“Did you hear the explosion?” Tamerlan asked me when we sat down on the summer terrace of the coffee shop near our office.
“No. When?” I asked, without any interest. I must have slept badly, or maybe I just wanted to talk about what I had been thinking about all day yesterday.
“At night. I don’t remember the exact time. Whether it was an explosion or a quake.”
“The generation of historians is silent?”
“There was nothing on the morning news.”
“Then it’s an earthquake,” I said, ending the conversation.
Tamerlan was my business partner. Eighteen months ago we had founded a new furniture brand, which we produced ourselves. Our main direction was the workspace — chairs, tables, lamps and everything else. In short, everything for the convenience of working from home. We founded it and the business took off. Sold. At first there was no demand, but through advertising we explained to these primates that it was beautiful, that it was worth spending money on. I don’t know about Tamerlan, but I thought I was creating art through the products we had in our hands. “Your dream desktop” was our slogan. How naive, I thought when I offered it to Tamerlan. But he liked it. He always tells me that every business should be naive, at least in the beginning. Sometimes he says such nonsense that I’ve gotten used to it. He looks at all business through the prism of predators. He was a lion with one goal — to feed the flock. I don’t deal with these concepts, although to be honest, I never tried. It was foreign to me, so foreign that I could watch the morning news while it happened. I had my own job: I was responsible for the operating and financial system of our company. I always wanted to simplify. And Tamerlan’s task was simple: scale this company. Yes, he had a lot of friends in business, and in private life. And I earned mine working with Tamerlan alone.
“That’s the heat!” he said, slightly adjusting his black t-shirt.
“You should dress lighter or something,” I said calmly, with a slight wit. Who wears a black T-shirt when it’s summer outside?
“You know that I love black. And besides, it’s my principle.”
“What kind of principle is it to always wear a black T-shirt?”
“Seriousness,” he answered with enormous, just enormous confidence, as if he was boasting. “This is the personification of seriousness. Everyone will think that I am seriousness itself.”
“I don’t think so. Nowadays people don’t care about your T-shirt. They discuss more anecdotal things than your black T-shirts.”
He joked about this principle. He was good at passing off stupidity as truth. Reading psychological business books and talking about them was an integral part of his free time. He was from a pretty rich family, and I always wondered why such a person always thinks about money. Self-development. Self-hypnosis. Financial independence. Financial grammar. And the last one — without a word. Success. Success. This damn organ has been playing in front of me for a year and a half now. Of course, it’s not for me to judge, although I have already judged. The longed-for success was, of course, his merit; being the support was probably mine. It didn’t matter what he always said, but how disappointingly he acted. He was in charge, I was doing my job, trying to do it professionally. It’s probably funny to hear that from me, someone with no higher education. Although being a nut is interesting too.
“Are you still having problems with your stomach?” he asked when we made our order. He ordered for himself what had lately become desirable for me — coffee and a black muffin. And I just ordered myself warm water. Cold was not allowed.
“Yesterday I was sick all day, almost to the point of nausea. The day before yesterday I couldn’t refuse myself soda. That’s what hurts. It’s nothing — it will hurt and hurt, then it will stop.”
“Go to a doctor!”
“No.”
“OK. You know! Go anyway!”
“No.”
“But I’m worried about you!” he said, taking a sip of hot coffee. I didn’t answer.
“Does this belly bother you? Doesn’t it kill your hope?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, I read that when something hurts you for a long time, a person starts to consider himself unreliable. Well, I meant that you’ve already been sick for quite a long time, that’s why you’re getting headaches — don’t you feel any kind of depression?”
“The only hopelessness for me now is to eat your black muffin, which I thought you were no longer going to eat up.”
“What seduces you?”
“Yes.”
“Then go to the doctor!”
I said nothing again.
We were twenty-three. What self-irony, I thought, to have at this age financial independence and extreme uselessness and hopelessness. He was right about something. As if I had forgotten something, or was missing my life by throwing money around — although as far as I can remember, I opened this door only out of interest, and not for the sake of necessity. This is the propaganda of modern capitalism. Where there is fish, there is water in the pond.
I have never had problems with my stomach. It appeared when I had just moved to the city, when I started living on my own. This is partly because of freedom, I thought at the very beginning. It turned out to be true. Lots of smoking. Indulging in expensive whiskey. Street food, because there was no time to cook for myself — although I cooked with love when I lived with my father and brother. Fuck it all. I recently read that stomach pain may be due to the brain or stress. In short, I don’t know, and I haven’t tried to figure it out. I just removed everything harmful except smoking. For some reason I wouldn’t quit smoking. That’s my word of honor.
“I went to the doctor,” I said, quietly and quickly. I didn’t want to start this conversation at all.
“Well?” Tamerlan caught me looking at him.
“I’m leaving the company. Sorry for the suddenness, but I’m done deciding.”
“Well?” he repeated.
“Because of what? Why are you intriguing?”
“Do you remember that joke I always told?” I asked.
“Fuck, don’t piss me off!” he reacted menacingly. Without blinking even once, he pushed me out of his space with his glance. It would seem that my loved one, my only one, is sitting in front of me — a friend, and also a partner — but I could not return the look. As if in front of me sat a baby from whom something had been taken away. They know how to look not with an offended look, but with an angry one. And they are fully able to look for a long time, because they don’t yet know the feeling of shyness, or they are not afraid that someone will sneak into their soul through a piercing gaze. At this moment I wondered when I had managed to become an adult. Unclear.
“Outside the stomach,” I began. “I have a psychological illness.”
“So what?”
“I’m a sick person, that’s what!” I answered.
“So what about this?”
I wanted to hit him at that moment. Why does all the anger stay with me, while he acts completely calm outside? My body never listens to me.
“There is damage in the temporal lobe, which is responsible for memory. Amnesia awaits me soon,” I couldn’t even believe that it was me, repeating it like a doctor.
Tamerlan said nothing. Now I watched his gaze looking for something positive behind me.
“Is treatment possible?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s get treatment!”
“No,” I answered, catching his gaze.
