Libertionne. Anna Tishchenko
The cavalcade was led by Moopechka, leading by the hand a frail-looking youth in a sumptuous pink jacket decorated with sequins, clearly the curator, and behind him teemed a crowd of reporters, and behind them, the judges. And everything heralded a happy ending, but suddenly a pitiful groan reached Tiberius’s ears. Taking a look at the creator and realizing that he who hesitates is lost, Tiberius turned to the public and slightly raised his voice. It’s true, nothing strengthens the vocal cords and nerves like lecturing in front of young gold-diggers in the mines of academia. Tiberius’s voice easily rose above the hum of the crowd, the background music, and other sounds.
“Ladies and gentlemen! Today the great Naitch calls your attention to a performance called ‘The Artistic Process’! ” And he turned and whispered, “Take your pants off now, you loser.”
The audience applauded, and cameras began clicking. Several hours later, Tiberius and Moopechka were profoundly amused as they watched the news broadcast dedicated to culture: “Today the great Naitch shocked the public with his unusually brave, innovative declaration in the sphere of art. Choosing Venus as the symbol of an aging artifact of a dead and barren classicism, he very passionately and expressively depicted the process of breaking away from the conditionalities of academism…” And so on and so forth.
The Gifts of Bacchus
And then began what Tiberius hated with every fiber of his soul. Evening socializing. One had to go from a bar to a club, then from a club to a bar, everywhere having to drink something and greet someone. At a bar called the Malevolent Hacker, he met Moopechka’s acquaintance Colin, who was a winemaker. In short, Moopechka had friends everywhere. This wonderful creature better than anyone embodied the postulate: “trust everything to God.” His mornings began with a dilemma – where and with whom to have breakfast. And what was interesting was that he always solved this issue, and never paid. And although as someone living on unemployment benefits Moopechka had more money than Tiberius, who worked five days a week, his pockets were always empty within the first few days of the month. And he never knew why. But the reason was fairly clear to Tiberius, from whom Moopechka was always trying to borrow money. The poor guy couldn’t live a single day without buying some kind of “terribly trendy little item.” His apartment, thanks to this lifestyle, closely resembled the warehouse of a fashion store, yet he was always complaining that he had absolutely nothing to wear. This was actually understandable – it was impossible to find anything in that pile of stuff.
“Ah, Colin, hi! Let me introduce you – this is Tiberius, who I’ve told you about so many times. Aren’t you jealous?”
Colin, who up to that moment was reading something intently, jumped up as if he had been stung, and broke into an ecstatic smile.”
“And what is it you are reading?” Moopechka glanced over the shoulder of his friend. “Roquelaure services? What is that?”
All three looked at the advertisement. “Roquelaure services. Just send a text, and you’ll immediately receive the service! Only one hundred thousand dollars. A whole hour offline!”
“I don’t get it,” said Moopechka, scratching his nose, perplexed. “Just to sit for an hour without Internet, one hundred thousand dollars? What’s the big deal?”
“Not just without Internet,” Tiberius said, for the first time in his life looking at an advertisement with interest and affection. “You are completely switched off from the grid. No cameras, no surveillance, you can do anything you want, that is, within the confines of your own apartment.”
“Right. And you want to tell me that the secret police will honestly close their eyes to everything.”
“I don’t think they would bother with such nonsense,” winked the bartender, who, as there were no clients, decided to join the discussion. “They are serious guys. Their job is to kill and torture people, supervise punitive expeditions, investigate secret plots. So, I think you can go ahead and fool around in your own apartment.”
“But weren’t they disbanded?” asked Moopechka, doubtingly. “The secret police? A few years ago? There was some kind of scandal.”
“Yes, I read about it,” said Tiberius absentmindedly. “There was a businessman who committed suicide not entirely on his own, the details came out in the investigation, there was an uproar – something like that, such medieval methods in our humanitarian day and age.”
“And so what?” the bartender shrugged. “They are always being disbanded, then they regroup again. As soon as the noise dies down. This is why I’m sure the Roquelaure service is a safe bet. In our time, a scandal in the press can even destroy monsters like the secret police.”
“But… a hundred thousand! Tibby’s salary is three thousand. And to be honest, I can’t imagine how I’d spend that hour, since everything’s is possible anyway. We live in a free empire.” Moopechka was a bit confused.
“For you,” thought Tiberius. “But not for me. Why, why wasn’t I born like everyone else? Why am I a freak, a pervert, who has to carefully hide his illness?”
“And the name is strange,” snickered Colin.
“Actually, no,” Tiberius objected softly. “‘Roquelaure’ is a black cloak with a hood, used by Venetian men so they wouldn’t be recognized.”
The next twenty minutes were informative. Tiberius, who had a rather outdated concept of winemaking, imagining sun-drenched vineyards and hundred-year-old alpine oak casks, discovered that wine, like the majority of modern-day products, was made at a factory from water and a mixture of interesting chemical substances. And the price of this industrially-produced cocktail was the same for all types of wine. Colin, laughing, added that if one were to increase by a few grams the dosage of two of the components, then the result would be a popular cleaning product found in every apartment.
“One and the same formula, you understand? The rest is the work of designers and PR specialists, as the market needs wine in different price categories. That’s why you never get too drunk from synthetic wine, but you will suffer from the consequences. That’s why I only drink beer,” the celebrated winemaker confided.
“But that’s probably also…”
“Of course. But I don’t know about this.”
And what could one say, knowledge increases sorrow.
“But real alcohol is still sold?”
“We make it. But we make very little, and sell it cheap. So that it’s not prestigious. Almost nobody buys it.
The Labyrinth of the Minotaur
The Gnarly Duck was just exactly like a fashionable club should be. Inside it was cramped, crowded, dark, with strange smells hanging in the air; the noise from the music and the hundreds of voices was so loud that people had to shout, and the light show dazzled the eyes. On the bar countertops, swaying in waves, were the lethargic and somnambulistic body motions of half-naked male and female strippers. Tiberius couldn’t help admiring one of them, who was very young and immaculately built. Her gaze was serene and completely absent. She seemed not to notice where she was and what she was doing, looking off into the distance somewhere above the heads of the dancers. “Exactly like Nausicaa, staring at the sea horizon fruitlessly, knowing that she will never see Odyssey.” No sooner had Tiberius crossed the threshold of the club, when his smartphone began to pester its owner with questions. “Should I show your geolocation? Do you want information about our discounts and special offers?” And so forth, and so on. Tiberius took pleasure in pressing “cancel.” He was in this place for the first time; usually he went to the more democratic “Delirium’, where one could sit quietly at the bar with a glass of wine and boring, guileless sandwiches. Here you had to order a table beforehand, and pay a handsome amount of money in advance. True, this included drinks marked with a star on the menu, a three-minute private dance (Tiberius