“There’s no such city as Chemukbez,” he said. “I don’t even think there’s any such word.”

  “Should I Google it?” An open laptop now materialized on the lap of the demon, who was now sitting to Filya’s left in a huge leather armchair.

  “Oops, I guess not,” the demon said. “Maybe we can Google something else. You, for example.”

  “I’m sick of me.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. You were so young you didn’t even masturbate that often. Then let’s try Nina . . . Oh, no, we aren’t going to have time. Hold on.”

  They both got a good hard jolt, then found themselves in a long corridor with a low ceiling lit by dim lamps painted blue. But the paint on some of them had peeled, and Filya squinted from time to time at the bright beams, which were as insolent as a street thug.

  “This sucks,” the Demon of the Void muttered behind his back, scraping the peeling blue paint off with his nail. “I just painted it yesterday. Stop, Filya. Look.”

  He shook his head contritely, pointing out a peeling lamp to Filippov.

  “Did you ever paint the Christmas tree lights when you were a kid?”

  “No,” Filippov replied. “Just light shows. I’d solder lights onto a wire and paint them. These little ones.”

  “Did the paint run?”

  “Well, yes. It heated up.”

  “I have to come up with something else.” The demon sighed.

  “Maybe buy blue ones to start with. They have those in hospitals.”

  The demon’s face lit up.

  “Not a bad idea. There, you see, it’s good you came with me. You’ve already been useful. Come on, move along.”

  They walked down the cramped corridor. The farther they went, the lower the ceiling kept dropping over their heads. At first, Filya stooped over, then he had to lean over, and thirty seconds later he was already bending his knees and walking in a demi-plié. All of a sudden, this pose struck him as funny.

  “Where are we, anyway?” he snorted. “We’re wandering like embryos through tubes.”

  “You’re just about to see for yourself.”

  There were voices up ahead. After going another twenty or so meters, Filya could at last straighten up, but he couldn’t help squinting at the bright light. His head surfaced in some kind of a box missing one side, and directly in front of him, in blinding footlights, two people were running around a stage.

  “Well, what do you think?” the demon whispered triumphantly, surfacing alongside him. “Do you appreciate the surprise?”

  “What’s this? The prompter’s booth?”

  “Hush.” The demon pressed a finger to his lips and then lovingly ran his hand over the wooden side. “A classic. There’s nothing like this now anywhere. Vintage. I gave it a little varnish here. Touch it. You’ll know how nice it is. Although, no. Come on, begin.”

  Filippov gave the demon a sidelong look.

  “Begin what?”

  The demon nodded at the actors tapping across the stage.

  “Prompt.”

  Filya shifted his gaze to the two poor flushed devils and shrugged.

  “Are you an idiot or something?” he said. “I don’t know the script.”

  The demon grinned cunningly and nastily.

  “Yes, you do. You do. At least you don’t have to pretend in front of me.”

  Filippov did know it, actually. He’d realized that after just a couple of lines. The fat, heavily made-up lady was Nina, and running after her from one side to the other was a balding scalawag with a glued-on mustache—and that was him, Filya.

  “Why the mustache?” he whispered to the demon. “I’ve never had one.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” the other said, brushing him off. “Directorial license. You listen carefully. If they forget the script, prompt them. Look, look! This is going to be great.”

  The very large lady playing Nina suddenly stopped at the center of a rotating circle, and her partner, who had rushed after her, muttering his monologue as he went, flew at her from behind and immediately bounced back like a rubber ball. He took an awkward hop, stood up to his full height on stage, and made an idiotic face. Somewhere behind Filya, the audience burst out laughing, readily and with childish delight.

  “A dandy!” The Demon of the Void elbowed him. “It’s a good house today. Can you sense how they’re responding?”

  The actors were portraying that moment in his life when Nina had left him for good, for Venechka the aviator. At the time, Filippov had taken it very hard. He’d stopped leaving the house, stopped eating, stopped getting up off the couch. Basically, he’d just stopped. For a few days, he would wake up in his empty, silent apartment, realizing that this was still him, that this sad life around him belonged to him and no one else, and then straight through until night he would watch the boring low clouds and the layer of dust that kept collecting by the day on the floor like a soft blanket. From time to time, someone would call or knock at the door, but Filippov didn’t feel like disturbing the dusty canvas. He beat two neat paths in it—to the phone and to the bathroom. Other routes didn’t interest him. Roaming in his head were thoughts of his own insignificance and death’s inevitability. Why doesn’t it happen right now since it’s coming in any event? At the same time, he found dying scary—not breathing, not lying on the couch, ceasing to feel that you’re a zero, not being.

  Periodically, he would walk over to the phone and stand next to it for a long time in order to be ready to pick up the phone in case Nina suddenly decided to call. Then he would change his mind. After more thought, he’d find himself back there standing and waiting so she wouldn’t have time to hang up. But she never did call.

  She came. She had to pick up a few things, including the dark-blue suit Filya’s mother had sewn for her after their wedding. A Chanel-style jacket and skirt. A luxury object in those days. Things like that weren’t sold in the stores. Not that much of anything was. You could get oil and sugar only with the coupons they issued. The sausage line started at four in the morning. The country was in approximately the same condition as Filya—falling to pieces. The thought of this gave him pleasure. He felt he wasn’t alone. With gloomy interest he watched his “I” lose, one after another, the basic features that distinguish a living person full of strength from a sorry corpse, and this process in some ways resembled the way the greatest country in the world was melting away before his very eyes—greatest in size, at least. The republics were spinning and ready to fall off like withered leaves, while Filya, in exactly the same way, had lost his confidence in himself, his curiosity and pride, his hopes and aspirations. He was quickly losing all interest in life, and it was Nina’s fault. With her betrayal—not that she’d had any such intention, of course—she’d found a way to take away something so important that he ceased to be himself and saw no point in moving on.

  When she came for her suit, Filya didn’t open the door. He was standing guard by the telephone again. When she opened the door with the key she still had, she found him in the pose of a startled deer that senses the hunter but still hopes the hunter hasn’t noticed it yet. When he heard the key turn in the lock, Filya thought it probably would have been better to be lying down, to arouse pity, but when Nina walked in and he looked in her face, he understood there would be no room for compassion.

  It was this scene that his good friend the demon now showed him. However, in real life everything had been different. Nina certainly hadn’t bashed around the apartment from corner to corner, or tramped like an elephant, or pulled the navy jacket over her fat body, making it strain at the seams, or hollered in a wicked voice, or goggled, or sweated huge dark patches under her arms. She’d killed Filya slowly with her new unapproachability and coldness and the overwhelming desire she stirred in him, wanting to touch her with even the tips of his hesitant, trembling fingers. And, of course, there were no fat bodies there. It was hard to imagine anyone more elegant than Nina. In her navy suit, she looked as if the local master ivory carvers had carved her out of a piece of the thinnest mammoth tusk available. With her light step, she slipped past him—Filya having frozen by the telephone in his baggy black shorts—glanced into the closet, and asked what had happened to her suit.

  Her voice really had changed. That much Filya did notice. Even now, he couldn’t deny that he’d been amazed at this completely new timbre. It was like talking to some other person. Or rather, the performer was the same but was being recorded by someone else, like when a famous actor’s voice is dubbed in the making of the film, after which it’s very hard to fight the sense of alienation. As if some stranger had taken up residence in someone you knew, and was looking at you through his eyes. Nina had the voice of someone pushing doomed men into the abyss. That is, he understood everything and was prepared to offer a modicum of sympathy, but in fact he wasn’t sorry for anyone because he was a professional. Someone had to do this job, after all.

  The voice of the fat lady on stage wasn’t even close, though. She was squealing like the hog they slaughtered for the November holidays in his grandmother’s village. Her pathetic partner tacked after her like a rabid pug, and both of them tramped so hard that each step raised noticeable puffs of dust from the wooden stage floor.

  “Got anything to drink?” Filya asked the demon.

  “Dry throat?” The demon grinned readily. “Me, too. Just wait, the finale’s going to be a killer.”

  “Are you pouring or not?”

  “Sure. Of course. What’s the matter with you?”

  The demon opened a small door in a side wall, revealing a minibar bathed in blue light.

  “I want port,” Filya said. “It used to be called Kavkaz. The stopper was some kind of plastic and hard to get out.”

  “What filth. How about slivovitz? Or French mirabelle? They make that from plums, too. There’s vilyamovka from Slovenia, a good pear moonshine. Very aromatic. I recommend it.”

  “We were drinking Kavkaz back then. The whole town was.”

  “Nostalgic considerations?” The demon nodded deferentially. “I understand. Here, hold this. I’ve already removed the stopper. Just don’t breathe out in my direction.”

  Filya took the homely little bulging bottle with the crookedly glued-on label and waited for the demon to give him a glass.

  “From the bottle,” the demon explained, shrugging. “Format is format. You have to treat traditions carefully. That’ll be four rubles thirty kopeks.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “No, it’s true. The price is right here on the label—for Zone 3. I have no idea what that is, but order above all.”

  “You’re full of it, evil one.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Hot air.”

  Filya applied his lips to the sticky neck and, for a couple of seconds, froze in the pose of the plaster bugler at a Pioneer camp. The poisonously sweet, warm moisture poured down his throat, and with it long-forgotten sensations; drinking this filth was practically impossible, but it was impossible to stop, too. Five or six shuddering swallows guaranteed almost instantaneous intoxication, making it worth the urge to vomit that always came with Kavkaz.

  “These are morons you’ve got,” Filya said, tearing himself away from the bottle and spitting out something at his feet. “Your director’s a moron, too. Forget that by the time of this scene, the navy suit wasn’t in the apartment anymore. I’d given it away to a homeless woman by our front door.”

  He fell silent in order to take one more swallow, then spat at his feet again.

  “Listen, what’s floating in there? Something keeps getting into my mouth.”

  “State standards permit sediment in Kavkaz port,” the demon replied in an official voice.

  “Fine, it doesn’t matter. Just look at these jerks. You’ve got way too much makeup, a discrepancy in their ages, and neither one of them has the right style. Who did the casting?”

  The demon chuckled unpleasantly. “This I didn’t expect!” he said. “You’ve been drawn to realism in your old age?”

  “What old age?” Filya was offended. “I’m a little over forty.”

  “Oh, right, sorry.” The demon composed a dreary face. “Old age is when you’re ninety-five. I keep forgetting your cunning ways. ‘Lord, he died so soon, so young, before he’d made it to fifty.’ Tell me, when you were young, did people pushing fifty seem young to you, too? Especially girls.” The demon smiled innocently and winked.

  “Quit trying to distract me,” Filya snarled. “We’re talking about something else. I realize you have your grotesque and postmodernism now. Feel free. But you could have slipped in an extra number. Something musical, for instance, or with dancing. Something with passion to grab the audience. Like the slow waltz to Tom Waits’s ‘Lucinda’—slow, rough, and tender at the same time. Get it? When you love that much, you feel like strangling them.”

  “Like this?” The demon pointed toward the stage, where a miserable-looking “Filya” was desperately strangling “Nina,” who was panting like a bulldog.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. You know what I mean.”

  “I thought you meant that.”

  “No one was trying to kill anyone.”

  “All right then.” The demon smirked. “The thought didn’t even cross your mind?”

  “I’m talking about dramatic counterpoint.”

  “And murder.”

  “Can’t you hear me? It could have a powerful effect. It could really get under the audience’s skin.”

  “Didn’t it work? Just look.”

  Filya turned his gaze back to the actress, and clearly and suddenly realized she was about to die. The fat woman was suffocating in the hands of her partner, who had sunk his hands into her and was hanging from her neck like a tick, obviously not intending to let go. His wild, hate-distorted face no longer looked idiotic; all that remained of the clown in him was the stupid makeup.

  “This is all the DTs,” Filya muttered through his teeth. “This isn’t you there. It’s the shakes.”

  “You’re offended.” The demon began to laugh quietly.

  “I’m not here, either. I’m in Paris . . . No, on the airplane. I fainted in the lavatory and I’m lying there, while you’re all nothing but pointless raving.”

  “Or maybe that guy with the Uazik hit you. Then this isn’t raving but your dying visions. Maybe you’ve died.”

  The fat woman kept wheezing, rolling her eyes, and not tearing her wild gaze from the prompter’s booth. She obviously had not anticipated how it would all end, and Filya was unspeakably sorry for her. He realized that she, like he, was here against her will. She’d been lured here with a promise of God knows what, and now they were killing her, and no one in the audience had any intention of helping her.

  Filya heard the audience in their seats start to sob and even weep. He felt sorry not only for the actress but for himself as well. There was little that reconciled him with life, but the scene the unfortunate fat woman had just played was an exception. He treasured it, knowing that at that moment, when he’d been suffering so much, he was a human being, and now, when they’d laughed so wickedly at this, he was hurt that they were taking this scene away from him forever, and that he had no more strength, no more of the arguments that until now had helped him stay reconciled with his life. He felt he was losing it right now and forever, and because of that he wept inconsolably.

  “There, you see?” The triumphant demon nudged him in the side. “And you said it wouldn’t affect you.”

  “Go to hell,” Filya squeezed out.

  “Punk!” the demon exclaimed. “Fuck you!”

  With a quick strike, he jabbed Filya first under the ribs and then across the face. The second blow made him lose his balance and go flying downward. This time his fall was brief. After hitting the back of his head against the iron radiator, Filya opened his eyes and saw the guy with the Uazik leaning over him. He was holding a flashlight.

  “Stay right here,” the guy said. “Don’t go outside. Or in other people’s cars, either. You might get hurt.”

  Filya looked around and realized he was being dragged back into the foyer. His left temple and side ached.

  “Did you beat me up or something?”

  “The next time I’ll just kill you. Sit tight, I said.”

  The guy spat and walked toward the door. After opening it, he stopped for some reason, then went back to Filippov, now sitting on the floor, pulled the shaggy cap off his own head, and tossed it in Filippov’s lap.

  “Take it. Otherwise, you’ll freeze to death.”

  “Thanks,” Filya mumbled huskily.

  His throat was totally dried out.

  A joke was one thing, but he had to keep moving. Filya didn’t like it when his dreams got that objective and tangible. It ruined his mood. He let reality seep through only in the mornings and put up with it until his first swallow of wine. Everything that happened after that was comfortably pushed back into a matte vagueness. Now, due to the lack of alcohol, he had no line of defense, although of the two evils he did prefer reality. His dreams annoyed him with the dismal passivity that was always his lot. In his dreams and nightmares, Filippov never played the leading roles. He was constantly being manipulated by some outside force. If for that reason alone, he now had to get up and keep moving.

  “I’ll just go,” he mumbled, pulling the other man’s hat down deeper. “I’ll just go where I want.”

  Fumbling in his coat pockets for his lighter, he pulled it out, flicked it a few times, and blinked at the orange column of flame. The lighter lit up almost nothing near Filya, but he didn’t care. The main thing was that something alive was warm in his hands. Turning the little wheel to the left, he halved the flame but didn’t let go of the valve until the metal ring got so hot it burned his thumb. He flicked it again and tried to hold the valve in such a way that he wasn’t touching any metal, but a few seconds later that became impossible. Also, he had to conserve gas. Even the small light and warmth the lighter gave out could come in very handy on his odyssey. His hometown—Filya could tell—had by no means put all its cards on the table. New surprises could be expected at any second.