автор: Boy

from the beginning we were prepared, we knew just what to do, for hadn`t we seen it all a hundred times?—the good people of the town going about their business, the suddenly interrupted TV programs, the faces in the crowd looking up, the little girl pointing in the air, the mouths opening, the dog yapping, the traffic stopped, the shopping bag falling to the sidewalk, and there, in the sky, coming closer…

...


whirling saucers, blinking lights and laser beams. Precise kaleidoscope of panic-patterns all around the world. (All around except the Commielands, of course, Ivan and Invaders drinking vodka with selyodka, foreign devil-brothers from the icy steppes and icy space.) Close-up of a glowy woman`s face in 1950`s cinematic black-and-white, reeling silently at sixteen frames per second. Her mouth a soft pit of mute screams lined with gleaming teeth. Non-white, bug-eyed aliens death-blasting us to stardust. Democracy in tragic ruins

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a beam of light in an acceptable nuance of the Divine, mild and honey-smooth and long, arousing like a master`s finger on an upturned belly. Haloes bursting in enraptured multitudes of gazes, like sunrise bursting from inside unblemished drops of dew, even as it burns the blades of sloping grass beneath. A glowing ark is sailing down a firmament awash with stars. A hand outstretched toward the multitudes, five-fingered, wise and strong, ring finger in a band of gold. A choir calling out:

`Uplift thyself! Through us thou shalt ascend! Live long and prosper!`

Close-up of a crayon-technicolored trinity of faces – mother, father, child, voices ringing bright and feisty like an early-morning bark, teeth gleaming hungrily against the sky. Buckle up, young bucks, this world is but a dust-speck in our eyes! Eff-tee-ell across the stars

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a star falls. It is cold and silent. In the quiet cold spacerock which bore him to this earth, he slips out of his stellar sleep, announcing his arrival with a bare sigh and opening of eyes. He then steps out, his rough metallic beast clattering behind, the movement of its flanks recrossing dusty earth in his wake. Humanity huddles like a flock before a storm. Close-up of his face. His mouth is an unbroken line, thin and silent. His beast is at his side, a single point of red glowing on the surface of its head. In that silent mouth and in the glowing point of red there lies a certainty. He knows us. He has come to judge. Woe to the unrighteous. Klaatu barada nikto

End of Reel

What happened was nothing like this. There was no destruction, no ascension and no judgment. I need not tell you. Like everyone, you also see, you also do not understand. From the day it happened exactly eighty years have passed. On the day it happened I was exactly eighty years old. I need not dwell on it. You have doubtlessly seen stranger things. Maybe in your house, in your mirror.

I was at that time living in a place by the sea where old folk lived out their lives and occasionally ended them. It was an old place, chipped and cloyed with the odor of roses and crinkled petunia. On the morning of my birthday I sat in the common room, on an armchair embroidered in intertwining purple vines, worn and roughened by a thousand late-night dozings and the idle strokes of absent-minded fingers. No one was coming today. In my lap and on the floor around my feet lay sprawled a hairy blanket. The tremulous inrush of wind left an undulating mark upon the window curtains, their pastel-green patterns obscured by my failing eyesight. It had rained the night before for the first time in a long while and I was trying to smell the wet autumn wind through the fresh sweat that lined the sleeves of passing nurses. The TV buzzed somewhere behind me.

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn`t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, `Ladies and gentlemen – `. He was silent after that. Everyone and all was silent – the old folk, the walls, the wind.

My hands shivered under the blanket and a misty feeling came over me, of cold and clear-eyed mornings on a park bench, green and chipped and sodden, watching listening with rain-specked trousers, rain pecking wetly at my polished shoes, plopping circular concentric kisses on the smooth cold cheeks of puddles where chestnuts have tumbled, marooned all around me beneath the crumbling shadows of shriveled autumn crowns.

On such quiet, clear-eyed mornings every fallen leaf is turning like a shuffling step towards me, and I wonder: What would it be, to be there to hear the first shuffling step of the first autumn leaf, to feel on your shoulder the thump of the very first tumbling chestnut; to feel that apocalyptic shiver that is carried by the beginning wind of every season, like the shivers that pass and repass over a horse`s skin just before it breaks into a gallop?

I think in that suspended silence of the common room I knew. What I knew was profound incomprehension. It was like something throwing another veil over my failing eyes. My hands still shiver sometimes, but that is the only trace left of that feeling. And as I try to understand that feeling, which so perfectly coincided with the arrival, the years, slowly, impossibly, accrete.

I have not changed.

I have tried to end it. After watching, fascinated, as my own blood unraveled for hours in a steaming bathtub, I learned it was impossible. Or rather, I gave up trying, out of fear that a morbid interest in my apparent deathlessness and the ingenious ways I might challenge it would overshadow all else in time.

Soon after, I left the old folks` home. I traveled. I looked at the world, how it had changed. It had changed impossibly, sometimes absurdly, and randomly. I remember a laborious climb up a road running up a slope leading to a sea cliff`s flat top, not far away from the old folks` home. Snags of grass blew around my feet, broken snatches of a voices` inarticulate harmony as the gusts of wind turned this way and that. Most of the sky was there that day. Most of what was there glowed like the nephrite underside of a seashell canted fully against the light. I gained the top and reached a building. `The Barthelme School for the Gifted`, was written above the entrance. In one of the courtyard`s flower-beds, amid a profusion of dead and darkened violet and moonflower blooms, sat a man and pushed the blooms back into the soft soil with delicate white hands, tilting his head to the harmony, which was now clearer but seemed not to follow any progression or pattern. I spoke to him. Here is what he told me:

`Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that ... that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems ... and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible.` The stresses on the last two words were punctuated sharply, with a responsible teacher`s firmness, but I was looking at the tear-stained corners of his mouth. `You know what I mean.`

He paused, made a dramatic flourish with a handful of broken flowers.

`And the trees all died. Come and see.` He jumped, started tugging at my sleeve. He smelled of fresh earth and faint aftershave. `They all! Died!`

I winced at his laugh. He suddenly ceased, set his mouth into a straight line, shook earth from his suit, cleared his throat and crossed himself. `Shall we?`

I had the absurd feeling he is either going to take me to the headmaster, or he would introduce me as the new boy in class. I followed him, the tips of my shivering fingers cold upon my legs even through the pockets of my woolen trousers. At one point, he stopped me with an upraised hand and took off his trousers. The scant hairs on his pale thighs stood on end, but he did not seem to notice the cold, wet wind. `You too, now. It is the etiquette, you see,` he said with a shrug and a smile.

`All right.` I waited, hands in my pockets. `Shall we continue?`

`Yes, of course,` he said, as if I had done what he had asked me.

Far to the right of the path leading to the orange orchard stretched a sliver of sea, still and greenish and sleek as the back of a snake. A cloying odor gradually took over the salty air, similar to that at the old folks` home, when in the garden the smell of purple roses and crinkled petunia mixed with that of old people`s breath and moving flesh. Rotten oranges and something stronger, fouler. The strange harmony moved closer.

Then we were there.

`They were orange trees. I don`t know why they died, they just died.` A slight indignation in his tone.

Oranges. Gray and soft and sodden globes sunk among the upright husks of trees and children`s bodies. The trouserless bodies sang. It was indeed the etiquette and I felt a pang of acute shame for not following it.

Each head was bowed in a posture of humility and contemplation. Long hair mercifully hid the remnants of faces. Each mouth produced a single tone, each mouth a different tone, each voice a frozen jewel strung along a helix. And amid that paradoxical space of sound and nidorous non-life there stood

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