And then my phone rang. I saw a familiar number, I picked it up, and from the other end I heard a strange sound like human breathing. I spoke, but the caller couldn’t hear me. I listened for a while and finally recognized the sound of a man moving. The mobile’s microphone was picking up the sound of rubbing against the material inside his pocket.

Sanja asked: “Who is it?”

“No one.”

“So why are you listening?”

“I’m listening to the direct broadcast of human being walking.”

This morning a new nurse came. She said it would be good for me to move, to walk around the room. I instantly dug myself out of bed, still plugged into hundreds of wires, and with needles in my veins.

In the bathroom, Sanja carefully washed my whole body with a wet cloth.

Then I walked around the room. It was good to be walking again. This was what the experience of one’s first step was like. I was walking!

But afterward, I was sitting in my chair and suddenly straightened up, and at that moment I felt something burst in my right groin (where they had shaved my private parts the day before with a razor). At the same moment I saw a swelling appear in that place. I pressed the button on my bed to call the nurse, who came quickly and looked at the swelling with interest. She measured my penis, which was lying over the swelling, with the outside edge of her hand and looked. She was concerned, she measured the pulse in my feet and hurried out of the room to find the duty doctor.

Very soon, instead of her and the doctor, a young man appeared, a technician with a strange plastic object. In the center of the square object was a half ball, which he pressed onto the swelling. The ends of the flat board into which the ball was incorporated had holes with a paper string drawn through them. He tied the string around my waist. But he moved slowly, all the time reading the instructions for installing this plastic object whose purpose was, presumably, to read impulses or messages sent by the swelling near my genitals.

And it wasn’t working. He gave up. He laid the plastic object down on the bedside cabinet, and left.

Was I now supposed to act like someone ill?

I didn’t want to.

No.

In Chekhov’s diaries there is a short note, a sketch for a story, about a man who went to the doctor, who examined him and discovered a weakness in his heart.

After that the man changed the way he lived, took medicines, and talked obsessively about his weakness; the whole town knew about his heart, and all the town’s doctors (whom he consulted regularly) talked about his illness. He didn’t marry, he stopped drinking, he always walked slowly and breathed with difficulty.