Io-Io
Outside the window, a cold, angry rain lashed down, shattering against the glass and blurring the lights of the evening city into dirty, trembling inkblots. Io-Io collapsed into a deep leather armchair with a heavy exhale. He reeked strongly of chlorine, ozone, and a damp towel—the smells of an exhausting evening training session in the pool. His back muscles burned after hundreds of meters of heavy breaststroke, demanding rest. The national championships were in a week; he needed to polish his front crawl, rest, gather his strength, and instead...
He turned on the TV, but immediately turned it off: "Sick of everything..." Muttering, he reached for the table and felt a rough, coarse texture in the twilight.
The true Control Room of the Seamy Side isn't made of consoles, blinking lights, or monitors. It is simply a ringing silence, an exorbitant heaviness in the shoulders, and the ability to see through time. Io-Io pulled on the stiff copper wire, untying the knots that bound the old parchment.
The book opened with a dry, electric rustle. On one of the pages, there was no text—instead, a mockingly beautiful summer pulsated there, shimmering with colors. Straight from the page, the scent of warmed cedar needles wafted into the dank, damp room. This was the Kishanya (The Pocket). And there, right in the center of the paper window, a young, thirty-year-old Ptyś—with those same stubbornly pursed lips and the same habit of scratching the back of his head—was lazily feeding a sugar cube to a massive bison.
Io-Io watched as the lean, almost young, yet already balding man lazily held out a piece of sugar to the huge bison.
"Grandpa, what in the scarlet flower are you chilling there for?" Io-Io said aloud, examining Ptyś with adolescent mockery.
Across thirty years of time, past an almost different hairstyle and the absence of stern wrinkles, Io-Io immediately recognized his grandfather, back when he didn't yet know he was a Grandpa and thought he had successfully escaped civilization into his cozy Kishanya, catching his zen. Into a wondrous place without kaskali, khikhituns, and other such scum.
Io-Io looked at this idyll, and his youthful anger mixed with endless exhaustion. Ptyś thought he had pulled off a beautiful escape, but Io-Io saw right through this Kishanya: the seams remained unstitched. This selfish paradise was devouring energy from the future. If Grandpa stayed there, the water from the river would leak through the holes into nowhere, the cedars would dry up and turn into dead telegraph deadwood, and to prevent the Blue-Eyed Evil (Likho) from dissolving this entire white house without a trace, he, the grandson, would have to patch this hole in the universe himself.
Io-Io picked up a broken piece of graphite lead and with force, almost tearing through the fibers of time, began scratching a message right over the living summer picture:
"Don't sit around there too long. Even though you escaped from the flophouse for vagrants, it's a bit early for you to settle down completely in the House. The seams are coming apart, Ptyś! Your Kishanya is devouring my future. Get out of there and grab an axe. I have to swim the front crawl at the championships in a week, I need to train, not darn the cosmos after you! The Blue-Eyed Evil is already near; it will dissolve your paradise faster and cleaner than you yourself once bleached out the D's in your grade book with chlorine..."
The mention of chlorine was his personal brand—a caustic bridge between the school toilet of the young Ptyś and the swimming pool of his infuriated grandson.
On the most frayed edge of the page, he vindictively scrawled: "Be afraid..." Then, cooling down a bit and smirking ironically, he added a mischievous note on the back: "Don't be afraid..."
Io-Io firmly gripped this page with its mocking July and ripped it from the binding with a crunch. Without aiming, he hurled the crumpled page straight into the dark, unlit corner of the room—where the shadows were always thicker than the laws of physics dictated.
The page torn from the parchment plunged into the darkness, punching through the layers of existence like a heavy stone punching through the depths of murky water, sending up ripples—first backward, into the narrow, centuries-old dust-choked crevice behind the sofa of the phantom train, where a rotor, appearing from who knows where, would catch it and hurl it even further. Or earlier.
The young man leaned back in his chair and wearily pulled his gym bag toward him. At the exact moment when the paper window finally dissolved into the Seamy Side, Io-Io managed to notice: the young Ptyś suddenly froze in the middle of the veranda, as if catching a fleeting, unearthly scent of chlorine through the thick aroma of cedar needles.
Ptyś
The air in the Kishanya was thick and sweet, like floral honey. The thirty-year-old (or thereabouts) Ptyś stood in the middle of the morning-sun-drenched veranda, feeling like an absolutely happy man who had finally cheated the system. He extended his hand with the sugar cube. A massive muzzle, covered in coarse fur and taking up half the French window, gratefully exhaled a warm "Moo-moo-oo" and reached for the treat.
And at that very moment, the perfect, frozen July glitched.
A sharp drop in pressure hit his ears, as if someone had forcefully slammed a giant door shut. The thick aroma of warmed cedar needles was suddenly torn apart by an alien, sharp scent—the smell of dampness, ozone, and... sterile, caustic chlorine.
Ptyś instinctively jerked his hand back. The sugar clattered onto the unevenly laid laminate flooring and onto a piece of parchment that had somehow appeared under his feet. Ptyś could have sworn there was nothing there just a moment ago. The bison snorted in displeasure, licked the refined sugar off the floor, careful not to touch the piece of paper, and stared questioningly at its host. But Ptyś was no longer noticing him. He slowly bent down and picked up the paper. It had a torn edge, and the text seemed not written, but furiously scratched out by something sharp and hard right over top of some picture.
Ptyś ran his eyes over the uneven, faded-purple lines. His eyebrows crept upward.
"Io-Io..." he read the signature aloud, and this stupid combination of letters sounded like an insult to common sense in the silence of the veranda. "What kind of Io-Io? A toy on a string? A Chinese thermos? Some arrogant scribbler picked a pseudonym and decided to play conspiracy with me? Or is this the blockheads' doing again?"
He tried to snort dismissively, wanting to crumple up this garbage and throw it out the window. Like, who knows how many crazy people wander around the seamy sides of reality. But his eyes clung to the words on their own.
"Don't sit around there too long... The seams are coming apart, Ptyś! Your Kishanya is devouring my future... I have to swim the front crawl at the championships in a week..."
"What the hell kind of swimming?" Ptyś muttered in irritation, pacing the room. "What championships? There are no weeks here at all, it's eternal summer here! And who is supposed to 'fix the world'? Me? I just got away from it!"
He was about to laugh at the absurdity of the message, but then his gaze stumbled upon the next phrase: "...will dissolve your paradise faster and cleaner than you yourself once bleached out the D's in your grade book with chlorine."
Right then, everything went cold inside him.
No one knew about the chlorine. Absolutely no one. It was his personal, shamefully triumphant secret from the sixth grade, when he, locked in the school toilet and choking on the toxic fumes of the bleach, meticulously etched out a 'D' in behavior so that his father wouldn't grab the army belt (well, that's how you're supposed to write about stern fathers—grabbed the belt. In reality, his father had never beaten him with a belt... actually—he suddenly remembered—only once, and even then with the cord from an iron. A black one, in a rubber braiding... br-r-r, we'll talk about that some other time). Two decades had passed, and yet the phantom smell of bleach suddenly hit his nose vividly right now, drowning out the aroma of warmed cedar needles and scorched parchment.
"Right," Ptyś stopped. The vaunted zen that he had so diligently built up around himself was covered with fine, prickly cracks. If someone knew about the chlorine, it meant this someone knew everything about him. And if this someone claimed that the "seams were coming apart"...
The bison stuck its head through the window again and let out its trademark "Moo-moo." But now there was no coziness in this sound. Now it sounded like the beep of a broken alarm clock, reminding him that time is a non-linear thing, and somewhere out there, ahead, he would have to pay for this stolen peace with interest.
Ptyś looked at the torn edge of the page.
"Don't be afraid..." the inscription read.
He flipped the parchment over. On the back, in the same handwriting: "Be afraid..."
Ptyś looked out the window at the top of the cedar tree and, for some reason, tossed into the sky: "Sradvechny Tvarets! Uratuy myane ad boyazi ulasnaha shchastsya..." (Eternal Creator! Save me from the fear of my own happiness...)
The river still meandered among the hills just the same, but it was too late—now its water suddenly seemed too dark at the bottom to him. The sky over the Kishanya was flawlessly blue, but peering closer, he suddenly realized: this blueness was unnatural. It was caustic and saturated, like litmus paper dipped in acid. The Blue-Eyed Evil.
The Private Club Named After Himself had been hacked. And hacked from the inside.
The young Grandpa turned away from the window in bewilderment and scratched the back of his head. He walked over to the corner of the veranda, where, among old buckets and cottage junk, stood a heavy, rust-spotted axe, looking lonely. The very tool that he had dragged here "just in case," hoping that the case would never arrive.
Ptyś picked it up, weighing it in his hand. The axe handle fit into his palm like a glove, answering his grip with a dull, woody heaviness.
"Alright then, swimmer," Ptyś said quietly, staring into nowhere. "Let's see where your seams are coming apart..."
