty that had long since sunk into the cracks, and then across the faded linoleum, he walked into the kitchen. Why hadn't his mother written to him that she needed money for repairs? Why this imitation PVC floorboards over the real ones, touched by time? Could she have written to him at all? Had she been told what work address to write to? For 15 years he had been too busy to think about it. Without removing the boiled-over coffee grounds from the burner, which had spilled on it the night before, he struck a match, and the small room was filled with the smell of burning. As he moved the half-empty kettle onto the burning burner, an impossible, unacceptable, unnatural sound reached his ears. Someone from outside had inserted a key into the lock of his door and was now turning it. His worn-out heart lost its rhythm, giving another sharp stab behind his sternum. The yellowish wall of the kitchen seemed to move back a hundred meters, his entire field of vision shrank to a narrow tunnel, and his body became even more alien and disobedient. He cursed himself for reacting so unacceptably for a professional, but he couldn't overcome this stupor and it only made him angrier. Meanwhile, the key finished turning and the plywood door began to open.