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[Alexandr Korol]

or “He’d never eat that,” or “He’d never go talk to someone like that.” But now it was all happening, and they were looking at me like I was still the same person, but there was someone — or something — else inside me. That’s what I noticed back then. And I saw the city differently — I didn’t even recognize it. It felt like I had been gone for fifty years. Like that feeling when you’ve traveled far away for a very long time, and then suddenly come back, and you’re seeing everything so freshly that you almost don’t recognize it. You sort of remember it all, but it’s like you’re a tourist, like it’s the first time. And that’s exactly how I felt after that place of power — as if I was seeing the city for the very first time. And I was young then, and with the kind of mindset I had, and the vocabulary I had at age 20, having just turned 21, I remember calling my mom just to check if she was even real in this world — because it felt like I was in a different world. I called — she answered, so she exists. I said, “Hey, remember we talked a week ago?” She said, “Yes.” I thought, okay, if she remembers everything, then it’s really her, everything’s the same. She asked, “Are you okay?” And I said, “Yeah. I’m just studying the history of St. Petersburg. I am totally in “cosmos.” At that moment, I felt like it was a different city, a different mother, and a different me. And of course, I wrote it all down, but I had no idea back then how it would all later unfold throughout the rest of my volumes of the novel “Alternative History.” That’s what I felt. A completely light, free body — no thoughts, no doubts, total fearlessness, complete confidence. But not that kind of ambitious confidence people often have — on the contrary, it was the most peaceful, tranquil kind. I remember I couldn’t eat — there was no desire to eat or drink anything. And it was hard to sleep, because your attention felt hijacked, like you were in shock, your head heavy, as if your head were inside a pipe or there were a halo above it. And when I lay down to sleep, I couldn’t fall asleep — not because of thoughts, but from shock. That’s a different thing. Some people can’t sleep because they’re overthinking — but here, there were no thoughts at all, yet still, I couldn’t fall asleep. I was just in a kind of “ahhhh,” like I couldn’t even return to the human world — I was still somewhere out there. And I’d sleep for a couple of hours at most, but couldn’t really sleep. And from there, I kept unraveling all of it — all those places of power. And the guys were helping me — I could feel they were in a different rhythm, and they could still use their minds, logic, figure things out — like looking up what’s located where, how far one cathedral is from another,