Skinhead held its jerking head, not allowing its clamped jaws to lock shut. Sometimes Longhair helped him: clamping between his rust-colored cowboy boots the fragile case he never put down for a moment, he grasped the wildly arching body with both arms, softening the blows that the madman dealt to himself . . .
Then Manikin would get up, and all of it repeated over and over . . . Skinhead looked inside its skull and saw that the two small hemispheres were covered with a dark brilliant membrane of not entirely determinable localization: either under the thick meninges of the dura mater or directly below on the soft arachnoid mater or pia mater. After each seizure this membrane would be covered with a new network of fissures, and small pieces of the membrane had fallen away, shrunk, and allowed healthy pale-gray portions of the brain, networked with pink blood vessels, to emerge . . .
“More analogues,” Skinhead noted. “We also have an electroshock method for treating schizophrenia . . .”
He would stroke the calmed half-wit on the head as the latter, like a child, rotated its head under the doctor’s hand so that not a place was left untouched . . .
Sister in the meantime had grown even more transparent, and when the journeyers sat down at the campfire, Skinhead noticed once how she pulled back her monastic cowl for an instant, and the face that peeked out from behind amazed him with its rare asymmetry—not one eye or eyebrow was where it belonged; there were only pale folds of limp skin with no eyelashes, and a scab on her forehead shaped like an eye, which bled at the center of the wound. With her almost invisible hand she replaced the cowl, and the location of her transparent hand against the background of her dark vestments was evident only because of her string of black woolen rosary beads.
Her departure passed unnoticed. Once after their usual rest her vestments lay alongside the campfire: her white blouse folded into her black inner rason; her cowl, the headdress of Eastern Orthodox Christian women monastics; and a red velvet purse. Skinhead opened the purse. Inside, wrapped in foil, lay a decayed woolen thread and a handful of ashes . . . Her vestments smelled of cinnamon, which since childhood he had not been able to tolerate, bitter almonds, and incense . . .
Sister had disappeared considerately, troubling no one, while the new person who just arrived caused everyone a mass of headaches. At first when he discovered himself next to the campfire, this middle-aged citizen of average height imagined that he was dreaming. And insofar as he could fathom no other state except consciousness and sleep, these woeful, somewhat constrained people sitting around the campfire seemed suspicious to him. The campfire itself, which burned at his feet, also seemed strange—too pale, and not hot.
“It’s all stage props,” the man in the sports jacket guessed. “Of course, this is a dream, a very entertaining dream.”
He began to peer diligently into this rather strange dream so as not to forget it when he woke up and to tell his wife, Nadya, about it. Her dreams were always unusually stupid: either she was taking his sports jacket to the cleaners, or her soup was boiling over in the pot. He dreamed only rarely, and never had he dreamed anything as intricate as this one with the campfire. He tried recounting the people sitting around the fire, but could not. Either they kept moving around slightly or their numbers changed. On closer examination it turned out that these people were not quite real, but shadows of some sort. Only one of them stood out among the others: a large, thickset fellow with his head shaved clean, a patch of light from the fire reflected on his forehead, his head half bald. A Lenin forehead. He chose Skinhead as the most respectable of the bunch to be his conversation partner.
“I have to ask him . . .” And then he stopped. He suddenly began to fear that this was no dream. And if it was not a dream, then the first thing he needed to ask was what this place was and how he had wound up here . . . If you ask that, they’ll decide you’re insane. What’s more, he could not remember what exactly had preceded his arrival at this place, which was obviously in the countryside, in some unfamiliar locale, and not even in Central Russia . . .
He peered once again at the faces of the people, decidedly strangers and somewhat bizarre: next to him was a thuglike half-wit, indifferent as a rock; next to him a long-haired fellow sat in a lotus pose with an unnaturally straight spine and a saxophone case clasped to his chest. His son had once carried around just such a case before he left home . . . There was a mangy dog, a fat woman of simple origins, and—he even perked up and calmed down a bit—to his left a very beautiful woman with a good Russian face lay right on the bare ground, supporting her chin in the palm of her hand.
“That one’s my type,” he thought with pleasure. “She looks like Nadya when she was young . . .” The others sank into the twilight, the fire illuminating first someone’s hand, then someone’s back . . .
“Need to collect my thoughts and figure out what caused this lapse,” he decided. The situation was unpleasant, but he felt no particular fear. He turned his thoughts toward home, the most secure place of his existence. So what did he remember? Nadya had served him a breakfast of fried potatoes and two meat patties. He distinctly remembered the patties lying on the plate angled toward each other. A piece of bread with sausage. Tea. It was Tuesday. He had a convenient class schedule: two more ninety-minute lectures on Wednesday and then free until Monday.
“Ever since I got promoted to full professor I’ve had a convenient schedule,” he mused. “True, I have extracurricular obligations, the party organization, and meetings at the rector’s office, which, by the way, I must not forget, are this week . . .” He drifted off on a tangent. “Right, next: I ate breakfast and took Kashtan out for a walk. In the distance I noticed that repulsive gray mastiff from the other entranceway . . . Then I went upstairs and changed . . .”
Just then he noticed that he was wearing his dark-gray dress suit with the lapels, not his dark-blue striped suit . . . He looked at the toes of his shoes: they were his black dress shoes. At that time of the morning he usually put on his old Romanian sandals with the slits . . .
“So, let’s think this out logically,” he told himself. “When I walked out of the house I had my briefcase. Today I’m lecturing first period to the fifth-year students on ‘Contemporary Issues in Gnosiology’; second period—‘Fundamentals of Scientific Atheism’ to the entire first-year class . . . I don’t have my briefcase. I don’t remember at all having delivered those lectures. I’m wearing different clothes. Consequently, between leaving the house and now, some event occurred that I do not remember . . . It happened between 8:25 A.M. and . . .” He wanted to look at his watch, but he was not wearing one . . . “It’s evening. But there’s no being assured that only ten hours have passed between the morning I imagine to have been today and now. Any amount of time could have passed since the moment I stopped keeping track . . . Consequently, I’ve had a lapse of memory. A cerebral vasospasm. So how do I reconstruct what happened next? Probably the Fourth Department Hospital, with a sanatorium or something similar after . . . But how could Nadya leave me on my own? A sick person requires . . . No, that’s not like her . . . Strange, strange . . .”
The Professor politely addressed Longhair: “Excuse me, what time is it?”