The Observer Effect. November 2

Morning.

The sun here doesn’t warm; it sterilizes, flooding the valley with a harsh, white light. The air is perfectly still. The silence is so thick that you can hear your own heart beating within it. I slept poorly, dreaming of charts and diagrams — the remnants of my Moscow life.

On the plane, while we flew above endless clouds, I re-read my grandfather’s triptych, Meihua. In my youth, this book had felt like a revelation — as if my grandfather, who had lived his entire life in Balashikha, had suddenly seen and understood something completely inaccessible to anyone else around him. China, Japan, alien cities, alien destinies, alien words — back then, it all seemed incredibly important to me, almost mystical. I devoured his descriptions, searching them for answers to my own questions, of which I had far too many at the time. It was intoxicating, like your first taste of cheap wine. I walked around feeling like an initiate, perceiving hidden meanings in the patterns on the wallpaper.

But now… His entire Asia was invented at a kitchen table, somewhere between drinking tea and watching the evening news. He wrote about China and Japan, but in reality, he was writing about himself — about his own fears and hopes that had never found an outlet. My grandfather, clearly, was fascinated by the idea of a vicious infinity, like a snake biting its own tail. He described worlds nested within one another, like matryoshka dolls. A beautiful metaphor for a man who spent his whole life in the exact same apartment. His universe was so small that he had to invent others just to keep from suffocating within it.

At seventeen, books like this seem like a revelation. At forty, they read like a diagnosis. The diagnosis of a man who found his own life far too cramped. But what if that cramped life was also a fiction? What if my grandfather didn’t invent Asia, but invented Balashikha instead?

Since morning, Alexey has been trying to get a satellite lock. Useless. Starlink is behaving strangely. A signal appears on the terminal for a few seconds — strong, steady — and then melts away as if it had never been there. Once, he managed to load the homepage of a news site: it bled onto the screen halfway, like an ancient fresco, and froze into a meaningless jumble of pixels and fragmented headlines — messages that looked more like static. He hasn’t been able to make a single call.

Dmitry Stanislavovich and Natalya Sergeevna are simply overjoyed. “A digital detox, Polina! Finally!” Sergey is whining that he can’t post photos to Instagram. Alexey frowns and silently tinkers with the settings. He is the only one truly unsettled by this. His engineer’s soul cannot tolerate irrational glitches.

As for me… I feel a strange calm. As if the world has simply unplugged us from the network, like a bothersome peripheral device. My grandfather would have said this was the first glitch in the Matrix. But I think it’s just a bad ISP on the roof of the world. And, honestly, I don’t care. Perhaps for the first time in many years.

November 2 →
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River