All that was left of the dream was the sweet sensation of forbidden pleasure. Memories came in fragments. Here were the lab employees in white coats flitting behind armored glass, like a stirred-up anthill. And here was a huge control panel, colorful buttons flickering like a Christmas tree. Actually, father had never taken Grisha to the lab. It was embarrassing to show such a huge loser of a son to his colleagues. Good for nothing, a wuss just like his mother. Not like Istotsky Sr., may he rot in hell. But Grisha had a good imagination, the dream lab was accurate. Supposedly.

In the dream, he was grown up and independent. Such a huge feeling, after waking it no longer fitted inside his body. On his own, no lectures or rules. A person, not a minor appendage of his parents. The dream might have been blurry, but one detail Grisha remembered clearly - how happy he was to tell his old man and his bitch of a research to go fuck themselves. Just hit the button and BOOM! The explosion swelled up without any sound. After it, the sight of the ashes brought an impermissible evil joy. You burned down, bitch, and I will rise from your ashes. You'll be my fertilizer!

After that, to wake up in this reality was merciless at the very least.

The seat belt lock smashed cruelly into his lower back. The muscles had become numb, so why were not the sensations in them gone? On the contrary, each bump on the lousy "Yekaterinburg-Almaty" highway echoed in his back and somewhere deep inside his skull. Right between the eyes. Or were they going to Mongolia? Grisha didn't remember, he wasn't really listening. It was his new tactic in communicating with parents - selective hearing. At least no one in his head could stop him from ignoring them. They could go fuck themselves.

His left elbow was pressed in deep between the seats. And his right one slipped down for a thousandth time and hit something stiff in endless bags and suitcases. Maybe a thermos? The mouth had gone dry a long time ago, but the rustle of the bag could attract father's attention. He could drink at the gas station, and if he was lucky the rusty water from the local pipelines would kill him. Did they even have pipelines here at all? Or did the barbarian technology stick at the level of collecting the rainwater? Did it ever rain here?

Stiff legs were propped up by endless sacks, it was impossible to stretch them out properly for the last six hours. How come they had so much stuff? Grisha remembered the rack from the fairy tales for some reason. Or was it some kind of bed? Procrastinating or something like that? Well, he knew for sure who was procrastinating - people who built this shit road.

Nasty sweat ran down his neck and Grisha tried to scratch himself as silently as possible. The size of their old car in which he was trapped with his parents and all their stuff did not allow him to keep a comfortable distance from his relatives. Usually, he preferred to leave at least one closed door and at least 30ft between them. It worked out more or less in the grandpop's apartment, but they didn't live there anymore.

Grisha flared his nostrils and blinked rapidly. He felt dry spit bitter on his tongue. Then he ran his finger over a burr on the door panel. It was sharp. Grandpop's apartment was sold suspiciously fast after his death. As if the old man had already been waiting in the wings. Even the flowers in a crooked bouquet, which Grisha left on a temporary iron tombstone without a photo, did not have time to fade. Now that they'd gone to the middle of nowhere, no one was going to put up a decent headstone. Only this temporary iron piece of shit would remain. And in a couple of years, it would lean over. It would rust and then the earth would swallow it. No one would ever know that there lay Nikolai Bryukhonenko, the kindest grandfather in the whole universe.

Grisha pressed down the plastic burr aggressively. Hell no! If mother wouldn't do it, he would come back and do it himself. And do it right. So that grandpop wouldn't get embarrassed. Was she alright there? Her father died and she didn't give a hoot. Everything was hotsy-totsy. This shit was fucked up.

Looking at it this way, the last month was full of crap, really. Grandpop's neighbor aunty Rina had said something like that. About some eclipse entrance or whatever. For instance, the old man's Unlucky Incident with a Laboratory Assistant. The guy didn't die but turned into a vegetable in a coma. Or more like into jelly. Grisha didn't know what was worse. It was definitely worse for this guy's family because there was always this annoying useless hope. It was like to keep disturbing a wound, not letting it heal. Did this lab dude even have a family? Or was he like the dearest father, just making sure that for others his life was hunky dory - a wife and a teenage son? But if you looked closer it was just one lying festering abscess. Though this fella had an accident while on duty. Were his relatives eligible for some kind of pension for distress in the name of scientific success? Or was it just for military men?

Actually, the old man's impeccability after the accident began to fall down for sure. They didn't exactly fire him; he was the chief of the research center after all. Boss, pitch and toss. But it ended up even worse, they hit his overgrown ego. His most vulnerable part, really, his Achilles' foot. Before a scandal broke out, daddy was transferred into some wretched branch of the institute. Fuckingrad-89 or something, Grisha wasn't listening. He only remembered something about the cozy little town and great climate. Yeah, right.

Another sweat drop ticked down between the shoulder blades. Sand crunched on the teeth. It was banging furiously against this junk of a car and finally found cracks to get in. To put it bluntly, it was not so hard to do. It's surprising how it still went. Real desert miracles - there was a book with this name too. Once they watched an episode of In the World of Animals about the dune habitants with grandpop. Grisha closed his eyes and imagined the car in the center of a rattlesnake knot. Even that company was better than being inside now.

The brakes cracked and Grisha nearly rolled down to the bags. It seemed that the sun decided to burn their retinae so that the foreign agents wouldn't find the way to the closed military town. And who would even look for it. In the middle of nowhere, and they had to use these shit roads. No self-respecting spy would go here. They wouldn't want to scoop out the spine turned into powder out of the underwear. And here is the last gas station in the world, the map didn't load further. There was no more internet.

Some unkempt piece of cardboard with scrawly letters saying: 'The last gas station for further 5600km' floated into the view. Grisha snorted quietly. Is that a glitch in the Matrix? Okay, okay.

The sand crackled under the wheels and the car stopped. The ancient gas pump's display materialized behind the window. Grisha remembered the mechanical scales from the market where he would often go with grandpop, who would always smile and give clumsy compliments to red-cheeked saleswomen with yellow curls under blue caps. They would laugh in response, their golden teeth twinkling. And then they would always give Grisha a treat. 'I hope you'll be a gentleman just like your granddad when you grow up, boy.' Now he wasn't sure who to look up to. His parents would more likely get the Failure of the Millennium award.

Grisha waited for his father to leave the car. There was a metallic rattle, then a dull sound of the cap unscrewing, then the steps getting away. In the rear mirror, he noticed his mom breathing air into her lungs. Lecture time. No, no, no.

"I'll go take a piss," he muttered through clenched teeth and sprang out of the car nearly twisting his sleeping ankle.

"Grisha, sweetheart, watch the language..." he heard closing the door.

Having gotten outside he went behind the gas station building. Its original color was unrecognizable under the red rust stains. Not a straight line in it. How did it even stand and who ever bought anything here? Another desert miracle. There was only crumbling concrete and the smell of heated iron and asphalt. Grisha licked his chapped lips with a rough tongue. In the road cracks dry tufts of some unlucky grass which had the misfortune of growing here were showing. Grisha decided that its life was probably short and full of misery. Although some stems were his waist high. After all, no one really used that road and grass grew right in the middle of it. Who would have thought, huh.

Something was rasping right next to him. Grisha squinted his eyes and fixed his gaze on a bolt on a chain. The structure was as rusty as everything around. The piece of iron was swinging from side to side in the blistering wind. Covering his eyes with a sweaty hand, Grisha managed to read the almost faded sign: WEATHER BOLT.

"Huh?"

Further, there was an instruction. 'If the bolt is wet, it is raining. If the bolt is dry, there is no rain. If the bolt casts a shadow, the weather is fair. If you cannot see the bolt, it is foggy.' Grisha blinked again and shook his head; his hair tumbled down to his shoulders. The midday sun was burning the top of his head. The bolt was casting the tiniest shadow which was crouching cowardly in the scorching heat.

The gas station territory was surrounded by a low fence, crooked like a scoliotic back. The fence reached Grisha's knee. Beyond it was the desert. In this sun-bleached background, there was only one dark spot - a public toilet, hole-above-abyss-style, about 60 feet away. Even at this distance, Grisha could feel the revolting stench of the toilet which the heat only made stronger. Grisha flinched in disgust, pushed his hands into his jeans' pockets, and walked in the opposite direction. Trash scrunched under his feet -- the sure proof that life still remained here. Even if he was busting he would prefer peeing between barchans giving the show for lizards. Or whoever lived here. They definitely watched the episode about deserts. Shit, it all slipped his memory. This way grandpop's face... He felt his fists clenching.

Grisha gave the fence a skeptical look and sat at the spot that was the least likely to pierce his ass with a steel bar, turning his back to the gas station and the car. This way he could pretend that they didn't exist in his life. That he was here by his own choice. That he followed his nose and stopped at a roadside café. To get a brain-freezing soda. And now he would stand up, brush himself down and keep going, free as the wind.

He tried hard to remember but couldn't see grandpop's appearance clearly. The image came and went, slipping through his fingers. Grisha shuffled his sneaker in frustration, a little cloud of dust whirled away to the side. What the fuck, it's only been two weeks! He couldn't already forget...

There were voices in the back, but he ignored them. For some reason, the hospital corridor where he heard the news about the death appeared in his memory painfully vividly. He remembered the strong smell of the aseptic ICU air. The endless dissonant beeping and rustling of devices. The wrinkled uniform of the doctor who was speaking with mother. The blue circles under the red eyes, flattened cap. Some hell of a shift you had, dude.

"My condolences... Admitted with suspected acute pulmonary embolism, which probably was the reason of death... We'll be able to confirm that after the autopsy."

But there was no autopsy. Buried him in no time and let's go! Father insisted, said, they needed to leave immediately. Mother even filled in a form to wrap it up as quickly as possible. They wrapped up everything, sweeping it under the rug. Poof, and there was no family any longer, as if they had never lived there. On one hand, Grisha hated the old man for that. On the other... the second the words "grandpop" and "autopsy" appeared in one sentence, his throat tightened. He wished the sand under him was quick and swallowed him. He didn't ask to deal with all of this.

The voices got louder, the wind finally brought fragments of sentences.

"Get in the car, now!"

"Grisha, sweetheart, please, listen to your father!"

The fingers clenched the warm metal bar, flakes of the paint peeling off dug into his hand. And it was so nice sitting here. Well, he could never sit nicely for long. Karma didn't let him. He wondered what he had done in the past life to end up here. Beat the shit out of a couple of baby pandas?

A shadow crawled over Grisha suddenly. The guts jumped up like on a roller coaster. The hairs on the nape and arms rose. The ears were burning.

"I told you... Are you deaf?! Get in the car, now!"

Grisha had no time to answer. Steel fingers dug into the shoulder and pulled up, turning him around. Angry tears filled his eyes embarrassingly but Grisha had promised himself not to show weakness in front of his father.

"Get off me! I'd better kick the bucket like grandpop! Or fall into a coma like your useless lab guy! This way I wouldn't have to check now if we already hit rock fucking bottom or are we gonna hear a knock from down-"

All of a sudden the head bounced off to the right, he saw stars and an explosion swelled up on his cheek. Grisha stared at the sand unbelievingly, pressing the hand to his face. Father punched him. Wha-

"Lower your hysterics' degree and get in the car, quick. Don't make me say it again."

Only one thought was beating in his head, in time with the cheek pulsating.

"Hate. You. Hate. You. Hate. You."

NOTES:

In the World of Animals is a Soviet and Russian television program dedicated to zoology and wildlife research, especially the habits and habitat of animals. It began airing in 1968 and is still running. It is famous for its opening and charismatic host, Nikolay Drozdov.

* * *

Today we would like to remind you that your wishes have already been fulfilled. You're one small step away from them. Close your eyes and see. What does your Soul* ask of you? Feel it. Then take this tiny step. The next one will lie ahead of it. And then the next one. And the next one.

Time will pass, and you'll look back and will see it. The grand path that made perfect sense from the very beginning, every tiny bit of it. But when you are focused on your next small step, you can't yet see the full picture. Doesn't mean it's not already there. Just relying on your Soul and feelings is actually enough guidance.

Today's message was brought to you by Atomgrad-29 Guild of Realtors. The hunt gets started!

* Only apply this message to you if you have one. Otherwise please contact your local authority for a soul and/or body allocation.