Friend

****

We meet in the kitchen of the apartment I rent. This room was originally in such a state that it would have been easier to lock it and forget about it than to clean it. But he likes it. He feels comfortable here. He feels good among all this old owner’s junk, dust, soot, and the dried little corpses of spiders. My friend—he’s a bit strange.

He always brings a thermos of horrifying instant coffee and pours it into plastic cups. I’m not sure it’s coffee. To me, that kind of taste and smell could belong to any vile concoction. Knowing my friend, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were just dirt diluted with water or something like that. I stopped drinking it after I once noticed a boiled cockroach in my portion. But I pretend to drink it. I don’t like hurting my friends.

It’s always hard for us to start a conversation. We’re not very sociable in general. I have a few coworkers I speak to strictly about work. And sometimes I count short exchanges with cashiers in stores as a successful social interaction. My friend only ever leaves his home to come to my kitchen. So the first half hour we just get used to the feeling of another person nearby.

I usually look out the window. It’s half-opaque with grime, and beyond it you can’t make out anything except tree branches. And sometimes headlights. Where my friend looks, I don’t know. Probably into his plastic cup. Or at the cobwebs. He always speaks first. After all, he really has no one else to talk to. And I have cashiers. And coworkers. He asks how I’m doing and whether I’ve stopped seeing nightmares. It’s almost like a password. He can’t ask whether I’m still seeing those strange things. We’re realists. We don’t believe in that sort of thing.

I involuntarily glance at the creature that has built itself a nest on my ceiling. It smiles at me with a terrifying mouth stretched across its entire face and continues to smack its food.

“Yes,” I answer, “I’m still seeing nightmares.”

My friend gets embarrassed. He doesn’t know how to continue the conversation. He knows how much I dislike his attempts to smooth things over. I believe that if he didn’t hesitate to drag me into all this, then he shouldn’t hesitate to call things by their proper names either. He’s the only one I can talk to. And I use that chance:

“Yesterday my boyfriend came over. We talked, fooled around. We were going to have sex. But it felt like something was wrong, I just didn’t know what. You know how it is. I was looking for an excuse and said that he smelled a bit unpleasant after a workday. And then I realized that he really did stink. He took out mint candies, though the problem wasn’t his breath—he smelled wrong in general. He gave me a couple too. He was on edge, probably, so he started crunching them. And so did I. And then I noticed that he had too many teeth, and too big a mouth, and that teeth probably aren’t supposed to grow all over the inside of a throat. And be that sharp. And then I remembered that I don’t have a boyfriend. You know, it wasn’t as scary as the first few times. I didn’t even show that something was wrong. I said, ‘Ding-ding. Someone’s calling me. I’ll open the door.’ You know how they don’t understand the difference between a doorbell and an imitation—they always fall for it. And I went into my neighbor’s room. She’s nice. She doesn’t need explanations. Only there did I notice that I was chewing glass, not candies. She hugged me, and we sat like that the whole evening. She’s really nice. She didn’t want to let me go.”

“You do remember that you don’t have a neighbor. Or other rooms,” my friend looks at me like I’m an idiot. And I feel ashamed—this was an especially stupid mistake. I was lucky the neighbor turned out to be non-aggressive.

“You need to be more careful,” he says. “They’re getting smarter. I just went into the bathroom to shave, like usual. And then I remembered that I don’t have a full-length mirror. And that even if I did, the reflection should look like me.”

“And you also grow a beard and don’t shave,” now I could look at him like an idiot too. But instead we look at each other warily. I search my memory for any other episodes involving this person, trying to make sure he himself isn’t an illusion. He’s probably doing the same. My friend turns pale. He looks at my coffee, which I still haven’t drunk.

“I know this is stupid,” his voice grows thin. It’s fear. “But if you don’t take at least one sip from your cup right now, I… Just drink it, okay?” I look into my cup, and I feel sick. I don’t know what’s in there. But it’s disgusting. It doesn’t look like something that should ever go inside a human. Those candies were disgusting too. I bring the cup to my lips and cover with my hand the thin stream running down my chin. The collar of my sweater absorbs the liquid.

“See? Everything’s fine. I’m human.” I learned that trick from them. They don’t eat or drink real food. But they pretend very well.

“I’m sorry. It’s just—if you spent so much time with your imaginary neighbor… I had to be sure.” He probably really is sorry. He starts retelling that story again, about the last person he communicated with. After whom he decided to cut off all social contact. “He was completely real. Clothes always appropriate for the season, spoke normally. You know, without those cheap tricks with false memories of conversations—I always remembered exactly what he said. He smelled nice too, probably used a lot of cologne. We met at a bar and kept meeting there. At first accidentally, or so I thought. Then we started setting dates. He took a long time to get close to me, waited for an invitation home. I invited him. A taxi, bought more booze at a night shop. I almost opened the door, and he… Well. Started smiling. You know how they do it. And then I remembered that I’d never seen him drink anything. Ever. Didn’t drink at all. In the bar. And I hadn’t noticed.” My friend touched his shoulder. There, under his sweater, were scars. I stitched them myself with threads soaked in vodka. “That was back when they still needed my invitation.”

We fall silent. There’s really nothing left to talk about. Many years ago, when all this had just begun, our meetings were much more intense. We discussed details, cried, and convinced each other that it was all in our heads. We flinched at every shadow outside the window and shared experiences. I said it was all his fault, that it was he who suggested we make quick money selling skeletons—as models for artists and medical students. He said it was all my overactive imagination, that we were students and needed money. That we weren’t guilty of anything. We drank a lot, invented ridiculous solutions to the problem.

Now we have nothing to talk about. I don’t even know why we still meet. We’ve become very different.

I’m being treated for schizophrenia.

And he died two years ago.