Insomvita. Oleksandr Dan

ends meet, both parents had to take side jobs. Still, money was scarce and they lived very simply. Ice-cream and watermelon were the best desserts that were served for dinner on Sunday or for celebrations.

      Robert invited only his school friend Jovan to his birthday party. His family usually did not have big, noisy parties to celebrate significant dates.

      Quickly devouring the rest of the cake and washing it down with apple juice straight from a three-liter jar, the two friends climbed up into the barn that stood in the shadow of a huge old walnut tree. The roof of the barn was made of tin, and those places that were not protected by the shadow of the tree became as hot as a frying pan under the direct sun, making it impossible to sit there. Nevertheless, the roof was a place where nobody could keep the friends from idling away the hours, casually conversing, singing loudly and dreaming.

      “Jovan, look, there are horses floating in the sky,” Robert said suddenly and laughed, pointing at some white clouds.

      “Coooool!” Jovan said in languid surprise as he watched the clouds pass, but he suddenly perked up and said, “Let’s guess which animals they resemble. The one who finds the most animals, wins!”

      There was, indeed, a huge white cloud in the shape of a floating horse. Its head turned slowly, but the thick mane transformed into the long wide tail of an enormous fish.

      “Horse-fish or fish-horse?” said Robert. He squinted at the sun and…

      That’s where it all happened.

      The blinding sun abruptly caused his eyes to darken. Robert felt light-headed and his ears clogged. He blinked and then glanced around with a look of bewilderment. Next to him sat a stranger. He was telling him something, but Robert couldn’t understand a thing, whether from surprise or the constant ringing in his ears, he could not be certain. In fact, he did not even try to understand the language of the strange boy. It seemed as though he was seeing everything for the first time, everything was odd, unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Robert’s face exhibited genuine surprise.

      He did not understand where he was, on whose roof he sat, or what he was doing there. Robert stood up and inspected his clothes. He was stunned – the clothes were new, as was the barn and, ultimately, the whole yard.

      Robert could not understand what was happening to him. Everything around him was completely unfamiliar. With eyes wide from bewilderment, Robert looked up at the sky.

      There, the horse with a fish tail was still floating proudly with his mane spread across the sky. Rays of sun broke like long threads through it and disappeared again. The horse appeared to be smiling.

      The first thought that came to Robert was that he was delirious. He knew that sunstroke could cause a loss of consciousness, but he could not comprehend how such hallucinations could at once seem so real and unreal. His heart was threatening to burst from his chest. A primal fear was starting to overwhelm him.

      The boy could not help but think that this was some mysterious, fantastic, but strikingly realistic dream. He kept looking around with an open mouth and wide eyes. He wanted to flee that roof to the ground, and without thinking he took a step. The hot roof burned his bare heel like when he was on the beach in Pattaya several days earlier, where his father had taken him and his mother to see the Gulf of Thailand. The sea had been teeming with jellyfish and Robert accidentally stepped on one.

      “Jellyfish. It’s just jellyfish, nothing to worry about,” the doctor had said calmly at the local hospital where the boy was taken with the burning foot. To the child, the word jellyfish meant a sudden stinging pain. The throbbing foot was covered with bright red marks.

      It lasted for just a moment. Feeling a sharp pain, Robert squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath.

      “Jellyfish! It doesn’t look like a horse-fish at all!” Jovan sat next to him laughing loudly. “Look, Robbie, see – there’s the head and there’s some tentacles. Like the one in our biology textbook."

      The snapshots of a distant, hot country disappeared abruptly without a trace, like the surprise Robert’s face bore just a few minutes prior.

      Robert smiled at Jovan and looked at the sky.

      And yet, it was a horse that was floating in the sky, not a jellyfish, he thought.

      Jovan and Robert, two inseparable friends, continued to enjoy looking at the clouds.

      Meanwhile, the horse with a long fish tail continued to float across the sky, smiling.

      Chapter 2

17 December 2011. 09:03 Geneva, Switzerland (Trevor)

      Bright sunlight seeping through a crack in the curtains lit a narrow strip of a wide bed. The rest was covered in darkness. A cell phone on a glass nightstand was persistently ringing. Running water could be heard from the shower. Men’s socks, trousers and women’s underwear were scattered on the floor.

      The phone went silent, but soon started ringing again. Trevor, in a bathrobe and with a towel draped over his head, approached the bed and picked it up.

      "Good morning, Victor… Sure, in an hour… Thanks."

      The line went dead. Amanda’s assistant reminded Trevor about the time of the session.

      Trevor dropped the phone and threw open the curtains. Light broke into the room. The windows of the Beau-Rivage Hotel on Lake Geneva revealed a fountain and the snowy mountain peaks of the Swiss Alps. On the bed, snoring softly, a young girl with long dark hair was sleeping. A gray, silk sheet enveloped her naked body like second skin. Breaking his gaze, Trevor recollected the previous evening at the nightclub he frequented whenever he was in Geneva.

      Last night the club featured some band that was probably quite popular, judging by the two hundred young people who crowded the stage, singing loudly along with the vocalist to the deafening accompaniment of drums.

      The thick blue and yellow beams of projectors caught the faces and hands of the fans in the crowd. Laser chasers were blinding Trevor, so he turned away from the stage and headed to the nearly deserted bar. The young bartender with short, bleached hair and a colorful tattoo took his order and poured a glass of whiskey. A girl sat alone at the other end of the bar, watching Trevor. When their eyes met she smiled and looked down. But then she looked at Trevor again with a tenacious, penetrating, somewhat inquisitive, even defiant look. Trevor slammed down his drink and confidently approached the girl.

      In the morning, he could not remember her name, where she was from or what they had talked about at that club. The several glasses of whiskey he had consumed scorched his memories of that night, melting away all that was unnecessary and leaving only fragmented, disconnected shots of their embraces and kisses. Trevor could not remember how they left the nightclub, how they got to the hotel, to his room, but his memory shamelessly continued to show him moments of their lovemaking. Trevor remembered her as passionate, bathed in sweat in his arms, illuminated by a narrow ray of pale moonlight, and he smiled.

      “Chloe!” The name of the stranger struck him like a bolt out of the blue. “I think that’s what she called herself? Right, it was Chloe.”

      Trevor dressed and opened his wallet. A plastic window revealed an ID with PRESS written in big letters on it. He pulled out four hundred Swiss francs, placed them on the bedside table next to the girl and quickly left the room. Soon, he was outside the hotel on the street.

      Christmas was fast approaching and the weather in Geneva was warm and autumnal. At night the temperature would fall to near freezing, which was unseasonably warm, but for Trevor, who had recently flown in from the Sahara, the weather was quite pleasant. The temperature in the desert at night also rarely rose above 3–4oC.

      Beau-Rivage Hotel to Rue du Cendrier is about a twenty-minute walk along the city’s promenade.

      Trevor felt very agitated before the second session. Until this point, he did not fully understand what had happened to him the day before. Over the past twenty hours, he kept thinking about the office of the psychologist Amanda, listening over and over to his own voice broadcast by the speakers of a small portable recorder, telling an incredible story of a part of his life that nobody knew about, hidden somewhere deep in his subconscious.

      It