Alexandr Korol

And you return, sort of, to that same old city of yours after 5 hours, you see the
same familiar people, all the matters — but this is already the world of heaven.
And so you don’t know that before this you weren’t in the world of heaven. And
this is a very important secret — how this is set up, how these transitions happen,
where I go off to and come back. Almost invisible, but it’s there.

You know, what is happening to me, no one knows and sees it — it’s specifically
my life. When we watch some fantastical, magical film, something happens with
the main hero, something befalls him — but usually the world on the earth of
people — they don’t know it and don’t see it. It happens only with you, the main
hero, and people and the world existed as they did and continue to exist. And it’s
so curious that right now I am living through the same thing. Someone right now
has certain worries, someone has others, and I have these. What did I feel these
days? I wasn’t worried about my relatives and my friends because I disappeared.
It’s as if I figured that I’ve given them very much — more than they even deserve.
I left them, as they say, “sitting pretty.” What’s also interesting — if you evaluate
it materially, with the mind — I left behind a small kind of whole empire of mine,
where I am the writer Alexandr Korol, with many kinds of achievements, with
much that I have. And when with one foot you’ve already become a tramp, but you
still remember the past, knowing that you already had and have everything — then
it doesn’t bother you much that you’re a tramp. You only feel a crazy freedom and
happiness — just incredible. And you don’t need anything at all.

It’s so wonderful to be, when you’re nobody, when in people’s eyes you’re an
ordinary person, and when you value the little things. Very unusual. I felt as if I
were either a secret agent, or a ghost, or an alien who ended up among people only
today. That’s the kind of self-feeling I had these days. Of course, I had thoughts:
if I am at the end of the eleventh volume, if it is finished, that’s not how it should
end… Why, if this is the end? Why, if I am leaving, did I not call on — precisely
the important word, “call on” — the readers to spread my novel? After all —
since I’m gone — you could go ahead and distribute it, print it out and send it to
everyone, hand it out to all the tramps, hand it out to some hospitals, launch an
ad campaign, send it to all the stars. And I didn’t ask this — how can that be? Will
people figure it out — will they want to do this, or is there no point in doing this?
Or is it still too early? Or have I not, after all, finished the eleventh volume?