“Sometimes you look at me so weirdly as if you’re much older,” giving a sigh, you commented on my thoughtful expression. “So, am I beautiful?”
Instead of answering, I rummaged in our pockets and took our mom’s lipstick, then colored your lips and smoothed down your hair. Fastidiously examining your face from all sides, you applied one more layer of lipstick, just to make sure, and dropped carelessly:
“I think we should make you up too.”
“No need to. Today I’m staying at home. You will go by yourself.”
As you are well aware, we have been doing everything together for our entire life. Of course, I was extremely tired of it. And so many nights I just dreamt of staying alone with myself for a while but the worst thing you could do at that moment was to support me in this desire.
Having decided to drink myself insensible, I suggested finishing the bottle standing in the attic. My head instantly started buzzing and throbbing, and all of a sudden I became deadly sleepy, as if we were taking sleeping pills instead of vodka. I can only remember brief snippets of what happened next. Somehow I found us in a boozer sitting opposite Compass Legs and strenuously pretending that whatever was going on had no relevance to me. However, I was drinking beer along with everybody, and when I tried to get up – obviously, to go to the bathroom – the chair nearly seized you, holding me back. I was heavy, dizzy, and reality looked hostile. Objects were losing their usual shape, blurring and vanishing. I felt like I was going mad, slowly sinking into a deep abyss, until I fell into a dead faint, and darkness surrounded us, or just me.
People who have undergone a leg or an arm-amputation are said to feel their limbs as if they remained in place, but I am wondering whether they feel them just a moment before they lose them forever. As for me, I felt neither my arms, nor my legs, nor your bodily presence. Instead, I had a dream of being a little girl again, and you were holding me in your arms. You gave me a bright, good-natured smile, stroked my hair, touched my neck and then started strangling me, still smiling. Caught up in a frenzy of horror, I felt myself dying, suffocating in my sleep, then I started groaning and tossing and finally woke up.
My pulse was throbbing in my temples, my hands were trembling, but two bitter hearts were still beating in agreement. Turning to the right, I felt – sometimes it’s more than seeing – you strangling yourself with a piece of old wire. By some miracle I twisted and slapped you in the face several times, not even realizing that all this time I was shrieking. You almost did it but ended up just gasping convulsively.
“Whyyyy?” I croaked. “Stop doing it! Drop it!”
I tried to kiss you on your forehead, cheeks, hair – everywhere I could reach, comforting you as a mother comforts her child, but the child didn’t listen to me and wanted to die.
“Leave me alone. I hate you, I hate myself, I hate everyone,” you whined plaintively and burst out crying; however, it resembled more of a blizzard’s yearning howl than crying. I can’t tell how long it lasted: five or ten minutes, one hour or a whole eternity.
“And what if you are going the right way?” I seemed to stop breathing, struck by that sudden thought. “Both of us are so tired of resisting, struggling, surviving and failing that there is no strength left to conquer the whole damn world. I give up too.”
“First, kill me, then yourself. I’m not going to stop you. On the contrary, I will help,” I said, putting my arms under my back and closing my eyes.
It is worth noting that killing yourself and killing someone else are not the same thing. For the former, you should lose faith; for the latter, you should never have any… Faith.
“Faith,” you called to me, sobbing quietly, “tell me, why? We are not such bad people. I’ve seen worse than us. Especially this one… with skinny legs,” you said hopelessly and lit a lantern.
“What happened?” I cried, squinting against the light. “Who are you talking about?”
“About Compass Legs, of course. Who could do much more evil?” you muttered dejectedly. “Don’t you remember anything?”
I shook my head. I seemed to remember nothing.
“He started making moves on me and then, after pushing me, he stopped and said: “Oh, my gosh, I must be completely drunk if I tried to make you mine.” You reminded me of the whole story and began to cry again. Through your tears you told me that it was you who started kissing him, not knowing how else to express your feelings for a man. For a moment I saw us with his eyes and felt nausea, shuddering with disgust. There is no more repulsive thing than a physiologically ugly person. Of course, in our own eyes we are just like everyone else, only more so – approximately twice as much; but how can we see through our own eyes anybody, let alone everybody else? For eyes are not lightbulbs, after all.
“Anyway, we’re going to be dead,” you whispered almost malevolently. “I tried to strangle him. Sorry.”
“It’s OK. Where there’s life there’s hope,” I suddenly said with unexpected determination. “If we are still alive today, I don’t see why we should die tomorrow.”
And I was right. The next day Compass Legs gazed at us so intently that I felt uneasy. Nevertheless, without saying a word, he dispassionately gathered all our income, having checked our pockets for form’s sake and went away. And I sincerely believed the same as you, that he didn’t remember anything at all.
I am still trying to understand when or where our paths diverged. How did it happen and why? Failing to do away with yourself at one stroke, you took another approach – slow suicide. You drank a great deal of vodka that evening, hiding behind an upturned collar, turning away and not wishing to listen. Witnessing your guzzling, I felt an obnoxious dizziness and started shivering with rage because now you were becoming a person I hated. True, at that moment I wanted to knock you to the ground and kick you with my feet. You fell asleep sitting on the floor, and I had to drag our bodies; occasionally you helped me with your feet. Nine yards to the bed took me half an hour. As a result I couldn’t bend my aching back, my arms disobeyed; besides, I got woozy from alcohol too, along with you, and had a delirious feeling that another, absolutely unknown and uninvited person came and lay down next to me instead of you. I wonder if one of us were to go insane, what would happen to the other. The same thing, I hope.
For a long time I couldn’t sleep. In despair, I drank up the remains of the vodka. On my way to long-awaited and desired unconsciousness, I continued to think intensely about everything important and necessary, until the world fell into emptiness where universal questions were removed.
Since then, you have called vodka your best and only friend, saving your life from tough and tougher ordeals. I dare say you are partly right. Alcohol really helps us close our eyes in the face of danger, whether imaginary or real, and enables us to escape the truth as one old woman taught us once.
Little by little, we turned into two dogs hating each other and sitting on one short leash – our liver ached permanently. Feeling sick was now a normal condition. Nausea came up even more often than ever before. Our heads were splitting, bitter tastes in our mouths and painful hangovers which pursued us constantly. Many people believe that hope supports faith, but in our case, paradoxically enough, Hope was hindering Faith. It’s funny. Maybe people really do have it all wrong with our names?
I’m talking on and on; it seems I really can get to the bottom of it all, to the truth. But you should understand I need to speak while you’re asleep; this makes more sense to me than any ordinary conversation, and I can see clearly now that it wasn’t love and patience but revenge and bitter hatred that helped us get to know each other much better.