Time and place: February 20, Anno Domini 2004; Military Recruitment Command. The world depicted: the trauma of being accepted into the ranks of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland, tightly held by an indoctrinal vice. 9:32 am local time. The sound of an alarm from my cell phone lifts my swollen eyelids with personified hands. I feel like Giordano Bruno burning at the stake. My temperature is 38.5°C. A subacute cold, brought on by the freezing temperatures of the century, was still winning against the Actimel team guarding my health—a private, penal company of useless cells transformed against their will into antibodies. Pills, lubricants, injections, inhalers, inhalers, electroshock therapy, suppositories, enemas didn't help—not even electrifying water by miraculous hands did! I'm still sick, still unfit for life, still unwell, but instead of lying in bed, I have to go to a military commission. This date, like your birthday, you don't choose yourself. It's assigned, as it were, from above, always belatedly, always wrong. I look at the battery level on my phone—you're on the verge of dying! Too bad—you probably wouldn't be of any use today anyway, my pocket-sized, mobile, tri-band substitute for contact with the outside world. With considerable difficulty, I rejected the temptation to become a military renegade, perpetually running from the gendarmerie, living in the forest, and subsisting on berries and locusts. I had to go, nygga. Life is a bitch, and you know it. BTW: The soldier is not sick, the soldier is checking the technical condition of the isolation room.
I had no appetite. I forced myself to eat a piece of toast with melted cheese and scrambled eggs, the appearance of which perfectly encapsulated the state of my brain, subjected to the frequent thermal anomaly served up by my red-hot skull. My neural protein was slowly coagulating, and I was running out of time. I took a quick shower, during which my teeth chattered so mercilessly that I probably woke everyone in a three-block radius. I dressed, exchanged a few words with my family, offered them the emotional fast food I could afford in my illness, and headed for a place modeled after a medieval torture chamber—the bus stop. After three landing approaches, the Ikarus bus rolled onto the cracked, cobblestone surface of the bus stop. Despite the late hour for the "lanny malki," the yellow Boeing substitute was bursting at the seams. It's a good thing my labyrinth protein hadn't completely hardened yet—I was still able to maintain balance in such an inhuman, twisting, and malpositioned body position, one that could easily aspire to be a secret, elaborate Kama Sutra position, inscribed in a never-published sutra. Twenty minutes of driving had raised my body temperature to 39°C. The windows around me steamed and wept, forming a pattern that would remind many party fanatics and extremists of Lenin's face. My radiator was a metal tube, normally used to resist the law of universal inertia—a tool people used to hold on to while driving.
I get out. Despite my 'overall' clothing, I feel a nagging, sensory-irritating cold. I still have about 500 meters to walk before I find myself in front of that—unfortunate for the simulators—WKU building. It doesn't seem far. However, my medical condition allows me to compare my march to the three-week Siberian assault of the Red Army, which conducted secret nuclear tests in the taiga wilderness. I walk, practically tear through snowdrifts on stretches of land poorly cleared by the road services. But where is this building that decides whether or not to join the army? This? This is supposed to be this monstrous, pyramidal fortress of justice? I enter. It's a bit like a Kafka novel. Dwarfed from the outside, yet more spacious inside. However, I soon realized that a significant portion of this architectural mirage, or quasi-miracle, has been used up in enormous corridors. Because the room for young men awaiting a thorough inspection of all their bodily orifices and a profound, Freudian psychoanalysis was very small. Perhaps it was the sheer number of people crammed into the room that so adversely affected the overall impression of the room? Perhaps it was the fourteen-inch television—a substitute for entertainment—that heightened the impression of minimalism? At just two hundred and three centimeters tall, I felt like a damn Gulliver in the land of Lilliput. A large portion of the waiting conscripts seemed slightly bored, yet in a fit of frustration, ready to rebel, even march on Baghdad.
I signed the list and waited. I sat in the hallway, as I was devoid of agoraphobia, unlike the crowd inside. I fell into a strange, abulic, morbid half-sleep. Three hours of waiting, as sterile as a fresh bandage, for the miracle of my name being called, acted like dioxins slowly dissolving in the bloodstream. I waited for a Cherubim, or a Seraphim, clad in white robes, who would take me to the final judgment—that routine, anal, dignity-defying inspection of my body, especially my sphincter. Enough. I had to fight. I felt hungry (my appetite was returning!) and decided to buy something to eat. It was a desperate attempt—according to Murphy's Law, if I wasn't in the building, I should be called. So, wanting to hasten this profound examination of my being, I headed to the grocery store across from the WKU building. For that 3.50, I bought not only three cream-filled doughnuts. I also bought exaltation, spasm, ejaculation of the absurd. Because, as soon as I (armed with three cream-blessed doughnuts) returned to the selection site, I heard from a compatriot I knew by sight: 'Come with us. They called you up too!' Roger that. Before my eyes appeared a military commission, which vividly resembled the battle-famous parliamentary investigative commission. Doctor, Major, Second Doctor, Nurse. In front of us, that is, four young men, not yet soiled by such inspections. Round one. Fight!
We were given a single chair to hold the winter clothes of four people, which were being folded up into layers. Undressed, with our feet on the cold floor, we stand before the esteemed commission. Four people in batek. We, the four tank men. We, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, awaiting judgment on the world. The seals began to be broken, and the first "Woe!" came. Everything was to be done according to the following pattern: "Behind the screen. Remove your underwear. Bend over. With your back to me. Spread your buttocks. Thank you. Do you smoke? Do you use drugs? Fine, next." And indeed, that's how it was. I was last in line. In front of me, behind the screen, my friend from the neighborhood, a nygguś, was spreading his buttocks. When asked, "Do you smoke?" with his buttocks still parted, he replies, "What? I can see the soot?" The nurse caught a crimson blush mid-flight, just as Jerzy Dudek caught Shevchenko's ball. The Major giggled as if on his fifth birthday, having received a coveted dollhouse as a gift. The Second Doctor almost choked on his coffee, sipped with a hint of decadence. And only the Attending Doctor wasn't amused: "You're so funny, aren't you?" It was clear that the boy from my neighborhood had just lost the chance to earn anything other than an 'A' rating. Next. My turn. I open the necessary things; I'm as pink as a baby because I still have that damn fever. Enaf. Time for weighing and measuring. Once again, I'm the last one to stand on the scale. The measuring tape proves too short for Gulliver. The crimson nurse who performed the procedure turns to the Second Doctor: "Doctor, I CAN'T MEASURE THIS MAN." The Second Doctor looked at me, but not directly in the eye—more like a torso below me—and when he finally understood the real meaning of the question, he replied, "Then tell me how tall you are." Gee, the Second Doctor, maintained his presence of mind, apparently thanks to the regular fueling of his gray matter with black, richly scented, aromatic coffee.
No more anal checkups for today. Get dressed. Easy to say! I still have to find my own clothes among all these textile offerings (placed on the chair altar). Soon, tripping over someone's corset and two bras, I managed to get dressed. Wait. Wait again. A deep, psychoanalytic, Freudian conversation awaits me – first with the secretary, then with the eminence himself – Mr. 'buy me a doll' Major. I enter. The secretary says in a clerical, dry voice, 'Please sit down.' Questions are asked: 'Do you have teeth? I mean, do you have a complete set of teeth? Complete. Fillings, I mean. Do you have. Tattoos? You know. Dragons, skeletons. Do you have. Tattoos? In strange places?' Her flow of words terrified me. I said my teeth were fine. I'm also not David Beckham, so I don't have a foreskin ornament. 'Do you take drugs? Like, into a vein? You know. Morphine. Into. A vein. An artery. A syringe?' The question about drugs was asked for the second time today – apparently, the Polish Army was running a campaign (besides recruitment) to stop using narcotics, or at least trying to kill two birds with one stone and uncover (on behalf of the DEA) a trafficking channel for marijuana, frequently transported across the Polish borders, which the authorities claimed were sealed. 'No. I don't use. So please go to that room. Over there. A room? Go.' Here's the Major. He was most likely a forcibly exiled soldier who knew too much. Perhaps he was demoted for his unhealthy, girlish way of treating privates. Or perhaps because in military circles he was – to put it pejoratively and somewhat casuistically – a queer? Thrown from the elites straight onto the remnants of military intestines. His plowed, lavender-scented face asked me the most profound, mystical questions of my life: "Name? Any questions? No? Thank you." And that was it. That's all, folks. The ceremonial ritual of the moment gave way to exhaustion. Good luck, Major, and I wish you promotion.
All that's left is to wait for the commission's decision. It was supposed to be a Kafkaesque verdict, because you couldn't delay it, hasten it, or influence it in any way. I'm waiting. Ahead of me, military service (this damned need to pigeonhole people everywhere) has been awarded to two guys. The first, a man with twenty-degree scoliosis—puff! punch! punch! punch—receives category 'A' (sic!). In the army, we have comfortable bunks, so your back won't ache. The second guy, carrying the cross of a heart condition on his shoulders, prolonging his life with beta blockers—puff! punch! punch! punch—also receives category 'A' (disorders don't impair the body's efficiency). Spox—you even get pills in the army. 'We want YOU!'—the US Army propaganda poster must have captured the doctors' imaginations too much, or the coffee ended too soon. Apparently, you could only get an 'E' category (or as a bullet) if, at birth, the doctors were trying to decide where to cut (because they didn't know where the umbilical cord ended and where you began). Enaf. Fortunately, there are still appeals. Good luck, gentlemen. Dude, seriously, don't despair—they won't let you go to the training ground with a heart condition (?).
Now it's me! Now it's me!—surprisingly—I get an 'A' category. Fortunately, my chosen educational path—the path of Neo—is still ongoing, and I get a deferment. My planned higher education is having a pleasant effect on my cold-affected morphology. Joining the army doesn't look like happening anytime soon. Phew. Mission accomplished. I'm utterly exhausted. Half-asleep, in some kind of total trip, I return home and announce the verdict to everyone with my fast food, sausage-like: "I got an A." I collapse into bed. When I wake up, the world will be a more beautiful place. Because right now, in my delirium, it seems to me that I'm lying not in my bed, but on a military bunk. We say a party, proletarian NO to nightmares!
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