Awakening... It wasn't just bad. It was frankly lousy, the kind that makes you regret the very fact of your existence.
First came the hammer of pain, splitting the skull from inside. Not sharp, cutting pain, but a dull, pulsing rhythm in the temples, as if there, behind the bone, a clumsy satanist-drummer had settled, beating a devil's roll with each heartbeat. Second came the dry mouth. Not just thirst, but the sensation as if someone had filled my throat with scorching Sahara sand, then polished it with sandpaper. The tongue, swollen and rough, shifted in my mouth like a dead lizard dried in the sun. Consciousness returned reluctantly, in torn shreds, clinging to the saving dark scraps of oblivion, but reality was persistent and merciless.
Before I could fully come to my senses and piece together the fragments of thought, a smell hit my nose. Nauseating, sour-sweet, unmistakably recognizable stench. The smell of vomit. Ironically, this stink cleared my consciousness better than a bucket of ice water could have. I tried to grimace, but even this simple movement of facial muscles caused a new wave of nausea rising to my throat.
Although no... Everything turned out even worse. This wasn't just a smell. This was vomit itself. A sticky, cooling puddle of my own body's vile emissions had soaked through my T-shirt and unpleasantly chilled the skin on my back and shoulder. The realization of this fact washed over me with an icy wave of disgust, making me shudder. And it would all be nothing, plenty happens in life, but this frankly wasn't what I remembered from the last moments before sleep. I distinctly remember going to bed. At my home. In my clean, freshly made bed. Absolutely sober and in an adequate state. And now...
With difficulty, leaning on the sticky, rough floor with trembling, unusually weak hands, I forced my poisoned body into a sitting position. The room swayed like a ship's deck in a force-nine storm. I squeezed my eyes shut, gripping the floor with my fingers and waiting out the attack of dizziness, and finally looked around. What I saw I categorically, to the point of teeth-grinding, did not like.
This isn't my bedroom. This isn't even close to my house.
A tiny one-room apartment, or more precisely, a studio. At a glance, twenty-five square meters, maybe thirty. A large room, if that word even applies here, serving the functions of both living room and bedroom and who knows what else. A battered couch with springs poking out here and there, having seen better days back during Nixon's era. A clumsy wardrobe of cheap particleboard with peeling "wood" film at the edges. A writing desk piled with some papers and empty instant noodle packages. In the corner huddled a kitchen set, a couple cabinets, a sink with a mountain of dirty dishes, and a two-burner electric hotplate. Everything looked not just shabby, but wretched and hopeless. Compared to my spacious private house, which I'd raised from ruins with my own hands over the last ten years, this place looked like a doghouse next to a palace.
But the main question wasn't that. WHAT. WAS. I. DOING. HERE?
Thoughts tangled, catching on each other. Kidnapped, forcibly drunk into oblivion and dumped here? Absurd idea. Who needs me? Friends arranged some idiotic prank beyond good and evil? No, not at all their style. Plus, practically all of them are in the city, hundreds of kilometers away. What, they have nothing better to do than drive in the middle of the night to pull off such a complex and pointless operation? Plus, they'd have to somehow extract me from the house without waking me, pour liters of alcohol into me... No, doesn't add up. Absolutely not.
And only now did it reach my still not-too-bright mind. That very discrepancy, which my subconscious stubbornly ignored, but it kept pushing and pushing to the surface, causing a dull, gnawing anxiety. The body! The dimensions! My hands! What the hell do they look so... skinny and delicate? These aren't my working, sinewy hands, covered with a dense network of old scars and work calluses from a decade of working with wood and metal! Hands that could drive a hundred-millimeter nail into a pine board with one precise punch and not notice. And these... These were only good for pressing keyboard buttons or turning pages. And in general, I feel somehow... shorter? Lighter?
Difficult. Too many questions and not a single answer. I only know that I know nothing. But I need to figure it out. With a firm intention to find at least some clue, I, staggering, headed to the only separate room in this studio, the bathroom. Each step echoed with a dull pain in my head, my body ached mercilessly, but somehow I ended up inside. Dirty... would be too mild to say. Ingrained yellowness on the toilet porcelain, a deep crack on the sink haphazardly patched with gray tape, a slippery cheap bar of soap instead of normal soap. From the single bulb without a shade came a dim, deathly light. Everything here screamed of poverty, indifference and neglect. My gaze rested on the grimy mirror above the washbasin, covered with dried splashes. It was precisely into this mirror that I looked.
"Oh fuck, shit!" burst from me in a hoarse, alien youthful voice. I recoiled from the mirror as if it were a leprous zombie-creature with a timed explosive on its chest.
From the mirror looked at me... not Me. That's the short version. And if not briefly, a youth about nineteen years old looked at me. Disheveled dark-brown hair, large brown eyes in which splashed a mixture of animal fear and confusion, and a quite ordinary, unremarkable face. No familiar three-day stubble, no network of wrinkles around the eyes, no deep scar on the chin left by a slipped chisel a couple years ago. Just smooth, pale skin with barely noticeable traces of teenage acne. Skinny build, height around a hundred seventy-five centimeters, judging by rough estimates. For clothes, a gray T-shirt soaked with vomit and checkered cotton shorts.
I stood thunderstruck, looking at the reflection but not seeing it. Before my inner gaze rose another picture. My workshop in the garage. The smell of ozone from the working welding machine, mixed with the tart sweetness of pine shavings. My hands, which I so inopportunely thought of earlier... I remembered them to the smallest details. A wide, calloused palm capable of easily grasping the end of a hundred-millimeter beam. A network of small whitish scars, memory of slipped drills, sharp metal edges and splinters that had already become part of the skin's relief. Under the nails, an ingrained, almost permanent dark strip of a mixture of machine oil and wood dust that no solvent could remove. These hands were a tool, an extension of my will. And what I saw now at myself and in the mirror... These pale, narrow palms with thin pianist's or artist's fingers, they evoked in me not just rejection, but some deep, animal feeling of wrongness. As if they'd replaced not just my body, but my very essence. I clenched my fists, feeling how the thin joints crunched unusually. No, these are definitely not my fists.
How? How did I end up in this... guy's body? Why precisely me? What happened to my real body? Who is this guy anyway? What the hell to do next? Questions swarmed in my head like maddened bees, and the already unwilling-to-subside hangover pain turned into a deafening migraine.
With difficulty stripping off the vomit-stained clothes and disgustedly throwing them in the corner, I climbed under the cold shower. The icy jets brought me somewhat to my senses, washing away not only dirt but part of the primordial shock. Deciding for now not to burden my sluggishly thinking head with a thousand and one questions, I, bypassing the vomit stain on the floor, collapsed on the couch.
Sprawling and staring at the cracked ceiling covered with fine wrinkles, I tried not to think about anything. Surprisingly, I started feeling sleepy. That's good. To hell with problems, morning is wiser than evening. In me still glimmered a weak, irrational hope that everything happening was just a dream. A bad, terrifyingly realistic, damn scary, but just a dream. With such encouraging thoughts I again fell into Morpheus's realm, and even the headache finally receded to the background.
How long I slept like that... I have no idea. But when I woke up, outside already reigned thick, velvety night. The city lived its life: neon signs and streetlights cast bizarre, dancing shadows on the room's walls, the hum of cars and a distant, mournful wail of a siren could be heard. Nighttime New York must be beautiful, only it's better not to go out on Hell's Kitchen's streets at night. You'll be very lucky if they just take your wallet and smartphone, not your life. Though there's a chance the Devil of Hell's Kitchen will hear your prayer for help and deal with the bandits. But what will he ask in return? A simple vigilante isn't called the Devil for pretty eyes...
"What the?.." I whispered into emptiness, suddenly realizing that these thoughts... weren't quite mine.