You wake up before you've woken up, and it's already too late.

Outside the window — not a field, but dough kneaded by someone who forgot the recipe for bread and only remembered flour and despair. A voice behind the wall speaks in the language of buzzing flies, and you somehow understand every word except the ones that are important and beautiful. This is not a dream. This is "Nepokoy" and the Rose Hotel, and no one invited you here — the highway just decided that today you're not going anywhere.

Welcome to the Rose Hotel

Yasha and Bernar turn off the highway to spend the night wherever they can — this is the only fact you can hold on to; further facts are canceled, like a bus that didn't come because the road it was supposed to travel no longer exists on the map. Or maybe it never existed at all. The hotel owner smiles as if she already knows how the evening will end, and the evening knows it will never end — it will simply flow into morning, and morning will return to yesterday, and so on in a circle, until the hogweed outside the window becomes the only witness that still cares. It's impossible to catch up with tomorrow.

Outside the windows, vandal runners with numbers on their chests race by — according to rumors, they symbolize the outside world, but they look like participants in a race held specifically for those who have already given up. The guests instead prefer the game of elephant — no one remembers the rules, but everyone plays because the alternative is to think about where the exit is.

There are fewer guests — that's probably how it's supposed to be. Someone says they saw a man turn into a pyramid. No one is surprised. Being surprised here is a privilege taken away at check-in, along with the return ticket. Pink rabbits follow the girl with glass eyes everywhere — first two, then three, as if they multiply with every question you ask that no one answers.

I Want an Eternal Tiger

Kuryokhin's music comes from nowhere and simultaneously from every doorway — it doesn't accompany the events, it authorizes them, like an official's signature on a document you haven't read but have already signed in return. Creak, hum, click — the hotel breathes this set of sounds instead of air, and gradually you notice that you're breathing the same. You nod. You have no choice, but nodding is still pleasant — it's the last thing that reminds you of free will.

There is a strange generosity in this hotel: the less they explain, the more you believe. Rotoscoping draws people as if they were first filmed and then asked to forget what a human body looks like. It's annoying until the second it becomes mesmerizing, and the boundary between these states lies somewhere around the third viewing of the same party scene, which simultaneously resembles a name day and a sentence. And the tiger smokes by the window, thinking about eternity, and that's perfectly normal. There are five rabbits now. Or there were always five, and you just didn't know how to count to five until you ended up at the Rose Hotel.

Calypso Wears an Apron

The hotel owner doesn't let go not because she's evil, but because eternal youth requires guests, like an aquarium requires fish. One rabbit looks at you as if it remembers you from a past you never had. Another — from a future you apparently won't reach. The other three are just waiting their turn to be someone from this list — the list, by the way, doesn't grow, only changes faces. Odysseus here is not a hero but a regular who forgot why he sailed. Yasha looks for an exit from a building that has long ceased to be a building and become a state — that state when you realize you've been captured by something nameless, and the only way to survive is to stop asking what it is. It seems Cortázar would have approved, if he were at all capable of explaining what's happening here, but he wouldn't have been able to either, so he would have just locked the door and gone off to write about bohemian life in Buenos Aires.

The Rose Hotel smells of a field that was forgotten to be mowed fifty years ago, and this smell doesn't dissipate even after the credits.

Check-Out Not Available

"Nepokoy" doesn't provide answers because questions are more important — like hogweed is more important than a lawn, like buzzing is more important than silence. By the way, welcome. The key to room seven is already in your pocket — you probably didn't notice checking in. The Rose Hotel is open 24/7. There are definitely five rabbits. And the review ended on this sentence.