"Enough of this nonsense, this is no longer funny, it's starting to be terrifying."
The friend nervously sipped the memory of that orange one that sexually scratched his throat. His BAD was being digested with tiny amounts of ethyl alcohol. He relaxed a bit, straightened up, and stopped glancing nervously from side to side. The shuffling of many feet could be heard growing louder on the stairs. Everywhere in the city, everyone was running out of their homes in panic and rushing to these gates, fearing it would begin without them. Which is obvious nonsense. Nothing ends, nothing begins, the friend is tipsy, then the condemned one will be drunk, then she will somersault sober up, then nothing will happen, you can turn to the first chapter and start reading from the beginning. And now everyone is trying to find someone, a flimsy alibi for their sudden escape, they sit down and light a cigarette, looking around.
The friend kept the pub rituals to a bare minimum. He didn't look around at all.
"Enough of this nonsense," he repeated.
"Friend, don't be soft," the Convicted One said conciliatorily. "Nobody here blames anyone for last night, and they should. Damn, that barrow was too much.
" "Don't be soft yourself. A barrow like that is a good, decent literary motif. Not a bird-dusted tombstone, you can stick a tombstone up your ass, but a barrow, even a barrow... strong stuff. "
The lover approached them and ordered some greenish ones that tasted like mouthwash.
"Hey guys, I'll sit down and we'll talk. I just saw a beautiful girl.
" "You always like uninteresting girls.
" "Because you look with your bloodshot, old whoreson's eyes, and it's no wonder you can't see anything with them. Routine kills creative enthusiasm." The point is, when you look at a girl, you think of something truly good and important, a pleasant melody or a decent book. Once that association becomes established and you start to lose yourself, you can watch that girl for hours with that painful stabbing "OUCH!" under your breastbone. And you can compose limericks about her, or think how nice it would be if she were with you now. A line
, some call it the furrow of consideration and reflection, crossed his doomed forehead.
"Lover, you haven't... known for a long time?
" "No..." The lover batted his eyelashes nervously. "No... what?
" "Nothing, never mind."
"No, the lover has a point in what he says," the friend interjected, "and it's a beautiful point, a bit musical and a bit poetic. The thought reminds me of a deer in the rut, and my heart aches with delight. The problem is that nothing has delighted me for a long time now, I don't like anything, I don't really want anything, and the reflections of a lover don't seem to cling to me. And such beauty of innocence, performed by a lover, will die and burn among us, because the ostentatious whoring of the condemned man appeals more to me.
" "See?" the condemned man woke up. "Old man, listen to me carefully. All women except my mother... and I think my mother too.
" "Convicted man, your mother is vodka, so don't ever dare speak ill of her, you boor," the friend said indignantly. "Mother, there's only one."
The condemned man instantly frowned, and his wide, popular eyes misted over; perhaps they were sleepwalkers. Or perhaps it was a deer.
For the condemned man had no mother as such, he was burdened with a sort of alchemical origin. To distinguish him from sheep performing tricks in a test tube, the Condemned Man was sired in a conscientious, honest chalice of pure wine. A characteristic feature of the condemned city was the crowding of the famous and respected. The famous strolled the streets, the respected drove along, everywhere the glitz and discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. However, in this peculiar city, each of the famous was born in the pain of late night, budding from the mixing of inappropriate, legally prohibited alcohols. And each had the same face, the same elegant gait, identically subtle movements. Even their wives were similar—tall, slim, and tanned; they swapped these wives at will. Lesser wine blends produced lesser celebrities. Such ones enjoyed respect only within their immediate family.
And on that one moonlit night, in a heady and enchanting mixture where crystalline spirits mingled their aromatic juices, a single bubble was missing, a single reaction blew him away right at the finish, or perhaps the bartenders were cheating on the Ukrainian spirit again. And the Condemned Man was born, like a perpetually drunk Venus from the foam. The Condemned Man, endowed with a noble countenance, a devastatingly handsome face, a profile like John Wayne's, by the dozen. But behind his almost mythical physique lurked the fate of being ostentatiously unknown, obscenely unpopular, exhibitionistically unnoticed. The deficiencies in the distillate that had replaced his mother, father, and pervert uncle in one fell swoop left a gap in his life story and a blemish on his CV. Thus was born the Condemned Man, condemned by vodka to his face. He combined the significance of his face with a complete lack of any significance whatsoever. He was unpopular to the point of obscene. Each night, when he finally sat down at the table, it turned out that fame was already there, or that he wouldn't come at all that day, but she'd ask for him elsewhere. The condemned man grew more silent with each passing day, for he felt his own bubbling transience in the metallic vapors, and so desperately wanted, before his heart uttered its final sigh, desperately wanted to become SOMEONE.
The friend was overcome by the flood of memories passing before the condemned man's eyes, and all the good mood behind that green and that yellow seemed lost and gone. He felt the square shape pricking his ribs again, heard the echoes of feet pacing around his gate, making ever smaller circles as they passed, and he grew increasingly nervous. Next to him, an exceptionally decent girl sat on a high bar stool, asked the time and about the fire, dropped her handkerchief, sat there a bit longer, muttered "faggot," and left, while his friend remained seated, feeling bad. Somewhere in the distance, Fikołek moved, and on the platform, a virtual transvestite twinkled ambiguously, or maybe it wasn't her...? Next to his friend sat a particularly unexceptional companion. He was exceptionally thin, which didn't particularly please his friend because he'd read somewhere that all thin people had unpleasant personalities. He had small, shifty eyes, which also irritated his friend because he loved to look people in the eye instead of chasing them all over his face. His hands were small and agile, which particularly irritated his friend because he liked his wallet, and his wallet liked his friend. In short, he was the kind of guy you could practically punch in the face, but he might have big, strong friends. And now he leans over his friend and whispers,
"Greetings from the big one."
The friend felt a great dryness and discomfort.
"The big one? Oh, the big one... I haven't seen him in a while. I was supposed to catch him somewhere, but this suddenly came up, I mean, how's he doing? Is he holding up, is everything going well?"
The rat-like man leaned forward and took a small sip from his beer. He wiped his mouth with an embroidered napkin.
"The big one will always be happy, regardless of the year, the weather, or the circumstances. A good name, however, doesn't belong to people who put the big one in a bad mood. Such people quickly learn that there are very few things more unpleasant than an angry big one."
The friend cleared his throat.
"Listen, let's not be like children, I behaved terribly, but I can still make amends.
I'd be happy to meet with the big one and explain to him how things stand, because if things get ugly, everyone loses, right? We've known each other for a long time, the big one knows he can count on me.
" "It's all true," the rat-like man smoked a long, ladies' cigarette. The friend noted with disgust that his fingernails were neatly trimmed. "Except the big one rarely thinks as consistently and rationally when he's angry. And he was exceptionally angry today. Do you have any important matters to attend to?"
"I know," the friend began to ponder, "here and there...
" "If I were you, I'd take care of them BEFORE you meet the big one. Because, you know, it happens."
The Rat Man stood up and carried his thin frame through the brick exit, painfully poking passersby with his sharp elbows and protruding collarbones. The Friend began to wonder if this was the right time to think about God and the most visually beautiful moments of his life. However, every time he tried to conjure up an image of divine infinity and perfection, he was reminded of his elementary school art teacher, who tried to molest students in the office. As for life, the more he tried to recall pleasant or simply pleasant moments, the more vividly and sharply he remembered slamming doors, empty rooms, and hooks being eaten by one another to soothe the feeling. The Friend would put this more precisely on the last page, in his last powerful line of dialogue. Meanwhile, he was feeling very bad. For nearly three decades, he hadn't had a single memory worth recalling. Everything pointed to the friend dying completely unprepared. "At least I have friends," he didn't actually have time to think, because the condemned man was already magically intoxicated, and the lover was waiting for his fatal attraction, sitting with his back to the woman whose name was not mentioned
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