The One You Were Before Yourself

I stood before a hole in reality and thought about my toothbrush.

Because the toothbrush was the last thing connecting me to Daniil Reinov, twenty-eight, physicist, Moscow, Shabolovka. The brush, the photograph, the notebook — three objects that held everything that was left of me.

— Ready? — asked Wei Lin.

— Is there such a thing as “ready”?

— No. There’s “decided.”

— Decided.

— Then go.

Kira — at the edge of the clearing. Different face, same gaze. She said goodbye without a nod, a smile or a wish of good luck: luck is the first floor, and on the sixth there’s something else.

Artyom — by a tree. Hands in pockets. Face like stone. Worried — I could see — for the principle: if one leaves, the rest cover. Silently.

Zoya — next to Noma. Two ends of a bridge.

Mom — not on the clearing. Somewhere — nearby. Like the slippers in the hallway twenty-one years ago: behind the door, silent, warm.

I set the backpack on the grass. Looked at it. Small, worn, broken zipper. Everything I had — on the grass. Everything I am — inside me. The separation, for the first time — visible.

I stepped into the passage. Left foot. The right followed, and — found no ground. Not in the sense that I flew. In the sense that ground didn’t exist there as a category. The foot — descended. Onto what — I didn’t have time to learn.

---

(What follows — two accounts. Mine — from the inside. And Kira’s — from the outside. Hers is shorter. I’ll put it first, so the reader has something to hold on to. Because in mine — there’ll be nothing to hold.)

From the outside — I stood. Seventeen minutes (Kira counted; those who love count minutes, because each one could be the last). Stood — in the passage — with eyes open. Looking — nowhere. My contour — blurred. First the fingers — went transparent in the light. Then the hands. Then the air where I stood — shimmered, like above asphalt in the heat.

Artyom stepped forward — by reflex, lunging to cover me and pull me out.

Kira — stopped him. Hand on his forearm. One touch. No words.

Wei Lin — didn’t move.

Snowflakes fell. Past the place where I was. Not onto — but through.

---

From the inside — everything was different.

The first thing to go was the ground under my boots. A second ago I’d felt it — wet grass, cold through the soles, slightly uneven earth under my left heel. Then — flat. Flat and — nothing at all. As if the texture had been removed and the blueprint left.

The air — thickened. Every breath — as if through water. My chest — worked out of habit. Then the habit — faltered. I caught myself not remembering whether I was on the inhale or the exhale. A strange discovery: it turns out “breathing” isn’t an automatic process, it’s a decision. Made — somewhere. Where exactly — I stopped being able to tell.

My mouth — filled with copper. The taste I’d known since third grade, when Mishka Korovin hit me with a pencil case and my nose bled during a math test. The same taste. Only — stronger, and — there was no blood. Because there was no nose either.

My teeth — hummed. Like the resonance of a dentist’s drill, going not into the tooth but into the eardrum, and then — into the place where a person keeps anxious anticipation. The hum — ran along the jaw, along the temporal bone, into the skull. There — it died away. Along with all other sound.

My ears — blocked. Then — unblocked. Then — came a silence that doesn’t exist. I knew it — from the night the aquarium cracked. Back then — it was frightening. Now — informative: one more plug had been pulled out of me, and behind it was exactly what that plug usually hides — the absence of sound as such, without any “quieter” or “louder.”

The skin of my face — first — tightened. Then — went numb. Like a patient after jaw surgery: you know you’re smiling — from the nurse’s look — but you can’t feel it. I tried to run my tongue over my lips — and found no lips. My tongue, as far as I could judge, was absent too.

Fingers. I made a fist. Made? I looked down — the hand was in place, fingers clenched. The brain said: “clenched.” There was no feedback. I no longer knew what a clenched fist feels like. I only knew that I’d clenched it, because I’d decided to.

(I tried the old test. The one traffic cops use to catch drunks: touch the tip of your nose with your index finger, eyes closed. Eyes closed, I raised a finger and brought it toward my nose. One second passed, then another, and I still couldn’t tell whether I’d touched it — the nose was somewhere over there, the finger was somewhere over there too, and whether they’d met was unknown. That’s objective information now: my body had left before I had time to say goodbye to it.)