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

And I was also injected with insulin intravenously, but at first, the head doctor warned my parents that they should agree to that treatment. Beltyukov, a young but experienced neighbor in the wardroom, told that they extracted insulin from bull's liver, there was nowhere else to get it from. The purpose of those injections was to bring a shut-in to a coma. Many were cured that way, subtracting the percentage on whom the drug worked incorrectly. Still, the number of survivors remained higher. The tricky part was snatching the shut-in off his coma in time.

Shots of insulin were done to me and Beltyukov in the morning, one insertion in the vein inside arm elbow. Then the nurse called the nearest paramedic and he came together with volunteers from the shut-ins to fix us with rags to the iron beds we were stretched on. They fixed only our arms but firmly, so that we could not wring them away when led back out of the current coma.

After about 20 minutes, the nurse returned to the wardroom to fill out some ledger, sitting at the white desk in the corner. That's why it was placed in that improper place – she was watching us like milk on fire not to let it drip over when seething.

Beltyukov and I lay on our beds, side by side, and talked, looking up into the ceiling. He was a sociable guy and somehow resembled Vitalik from the construction battalion or, maybe, not very much so. Then our conversation turned into incoherent exclamations: Beltyukov shouted about the dominance of fucking matriarchy, and I kept proclaiming that all people were brothers and how could you possibly not see it!? Meanwhile, my head was tilting back to see my backbone, only the pillow was always in the way.

It signaled the nurse to put aside her ledger, and give us a shot of glucose intravenously to ward off the upcoming dive into the fatal phase of coma. Then they untied us and gave a glass of water with a thick sugar solution because the mouth was burning awful hot. That does not mean that Beltyukov and I always shouted the same thing, yet such were the core themes of our slogans at uncontrolled chanting when under insulin. On Sundays, they did not inject us that shit…

The hardest to recover from was the shot of sulfur. Normally, it is injected to drunks in the form of punishment, however, the head doctor might have been having some special experimental considerations or certain optimistic hopes. She wanted to do her best, probably. It's also a shot in the rear, with the effect spreading over deep into the bone tissue. 2 days following the injection, the patient treated to it has to drag his leg because of feeling a sharp pain as if your join was finely smashed.

The shot of sulfur broke my will. Dragging the leg, I shuffled to the dining room to eat the lard from the delivery, but when the chmo dispenser shut-in handed me the cellophane packet, it smelled like my briefcase in the sixth grade, when I forgot to eat the ham sandwich at school, and it spent there all winter vacations. I had to throw the rotten lard away…

My relations with the fellow shut-ins were even and correct, as anywhere else, I staunchly stayed an undeclared renegade. Naturally, those derailed out of reach and submerged into the vagaries of their private worlds, did not notice me, while shut-ins capable of thinking, as far as possible, showed certain respect caused by the sympathy and compassion for my exposure to the insulin injections. Only one young guy, Podrez, for some time was fawning over me without any reason but then, in the queue to the dining room, he hit me in the stomach, I couldn't guess why.

2 minutes later, Beltyukov, in the same queue, found some fault with Podrez, pinioned him and kept immobilized. He did not say me anything, not even with his eyes, but there was no need for hinting that Podrez was fixed by him for me to jab the guy into any spot at my discretion. But I did not hit, I feel sorry for the mentally ill, notwithstanding my hurt stomach.

A far more terrible blow dealt me the loss of the book in English. On the white desk in our wardroom, there remained only the copybook with the since long finished translation and the pen stuck in between its pages. I was upset unbearably because the book was borrowed from Zhomnir, who had borrowed it from another teacher at the Department of English – the ever-smiling Nona. But when I, in that terrified state, turned to the head doctor, she, with the indefinite indifference, responded that the book would not go anywhere.

And she was right. 3 days later it was returned to me by a shut-in who collected it from the nutty kidnapper at Wardroom 7, he failed to keep it concealed any longer.

(…I understand the thief's sentiment. At those times they did not know in the Soviet Union how to produce such glossy paperbacks for books, and all of a sudden—wow!—a gaudy close-up of a female face against the background of the fifth unit. Who would resist?..)

He did not spoil it in any way, and only the backside of the cover bore light touches of a pencil by which he tenderly poured out his adoration, slightly reminiscent of a sketch of the cerebral cortex, or whimsy curls of whirling smoke. It even might have been some formulas of the unknown scientific language from beyond the future, only that I have given up already moving down that road…

The shut-ins were all so very different. At first sight of some of them, you could immediately see they had a yo-yo stream of consciousness if any at all, but with some other, you’d hardly say he's nuts.

In general, there were all kinds of sorts, with quite neighborly types among them, like that brunette fat man. However,