Chapter 36

For a few seconds neither of us said a word.

The huge, indifferent city of London went on with its evening life. Buses shot past with a whoosh, cabs hissed, people hurried home along the pavement with supermarket bags. Somewhere by the entrance to a small park a child laughed loudly.

It was astonishing and eerie to realize how blind and indifferent the world was to a moment that, right now, on this patch of asphalt, was completely breaking someone's life in two.

I was still gripping the yellowed envelope in my palm. I didn't try to open it. A clear intuitive certainty lived inside me: the moment I broke the integrity of that paper, there would be no way back.

"Can I..."

"No," Harris cut me off gently but firmly, before I could finish. "Not now, Michael."

I slowly nodded. And it was strange — a week ago that kind of withholding would have driven me out of my mind. Not now. An understanding of one simple thing was gradually coming to me. This broken man in front of me wasn't playing spy games. He physically could not give me more than he was giving now.

We moved slowly along the Thames embankment. No one proposed this route out loud — we simply, at the same moment, in sync, took the first step toward the river.

Helen walked a little behind, two metres from us. She deliberately kept her distance, not intruding on the space of our silence. As if on some subconscious level she sensed keenly that certain conversations can only happen between two people who have shared one catastrophe.

Harris stopped by the massive stone wall of the embankment. He leaned heavily on it with his forearms and looked at the dark, oily-glinting water.

"Beautiful," he said quietly.

I was surprised by that incongruous, mundane remark.

"What?"

"The city." He swept his chin along the horizon. "London."

I looked ahead too. The leaden, almost black sheet of the Thames. Yellow and neon trails of reflected lamplight. The occasional half-empty tour boat lazily cutting the water.

"Yes," I forced out. "I suppose."

He smiled — very faintly, barely perceptibly.

"You never used to notice this city, Michael."

"What do you mean — used to?"

"You always looked over people's heads, over the rooftops. The next big project, the next ministry contract, another architectural idea. London was functional infrastructure to you. A server. But never a place to live."

I didn't answer. Because it was the pure truth.

After a while Harris suddenly asked, with no transition at all:

"Are you still drinking, Michael?"

The question sounded so ordinary — in the tone of an old acquaintance asking after your health — that at first I didn't immediately grasp what he meant.

"What?"

"Whisky." He didn't turn his head. "Are you still knocking it back in the evenings?"

I was tensely silent. He didn't rush me. Finally I shook my head briefly:

"No."

"For how long?"

"Almost five years. Since the moment I came to in the hospital."

Thomas closed his eyes. Very slowly, he exhaled deeply — as if a heavy concrete slab had been lifted off his chest. And for the first time all evening I saw on his gaunt face a genuine, living relief. Not joy, not triumph. Exactly relief — the kind that comes after a long wait for something unknown.

"Good," he said quietly, almost intimately. "God, how good that is."

"Why are you asking about this right now?"

Harris walked in silence for a long time, looking at his old shoes.

"Because more than anything in the world — all these years — I was afraid that after you ran the procedure you'd start again. That you wouldn't withstand the emptiness inside and would go back to the glass."

I stopped sharply:

"You knew about it? About my drinking?"

He nodded guiltily:

"Of course I knew. We sat together after work too often. You almost never told me anything about yourself — about what was inside you. You just silently poured yourself another double. And another. And another."

Inside, somewhere behind the ribs, something clenched in a painful spasm. A strange, paradoxical sensation — a memory without the memory itself. I didn't see specific faces or interiors before my eyes, but on a purely physiological level I suddenly felt the texture of a heavy oak table under my fingers, the sharp smell of alcohol, the dim gloom of an old pub, and my own suffocating silence.

"Had Anna already left me by then?" I asked, unexpectedly even to myself.

Harris jerked his head up sharply. His inflamed eyes went round. That name — Anna — sounded in the damp air of the embankment as if I had accidentally pushed open a hidden door to a room I had long and firmly forgotten existed.

"How do you..." he broke off and immediately smiled, guiltily, bitterly. "Sorry. I forget sometimes. The damned fog."

"Who is she, Thomas? Who is Anna?"

Harris said nothing. It wasn't a conscious refusal. He looked genuinely at a loss — as if he himself didn't fully know whether he now had the moral right to give me back these pieces of the past.

Finally he said:

"Someone who loved you very much, Michael. And whom, because of your eternal chase after results, you kept waiting. Too long."

I felt Helen behind my back turn away, barely perceptibly, tactfully, fixing her eyes on the lights of the bridge. She made a pointed show of the conversation not concerning her and of hearing nothing. But she heard. Of course she did.

"Is she alive? Does she exist now?"

Harris gave me a long, endlessly sad look:

"I don't know, Michael. Honestly — I don't know. The last time I saw her was still back then, before April. Before everything around us started happening too fast."

We walked on again. Slowly, with no particular destination — the vector of movement was set by the city itself.

"Harris."

"Yes?"

"You keep saying 'we.' We worked, we sat in the bar, we argued. Why?"

He gave a quiet, joyless chuckle:

"Because back then, five years ago, I foolishly thought... that you and I still had a great deal of time ahead of us."

We turned into one of the dark backstreets of Pimlico and came out at an old pub sunk into a basement floor. A small, squat building of darkened red brick. Above the oak door, on rusty chains, a worn sign swayed lazily, its gold lettering half rubbed away.

Harris stopped sharply.

He looked at that door so long and so fixedly that without any words I understood: he had recognized the place.

"We used to come here?"

He nodded silently:

"Almost every Thursday. After the lab closed."

I reached for the door handle. Harris caught my elbow, gently but firmly.

"Don't, Michael. Don't go in there."

"Why?"

He smiled — wearily, like a man who knows exactly the anatomy of old wounds:

"Some places are better remembered closed."

At that moment the heavy door swung open on its own with a dull creak. Out came an elderly, heavyset barman in a starched apron, wiping his hands on a grey towel — to roll an empty beer barrel onto the pavement. He mechanically raised his head, cast a glance at Harris, then shifted it to me.

And froze.

For a few seconds he simply stared, silently, without blinking, at the features of my face in the dim lamplight. Then he said quietly, with a kind of reverent horror:

"God... Mr Lawson? Is it... is it really you?"

Beside me, Helen instantly drew herself up and went still, like a taut string. The barman came closer, shuffling in an old man's way — as if trying to the last to make sure his eyes weren't deceiving him.

"Is it really you? Alive?"

I nodded uncertainly:

"Yes. It's me."

The elderly face suddenly smoothed out, and he smiled — very warmly, homely, like at an old friend returned from an incredibly long journey.

"Good to see you, sir. God, it's been so long since you were here."

I had absolutely no idea what to say. The barman shifted his gaze to Harris, then back to me — and said a sentence that literally stopped the breath inside me:

"Don't worry, Mr Lawson. I keep my word. After that... last evening of yours... I never once, under any circumstances, poured you a single drop of whisky again. Whatever it cost me."

A pause. Long, dense, like a wall.

I slowly shifted my gaze to Harris. He stood absolutely still, head down, looking at the wet asphalt. Then he said, barely audibly:

"You see, Michael... You managed it after all. At least in this."

The barman went back inside, holding the door — and for a second a warm smell of fried meat, beer, and old wood spilled out of the pub. The door closed. The smell hung in the air a few more seconds, then dissolved into the damp of the embankment.

Harris and I stood in silence.

Helen moved a few steps aside — to the embankment parapet — and looked at the Thames. She was far enough that we could not think about her presence. And close enough that I could feel — she was here.

"Thomas," I said at last.

"Yes."

"That last evening. Before you ran the procedure." I paused, choosing my words. "How was it?"

Harris didn't answer for a long time. He looked at the river. Then quietly, almost under his breath:

"You were very calm. That was more frightening than if you'd shouted or been angry. You just sat there, sorting your things and methodically packing them into boxes. As if you were moving house." He stopped. "You did everything yourself. I only watched. I couldn't stop you, Michael. I tried. But by that point I already knew you'd made the decision for good."

"And you let me."

"I stayed with you." There was neither excuse nor self-flagellation in his voice — only a tired, bare truth. "I couldn't leave. If you do something like that to yourself... and there's a person nearby who simply walks away... that's a different betrayal. Worse."

I looked at the dark water. Somewhere far off on the river a light moved slowly — small, red, almost motionless.

"Do you regret it?" I asked.

He didn't answer at once.

"Every day," he said finally. "And not once."

It was a strange answer. But I understood it.

It was at that exact second — not earlier and not later — that a thought pierced me which I had long not let take shape in words.

Until this evening I had thought of the past Michael Lawson as an enemy. As a man who had methodically, with cold engineering precision, built my present life as a cage. Controlled me through notebooks, through the headset, through notes, through the envelope with two words on the front.

But now, looking at this exhausted, fading man beside me — at a man who had kept someone else's envelope for five years and never once opened it, because he'd promised — I saw something else for the first time.

The past Michael was not a monster.

He was a man who knew something about himself that I did not yet know. And who, going off into the dark, did the one thing within his power: he tried to leave enough threads that someone — maybe himself, only a different self — would one day be able to find them.

It wasn't cruelty. It was, perhaps, the last form of care available to him.

"Harris," I called quietly.

He turned.

"Thank you for keeping the envelope."

He looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded — once, briefly, without a word.

That was enough.