I remember that night as clearly, as if it all happened last week...

- So your parents will be out till tomorrow?

- Aha.

- And you want to make a sleep over?

- Exactly.

- And you want to decorate the room... or what?

- More than that! I want to make it feel surreal. We'll drape walls with bedsheets, we'll use colored lights all over the place... slide projector projecting weird patterns all around...

- We'll get some beer?

- Aha.

- Hm. Then fine.

- Ok. We'll meet you at the shop at 6 PM then...

We did all, that I have described. We gathered potted plants from around the house and placed them around the TV. We called him "The Speaker of the Jungle". We pulled an old gass mask onto the ceiling lamp so that light was coming out from the round glass eyelets. We also attached a flashlight to the dangling end of it's long corrugated tube-trunk. We called him "The Man with Eyes that Cannot Lie". And he had a son - a children rubber gass mask (the type, you can see on photos of Prypyat') pulled on the head of a plush lion. We called him "The Son of the Man with Eyes that Cannot Lie". Special improvised device was rotating two pieces of perforated loudspeaker fenders in opposite dirrections in front of a slide projector. The whole system was producing contantly morphing moiré patterns projected on the wall . We were so proud of ourselves for inventing this thing. We called it "The Weidness Rotator".

We had a fan blowing the wind around, making the bedsheets move, we had backround music, we had snacks and beer served on a tennis rockets, burning incens and a hookah. 

It already started to dusk ouside, when we begun constructing Mr. Beer. We stuffed my old jeans and swetshrit with pillows. Slippers were the feet and my father's leather winter gloves were the hands. We binded everything together with a duct tape and hung the body into the middle of decorative wall carpet. Then we sticked a bunch of vinil tubes into two-liter bottle of beer in a dreadlock fasion and thus it became the head. We called him, obviously, "Mr. Beer".

The rest of the evening we spent relaxating, listening to the music, smoking hookah... Ocasionally we used to come the Mr, Beer and drink beer from his head through the tubes in his head. We were laying around and just talking, enjoying the surreal ambient we've created.

And then he became alive.

Vitaliy died first. He came too close to the damn thing, when it started to moove. Later I heard Stas crying terrified as I was hiding under a pile of pillows on a coach.

Then, suddenly, he stopped crying.

M'r. Beer didn't notice me. I heard him leaving. I learned to perceive those events as if it all was a weird drem. Nevertheless, even now, 20 yers later, I often have a feeling that someone or something is following me. But when I turn around - there's noone there, only a trail of drips on the ground leading towards me. I always was scared to admit, but I know by the smell - it's beer.