TENTH - Falling down
Darkness was still descending with terrifying speed, and soon they could barely see each other. Jasmine could only see the outline of the figure next to her, the sound of his breathing and the warmth of his human body and, at least for now, that was enough for her. She grinned nervously. A pleasant male voice next to her asked her why she was smiling. He sounded worried.
"I realized," she said, "how a week ago it seemed like a big problem that I couldn't find shoes that I'd like anywhere in the city. And look at me now!"
"Yes," said a voice next to her, "And I was worried about money. We've always had a problem paying the bills."
"I've always strived for complete control over as many aspects as possible in my life," she continued, as if she was talking to herself, "maybe I'm a control freak. It gets to the point where I'm terribly afraid of flying, just because then someone else decides whether I survive the flight or not. It's not up to me anymore, right? It goes so far that even though I want to be in a relationship with someone, I'm actually avoiding commitment because I know that living together with another human being would take away a lot of control over my life. Isn't that selfish? I think the punishment for that selfishness is catching up with me now. I have no control now. I'm falling deeper and deeper and I don't know how, why or where I'll end up. If there is no passage of time, no physical laws, if there are no rules, then we have no control over our destinies, and we cannot influence them, because we don't know how. This must be hell for people of me.'
"I've never been able to keep complete control of my life," Boris said from the darkness beside her. The van was parked near Mariana's car, because all four of them agreed to just sit in vehicles until they figure out where to go and be ready to start the vehicle if it is really necessary. None of them wanted to leave any human being here to wander helplessly, even if they had shell around their bodies.
"I served in the army when I was nineteen," he continued, "and then I understood what it means to have no control over what happens to you, not even over ordinary daily activities. Everything is determined by someone else. I worked in hospital later and it was even worse. You can see that you can do shit about most life and death situations. When that ended, I realized that in the music business you depend on others too. We always lived insecure lives, we could never plan anything. Eventually you get used to it. You learn not to plan too much, not to hope too much, and you master that way of life. To live from today to tomorrow."
Jasmine weakly leaned back in the seat, feeling the pain from the cut on her stomach spread sideways to her back. She had no control now. She found a place where it was impossible to influence any aspect, not even the weakest course of events, because the results of any action could not be predicted in this place due to the obvious chaos in the physical laws.
Suddenly the van rocked side to side violently. Without thinking, Jasmine and Boris locked the door next to them almost at the same time. Something tapped against the window on Jasmine's side and she screamed, even though there was only darkness outside. A horrified scream came from Mariana's car, parked right next to them. The van rocked once more. She had the impression that the van was gradually falling down, like down the abyss, meter by meter. She turned to Boris, but he was busy trying desperately to start the engine. The engine started to rumble, but wheels were just rolling into emptiness, like there was nothing beneath it.
"It seems we got stuck in the mud or fell into a hole!" Boris cursed. He was still trying to get the vehicle started, but the wheels just kept spinning into nothing. He turned off the engine and leaned back in the seat. Then he took out a lighter and a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. He was then smoking in the relaxed manner of someone who simply accepted the given situation and left it to fate to decide what would happen to them. He suddenly slapped his forehead with his hand.
"Well, of course, I completely forgot! Radio!"
He turned on the ancient radio and there was just static noise, nothing else. Jasmine wanted to try herself, but he stopped her with one movement of his hand. He turned the station pickup knob on both sides all the way, but there was nothing but a static noise. He left the radio on random frequency and sat back in his seat with a cigarette in his mouth and, as it seemed to Jasmine, an irritatingly calm expression on his face.
"What does that mean?" she asked him. The van rocked few times again and seemed to collapse down a little more "What does that mean? That we have no radio reception here? Or are we actually in hell?" But this is what her hell would look like, not his hell.
As he sat silently in almost complete darkness, disturbed only by the tiny flame of his cigarette, he appeared to become more and more still, and his movements became heavier and slower. Finally, he remained sitting quite stiffly with a cigarette burning in his right hand. The van rocked once more, this time much more forcefully, and Jasmine felt that they were unmistakably sinking, somewhere, into an unknown depth. She panicked and grabbed Boris by the upper arm. That touch sent a shiver up her spine like a strong stream of ice water. Instead of her companion, who until a few seconds ago was raising a cigarette to his lips, next to her was a human-sized plaster doll in a perfect sitting position. With a flick of her hand, the doll collapsed against the side window of driver's seat, and Jasmine could now, with eyes accustomed to the darkness, see its blank, plaster face, white bulging eyes, and an etched imitation of a beard beneath beautifully sculpted lips. It was so perfectly smooth sculpted that it almost glowed in the dark. The small, cynical smile at the corner of the doll's lips seemed to be directed at her.
She leaned against the door on her side, trying to get away, to get as far away as possible from that cynical plaster imitation of a human being. This was not possible. There was no way this could happen. As much as she had previously convinced herself that this place was a vortex where physical laws no longer mattered, something like this her mind simply refused to accept. She huddled against the door, almost unconsciously repeating the words like a prayer, saying over and over that this could not be true, that all this could not happen, never and to no one. After a while she slowly calmed down, curled up in her seat as comfortably as the wound on her stomach would allow and closed her eyes hoping that when she opens them she would wake up in her bed and this whole day, from the very beginning, was just a dream, one long, absurd nightmare and that everything would be normal again.
Opening her eyes again was hard, harder than anything she had ever had to do in her life. When she opened her eyelids, for just a few seconds, she was in her bed. Lying in clean sheets, above her was a ceiling lamp with the light turned off, while the light of the street lamps was coming through the window. And that was not all. Not only was she in her room, but she was sure she felt the softness and pleasant coolness of the clean sheets and the warmth of the fluffy blanket around her body. It only took a few seconds before she realized where she really was. The plaster doll, her previous acquaintance, the man with whom she spoke only a few minutes ago and who practically saved her life, was sitting on his seat with a now completely burnt cigarette in his hand. The darkness outside the van was complete and she couldn't see anything through the windows. There were no traces of the other car, even though it was parked on the right side of the van, right next to Jasmine's window. She considered her options. She could start the van and try to drive off somewhere, anywhere. Anything was better than staying in this place. However, she had only driven Yugo so far and wasn't sure she would be able to drive the van. Another problem was the plaster doll. She wasn't sure how to get him out of the driver's seat. She was afraid to touch him. What if she too becomes a plaster doll? What if he damages it and the man was still there...somewhere...inside. In a doll.
For a while she was sitting curled up in her seat, almost afraid to breathe, too frightened to even blink. She was unaware of tears that were gathering in the corners of her eyes, so much that she was surprised when she felt them flowing down her cheeks in streams. Several times, through the mist of tears, she thought she could see her room, felt the softness and safety of the bed, and somewhere inside she wondered if this was a sign of impending madness and maybe the moments at her home are moments of pure deliverance. At one point, she almost laughed out loud. She was always meticulous, orderly, organized, but painfully silent and closed person. She always had her own little, carefully crafted world that she kept under control for so many years. Even if nothing is going right in outside world, or during years when poverty was rampant and inflation broke all records, when crime was growing, during so many wars and miseries in the world, Jasmine kept the peace within her little empire.
As the years passed, fewer and fewer people managed to enter her increasingly more closing, claustrophobic world. Everyone who entered her life was bringing their own laws, their own habits, quirks, their world, their own view of everything, their entropy. Everyone from outside was bringing a certain amount of chaos into Jasmine's world. She could not, or did not want, or was too tired, to try to understand the outside world, to obey its laws. That's why she had her own world. It was difficult to find someone who would understand this partly creepy and partly comforting creation of her mind. It was difficult to find someone who would understand her. People mostly avoided her and that was not unusual. People have always hated everything that they couldn't understand. Oh, Jasmine wasn't so irrational that she didn't realize that she didn't try hard enough to accept other people with their social laws and rules, a way of behaving that fit into the unwritten laws of society, nor was she unaware of her flaws, which sometimes surfaced with terrifying intensity , like a powerful eruption of a volcano, which everyone thought had been extinguished a long time ago. Her refusal to accept social norms could have been laziness and selfishness that did not allow her to make an effort around other people and to adapt, and it could have been sincerity in its purest form, which did not allow her to pretend.
Sitting like that, in the darkness of pure non-existence, Jasmine slowly understood the essence of the vortex. She turned to the plaster figure that was watching her with its empty eyes. Not caring anymore about the logic and meanings of her actions, Jasmine leaned towards him and gently ran her fingers over her plastered lips, parted to receive a cigarette.
"Stay like that and don't move," she told him quietly, "I'm getting out of the van." I'll come back for you later.'
She carefully unlocked the door, opened it and got out of the van. Around her, a cold and damp fog was gathering around, thick and shining like snow. It curled around Jasmine's body like foam. Air was fresh, and significantly colder than it had been before they were locked in the van. The trees were barely visible in the clouds of mist, but the taller parts of the trees emerging from the mist looked somehow different. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness and the fog cleared a little, she realized that everything around her looked different. This was not at all the same place the van had been parked before they had locked themselves in it, before they felt the descent. She crouched next to the van, carefully holding on to the side door, and inspected the wheels. They were dug deep into grayish mud, because there was no road left. That's why they couldn't even start it. The vehicle was stuck. Somewhere in the heights above the mist, the moon stared down at her, pale and green as a corpse's head. Wherever they were, one thing was certain: this was no longer her world. She was stuck in a nightmare.
Then she realized something else, something that should have been horrible, but in a twisted way, like in nightmares, wasn't. Not anymore. She was all alone. Boris sat calmly in the van in the form of a dead plaster doll, and Mariana's red car, which was supposed to be parked next to their van, disappeared without a trace.