First moments, the darkness did not seem absolute, some pin-prick scintillas still jittered here and there, and extremely dark yet somewhat grayish streaks retained their static positions at the edges of actual blackness, however, all that jump-n’-statics abated, and dissolve, and died away substituted with solid jet-black impenetrability, and the wider opened I my eyes the more of aspic char-coaled dark entered them. The silence wished for so much just a while ago—before the ominous click of the lid—commenced depressing the ear drums and gradually wrapped the all-pervading blackness with the hermetic shroud of soundlessness.

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

A captive in the doubled 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, fixed in, strait-jacketed, incarcerated.

The panic smacked me like the mains of 240 v, yanked hither-thither like a withered pear-tree quacking in vigorous clutch of the deuce yet even for those violent jerks there was not room enough—my nose squeezed between the knees, unyielding bottom under my left shoulder, the right one rubs against the hard lid and no way to stretch the legs out at least for one foot. Got nabbed by shrewd dickens under a washing-tab!

And only my head could still enjoy the freedom of banging its back against the shell wall, without the proper revving though to certainly prevent my suicide just like they did to the accomplice in Lincoln’s killing before the execution… a sack of thick black cloth was put onto his head to spoil his aiming, not to let him ram his head against the wall and smash it open and ruin their pleasure of watching his dance in the noose… 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 am carrying since then in the sling over my chest... but no, damn! the powder must've got washed away by that mad rain… wait-wait-wait! But there’s no softening layer on my head except for my hair. 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 commingles with a 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 mantra—one potent headback-bang for every syllable in it—before the loss of consciousness wrapped mercifully everything in 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 maybe have forgotten unintentionally

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

the downcast stares of all the present alertly followed the ongoing movement of an index finger hopping along the circle without ever hitting any chest just like a watch hand substituted with a compass arrow issuing the morbid green-gray phosphorous glow from its head

a voice sounding with hollow aloofness as it happens in the thick fog which suffocates the tiniest echo of any sound accentuated every arrow's leap —

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

tell us all:

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 dawned already and spilled a paler grayness and also 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 put my head up and was made squint tightly.

Where am I?

What a mistake! I should of never put it up. Ever. The raw piercing brilliance of the shining day scorched and erased without a trace or hope for return everything it was filled with before. All left there were just patchy clots sintered indistinctly – some horizontal lightning, some pitch-black gap of the like horizontality… Some 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 surrounds me. Rough asphalt in the road divides two serrated rows of houses opposing each other, different in size and height. All of the walls look alike. Tired. Weary of everything up to themselves as well as of the row they belong to. Of both the dried tree stuck up from the asphalt and the bench under. Empty. Almost.

I went to it…

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

The most stupefying feature about him were his eyes filled with cartographic lines of the blood vessels drawn densely in his eyeballs the color of the powder-blue fog in which there swam brown irises ferrying wide pupils, those also swam all the time yet in more controlled way so as not to spill overboard, into his eyes whites.

The like optics organs are not a too big rarity yet—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 half an ear because the second half was pricked up to catch the hollow sounds 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 recollected 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 bore 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 unbearable buzz, 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 windy dream meandering through all the 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 properly answered can very easily shake you off into the quicksand of doubts if that “I” exists after 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”?

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 disappointment – the clicks were being produced 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 also knew where – 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 opened both of his Afro-American eyes widely 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 wizzing like a cow right under my window?"

"It’s me, Mommy."

"You? Pumpkin? O! Go on, pee, sugar, pee!"

* * *