Кровь Идиота перевод на английский

Prologue
It all started when I forgot how to breathe. Not figuratively, but literally. I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea, looking out the window at a plump pigeon pecking stupidly at crumbs on the eaves, and suddenly I realized my body wasn't breathing. The panic was brief and bright, like a flash of magnesium. And then something clicked, and air began flowing into my lungs again, on its own, without my intervention.
It was at that moment that I realized that my blood was an idiot.
It flowed through my veins without the slightest understanding of what was happening. It delivered oxygen to my cells simply because that was how it was supposed to be, without a thought as to why it was needed. It coagulated when cut, obeying a blind, ancient instinct, not reason. My blood was a perfect, flawlessly functioning idiot.
And I thought: what if she infects everything else with her idiocy?

Part One. The White Wall
My name is Artyom, and I worked in the department cataloging unwanted items. My job was to assign inventory numbers to dusty folders containing thirty-year-old documents, which were then sent to the building's basement to quietly crumble to dust. It was a job devoid of not only meaning, but even the slightest hint of purpose.
My life was a white wall. The walls of my apartment, the walls of my office, the walls of my skull. Everything was painted a flat, matte, impenetrable white. Even sounds were absorbed by this whiteness.
Everything changed on Thursday, when I cut my finger on the rim of a pineapple can. A drop of blood, crimson and alive, fell onto the white sheet of paper lying on the table, ready for yet another cataloging. And instead of simply spreading into a smear, it behaved strangely.
It didn't soak in. It froze on the surface, as if pondering. And then, slowly, very slowly, it began to spread, forming not a stain but something vaguely resembling a map of an unknown city. Streets, alleys, dead ends. In the center of this bloody city was a small, dense spot—a square where, it seemed to me, the main idiot running this entire system lived.
I poked the spot with the tip of a pencil and felt a dull, aching pain somewhere in the liver area.
That's how it all began. I became an artist, and my blood became paint.

Part Two. Mapping the Inner Idiot
I started experimenting. Small cuts, needle pricks. I dripped blood onto paper, onto the floor, onto the wall of my white apartment. And I watched.
The blood wasn't just liquid. It was memory. But a stupid, fragmentary memory, like the dreams of a mental patient. A landscape gradually emerged on the wall of my room. Recognizable and alien at once. It was the park of my childhood, but the trees were crooked, the swings rusty and creaking, casting long, uncertain shadows even at midday. A child sat on one of the swings—me, about seven years old. But it wasn't my face, but something like a mask, etched with blood, an empty, idiotic expression.
The blood didn't depict reality, but its inner, visceral content. It brought to light all the fears, all the omissions, all the petty humiliations I'd long forgotten. She was a poor storyteller, she got confused in her testimony, but her pictures were terrifyingly truthful.
One day, I drew a portrait of the head of the cataloging department, Viktor Petrovich, in blood. I did it on the back of an unwanted report. The next day, Viktor Petrovich, usually so prim and stern, came to work pale and confused. He kept scratching his arm and said he'd been dreaming all night that he was an ant lost in a giant anthill made of yellow paper.
My blood began to influence reality. Idiocy was contagious.

Part Three: The Common Sense Epidemic
The infection spread slowly but surely. It wasn't evil. It was simply stupid.
My colleague, who was always making grandiose plans to quit his job and move to Bali, suddenly began collecting bottle caps with gusto. A childhood friend, obsessed with success and status, sold his car and bought himself ten identical suits, claiming it was "saving on laundry."
It was an epidemic of absurdity. People weren't going crazy in the classic sense. They were simply losing track of the complex cause-and-effect relationships we call "common sense." Their actions began to follow the simplest, almost childish logic. If you're hungry, eat a cookie. If your boss yells at you, hide under the table. If it's raining outside, put a flowerpot on your head.
The city slowly sank into a sleep of reason that gave birth not to monsters, but to touching, absurd idiots.
The authorities announced a new type of flu, "loss of purpose syndrome." Loudspeakers drove around the city, urging people to "maintain vigilance and logical thinking." But it was useless. Logic was the virus against which idiotic blood offered the best immunity.
And I became the prophet of this epidemic. Not because I wanted it, but because my blood was the source. I walked the streets, and people, already infected, looked at me with silent question. They sensed a kindred spirit in me. I was their idiot king.

Part Four. The Core
To stop this, I had to get to the source. To the main idiot who sat at the center of the drawn map. To the heart of my own absurdity.
I understood that this required not just a drop, but a lot of blood. A lot. It was an act of suicide or a supreme insight.
I came to that very park from my bloody paintings. It was autumn. The crooked trees shed their leaves, which fell, defying all the laws of physics, not downwards, but sideways. I sat on the very swing where the bloody double with the mask instead of a face sat.
And I cut my veins.
Not out of despair. But like an artist who has exhausted all his colors and decides to paint the final picture with his life itself.
Blood flowed onto the withered grass. But it didn't soak in. It collected into a stream, which slowly crept toward the center of the clearing. And where it flowed, the ground began to give way. A hole formed. A shallow one. And at the bottom of it lay a small, wrinkled, unborn version of myself. It was the size of a fist, and its empty eye sockets stared up at the sky.
It was him. That same idiot. The root cause. The unborn possibility, the forgotten fear, the rejected stupidity.
He looked at me. And I realized that we can't destroy our inner idiot. We can only embrace it. Recognize its right to exist. Because it is the idiot, not the mind, that makes the blood flow and the heart beat.
I reached out and touched it. It was cold and warm at the same time.

Epilogue
The epidemic ended as suddenly as it had begun. People woke up as if from a dream. They gazed in bewilderment at their collections of bottle caps, removed flower pots from their heads, and tried to remember why they had done so. Common sense returned to their lives. But something had changed. A shadow appeared in their eyes. A shadow of lightness. A shadow of understanding that the world doesn't have to be strict and logical.
I survived. The wounds healed strangely, leaving behind not scars but thin, almost invisible patterns, like maps.
I don't work in the cataloging department anymore. I became a gardener. I tend to the trees in that very park. Sometimes, at night, I come to the clearing and talk to what's in the hole. We talk about simple things. About the weather. About the smell of damp earth. About the stupidity of pigeons and the wisdom of worms.
My blood still flows through my veins. It still doesn't understand why it does this. But now I know that this is its greatest wisdom. The idiocy of blood is not a disease. It is a blessing. It is a reminder that life itself is a beautiful, meaningless, and utterly idiotic act of creation.
And I am grateful for every moment of it.