Long story short.

Had to take two jobs.

The first one: an office, no being late!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! bitch, fuck!!! a rolling chair with a low backrest—totally useless, but that is not the point. You sit down in front of the screen, there is a piece of paper on the desk with many letterz. Many! You pick up the phone receiver and you call, you call. And you say exactly what is scribbl-etched there (on the piece of paper with the letterz). Since I don’t understand what’s on there, I only see the little legs of the letterz, how they dance so that some little letters would charm the other little letters and that exact thing would happen. Long story short. They don’t pay me there, they say: You are out-weeping those letterz with the wrong timbre of speech speed! You will do exactly as told, and then you’ll get the dough, GOT IT???!!!! Albert Tikhonovich Skrumsky (that’s me).

Sooooooooooooooooooooooo.

So, the second job is sweeping yards and clearing trash cans. Well, we can do that. That’s right up my alley! I manage, sometimes scoring a "fine, we take it, now get out of here," which means excellently. And so, once, and twice, and thrice, I rustle along the curb on Staroderevenskaya Street. And right there I see, damn! Rainwater is drain-flowing into a hole under the curb, and there’s somethin’ in there. Well there is, there is, I’m telling you! I go splish with the mop and right onto the sidewalk kablam, the whole puddle shatters apart, even, in horrible terror. Peering from top to bottom I am into this crack, and in there!: soft light from candles, a teeeeeeny-tiny little room, quite modest it is, however, and sitting there are two little humans—naked and terribly skin-and-bony-scrawny. They’re quietly sipping tea there, munch-crunching on cookies (crumbs). They notice me and aren’t particularly surprised. "What do you want?" one says to me in a squeaky little voice. I say: "Are you flooding? I'm from the ZhKS (Housing Comm)! Not flooding, I’m asking?"—I’m asking. They sigh heavily and they say: "Well yeah, we are flooding, what can you do …" And I decided that my goal, if we judge on cosmic scales, is to save the family of "under-curblings!" Right then and there I forge-ot about the jobs, and every rainy day, I, with my hands, hold back the flow with my legs, with my ass, well, as best I can … And it becomes clear. The sun is shining. I come to them with a bag full of crumbs. They go to me, like: "You’re a good one, a good one. Now everything will be otherwise for you. Now you yourself become the 'Otherwiseness.'"

But that’s not the point.

I went on a bender. Sitting alone in the apartment. Destitute junk everywhere. In the crapper, the wardrobe collapsed. The kitchen is empty. Save for the glass containers, empty and full. Sitting, staring into my sock. And I see, inside the ventillational hole in the wall near the ceiling, which is all webbed up by a twisted spider, the neighbor’s face trying to squeeze through the narrow vent-passage. And somehow he manages. Like jelly, his face slithers through, then a shoulder, and his left arm in a padded jacket. He looked … well, like you've died and been rotting away in peace, and then some bastards wake you up, so you crawl back out to the surface—a bit rotten, a bit dead, and very much out of sorts. Shouting at me, he goes: "Neighborly buddy, gimme a hair of the dog, I’m dying, dammit!" And he stretches his hand towards me. In the fridge I found a cold, untouched 0.7L bottle. Climbed onto the furniture, and poured all of that 0.7L right into him. And down from his mop of hair, dead and tiny little demons come tumbling. There are tons of them on him. Rolling out of his ears and his nostrils and his eyebrows. "Out, away with you, go! You mangy, horned creeps!"

And he, having cured his hangover, grabs me by the throat, BAM! And says with this raspy voice: "Here, take my plasticine-ness!"

Well, the point is not in that, but in this.

What came next?

I am rushing to the exit—it’s Moonday.

Must hurry, hurry, call and say: "umblambabu I don’t give a fuck about ali-babu, have a great day, and you too ..."

I step out in my suit, the one that neighbor gave me, I mean, he’s on a bender, so he has no use for it anyway, it’s from some wedding: totally wasted-blue, even the tie. As I was stepping unevenly down all the stairs, I noticed under the shroud of the hallway lamps that the suit felt as if it had become rubber. And the tie too.

And so what?

Well, this: I step out of the paradnaya (the entry hall) looking all grand-parade, all like a glyshch. I look at a tree; an autumn leaf is flying down from it. I throw my arm forward and it stretches out by a meter or a meter and a half!? I catch the leaf in my palm. It is all crimson, like crystal. And I am all blue, I am blue, I am all-powerful! And then I suddenly feel strange, everything around turns red-and-yellow, and then purple-burgundy. And I don’t get it, what time is it right now?? Is it morning or evening? Do I need to go to the office, or what, I can’t wrap my mind around it at all … And the leaf condemns me to commit into a red-and-yellow, purple-burgundy shift. I find myself in a boat manufactured out of my own suit. And me, I’m naked, naked as an own-goal. Around me is a blazing, endless ocean. And the black sky hangs there like a monthly sales quota. The water is burning, the water is burning—could it be made of alcohol by any chance? And there are no oars. And I am not oar-fully cheerful, somehow. I am just waiting for a wave to carry me closer to the strip of light. The one between the sky and the fire. Burning in the distance with a blinding pale light, pale but blinding—but pale nonetheless, NO! Blinding!

But that is not the point.

Squeezed my eyes shut. Opened them.

And I’m at the dacha. All blue, blue as blue can be. Like that dude from the Boomer bubblegum—he’s dead, by the way.

I’m on the second floor, looking out the window, my six hundred square meters of land are right there. Crawling over the fence are the soldiers of some mercenary spec-ops unit. I see a machine gun under the bed. It’s rubber again, goddammit! Oh, for fuck’s sake … I start spraying them with rubber micro-dicks! I’ve got a whole box right next to me stuffed with this filthy shame.

The soldiers shake their fingers at me, and one of them shouts: "That's a criminal offense! Watch it, fucker! You dick-peddling propagandist!" And they vanish.

But what is the point?

Don’t judge … The point is not in this.

Then what?

Then what?

The report!—

Why did you skip work, you jerk?

And why on Fart-day

At the Xerox machine.

You didn’t stand all day?

Well, that's why.