First off, the darkness did not seem absolute, some pin-prick scintillas still oscillated here and there, and extremely dark but still a sliver gray-hued streaks retained their static position along the edges of actual blackness.

However, all that jump-n’-statics abated gradually, and dissolve, and died away substituted with solid jet-black impenetrability. The wider opened I my eyes, the more of aspic char-coaled dark oozed into them.

The silence—wished for so eagerly just a while ago, before the ominous click of the lid—commenced to depress the ear drums drowned within the all-pervading blackness getting wrapped, layer after layer, into a thicker and thicker shroud of hermetic soundlessness.

“Aaaa!” hollered I desperately at the top of my lungs, horrified, trying to disengage myself, to kick away the sticky horror of being deaf-and-blind, which straining only brought about an even bigger fright and made me realize that atop of everything else I'd become mute. The scream felt like virtual, it did not reach the organs of hearing and sounded only within me. But how on earth could I be sure that it was sounding at all?

A captive in the double cage, twice doubled as a matter of fact – three layers of indissoluble calcium in the shell's structure added with my deaf-mute-blindness, a kinda mollusk’s mantle sack, that's what I was, firmly fixed, strait-jacketed, incarcerated.

Piercing panic rushed thru me like AC of 240 V, set all of my frame a-shake like the vigorous clutch of the deuce yanking a withered pear-tree, hither-thither, yet even those violent quakes went on within the delimited space of a rock-hard cocoon—my nose squeezed between the knees, unyielding bottom under my left shoulder, the lid (not budging an inch) from above, and no way to stretch the legs out. Help! Got trapped and nabbed by the shrewd dickens like an unboiled frog under the upside-down washing-tab!

And only my head still have some room to enjoy the freedom of knocking its back against the shell wall, without the proper revving though to prevent, sadistically, my suicide, just like they did to the accomplice in Lincoln’s killing before the execution… a sack of thick black cloth pressed onto the head to spoil his aiming, not to let Louis ram his skull against the wall and smash it open and damn well ruin the high of the law-abiding crowd coming together with the hangman a-swing in his noose on the warm sunny day… where’s something hard enough?. please!. but the cloth kept softening the impact to save the show…

Of course, I’ve got my constant accessory on me – an old good boarding pistol from two hundred years back, the find on the smashed galleon, which I don’t part with ever since, is still in the sling over my chest... but no, damn! the powder must've got washed away by that mad toad-strangler downpour... wait-wait-wait! See? there’s no softening layer on my head except for my wet hair. Ha! This is the major flaw in their calculations! That’s where the bastards have screwed up!

And I begin to pound the back of my head against the stone-hard calcium carbonate in the shell composition. The pain is shot thru with hilarious triumph – aha! At least I’m able to feel it! Bas! Tard’s! Screwed! Up! Bas! Tard’s! Screwed! Up!

It’s hard to say how many times I’ve looped thru this here mantra—one potent headback-bang for every syllable in it—before the loss of consciousness swaddled everything into the merciful liberating darkness…

………………………………….

...we stood in a close circle where there were some whose names I knew and some fairly unknown though all of them I met for the first time or mayhap had inadvertently forgotten...

...because of the strangely dim light everything around submerged in an unidentifiable uniform murkiness which did not allow for guessing the time of day or where this strange light was coming from or why the contour of each thing got doubled by an additional external line etching any object with a pin-thin luminescence of also gray-hued and equally inexplicable yet more bright weeny glow...

...the downcast stares of all the present alertly followed the ongoing movement of an index finger ticking jerkily along the circle without ever hitting any chest just like a clock hand substituted with a compass arrow exuding morbid-greenish phosphorous gleam off its head...

...each arrow leap got accentuated by a voice full of that hollow aloofness as it happens in the thick fog which suffocates the tiniest echo of any sound —

"The porch of gold was seated by : czar and czars’ sonny : king and king’s sonny : shoemaker and tailor : policeman and watchman : so who are you at all?

tell us all:

tell us: tell us: tell us:

Who?

Are?

You?

...sheeshell… meeshell…

off with you!

to the DEUCE!"

………………………………….

The ascending echoless voice cut off abruptly, and ticking of the index finger spooling inside the circle got lost too together with everything else leaving behind only grayness evenly monochrome and loaded with no contours, but inside it there already dawned and spilled a paler grayness mingled with some light from a still not quite discernible direction.

My eyes followed the light and I made out the feet emerging from nowhere, mine, kept wide and ready to fiddle with the pitching of a ship, yet in place of the deck under them there cropped up and met my bare soles a stretch of the sunlit asphalt. I arched my neck back to raise my face up and at once was made squint tightly.

Where am I?

What a mistake! I should of never put my head up. Ever. The fierce raw brilliance of the shining day scorched and erased without a trace or any hope for retrieval everything it had contained before.

All left there were just patchy clots sintered indistinctly – some horizontal lightning, some pitch-black gap of the like horizontality…

A stingy pain throbbed there in the back of my head... I must’ve scratched it against Peccy’s valves… Hold on! Who’s Peccy anyway?

Who am I?!

A desolate sun-swept street around me. Rough asphalt in the road divides the two serrated rows of houses opposing each other, different in size and height. All of the walls look alike. Tired. Weary of everything, even of themselves, and of the row they are lined in. Tired of the tree stuck up from the asphalt, dried, the tree, the lifeless boughs look like withered roots. The tree, like planted upside down, provides no shade for the bench beneath it. Empty bench. Almost.

I veered to it…

The old man seated there exhibited astounding garrulousness. However, the stream of his speaking activities hardly coalesced into a picture of any sensible coherence.

The most stupefying feature about that nonsense pouring talking head were his eyes filled with cartographic lines of the blood vessels shooting densely all over his eyeballs the color of the powder-blue fog thru which there swam brown irises ferrying wide pupils. Those also swam all the time yet in a more controlled way, so as not to spill overboard, into his eyes whites.

The like optics organs are not an infrequent rarity and, in the same breath, the trump card among the celebrities in the business of movie production, as well as by the leading showmen, of Afro-American orientation.

Being aware, as it seemed, of his gift, he did his best to keep them up-squinted, which stratagem imparted to the fairly worn-out features of his face the looks of almost giggling Buddha, intended obviously as a red herring to put autograph hunters off track.

At times, because of negligence or weariness, one of his eyelids slackened its squint. However, the resulting map in no way increased the chances of collectors who, having rushed after the jolly Asiatic hieroglyph of Jack Chan’s signature, all of a sudden ran into the gloomy gaze of Morgan Freeman from the adjacent eye or vise versa.

However, I listened to him with just a half ear because the second half was pricked up to catch the hollow hum of intense thought work behind the thin partition from the dura mater embracing the gray matter convolutions.

By me, it is that classic case of “fragmented memory”: why did I recollect my uncle? the neurosurgeon? (what was his name, I wonder?) who had shown me the picture of cranium section to demonstrate the meninges of the brain, where the mentioned partition bears all kinds of graffiti: “dura mater” in Latin, then comes Cyrillic «здесь был Вася», which again reflows in Latin lettering «Kilroy was here».

And that’s exactly what produces this ever-present buzz (behind the partitioning), the absence of raw material for processing does, the thoughts just spin in an unproductive slip, like to when you try to recollect that long and winding dream that meandered through all of your night, but you are up and have shaved already, and sitting at your breakfast, and all retained by you are only vague elusive shreds of that past dream – something about Belomor cigarettes in it, eh? Or what?

Okay fine, let’s assume I’m seated now on this hard bench and this old screwball is yakking of nobody knows what, but who am I and where from?

And these two questions, if not answered with proper promptness, can very easily shed you off into the quicksand of doubts whether that “I” exists at all.

Aha! I’ve remembered! There was nothing about Belomor in it, and someone kept dumbly repeating, “Any evidence there was a boy? Any evidence there was a boy?? Any???”

Still and yet, who am I? Or am I simply to go on along with that trite sophism, “I feel the bench hardness under my ass, ergo: I exist”?

Exactly that moment I heard the dear and all-too-well-familiar clatter of hoofs…

My Rosinante!. click-clack… clippety-cluck… am I a jokey? An Olympic champion in show jumping? Or derby was our profile?

The curiosity woke me up and turned to face a bitter disappointment – the clicks were sounded by the feet of a female representation of the hominid species from the group of tailless primates, shod in shining yellow spikes, it’s them clattered along the sidewalk.

Ah, Rosinante! Where have we lost each other?!.

The look of her rather short caparison stung me with the unasked-for recollection, I have already seen the like tatters and I could easily reconstruct the rest of the picture – an iron-girdled chest, its lid thrown open, filled with bottles of dark glass securely drowned into the shim of exactly same rags, gaily angular snakes of the sunlight reflected by small ripples of water twine and swirl in the boards of the ceiling… where was it? In what dream?.

My neighbor in the bench fired off another incomprehensible declamation, this time on some sports subject, gorodki competition or something like that. Could he have been a coach at the CSCSA club before his retirement?

Very soon I felt the need to urinate and asked him the whereabouts of a nearest public toilet.

A first, he sent me, in the manner of his lacework verbalization, behind the car sheds, but guessing from the expression of my face that I had no predilection to silly jests like that at the moments of physiological need, he widely opened both of his Afro-American eyes and nodded invitingly in the direction of steps leading to the basement of a nearby house.

Leaving him alone, I still caught shreds of a centuries-old joke he was telling to the dried tree (Pyrus communis):

"Who the hell is whizzing like a cow right under my window?"

"It’s me, Mommy."

"You? Pumpkin? Go on, dear! Pee, sugar, pee!"

* * *