The electric light curls in the fog, enshrouding heads of street-lamps like roily yellowish-white nimbuses. The blue evening shows everywhere through the misty veil. Street-lamps draw up in a row, by one throughout suspensions of the long bridge, which evanesce at all, hang half in the air, and appear clear, distinctly and suddenly.
A man, got to the middle of the bridge, becomes himself of a blear and something sinister figure afar: he's young, short and so attenuate that it's a sorry sight. The unfastened grey coat of thick cloth, looked on him normally about a month ago, now sets visibly baggy. The man retracts his head not covered with any headgear in his hunched up shoulders, and buries his hands without gloves in his pockets (there where a sleeve ends and a slit of the pocket begins pale strips of wrists are seen).
Stopped and without looking around, he accurately goes over the balk beyond, clutches at cast-iron rail and leans his entire body far forward, saging on his spread hands out. The man doesn't look down the first time. Sooner or later his hands will weary or his fingers will be frozen, or both of them at once, and then he falls there. This bridge seemed him high reliably; high as a chance to crash on the marble-hard ice so hard, that he will never get back alive. And nobody'll help him with it; that's not pulling out of the loop and not suturing mangled hands for you, dear dogooders.
Is it fearful? Extremely. No less than at other times. But he must. He must die now, so tomorrow... no one else will die because of him.
Even if you're a psycho, even if you're a murderer, even if you have been able to convince yourself of it - you should be enough courage to save lots and lots lives of others at the expense of one yours.
... shouldn't you?
The slack wind blows: it carries sparse snow, walks through the hair, plays with the scarf of the light pale-crimson cloth, not wound round the neck and just thrown over it.
But why are you? Why are you still killing, eh, Zappa? You don't really know how to do it. And you know how to hate, probalby, the worst in this world. And now you, like in childhood, rather will cower, crouch and huddle into a corner, than answer back. And not every child now can be hurt as easily as you.
And you still haven't been killed only because... recently it's appeared somebody to defend scatty you. To tear to pieces with the jaws full of the sharpest teeth, to scrag, to rip eyeballs out the flesh, to toast by high-voltage discharges in the gripping nippers, to penetrate into the body and eat away entrails very swiftly.
It's appeared somebody to protect you from the evil peoplpe.
... But who will protect the people - from you?
The man on the bridge shivers increasingly, his hands grip the rail the more strongly and the more stubbornly.
... But that cute young lady, with shreds of the hairy skin flapped from her head, and with her face cankered to the state of the porous sponge.
... A victorian old man, turned into the firebrand.
... A three-year child cut in very small pieces, with which you farced his leftover... entire parts after.
... A pregnant woman out of whom a fetus was cut and half-eaten.
... A middle-aged gentleman, with his sawn-off head and marks across his neck and a part of his face because you managed to saw his head off far from promptly.
What harm had been done you by - them? What else wrong have they done you, besides that the child, and the old man, and the lady, and the woman, and the gentleman were loved by someone and weren't alone in their lives?
You didn't know anyone of these people and, moreover, didn't even remember, how and by what you killed them. The only thing you remembered very well after each of your murders - that you hated your victims. By another's hatred, not by yours, of course. But this hatred was strong, engrossing and self-forgetful; like the love hung up by the feet.
A long shivery exhalation flies a little way ahead like a white cloud.
Forensic scientists examined bodies were just marveled. An ordinary man, whether he's sane or insane isn't able to gnaw a body so without dog's teeth, isn't able to leave chains of such stings not being a scolopendra, isn't able to give such electric shock without a relevant device with terminals at hand... Oh, you more than anyone would like to believe that it isn't the fault of your hands!... Your hands. And fangs. And dactylognathits. And energetic tentacles.
The public heard about maniac's crimes clamoured, naturally. Only few of them knew what a mild soul and a dovelike heart you have by nature; and working in the charity fund you intended to help people all through your life, not to hurt them. It was lucky for you, that these "few people" turned out not the last people in the society: the leader of the Holy Order, paladin Ky Kiske and a leading light in the medical science doctor Faust. Thanks to them you were alternately sent to prison, to monastery and to a mental health clinic, and not, say, right to a gas chamber.
Because they did want to help you.
"An exorcism", insisted Ky Kiske.
"The haloperidol and the deprivation", claimed doctor Faust ex cathedra.
"Well, how are you going to conjure all these evil spirits out of this poor one by sleep deprivation and injection of antipsychotics!".
"For your god's sake, young man, what the "evil spirits" your exalted imagination has born! I'm afraid but the nonce obviously oversteps the bounds of your competence as we have to deal with the outright recurrent schizophrenia in its paranoid form. At the given moment the disease has been in the phase of the illusional-fantastic derealization and depersonalization, as evidenced by the exacerbation and sensorialization of delusions, the illusional-fantastic perception of the milieu and the beginning of the oniric obfuscation. Even if you don't understand such psychiatric deviations well you nevertheless are not going to deny the obvious, are you? Auditory and visual hallucinations of my patient, falling into the hysteroid state, siderations of the amotivational aggression - that's all of your... "evil spirits"".
"I don't cast doubts on your professionalism, by any manner of means, but you should think about how much souls of people who just about left to die within the walls of your clinic were sanctified in the cathedral of Saints Morgana! Our priest saw this man, and he understands demoniacals not worse than you, doctor, and, on the second thought, - better. Did you watch, just for once, how this young man dribbles, how awfully he is convulsed, how his body bulges in the process, how horribly unhumanly he skirls? What is it like, in your opinion? You'd say it is like ordinary epilepsy or catalepsy?!"
"I'd say that it is like a new kind of the recurrent schizophrenia, which needs further investigation before the treatment has been developed. That's why I must offer the competent medical care for the morbid - and what do you ready to offer? Some words, ritual gestures and spatters of the water high in argentum?"
The wind is getting colder though it doesn't become stronger at the same time.
Of course, you were beyond feeling whimsicality of methods of the assistance lent you. You were the same enthusiastic about the affusion with holy water, countless overshadowings by the sign of the Cross, "Anima Christi" and other plaintive-pompous prayerful chants whirling up the somber vaults of the cathedral, and injections, strait-jackets, insulin comas and conversations with a doctor with the gentle-creepy voice. Wherein it seems, that you alone could hear dog's growl from under your hospital bed: it was low and became the more silent, but menacing and tracing nerves like the ribbed washboard perceptibly with its roars. You alone could notice gray ghosts moving about among columns of the cathedral and trying to free themselves from under the belts and bindings.
They - didn't like what priests and medics were doing to you.
And yet, finally leaving the monastery, and after, three years hence, - the Mental Health, you wanted so much to believe that you left it cured and normal. Forever. But your belief was betrayed at the last minute literally, when spirits - ALL TOGETHER - suddenly rose from the medical drug (or from the litanium sleeping?) in you, hold by nobody. Led by S-ko in the state of a cold rage. And almost no one was left alive after the disarray you had made in the clinic - nor patients, nor hospital staff, nor security guards. Someone of spirits, it seemed to be headless Raou, crooned in farewell "Medice, cura te iiiiiiiiiiiipsum..." sneeringly, reflecting in head physician's glazed eyes.
The last spirit who came back to your body was your own. On the outskirts of the city.
The fog dissolves almost completely, showing plain white ice, without a mark on it. It is so far below, that it seems to be even near.
It's a pity that neither officer Kiske, nor doctor Faust could appreciate your humble contribution to efforts to find some solution to this problem. Now you do understand that you knew better than all of them what should be done with you. And if they knew the same - the decency and the honor were the hidrance for one and a professional curiosity and a passionate for experiments - hence it's not any good of all their knowledge! Ky found you in the backyard of the monastery, cut the cord upon which you almost managed to hang yourself succesessfully, and yell at you since you "had almost succumbed to the most recreant of mortal sins!". Cuts on the inner side of your elbow were sutured by doctor Faust. With his own hand. And after that he prescribed you, with his own hand, a lot of extra antidepressants.
But now, by a happy coincidence, there is no Ky with his bloody honor, no Faust with his bloody Hippocratic oath - and actually there is not a passer-by. What a good moment, what a great chance to put the end of all these. No more madness. No more murders. No more... another's hatred. Tomorrow - no one else will die because of you.
In his mind realized that the things are going badly images start to streak rabidly: a copper crucifix at the head of the bed, in the pale morning light; mother's hand hung from the bloodied table somehow very long; Ky Kiske's face, serious and sympathetic at the same time; shards of the mirror, in each of which is a dog, black, ragged and waiting to pounce and bite.
At some point Zappa feel that he really fall the more forwards and down. His head swam the more, when he squeezed his eyes, unnecessarily. Before his squeezed eyes the thick ice below is cracking all over, erupting, blowing up with fragments. And the whole abyss of deep silk is waving with folds and wrinkles. It is so deep, that casual snowflakes falling off the balk beneath the feet and disappearing into its curves, seemes to be sharply, contrastly, opaquely white.
"Hide yourself here from other people", scallops of silk are canoodling together, "From other people hide yourself here".
... but Zappa wasn't allowed to save the world well from himself again.
He didn't struggle, not even flinch. If it was someone alive - he would actually fall from the bridge. In surprise. But Zappa had long been accustomed to her touches. And he had realized fully that resisting it threatens with PAIN. Horrible. Superhuman.
Two hands are closing around his hands never parted with the rail, mildly, finger by finger, and indisputably. They grip them, not permitting to stir. After that the owner of dead hands goes on to embrace.
She embraces him like a mother: holding his head close to her, keeping her palms on his forehead, moving them down, on his eyes, turned already wet (Have no fear. I am near you). Like a sister: wraping him in his coat, curving her hands around his shoulders by a gesture like throwing the invisible cloak on (Do not do a thing you will regret later). Like a mistress: laying her hands crosswise on his chest, unfolding her bony-slim fingers, pressing him back into the iron pattern of the rail (You are mine, indisputably mine. I won't send you away to any.)
The woman who once was able to replace the whole world for one and to steal it from another. Who became the meaning of life for one and the curse of life for another.
Her long hair, black like an ash of smoldering ruins, as if it had been burned of its ginger flame, mixed with his brown hair of his temple, some strands flew down on his shoulder. Her hands sweep him under his neck, put his elbows together and pull him to her, making his body arch like a bow.
Step back over the edge.