Сергей Огольцов – The Tallest Story Ever (страница 7)
Apparently, they descended into the garden by the side stairs from the gate, along the blind wall.
Without a wince, Bookoff indifferently plucked a flat thorn from his palm. Crooked like a guirza viper's tooth, it was green. One of the mature stems had turned up under his hand as he was grabbing the rebar.
He dropped into the grass the souvenir from the bush. The blood from his hand was wiped off with the piece of paper he still managed to collect while standing up. The smeared, crumpled throwaway was stuffed into the hip pocket in his jeans. Then Bookoff answered to the fat-guts with the nasty rasp of his voice, which had long since got unused to speaking.
‘Live on and check it. If not burst with fat on the way’.
"You old stump! You don't know who you're yapping at!" Yelled the one without much of a belly, but whose beefy arms bulged out of his shirt sleeves, the bullish neck started all at once from the shaved back of his head.
Bookoff sighed slowly through his nose, but continued to stare at the fat man. He'd silently endured the kid's antics at the supermarket – that was the winner's territory, but here, albeit neglected, was his garden. The civilian appraisers had behaved with restraint here; it was obvious the man had invested his life in these six hundred square meters and the roughly built, yet big house.
‘Call your dog off,’ screeched he.
‘Well, bastard, that was the last of your…’ exploded the muscleman.
‘Оghrush!’ tamed him with a master’s air the tie-dandied fatty, ‘I am who does the talking here. Better go polish your steering wheel, we're leaving soon.’
Left alone with Bookoff, the fat man asked:
‘Are you alone in the house? Was there a man asking for a hideout? An eye-missing man?’
‘I’m bored to death with all of you,’ Bookoff replied listlessly. ‘Both with or without eyes.’
He turned toward the backdoor, but by the time he reached it, the nudnick in cheaters had already disappeared around the corner, from where started the side stairs along the blind wall, leading up to the dead-end lane beyond the gate.
Bookoff returned to his chair in the living room to his waiting.
Vasiok
_
05
The rubber clad hands that kidnapped me off the dealboard bed moved no longer. The squeaky voice had also fallen silent. It was comfortable enough to lie there, but I didn't feel like sleeping and opened my eyes.
No, my memory didn't fail me. Not even by half a micron. The back of my economy class seat holds me in that very position as the anonymous hands years ago after separating me from my mother. Once and for all.
Now, having since long been big and strong, I lie on my back at the exactly same angle to the absolute horizontal that everyone feels even with their eyes shut.
Yes, of course, the angle’s matched perfectly, which is probably why I feel the whiff of sterile, slippery scent of alien hands. The back of my head is 2.5 cm higher than my tailbone, just like it was that midnight hour, although everything else not exactly… Yep, the surroundings have changed drastically.
There remains nothing of the yellow swath in the dark ceiling, painted with the light from the table lamp in the next room. Instead, I have a visual impression of a well mouth magnified to a much wider circle plumb upward above my face.
The night sky peers in thru it, hung with ample festoons of stars aglimmer. I can't recall any like them; by the size they surpass any of those stored in the casket of my long-term memory, LTM. And they're not like pin-pricks or dots winking leerily, but sooner resembled smallish balls of yarn, or glossy billiard balls affixed to outline contours of constellations never seen. A kinda vinaigrette of gleaming combinations spread over velvet brick-red space.
[–]
Vincent, a multiple world champion in carom, lowers the well-worn butt of his cue, while the Dutch challenger van Gogh carefully rubs in rosins in the end of his…
[–]
Clews of dissimilar starlight shimmer in the wide well mouth above. Where did flight 0244 ZRH TLV take me? How? And why?
Once again, I’ve rammed into a mound of unanswerable questions. Whoosh! Like a pod of whales in some lost latitudes, with noisy snorts, splash-breaks to the surface, blows up a-cackling sprays. The calm of the latitudes is broken, stirred, tossed with unexpected currents in the whirled surface.
What's the point? No answer… Silence is the only response to them…
Inhale as deep as will keep your lungs, bro whale, and dive back into the sea abyss. The program laid out for you and your kin by Creator remains precise and clear: graze, graze, and graze some more of top-tier plankton brimming with beneficial effect on proliferation. I'd eat it myself, were I not busy to so extreme an extent – there's so much more else to do!
No answer again? So be it. Even the silence of a soundproof chamber won't frighten me anymore. Besides, from plentiful experience, I’ve long since learned – you'll jolly well find a comprehensive answer you seek. And that's a 100 % fact. Perk up, don’t get crest-fallen, spare no selfless efforts. Never give in and sooner or later you'll find the answer! Of which you’ll bitterly regret. As always.
Yes, the answers pop up inevitably, provided you’ve wiped off your worldview and mental makeup the trite, obnoxious, irrational, and opportunistic formula: “Why the hell did I even need it?”
Of course, no one is immune from creepy trends in their private life. Especially those, who’ve ever tasted Petyikka's fish soup. However, posing the question in such a way deviates from honest logic. The answer implicitly sits in the first argument. "Bitchy cheating and freeloading," Petyikka would say.
Whereas, if you adhere to the rules of building syllogistically balanced statements, you come to the unequivocal conclusion that the pop-up pod of marine mammals to represent "hows?", "whys?", and other question words is the evidence of seriously weak short-term memory, STM. More evidently, when compared to its counterpart, LTM, retaining both feeding tits, and the umbilical cord, and the light at the end of the tunnel, preferably not within it (you don’t care for a rendezvous with a hungry primeval tribe, right?) but from the outside.
However, I don't see any particular problem here. In 20 years, which stretch inevitably turns into STM into LTM, I'll recollect everything – ha! my long-term memory always was the second to none. And then I'll know in minute detail what happened there, in the passanger cabin of the flight 0244, under the screech of circular saws…
And also, why and how the airliner got squatted in penguin-like attitude, tail down… And where – donnerwetter! – had half the fuselage gone, together with the nose and the crew cockpit?
Quite a lot of things I would have asked my STM about, whose testimony breaks off at the moment filled with the screech of circular saws along the backward swaying of the Airbus, tail-first and dropping down like a sack of hammers.
Yet, as said, it’ll take another 20 years for STM to fully mature and swap its S to L in the anti-alphabetical sequence STM → LTM.
For someone, it's "O-o! 20 years!", while for some other one, it's "Ha! 20 years!" All depends on your precise location. If your short-term memory has just waved after your spaceship at the launching pad, then, traveling at the speed of light, you won't even notice your separation with STM. But when, the space voyage at the cruising speed of 300,000 km/sec is taken not by you but by your STM, that's a different kettle of fish. The roles are swapped, as well as the locations.
You're scrolling through the entire twenty-year stretch in slow motion, from jingle-in to jingle-out. Yeah, bro…
And you may safely throw all your backup "plan B’s" on the scrap heap. They’re useless trash, when from a shitty yet partly understandable situation you land into a planetarium of strange stars.
The tour guide is off work, so there's no one to introduce us, and I, as a refined gentleman and impeccable, in my opinion, personality don't pester strangers with queer inquiries until they give a wink. They do seem to be winking, but, unfamiliar with the rules and criminal etiquette at this little joint, I am not particularly keen on looking like a slob in their opinion.
More so since the night sky hue remains firmly stalled in the orange-reddish range of the spectrum. And that quite possibly, goes for "whoa!" signal in terms of aboriginal astrology.
In short, if you suddenly find yourself flat out (no matter what's underneath you: mats, tatami mats, or the synthetic upholstery in an economy-class passenger seat), the best course of action is to relax and obtain as deep satisfaction as possible. At least from the depths of your LTM casket, since no trace of STM is there…
The twinkling starlight tempts to meditate on other tits that became frequently available after the puberty completion, when milk determined their attraction no more. The present situation prompts to audit the deposits in LTM… while stretching on my back… No, not what some sad sack could have imagined but hands off. Moreover, since the treasures out there stay ghostly intangible. And that’s a shame, really – such a wonderful illumination wasted to no gains.