For as long as I can remember, I never once saw any point in sitting down like this and writing something. Today, however — whether from idleness or from the fact that I’ve grown utterly indifferent to my own life — I decided to sit down and write. Whatever comes out on this sheet of paper, so be it. I will not cross anything out. Decisively.
I’ll start, perhaps, from the end. I am 47 years old. I work as a mid-level government official. Nearly all my days are monotonous and unremarkable. Morning — off to work. Afternoon — lunch in the canteen. Evening — back home. Nothing happens in my life. Everyone around me rushes about with thoughts of some vague, incomprehensible progress, their eyes alive with all manner of ideas. But I have nothing. I am empty, like a Shaolin monk. Or no — more like a seashell, long ago picked clean and hollow, lying on the shore.
After work, I come home and sit down to play on the computer. I play for hours, deep into the night. And even the games I play are the same ones — have been for about ten years now. There is also a wife at home. But she has long looked at me like a threadbare living-room set — not as a person, let alone a man. It seems she leads some kind of parallel life, though I no longer observe in her any signs of life at all. And frankly, I’m glad. I’m very glad. She wants nothing from me, expects nothing — convenient as hell. I can play my games in peace.
Though I do recall that I once had dreams of my own, and thoughts of some kind of progress! But at some point… damn it, at exactly what point? It’s hard to say now. I completely missed when and how it happened, but gradually everything began to dwindle and close in around me.
As a child I was observant — I noticed the small things. But even that observance began to fail me. Whatever talents I may have had began to leave me, one by one. As though someone had decided to take away the little I possessed.
My thoughts dwindled, and my life shrank along with them. Everything around me grew larger while I grew smaller. The smaller I became, the more incomprehensible the world around me turned. I simply stopped understanding anyone or anything. Why does someone do this, why does someone do that? Because I myself had dwindled, everything I couldn’t understand became frightening rather than interesting. Now it has all grown so difficult for me that I can no longer even tell what is new and what is old. I wouldn’t even recognize my own enemy if I saw his face.
It has come to this: even a new person at work — not even in my department — even they scare the hell out of me. The appearance of new people in the office sends me into a panic. I freeze, not knowing what to do. The only thing I want is for no one to notice me. And not to be fired, of course.
I kept telling myself that life would somehow arrange everything for me on its own. That one only needed to be in the right place at the right time. Until then, one simply had to sit it out somehow. And after that… I’d inevitably be carried to the top of the food chain. Damn it, I believed this nonsense from my very youth — that fate had prepared something great for me! And whatever gave me that idea?!
There were times I’d wake at three in the morning and imagine it: there I am, basking in power, wielding influence over one and all. A minister — no less. With a single stroke of my pen, I determine the movement of tectonic plates. Which plates, exactly, and in what direction — that I never quite worked out. Such details didn’t interest me much.
Everything is predetermined — that’s what I thought just now. Though... what was I saying? Ah, yes — that I was afraid, like a cockroach, to make a single unnecessary move! And why? Because I might cut myself off from the long-awaited summit. Laughable! I was afraid of losing something I had never possessed in the first place! How many times did I do nothing, for fear of losing what I never had to begin with?
I don’t remember whether it was on some television program or on the radio, but I once heard something along the following lines. Aristotle, they say, compared people to lines. Intelligent people, apparently, are like straight lines — always alike, always aligned, and therefore they understand one another with ease. Foolish people, it turns out, are crooked lines — they don’t align with each other, nor with the straight ones, and are therefore incapable of understanding either their own kind or their betters.
If that wise guy Aristotle could see me now, he would surely say: “There it is — a crooked line in the flesh!” I understand neither my fellow wretches nor those who have more in this life. The latter, incidentally, I decisively despise with all my soul. Why do they get everything, and I get nothing?
The hatred, by the way, has also dwindled. It used to boil inside me, used to drive me to certain impulses. Now I hate quietly, like a smoldering cigarette butt in an ashtray. And if I don’t manage to disappear and hide in time, I’ll be sure to smile right to their face.
This is how I’ve been living, it seems, for the last ten years or so. All of it dim memories, diluted by fleeting, deceptive little joys. If I try to recall something now, I couldn’t even tell you if it happened five years ago or just last month.
But it wasn’t always like this! I swear it to myself now, on this very same paper! I remember that it wasn’t always like this. Good God, I wasn’t born a cockroach from the start, was I? That is the question. That is what interests me now. I must remember. I must, without fail, understand this...