Chapter 2

You are Yuri. The man Annette called a deep-sea diver when you first met, because you were just as solitary and impenetrable.

Your life is full of difficult questions. Perhaps because your parents hardly raised you; they only loved you.

Recently, the security guard at your bank branch asked why you had been so serious lately. By “serious,” of course, he meant gloomy.

“Thinking. I have plenty to think about.”

“Does it help?” he asked.

You were surprised, then admitted:

“Not much.”

“Then do not think.”

The guard was the only person who spoke to you without formality. That was simply how it began; you failed to correct him at first, and now it was too late.

“How am I supposed not to think?”

“Just do not. I have not thought for fifteen years. Start thinking and you will stop wanting to live. Everyone who thinks is unhappy...”

You shook your head in bewilderment, but remembered the guard’s words. You tried not to think about anything. It was true that your thoughts vanished into a malignant infinity, and what good did they do?

No, you needed rest. You had even scheduled the second part of your vacation for the near future. You and your wife would go somewhere, get away from all this, recover ... and afterward, who knew, perhaps you would move? Why not abandon everything, including your job?

They never raised your salary, only demanded more. Your bank was small and barely profitable. Could you not find something better? You already disliked entering the branch each morning and seeing the same symbols of the current patriotic mood.

But whom are you deceiving? It is not your job you want to escape. It is yourself. Your wife’s betrayals.

You love her with ever greater cruelty toward yourself, with ever less mercy, the more often you witness them. Again and again, you prove to yourself the enormous strength of your love. Anyone can love for a reason. But to love in spite of...

Never mind.

“I do not think love has a size at all. There is only yes or no,” you decide, and immediately rebuke yourself for thinking.

Better to listen to music, read the news on Telegram...

Passing a statue of an unidentified writer, you open the app.

At once an unexpected enemy blow pierces you. At the top of your list is the channel Local Sluts. The app says there are nineteen new posts.

Damn it, you do not remember subscribing. It must have happened by accident. You want to delete the channel without reading it. There is nothing there but filth ... but your fingers refuse to obey.

Yes, filth. Yet perhaps filth about your wife.

“Better not to think about it,” you whisper the guard’s truth to yourself.

But your finger irresistibly cancels the deletion, traveling the difficult road from truth to certainty. No. Escapism, closing your eyes — that is not for you. You need to see.

And you open the channel.

The latest posts are uninteresting. Someone has uploaded photographs of women he wants to hurt. Someone else has clearly taken pictures from the internet.

But your gaze immediately stops on a post by Omar. It stands out; you can feel that something here is real. It has far more reactions and comments than the others.