The time was 4 a.m., and it was not yet light; the city still felt like night. When he left the club, Gustav drove onto Southwestern Avenue and headed into the region, an hour and a half to his house behind the Small Regional Ring on the Southwestern Highway.
It was good to think at times like this. About what was, what will be, what is now.
He liked what was happening to people now. The era when mass society began to create one common stream of thought for everyone. Everyone thought in their own way, while thinking like everyone else. This game with the subconscious mind inside a huge number of people.
Twenty years ago, there was a consumer society where everyone just had to get a "thing". Then this thing was made old, and the hunt for a new "thing" began.
Now this is not enough. There is a crisis in the consumer society.
Everyone needs to be something, to be someone, to mean something to the world. Or at least to consider yourself as such, to believe that you mean something. Maybe it's because of the demand for complex labor. Maybe it's because things have become freer and more colorful in the sociocultural space. Maybe it was because everything became accessible to almost everyone through the information revolution made by the Internet. But the new subspecies of man was very different from all those that had preceded him.
Man playing. A post-materialistic basis of worldview, where the game concept of life does not just push a person forward, but makes him enjoy what he does. And it is not enough that everything works out – it is necessary to make it look beautiful, to create a creative image.
Of course, not without obvious disadvantages. And the new "Avgian stables" are a culture shock, where there is no outline of stability, the very stability that is simply a comfort zone in its essence; but there is zero competence, calling everything into question and the need for one's own trajectory, which requires constant reflection.
Having broken free from the shackles of his own limitations, once built to protect himself from his own stupidity, a man found himself in front of a mirror in an empty field, believing that it was better, and not realizing what it would lead to. Like those countries that possess nuclear weapons; with hysterics, blood and tears they have sought them until the very moment of obtaining them and with trembling and heaviness in their souls since the moment of their possession, having earned a huge responsibility for innocent people all over the world and a timid desire to return everything as it used to be for everyone, with the usual bloodthirsty all-killing wars and primitive understanding of human life as such.
All this led to the phrase "No knowledge now is knowledge in the 'old sense' where 'to know' is to be certain." And politicians especially liked it.
The world, consisting entirely of assumptions, allowed you to build these assumptions for yourself regardless of actions – in fact, you could do anything at all, as long as it was properly presented. Exactly presented. Twenty or fifty years ago, you had to prove or justify something, but now it was enough just to present it, to present it in such a way that it would be perceived as you needed it to be. Gustav was much more interesting in this atmosphere. People who are more responsible for themselves are much more difficult to destroy, to bring to a state of despair, to take away the last thing. After all, a person no longer has a single pillar of all things, as it happens with believers or nationalists. When a person attributes everything that happens to him only to his own zone of responsibility, when he knows the price of a mistake, when he is ready to correct this mistake as soon as he notices it, then he becomes not just a man, but a life-sustaining machine for achieving the goal. He becomes a goal-oriented willful hunter in life. And even with Gustav's abilities and centuries of experience, he had to act more and more unconventionally, as if clinging to the strings of other people's mistakes, and it was more and more dragging than before.
Katherine, for example, was the easiest to deal with, although she was initially supposed to be the tough nut, but she was simply let down by her attitude towards animals.
Natalie, whom Gustave had recently killed, lived up to expectations, showing a willingness to rely too much on a strange man, believing in some "signs" in her destiny, while constantly remembering how many people she had wiped her feet on before simply because she could do so with impunity, and did so with a satisfaction in her own beauty that was incomprehensible to her.
Vladimir Arkadyevich was experienced, but old. There was no need to "read" him or to invent combinations. One just had to wait for his mistake, like the one that forms in anyone if you don't sleep for a long time or do everything yourself. And his main enemy, fatigue, would never show up directly and remind him of himself. Such an enemy is always at the ready, and therefore always wins.
The only one of the latter with whom one could act according to standards was Oksana. But that's just luck with alcohol. When alcohol is involved, there is no longer any room for the person playing, or responsibility for one's image and ability to have a point. It's as if a person goes into the stone age of primal needs and comes back from there as if from a cesspool, unsure not only of whether he will be accepted back, but whether he himself deserves it.
"Requests" for such a return were expected by Gustav sometime in the afternoon or nearer the evening, but certainly on this day.
By five in the morning the Irishman had reached the regional center. His house was located in a dense forest on the road from the cottage village "Grafskaya Usadba". Initially he had considered the possibility of settling there, in the elite part, where the houses stood almost in the forest, separated by frequent trees and separated from the other part of the settlement by three ponds, but he was slightly shaken by the inevitable fact of being in the neighborhood with people. Having once been in France in the first half of the 18th century, he was living in a suburb of Paris. Opportunities for seduction at court were plentiful, and the romance of the time, was deeper and more refined in its essence. One of his lovers, left with a broken heart, did not kill himself at home poison or drown himself in the Seine, and hanged himself right in front of his house and so that it was clearly visible to all. Of course, there were no consequences for him, although a day later the girl's relatives, having found out what the matter was, came to his house, intending to tear him to pieces and hang him in the same place where she had hung herself. By that time Gustav had already left, having remembered well that in his case it was necessary to live separately from everyone else, or at least in a place where neighbors would be closed off from each other by concrete walls of a stone jungle. This time he chose the first option and was very satisfied: he had his own house with autonomous power supply and water purification system, only two floors with 4-meter ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows so that from the second floor you could look into the forest with a hunter's eyes. On the edges of the house were two outbuildings. Actually, they were the most important part of the whole complex: the first was a tower, the top floor of which reached such a height that from the panoramic windows you could see the tops of the trees going away like a green sea, sprouting in the wind – such a view inspired Gustav with new thoughts, new possibilities. Besides, it was here that Gustav could most enjoy other people's suffering, remember the right steps, the goals achieved, and the edges of the trees seemed to agree with him, nodding their heads and confirming every thought. The second building looked no bigger than a barn from the outside, but it was just an entrance. Underground there were two more floors, both black as night and full of all sorts of equipment. The minuscule second floor was a single room with a black leather chester couch in the center. It was a good place for solitude, when some process just needed to wait or think of something new, because dungeons gave the most exquisite and extraordinary ideas and ways of their realization, and sometimes it was even surprising how much difference in the course of thought could be only because of where this thought was born – the darkness made the thought richer, freer and allowed it to do anything.
