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While melancholy memories were flooding through me, my family had already fully equipped me for my future exploits. Before I knew it, it was evening. All we had left to do was eat dinner and say goodbye. We finished the delicious pizza the robot courier had brought us and called me a cab. I promised to do my first live show on the road: give my daughters a tour of the city they were born in, but hadn’t been to in a very long time. I was sure that my girls would not recognize it; indeed, I doubted whether I would recognize the city myself. After a long and warm embrace, I did get into the snow-white cab that was to take me to my old apartment. I was going back to where it all began.
7
I rode in the cab and kept trying to convince myself that I had made the right decision when I left the zone of the protected city. It’s always unpleasant to leave my comfort zone, especially when you realize that living conditions are now deteriorating with every second, with every meter I move away from Eden. Even though the cab was as comfortable as possible, my soul was scratching at me-no refreshments, no light jazz pouring in as if from nowhere, not even a soft, stitched leather couch could save me. On the one hand, I was very glad to be going home now, to the very place I had only good memories of. In general, the human brain is designed from the start to erase all the bad stuff, leaving only the most tender and pleasant memories. Of course, I remembered that a lot of things had happened there, and even events that would have been better not to have happened at all, but I did not want to think about it, chased the memories away, scrolling through the future again and again.
Suddenly I realized exactly how ridiculous my idea was. What if, in idealizing the memories, I hadn’t considered the fact that I could only make things worse? And at the same time, I knew clearly that I couldn’t turn back, and I didn’t want to. My trip was only supposed to last about twenty minutes, and it started on the insanely dusty Savushkin Street. This district was always windy because of its proximity to the Bay, and when the roads were covered with a few centimeters of dust, the black tornadoes often started dancing wildly here. The only thing that had changed on the positive side was the lack of traffic. I drove along the embankment almost all the way to the end and recognized all kinds of buildings, some I had memories with, but I didn’t have time to manifest them in my memory. In my head, my thoughts were changing as quickly as the landscape outside the window, as if I were watching a personal dialog film, necessarily black and white, and my thoughts were bleak and gray, just as the city had become.
