Beqa Adamashvili

Translated from Georgian by Tamar Japaridze

Prologue

Death sets his alarm clock for 4:33 a.m.

He had been counting everything since insomnia became his vigilant adversary. First he counted the sheep (ten thousand one hundred and ten!), then the sleepless nights (seven thousand seven hundred and seven!), then the seconds spent on counting the sheep and the sleepless nights (eighteen thousand and three!), then the seconds spent on counting the seconds spent on counting the sheep and the sleepless nights… Suddenly it occurred to him that there were six hundred and twenty(!) other ways of falling asleep besides this futile counting, and decided to try something else.

He thought, he’d better think about nothing, but then realized that thinking of thinking about nothing was already a thought, and felt a persistent ache in his cranium. Next he turned to a volume by Proust hoping to fall asleep from boredom, but soon reckoned that it wasn’t worth his while, as he didn’t want to be in search of lost time later. Neither closing his eyes to all injustice nor imagining the public presentation of the Tokyo telephone directory was of any help. In the end, he waved his wrist bones and finger phalanges despairingly, stared at the wall opposite, and tried to calm himself down by the fact that, all in all, his state was far better than that of the Devil’s who had never once slept in all his days…

…The opposite wall represented a part of Death’s cozy but pretty dead office. On the left there was a door with a huge poster of Jim Morrison – his favorite lead vocalist, a worthy member of his precious collection that was still incomplete. He wanted his collection to consist of twenty-seven unique specimens. When all the twenty-seven were there, he would create the best music band of all time, with big names, equally big performers, and the sequels (such as “Also Like, Haha and Wow” or “Five more months, please”.[1]) to hits of different epochs. But the valuable specimens had to be selected with the accuracy of a jeweler, since the increasing number of willing applicants created a danger to the quality of the future band.

At the corner of the room, right where two walls met, there started an exhibition of myriad wonderful photos (eight thousand seven hundred and forty-five in total number!). All of them depicted him, and the whole thing represented a sort of a summary or rather a chronicle of ‘Death at work’. The remarks inscribed on the edges of the pictures gave a detailed account of his lifetime activities - A Time to Live and a Time to Die:

­

A huge scythe hung on the third wall. It hung diagonally, on two nails. After new technologies had been introduced, Death scarcely utilized it as intended; he mostly used it as a selfie stick or a prop (he was always depicted holding the scythe, you know, and he didn’t want to deceive the expectation of mortals). He was no longer a kid, so to speak, and was tired to death from carrying the scythe on his shoulders. However, he had a scythe-shaped cursor on the monitor of his special device from the company ‘Atropos’, in which he kept numerous (seven thousand four hundred and twenty!) subfolders (‘War’, ‘Cataclysm’, ‘Disease’, ‘Accident’, ‘Old Age’, ‘Terrorism’, ‘Crucifixion’, ‘Darwin Prize’, etc.) and seven billion eight hundred million five hundred thousand three hundred  and twenty files (fancy that!) in a huge  folder named ‘Humankind’. His job was to distribute continuously updated files into subfolders and delete some of them from time to time.

Over the ‘Atropos’ there were shelves full of Terry Pratchett books. To Death’s mind, Terry Pratchett used to write unforgettable books, until he had to be sent to the ‘Alzheimer’ subfolder. Some other novels, too, were written very skillfully by famous authors: Mann, Zusak, Saramago, Christie and many others who tried to acquire immortality by writing about Death, and hence helped to revive his narcissistic library.

Death rubbed his eye sockets (which were staring at the wall) with the thumb and index finger phalanges. His insomnia was caused entirely by psychological factors. He was afraid to fall so hard asleep with fatigue that even the alarm clock could not wake him up. “I must consult a psycho-therapist ASAP”, he decided. The last one he visited in 1939 was Freud. But he didn’t consult him, it was just his duty visit, since the file ‘Sigmund Freud – 1856’ had long been in the subfolder of ‘Severely Sick,’ and it was already the poor man himself who was lying on the couch. “Never mind”, Death calmed himself down. “He was good at discussing sleep, not sleeplessness”. Then he recalled that his insomnia occurred much earlier than his visit to Freud, namely after one occasion when he had to be very vigilant but fell asleep, and the world’s entire history changed dramatically.

Alois was to die during coitus. By all means! Otherwise, the experiment would fail, and Death would be strictly accused of inefficiency by his creators.

That evening Alois drank everything but deadly poison. Acutely intoxicated by alcohol, he even suffered from diplopia: one finger seemed to be two to him, those two seemed four, and four seemed eight. Eventually, it resulted in such an anatomic abnormality, that the poor man had to close his eyes and shake his head to come back to reality. For the same reason, upon returning home, he (having at last found one real door out of sixteen) first saw one Klara, then two, then four, and then eight respectively. So he closed his eyes, shook his head, and before his wife multiplied again, he took her to the bedroom to multiply the number of his family members.

Their coitus was nothing like the sex in romantic movies; it was more like the act of reproduction in documentaries from the series ‘Animal Planet’: Alois puffed like a train in the films of the Lumiere brothers, and Klara was as silent as the same movies.

The lethal heart attack should have started at that very moment.

But alas! Death fell asleep.

A fatal misfortune indeed!

Several minutes later, the act was over and Alois, panting heavily, climbed down from Klara to the bed. At first glance, this was an ordinary night like one thousand and one other nights, but it turned out to be fabulous: wee Adolf defeated his enemies using the blitzkrieg tactics and headed towards his mother's ovum at the speed of light...

… The unpleasant memory not only kept Death fully awake but also made him lose the desire to think about sleep whatever. He stood up, took off his cloak, and examined himself thoroughly and closely in the mirror. “I need to gain weight, I am nothing but bones”, he concluded. Having hung his cloak over the electric chair, he began to think about coveted holidays. He really deserved a good rest after millions of years without a single day off. “Of course He doesn't care… He himself rests on Sundays, anyway”, Death grumbled, and suddenly spotted someone in the dark… Damn’d hallucinations! He rubbed his eye sockets with finger phalanges and scrutinized the darkness in front of him. This time he saw no one there. So he chilled out, lay down and continued to meditate. Time really flew quickly! He remembered Abel very well, as if they met just a century ago. Death was a simple intern those days, and it was too difficult for him to get used to his job… Aw, and how he sweated while chasing Methuselah!.. Then there came that Great Flood. He worked forty days in a row, but one tippler - a carpenter - spoiled his every effort. Recalling the Flood reminded him of the “Titanic”. It was awfully cold that night and Death was chilled to the bone…Brrr… He shivered. Once he witnessed a devastating heat in London: September of that autumn was so hot as if it was on fire… When the image of the blazing fire submerged into the fluid of his subconscious, some new images emerged from it by the law of buoyancy… Archimedes… A hot bath… together with Marat… The warm water felt very pleasant… The sudden feeling of pleasure thrilled the whole of his skeleton. He relaxed.

“I must not sleep!” he thought, and fell asleep almost instantly.

It was about four in the morning.

                            Another Prologue

As Memento Mori awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he discovered that he was a fictional character, and that he remembered only three things about himself:

1. He had a strange name – “Memento Mori”;

2. He was a fictional character;

3. He remembered only three things about himself.

It’s difficult indeed to be a character in such an odd situation, especially when you appear right in the prologue from nowhere, knowing nothing about your past or future, and being able to say only a few words in three short phrases about your present. You are surrounded by strange void spaces: if you go to the window and look out of it, you might see vast emptiness. Moreover, you won’t be able to spot the window at all, if the author doesn’t say that the room, in which you happen to be, has four large windows with a wonderful view on the rye field over the crazy cliff, and that the whole of this spot is especially beautiful in the late autumn, when the tree branches resemble gigantic brushes, while leaves look like the drops of coloured paints. The author should also say something like ‘it’s a wonderful experience to watch heffalumps and woozles floating by the south window’, and so on and so forth. But the thing is that Memento Mori won’t go to the window, as he thinks that description of the nature is always pretty unnatural. By and large, he thinks that one living tree is much more important than the whole forest described on many pages for which the very tree has been cut down. Anyway, let me remind you that Memento Mori still doesn’t know anything about what he knows or thinks apart from what has already been said about him. Neither does he know what will be said further.

And yet, unlike him, the majority of characters usually never realize that they are characters, and that even their simple decisions, such as what to have for supper, for instance, are cooked in another person’s mind. There is nothing extraordinary in such naivety. Imagine a stranger coming up to you and asserting that actually the Earth is nothing but a fictional planet from a book  by an inhabitant of the planet Kimkardash[2], and that in reality you, too, don’t exist either. Would you believe it? Of course you wouldn’t.

As for Memento Mori, he first found out that he was just a fictional character and only after that he believed it. In the world where a human being can turn into an enormous insect in his sleep, or a huge black cat walking on two legs can ride a tram hanging on it, nothing is impossible. “However”, Memento Mori thought, “if the author always directs the character’s thoughts, then it might be his decision as well to make me think that I can act independently. Therefore, my sense of senselessness of such a character might also be dictated by him”… Well, well. What’s the use of worrying about such trifles when by accepting the idea that you are a fictional character, you acquire a great literary power: you can make the other characters rebel against the author, completely ignore his words, or just travel from book to book. So tell me, for goodness’ sake, who cares whether it all happens at the will of the author or not? No one does! Neither will Memento Mori. The author has died! And the literary critic who first asserted this fact died as well. So Long Live the New Character!

                                                     * * *

Three asterisks in a row usually stand for the phrase ‘time has passed’. That is to say, nothing important happened in Memento Mori’s life between the last line of the previous paragraph and the first line of the following one. He only slept and ate. As nobody feels like reading about the characters that are only sleeping and eating, Memento Mori decided to exchange his laziness and drowsiness for something more impressive. He had an exclusive superpower, let alone everything else, and ignoring this fact (especially in the world full of cruel authors who could kill their characters with one simple sentence) was the same as to forget the password of your own WI-FI. Such an unfair situation needs one superhero at least – Supermento! Mementomori-man! Termimentomori!!!!

Or let it be Memento Mori again.

For several years (which might sound a long period of time, but it can be described in fifteen letters, as you see) he had been reading various books from ‘The Sense of an Ending’ to ‘The Neverending Story’. Then he started skipping from book to book making an effort to save protagonists: he tried to assure Romeo and Juliet that there was no need to turn every problem into a tragedy, because later their problem might seem merely a sweet memory of the past. He also tried to offer the first aid to Ostap Bender while Ippolit Matveyevich was drowning in a river (Bolivar cannot carry double). At times, when the magic penicillin had been already invented, he even visited the Davos sanatorium in secret. Sometimes he managed to triumph over the authors, but some other times the volume of the book created a serious obstacle for him, and struggling through its pages he missed the train of the protagonist. Once he even tried his luck in ‘War and Peace’, but surrendered in no time. He wasn’t able to save the Lisbon girls from ‘The Virgin Suicides’, neither could he succeed with ***Spoiler Alert***[3]… What could he do? He was coping alone with a million other characters. Little wonder he couldn’t manage to save them all, (and there was no need of doing it by the way). He even pushed Moriarty himself at the Reichenbach Fall, and still remembered bewildered face of Sherlock whose razor-sharp mind could not guess from where this Deus Ex Machina came.

Frankly speaking, travelling through the books didn’t prove to be exciting either. True, it was much better than a continuous process of eating and sleeping, but several more paragraphs, and the reader (fed up with so many literary allusions) might close the book with such a sound and fury that Memento Mori would be crushed between pages. The only way to avoid such a terrible misfortune was to start telling a new story… At that very moment, Memento Mori found out something that saved him from the Sword of Damocles very easily: while he was concerned with other problems, someone’s murder had been planned in his own book. The murder had to take place in the morning, at 4:33 sharp!.. Yeah, everything was written clearly in the prologue, except one detail:

Who was to be murdered?

Translated from Georgian by Tamar Japaridze. 

[1] The sequels to the hits “All You Need Is Love” and “Wake Me up When September Ends”.

[2] Kimkardash – a fictional planet in a book by an inhabitant of the planet earth

[3] I mean Randle McMurphy, whom Memento Mori couldn’t save, although (unlike Ken Kesey) he at least tried to.