With his thrill-seeking buddies he would ride the freights that dragged past the gray buildings lined up in a long row — as if to demonstrate the relativity of motion to the abstract observer. Or he'd flatten pieces of scrap under train wheels, scrap that seemed to retain some of its monstrous weight and quaking power, like the echo of the caboose, as if the freight train, making its groaning sounds, were retreating from him in two directions. With that same enterprising gang, young Krylov climbed the abandoned TV tower the Uralers called the Toadstool. The town's main attraction, which had never been used for its designated purpose and for a good ten years had been deteriorating in a striated mirage above the cubist apartment blocs and cellophane river, was guarded by the police, but only very theoretically. There, inside the concrete pillar, which had holes like a whistle, the rusted stairs were rickety and some places were like a creaking swing. The wind up top, bursting through the cracks, instantly dried your sweat, making the thrill-seeker feel as if his whole body had been trapped in a sticky spider web. Despite the difficulties of the climb, though, the column was covered in all kinds of graffiti just as solidly as any proletarian entryway. At the very top, on the wind-lashed circular platform, which bobbed around like an airborne raft, he couldn't keep his feet at first, even in the relatively safe center; he felt like lying flat on his belly and not watching the skinny grating of the guard rail, buried by winding tendrils, ladle the sun-drenched blur, not watching the pink rag that was tied to it and ripped to shreds furiously flap.
Teen Krylov had already figured it out, though. If you wanted to be a real Uraler, you had to take risks — lots of them, and the more reckless the better. Standing at the very edge, feeling where the low wall stopped and emptiness began, just above knee height, like a cello bow passing across strung nerves, he was one of the few who could piss straight into the abyss, where his output scattered like beads from a broken strand. When out-of-town base jumpers first showed up at the tower and started jumping over the side, flicking the long tongues of their parachutes, Krylov decided he was definitely going to jump, too, but it was not to be. «Don't even think about it, buddy,» the guy with deeply set kind eyes that glistened amid his wrinkles and lashes like drops of dark oil, told him. «You have to train for sixmonths to base-jump. It's all a matter of seconds here, get it? You'd fuck yourself up good…» The good man explained what exactly would happen to Krylov, using an expression of exceptional profanity while watching good-naturedly the thrill-seekers' hangout, where an empty balloon drifted, drunk on the thin air and shining like a 60-watt bulb in absolute sun. «So I fuck myself up. So what? It's my right.» Krylov wouldn't back down, although his stomach was in knots and the abyss below seemed to turn like a hatch being opened. «See this parachute?» the good baser nodded over his shoulder. «It costs two grand. If you fuck yourself up, I'm not getting it back.»
This argument convinced Krylov. The two grand figure made an impression. Krylov's activities outside the house now tended to be commercial. He and his buddies, wearing loose Chinese-made Adidas sweats, shoplifted on a small scale from «their» supermarket, the Oriental, keeping cheeky outsiders off their territory. They prospected at Matrosov Square, formerly Haymarket, where the river lay on the sand like a woman on a sheet, and under the sand, in the black, foul-smelling muck that used to be cleaned off the bottom by the municipal cleaners, they'd find different coins, gold ones even, the size of a Soviet kopek, with a two-headed eagle the size of a gnat. Soon teen Krylov's mind had come up with something like virtual bookkeeping. A parachute was two grand. A used PC — two hundred fifty. The new World Coins catalog — fifty-four. A headlamp for crawling through the vaulted shallow underground mines — eight hundred rubles. A sturdy Polish knapsack — four hundred fifty. Not all — or even many — of his dreams could come true. Teen Krylov adjusted to jumping from the Toadstool in his dreams. As he drifted off, his URL was a specific array of sensations — in particular, the image of a balloon being borne off, which tuned every nerve in his body to the four hundred meters of altitude, at which point the balloon reminded him of an astronaut stepping out for a space-walk. Not always, but often Krylov reached a state where everything was swaying, tossing, whistling. As in real life the clouds' wet shadows floated deep in the golden abyss and were greedily collected by the city blocks, the way water collects pieces of sugar, but the Toadstool's harsh shadow wouldn't dissolve — which made it hard to accept himself as a dot on the rim of a broken hat of shadows or on the crest of a small brown roof. In his dreams, Krylov broke away from the concrete by making a special effort with his tensed diaphragm; immediately, his ears and head felt like a jammed receiver, and the insane air slipping into his mouth fluttered his puffed out cheeks from the inside like tattered banners. After losing himself like a dot on the bottom of a prettier, livelier abyss, Krylov had an unbearably sharp presentiment of merging with himself as he hurtled down, like a crazed motorcyclist — but the paradisiacal two-thousand-dollar parachute on his back just wouldn't open, so he had to dissolve in the wind as quickly as possible and without a trace, which Krylov set about doing quite practically, surrendering utterly to the logic of his dream and its vibrating, vanishing words.
When he started earning some money, teen Krylov felt more grown up than he really was. He'd been through all the trivial agonies of a self-centered young oaf with a laughable father (by this time his father had become a toadying chauffeur for a piss-ugly boss and was driving a Mercedes, just like he'd always wanted), and things got much easier for him with his parents. His silence in response to their helpless cries now seemed perfectly natural, and from time to time he would even leave his school report in the kitchen, by way of impersonal information, a perfectly proper school report with good marks. Studying came easy to Krylov, it was as if there was no science at all. Everything bubbled up and evaporated, like steam: quadratic equations, English verb tenses, and Einstein's definitions, which were in some way like Krylov's dreams. What was worse was that his parents' mere presence kept Krylov from having a good read. They obviously suspected him of hiding a porno magazine under his algebra textbook, not a Frederic Paul novel. All in all, relations between teen Krylov and his parents consisted of endless suspicions. Imagining what they were imagining while they waited up for their sonny boy at night under their stupid kitchen lamp, Krylov admitted that no matter how hard he tried he could never be as bad as those two, who had once conspired to give birth to him, thought he was. Looking at them, dressed at home in identical old jeans with saggy butts, which looked like identical shopping bags, Krylov could more readily have believed that he'd been conceived in a test tube. Even more, he could not imagine why they'd needed to do it. He was perfectly well informed about where children come from, and he had enjoyed the favors of Ritka and Svetka — two sisters one year apart who never said no and who had coarse kissers and soft asses that afterward got hot spots on them that blossomed like roses. Krylov could not possibly imagine his mother and father getting it together to have him; if any sound ever reached him at night from their dark, gloomily smelly bedroom, then it was nothing but the unending family opera.
In short, his parents believed that Krylov committed all the crimes in their neighborhood, just as in the past common people thought that Lenin had invented the electric bulb and Stalin everything else. The image created by his parents' imagination coincided with Ritka and Svetka's ideal — someone to share, like all their boyfriends and their cheap dresses with golden sparkles and puff paint designs. They pictured this ideal as a tough guy who saw life as having control over everything that moved, and who was controlled in turn by a benign papa-thug, whose thick shaved neck looked like a cold meat patty with a layer of white fat and who sported a gold chain as chunky as a tractor tire. All the guys — from the clean-shaven lookout, whom Krylov had only seen from behind, to puny Genchik, famous for his ability to send his bubbly spit flying several meters — possessed a common quality: a nauseating «soulfulness». They took serious offense if something seemed amiss to them — and some fuzzy-eyed jerk with a head no more complexly constructed than a gearbox could for some reason remember a guy and chase him like a jackrabbit, becoming the ubiquitous godling of their home courtyards and garages as far as his victim was concerned.