August 19, 1998
Wednesday
1:00 p.m.
We drove under the bridge, parked, unloaded. Stood facing the gas station.
– The light’s like Hollywood, – she said, looking at the sun. – From here, you’ll start walking on my signal. Don’t rush, be natural, like on the tape.
– Where’s it from?
– The Master passed it along. We don’t have to film it, but... – she hesitated.
– What?
– Better to reshoot it. Nothing replaces the real thing.
– Were you in the sphere? In the blue room?
– Yes.
– Was that the real thing too?
– Idiot, – she wrapped her arms around me and pressed her lips into mine.
As I started to go weak under the force of the kiss, she looked me straight in the eyes and said:
– I’ve loved you for hundreds of years. I sold my soul to the devil for tonight. I love you more than life, and hate you just a little less than I love you.
Letting go of me, leaving me alone, she climbed up onto the bridge, stood beside Zhorik, who aimed the lens at me, and then what?
... she waved her hand
... whispered: «Go.»
I heard it with my heart: «Go, don’t be a coward. Be strong and proud, the way I fell in love with you.»
I waved back, turned, took a step, a second, a third...
Had I burned her at the stake long ago? Had I gone off into the sands because of her? Hundreds of years back? Thousands? Did she hate me for her own love?
How could that be?
You have to pay for everything. For someone else’s love you never noticed. For your own love, the one you dreamed of... Yes! I was the happiest man in the universe. My life had held a spark worth everything!
The screech of brakes, a smear of a car pulled me from my thoughts. Flashes of fire, sending thirty or forty grams of lead into my chest, didn’t stop me – no, they only helped, sketching across my mind, in broad strokes, a bright red backdrop, above which, in a golden glow of light, she soared like a light-winged angel – the only one, otherworldly, still just as unreachable and distant as yesterday, as a hundred, as a thousand, as ten thousand years ago...
