Вадим Бабенко - The Place of Quarantine

I walked beside it for a few minutes and then, obeying an inexplicable impulse, glanced around stealthily, squeezed in and sat down on a plastic seat. It was cramped in the cabin; my knees squeezed against the front partition, but I put up with it – no one promised it was going to be comfortable. I did all this without any definite aim – not really knowing what I wanted to achieve.

At first, we barely crawled along, stopping occasionally; and then, probably having reached maximum load, the vehicle picked up speed. It wouldn’t be easy to jump out of it now – and I didn’t try, just sat and waited. Little by little the buildings became lower and shabbier, the entire area looking increasingly uninhabited. Afterward, squat blocks, looking like warehouses, stretched out – the road looped between them, moving away from the sea, and suddenly ended in front of a gate. The car had stopped. I knew I needed to seize the moment and get away, but for some reason, I hesitated – and then it was too late.

The gates swung open, and we drove into a large hangar with no lights. I just managed to catch a glimpse of some indistinct structures on both sides – high iron cabinets, narrow stairs between them – and that was it, the doors closed; complete darkness enveloped me. The vehicle started, accelerated and rushed off somewhere. I became frightened, then seriously terrified. My ears were ringing; I could barely stop myself from screaming; then suddenly a whistling signal rang out, the car braked sharply, and I let out a miserable wail, clinging to the seat with all my might. We turned to the right and stopped a minute later. A dim light switched on – it was coming from the ceiling and walls of a small room, more like a chamber in which my automated refuse collector barely fit. Directly in front of the windshield, there was a dark screen – the same as the one in my bedroom. Soon it came to life, and on it appeared an unfamiliar face with no hair or eyebrows and a smooth high forehead.

“Violation of the instructions,” the man on the screen said casually. “Identification. What is your name? What is the name of your roommate? Do you remember the number of your housing unit?”

His lips barely moved; his eyes did not blink. I cleared my throat and answered his questions. It would have been silly to argue or get angry – I was obviously in the wrong. Having listened to me, the man nodded and disappeared from the screen, and in a quarter of an hour, my Nestor arrived in his place.

“I’m curious: you wanted to escape?” he asked and laughed his strange laugh. “The Count of Monte Cristo woke up inside you?”

I was sullenly silent. Nestor gave another giggle and continued, more seriously, “I must say that sneaking into the utility sector is a dangerous thing to do. For your Quarantine entity, it would have been fatal. It’s good we have such a reliable control system here.”

“Okay, I’ll take note,” I muttered with difficulty. For some reason, my tongue would not obey me.

Nestor bowed his head, carefully examining me, and asked, “Do you want to go back? Or maybe you don’t want to go back? However, nothing else is on offer. The procedure is completely clear on that.”

He covered his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fingers and suddenly glared at me again: “Well, what have you decided? I’m talking about my proposal, of course.”

“I’ll give you an answer the day after tomorrow,” I said dryly, feeling his persistence tiring me.

Nestor nodded and said in a bored, grumbling tone, “Well, you’ll have to wait now. It’ll take a while, but you only have yourself to blame.”

The wait in the cramped room really did drag on – even my fake backside seemed to go numb. A few times I tried to call out to somebody, but to no avail – there was no response; the screen remained dead. Only when I got out of the car and tried to go around it, squeezing with difficulty between its frame and the walls, did a mechanical voice start, repeating over and over, “Return to the vehicle. Return to the vehicle…”

I got back in, and the voice went quiet. It was hot, stuffy; fake perspiration even seemed to break out on my back and forehead. I waited and waited and waited. It was unclear to me whether hours or even a day had passed; I had lost all track of time. My sense of place had also collapsed – it was like being suspended in a vacuum, locked in an iron box. Locked in a dungeon… I felt sorry for myself; my eyes were stinging. My fake body almost began to shed fake tears. My understanding – prefixed with a “mis” – of reality, of the entire boundless cosmos, had reached the point of absurdity. I felt, more acutely than ever, the alien nature of space, its vastness, power. I reflected on my measureless smallness and – suddenly I realized this absurdity was precisely what I needed. Within it and out of it something vital was crystallizing – the very thing that I had tried so hard to read in the chaos of the waves, that I struggled to formulate, that I had to decide – for myself, for everyone else, despite and thanks to everyone else. Now I knew what my mind needed to make a final small step – the lack of space, the almost complete immobility. The restraint of my freedom – to the extreme, to the limit toward which the place of Quarantine converged…

The same refuse vehicle drove me back to my block – in the dark, along a completely deserted seafront. I muttered to myself all the way, “You fool, fool!” – embarrassed at my weakness, at my listless stupidity. Yes, it’s easy to lose your way in the blindness of “insight” – especially when you want it yourself. When you are almost happy to give up, surrender to the inevitable, to capitulate before it. And then revel in your small, parochial suffering – from one life to the next. It all seems so simple, and there’s always a door visibly marked with an “Exit” sign, but getting out is not that easy. In your B Object – perhaps as a result of the regrouping, ha-ha – the incompleteness of your actions pulsates stubbornly, even if hopelessness seems to reign. That’s how destiny works, how the Cloud connects your life with the lives of the others. That’s how they – the Cloud and destiny – link all your past with all your future: throwing you rope ladders from impregnable rocks, building hanging bridges without handrails, luring and scaring with bright lights, with pyrotechnics of emotions and feelings, with flashes of local supernovae of your “ego”…

The car braked sharply at my front door. I went up in the elevator, passed through the empty living room and sat down, simply fell into my chair. Sluggishly, I thought to myself that I might be hungry but banished the thought and fell into a dream. I slept like an infant deeply and heavily until the morning.

The next day, Elsa greeted me with an ironic grin. “My counselor said you got lost yesterday,” she said with exaggerated empathy. “They found you somewhere near the dump, he told me… Did you fall into a reverie and go the wrong way? Or were you trying to escape? From me? From your Nestor? From the whole shebang?”

I tried to laugh it off, but my jokes sounded inept. Fortunately, Elsa did not insist on an answer. She put some fresh toast on the table; we quickly ate breakfast and both got on with our own thing.

Nestor was similarly indifferent during our midday session – as if he wasn’t interested in what I would say the next day. Our meeting lasted no time; then I went back to the living room and saw Elsa dressed for a walk – in a light raincoat and with an umbrella in her hands.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s go out and talk? It’s drizzling on the seafront, but what are trifles like that to us…”

Soon we were wandering along the wet pavement of the promenade. Elsa held my arm firmly, looking at me sideways with very serious eyes; then she suddenly asked in practically the same words as Nestor, “So, what have you decided?”