INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter One.

Fritz von Franz is the typical modern man. He wants things to make sense. He wants to mind his own business and none other’s. He works a job as a programmer and intends to live comfortably. Yet whatever his pretensions towards certainty and clarity may be are about to be shaken and muddied. A trans-dimensional alien interferes in his life, presenting himself in a bizarre series of visions that Fritz must interpret in order to perhaps become a hero.

Dmitry Andreyev’s debut Absurdist epic is a surreal tour of the mind that leaves one questioning all of one’s prejudices. Each character, as both a person and a symbol, becomes entangled in the mind-bending enterprise in a way that leaves both the reader and the character thinking, “Huh?” in the most satisfying, delightfully humorous, and terrifying of ways.

Dmitry Andreyev was born in Moscow, Russia in 1991, just at the end of the Soviet Union. He immigrated to the United States four years later. He lives with his family in San Diego, California.

Interference

“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.”

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Chapter one

Fritz von Franz delighted himself in being precise. This occurred to him as a matter of course. He  had never been imprecise, except where matters of tremendous emotional sensitivity were concerned. The only exception to his habit and, in fact, orthodoxy of precision was the time of morning when he would awake. There had only been one instance wherein he succeeded in waking at a time that he himself had designated.

He had set about waking at four in the morning to get away from his parents. He could not remember the last time he had seen dawn. The morning Sun leant its peering perceptiveness to a sky that appeared, to him, to be merely a crowd of mossy trees unified by their statistical properties. He could describe each, if asked, as a fir or maybe even a sycamore, as befit its formal nature, but he usually paid no attention to it. What leant character to the morning of his departure from his parents' house had been  his own anxiety. The Sun seemed to dog him, hovering, unrelenting in its eventual flowering into a glowing yellow that would stand in ironic – almost jeering – juxtaposition to his predicament.

“I just want you to understand,” he told me back then as we sat at a table at a Starbucks. “If I hadn't left, it would've been much worse.” He fixed me, then, in a stern glare that was uniquely and tragically his own trademark: An almost tribal stare, pointed and penetrating, interrupted only by a haze of what I took to be delusion.

His parents, several weeks later, arranged for a restraining order to permanently keep him more than a hundred yards away from their house at all times. He had never considered it a home. If I am to believe his account, he had never deserved the eviction. The only trait I can imagine by virtue of which it may have been merited might have been his almost pious insistence upon logic, as cold and sterile and depersonalising at times as his mother's own, emotionally self-convinced psychological dogma. He made me read his conversation with her one day.

Perhaps it would have been worse for him, in fact, had he not left home that morning.

What little I know of how he extricated himself from that situation upon that morning, taking to the streets for three years, I would only learn when we were much older. He had always been private in regards to his dreams, and he preferred to interpret them for himself – A habit that I admonished him against repeatedly.

That night, he had dreamt that he was riding in an airplane. His mother and father abandoned him to visit the cockpit. All that he could remember was that they had sat at either side of him in the middle row of an airplane that had three rows. They had not spoken at all, but they would refuse to get up, obstructing his opportunity to get up and use the lavatory. Finally, he pissed himself. Rather than hanging around for any substantial margin of time – the length he would have expected them to had this been an Actual incident – to castigate him, his father did something strange, prompting his mother, at his left side, to follow suit. The two of them stood up and went up their respective aisles to complain to the pilot.

He took the first opportunity to get up, but, as he paced the aisle awkwardly, taking care to apologise methodically as he passed foot upon foot sticking out from their seats like teeth in half a human zipper, the airplane veered and then turned vertical. One second found him stumbling upon the legs of an attractive girl older than him by an unfair margin as all but the lights at the restroom end of the plane went out. The next had him pressed against the back of the vessel by wind resistance, eyes peeled as much by wind as by terror as he watched the tubule that was the interior corridors of the plane plummet past stripes of light. Papers flying from briefcases sent a barrage of papers that attacked him as he heard the screams drowned out by what felt like a sonic boom.

The dream changed. He was falling through the sky. It was dark, but the darkness seemed to have been coloured by some almost cartoonish, magical but terrifying cloudiness overhead. He could not see his plane as he turned his head about, with tremendous pain, to see his point of departure overhead.

He flew past stratum upon stratum of clouds. A light was approaching. He was terrified. He then realised that he was sweating in his armpits. The sweat was drawing his attention to a backpack strapped about his shoulders by two casual straps. The backpack had a parachute. He did not know how he knew this. He only knew that he did not know how to open it.

Clinging to one of the straps, for dear life, he opened the backpack, fumbling with the terror of letting something slip away and be consumed in the dark clouds above and therefore behind him. The left lobe of his brain raced, recalling Newton's laws of gravity, as another part of his mind saw his life flash before his eyes. As he reached a pale hand into the left pocket of the pack, he extricated from it a key that seemed to be glowing yellow by not so much a supernatural force as his sheer shock and delight at having found it. There was no keyhole in the backpack, but there was a strange pattern of scratches etched into the side of the key.

He brought these two his eyes. They read, “Lucidity.”

He recognised that he was asleep. The dream became lucid. As a cotton pile of deep dark clouds broke into a sunny morning sky, inexplicably, he willed himself to fly.

He began to fly in the opposite direction: Up. Just before immersing himself in black clouds again, he remembered, in his lucidity, his determination to awake at four o'clock in the morning.

At that point, the dream ended. He found himself in his dark room, dawn breaking.

He barely hesitated to grab a tooth brush from the restroom, taking special care not to wake anyone by treading with something like softness. He even looked at his feet as he did so, just in case something might trip him.

Dm.A.A.