It’s midnight by the clock. The three of us came here in a Deo Matiz. They picked me up at Petrogradskaya.
A small terrier walks around the room slowly. The first thing its owner did upon entering the apartment was put a bowl of food down. The dog’s called Rogue.
K cuts hashish into thin squares on the tabletop. Gathers them into a spliff, mixes them with tobacco on rolling paper, rolls with a filter, seals it, and passes it around the circle.
I’m not feeling the speed. “Nothing so far.”
“Yeah, there was a little something there.”
The hashish dulls any reaction, I move over to the leather armchair beside the sofa. It’s deep. I slide down the back, stretch out. Feel a small spark in my cerebellum, which flows down my cheeks to the heart.
“Fellas, let me tell you that it is friggin’ awesome to have sex in that chair,” K says.
He takes a scale out of an extravagant ebonite case. Next, a blue parcel with white substance. He places the parcel on one side of the scale, a counterweight on the other. The scales are even.
“Thirty grams.” K takes a lighter and seals the parcel.
We sit drinking coffee.
“Well, should we talk about why you’re here?”
I get up, go into the hallway. K has stacked books to the ceiling and painted them silver. The books reach the top of my head. I take a napkin that’s been folded several times out of a bag. Return to the room.
“My grandma called her friend and said: Get here as fast as you can! My K has gone crazy—he’s drilling into books. That’s when I was making that sculpture.”
I hand the napkin to K. “You’ve even got Marx in there.”
K unwraps the napkin. In it are sugar cubes that I swiped from home. K takes an insulin syringe and expels a small amount of antiseptic or iodine. Fills it and checks it in the light. Holds it over the two pieces of sugar. Carefully lets drops fall. Checks the syringe. Wraps the pieces in foil, each one separately, puts the instrument away.
I had handed over the money to C for two drops of English LSD while we were still in the car.
“Well, there it is, it’s ready.”
K throws himself against the back of the sofa. His shirt is open and his athletic torso is visible. Although he’s thirty-five, K looks more like twenty-five or thirty. He’s short, swarthy, lean, but somehow exceedingly slow and graceful in his movements.
The mug of coffee is half empty. I recline in the chair.
C is still rooting around the Internet—putting on different songs and videos. C is also athletically built, but it’s a different kind of athleticism. In his youth he played basketball professionally. C is blonde with blue eyes. K is a brunette with brown eyes. C’s big, almost childlike lips betray his sensitive nature.
It’s nearing one a.m. We sit smoking a second joint. Watch a funny video. Finish up the coffee.
On the glass tabletop are the two little parcels wrapped in foil.
K walks into the room with a pistol. Black, heavy, big. K walks up to the carpentry table and with a strange contemplative expression he holds the pistol up to eye level.
After that he throws it on the table. The sound is abrupt, loud, unpleasant.
I get up, come closer. “Is it real?” I break the tension, pointing to the barrel.
“Yeah, don’t be afraid, I filed down the hammer.”
I can feel the room exhale; even C brightens up.
“What do you need it for?”
“I have to make it inoperable.”
I take the pistol, twirl it in my hands. “That’s funny, a gun that can’t shoot. It’s lost its destiny.”
K takes the barrel from my hands and with white plaster he tightly stops up the openings beneath the screw with a palette knife.
The doorbell rings. C and I flinch. Rogue barks.
Two enter. One is red, tall, with a full beard, his eyes are racing. The second is shorter, a bit heavier, with gray circles under his eyes. His name is P, I crossed paths with him in the Siberian city of U. He’s a musician.
We greet each other. The fellas sit on the floor. K takes the sealed parcel of speed, places it on the edge of the table.
“You got lucky, fellas. Seriously lucky. The goods are pure. This hasn’t happened in a long time.”
The fellas nod. They stare at the little blue bag with hungry eyes. Especially Red.
We sit, lazily talking things over. K lights up a new joint. We pass it around.
“I think I’ll pass,” Red says.
P takes the joint from my hands. I put my legs up on the armrest of the chair. P passes it along, sets his smartphone on the table. Presses it. The glass tabletop and this device merge into one another. P places the little bag of amphetamines on top.
“So you, like, make music?” K asks.
“Something like that,” P replies.
“Well, put something of yours on for us.”
P becomes flustered, but then gets up and heads to the computer. “Here, this is from the old demo.”
An IDM beat begins to play. I hear a recorded voice from the radio. I focus my eyes on the screen, try to read the name of the band. Aurora Baghdad.
We finish smoking the joint.
“Well, I guess we’ll go.”
The fellas get up. We say our goodbyes. C and K go into the hallway to see them off, I remain in the room.
I hear: “We rode here on kick-scooters.”
“It’s the first time that I’ve ever ridden a kick-scooter.”
“How did that go?”
They walk out the door, continue talking there.
I move over to the sofa. Try to find something online.
K and C return. K rolls another joint.
I tell you, it’s really cool here at his place.
“All right, you haven’t even seen the whole apartment.”
K’s converted half the kitchen into a carpentry workshop. He’s got a workbench there, a carpenter’s vise, a lathe. The floor is covered with wood shavings.
“Before, I used to make lots of little things and give them away as presents. I called them pleasantries. But then I realized they were much more dear to me than anyone else.” K stares off somewhere beneath the ceiling, lost in thought. “So now I make them for myself.”
We return to the other room. K leads us to the wardrobe with the heart. Opens it. There’s a small illuminated nook in which miniature items are arranged on red velvet. K removes a perfectly smooth egg from a stand.
“This is what they look like.”
Among the items are a box for wedding rings and Escher’s staircase made of wood.
K returns the egg to its place and closes the drawer.
I take a seat on the sofa and lift my arms out across the shelves that begin where the back of the sofa curves.
“Feel it. Doesn’t it feel like the wings of an angel?”
There’s definitely something to that. I throw my head back. Pushkin’s turned upside down. My arms on the nautical boards, I’m ready to start flapping them and fly away.
K sits down, rolls yet another spliff.
“What do you think? Should we trip?” I offer.
“Why not?” C responds.
The original plan was different. Drop in on K, take acid, and go see P and company. They rent a studio apartment right here on Komendantsky where they record music. Half of the group came here from E especially for that. There’s a boom in the Urals right now of new music with a slant toward reggae.
But it’s evident that something didn’t line up with C and P
C and I unwrap the foil, toast symbolically. Let’s ride. It’s one thirty.
C’s at the computer again, searches, finds, puts on.