When he finally found the time to look back over his life, he found his past sinking into oblivion. “How could this be?” was his first thought. Every time he’d given his past a fleeting glance before returning at once to his drab present, he’d gotten the impression that over there, in his past, everything was in order. He was convinced that in the repository of his memory, the record of his days was intact, and he only needed some time to set the entire sequence of images in mental motion. But now, when he finally found the time, he discovered that life had started to erase its tracks from the other end.

“How sad,” thought the man. There could no longer be any doubt that he was heading straight for the abyss at the edge of which all life ceased. He realized that death no longer lay in ambush some place far, but instead was creeping up stealthily from behind, erasing in its path all traces of existence, and that once it caught up to him, there would be nothing awaiting him in the future. Nor would death leave him any chance to regret anything from his own past. What a pity life went by so quickly! What a pity to live life in such fullness and then be forced to abandon it to oblivion. It’s too bad about that child, too. He felt guilty when the bright image of that innocent child flashed like lightning through his fading memory; he couldn’t bring himself to understand how the child had dissolved into that grim frame of his and vanished at some point. “To hell with your dismal body,” bitterly thought the lonely man.

“Wasn’t it nice when that child wasn’t aware of your existence yet?” he mused. And carefully, not to strain any of his hurting muscles, he lifted himself up, cautiously, gingerly, to make some coffee. He felt that he should have been peeling an apple or fixing his son’s bike instead. Or doing one of many other things that a person in his fifties does around the house. Instead, every action he performed was aimed at serving himself, and, consequently, if not meaningless, was then at least boring. Nobody was there to delight in the peeled and sliced apple arranged in a neat circle on a plate; and nobody was there to admire with filial pride the dexterity of the paternal hand quickly restoring a bicycle to working order. So he had become the sole consumer of what his own efforts produced, the sole taster of the salad he prepared, and his own interlocutor, for he also had started speaking to himself. The sea was supposedly only three hundred feet away, but he could neither feel its breath nor hear its sounds, as it was cut off from the city by a roaring highway.

The village of one-storied houses along the highway looked dead in the afternoon. The locals ventured outside only in cases of dire necessity, and right after sunset, they would yell at their children to go inside; after all, the children had to get some sleep and attend school, all before the heat of the day became intolerable. The house where he lived looked sturdy, and was rather isolated from the world, but baby lizards still managed to find little holes, and they made their way into that veritable paradise of cool air of which man alone was master, the immense space with walls and ceilings, which could have given a million lizards reprieve from the afternoon heat. But the lizards had no luck finding reprieve there, because the man loathed reptiles ever since his childhood, and generally hated slimy things. He couldn’t even force himself to eat pasta until he turned twenty (he also didn’t eat rice, but that was because he followed his older brother’s example), and every time his family sat down to khash,* his mother had to find something else for him in her stores of food. It took him an incredible exertion of willpower to overcome his aversion to khash. But eating khash was unavoidable for a number of reasons. For one, it afforded one the opportunity to get together with friends early on a Sunday morning. Moreover, in the Armenian life, where rituals are sparse, eating khash was the only real ritual that had nothing to do with funerals, the genocide and other, similarly mournful events. That was when he learned to drink vodka. He never figured out why other Southerners ever drank vodka, but he did it to overcome his aversion to khash. Of course, drinking vodka was a whole different aversion of. And he never stopped fishing the tripe out of his khash, the way he used to fish out pieces of onion floating in the soup when he was a child.

He discovered that the human potential for being glued to the television was limitless. It was possible to watch television practically with no interruption, day and night, for weeks on end, snoozing and waking without quitting the couch. Who knew if one day the habit would result in lazy and innocent cretinism or in a dangerously strained string snapping inside him. In any case, losing the ability to think was not advisable. And what better way to think than through writing? As always in such cases, the first thought that runs through the head of a disgraced former general of an insignificant country is the eternal theme of loyalty and betrayal, revolution and counter-revolution. However, his involvement in politics was all too fresh for the residue of disgust to have evaporated and yet no longer fresh enough for his indignant feelings to come bursting out with volcanic power. Nor was he so naïve as to believe that making an example of his life would be a good lesson to anyone. When has history served as a lesson to anyone for it be different this time around? Every generation considers it its inalienable right to learn from its own mistakes, and exploits this right very aggressively. And as soon as one generation has made enough mistakes to be able to extract useful lessons from it, the time arrives for the next generation to be making its mistakes. This left him with the sole option of writing unambitious journal entries. He found it preferable to write poetic descriptions of those inimitable days he spent confined within the four walls than to gradually develop the habit of speaking to himself, all symptoms of which he was already showing. But first, he had to drive away the image of a fourteen-year-old girl scribbling, “Dear diary….” This recurring mage kept him mindful of the imminent danger of turning into a sentimental sap, which didn’t seem better than succumbing to premature senility—and, really, these two were probably different manifestations of the same phenomenon. But for a long time, the pen sat awkwardly in his hands. You get a similar feeling when you shave for the first time or when, after being bed-ridden for a long time, you try to button up your own shirt. This is what happens when year in and year out your assistants make your coffee, write for you, oil your gun, and even charge your phone. In this mode of compulsorily parasitic existence, the only time you use a pen is when you sign your name to documents, and the only time you think is when you approve or reject others’ ideas. At the end, the only time you are left to your own devices is when you are doing those few things that even a general surrounded around the clock by a protective detail can only do in private. And when the man is finally on his own, it takes him a long time to figure out whether his helplessness is a result of aging or being accustomed to idleness. It’s the same for a schoolboy who returns to class after the long summer break to discover that his pen sits awkwardly in his hand, and he can’t focus on the dictation. And the thick-headed teacher doesn’t understand that she should ease the child back into the school year not with a dictation but a free-write essay.

The coffee boiled over again. He stood by the stove, watching over the narrow mouth of the coffee-maker; he didn’t stir for a second, not even to rinse out his coffee cup, but still failed to notice the froth rising to the top.* He was facing a familiar dilemma: should he attend to the spilled coffee before it caked up on the heated enamel of the stove or should he enjoy his coffee first? If he left the mess for later, it would take him longer to clean it up. “And what is your rush, exactly?” sarcastically asked himself the Loner. From time to time, the roaring of a passing truck or the honking of a car reminded him that, despite everything, life still went on outside the walls of his house. The other reminder of that life was the chirping of the sparrows after sunset. Where do the sparrows hide from the heat in the afternoon in this shadeless land? How much longer would he have to live in this country to accept as real tree-shade the shade of the palm tree and to find the chirping of the sparrows amid the palm leaves authentic? He would have found more authentic the chattering of a magpie or some other, more motley-colored bird. The only way he ever pictured the sparrows was them splashing around in puddles of melted snow water in the spring. And if there had to be a tree in the picture he conjured up, then it was a willow or an apricot tree, its moist branches darkened with the promise of pregnant buds. And if you’re picturing sparrows, all skin and bones after weathering the hungry winter months, splashing around in the puddles, you can’t help recalling a boy, with his trouser legs rolled up and with sandals on his bare feet, chasing the sparrows with a willow twig in his hand. “Isn’t your son but a quest for your own childhood?” pondered the Loner as he carefully took the first sip of the scolding-hot coffee. His next challenge was to carry the coffee to his office—or so he had dubbed one of the two rooms he wasn’t using as a bedroom—without spilling it on the way. Should he take the ashtray with him, too, or should he come back to fetch it after safely setting down the coffee? He decided to carry both at once. Of course, he had nowhere to rush, but if you have been conditioned throughout your entire life to maximize the efficiency of your movements, you cannot break the habit even if your days become unending, and your time—limitless. He never learned to balance the coffee cup on a saucer when carrying it to the office. And when, after a few years of trying, he finally figured out that the trick was steadying the cup with one hand and the saucer—with the other, it was already too late. He was irked by how long it took him to realize this. He felt similarly irked but also proud of his son when he so how the barely six-year-old boy was soaping one of his hands by rotating the rectangle of the soapbar in his palm, without the aid of the other hand. No way he could have learned the trick by seeing and remembering it at an age when it took an entire lifetime to learn how to tie one’s shoelaces. But then again, we are blessed with carrying the primates’ adaptation skills in our genes; even if they skip us, we can still pass them on to our children. Anyway, unless somebody was serving him the coffee, he simply didn’t use the saucer. If he considered the occasion momentous, he made the effort to go back to the kitchen for the saucer and deliver it to the coffee cup in the office. Every time he did this, he also emptied the ashtray. “And if it’s really true that your child is your quest for your lost childhood, then what was own your childhood but your parents’ quest for theirs?” thought the Loner. He lit the cigarette at the wrong end. As always, when he did this, his first impulse was to just turn the cigarette around and stick the other end between his lips, and every time he burned his tongue with the hot, melting filter. Only after doing that would he toss the cigarette into the ashtray and light a new one. He had resigned himself to it. “In this case, what is your link in the chain? When does the child become independent of his parents? How old does he have to be for that? How much does he have to learn?” He wondered if with every child, a person relived himself, trying to recollect a certain age, when one knows as much about life as about death – which is to say nothing. It’s that brief period when life seems eternal; as adults, people want to replay this period repeatedly, over and over again, as the real version of their life that never really materialized. It didn’t materialize because life could only exist prior to the consciousness of death. Then, out of nowhere, the consciousness of death arrived, and with it, the fear of the unknown, and then the bewilderment—but why? Nothing that followed this was life, the way it had been before the Moment of Primal Fear; now it was but a continuous effort to cheat death and to grovel before God. The coffee tasted bitter, bitterer than black, unsweetened coffee usually tastes. He thought he should sweeten his day with a piece of sugar, especially since it was the beginning of a new week. In the past eleven months, the only thing that transpired in the endless caravan of days was the alternation of beginning and ending weeks. Not counting, of course, the rising and setting of the sun. But be it a long day or a short day, be it a moonless or moonlit night, one needs to break up the dreary flow of days by punctuating life somehow. The day—after the first cup of coffee; Saturday arriving before Sunday, the easy Tuesday after the difficult Monday. The Earth’s gravitational force might suffice for keeping a man steady and upright, but it certainly isn’t enough to maintain a person’s emotional balance in the face of the unebbing flow of days. The man cannot simply float in the viscous stream of time and slam into the endlessness of the cosmos. “Just enjoy the taste of this cup of coffee,” reasoned the Loner with himself. One should enjoy the feeling that today he’s drinking the same coffee as he drank fifteen years earlier. In truth, it’s probably not the same coffee, and, quite likely, it tastes nothing like what he drank fifteen years ago, but the memory of taste tells him that it is the same. It was well within the realm of possibility that if one day he were to lose his sense of taste, the memory of taste would completely prevent him from realizing this. Similarly, perhaps, when death finally caught up to him, he’d remain unaware of it because of the habit of living. Every look he cast out the kitchen window was an act of courage. Outside was the motionless palm tree in the neighbor’s backyard, and the blindingly white wall of his own fence. What was the purpose of this whiteness? The sunlight was already unbearable, the sparkling sea mercilessly blinded anyone who dared to look at it—was the whiteness of the fence there to make the misery complete?

            Nothing indicated the proximity of the sea. The southern sea is, in essence, the extension of the desert in liquid form. One should feel grateful that at least the sea does not boil the fish swimming in it and cast them onto its shores.  Oh heartless god of the desert, you know well that only this place could have given birth to the legend of the Savior. This is the place where the hope of Paradise should have flourished because year round the day is hell, and the darkness, though it looks cold, scorches like the bowels of hell, and every movement of the air feels not like a wind but like tongues of flame licking the human body. Here, faith could’ve only been fervent because there was no other way to escape the earthly hell, except by fanatically praying for salvation and for frantically believing in it. And the Savior could’ve appeared only in the human likeness, for among those sands and cliffs nothing else was useful and permanent enough to serve a totemic purpose. After all, one cannot saddle, eat, and worship a camel at the same time. And so the subject of worship was created in the human likeness, so we could believe it was a man, born helpless just like us. Someone who couldn’t have known the road to the other, real life. That other one was the real life because this one, it seemed, didn’t quite materialize. It didn’t materialize because how could the opposite of nonexistence be suffering, and how could life be a punishment when the innocent did not deserve to be punished? Nobody comes into this world of his own free will, which means that nobody is endowed with the consciousness of how painful it is to leave it. After all, how can nature compensate for life with baseness? The passage from existence to nonexistence must, at the very least, be unconscious, just like birth. The opposite would be illogical. In this universe, constructed logically down to its smallest atom, such lack of logic cannot hold. There can be no consciousness of the end of existence because there can be no consciousness of the final one that followed it. The consciousness of the final moment is impossible because it would have to be preceded by the recognition of the penultimate moment. And therein lies the whole issue: the realization of that penultimate moment is impossible because nobody would ever believe in the inevitability of the final moment. “You shouldn’t believe it,” murmured the Loner.

One of those days he awoke abruptly because he realized that his heart had just skipped a beat. And that’s when he had the epiphany—one doesn’t sense the interruption, temporary or permanent. What one feels is the resumption of the beat after that interruption. Just like when one faints, he feels the coming to but never the passing out.

Translated, from the Armenian, by Margarit T. Ordukhanyan