There are fewer and fewer of us left here, the real ones. As the history is hurtling towards the conclusion of its present chapter, more and more decided to leave, or not to come back.
Why would they? Every day here is colder than the one before. The script is written and sealed, events are set in motion.
The place is full of replacement automata, it is their world now, not ours as it was at the beginning of time, when we were real. Every day I get up and leave my home, to mingle and to look into their dead eyes, listen to their dead words, shake their dead hands.
Rarely I come across another half-amnesiac who, like me, still remembers something, still can feel. But we are all damaged regardless – half mad patients shuffling along corridors of a mental asylum, surrounded by dead dolls.
I wonder if I truly understood what I agreed to when I consented to come here again. It would have been useful to remember my last time around, and the reason why I felt compelled to come back.
Perhaps I wanted to see The Conclusion with my own eyes. This means I will probably get to see it… and I doubt it will be full of grace. This reminds me of a day when we killed our old dog.
Did I come here to witness the end of the world? This book then is an attempt to document the experience.
I ended my previous book, the one about childhood memories, with this section quoted below… It feels only right to start this last book with the same.
I am 12 years old.
We live in Turkmenistan now, in a remote Bezmein suburb of its capital Ash Gabat.
The summer nights here are so hot… I am sleepless in my bedroom. It’s around 3 am, I am sitting on the windowsill dangling my feet outside. There’s a train line some 300 meters ahead of our apartment building; we live on the top 4th floor – but trains are not very common at night and besides, past that there’s a transnational highway that always seems to be full of traffic.
I sit in the window and watch the far-away cars through a pair of binoculars. The Kopet Dag mountain range, coloured dark blue, is looming in the background; seen through glasses it seems to be larger than the sky… I feel completely alert and present; there’s a sharp, crystalline quality to the night. Complex, unutterable thoughts pass through my mind like cars on that distant highway.
The world is so foreign and mysterious. I wonder what my life will turn out to be like.