The Observer Effect. November 4

In the morning, I realized that my grandfather, for all his insight, was wrong about the most important thing.

He would have described our situation using the title of a story by a writer he revered: “The Garden of Forking Paths.” A multitude of futures branching out from every point in the present. But he was wrong. The paths are not forking. They are vanishing, leaving behind only the theoretical possibility of their existence.

The day began with a visit that could have been considered a message from another, parallel world, had it not been obvious that even that world, too, had begun to disintegrate into incoherent fragments. Padma’s parents arrived, leading her by the hand. Their faces were calm, but it was the calm of people who had stopped asking questions and focused on practical tasks. They brought news, gleaned from an old radio receiver hissing like a snake. Martial law had been declared in the country. The reason was unknown. The information was incomplete, corrupted, much like those scraps of news Alexey had managed to download. The main fact, the only undeniable constant in this equation: all transportation had been halted. There would be no bus.

It seemed to me that we all received this fact with a kind of perverse relief. The uncertainty of waiting had been replaced by the certainty of a trap.

Then came the second piece of news, even stranger in its mundanity. Padma’s parents, preparing to head to the regional center on their old, rattling motorcycle for salt and candles, asked us to look after their daughter. “Padma wants to stay with you, if you don’t mind.”

We didn’t object, of course. Dmitry Stanislavovich even tried to joke that now we had an “official guide to local customs.”

There was nothing surprising about this. Children are always drawn to the new. But in the context of what was happening, this act — handing a child over to the care of strangers during a crisis — felt like the passing of the last valuable manuscript from a besieged library. It seemed to me that she hadn’t chosen to stay with us; rather, some higher logic, or the total lack thereof, had left us this artifact, this anchor to reality, which we were now obligated to preserve.

Dmitry Stanislavovich, trying to hold on to the familiar fabric of existence, asked a practical question: “And what about the elder?” The answer was like a report on a failed scientific experiment. The parents had gone to see him in the morning. There was no one in the house. He had vanished. No one saw him leave. In a small village where everyone’s every step is known, a man had simply ceased to exist within the confines of his dwelling. His disappearance wasn’t a Conan Doyle-style mystery. It was a logical paradox. Yesterday’s ritual had not been a diagnosis. It was an annihilation.

After the roar of the motorcycle faded into the distance, leaving us with the silent girl, Sergey, in a fit of proactive despair, proposed the unthinkable to Alexey. To haul the Starlink terminal higher into the mountains. His logic was the logic of a Stone Age man: to see further, you must climb higher.

The ensuing argument between Sergey and Alexey was like a dispute between two scholastics over the nature of angels while the cathedral around them was already being consumed by fire. Alexey, with the patience of a man explaining the laws of thermodynamics to a child, laid out the theory:

“It’s not about altitude, Sergey, it’s about the satellite’s coverage area, its trajectory. We are in a ‘dead zone,’ in a shadow. Taking the terminal a couple of hundred meters higher is like trying to shout at the moon by standing on a chair. It won’t change a thing.”

He was absolutely right from the perspective of his engineering universe. But in our new reality, his correctness was just as meaningless as Sergey’s delusion. They were arguing about the rules of the game, failing to realize that the very board they were playing on was missing.

I looked at them and understood: we were trapped in a labyrinth that had neither entrance nor exit. Just walls, between which all paths abruptly sheared off.

We wait for tomorrow.

November 5 →
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River