I sprang up and bolted from the beach, tearing uphill towards the highway. I had to find that guy, no matter what. He’d done something, something monstrous. He should have done it to me.

I burst onto the highway and veered slightly off course. I saw him, shovel in hand, covered in mud. He was on the shoulder, about two hundred meters away. I screamed, "Hey, you!"

In response, the clouds unleashed a downpour. A wall of rain hid almost everything, but I saw him—desperate, with my last ounce of hope. I saw a car pull out of the woods. He climbed right into the front seat with the shovel, slammed the door, and the car merged onto the highway. They were getting closer. I yelled, "Stop!!"—the rain turned to hail, and the highway became a popcorn maker. I stood facing them, waving my arms. They swerved around me at immense speed at the last second. It wasn’t a gray BMW 525. I decided to get back to the city as fast as possible. Quickly, to the car. Cut through the forest. I intentionally walked slightly off the path. Five hundred meters in, I saw a freshly buried pit. I got scared. You won’t believe it, but I thought they’d buried you. My first convulsive instinct was to dig up the grave. But as soon as I knelt beside it, such a terror overwhelmed me that even the hail slowed its fall. I was in a panic. I jumped up and ran right over the grave, kicking up a little sand with my feet. Get out of here, fast!

Under the hail, I sprinted to the car, started it, and drove without music all the way back to the city. Just plowing down the wet highway. I was already grieving for you then. I was sure I was responsible for your death: I hadn’t managed to do anything to myself; I stayed the same. Attraction burned me from the inside just as indifference froze me from the outside.

I spent all Sunday in a daze. I remembered you—unfortunate, who never even managed to greet me, but who meant more to me than my own life.

On Monday, my investigation began. Or rather, it started spontaneously: there was a memorial table in the office with photos of two guys: the one with the shovel and another one. They'd done their last deed and hastily split.

The investigation ended just as it began.

"Glenn, you missed so much on Friday! Saw those guys, in the photos? Yesterday, they got into a fight with some girl. Just stepped outside, and there's this knockout."

"And?" I couldn't stand it.

"To death." I knew it. Damn! Why?! "They went wild. So, they drove off, quickly hid her somewhere. Glenn, it's a secret."

"Right." I rubbed my forehead again. "Listen, was she alone?"

"Don't know. When they started hitting her, she was alone."

"And where did they hide her?"

"Don't know. It's a secret, I already told you everything."

The next Sunday, a week later, I threw a shovel in the car, put on a new lens, and drove to where you were buried. I drove, my fingers crumbling the steering wheel. A dot on the windshield was my crosshairs. Several times I passed on the oncoming lane, swerving at the last second from trucks. I wanted a collision, a fireworks show, a shock, but each time instinct made my fingers violently yank the car back to the right lane. I passed the gas station where I ate with the cars, then the one where I bought cigarettes... then turned back a bit and roared onto the dirt road. I shattered the peace that had reigned here for eight days. I parked the car, took out the shovel, took out the camera, and walked to the spot where the sand was still loose, and the grass wasn't meant to grow until next summer.

A small bush separated me from the grave. Someone was quietly talking behind it. I froze, shovel in my right hand, camera in my left. The tripod dangled on my back. That day, I refused to film the opening of the opera festival. The same image kept flashing before my eyes: the soprano fading, leaving the stage, her leaden skirts rustling, rowing through the air with the microphone like an oar, the plump singer. The stage sets on the open-air stage swayed in the wind, the music almost dying out. Then the back of the stage shutters opened, and two stagehands sharply rolled a long wooden chest with wrought iron fittings onto the stage, then silently dived back under the already lowering shutters. You were lying on the chest.

What phantasmagoria is going on in this place! People keep appearing here, for some reason. I listened to the conversation: two men were talking about physics. Then they started talking about university:

"I only come in spring; I need to teach a short course. The rest of the time, I'm not even here."

"I wish. You wouldn't believe it, some grad student broke into my place around midnight."

"Home?"

"Well, where else? My wife's home, I'm about to go to sleep. And then this girl."

"So, like in the old days?"

"I tried. Offered her tea, started talking about quanta."

"What's she writing about?"

"Semiconductors. Doesn't matter... Not a minute passed before she said: 'You probably don't remember, but quanta isn't my specialization.' Listen, that's the first girl like that in twenty years."

"Then why was she so late?"

"Said she had a fight with her friend, tried to reconstruct the conversation for a long time, but it just didn't work. Problems with men, too. Then she checks her watch—ten-thirty. Naturally, it's the perfect time to visit Doctor Doppfelganger."

"Heh-heh! And you just let her go?"

"Yeah. Too good a girl, too honest to play those games with. She's a scientist!"

"Come on! They all want it, with a guy like you. Couldn't you just get rid of the wife?"

"Yeah, I could. Don't need to. Or do you think I'm so starved I can't leave even a grad student like that alone?"

"Is she pretty?"

"Of course she's pretty. Her parents are from Ireland, I think. At least, I saw her father there. Name, face, voice, laugh. Yeah, I would've been forgiven twenty years ago."

"When she was seven?"

"I already have a Doppfelganger constant. I mean, my wife."

"Lucky you, a constant and a wife all in one... and how's it going with that company?" — a pause — "Well, you said you were planning to release some creation of yours."

"Ah, seems they're not very interested in it right now."

"Maybe you're lacking in attraction?"

"Listen, we're not doing a barbecue here! Let's go to the beach instead, to the sea. It's close."

"I'll call the ladies." The two slowly began walking away toward the highway. Throughout their entire conversation, I stood behind the bush, afraid to move, constantly checking with my finger if my SD card was still there. This tic appears every time I have to do something others shouldn't know about. I ran my thumb over my right jeans pocket and felt the small, slippery block of information.

I stepped into the circle of bushes where your grave shimmered with sand. The shovel almost silently landed on the ground beside the edge of the pale grave patch, and the camera was on its tripod and set up within a minute. I picked up the shovel and, rocking the camera with my right hand, slowly gathered my thoughts.

The camera filmed birds and treetops, which together were creating some unusually melodic music. The camera didn't see what I was doing.

I picked up the shovel, ready to dig. Didn't know where to start. For some reason, I thought I’d definitely hit your neck and slice it. I checked the SD one more time and swung. The camera started to fall: I’d carelessly lowered it. Tossing the shovel aside, I caught the camera, lifted it again, and fixed it in a position where it constantly filmed the top of an old aspen, where someone's nest was.

Checking the flash drive one last time, I looked at the shovel, looked at the sand of the grave—and then some switch inside me flipped, blinked, something beeped, an alarm went off. My legs buckled, and I fell right onto the grave. With the first sob, inhaling a noseful of sand, I burst into tears. For the first time in twenty years, louder than ever, hoarser than ever. I roared so hard that the resonance of my voice trimmed the grass around me. I caught myself thinking: I'm crying melodically. Is this what attraction should be?

"Glenn always experimenting. Even on a Sunday, you don't want to rest. What are you calling the installation?" — Hanna, who knows me inside and out, had seen everything I'd shot that wasn't for TV. She stood over me, smiling admiringly. She called herself a fan of my non-commercial video talent.

I sprawled on the sand, on my back, trying to press myself as deep as possible into it: not to you, but away from her. I was afraid of Hanna, afraid of everything. Constantly checking the SD and glancing at the camera, I took a better look at Hanna. Why does everyone gravitate to this place? Maybe you're the one attracting them somehow?

"Attraction." Hanna didn't make much of it, but a couple of months later, I saw that video in an underground club. The name stuck. Some people liked the recording. They gave various reasons, but none of them were true. The truth: it was an honest recording. Accidental and truthful.

"Glennie, you need to rest. Want to go for a swim?"

"Only in the lake, not the sea!" I checked the SD and stood up to turn off the camera.

"Whatever you say. Is that your shovel?"

"Yeah, I wanted to slap the sand with it, but the sound wasn't right. Gotta get a different shovel."

Hanna and I spent the entire evening at the lake. Even naked, I kept checking the SD somewhere near my hip. And only when she pulled me into the water, only when we were among the huge boulders lying on the bottom, only when she made me understand ten times what I should do, did my neurosemantic tic leave me. An hour later, as I sat on the shore smoking, spotting interesting sights around, she came out of the lake, took my camera, and slowly, water dripping from her naked body, walked back into the water. She moved further and further away, and the refraction of light bent her body higher and higher, as if peeling a silicone mask from her plaster skeleton. She turned on the camera and filmed me, naked, not knowing where to hide, not having managed to light a new cigarette, tired and lost. She danced with my camera on her shoulder, her body causing water fluctuations at hip-depth, at chest-depth. And then she pressed the button, took out the cassette, threw it to me, and lifted her legs. The nymph, along with my camera, disappeared to the very bottom. Then, underwater, she dragged the camera to the spot where I had just been caressing her, completely detached, and returned to me. I finally lit my cigarette and looked at her, full of hatred, full of despair.

"Glenn, the camera can still be saved," she said, looking straight into my eyes, standing half a meter from me. I reached out my hands and, in turn, pulled her to the ground. I just wanted to thank her.

The next day, I submitted my resignation, but I wasn't fired until a month later, with thunder and lightning the world had never seen: to get me fired, I had to shoot a crucial interview against the backdrop of pre-ordered strippers dancing right on the main street where we were questioning some deputy. Not showing that footage on the news would have completely screwed over the channel. There was no time to edit the video, so the entire audience saw an interview with naked muscle-bound guys in the background.

A month later, my band played its first gig. I didn't want to waste time. Hanna and I sometimes met at cafes and invariably laughed at our former bosses, who still hate themselves for agreeing to fire me. I have a best friend. But Hanna did so much more for me. Experience shows that women have far more capacity for friendly support of men than we do ourselves. She made me human. I owe her.

"Hanna, how did you end up in that forest when I was filming 'Attraction'?" I asked, half a year later. "What were you doing there?" She seemed a bit surprised.

"I was walking. Do you know a better place to walk around here?"

"But why then..." No, I won't talk about the grave. Besides, I just heard the answer.

"Why what?"

"Why did you do it?"

"This? You're my friend, Glenn."

"Can I ask you a question I only ask friends? What's the most disgusting thing about me?"

"The camera, Glennie, the camera. It's gone now. You're getting better every day. Glennie, I felt real disgust for you that Sunday. You weren't a man, you weren't a person, you barely existed."

Getting better? I'm showing more and more attraction. The answer to me—sympathy, adoration, condescension. But the inner attraction is vanishing. Do I even need this sympathy, adoration, condescension? You're gone. I didn't get it from you. And I don't know where to go now. You always seemed unapproachable to me. Now you truly are.

With this confession, I hope to shed my own heavy burdens, to continue life as a full person. Should I thank you too? Yes, absolutely, you two, you and Hanna—two women who dragged me by the ears out of the darkness of my soul. You never saw each other, never knew of each other's existence. You didn't want to help me; you just wanted to get rid of me. And you were rid of the whole world.

A year passed. Now I decided, finally, to visit you here, at your grave. I see it's well-maintained. I love you no less than before. Though I feel lighter after this story, I don't feel free. I want you back.

Listen, I don't check the SD anymore, I haven't held a camera in almost a year, I'm doing well, if you care. I finally grew up. Damn it, why aren't you with me!

You have a headstone here. Your name...

...Roberta Hanzig...

That's not you.