Giorgio Hypnos – The Thing That Asks for Milk (страница 2)
“Sir. Leave the room. Now.”
“Wait, I—” He lifted the camera as if it were his right.
“Faster, sir.”
He caught Kate’s face—for one second. She turned her head and looked at him like she wanted to remember. There was more calm in her eyes than there was in him.
The door shut in front of him with a soft click, like a lock on a cage.
He was left in the corridor with the camera in his hand, and the camera kept recording—his shaking fingers, the white wall, the strip of light under the door.
He didn’t stop the recording.
After that, there were a lot of things he didn’t “turn off.”
***
After that, everything turned into mosaic fragments that wouldn’t fit into any sequence.
A doctor with a tired face. The words: “We’re sorry. We did everything.” A plastic cup of water he couldn’t bring to his mouth—he dropped it, splashing not only himself but the doctor’s blue gown.
Cold, shaking hands, and a stuttering voice that had gone suddenly hoarse. Black-and-white shorts flickered through his mind: a conversation in an office, signatures, stamps, documents being pushed into his disobedient hands.
He signed without looking, barely reading—he wanted to run from the text too badly.
All that remained in his head was: “I had a child… and he died.” And: “Kate is gone.” He repeated it to himself as if the right wording could keep the world from coming apart.
When they gave him his things back, he found the action camera in the bag. It was off; the red indicator blinked—the battery had died. He thought, I need to erase it.
***
Then there was the funeral. Then the house, where there was suddenly too much space.
Then—the first bottle.
Not for pleasure. For sleep. To close his eyes and not see that corridor outside the room, that door, that pause before the cry.
He was a wine critic, a man who could tell by smell whether a wine had been stored right, where the cork had failed, where the taste had “broken.” And now he drank cheap whiskey from the local grocery store because its taste demanded no attention—it just burned and erased whatever it could.
The first days he still tried to live “like before.” He got up, brushed his teeth, shaved, opened his laptop, pulled up his database—neat fields, sorting, and edited notes.
But all of it belonged to someone else’s life. His own life had vanished.
The action camera lay on a kitchen shelf beside its charging base. He put it on the charger because that was what he always did.
The router blinked in the corner. A radio on the windowsill muttered something about traffic and the weather. And all of it—light, electricity, sound—kept the house in a state of “normal.”
Leo’s brain tried to live normally during the day, but almost every evening his thoughts carried him into the dark, and he left the empty house for another dose of whiskey.
***
He tossed and turned, slipping in and out of dreams he couldn’t remember. And then the pain came.
Not physical. The kind that lives under your ribs like a cold piece of metal, and if you breathe too deep, it cuts you from the inside.
He sat up and swung his legs to the floor. Somewhere in the kitchen a clock ticked. Tick. Tick. Tick—like the steps of a midwife walking away down the maternity-ward corridor. In his head, flashes of that night ran again.
“We’re sorry…” the doctor had said then, and the word fell onto the tiled floor like a shattered cup.
Sorry about what? Sorry about the woman he would never see again? Or about the baby they hadn’t even had time to name?
He got up, went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face. In the mirror—stubble, red eyes, skin a shade darker from exhaustion.
On his wrist was a fresh scratch.
He didn’t remember where it came from. Maybe last night, when he was swaying around the yard, he snagged himself on a nail in the fence. Maybe he dropped a bottle and picked up the shards. The scratch was long, ragged, swollen.
“Like everything else in my life,” he thought. “Ragged.”
Near the couch he found what was left of the whiskey and took a swallow. The alcohol spread down his throat, burned, and his head got quieter—not better, but quieter, as if someone had turned down the radio that played the same word around the clock: too late.
Chapter 3
A couple of weeks later, one evening, Leo came back from the store with a grocery bag that held a lot more alcohol than groceries, and he saw a shoebox on the threshold of his house. He swayed a little from what he’d already had to drink that night.
He set the bag down on the porch beside him and bent toward the box, listening. Something moved inside.
Leo jerked back and scanned the area, trying to make out in the dark who’d decided to mess with him, and why they’d left this box.
The street was empty. Dusk lay over the scattered leaves like a dirty bluish film. Somewhere in the distance a car went by.
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