Илай Колесников
Earlyborn
Chapter 6
He came to the coconut trees really fast, but climbing on them took much time… On the way, he met a same merry fellow as he was himself who, for some reason, caught few butterflies fallen asleep and was going to sell them out now. That fellow had a motor scooter. Dionysius, with the help of the eloquence got from his French mother, managed to deal with a guy to buy a basket dangling on a scooter, to which he promised not to tell the police that he was a witness of something alike to butterfly smuggling. He picked up lots of coconuts in the basket and lost one—as the result, he was compelled to drink the coconut milk so that it would not blot his snow-white T-shirt permanently. Yet the T-shirt became dirty. “No big deal,” cheered up Dionysius reckoned and took off the messy clothing. People in Costa Rica take this for granted more often than in Europe, and almost everywhere you could meet a man with a naked torso or a woman in a bright swimsuit. “I definitely need to put on glasses… A sort of ones a drug baron in American motion pictures has; it will be outstanding. There, on the summit of golden mafia!” Dionysius at once came up with the idea. If you live reckless, life is wonderful, and the inconveniences you experience merely bring you the precious experience. What an interesting surprise—almost always when a person pulls himself together and do not stuck with empty pockets, which is adjacent to the death and the wondrous laziness, almost always a person struggled poverty and had that experience I told you about, once making his way through the true way, would be the more rich and successful, the poorer he was. But wealth is evanescent. This already dawned on Dionysius when we took a half of parents’ money from the chest buried somewhere on the snow-white Costa Rica beach. Of course, soon after that he built a house, almost an English villa, and married a notable young lady. Suddenly, although it happens, there happened a breakdown. The answer to a question “Why?” is still a secret. Probably, the cause was in his indifference to the events and that all was the echo of the past. Dionysius concluded that good life satiated him. “That is the same as with the diet and healthy eating,” he reflected, “absolutely that, since once when you were eating chicken breasts for a month, and suddenly stopped and almost found the meaning of your life in a tiny toast with jam and nuts.” So was with Dionysius when he began eating one toast each day and soon was gone off pleasure. Were his considerations moot? Perhaps. However, Dionysius is a stubborn Frenchman. He abandoned his apartments and decided to lease out them to the tourists, opened a bank account where he deposited the money got from them while letting out; he personally moved there, at the Argentina farm.
The only dream he had was to make his children’s future decent, using the money from that bank account. But using rationally—not as the others did. He did not want to put his children in a private school, where they could have got not under good influence – on the contrary. No, his children would study in a public school in France, wear usual clothes, with no marks of trends and names of brands, they would not play any video games with console all evenings long—would read classic works of literature. He expected his children to enjoy life just when they ate an ice cream after long-lasting walks, in general, so that his children did not attain too much pleasure from life. That being said, Dionysius chose he would not work for hours till the morning. Given such a sum of money, he was not going to note down his job higher than the family in his list of priorities, and they would make it a habit strolling in the park before dinner. His wife and he would be blessed with two or three kids for so splendid a living gladdens. She would not waste her money on plastic surgeries and mink coats, never! If his wife found an appropriate occupation, he would definitely help her to succeed in it… In addition to that, Dionysius would have a sum on his account for expensive gifts. Never would he spend much money for himself. How excited made him this coconut milk! :)
Dionysius went, shaking his wicker basket with the delicacies, which one, oddly enough, may not deem like that. From the sky that was still sunny and clear, as the skin of some not yet ripe orange, fell now, seems, freshly squeezed juice. And that was understandable: the summer in Latin America was often tropical, and as a little boy in Russia would go out to buy some bread and naturally would catch the snowflakes with his tongue, so here the local children ran out once they heard rhythmic strains of rain, coming down like the freshly pressed in a lemon-squeezer juice of a five-star hotel. A fellow who was a butterfly smuggler passed him by and noticed how to take back his basket. The smuggler twigged that the person whom he gave the basket was right at the moment was making the crime not less, maybe more than he himself did (since coconuts were the property of the town whilst butterflies were not), he grabbed the basket from the robber effortlessly as it was when he first gave it to him. Seeing this, Dionysius was not upset. He was not an easily upset person, although he seemed opposite at first glance. Under no circumstances must you believe initial impression. If for no other reason that most interesting people, trying it as the sort of checking your strength for no purpose, never act to show their real potential. The rain started, and even the thread of our speculations could not stop it, nor could they prevent a little boy first came to help his father and earned much money at one go from running into a rack with coconut milk, so scrupulously stored on its shelves. He did it startlingly right in front of Dionysius’s eyes. Dionysius did not expect that turn of events which were just as ones in a film created by a short-sighted director, who did not want them to live up to any expectations, but be estimated by the impulse they brought, by their very existence. Sometimes life, not cinema, is predictable, which means that everyone will reap what they sow, and no one will be afflicted with justice. Dionysius felt unduly pleasant gladness, as after the languor, which appears when you do something complicated and at the same time useful for a long time, immerse yourself entirely at the work and became so exhausted that you want to interrupt it, yet, finally, do not give up and keep working. It happens when you are not aware of how many more seconds or minutes you will endure to beat your record, and when you do not how gradually you may probably improve the situation. This can be compared with the path you stand on to beat the world record. Dionysius felt intuitively that he had to go to a father and a son and put some coconuts, which he could not place into that now stolen basket, so that he found a nook for them in his pockets, next to the family, since a child should not be sad and bothered on the account of the ruined rack. His legs guided him forward with somewhat jet or alien force. Yet it was fate’s will that he caught the look of the father and a boy and no flow of mutual attention in it, which could have lead them to the further coherent action. In other words, there was no collaboration between them that usually happens with you and that wonderful greeter in a perfume shop or at the travel agency. At that very moment the fate seemed to encourage Dionysius to make his own choice. And he made his decision, following one trait of character which he got when the tax inspectorate came to him at his farm. He approached to the family and gave them the coconuts he had in his pockets and which were not theirs. That happened accurately as he wished. He left them as soon as his pockets where empty. The rain was coming down in buckets as everlasting film and touched the numb from the pleasure of the finished deed Dionysius’s face.
Obviously, Dionysius bore in mind that the ticket he bought was left in inspector’s hands—the reason is that Costa Rica is a hospitable country, and here a seller and an inspector is one and the same woman, but as there was no paper to feed into the printer, she promised Dionysius from behind the window to let him board on the plane without the ticket. He being a credulous person who believed in fairness agreed on it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Dionysius could still not be on the plane if it was not that café, the chef of which ordered him a cup of coffee with a bun at no charge. This is the morality of the sixth chapter, my friends. Never have good doings left with no equal ones in return. He was looking through the mad and dust specked silvery window and suddenly he felt that something covered his heart and now was sitting in his heart: it was the dust. While a flight attendant was handing around refreshing beverages, Dionysius thought that it was weird that people who had seats in business class still had not realized that the true power is in humility. Dionysius was in such high spirits now that he asked the nearby passenger, who was a young man with a laptop dressed smart and with that rejection of beauty and fashion which only programmers have, about it. “What is the real might?” Dionysius was not ideal, so he forgot at times about the idiosyncrasy of people. He did not remember that everyone has his own opinion on what the truth is, and no one knows who is certainly right if the truth itself exists. Taking this into consideration, all the people are initially mistaken. In this case, the phrase from the poem “Silentium” by Tyutchev “A thought once uttered is untrue” is absolutely suitable. The young man with a laptop did not answer Dionysius not on the account of misunderstanding or being impolite, but since he was deaf. Then it occurred to our wanderer that he was a right dimwit. After all, the universe is not eternal and imperishable, yet we believe it to be so. Meanwhile people with disabilities have totally their notions about the world and see this world in a different way, hence their own meaning of life opens in front of them. It is hard to get. Flocks of birds flew behind the window.
Chapter 7
It was nearly the first time when Earlyborn got up late, seemingly because she became exhausted at night. Nothing unusual. The young lady was so enthusiastic about making up stories about teeny-weeny people shuttling around that she was doing it till her brother woke up. She wanted to make breakfast—succeeded, straight away brewed an alarm clock and soon dozed off with no mighty under her consciousness. The alarm clock set off but no one listened for it, since it was impossible to hear the alarm clock when it was placed into an electric kettle. Earlyborn was particularly creative about various breakages: out of thousands of places to put the alarm clock in she, sleepy or after some poor sleep, preferred that very container. It was very good that there was no short circuit or something of that kind. As Zhenka was a great prankster too, he took a series of shots depicting his sister from different angles while her snooze; some young ladies would even feel jealous looking at those photos as they did not think of them at their autumn photo sessions. Those pictures were: Earlyborn with the electric kettle, and with her left eye half-open, and with her right one covered with a frying pan – he was satisfied. Zhenka decided to develop the joke and made a quest for his sister to find her phone earlier than he would manage to delete any photo from it, but he put them all into self-deleting. Obviously, Zhenka did not arrive here just to ruffle Earlyborn, but to perk her up slightly, since he saw there was something wrong. He wanted to do that next way. He saw his sister as a sack of potatoes, in which there is probably somehow little tea unmixed with sugar, so that such a state of affairs does not gladden you. However, if you pick the suck for a while, mix tea with sugar and potatoes, potatoes will happen to be middle-sized, and the tea—a little too sugary. So it was roughly that what Zhenka planned to do with Earlyborn. What could he do instead? He was not supposed to be Earlyborn’s personal psychologist, was he not? All the same she would not say a word, but notice that everything is visible, and would withdrew into her shell, back into a lair of affliction and fear, from which she was beckoned by the way of bluff, pressure and the huge surprise effect. Now Zhenka was not to keep something which was already beckoned. Zhenka somehow learned about his sister’s dream to travel following the map of stars (she drew the Ursa Major for this reason) and sketched maybe a dozen of diverse routes, when she was sleeping and the alarm clock was boiling. One of them led through the whole Russia; others, conversely, did not lead across any country—they got round islands and continents. This all lay in one place, and Zhenka expected Earlyborn to be extremely happy, so that it would rejuvenate her. She found her phone and those drawn routes and did not offend—she brightened up and felt so for the rest of the day. Zhenka saw the sparkle in her eyes and thought his efforts were not in vain. She again went away abruptly to continue sleeping, and he had nothing but to accept that that sparkle was simply the reflection of his own sparkle. Her own sparkle was still napping… Earlyborn another time headed for the balcony, seemingly till the dawn.
As it mainly (almost always) happens when you stop waiting for anything, or when you become less demanding in your expectations, there will definitely be an event similar to one which was in the past. There will surely be an event which suggests you to agree with what you already refused. Whether it occurs since you put an end to building hopes and start gazing at the world from different angle or it happens as it happened now? Coming out at the balcony, Earlyborn experienced what made her happy during her years, decades of her youth. You cannot describe that feeling with words. Metaphors are helpless there, as it was the emotion which comes to you if a train that you missed suddenly crawls back to you, or which you bear through after a nightmare when you assure yourself that everybody is alive and it is time to live. Merely because you are like the line x in the coordinate grid, and the sine curve of happiness interweaved with you in harmony. So now you have nothing to do to be delighted for all the time when it is in that phase. Earlyborn looked at the Eiffel Tower as though she looked at an underachiever who contrived to get B for a test and she was now pointing out him mistakes he made, and he realizes that he put a foot wrong. Earlyborn, it seemed, consoled the Tower that the human being does not live forever whilst the Tower—does; she likened the things mentioned to the romantic story, so that the midnight Paris air filled with power, which was a hundred times mightier than the spirit of bright Esenin’s sorrow. Something dawned on Earlyborn this marvelous Paris midnight. She observed those feverish faces that all at once routinely wondered at same things and rejoiced insincerely, bursting with laughter seemed to be poured from cast iron. Those people do not have imagination and, as the result, they have the limited view on the world! It depends on their mental growth and more often such people stop just at gazing in amazement at their idols and do not pay attention at anything else.
She passed her already sleeping brother by, who, with no doubt, did not devote his precious time to these aimless speculations, to take her phone from the phone charger. She flatly unplugged her phone, and an unclear image rotated by 180 degrees appeared on the lock screen with a 72% charge. She had never let her phone be not fully charged, but now she did it and went to the balcony. She counted to ten, looking at hateful to her crescent moon and the annoying Eiffel Tower (as if nobody could invent something more sophisticated for a change!) and, I think, did not see them—she spoke to some supernatural forces of darkness or light as kids do when lying in bed… She exhaled deeply and deleted her Facebook account. And then the Instagram, the Twitter, even the Telegram account—went rogue! Earlyborn raised her hands up and was about to throw away her phone right down from the balcony, like a basketball player (for she was a basketball player in her childhood), yet she heaved backwards, recollected herself rapidly and gently put her phone on a shawl. All at once a sparkle loomed in her eyes, as though a preposterous idea came to her mind; it was that sparkle which Luisian had at the beginning of his doings and Earlyborn’s brother craved to see in his sister. It appears when you do not go to bed for three days. It was like Zhenka shared his light with the sister by his mental wish. Again she passed the doorway by, and the curtains, as house dust mites (if they do exist), were astonished to see her come to the balcony that often: she usually went to the balcony once in the evening, which was the whole life for those creatures.
Earlyborn put on her just a little cold boots, which were not for the weather outdoors (it was in the 20s, dressed in a warm fashionable coat, you name it, a hat with dinosaurs and went just as for a walk, armed with some household appliances. It is needless to hope that she would not be robbed in that clothing, but a reckless person, at times, is worse than a mad bear, and it was good, actually, that no one tried to steal a thing from her hands, since he could get multiple lacerations from blows of a microwave. Hopefully, she did not take a washing machine with her. But what am I talking about? Earlyborn decided to sell her lots of unwanted appliances: some were purchased just on account of her wishes, some—by the advice of a designer, but our heroine did not get their use, and was going to give all her possessions to different shops. To which? Oh, do not worry, for Earlyborn already was not a child and had a number of acquaintances in shops. Apparently, few men manage to find fresh flowers even at night on the outskirts of towns. And women, in return, can sell iPhones and household appliances. In the end, Earlyborn disposed from unwanted things and came back home early morning with fragrant croissants, baked out of soft and fresh dough, which was absolutely of excellent quality and, therefore, exorbitant. But Earlyborn made up her mind on the healthcare and concluded not to economize on presents for the brother. Since he was little and helped their father, mother, and, moreover, grandpa to push tractors on occasion, he had a dream to have a car. Despite now he was twenty two and earned good for Irkutsk money, he could not afford so magnificent a thing, because their family was said to be not the most well off one—they were middle-class. So Earlyborn dared to buy him a car, furthermore, the time for them to set off was soon coming, and in Antarctic, it was more likely to have no internet. The brother would be incredibly happy. She sold her possessions in total for one million rubles and went to take extra three millions from her bank account. The time came when I can reveal a secret that suddenly, out of nowhere, a wealthy grandfather appeared—he was virtually a king (a father of her mother’s first husband); his death was sudden too, but he left her quite a heritance and a house in Dubai, which she leased and lived for the money she received. At times she was scared. Money is evil, and despite Earlyborn was all but first woman of fashion in Paris in her street, she clearly comprehended that once you started wasting money, you would not stop; that was now the reason for her to spend only a half of the legacy and live on the profit from the rent in Dubai. She dealt with everything: twenty euro were usually left and she carefully credited her savings account with it and after that she sent a sum to her family, in Russia. Her family was her stepfather. Mother passed away, father too, and that another woman… Generally, in this case “They did not suit each other” is said. To cut a long story short, there had to be enough money to purchase a premium car. Of course, not Porsche, yet here is the point: the more expensive car you buy, the more expensive one you crave to get. As if you took part in a voluntary racing with kids, where you, being a year older than others, wanted to come not in the first ten, but to be merely the first. Earlyborn beautifully wrapped her credit card, put a couple of croissants on it, and saliva of pleasure began to flow if not out of Zhenka’s mouth, then, out of his very heart. She brewed a cup of mango coffee for herself with no sugar, since she watched her already slim enough figure. Earlyborn, by the way, back in the days was a model for covers of fashion magazines and sometimes of man journals. She was a shameless lady, as some granny on a bench in Saratov would describe her. Let it be so: her shamelessness brought her up to ten millions in a year. It seemed, Earlyborn would be truly happy if there were not this feeling of satiation and sadness in the eyes. To get the happiness Earlyborn could marry and after, wrapped in a shawl, sing his son, lying in a bed from IKEA and yawning into an IKEA multicoloured night light, a lullaby with that tenderness, which only a mother, not a young lady, can have.
