Slava Rubchinsky

Slava woke up face-down on the floor.

Vinyl, sticky, someone else's floor—house parties are unforgiving. He’d been out for fifteen minutes, maybe less: the track had switched to "Ulety," and he remembered both: he remembered "Moneta" too. Alcohol was still the master of his body—his hands felt like they belonged to someone from another city, and his vision was assembling itself piece by piece, like a cheap cabinet without instructions. His head was buzzing, as if cockroaches had moved in and started a renovation.

He peeled his cheek off the floor. The mattress beside him was empty. Above him was the ceiling of their mutual friend Pashka’s place, familiar to the point of nausea, with a crack shaped like the Neva River. Someone's birthday. College exams were coming up soon—no, what kind of college—just some local vocational school, followed by New Year's, but for now, it was December 2017, a small town, and outside the window, the snow was falling against a sunset—crimson, fuck, crimson, like the cover of the album he was starting to hallucinate.

And his trip was right here.

you. By the window. A silhouette against that pink haze—the realization pierced Slava through and through, cold and hot all at once. He remembered. Not everything—just fragments, like a jagged film: his own palm tangled in someone else's hair, that shudder that ran from the nape of the neck to the heels, a taste he’d never had in his life and, apparently, never would. He had kissed those lips. He would have sworn to it. Or maybe it was all just a dream in the middle of a party, which would have made more sense in his life.

Someone nearby was laughing at a shoelace. Someone was shouting, "Drink it all, this isn't a tasting room!" The hookah puffed, smelling of cheap cider and someone else's cigarettes. Slava sat up, clutched his head in his hands, and put on the face of a man who remembered nothing. Professionally. Years of practice had made it automatic: fix the expression, find the smile, Slava Rubchinskiy greets his guests.

— Oh! He's alive! someone yelled from above, — Bro, you were lying there like a corpse for fifteen minutes, we were already arguing about who to call.

— No one, Slava said hoarsely, — I'm immortal. Even the maternity ward wouldn't take me back.

The room erupted in laughter. Just the way he liked it: they laughed, and then they left him be. He picked his glasses up from the floor, put them on to hide his eyes, and looked at you across the entire zoo. Of course. They weren't even looking back. Or so it seemed. But they were—tracking his every move, because his body had frozen in exactly that way people do when they're waiting.

He stood up, masking his face with cold contempt. The same look he gave when he couldn't handle it anymore. His legs felt like two coat hangers, but they held; his sweatshirt was slung over his shoulders, the collar crumpled. He needed a hair of the dog. Or to get trashed again. Or to walk over there, to his four a.m. vision, and ask: "Did I dream it or not?"—and burn with shame on the spot, redder than that sunset outside.

He walked toward the window. He stumbled, stood, and walked again. Across the entire room. Past the hookah, past the remnants of cake, past everyone who was used to Slava never approaching you head-on.

— Hey, the guy said, stopping beside them and staring at the glass, where their reflections hung side by side over the snow, at least close to each other, — I just had a terrifying dream for fifteen minutes. Or maybe I didn't. Do you even know what was happening while I was a corpse?

He turned his head. Just enough to see those cursed eyes. The pupils. Whether they were blown wide or not. He was about to find out if it was a dream or a sentence.