8

So what? Whereto now? In two more floors the final stair-flight ran up to the roof entrance guarded by the door in its chastity belt of a thick iron bar with a weighty padlock for the buckle. Some classically helpless dead end.

The obvious truth was further endorsed by an awry statement made with yellow-spray by a disappointed teenager explorer of the roof vistas—a young blade in the growth of the would-be juvenal delinquents. Across the sheet metal in the door construction, that unforeseen and insurmountable predicament, the young (but having already sipped the bitter taste of infeasibility) stardust lover announced to all who might be concerned (including, possibly, his own self too) of the frontiers reaching the same limit:

“come to get the fuck!”

To make the message clearer, the blade added a sketch, expressively full of feeling (scaled 5:1, in the Picasso’s late period style) of the middle finger stuck out in the renown bearing.

Some time back, V had an opportunity to to familiarize himself with the setting up there after a recreational joint. The Moroccan flower awoke the spirit of a thoughtful adventurer and loving nature admirer.

And then the four of them (two Vs plus those two freshly awoken guys—although now it’s hard to be sure who had started the whole shit) challenged each other to venture for a mountaineering trek – the higher you get, the wider the vistas, you know.

So, they crawled out and dragged their asses up the winding stair-flights, higher and higher, without a single water-head along the whole route. He could very easily thirst himself to death in that stressful strenuous plodding up the unmotivatedly steep flights, yet he did it, already alone—the three weaklings lost on the way—and sympathized, wholeheartedly, both the young sociopath and his yellow graffiti substituting for the light in the end of tunnel, rather askew yet unmistakably sincere.

A classic life-size mouse-trap, there’s no better definition for an impasse of the sort he got into after the sudden phone call. Going down by the elevator was out of question – the locksmith-sentinel by his apartment door, one level down, would certainly intercept his trip with the ironic wink of his heat’s hole: ‘Whereto, boob?’

Looked like the kid’s prophecy began to come true and wherever you turn – “here fucked you get!”, agreed V while the racket of adrenaline and the cosmic silence of desperation inundated with their unthinkable mixture his veins and everything else they could run into… no difference… final race…

The touch of a hand landing softly onto his shoulder all but tore from his guts a guttural squeak of a run down cub coupled with a high jump up on the spot.

But no! Manly kept V himself in hands. Only his hair was hard to control and it bristled up in spikes, when he turned his forehead in minuscular drops of sudden perspiration to fixate thegoggle (his as well) on the soft oval of a young face looking at him from within a shack of crisp curls, and a long tapering index finger put across her soft lips in the speechless call for restraint, against the backdrop of the open door to her flat. She nodded her head towards the entrance in a silent invitation. Without giving it a second thought, V followed that goddess from the machine.

(*For the record, in ancient Hellas’ theater they kept a male atthat job: Deus ex machina. Alas, sexism was not invented yesterday. An indisputably ugly phenomenon is rooted too deeply, you can’t get rid of it at a couple of hey-hoo! Nope, it’s not as easy as overthrowing a czar who half year back gave up his throne. And no matter how hard the West, stemming from the Greek foundation, swaggers of the emancipation of chicks in their gynaecea, birthmarks are ungetriddable. So, what could be expected of the Eastern civilizations? From the stalwart fidels dreaming of their own harems, personal, unquestioning, and humble? They are not toofar away from each other as blared Mr. Kipling out, gynaeceum—harem, g—h. Hi there, Neighbor!

However, you can’t concoct a bestseller of preaching (the guy with his Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck forestalled you) just let’s leave the stuff to Monsieur Diderot or, for the sake of patriotism, to Count Tolstoy who also was a shrewd chop-chop-logician...

Hell, no! We’d better leave His Excellency alone, his specialty menu consists of anti-alcoholism sermons…

Some circus of screwed up freaks we got in, aren’t we? First, they send their innocent youth to meat grinder in the Nam jungle or the Bakhmut Town and then start seeing thru the press tons of booklets to fight all-pervading addiction to drugs in their nations. Understandably though, for centuries were they harnessing cart to the horse.

That’s why Leo Tolstoy had to bury the talent handed to him by God into the dunghill of the well-intentioned propaganda...

Besides, you have to make allowance for the changes in the audience. Twitter has drilled them and trained not to understand a thought longer that 150 characters, beyond whichlimit it starts to leak thru their ears giving awful headaches to poor things. Whereasthe classic used to pour out (when got into the groove after the proper dose) passages which you can never ram into such Procrustes’ bed. So let the old man doze on...

Here! Here! (Invigorated mutual ovation.)

All that is so pretty nice. You are smart. Huh? But who has to check and see that the story flow dried up like the Euphrates, eh? Environmental motherfucker, you!

Oh-ho! I beg your pardon dear Reader! Please, this way! Let us step over the threshold and enter the dwelling of the young beautiful savior… or, perhaps, a perfidious man-trap traitor? Right now each and every plot in the trade is steered by the bots of AI, you never can tell what bolt will fuck you from which blue…

Okay, we’ll see what’s what while it evolves, so – full ahead! Let us escape the fate of the Euphrates where even an ant would get none of their knees wet...)

They entered the hall and, to the cautious click of the lock, from farther within the apartment there sounded a voice:

‘What’s there, Lia?’

‘A pizza-boy got to the wrong floor, Auntie.’

‘Those boys get dummier each year! Come, close the window I’m chilly,’ went on the same exacting voice.

‘Alright, Auntie! I’m on my way!’

On its own accord and too eagerly to be restrained, the V’s right eye stuck to the slightly spherical glass in the door peep-hole. His palms splayed wide pressed to the plumb vertical surface of the door with the same feeling which brims you up when you caress the streamlined side of your pickup or Porsche and the police officer’s, touting his pistol, yells: ‘Keep you hands visible please, Sir?’

Two men swathed in the strange silence of abysmal depths barely accessible for divers crossed the landing behind the hermetic door of the decompression chamber. Four eyes in two separate stares of the scuba divers wearing no masks nor biting their snorkels (but with their heats at ready)scanned with crisscrossed glimpses of the hostilely peeled eyes the situation at the bottom swimming soundlessly by, like in a silent movie, before the V’s frozen, unblinking gaze clapped tothe peep-hole, and getting out of his vision’s encompass.

He wiped the sweat off the brow and turned his face to Lia.

‘Hush!’ whispered the girl and also turned, her back, to him to walk with the lithe gait echoing a young panther pliancy, to the nearest door on the left. She never looked back to make sure that he followed her example. As though he had an alternative!.

On entering the room, the girl doffed her brown shoulder bag, dropped it on the spruce cot cover, and left at once.

It was a small bedroom of a person not too sucked in glamorizing decor. His look met no glossy posters appealing to a lover of gory brazenness or, on the contrary, the mellow grace so dear to a misty-eyed consumers.

Still and yet, the person was resolute enough to contribute a thing or two to the design of her home and who also knew her beans about the pop-art which fact was evidenced by the composition made up of computer standard laser disks (yes! the legendary DVD-RW of 4.7 GB! Who would believe they still exist!) to the right from the bed.

The swath of the wall of about two square meters was covered with their light shining circles mounted, back-to-back, in close rows reminiscent of scales in a knight’s armor or in the panoply of his loyal steed..,.

Lia was back pretty soon. She carefully closed the door, turned about, and with an air of expectation looked at him, her rosy lower lip slightly pressed with the pearly rosary of her impeccable teeth.

Something vaguely familiar was there in her face. However, V was in a quandary as to what namely or when and where. To somehow quench his embarrassment, he attempted at an awkward smile.

‘Wow!’ said she. ‘Hi! At last, you did it, congrats!’

With the same irresistible gate she went over and sat down on the chair by the window.

‘Have we ever met?’ After a momentary hesitation asked he sinking onto the second in the couple of chairs in the room.

‘Ha! Twice! In the elevator.’

‘Ah-ha! Sure. I did feel that, yes…’ He shook his head reproachfully at his leaky memory. Now he definitely remembered.

She gave a nod of acknowledgment to his remembrance.

‘Each of the rides up I thought to myself: “Let him smile, just smile, and I’d talk to him. I swear, I’ll do!” But each time you were too deep into your thoughts, which bailed you out – I didn’t want to distract.’

‘But how come... back there on the landing? I couldn’t hear you unlocking the door.’

‘I had been gone almost but Aunt Silva called me for a second. I came back to tuck her in and returned to the door unlocked already. Just in time to see your troubled back. Why are you so suspicious, V?’

‘What?’ exclaimed V in an inconcealable stupefaction.

’It was cool, ain’t it? You should had watched your face that moment! Easy, man. No sweat. At times, when you see your buddy off, he may at times be so overfull with gratitude that a couple of levels, both downward and upward, could learn that some V lived about your floor. Once I spotted who namely makes him so happy. You keep a distiller machine at your place?'

‘You’re very cute, Lia. Yet going out on the landing that moment… It was a suspicious move. Why did you help me out?. Or sooner, saved me?’

‘Seems like I fell for you last year. That’s why. And now tell me what shit are you in?’

‘I wish I knew...’