There are fewer and fewer of us left here, the ones with a pulse. 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.
(based on a vivid dream)
We are both on a train, going along the long route that has many stations… I know the name of the place where we get off – that’s where we are going, that’s where the train stops; harder to tell when exactly it gets there but I can make a guess. We already passed quite a few, and although I don’t know all the names of stations that are still ahead, I think I’ve heard of at least some.
You are reading a book; it must be something quite engrossing since you are completely lost in the text and don’t even raise your eyes to look around… I see you making notes on the margins of the pages. I hope it’s a happy one and full of exciting adventures; I idly wonder who you imagine yourself to be in that book. From time to time you look up at me with a smile, then look down again – I love these moments.
I brought a book too, but mine is not that interesting, and besides I think I already figured out the plotline. Some time ago I put it in my lap and now I am just sitting in this train car gazing at other passengers, stations and the passing landscape outside. Most are half asleep, gently rocked along by the movement of the train, others are reading books or listening to music with their eyes closed.
There are few like me, awake and looking around. Sometimes I feel their gaze, and sometimes we lock eyes – there’s a certain mutual recognition that flashes like a coded message between us.
As we stop at stations, people come and go. The stops are short, and a few times I stepped out onto the platform to stretch my legs and exchange meaningless pleasantries with station attendants. Sometimes I wonder what that might be like, to get off permanently at some random station, before my intended destination.
From my seat I can only see the far away part of the shifting landscape in the window as we move. It’s hard to discern the details: some sort of structures of unknown utility; telegraph posts, wires that go up and down, trees, rivers, bridges, hills… it seems to be getting colder outside as we are continuing on this journey.
Occasionally, when we are stopped at a station, I study others walking around the platform or the station building. They don’t look into the windows of our train; too busy attending to their own business, rushing somewhere with their luggage. Only very rarely I’d see a person lean in and look through the glass. We look at each other; sometimes they will mouth a message that I pretend to understand.