.Россия.

A memoir of my life with intex, chapter 25

Chapter 25

     She finds this somehow quite easy
     to accept: I have looked upon
     things not meant to be seen, and I
     have not escaped unscathed. 
          .Robert Bennett, City of Stairs

     In Russia, the truth almost always
     has an entirely fantastical character. 
          .Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary

.1

In that first arresting instant watching the combustion of the American Pentagon and the disintegration of the World Trade Center, biblical events unfurling behind a scroll of Cyrillic, I melted beneath the most scalding shame and panic I’ve known. I am playing with forces beyond human understanding and in my provincial gullibility was manipulated by extraterrestrial agents into unbolting a defensive gateway to Earth and now the bastions of humanity are under assault!

Alien syllables shaped in my mind, a new way to mull, a new way to speak. A word, if that’s what it was, passed my lips in a dry hollow gasp:

Война!

New York City and Washington D.C. are under attack by intex!, is what I thought when I disembarked the strange plane. The cause of the cataclysm was me. I had unzipped a riddle tendered by a stranger in a maze. Five warned me against it and now connection to Five was lost and war begun. Or perhaps Five had always sheltered the Earthly realm and I was somehow maneuvered into divorcing or extinguishing Five.

I trembled there in Шереметьево, eyes swiveling from Pentagon-blackening horror to the bleak citizens of this chimerical world, all frowning, scowling, or stony-faced with occasional aromatic bursts of floral perfume and deep-musk cologne.

I was in Russia. Not an extraterrestrial planet, not exactly. I was on Earth. In an aerodrome in Moscow, capital of the Russian Federation. I was not Russian. I was sure of that. But what was I? Where did I come from?

Who was I?

In an appalling moment of fugue I realized I do not know my own name.