The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

so fucking long ago that you should’ve drop it, you'll still keep doing it and doing… Like that team of zeks who felled an Oak coppice equipped with only a couple of jigsaws.

Or, let’s take, the so-called "piggy" drift; this is when you got started eating something and all of a sudden there unfolds such a gamma of taste sensations that you, without ever noticing it, could put away a whole pot of cold macaroni from the day before yesterday and scrape the bottom.

And, on the whole, you became ever so prudent, awesomely perspicuous, and when some buddy’s coming up to you, like, "Hi, how's your nothing?" you knew already at which point of his nonprofit socializing he’d start chiseling for a pinch for a joint.

Or there may get started to form all kinds of deep thoughts by you—fucking Isaac Newton!—only that they did not linger for long so as to shape them clearly and got lost because of one thing or another distracted you over to something else equally profound. All in all, a play of shadows on the swirling whiffs of fog.

Listening to music when you ride the wave is the utmost drift…)

In the musicians’ we had a record player on the bookshelf together with the one and only LP disc, "Burn" by The Deep Purple… Getting seated on the floor next to a speaker, I would hold the disc cover in my hands and consider it unswervingly till all of the side played to the end – there were their busts, like, in bronze, with a tongue of flame from each one's head, like, a lighter, sort of, the dudes were clearly understanding what's what in blasting…

A real bummer popped up when anasha suddenly ran out and, no matter whomever you rolled up, no one had it; such a period was named "the empty suction". Everyone became dog snappy, some buddies even got crashed because of the fucking khoomar was so too pressing. No kidding, they became just fragments a-jitter; some simply eyesore sight…

Once Gray heated me with pills that he brought from the city.

"Would ye?"

"What's that?"

"Nyshtyak."

"Okay".

He was passing them, one by one, for me to swallow. With half of the pack over, I said, "And what's the dose?"

"All's nyshtyak."

So I consumed the whole pack. Then a roar flooded the ears, as from a waterfall, and the night got dense and dark around.

Oh… the stoker-house… Vanya's shift… I entered.

He talked to me but I couldn't get it at all. Then I began to walk around the furnace, what for?. He told me later that at one point I stopped in the dark passage behind the boiler, and stood there for half-hour as a monument, like, in bronze. And, most importantly, I was afraid of going to bed: what if getting somehow asleep I wouldn't wake up? But eventually, I came to myself.

And Gray was just a bitchy scumbag not knowing the dose himself, kinda experimenting on people whether I'd survive or not.

"But you're some fucking moose!."

Vanya's wife came on a visit from their Crimea village… The construction battalion started to seem some club of married dolts because of whose premature marriages I again was pulling at the stoker-house one shift after another.

When she left, Vanya changed from the parade-crap into his fatigues and came to the stoker-house as gloomy as the sadness itself. I didn't want to barge in the buddy's meditations and the darkness outside the windows was as delicate as me…

And then Roodko, the Club Director, arrived in the stoker-house. He had the regular cold in his snoot and, in the medical unit, they forked him out some powder for inhalation. So, grabbing on the way a tin cup from the Dishwashers', he navigated to the stoker-house in another of his futile attempts at curbing his adenoidal condition.

The powder from the folded sheet of paper was poured into the cup, then he added boiling water from the boiler tap and covered the cup with a stray piece of cardboard, sort of a lid to keep the mixture hot and not let it cool down right away.

That way he and I sat by the round table talking our talks. And, while talking, Roodko would move that cardboard lid, sniff at the cup a time or two, cover it back and we would go on with our gossip.

Now, by that particular moment in the course of his army service, Vanya had already seen different sights in the stoker-house and, standing in the dark of the adjacent hall of it, he followed all those collateral manipulations and came to certain aberrant conclusions. In determined strides, neared he the round table and, "Roodko! Gimme too!"

"What to give?"

"Well, this!" And Vanya pointed at the Roodko's contraption.

Roodko was as naive as any other intellectual and he thought if he had a running nose then whosoever could have it also. "Welcome."

Vanya pulled the cardboard off, took a couple of sniffs, deep indeed, filling himself to the heels, and I saw how his eyes rolled under his forehead getting more and more, however strange it may sound, crosswise on the way.

So what? I, personally, would believe it. Self-hypnosis is a great power because faith moves the mountains. If Vanya believed that Roodko was consuming the fucking "blue fairy" by bucketfuls there, then any other moment he could fall into hallucinatory strawberry fields and fucking easily too, I swear. Someone had to save the buddy.

"Vanya," says I, "the other day in the Canteen I talked to a Tatar from your draft."

"And what?"

"Well, nothing special…just that I says there, 'hey buddy, what's your name?', and he says, ‘Me a-Russian no understand'…to which, 'Okay,' says I, 'a fully clear matter, but how much do you have to serve yet?'…and here he at once clutches his head from both sides, 'Vooy! Fucking too much!' says he… So, Vanya, could he was a friend of yours?"

In short, I did have pumped the partner back from his hallucinations because that's the law of soldiery friendship – help your comrade