In life—no matter how clear, pigeonholed, and boring it is—there are these times when we understand with absolute clarity that at this very moment anything is possible, and we understand this coldly, disinterestedly, and, at the same time, furiously. Suddenly, we understand that the plane might crash, our spouse might not come home, the person standing next to us in the Metro might be carrying a deadly virus. Moreover, a friend who died long ago might call out to us in an underground passageway, the midnight sky might shine from end to end, a fish might talk, and a black cat might consider us a bad omen. There are moments when anything seems possible, anything our imaginations can conceive.

  In such instances, death might well seem to await us in our provincial hotel room. Not that bald freak in the hooded cloak from Bergman’s Seventh Seal, and not that shrimp with the braid from the joke about the canary, but our own proper, ordinary-size death, which for some reason has let us be for a whole forty-two years. And then we turn around and start running away, even though we’ve told ourselves a hundred thousand times that we’re not afraid of death, that dying is just going home, or to the harbor, as fearless Tom Waits sings. But the red carpet is already conspiring with our inflamed fantasy, has already become an uncrossable mire, and our feet are sinking into it, getting stuck, and our flight is starting to look more and more like distressed bellowing. Here we are bellowing with all our might down this carpet until a door opens behind us and a human being finally peeks out of the room into the corridor, a living creature. But we’re still not prepared to recognize him, or rather, her, because we’re busy running, our dash for the world of the living filmed on very slow stock.

  “Stop! Where are you going?” the creature in the flesh says melodically, and we turn around mistrustfully, slow the swift viscosity of this waking dream, catch our breath, and once again bring the surrounding world into focus.

  “Who are you?” Filippov said. “Why? Why are you in my room?”

  “I found the key on the floor. Over there.” She pointed to the end of the hall, as far as Filya had managed to run during his recent flailings. “I’m Rita. Do you remember me? Today on the port road.”

  “Rita?” Filippov pressed his entire body to the wall and slid to the floor. “Rita? It’s really you? You shouldn’t do that to people. You nearly killed me.”

  He came to smack-dab in the middle of his life. Or rather, in the middle of what at that moment he took for his life. Rita was dragging him by the hand down the hall. With her free hand she was holding a bottle of red wine that had turned up out of nowhere and was even open already. The coat buttoned up over his collar was tightly wound with someone’s scarf, which gave off the intolerable smell of perfume.

  “Where are we going?” he said.

  Rita didn’t answer him, and Filya came to the conclusion that he’d only thought, not said it. Taking swigs from the bottle as they went, he managed to be vaguely surprised that his fastidious body might in his absence not only have sprawled out unclaimed in the lavatory of the Boeing’s tail, it had already dressed itself, had found and opened a bottle of wine, and now was trailing somewhere after a beautiful young woman.

  “Capable beast,” he thought out loud about his physical shell.

  “What?” Rita turned to him.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “I explained it to you.”

  From the room they were walking past at that moment and into the corridor jumped a guy in a black down parka and a huge fox hat. Holding a television. He bumped into Filya and set off nearly at a run, and a moment later had disappeared around the corner. Something was happening in the other rooms, too. Glass was breaking; things were being dropped. The sounds of a nasty racket were flying at them from everywhere.

  “Let’s go.” Rita pulled Filya by the sleeve. “Don’t stop. We have to keep moving.”

  Filippov distinctly saw a cloud of steam detach from her lips at these words.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  She had barely managed to drag him out of the hotel when the light behind them went out, and all six floors, including the glass door lobby, plunged into total darkness.

  “Finita la commedia,” Filya said, leaning his head back and gazing at the darkened hulk behind him. “Everyone is free to go.”

  He turned around and froze in place with an open mouth, and thick steam poured out like from a dormant geyser. There was an endless stream of people walking past the hotel.

  They were moving down the street, down the sidewalk, through the parking lot, even down the hotel steps. The rare streetlamps, straining a yellowish semblance of light into the fog, had already picked this swaying black mass out of the darkness, but someone was already turning them off, one by one, and absolute darkness was rolling toward them from the central square. The windows in the building opposite blinked and went out, too. The crowd floating down the avenue was now lit only by the headlights of stranded cars. Helpless, like life rafts in the ocean around a sinking liner, they emitted a muddy light, picking out of the darkness the endless backs and coiling breath of the thousands upon thousands in this throng of humanity.

  Bewitched by this scene, Filippov was awakened by a powerful pain in his left earlobe, which was a sure, although long-forgotten, sign of frostbite. Rita was now dragging him around the corner from the hotel, and he was rubbing his ear while automatically taking sips of the instantly iced wine. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all a dream, that above all this was a layer of water—kilometers, megatons of the Arctic Ocean—and all these inhabitants of the underwater kingdom had contrived their own wordless exodus in search of dry land, the promised land, or—just the opposite—an even deeper spot for themselves.

  In the car, where the warmth pierced him even more sharply than the cold had before, and where he was immediately struck by a faint trembling, Filya tried to concentrate on what Rita had started talking about so loudly after she jumped into the passenger seat, but then he realized she’d been talking for rather a long time and he simply had only now heard her, as if outside was outer space and the sounds in it didn’t reach him.

  “He’s got this vile mug—like a mollusk’s. That miserable Cthulhu.”

  “What?” Filya said, gazing at the solid, faceless mass he guessed was outside the car. “Whose mug?”

  “The investigator, that Tolik. Imagine, he goes, ‘Call me Tolik if we ever meet outside the station.’ And I go, ‘Why should we ever meet anywhere else?’ On his own turf, he’s not Tolik. There he’s this whole Anatoly Sergeyevich. Anatoly Sergeyevich Cthulhu. He hides his tentacles under his desk.”

  “What tentacles?” Filya couldn’t tear himself away from the window. “Where are they all going?”

  Rita switched on the overhead light and turned toward Filippov.

  “I was telling you in the hotel. There are heat outages in town. Something happened at the power station, or the heating station—I don’t know what they call it. The radio said they’d get it fixed soon. But they let everyone leave work. People are going home.”

  “You mean it’s evening?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see . . . But why are there so many of them?”

  “I’m telling you. Everyone was told to go. The whole town’s on the move. There are plenty of students here, too. There was a comedy slam at the university.”

  “But why on foot? Have the buses stopped?”

  “I don’t know.” Rita shrugged but didn’t lean back. She kept looking tensely into Filya’s face, as if expecting something from him, expecting him to come out with some decision.

  “But where are we going?” he asked after a pause, during which he’d tried in vain to stop the shuddering that was hammering at him.

  “Nowhere.” The driver turned to him. “We’re just parked. I’m not driving through this crowd.”

  Filippov thought his face was vaguely familiar.

  “Who are you?” he said, taking a big swallow from the bottle and splashing wine on his chest.

  “This is Tyoma,” Rita said. “I was telling you about him that whole time.”

  “Tyoma?” Filippov rubbed the dark splashes on his coat lapel. “Your mama wouldn’t be Zina, would she?”

  The youth smiled, and Filya immediately recognized the pink princess’s smile.

  “Yes, she flew with you from Moscow today.”

  “Aha, and this here is the young woman who nearly killed us afterward.”

  “I explained already,” Rita said heatedly. “I was supposed to meet you all earlier, but Danilov took me out of town. That’s why I drove off in his car and his guards chased me.”

  Filippov belched, shook his head, and motioned for Rita to stop.

  “Listen, let’s not do this all at once, and let’s not do it now. This Danilov, this chase—this has nothing to do with me. How did you know I was flying in? Who are you, anyway? Why did you come to meet me?”

  “Your friend said you were flying in. The artist. You called him the day before yesterday from Paris.”

  “And you know him or something?”

  “No, my mama sees him socially.”

  Filya snickered and looked at himself in the mirror, rubbing his burning left ear. “Yeah, I came incognito, so to speak,” he said. “But with this face . . .”

  “Same thing happened to me,” Tyoma said when he caught Filya’s look. “Didn’t shave for a few weeks, and then at a party in a club I decided to drink flaming absinthe on a bet. My friends said, ‘Let’s light it up.’ Well, they did. They were all clean-shaven. But my beard caught fire—and the bartender barely managed to toss me a towel. Good times. My burns were more or less like those.”

  He pointed to Filippov’s face in the mirror and laughed quietly.

  “Did it hurt for long?” Filya asked.

  “I don’t remember. Five or six days. What happened to you?”

  “Something like that. Probably.”

  All of a sudden, without saying a word, Rita opened her door wide and hopped out of the car. Tyoma was leaning toward the windshield, trying to make out what he could in the dark and haze, while Filya, who had already subdued his shivering, took his first decent swallow. The wine was god-awful, but Filya was glad that it poured down his throat rather than his chest. He’d had enough shivering in his life, even without these crazy swings in temperature.

  “What are you doing?” Tyoma asked Rita after she dove back out of the dark and into the car.

  “I thought . . .”

  “You thought what?”

  “There was a kid there. Let’s go. The crowd’s thinned out.”

  “So you’ve started seeing things?” Tyoma said.

  “Hey, why are we shaking like this?” Filya interrupted. “I thought we were on the central avenue. Or are the streets here completely screwed?”

  “The wheels froze a little,” Tyoma replied. “The car’s heavy, and it stood in one place for at least forty minutes. They get square when it’s freezing if you’re not driving.”

  “Is it going to be like this long?”

  “A couple of minutes.”

  “That much I can stand.” Filya sighed, leaned back in his seat, and carefully pressed the now-shaking bottle to his belly.

  He never did get an answer to his question of where they were going, but after the warmth that had poured inside him and out, that didn’t bother him anymore. The car quickly stopped shaking, and Filippov could without fear apply himself to the glass friend that had come from he had no idea where. They were both being taken somewhere without being told where, but the main thing was that they were together—Filya and his good, reliable friend, so full of life and promise, who would have to betray him, though not soon, when it turned into an empty and indifferent creature.

  “You were asking why everyone was on foot.” Tyoma’s voice penetrated Filippov’s blissful anabiosis. “Look what’s happening at the bus stop.”

  His cloudy headlights were aimed at an antediluvian bus swarmed by inhabitants of the local underwater kingdom. Once again, Filya felt like he was under several kilometers of water, although now he was no longer Filya but Jacques Cousteau, or Steve Zissou, Bill Murray in a submariner’s red cap, an inquiring scientist leaning against the porthole of his deep-water bathyscaphe.

  “What are they doing?” he asked.

  “Trying to board the bus.”

  People wearing clumsy clothes that maximally impeded all their movements were crowding around a bus, looking like a giant colony of sea crabs besieging a sleeping fish. Their voices could barely be heard in the car, which made the entire scene even more unearthly and frightening—and, to Filya’s eye, gorgeous.

  “Wait up.” He tapped Tyoma’s shoulder. “Can you stop for a second?”

  “Sure, I can.”

  “Add some light. Shine it over there.”

  He pointed toward where the whirlpool of human bodies was swirling and seething like a genuine maelstrom.

  “No. I’d have to drive onto the sidewalk.”

  “Well, go ahead. I can’t see anything from here.”

  “Have you completely lost it?” Rita said. “There are people there.”

  “You worry too much,” said Tyoma, infected by Filya’s investigative daring. “I’ll be careful.”

  The car listed while driving over the curb and stopped at an unpleasant angle, which made Filippov lean to the right. The cloudy fog lights were now shining straight at the gaping opening of the bus’s back doors, which was too narrow for the besieging crowd. Heads, arms, and shoulders flashed in the opening, but everyone’s desperate efforts to board were leading to the exact opposite result. By trying to get inside, each person wasted their strength and produced more than enough energy to block everyone else’s strength and energy, so they swayed helplessly in a thick human muddle.

  “I never cease to be amazed at the local customs,” Tyoma said. “In Moscow, people would form a line and board calmly.”

  “That won’t cut it here,” Filya spoke up. “The Northern temperament. The last in line are still going to think there won’t be enough room for them. And they’ll be right. There won’t.”

  “Tyoma, let’s go, please,” Rita said nervously. “Mama’s expecting us.”

  “Then call her,” Filippov said.

  “I can’t. There’s no signal.”

  “That’s nuts,” he said in disbelief. “Come on, give me your cell.”

  Rita handed him her phone, and Filippov quickly pulled out the SIM card and inserted his own. There really was no signal.

  “F-f-fuck,” Filippov exhaled. “I’m waiting for a very important message. Does this happen often here?”

  “Of course not,” Rita said. “I don’t remember this ever happening.”

  “Damn! Fine, let’s get to your place quick. I’ll check from your home phone.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “I’ll call my voice mail. Let’s go!” Filippov poked Tyoma in the shoulder. “It’s not interesting here anymore.”

  The car rocked like a boat again and drove down into the roadway, smearing its dirty light over the crowd one last time. Filya didn’t give a rat’s ass now about these flickering arms, heads, and faces—or rather, not even faces, but hoary masks that left only a narrow slit for the eyes, while all the rest was covered with a solid crust from the breath that escaped and immediately froze on these people’s scarves, kerchiefs, and eyelashes. At any other time, Filippov wouldn’t have passed up the chance to compose a life for these people, put a few vivid individuals into this sticky biomass, and be aghast at their loneliness in the faceless crowd and the impossibility of tearing away from it or even just freeing up their arms. He would have invented families for these unfortunates: dear ones not knowing anything and going out of their minds in their apartment, which was getting colder by the minute, and friends who kept dialing their number. He would probably have invented all sorts of things, but right now he was seriously worried about the phone signal being lost all over town. Therefore, he didn’t see the bus, which had been waiting patiently at the stop up until now, finally shudder and get going, floating away into the fog like an awakened whale, while the crowd at the back doors sighed with one big shared chest, and the sturdy, the strong, and the decisive, who had begun to push, immediately cut through, and those who were weaker fell underfoot. But no one was looking down there, at them, anymore. The bus sailed farther and farther into the fog, and people were hanging out the unclosed door, like dark fungus growing on a tree, little by little falling off, disappearing, gradually restoring the bus to its proper bus look.

  When the car stopped, Filippov started feeling sick. His face had become oddly cold from the inside while at the same time being covered with sweat. He thought the Demon of the Void might be just about to show up with his idiotic jokes, but he didn’t. Apparently, he had no use for other witnesses. He preferred an audience of one: Filya.

  In vain anticipation of his old friend, Filippov sat in the stopped car, his eyes bugged-out and his mouth wide-open. He was being tortured by an air bubble rising from somewhere in his stomach, which just couldn’t escape. Rita and Tyoma turned around and looked at Filya sitting there silently, but they didn’t say a word. Filya thought their looks seemed sinister.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said when he’d finally burped up the air that had paralyzed him. “There’s someone standing in the dark there. Take me back to the hotel.”

  “Stop it,” Rita said. “There’s no one there. And the hotel isn’t all that safe. What if they don’t have electricity until morning? Come on. Don’t make trouble.”

  She opened the door and hopped out of the car. Filippov knew there wasn’t anyone outside, but he was already beleaguered by vague fears concerning Rita and her companion, who had yet to explain to him where they were taking him or why. Continuing to fight a sudden panic attack, he applied himself to the bottle, though it came up empty.

  “Beast,” Filya muttered, letting the worthless glass corpse thud to the floor. “You picked quite the moment.”

  Rita and Tyoma, both wearing tall felt-soled deerskin boots, easily climbed onto the high, iced-over porch, while Filippov lagged behind, flapping his arms helplessly. When he slipped over the icy crust in his stupid Kris Van Assche sneakers, he expelled a small waterfall with a dull moan. Judging from the taste of what Filya threw up, he hadn’t digested the wine at all, it had just been poured from the bottle into the wineskin that was his stomach and then onto the icy crusts built up in front of the porch. Having served more than once in this sense as alcohol’s beast of burden, Filippov wasn’t the least chagrined. He waved his companions on and leaned against the railing in anticipation of a second wave.