2. The Book of Knowledge. 9. 4. Abreaction

The BOOK of KNOWLEDGE,
a novel by Alexandra Kryuchkova
in the “PLAYING ANOTHER REALITY” series

PART 2. ANOTHER REALITY

DAY 9.

CHAPTER 9.4. ABREACTION

After dinner, RAM announced my literature party. Everyone sat down, and I knew already what I would do before reading my poems. I decided to open my Black Box. In the hall, full of people who had gone through a lot themselves, and each of them had their own pain.

I would have to scroll my life from birth to “here and now”. What I would be able to say out loud meant already passed and let go, but what would be left behind the scenes…

So I began to remember. Step by step. Year by year. Frame by frame. I was consciously inducing my abreaction.

***

December. The snow is falling. Suddenly, there’s lightning in the sky, and thunder is rumbling. I realize what that means. I start weeping, and they are looking at me understanding nothing. I am twelve. We’ve just started our first lesson. The math teacher is looking at me sternly over her glasses.

“My mother has just died… Just now…” I say softly, and the teacher thinks I’ve lost my mind.

We have no second lesson that day. I can go home, but I am scared. My friend and I go to the subway, walking until the third lesson. My mother’s sister appears walking towards us. I know she is supposed to be at work right now, but… We stop and look at each other. Silently. She won’t say anything, but I understand… And we go on walking with my friend to the subway.

December. The snow is falling.

After school I return home. I go to the entrance of the house. The neighbors, standing at the bench, stop talking at the sight of me. Someone is weeping. I don’t stop and silently enter the house. I press the elevator button and enter it. The elevator goes up to the sixth floor. I’m afraid to go out, since I think that the coffin lid should already be there… I force myself to take a step from the elevator into the stairwell. I turn right towards our flat with my eyes closed. I force myself to open my eyes. There is no lid there. I sigh with the hope that it only seemed to me. I ring the doorbell.

Grandma opens the door. All dressed in black. There are a lot of strangers inside. They all are saying something. Someone says, “The girl has come”. I keep silent. They stand in the corridor looking at me. In silence. I want to enter the room where my mother is, but my grandma, standing right in front of the door, keeps it closed and says,

“Wash your hands…”

I still refuse to believe that… I open the door to the bathroom and see the mirror covered with a towel… I immediately step back out. They all are looking at me, and I am slowly sliding down the wall, “MA-MAAAAAAA!!!”

December. The snow is falling outside. I want to howl…

***

Since my mother died, I don’t talk to anyone in this big flat. I am withdrawn into myself. Everyone here is on their own. Everyone is in their own room. Everyone is within themselves. And at school, I always keep quiet, too. They won’t understand anything I can tell them. They play dolls and balls. At home I am tormented by nightmares both in reality and in my dream. The door to the room constantly opens wide, even when all the windows and other doors are closed. I hear footsteps, floorboards creaking, breathing behind me, I see the Man in Black standing by the window. Icons fall on the floor from the walls, although they are nailed down. Neither pins in my clothes nor needles stuck in the door frame help me. I am afraid to fall asleep, since I have terrible dreams, and most of them come true. My mother comes to me in dreams all the time. She says that it’s my grandma who kills everyone. My grandma often complains in the morning, my mother tried to strangled her at night again. My grandma giggles ominously and asks what I see. She knows that I can see.

I get on the windowsill of the wide open window. I’ve carefully studied all the ways to get out of here. It’s easier through the window. I don’t want to live. I don’t know what for. I don’t know how. I have nowhere to go. I have no one and nothing here left. I don’t know why I didn’t die then. Why did the doctors drag me out of There?

The music is getting louder. I’m looking up in the sky. In a couple of minutes, I’ll step into it. To my mother. Suddenly, I feel the door to the room behind me open. Turning around, I slip on the snow-covered windowsill, and my right hand flies swiftly down the frame. There is a thermometer outside the window that measures the temperature. For a moment, it stops my fall as if pushing me back into the room, and it falls down. Instead of me.

My grandma is silently approaching from behind, “The sixth floor is too low, my dear.”

December. Night. The snow is falling. The street lights are on. I want to howl…

***

December. Night. The snow is falling outside. The street lights are on.

He tries to piss me off. It disturbs him that I am who I am. He wants me to be like everyone else. So that I paint nothing, write nothing and wouldn’t work anywhere. I would make soup. And eat it every day, because there is no money in the house and it will never be if I don’t work. I went to work when I began to faint in the street.

He grabs the vases and plates I’ve painted and throws them at the walls. They shatter. I am silent. He takes my poems and tears them into small pieces in a rage. I am silent. He grabs me and throws me onto the tiled floor in the hallway. Stomps me by his feet. He screams that he wants me to die. I am silent. I try to leave the flat, but he won’t let me. I go to my room. I lay down on the bed facing the wall weeping silently. He comes in, takes a pillow, gets over me and smothers me with the pillow. I can’t breathe. And it seems to me that this time I won’t be able not to breathe for so long. Suffocating, I try to take his iron hands away from my throat. There’s a knife in one of his hands. The blade of the knife slides along my little finger. Blood starts pouring like a river. He takes me and drags me to the balcony. He shouts that he wants me to jump out of the window. He says no one needs me here, I don’t have anyone. He locks me on the balcony. I’m barefoot. In my nightie. He leaves the room and turns off the light.

I am standing on the balcony. The street lights are on. The snow is falling. Night. December. I close my eyes weeping silently. I don’t want to live. I don’t know what for. I don’t know how. I have nowhere to go. I have no one and nothing here. I don’t know why I didn’t die then. Why did the doctors drag me out of There? I am looking up into the sky, “The sixth floor is too low, my dear…” It’s the sixth again. Damn it! I am sinking to the cold concrete floor, and my blood is pouring down. This scar along the little finger on my right hand will remain forever.

December. Night. Snow. Street lights. Balcony. I want to howl…

***

December. Night. Snow. Street lights…

Ray has been silent for weeks now. He is like a somnambulist in a deep hypnotic trance. I am unable to get him out. He is constantly silent. He doesn’t hear me.

“Let’s go away somewhere,” I suggest. “You will forget everything. Please.”

He keeps silent for a long time, then nods his head in agreement, looks at the calendar and silently points to the next week.

My Teacher comes to my office on Friday afternoon. Ray doesn’t know about my Teacher’s arrival. We are sitting with the Teacher in my former and now empty office.

“Alice, you mustn’t go anywhere. You’ll crash. Don’t do it, do you hear me?”

In the evening I go to Ray. He gives me a strange look and says in a voice that is not his own, “What did he say to you?”

“Who?”

“What did he say to you?”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

I am silent. Ray takes me by the shoulders and shakes me shouting, “WHAT DID HE SAY TO YOU?”

“That everything will be fine,” I answer calmly.

Ray lets me go, sits back in his chair, withdrawing into himself.

Hera calls me over the weekend, “You mustn’t go anywhere. You shouldn’t die with him. You have no right to go anywhere with him! Do you understand me?”

I sigh. The future is multivariate. I don’t care what they see. We have to get out of here. This nightmare must end.

On Monday evening, Ray says in a detached voice, “My car’s brakes failed today. I have to take my car to the service center. I can’t drive it anymore.”

I pause and say calmly, “So we’ll go in my car.”

Ray nods in agreement and withdraws into himself again.

On Tuesday, for the first time in months, he finally agrees to wander with me around the city. I know where we’re going. The closer we get to that place, the more often he stops and looks at me suspiciously.

A few houses away, Ray asks in a voice that isn’t his own, “Where are you leading me?”

“I’ll show you a place very dear to me. Please, let’s go. Come on, everything will be fine.”

I take his hand and lead him on. Ray is walking slowly. And then … he sees where I’m leading him, and stops, “I won’t go there.”

“Please, do it for me. Please… We won’t do anything there. We’ll just see something inside.”

I’m dragging him by the hand to the steps. Ray stops at the first one and doesn’t move on.

“I can’t… I don’t want to… I won’t go there… I’ll wait for you here.”

“No. We’ll go there together. I beg you. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I promise we’ll just get in and out. I just want to show you the place I…”

“I won’t go.”

I’m pulling Ray’s hand towards the entrance. He resists.

“I promise you, we’ll just go in and immediately go out through another door. Please, let’s go. Just for two minutes…”

I’m coaxing him like a child. It feels like an eternity.

“Okay,” Ray sighs heavily. “Only if… we leave it right away.”

We enter the Temple where I used to sing as a child. I bring him to my favorite icon, “Seeking for the Dead”. Ray lowers his eyes and pulls my hand towards the exit. We go to the altar to exit through the left door. Ray is almost running towards it. I try to slow him down by squeezing his arm with all my strength and holding him close. Ray says reproachfully, “You promised me!” He opens the door at the left altar gate, bursting out like a bird out of a cage, and with a relief he inhales the street air deeply. I’m following him. Now he is calm. We are slowly and silently walking away.

My godmother calls me in the evening. I am silent. I haven’t spoken to anyone for six months. I don’t know what to say. And how to tell about it. Nobody will understand anything. The godmother invites me to meet with a clairvoyant. On Wednesday morning we meet in a cafe. She silently takes my hand. I haven’t uttered a word, but she tells me even about what Ray will tell me only tomorrow and what will be confirmed by him many, many years later. The clairvoyant says that the only proof of what is happening is a notebook in a brown leather cover, hidden in another city, in a house with a bay window, in the bottom of a chair-bed, next to which there is something like a tree in a tub on the floor.

“You can’t change anything. You’ll never find yourself in that house to find and show him that notebook with the spells written in it. That woman spoke to three powerful sorcerers. You don’t believe me, but try to make him drink at least a sip of Holy Water or church wine, and preferably in front of witnesses.”

Marina is my only witness, and that untouched by him church wine and Holy Water, which Ray replaced several times in a row with ordinary water. But this will happen afterwards. Many years will pass, however, Ray will learn the truth not from me and not from Marina, and he’ll ask me about that nightmarish year, completely erased from his memory.

On Wednesday evening I go to take a gift to the other side of the city. December. Night. The snow is falling. I leave the car on the street and come back in forty-five minutes. And … I stop in the middle of the road. There is no car left there. I’m standing here alone. The snow is falling. The street lights are on. Night. December. I’m looking up into the sky and … I burst into hysterical laughter…

“What happened?” Ray asks me in the morning.

“My car was stolen…”

Looking at me silently, he sighs heavily, having realized that we are not going anywhere. I try to talk to him, and he starts yelling, “Leave me alone! Get away from me! Don’t you understand what’s going on? We can’t be together… I’m… I’m a killer… Don’t get your hands dirty. You will die next to me!”

“I don’t care… Do you want us to leave this country… forever?”

Ray looks at me incredulously.

“I can ask my friends to help me buy a flat there, or a house.”

“Ask…”

In six months, Ray will tell me to announce at home that I’m leaving here. But this won’t happen, because… it will never happen…

We’ll meet in a few years. It will be December. And the snow will be falling. And the street light will be on. I’ll be in a deep hypnotic trance like he was once. Ray won’t ask me anything. He always knows everything in advance. He always knows everything about me. He will hug me kissing me, and then he will say, “You must live, Alice. You are a Great Woman, and you shouldn’t die because of someone who is not worthy of you… If you want, let’s leave.”

Ray will have to pick me up in his car. He’ll have to visit a place for a couple of hours. I’ll be waiting for his call in a cafe. He’ll call me and…

And when I see his phone number on the display, I’ll already know what he’ll say. Ray will say, “Hello…” and will stop for a pause. I’ll sigh and tell him, “Hello…” And then he’ll exhale meaningfully, “My car… has been just stolen…” And we’ll be silent for a long time. And then Ray will quietly ask, “Well, bye then?” And it will be December. And the snow will be falling. And the streets lights will be on. And I’ll want to howl…

***

Of course, what I had told them was far from everything that had surfaced in my memory. But that day I realized what had already been passed, and what remained behind the scenes and still hurt. And then I recited my poems to them. And after that they were all silent for a long time.