I didn’t stop.

He hauled himself up to my room. He examined every last thing: the books, yes, the same ones Mum hung on your door in the string bag. (I read them, you know!) Then the fridge: Why no food? He flicked the bedside light on and off, plonked down unceremoniously on the bed with a groan, got up and paced the room again. He asked suddenly: “What are your dreams about?”

I didn’t answer. I instead stood at the door, angry as a chained dog, and silently waited for him to leave. He just kept walking around the room, poking his beak everywhere.

“Nice set-up here. Not bad. So then, about your dreams?”

I told him the truth.

“I don’t have too many of them, but a good few of the ones I can remember are of me beating you. You get a good thrashing.”

He didn’t seem to take in the words. He spotted a pack of condoms on the shelf. An expression of judgemental disgust, infantile resentment, appeared on his face.

He asked with a grimace for thirty hryvnia to buy a beer. Money in hand, he headed for the door.

“Me,” he said, proudly raising his chin and screwing up his hat, “after your mother died, I never slept with another woman. Unless I had been drinking that is. I couldn’t forget her.”

Chapter 10

A burned book. A mute witch on a pyre.

A burned book is proof certain that our thoughts and feelings are material things that occupy space. A burned book is proof that Time—the era in which the author lived and our own time, which we spend wandering through the labyrinths of other people’s consciousness—is not relative and that it can be represented by a chain of words, characters, and sounds.

This convenient lie has been canon for centuries. I don’t buy it. Consciousness isn’t a mere sequence of thoughts, but a network, a labyrinth. Where the human form might have a plot—birth to death—the same cannot be said of consciousness. I have no way of knowing this for certain, but it is what my intuition tells me. I am certain only that our consciousness is like an inexorable train rushing forward on a rolling railroad and unable to change direction. This lie needs to perish. It’s what prevents us from being at one with the universe.

This is what I was taught: characters must be active, their actions should change the course of the narrative. To hell with that! There are at least two reasons why none of my characters will influence the course of events: first, this only makes sense in the heroic Soviet novel (maybe in others too, but I’ve only read the Soviet ones). There, the hero affects the course of the battle and, thereby, the whole war. That’s not real life. Man is a grain of sand, powerless, carried along by the wave, dragged along the shore. All that remains for him is to try his best to survive. In a real war, in real life, the individual is powerless: it is the same powerlessness that grips us in nightmares. It is this passivity to which we should aspire. This passivity is our first step towards destroying the plot.