The Maya Pill

CROSSROADS

Bald Britney Spears writhed hysterically, slashed her veins, twisted her hospital bedding into a rope, and attempted to hang herself with it. Then she burst into tears, repented, summoned her former husband Kevin Federline, and promised to bear him a third child. Then she sobbed again, invoked the name of Beelzebub, called herself a fake, sought out the best tattoo artist in the United States of America, and had the number 666 branded onto the crown of her head.

Thirteen years ago, a scrawny old man materialized out of thin air in the bedroom of a pudgy girl. The old man looked like a goat and was wearing a baseball cap with “INY” on the front. The girl was clutching a curling iron in her hands, pretending it was a microphone, and gyrating in front of her mirror to the sounds of a Madonna tune coming from a cheap cassette player. The old man perched on the edge of a chair and with the muted and watery leer of a jaded pedophile observed the girl’s fleshy thighs bulging out from under her tight white shorts.

The girl glanced over and saw him, but before she could scream the old man reached over and handed her a bunch of pages torn from a school notebook. The pages were covered with elegant handwriting, with Gothic curlicues. The girl quickly skimmed the writing, then looked up at the old man, her big eyes brimming with greed and disbelief.

“What do you want me to do?” asked the girl.

She didn’t know Russian or Latin, or ancient Aramaic—only English, or, rather, American.

The old lecher would have understood her in any language, but he said:

“First just sign the contract.”

He could have answered in any language; he knows Russian, and Latin, and ancient Aramaic, and Greek, and Sanskrit. They say he even knows Albanian.

With the innate clumsiness of an overweight pre-teen, the girl lurched over to her school backpack, emptied its contents onto her bed, and fished out a ballpoint pen of Chinese manufacture.

The old man shook his head: “Blood. This kind of contract must be signed in blood.”

The girl was taken aback, but only for a moment. Staring impudently into the pervert’s eyes, she undid the button and zipper on her white shorts and lowered them to her knees. Then, hiking her gaudy stretch panties over to one side, she poked her finger between her legs and dug around inside. Without taking her eyes off the man’s face, she lifted her stained finger and smeared a crooked, rust-colored cross on the notebook paper with the ink of her first menstrual blood.

The old man gathered up the pages and vanished. Only then did the girl realize that his image hadn’t been reflected in the mirror.

The contract stipulated a thirteen-year term.

You might ask how I came to know these details. I learned them firsthand from one of the parties to the contract. And I’m not personally acquainted with Britney, so you can guess who I mean.

If you’ve read any books about voodoo or know anything about the history of the blues, you know the legend of the Trickster. Outside every city is a crooked crossroads, with a withered tree standing in its southwest corner. Every blues master has visited one of these corners on the night of a new moon. There he met the devil and sold him his soul in exchange for fame and glory. The devil in this particular legend is known as the Trickster, or Deceiver. No one can outwit him; he will steal your soul, dear child, and all you will get in return will be a pile of yellowed newspapers with your photograph on the front page.

The city of St. Petersburg has one of those crooked crossroads, in Vesyoly, at the place where Bloody Bolsheviks Prospect meets International Prostitute Kollontai Street. A withered old tree used to stand there, on the spot now occupied by a Neste gas station.

I used to be in a band with Ilya, who later made it big under the stage name “Devil.” We were coming back late from a rehearsal one dark night. Feeble little stars cowered behind a dirty gauze veil of clouds, and alcoholics, plagued with nightmares, tossed and turned on park benches nearby. The Trickster came coasting along in a burgundy-colored Volga, the deluxe model. He pulled up beside us just as we reached the crossroads, and invited us into his car. I immediately realized what was going on and instructed the old goat to kiss my ass. Mama taught me never to get into cars with suspicious-looking strangers.

But Ilya did. He got into the back seat and struck up a conversation with the old scumbag. Now Ilyukha sings his songs in huge stadiums and has his own TV show. Whereas my three solo albums came out in editions of twenty copies each, total, on cassette.

Not too long ago, the old swindler visited me again. He told me about Britney, and a whole slew of other clients too. He had heard that I’d become a writer, and figuring that this might give him another chance, poked his contract under my nose. It reeked of urine from a railway station toilet.

My response to the Source of All Sin, after censoring out the nonstandard vocabulary, could be distilled down to two English words: get lost. Rebuffed, the tempter spat malevolently onto my kitchen floor, and his saliva sizzled and scorched a hole in the linoleum. It’s still there on the floor, under the cardboard carton that I use as a table for my electric teapot and toaster. You can come over and take a look: With its ragged edges and dark center, it resembles a black hole, like the ones in outer space, and gives off a sulfury smell.

The Adversary was in a pathetic state. He told me a sob story about how he’d been to see K, and P, had dropped in on N, and had even flown out to the middle of nowhere to see G, but everyone had turned him down in more or less insulting terms. The despondent seducer whined that now he would have to make a deal with a client you couldn’t even call a writer, a scribbling hack whose opuses even he couldn’t stand to look at, much less read, and that everyone in hell would mock him, the so-called Master of Evil, when he dragged that sorry-ass soul down there. O, how low he had fallen, after Goethe and Sorokin!

At that point the Prince of Darkness, drained of all hope, dissolved into a pale gray haze that looked like bus exhaust, and wafted southward in the direction of Moscow.

Literary critics had unanimously identified my latest novel as the most insignificant and forgettable book of the year. Most bookstores don’t carry it. Sales experts, following some tyrannical inner voice that they call “the dictates of the market”—though we know that the market has nothing to do with it—loaded the shelves with row upon row of copies of a single book by a different author, which had become a surprise bestseller. They even colonized the bookstore windows, piling up a million more copies in huge stacks that spill over onto the sills.

Verily, vanity of vanities, the things of this earth.

Thus did I twice shame the Enemy of the human race and save my eternal soul.

FAMILY TREE

My name is Maximus. Not Maxim, not Max, but Maximus; you can check my passport and driver’s license. I owe the name to my uncle, or rather, to his work buddies, who had marked some milestone in his employment by giving him an old book on the history of Ancient Rome just before I was born. Some random Roman emperor’s or general’s name came up, and my uncle, who was also my godfather, bestowed it upon me. Could have been worse. I’m eternally grateful to my godfather for not choosing one of those other names the Romans were so fond of, the ones that have both masculine and feminine equivalents in Russian. Like Valerian, Valentinian, Julius, or Claudius. It’s scary to think how many schoolmates I would have had to massacre during their tender childhood years for calling me girly names like Valka or Claudia behind my back.

My ancestors acquired the surname Semipyatnitsky during the years of serfdom. Don’t believe people with names like Sokolovsky, Tarasovsky, Dubovitsky, or Lebedinsky when they try to claim noble birth. On the contrary. That elegant “-sky” suffix usually marks the descendents of lowly peasants with no status whatsoever, who didn’t even know who their parents were, much less their ancestors, and accordingly were listed in the census under their master’s name: “Who do you boys belong to?” “We’re Colonel Ordyntsev’s chattel.”

What’s known for a fact is that my ancestor, the potent patriarch and founder of the family line, was a stableman on an estate in Saratov province, a carouser and cardsharp whose unreliable character had earned him the nickname Seven Fridays—for him, every day was the beginning of the weekend. It’s also known that my ancestors weren’t Russian, and might have been of Tatar blood. My father’s name is Raul Emilievich. So my full name is Maximus Raulevich Semipyatnitsky. No one uses my patronymic, though; as is said in such cases, I have not earned it.

Our distant relatives bear the name Saifiddulin. Raul and Émile are French names, as far as I can tell, but though it might seem strange to you, they’re extremely popular among Russian Tatars. This supports my family’s hypothesis about the Tatar blood.

But there’s another story as well, a beautiful legend. Through the ages, generations of Semipyatnitskys have passed down the tale that our family originated not in a Tatar tribe—though my forefathers must have come into close contact with Tatars as a matter of course, as neighbors in the Turkish world—but rather in ancient Khazaria, which at one time was a great power, and which vanished, like Atlantis, in the currents of history. It’s even said that our family was related to the Great Khagan.

I don’t know how much of this legend is true and how much of it is just inspiring nonsense that my ancestors made up to boost their morale in their demeaning and dependent social position. But whether there’s some kind of genetic memory at work, or whether all these tall tales have just seeped into my subconscious, for whatever reason, I’m sometimes visited by strange dreams. Last night, for example.

KHAZAR DEMOCRACY

Once upon a time, in the glorious city of Itil, which stands on the River Volga, in the capital city of the Khazar Tsar-Khagan, there lived a herdsman of horses, the younger son of a man named Nattukh, Saat by name. This is no epic tale; there was nothing heroic about Saat; he was just an ordinary man living an ordinary life. He pastured his mares on the steppe, carried foals in his arms, shoveled manure, and hauled it from the corrals. Of course a poor herdsman like Saat wouldn’t live in Itil itself; a square sazhen of land an arrow’s flight from the Khagan’s palace cost way more than he could afford: five weights of silver. No, he lived far away, at the very edge of the steppe. And that is as it should be: Where can you find space to graze your mares in Itil? Half the time you can’t even find an open hitching post. Horsemen wander the streets, searching among the stone houses, but the posts are all being used, there’s not a single free one to toss your reins over! The steppe, though, is a land of plenty: feather grass and wind. Saat’s tent was tattered, draughty, and full of holes. But he did not lose spirit. On a summer night, the stars would shine their way through the rips in his tent roof; their rays caressed and warmed him.

But Saat had no one, only starlight, to caress and warm him. He was lonely. He did not crave gold or silver; it wasn’t a big stone mansion he wanted, not glory and fame; his only desire was to have a black-haired maiden by his side, a girl with hazel eyes, a bosom like a young mare’s udder, and gentle sloping withers. Long did he crave a wife!

But then that desire, too, passed.

And after that Saat had the perfect life.

Itil held no appeal for Saat; Saat forgot Itil. Even the tax collector forsook the path to Saat’s tent. When a man lacks a wife and worldly wealth, when he doesn’t go to the bazaar or to the bathhouse to gossip; when he doesn’t inhale the dust at the Khagan’s gate, it is as though he doesn’t exist; he is invisible. And free.

Sometimes Saat would think: Great is the Khagan, glory to him and victory over all his foes, what use to him is a poor herdsman and his mares? How can the Khagan, blessed be his name under the moon and sun, be mindful of all the herdsmen in the boundless steppe? Send troops into battle, gather in the taxes, array concubines on thick woolen carpets, manage the affairs of state! And the herdsman, for his part, what need has he of the Khagan? The bay mare has foaled, the milk in the burdiuk has fermented wrong and turned all clotty, and yesterday the wolves howled all night long, what if they attack the horses? The Khagan and the herdsman lead separate lives. And so be it.

But every year there was a marvelous and strange occurrence. On the second moonless night after the day when light and dark fell in equal measure upon the spring grass, Saat would rise with the dawn; he wasn’t quite awake, but sort of still sleeping, sleepwalking. He would take up his kizil-wood staff and set forth in the fog, in the direction of Itil.

If he had been able to see, he would have realized that he was not alone. From all over the steppe, men walked, swaying blankly from side to side in their tattered beshmets. Eyes open, but dreaming. Falling down, bumping into, or even trampling one another. But pressing inexorably forward, onward, like a swarm of ants crossing a ford.

For once a year all of Khazaria is called upon to vow for the Khagan and to elect the Great Kurultai.

So here comes Saat, making his way across the steppe, and his head feeling like a buzzing beehive, but divided into different chambers, each swarming with its own political party, so not just one beehive, politically speaking, but several… peehives, if you will. And even if you won’t.

So Saat feels that three tenths of his head, from the right ear to the crown, are for United Khazaria: this peehive is the biggest and the Khagan himself is in it or nearby. And Saat feels that two tenths of his head, the crown and half the back, are for A Just Khazaria, which is new, and also for the Khagan, but from the other side, as it were. And one tenth of his head, the part by the left ear, is for the Utmost Primordial Communal Peehive Party of Khazaria. This peehive is ancient; it has come down from his forefathers. And one half tenth of his head, behind the ear, just a scratch, really, is for the Robber Bandit Peehive of Khazaria. And this party has no more sense than a pile of rotten straw, but its leader is a bandit they call the Thrush, Solovey, and he’s a riot, so much fun! The rest of his head stayed home; it didn’t go to vow anything, didn’t elect anyone. And fine, so let half an ear come, that should be enough for the Great Kurultai.

Shamans lead a bear around the streets of Itil. The bear jingles its bell, dances. United Khazaria is the winner. Who else is there anyway? It’s all just Murzlas in the Kurultai. They’re not like Khazars: dark-skinned, curly-haired, with round eyes. There’s a saying in the bathhouses: For the Murzlas the Khagan is no law, and the shaitan spirit no brother. Though the shaitan may very well be their father. But you hear all kinds of things in the bathhouse.

Saat returns at night, collapses in his ragged tent, sinks into a deep slumber. Gets up the next day and remembers nothing! Feet all bloody, but where he has been and what he has been doing?—might as well ask the wind!

The old women whisper that every year the Itil sorcerers and shamans send out a huge cloud of foul air, filled with violet-colored dust, gathering the entire Khazar people together to vow allegiance. The ragged herdsmen come to Itil, trudging on their last legs like the living dead, and they speak their vows, vote in swarms with their voices. Afterward they have no recollection of whom they voted for, or of even voting at all. But the Khagan is eternal, and the Kurultai is with him: you swore allegiance back then, so now obey; go forth: raid, gather taxes for our coffers and maidens for our beds, bow down to the earth before us. For we are blood of your blood, flesh of your flesh and it’s all for your sake. And the Khazars live on. They carry on as they can, in their own way. And the Khagan, too, with the Kurultai. Until next spring. This is one way. And it is even a good way. Just so long as there’s no war.

RAVENS OF MORNING

Every morning around eight thirty I venture forth. The door to the apartment building closes lazily behind me on its pneumatic hinge. The first thing I hear is the croaking of ravens. They’re everywhere; they live here year ‘round. They weave their black-branched nests on the treetops in the courtyard, and subsist on a diet of human leavings gleaned from the trash bins.

Sometimes I ask myself: Why is it only the most disgusting, ugly, and nasty creatures that have adapted to live with human beings? Ravens, rats, and cockroaches are man’s constant companions in his wanderings through time. They establish their abodes either inside those of humans, or in close proximity to them. For whatever reason, human cities are devoid of proud eagles, noble deer, gorgeous butterflies, and even soft-furred beavers. Could it be that in the Creator’s plan these fauna are placed near us so as to enhance the aesthetic effect of man’s perfection, by contrast?

Or do they sense that we’re kindred spirits, grimy, low birds of a feather?

The ravens croak in the morning. Harken to where the noise is coming from. If it’s from the right, no problem. But if a raven croaks three times on your left, no good will come of it. An ancient Khazar omen.

Observe also the position of the waxing moon. If it’s on the right, all is well; on the left, you’re in trouble.

If you see a bad omen, though, all is not lost; there’s a sure way to protect yourself. Immediately spit three times over your left shoulder. Everyone knows that the devil lurks behind a man’s left shoulder; there’s an angel on the other side. So spit three times into the devil’s snout; that’ll throw him off. Then make four complete turns clockwise, that is, left to right. That’ll make the devil dizzy, and then the angel can give him one in the rear. Last, take off your coat, turn it inside out, and put it back on. It will utterly baffle the demon. And he won’t give you any more trouble.

I learned this from my Khazar grandma. She also taught me how to cast spells using a dried branch, how to undo an evil spell using nothing but water, how to draw signs to protect yourself from shape-shifters, and how to distinguish the living dead from the living living, and the living dead from the dead dead.

But I’ve forgotten just about everything from that distant time, those years when I was a schoolboy, and used to spend my summer vacations on a farm far away, on the shores of a broad, muddy river, with my wise, fairy-tale grandmother. It was so long ago, it feels like another lifetime. Or someone else’s.

A line from one of those three cassette albums.

The life I live now is completely different.

HEGEMON

I greet the ravens, and if necessary, I spit the shoulder demon away, and head for the shopping-center parking lot. I go up to my boxy gray car, get the remote key out of my pocket, and press the button. The door locks click, and I open the driver’s side door and crawl in.

My car is a 2006 Renault Logan, ultra-economy class, designed for the Turkish market and assembled in Moldova or someplace. Bought on credit with a three-year loan with an insane interest rate. Of course the color caused no end of torment. When the bank agreed to the loan, there was too much variety on the lot: For example, instead of drab gray, you could also choose plain gray. Or drabber gray. And then, there was also plain drab gray. Well, I put a lot of thought into it and finally decided I might as well get a gray one—I liked the color so much.

We could spend some time on this. These days, a man’s social status, his identity and place in the world, everything that he has (or has not) achieved in his lifetime, can be gauged quickly and easily with one look at the car he drives.

In one of my previous lives, sometime around 1995, I was walking along the Palace Embankment past the Admiralty one warm summer night, hand in hand with a tall, ravishing brunette, talking big: “Katya, if today, right this minute, the devil came up and let me see into the future, and if I saw that I was destined to become an ordinary man like millions of others, that I would just go to work every day, come home at night and watch TV, spend my weekends shopping, and all the rest of it, and if the devil were to hand me a gun, I would shoot myself right then and there, without a moment’s hesitation!”

Over the next couple of years Katya got tired of me, of my tendency to disappear into a black hole for weeks and months on end and then suddenly turn up with no warning, “Hey, you busy tonight?” Katya married a good man. Katya has a job as a senior legal advisor, an assistant prosecutor. She might even have made prosecutor by now.

And here I am getting into my cheap Franco-Turkish car, thinking what a dirty trick it had been for the devil not to show up then and there with that movie about my future life and a loaded pistol in his clawlike hand. But what can you expect from the spawn of hell? Now he can gloat at the sight of me, the man I’ve become, a fate worse than death, the very man I swore I’d never be. On the other hand, don’t forget, I did turn him down twice when he offered his contract—my soul in exchange for a chance at something more. Gloating is all he has.

Yes, I careened across the globe from the White Sea to the Indian Ocean and back again; tried on a monk’s cassock, then ragged blue jeans; walked around clutching a string of wooden prayer beads, then the handle of a Makarov pistol. I scrambled the best, formative years of my life in the geometric Brownian motion of an unfathomable fate. Now what’s left of me spends its days in voluntary servitude as an ordinary office drudge, a cheap white-collar worker in an off-the-rack business suit, my double chin spilling over the necktie leash around my fleshy neck.

I’ve merged into a class totally devoid of class consciousness. I’ve become what is demeaningly designated as “lower middle class,” the baseline standard for poor taste and ineptitude, unenvied even by blue-collar workers, who merely detest us for getting to work in warm, dry offices, while manual workers spend their days up to their ears in shit and engine oil, poking around in the guts of broken machines. No, they don’t envy us; sometimes they actually earn more than we do. Successful people, the upper middle class, hold us in contempt, whereas for high society we don’t even exist at all except as an anonymous throng of pathetic losers, barely visible behind the wheels of the junk cluttering up the road and getting in the way of their limousines and sports cars.

In songs and jokes we’re “mid-level managers,” MLM for short. The term is not to be taken literally; it implies that there are other managers on an even lower rung, but there’s actually no one below us; the next level down is the flames of hell. So when you think about it, we managers don’t really manage anyone—there’s no one there. But “manage” has another meaning as well: to control. In the strictest sense of the word, we’re not really managing—but in fact we sit at the controls of the entire global economy.

I shall now speak out on behalf of the insulted and injured, the proletariat of our new epoch. Lend me your ears!

In stuffy, crowded, overstaffed offices from San Francisco to Qingdao, decrepit air conditioners rattle noisily in the background, or worse, there’s no AC at all. Amid the din and shouting, with Windows on the verge of collapse, the MLM presides. A telephone receiver is permanently attached to his ear, and he himself is plugged into the computer network like a mere appendix to the keyboard. There he sits, building the economy, hastening the march of progress, propelling mankind inexorably onward toward its inevitable collapse.

Not stockholders, who care only about their dividends, not the masters of business standing regally over the fray like Kutuzov and Napoleon at Borodino, themselves subject to the flow of history and lacking free will; not the top managers who claw bonuses for themselves out of each and every deal and preen before fitness-club mirrors; and certainly not the actual workers in the factories, who could give a shit about any of that—no, it’s the office worker: the manager of sales, procurement, logistics, export, import, marketing, human resources, and whatever the hell else—it is he who determines the fate of the world, he, the very embodiment of efficiency, who implements the laws of economics.

An exhausted and alienated import manager in France compares pricing and supply proposals and selects some product from China after rejecting an Italian company’s bid. Meanwhile his director flies to Rome on company money, stays in a Radisson or Hilton, drinks himself under the table at some banquet in an Italian restaurant, and seduces the host’s wife, and now he needs to get a contract with the Italian company, if only to justify his own existence and his exorbitant salary. The exhausted and alienated import manager couldn’t care less; it makes no impression on him, even when he finds out that it was the director of the Italian company who delivered his own wife to the drunken French director’s bed (and she’s not his wife anyway, but an “export escort” hired especially to seal the deal). All the import manager did was compare prices and terms and select the Chinese product.

If the director digs in his heels, the import manager won’t argue, he’ll give in. He has a secret weapon: covert sabotage. Almost immediately things start to go wrong with the Italians. Deliveries are delayed; the paperwork is mixed up, work at the plant grinds to a halt, and the entire transaction comes up a loss. The director gets taken down a peg at the next stockholders’ meeting, and deliveries begin coming in from China.

Because that’s what made sense from the beginning. And the exhausted and alienated manager, who doesn’t stand to gain or earn bonuses from any of these deals, all he wants is for everything to balance out, to make sense, and to benefit the business. It gives him a feeling of functional harmony and insulates him from an awareness of the absurdity of existence.

That’s all.

Thousands upon thousands of import managers the world over make the same kinds of decisions, and terrestrial exports soar to celestial heights.

When he’s done with the world economy, having finally directed it into the proper channels and calculated all the trends and vectors, the exhausted manager sets off for home.

And immediately starts in on the economy from the other side.

He buys up mass-market clothing, fills the seats in chain restaurants, clears stuff off the supermarket shelves. It’s not easy; he can’t cram everything in, but he keeps on trying: eating and drinking, drinking and eating. Periodically he stuffs some new, pointless item of clothing into the one miniscule closet that itself takes up nearly all the space in his apartment. And who, if not he, can consume all that stuff coming out of the world’s factories? He’s tired, he’s miserable, but he knows how to laugh, he seeks out entertainment, and after all, who, if not he, will fill the dance clubs and concert halls? Occasionally he’ll even buy a book and read it, a bestseller, just to keep up with things, to follow what’s going on up there in first class. It was written for him, after all; and he’s the one drenched in the toxic spit of their scorn: Yes, I’m a piece of shit, a loser, he agrees, and keeps on reading. Who knows, he might hit the lotto jackpot and wind up in the penthouse of the Tower of Babel, and, if so, he’ll be able to take advantage of what his reading has taught him about the difference between a genuine thirty-five thousand-euro watch and the one that’s not so genuine, the kind that your basic dimwit can pick up for fifteen hundred American dollars.

He believes in God, believes in the President, believes in the Law, believes in the Market, believes in Science, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy. He takes out loans for his condo and his car, he maxes out his credit card for a serving of yogurt. It’s his way of issuing credit to the economy, a bond of trust to the government and to society as a whole.

The most deranged among them even bring children into the world.

He is an optimist.

He is Hegemon, he is mankind in the twenty-first century.

Respect this man, bland and faceless though he may be.

Rejoice in his blandness. For when he becomes aware of his true class interests, he will turn the world upside down, without even reaching for a weapon. Everything is already in his power. And if this million-handed mid-level manager should collectively decide to press the delete key, he will erase the Universe.

THE BOX

Now this is how the story goes:

That day I pulled up to the office as usual in my gray Renault with its funny-looking, stunted little hood, and wedged the car into an improvised parking place on the lawn in front of the building. I got the lanyard with the Smart Card out of my pocket and draped it around my neck. This is my personal collar, the visible mark of my servitude. Nine-to-five slavery, they call it in the advanced capitalist countries, where over the course of their many decades at the reins of power the liberal socialist parties have trained employers (i.e., exploiters) to observe the eight-hour working day (including lunch break). In my case that comes to nine-to-six; here in the former land of triumphant socialism those eight hours do not include your lunch break.

The sensor reads my Smart Card and records the times of my arrival in the morning, my departure at the end of the day, my lunch and restroom breaks, and my other personal time, which must not exceed one half hour per day, total. There are fines for tardiness, for leaving work early, and for exceeding the allotted break time.

I passed through the turnstile, swiped the heavy metal door open with my Smart Card, and walked past the secretaries’ desks to the Import Department. My desk is next to the door, so people are coming and going behind my back all day long.

Could be worse. This girl I know works in marketing for an office furniture company. Her desk is right in the middle of the showroom. It has a price tag on it. So while she’s sitting there doing her work, customers keep coming up to her desk and opening and closing the drawers, peering underneath and feeling the legs (of the table), and knocking on the desk with everything but their teeth to test the quality of the veneer. She says that she’s gotten used to it and doesn’t even notice them anymore.

The Import Department is a medium-sized rectangular room with a windowless interior wall; a glass partition separating Import from IT; a partition between the Department and the corridor; and the building’s external wall, which has three windows (no AC). There are twenty-four other desks with twenty-four employees (besides me) working at them. The desks are jammed right up next to each other, with narrow aisles leading to the printers, the fax machine, and the copier. Pretty near constantly, all twenty-four employees are yelling into their phones, competing with one another to be heard. A couple of hours into the workday, my head starts to throb from the racket; by lunchtime the oxygen in the room is depleted and we’ve switched over to a carbon-dioxide diet, like plants. We haven’t yet mastered the art of photosynthesis, though, so what we’re exhaling is not oxygen, but the same gas we’re breathing in, only more concentrated. The windows are open year-round, but that doesn’t help: The dense, stifling atmosphere in the room blocks any fresh airflow; if you put a candle on the windowsill, the flame would stand utterly still and vertical, without the slightest movement, like the consciousness of a yogi in a profound meditative state. If fresh air somehow manages to break through, the draughts infect one third of the office population with a whole smorgasbord of upper-respiratory ailments.

My job title is Leading Specialist. That’s a great jumping-off place for a career if you’re twenty-five. For a man of thirty-five it’s the kiss of death, a complete dead end.

I am thirty-five.

That morning I thought about it again, and my soul felt like… like a herd of scratching cats. Or, rather, it was more like if the cats had spewed their liquid and solid excrement directly into my soul, and the scratching I felt was them trying to clean up after themselves. Have you ever seen a cat scratching at the linoleum after he’s peed on it, imagining that he’s covering the evidence?

I tossed my faux-leather briefcase onto my desk, on top of a heap of random papers, sank onto my chair, and, forming the classic Anglo-American fuck-you gesture, jabbed the computer’s ON button with my middle finger. It started booting up, and the monitor went white. The face of Jessica Simpson flashed briefly before me (the intermediary desktop graphic I’d installed)—but then the screen showed the standard corporate interface for my workplace, that is, the Cold Plus Corporation.

First thing, I clicked on the bat image to check my e-mail. Everyone else in the department uses Windows Outlook; I’m the only one with The Bat. An involuntary extravagance. The IT People simply forgot to switch my e-mail program over when they installed the office system. I like The Bat.

The program reminds me of Grebenshikov’s song about the Yellow Moon. It also makes me think of vampires and Pelevin’s Empire V. But the real advantage is that when you forward letters from contractors to colleagues, they arrive as though they were sent directly from the original sender—no middleman—so you don’t have to deal with the fallout.

Several dozen new messages popped up, and as usual I began with the spam. Spam has its own special patterns. A couple of months ago I was being bombarded with ads for Viagra, Vuka-Vuka, and other miraculous substances purporting to enhance male potency. Then I kept getting information about a unique, brand-new method for mastering English. Last week I received an invitation to acquire real estate outside Moscow: a two-story mansion on a two-thousand-square-meter lot on the Rublev side, for a mere one-and-a-half million dollars. Clearly my virtual status is rising. Give it a little time and the circle will close back in on itself; I’ll start getting invitations to enroll in professional development courses for sales managers.

I was just about to delete the next message, but realized just in time that it was from our Dutch supplier of frozen French fries, forwarded to me by our Department Import Manager. The letter was an answer, and as I first thought, just the latest installment in a listless dialogue we’d been having with them about compensation for a loss, to the tune of eight hundred dollars, that Cold Plus had suffered in the Russian port because the forty-foot container had exceeded the maximum stipulated gross weight.

In the previous message, the Dutch export manager had denied responsibility, citing several lengthy provisions from INCOTERMS-2000,[3] and had repeated three times that, insofar as we were following FCA delivery standards,[4] “we are not the shipper.”

I had put the message aside for several days, biding my time until the mood was right, and after my next regular meeting with the Import Director to go over the different flights, I was blessed with inspiration and composed a response in my best English:

Thinking back to this message, I realized that I’d laid it on a little thick. So now I’d get some kind of reprimand. I didn’t want to read the message, so I shouted across three desks to the Import Manager for Potatoes, catching her just as she hung up her phone.

“Lina! What the hell is he writing now? This time, that he’s not selling, just looking?”

“Who, the Dutch guy?”

“Uh-huh, the Flying Dutchman, and he can stick it up his… You forwarded his message, but damned if I’m going to read it.”

“Nah, in fact, they agreed to compensate us fifty-fifty.”

“Oh. So I typed two entire volumes of War and Peace for a measly four hundred dollars?”

“That’s about right.”

“So what’s the rest of the message about?”

“Something completely different. Remember the time they snuck those undeclared samples into a container?”

I did remember. It happens every once in a while: Some item that isn’t declared on the invoice gets slipped into a container, deep inside, away from the door. Customs can’t open and unload all the containers, so they conduct random inspections. More often than not that happens if there’s a glitch, or if some information comes in from the higher-ups, or if the customs office has a conflict with the broker and they want to show him who’s boss. So in theory it’s possible to bring in entire containers full of contraband, with a couple of rows of approved goods stacked inside the doors, just in case.

By the way, have you ever wondered why bananas are cheaper here than apples? My guess is it’s because the banana companies are a front: If a few bags of pure cocaine were loaded into every container of bananas, profits would far exceed any overhead. Your bananas could even be distributed free of charge.

I try to avoid breaking the rules. So when Lina asked, as she always does, “The Dutch want to load three pallets of samples in the container. Is that okay?” I refused.

“Right. Three pallets, half a ton each. One and a half tons of contraband per container. Maybe we should just give up declaring anything? We’ll just declare oxygen. What’s the TN VED code for air?[5] Zero duty?”

“I’m not kidding, Max.”

“I’m not Max. My name is Maximus.”

“I don’t care if it’s Caligula, asshole. We need samples. The front office is on our case day in and day out, they’re going nuts trying to get the mashed potatoes with mushrooms on the shelves before our competitors. And the broker with the mushrooms doesn’t want to declare them—that way the mushrooms will be pure profit. You know that!”

“I do. And I also know that we’ll bring in two hundred tons of the mushroom mixture, and it’ll just sit in the warehouse taking up space for six months, and then all of a sudden no one will have any use for it.”

“So what? At least they’ll be off our backs.”

“Fine, then, load them up. But why three pallets at once? Let them have ten boxes, that should be enough. If they decide to inspect the whole batch, we can buy the inspectors off for a hundred bucks. But three pallets could get us arrested.”

“Okay! Should I tell the broker?”

“No, keep them in the dark as usual.”

“Got it.”

“But make sure they get it right—it needs to go on the floor in the very back. And God forbid they include the boxes in the bill of lading and packing list! Tell them exactly how to fill out the forms.”

“I know, I know—I’m no virgin.”

“Oh, you expect me to believe that?”

“Figure of speech, you dimwit.”

“As though anyone would take you!”

“You… you yellow-faced Tatar!”

“Khazar. Get it right: My face is Khazar. But really, who’d want you anyway? Haunting the workplace every day till nine P.M… .”

“I’m going to throw this hole punch at you!”

“Hole punch, hole punch… is that an invitation?”

“Filthy mind. Only you could come up with something like that. I think you’re in desperate need of a girlfriend.”

“All right, we’ve had our little laugh. Let’s look at the rest of the message.”

That’s the way it was. More or less. But then something else came up. There’s always something coming up with these samples—first they try to cheat us, and then they mount an ambush.

“What is it this time, Lina?”

“They claim something got into a shipment that didn’t belong there.”

“Meaning?”

“They put in an extra box of something, by mistake, and now they want it back, I guess. They’re worried we might accidentally send it out to a retailer or open it ourselves. Rat poison, something like that…”

Now that was interesting. I decided to read the message after all. In spite of the insulting tone of my earlier letter, the supplier was proposing to split the expenses down the middle, and was being extremely courteous about it.

The second half of the message had to do with a box labeled PTH-IP-176539/48, twenty kilograms net weight. You could tell that the author of the message was trying too hard to strike a casual tone: We’ve just made a little mistake, everyone screws up now and then, no? So just set the box to one side, and we’ll come and get it, no problem.

But he wasn’t doing a very good job of sounding innocent. The wording was too strained, and I could see that there was real panic behind it, barely patched over. This was clearly no ordinary box. And sure enough, the phone on my desk rang and I heard the voice of the Import Director, calling from out on the road.

“Maximus?”

“Yes, Diana Anatolyevna.”

Or should I call her “Madam Director”? My boss is three years younger than me. It’s demeaning. She addresses me either by my first name or my last, but I use her full name, with the patronymic. It’s not required, but some masochistic impulse makes me do it.

“Hello.”

“Good afternoon, Diana Anatolyevna.”

“These crazy Dutch guys have been calling my cell all morning.”

“The swine!”

“They’re in a huge rush to sign a supplementary contract to issue bonuses by sales volume.”

“Imagine that!”

“Anyway, they’re on their way to Russia as we speak. They want to be in the office first thing tomorrow. Can you pick them up at their hotel in the morning?”

“Whatever you say, Diana Anatolyevna.”

“Semipyatnitsky, can we do without the excess humility? You know my car’s in the shop.”

“I said I’d pick them up.”

“All right… so look: I’ll come straight to the office from the airport; they can meet me there. Also, they mentioned a box, something that accidentally got into a container along with the samples. Are you up on this?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Have the box brought from the warehouse to the office—the Dutchmen want to take it back with them. Though I’m finding it hard to imagine how they’re going to manage that. And why all the fuss?”

That’s an awful lot of trouble for a box of rat poison, I thought to myself. This sudden visit by the supplier’s representatives had to be about the box. It was the contract about the bonuses that was incidental; that sort of thing can be decided without a face-to-face meeting.

I skimmed the message again. The Dutch were insisting that the box remain sealed, to keep the contents intact. So were they just going to take the box back to Holland with them, seals and all, as checked baggage?

Or would they open it beforehand and pack the contents in their personal luggage?

What was in that box?

I had to take a look. I could justify myself later by claiming that it had fallen off the forklift and broken open, or I could come up with some other story. I couldn’t get that box out of my mind. I had to head over and see it for myself.

COLD CORPORATION

Let me say a few words about the organization where I work, its history and the nature of its business.

In its current form, Cold Plus is a conglomerate comprising regional distribution companies, warehouse complexes, and transport and freight enterprises, all administered from one central office. Cold Plus imports frozen food products from all over the world and arranges their processing through customs, trans-shipping, storage, delivery to processing companies, and distribution onto the retail market. The assortment, or, as they still call it, the product line, is enormous. Everything from potatoes to strawberries, shrimp to octopus, even cakes, candy, and bread, is frozen and freighted in from abroad in refrigerated containers and trucks. Just so you know, the chunks of “fresh fruit” in your morning yogurt are shipped in from China at a controlled temperature of minus eighteen Celsius and defrosted in Russia. The cheesecake that you order in a café was brought in frozen from Australia and thawed in the microwave, just moments before the waiter brought it to your table. The “fresh,” “steamed,” or “chilled” meat and fish in your supermarket more often than not were frozen a year ago somewhere in Argentina and underwent special processing to give them the appropriate degree of “freshness.”

Many years ago, when such products were still a rarity, a group of clever entrepreneurs involved in the food importing business realized the potential for growth in frozen food and poured all their energy and resources into that sector. Demand grew with every passing year, and along with it the business of the Cold Plus Corporation. Now, practically everything we eat is frozen and freezing is the most widespread means of preserving the nutritional quality of food over time. The company’s owners are now known as pioneers in the industry and are enjoying the well-deserved fruits of their bold initiative.

Cold Plus is a success story, the kind of thing you read about in glossy magazines aimed at a yuppie readership, but consumed mostly by mid-level managers like me, and students, who take it as an inspirational example of the kind of success they can aspire to in their future careers.

In principle it’s a true story—though a few details are missing. And as we know, the devil’s in the details.

A more complete reconstruction of the company’s “success story” would go as follows:

At the very beginning of the glorious, fabulous, and romantic ’90s, a group of Young Communists occupying leadership positions in the City Committee of the Komsomol followed the example of the Communist Party itself, which, according to a slogan posted in the halls of the City Committee Headquarters, was the Committee’s helmsman, and steered the conversion of the economy to market principles, plunging fearlessly into the abyss of capitalism.

This period in post-Soviet history is called, to borrow Marxist terminology, the epoch of “primitive capital accumulation.” Here the distinctions between good and evil get murky. For some, the phrase summons up visions of the Wild West: gold prospectors, adventurers, prostitutes, hucksters, and reckless cowboys. But in Russia’s case, there wasn’t much romance to it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a fantasy.

You see, the epoch of “primitive capital accumulation” in Russia and throughout the Soviet Union actually comprised the years of collectivization and industrialization, and the subsequent construction of “advanced socialism.” During this period, capital was accumulated by means of cruel exploitation of the population and the confiscation not only of surplus goods, but necessities too; resources were concentrated in the offices of the bureaucracy and the Party machine, where they underwent processing into the ideal form for use by the country’s future leaders. By the time the ’90s came along, the only thing left to do was divvy up all that accumulated capital. And this task fell to the self-proclaimed red-carpet cowboys, the movers and shakers on the seats of power.

But let us return to our city Komsomol Committee. One of the country’s first commercial banks, Bee Trust, was founded through the patronage of the Komsomol, and with the direct participation of its leaders. There was no need to spend centuries accumulating money, collecting it from thousands of individual depositors, as had been the case in old, backward Europe. Money was decanted directly from the city budget into this private bank in exchange for an utterly mundane transfer of a specified percentage of said funds back into the hands of the budget administrators in the form of hard currency. The same old gang of Party, Komsomol, and administrative functionaries retained their old positions, now “serving” in a new capacity.

After the liberalization of foreign trade, special structures were established under the bank’s supervision to manage import operations. Purchases were covered by what still passed as government funds, transferred to the bank from the state budget; the revenue from sales within the country, though, following the age-old rules of the game, became the personal capital of those who had established the business.

Initially, the budding Komsomol capitalists indiscriminately bought up everything they could abroad, paying whatever price they were asked. In those days, even the rank and file involved in these deals on the Russian side could become millionaires after a mere month on the job through the unofficial commissions they received from foreign contractors for deals they signed on behalf of the government at exorbitant prices and with crushing terms.

The leadership cast a blind eye on the growing prosperity of their junior partners; they weren’t doing so badly themselves, after all. Economically, the deals had absolutely no significance. All of the expenses were written off the accounts of Bee Trust, and the profits went directly into the owners’ pockets.

The Bee Trust group’s business realized the eternal dream of farmers everywhere: The two halves of the chicken, the part that consumed resources and the part that provided profit, were kept separate. The front part of the chicken, the part that needed to be fed, remained entirely in the government’s chicken coop, whereas the back part, the part that laid the golden eggs, was privatized by Komsomol chicken farmers.

But all good things come to an end. The dolce vita of the Bee Trust bank ground to an abrupt halt on the day the Russian state declared bankruptcy. In addition to financing imports and buying up real estate, the Komsomol bankers had also gotten involved (excessively, it turned out) with securities. These securities primarily took the form of notorious short-term government bonds. Essentially, their purpose was to serve as an instrument whereby the state could attract funds to cover the ever-present budget deficit. Given the high and unpredictable levels of inflation at that time, these funds were obtained at unprecedented high interest rates.

Bee Trust, like many other banks, acquired these bonds by taking out subsidized loans from the government-owned Central Bank. They obtained them at an artificially low interest rate, then turned around and basically sold them back to the Russian government, but at a much higher rate. In this way, the Russian state issued credit and then covered that same credit by paying private banks for it.

The delta of this inspired operation allowed Bee Trust to increase its assets and to live high on the hog. The bank’s offices occupied a five-story building in the historical city center, a palace that had originally belonged to some prince or count. Immediately after it acquired the building, the bank hired a Finnish company to completely overhaul and remodel it in the European style. The aged gilding and eighteenth-century plaster moldings were knocked down, the mosaics and frescoes were scraped from the walls, and the decorative columns, crowned with sculptures of ancient heroes and divinities, were dismantled.

Four laid-off museum employees joined forces with a schoolteacher and formed a picket line outside the building to protest the destruction of a monument of historical and cultural value. The demonstrators spread out some pages from the newspaper Pravda on the concrete foundation of the palace fence and set out a bottle of vodka, a can of sprats in tomato sauce, and some spiced smelt and black bread. The protest went on for well over two hours. The intrepid defenders of culture invoked the memory of the palace’s Italian architect and its original owner, a high-ranking general and patron of the arts, a nobleman, and, as legend would have it, a descendent of Khazar royalty. Periodically they would shout out a slogan, demanding that respect be shown to the cultural treasures within. They then turned to one another and indulged in effusive outbursts of mutual esteem.

The protest came to a halt when the bank’s security system summoned the local militia, who proceeded to bundle the exhausted resistance fighters into a Kozel van and truck them off somewhere—most likely to be tortured in some windowless chamber.

The international media ignored the protest; most likely they were preoccupied with covering the meteoric rise of a new pop star—or should we say, pop “idol”?—by the name of Britney Spears.

Whatever the case, in 1998 the Russian government declared bankruptcy; that is, it declined to meet its debt obligations. At that point it was discovered that a critical amount of Bee Trust assets were held in the form of short-term government bonds.

Some time elapsed before everything came crashing down. For over a year the bank continued to occupy its remodeled European palace and maintained its sponsorship of the city hockey team. But the times kept on a-changing. The leading man of the TV drama that is Kremlin politics was replaced; new people moved into city government posts, notably those in charge of disbursing the municipal budget. These people had their own personal banks. Bee Trust was squeezed out.

Actually, the expression “came crashing down” is a little too melodramatic. Yes, Bee Trust, as a legal entity, underwent the bankruptcy and liquidation processes. Yes, bank employees who had become accustomed to an excessively cushy lifestyle lost their jobs. Yes, a few small-account holders—a couple thousand retirees—were ruined. But small stuff, really, in the grand scheme of things.

As for our Young Communist capitalists, they no longer depended exclusively on their bank resources. Each one of them held diversified assets: real estate, large amounts of cash both in hard currency and in accounts in countries with stable banking systems, as well as shares and interests in other branches of business.

One of those branches was import. Previously the Bee Trust group had dealt in the whole spectrum of food products. Now the time had come to break down into narrower areas of specialization. The era when one day you’d buy computers, the next prophylactics, and a week later bananas—all the while transporting non-ferrous metals and timber across the border—was over. Each different business staked out its own territory, with a finite number of players: authorized personnel only. Following the well-established laws of economics, the Russian economy entered the stage of monopoly capitalism.

The Bee Trust group imported all kinds of food products: fresh tropical fruits, vegetables, processed and canned goods, frozen foods, alcoholic beverages. But it didn’t have the capacity or means to maintain a full-scale defense along such a broad front. The big corporations got rid of bit players in the banana and mandarin orange business by flooding the market with cheap product. Decisions as to who would be involved in alcohol sales were made at completely different levels of officialdom, with which the Komsomol capitalists fell out of touch. Processed foods were taken over by mass producers, with different brands competing for market share. Bee Trust was left to choose between two alternatives: canned goods or frozen food.

The canned-goods market at the time was large and seemed promising. So the senior partners of Bee Trust went for tin cans and founded the United Preserves International Corporation, which, in spite of the name, entailed a process of division rather than unification.

Four of the young Komsomol capitalists who had made their fortune on kickbacks from foreign suppliers took up the frozen-food business, which had been rejected by their senior colleagues. They founded a small company and called it Cold Plus.

The subsequent fate of United Preserves International is pure decline and fall stuff. The company collapsed within a few years. Some of its owners perished in internecine struggles; others squirreled away some capital and dispatched it abroad; the rest ended their business careers in poverty and squalor after spending the last of their money acquiring Russian companies producing canned meat and condensed milk.

Cold Plus, on the other hand, took advantage of the expanding market and the increase in demand and swelled up like shit on yeast. Its branches and warehouses multiplied, and Cold Plus swallowed up its small competitors and suppliers. By the time I entered the story, it had become a large and successful corporation, the industry leader in frozen food.

Now, this version of the corporation’s history would be perfect for expansive documentation in some opposition newspaper, one of the ones that are financed by disgraced oligarchies (such as the rats who ran the notorious United Preserves International) or supported by left-wing enthusiasts. But the story is a lot more interesting than that. As I’ve already said, the devil’s in the details. His goaty snout peers out from backstage during this little drama entitled The Cold Plus Corporation: An Arduous Path to the Snowy Peaks.

Because the prime mover behind the introduction of the deep-freeze method was Satan himself. Oh yes. As we know, there are certain regions of hell in which the temperature is maintained at an extremely low level. Satan preserves the fruits of Eden there to this day—just in case.

As part of his campaign to promote the deadly sin of gluttony, Satan arranged for each home to have its own refrigerator, along with a microwave oven. Now each and every sinner can indulge in gluttony twenty-four seven simply by grabbing some food out of the freezer and sticking it in the microwave for a few minutes.

In order to keep each refrigerator full, and to further simplify the life of the glutton, Satan devised a way to freeze every possible comestible on Earth.

And his fantasy expanded beyond mere food. The infernal technology of cryonics began to be promoted as a means of preserving the dead, or just their brains, depending on who you’re talking to. Deep-freeze technology also made blood transfusions and organ transplantation possible on a large scale. But that’s a different story…

Let us return to the Bee Trust bank and the Cold Plus Corporation. The few years of the bank’s prosperity were dominated by the contracting führers from the Komsomol. The bank’s very name, along with its twisted motto, stolen from the dollar bill—In God Bee Trust—hints at the true force behind the throne: B[ee] for Beelzebub. There is no doubt where the Komsomol capitalists placed their full faith and credit.

By the year of the great default, the term of their original satanic contract with the Komsomol was running out, and Beelzebub needed to obtain new signatures in fresh blood on his ancient paper. It was then that his young clients in infernal servitude got the brilliant idea of developing the deep-freeze business.

AT THE WAREHOUSE

The department director wasn’t in, so I didn’t have to ask permission to leave. I just mentioned to the girls at the front desk that I was going to the warehouse, and signed out at the security desk. Having dispensed with the formalities, I went to the elevator and pressed the down button.

The doors parted, and before my eyes I beheld the Goddess of Sex, Spring, and Fertility, a tanned brunette with a perfectly sculpted bosom and sultry eyes. For a moment I was unable to move, then she asked, “Are you getting in or not?” Her voice sent vibrations down my spine. Well, yes I am. “Hot damn!” I thought, in ecstasy or frustration or some mixture of the two. Most likely the girl was a new hire in one of the other offices in our building. As we rode down, I scrutinized the Rules for Elevator Use on the wall so as to keep from gaping at the goddess’s breasts. At the first floor the girl got out and headed down the hall toward the break room; I went in the opposite direction, to the exit. Whew, made it. At ease.

I got in the car and started the engine, then inserted the theft-proof front panel on the radio and surfed the dial until I hit on some acceptable music. Then I backed out, exited the parking area, and set off along the crowded city streets toward the other side of town, where Cold Plus has its warehouses.

Recently I’ve been choosing stations that play rap, hip-hop, or just kolbasa pop without lyrics. The moment I hear the opening chords of a contemporary Russian pop song, I have an irresistible urge to puke all over the dashboard. I devoted many years to rock and roll and was always its biggest fan and connoisseur, but my brand loyalty exhausted itself and has now ricocheted in the opposite direction.

At first I used to be surprised when I heard about a real rock band putting on a joint concert with some commercialized pop act. Or when it would team up with some plastic pop group and go on tour to raise money for the president—yours, theirs, ours, “Nashists’”—and the party in power. Or when it went out to that stinking lakeside campground to perform for rowdy enthusiasts amassed at the big pro-Kremlin youth brigade’s annual rally.[6]

Then I realized that it was unfair to Russian rock musicians to expect them to hew exclusively to their aesthetic principles and commit themselves to being engaged citizens. Why should they? They’re not doing anything earthshaking, after all. They’re simply paid by the hour to entertain people—as a rule, slackers in synthetic leather jackets drinking beer out of big PVC bottles. The ones whose parents have better salaries listen to R&B—which no longer signifies “Rhythm and Blues,” by the way; this new music has nothing to do with real Rhythm and Blues—now it means “Rich and Beautiful.”

No ideas in music now—just marketing.

On the whole, pop rock fulfills one social and political function—to take away people’s ability to think. In a country where consumer demand increases as production decreases, where elections offer no real choice, and where no yardstick can measure the abyss that awaits, there’s no need for people who can use their heads. They’re useless, annoying, dangerous.

In an earlier era, they used to ban genetics and cybernetics; now it’s garden-variety formal logic that’s off limits. Because if a person starts thinking about things using simple syllogisms, it’s obvious where it can lead: to revolutionary thoughts. And revolution is a crime. So people need to be protected from logic.

Both the singer Mak$im on the one hand, and the group B-2 on the other, dispense with logical ways of thinking. It’s not that their lyrics make no sense; but any meaning they might have just slips away, no matter how much you concentrate. These days it’s just impossible to figure out who it was that loved whom, and why they broke up, and then, if the song is so sad, then why are the singers all smiling? Rampant postmodernism. And, actually, Mak$im is better than B-2. Because no one needs these things to make sense. They just have to be a little sad, like how you feel after your second glass of vodka, but positive overall, you know, not too heavy. No need to strain your brain.

Modern art doesn’t march at the head of a crowd waving a banner, nor does it thrust its mighty prow through ice-bound seas; it issues no summons, has no regrets, cries no tears. Modern art stands by the side of the road with a bottle of uncarbonated mineral water in its uplifted hand, and when a car pulls over, it leans over and calls into the open window, “Cool drink, anyone?”

Nowadays it’s only the occasional rapper who might come up with some interesting lyrics and some semblance of content. There is no real rock and roll any more, and there hasn’t been for a long time; what we have instead is rap. And kolbasa without lyrics is ideal precisely because there are no words: perfect for driving.

You can of course listen to megahits and oldies. Of course you can. But how many times can you listen to the same ones? I even know all the newer songs by heart. The old ones are just overkill, brainwashing. “Hotel California” is a great song. No question about it. And the first one thousand six hundred eighty-four or so times I heard it I really liked it. Then I was forced to listen to it three thousand more times. At that point I think my enthusiasm dimmed just a bit. Another couple thousand more times, and now my system goes into anaphylactic shock at the first chords.

All the good old rock and roll, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, even Pink Floyd, sets my teeth on edge. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just that rock and roll didn’t count on our longevity. Live hard, die young! But we clung to life and overstayed our welcome.

By the time my thoughts reached that point, I had switched over to the CD player, and Kurt Cobain’s voice filled the speakers. Now there’s someone who did it right.

Nirvana took me as far as the warehouse complex, where I parked in front of the office.

Inside, complete bedlam: Buried in papers, the girl at the front desk was pounding manically on her computer keyboard, correcting invoices. The room was packed full of city delivery drivers, and the noise of their grumbling filled the air. I fought my way through to the girl and asked:

“Where’s the warehouse manager? The deputy manager? Where is everyone?”

“They’re all out at the loading dock. Gone, every last one, the sons of bitches. Leave me alone! Don’t come near me! Don’t ask me anything! Fuck off, all of you!”

“Okay, fine. I’m almost done, I’ll be out of here in a minute—can I use your phone?”

“Fuck you!”

“All right, okay.”

I left the office and lit a cigarette. What was going on out here? Of course there’s always something going wrong with deliveries; there are software breakdowns, and human error, and before you know it you’re reinventing the space shuttle from scratch, piece by piece, all by yourself. But this chaos was way beyond normal. And not a single manager in the office.

I finished my cigarette and tossed the butt into the urn by the door, crossed the road, and entered the warehouse complex. A forty-foot refrigerated container truck stood at the loading dock, with workers swarming around. Everything looked normal there.

But when I climbed up onto the loading dock and approached the container in question, I realized that it was hardly business as usual. In fact nothing was as usual.

The workmen were moving like sleepwalkers, gliding along with a weird kind of grace, tracing slow-motion dance steps. Their eyes were wide open and they radiated an air of perfect bliss. This obvious state of grace was having a markedly deleterious effect on their efficiency, however. I watched one young guy in blue overalls for several minutes. He would pick up a box in the container, carry it to the forklift, set it down there, and then straighten up. Then he would bend down again and pick up the same box and carry it right back into the container. There he would set it down in the row of boxes, straighten up, again bend over, pick up the same box, and carry it back over to the forklift.

The workers took no notice of my presence. I don’t think they’d have noticed Godzilla arriving on the scene, let alone some clerk from the central office.

Trying to avoid colliding with the mesmerized workers, I made my way over to the foreman’s booth and peered in through the window, where I beheld an even more curious and striking scene. The foreman—a genuine Frenchman named Jean whose parents the Unclean Spirit had lured into the USSR via the Comintern and abandoned there to gasp their lives away during the era of reforms—was sitting inside the booth. No shirt, “topless,” if you can apply that term to a man’s hairy chest.

But three females, also topless, were crawling on their hands and knees on the floor around Jean’s feet. I recognized one of them, the deputy warehouse director; the others were apparently administrative assistants or accounting clerks. The women were caressing Jean, and one of them was already undoing his pants. All of this was entertaining enough to watch, of course, and it was tempting to stay and see out the orgy, but I turned and headed for the walk-in freezer in search of the warehouse director.

Sure enough, there he was, wandering around between the racks in the walk-in cooler, wearing a quilted coat and an army cap with earflaps.

I went up to him and said, cautiously, “Good afternoon, Victor Stepanovich. How are things going here? Everything okay?”

“Huh?… Ah, it’s Maxim!”

“Maximus.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, forget it.”

“Is something the matter?”

“The matter?”

“Well, I mean… in general… it’s just that… you’ve… you’ve got so much stuff coming in! Where am I supposed to put it all?”

“Have you been unloading potatoes from Holland today?”

“Yes we have! But were can we put them all? Look around you, they’re everywhere! Potatoes here, potatoes there, potatoes everywhere! We’ve got nowhere left!”

Victor Stepanovich gestured wildly at the racks, which were completely empty, and at the empty corners of the walk-in. Then he grabbed me by the sleeve with his right hand and led me to the exit, describing semicircles in the air with his left.

“They’re clogging up the aisles! And the loading dock. Potatoes!”

“Victor Stepanovich!”

“Why are there so many potatoes?”

“Victor Stepanovich!”

“Enough for a whole year! Where can we put them all?”

“Victor Stepanovich! There are no potatoes here! None whatsoever!”

“What do you mean, no potatoes?”

“Where is the box, Victor Stepanovich? The box with the rat poison?”

“Oh, the box, yes… Lina called and said something.”

All right. So Lina had called and told them about the box. Who asked her to get involved? Honestly.

“So? Where is it? Is it still sealed?”

“Yes, it is. It’s in the foreman’s booth. But it’s just that… it got a little torn.”

“What do you mean, torn??”

“Well, it just… kind of slipped off the forklift and got a little torn.” Sure it did. Slipped off the forklift. He could have come up with something more original.

Everything was clear now, just about. It wasn’t rat poison—no, the box had some kind of narcotic in it. Or maybe hallucinogens, LSD or something along those lines. Some potato-dealers, those Dutch. And everyone out here had popped their fill of whatever it was. That’s our guys for you. Call over from the main office and warn them that one of the boxes has rat poison in it, and they immediately want to try some. To hell with them. I’ll just check out the box and its contents and be on my way.

“I see how things are. And I just might not say anything back at the office about what’s going on out here. But I’ve been instructed to bring the box back—the supplier is coming all the way from Holland tomorrow to pick it up.”

Victor Stepanovich said that the box was in the foreman’s booth, and then he turned and trudged back into the walk-in to resume his count of the pallets with their nonexistent potatoes. I went back to the booth and flung open the wooden door.

During my brief absence, Jean and the ladies had made significant progress. Jean’s blue work pants were down by his knees, and the two administrative assistants (or accounting clerks) were hard at work down there, doing the “double helicopter” maneuver. The deputy director was stationed a little higher up, with Jean’s face pressed between the two white mounds of her breasts.

The comradely group didn’t react to my presence, which I can’t say surprised me in the least. I glanced around the booth. A metal cabinet containing work clothes stood against the opposite wall. The cupboard doors were covered with posters of naked women. A rickety table stood against the wall by the window, with some dirty mugs and glasses on it. I glanced under the table and there it was: a torn carton with big letters printed on the outside—PTH IP—followed by some numbers.

I crouched down and carefully slid the box out. Some little pink pills spilled from the tear. I scooped up a handful and took a close look. The pills were round, about the size of a No-Spa tablet, but without the diagonal stripe. Each pill had three letters printed on its surface, the same ones as on the box: PTH. Quite a sophisticated rat poison, with its own logo, evidently aimed at attracting a loyal consumer base—oh, right. Obviously, their rat-poison story wasn’t worth a second thought.

“Right, if you have no objection, we’ll just be on our way.”

No one was listening.

There was a roll of packing tape and a pair of scissors on the windowsill. I quickly patched the tear, picked up the box, and prepared to make my exit. I took a couple of seconds to inspect the additional gallery of glossy whores on the inside of the door, and it suddenly occurred to me that the security guards wouldn’t let me through the front gate without documentation for the box.

Jean was still in his private paradise, in the tender care of what he no doubt imagined to be nubile houris. I couldn’t bring myself to drag him back down to our fallen world, fraught as it is with misery and delusion. Felt sorry for the boy. He would come to before long, and when his vision cleared he would notice the accounting clerks’ bowlegs and bulgy noses and the deputy director’s advanced age and life-scarred, hangdog air.

I rummaged around and soon found what I needed in a drawer of the table next to the metal cupboard: a pen, an invoice form, and an official stamp.

In the same drawer there were some torn condom wrappers—the special kind for anal sex—and then some kind of powder, and a bunch of other junk. I decided to postpone thinking about any of this until later. Elbowing the tea-yellowed mugs on the table to one side, I quickly filled in the invoice—“Samples for the central office, 20 kg.”—scrawled a fancy-looking signature, and stamped the page.

I stuffed the invoice into the side pocket of my jacket and carried the box out of the booth.

On the way out I gave the deputy director a little spank on her generous behind, just for laughs. She didn’t notice.

I passed through security and crossed the road to the parking lot, unlocked the car with the remote, nestled the box gently onto the back, got into the driver’s seat, turned on the music, and started back toward the office.

The office?

ONE MILLION US DOLLARS

No way!

To hell with Cold Plus and its demented Dutchmen. Up Beelzebub’s ass with my boring, monotonous, humiliating job. Straight to the flames of hell with my slavery and beggary. To hell with them!

I inched along in the flow of skittish cars, reviewing on my internal screen the filmstrip of my life, from my very first memories to the present day. A story of almost unrelenting poverty and need.

The few exceptions cluster at the very beginning of the show. Here I am at three or four years of age. I’m wearing a neat little sailor suit and tooling around the playground in an ivory-colored kiddie Cadillac. The car is made of plastic and cheap metal and was assembled in some factory in Hungary, or possibly Poland. It’s pedal-driven; my feet in their light canvas slip-ons propel the car around on the asphalt, a one-kid-power motor under the flimsy hood. My older sister walks along beside me, protecting me and my precious vehicle from thieves and hooligans. The other kids from the apartment building stare at us in mute admiration.

My very first Cadillac, and also my last…

Now here I am at five or six. I’m in a little dress coat, with a white dickey and a bow tie on an elastic band around my neck. My handsome father, mustached and decked out in a fine suit, is holding my right hand. My beautiful mother, wearing a fancy dress and with her hair freshly permed, is holding my left hand. We are strolling along the seaside promenade in the resort city of Sochi, a fantastical place where we have access to everything—beaches and swimming pools, amusements and rides, restaurants with their Chicken Tabaka and wondrous Pepsi Cola.

At that time my father had been a man of some authority with a promising career, a government official in the Soviet economic system; my mother was that rarity, a stay-at-home housewife.

Soon afterward, my father’s career collapsed due to an excessive and misplaced adherence to principle. After that he became a low-level employee in the statistics department of some pointless agency, and my mother took a job as a schoolteacher. These scenes in my little filmstrip are gray and melancholy.

Now I am seven. Or eight. No, still seven, that’s right; it’s New Year’s Eve. 1980 will be the year of the Moscow Olympics. I’ve been assigned to play the role of the New Year itself, in the form of a frisky little bear cub. In the store, though, my mother sees the price tag on the bear costume, takes me by the hand, and leads me home without a word. At the pageant I run around inside the circle dance wearing a pair of simple red pedal pushers, with two big cardboard ears attached to my head. Hot tears roll down my cheeks. The first adult tears of my young life.

And my first cardboard ears—I will continue to wear them throughout my life, in one form or another.

After that everything pretty much continues in exactly the same way, just one thing after another.

My next pair of shoes are mud-colored Speedsters. They look utterly ridiculous, like clown shoes on my feet, which are already too big and flat as it is. But I’m only ten, no more, and it’s not that big a deal at that point in my life. The problem is that my feet hurt. The shoes chafe and cause bloody calluses. Mom says that I’ll get used to it; I have to break them in. But before she can turn away I see the tears in her eyes. Indeed, she was giving me false hope; the strange material that my shoes are made of doesn’t stretch or ease with time; it just dries out and forms hard bumps in random places on the inside.

Now comes a longer story. I have a dream: I want to get a bike. An Eaglet or a Stork. With big wheels, a bright shiny frame, and a heavy chain liberally lubricated with motor oil. And of course with orange and red reflectors on the back fender. I already have the reflectors: I swapped a stamp collection for them with a kid at school. My older sister had been collecting stamps for a long time, since she was small, and now she had no use for them. Probably. I mean, she didn’t even remember them. So I had the reflectors, just no bike. And my parents didn’t have any money to spare. Bikes are expensive—eighty rubles!

I’m no pauper, though. I’m already grown up and I can earn the money all by myself. I’m twelve, almost thirteen. So I manage to get a job over summer vacation at the loading dock at a food processing plant. It’s against Soviet labor law; I’m still considered a child. But they write me into the paperwork as sixteen. And indeed even at twelve I’m tall and broad-shouldered and look, if not quite sixteen, fifteen at least. Or no younger than fourteen, that’s how I look at twelve. So I spend the whole summer lifting and hauling heavy boxes of canned food.

But it’s not so bad, really; since I’m a minor I don’t have to work a full eight-hour day. My shift starts around lunchtime; I can sleep in and have breakfast at home. My coworkers and I have lunch at the plant, eating the same canned food that we’re hauling from the shop to the warehouse. We’re just following the unspoken rule of Socialist production: Eat as much as you want on the job, just don’t take any food offsite except in your stomach.

I go home in the evening. The noise of the kids playing outside doesn’t tempt me. I’m too tired. I don’t have a bike anyway, so I can’t join the others in their races or forays into other neighborhoods. Soon, though—soon I will have my own bike and then I can go out at night and ride around with my friends. I take a shower, making big plans, put on my pajamas, and go to bed. I read in bed until I fall asleep with the book still in my hands.

Just before the beginning of the school year, with summer vacation coming to an end, I quit my job and pick up my pay, in cash, at the payroll office. It’s a small wad of crumpled, greasy one-ruble bills, sassy green threes, and even a few crisp blue fives. Plus a few nickel and copper coins, every minute accounted for down to the last kopeck.

I went home that day solemn and proud. I’d grown up. I became a man that day as I walked home from work, feeling the money in my pocket, the first money I’d ever earned. An initiation, like in tribes of hunters when a boy becomes a man by making his first kill in the forest and bringing it home to his family’s hearth.

I felt nothing like that later, several years later, when for the first time I plunged my jasper root into that moist, quivering crevice, if you will… My first time. Nothing poetic, just disgust and a drained, wasted feeling. Thirty seconds, a little friction, and I dispatched my entire arsenal, with its crew of cosmonauts, on a one-way trip into the chasm, that black hole beyond the scarlet petals, never to return. I felt nothing, no communion with a new life, no sense of belonging in a marvelous new world full of potential and bliss. Just disgust and a drained, wasted feeling. Primitive, animal shame.

Because I had become a man long before, that first time I received money for my hard labor and brought it home to my family.

I brought the money home and handed it over to my mother, the bills, that is; the coins remained in my pocket. There had been enough to buy a bike, even with a little left over. I had chosen the bike I wanted long before and had shown it to my mother several times already. It was a blue-frame Stork; they had it in the department store, in the sporting goods section on the first floor.

The next day Mom came into my room and, maintaining a tense silence, without looking at me, started randomly pulling books off my shelf. They were arranged in alphabetical order, side by side. She’d take a few out, wipe nonexistent dust off the clean surface of the shelf, and then put them back, out of order. Without a word. Without looking at me.

“Ma?” I asked.

They weren’t going to get me the bike. A pair of second-hand Italian demi boots had turned up, just perfect for my big sister. A rare find, the right size, but there wasn’t enough money to cover them. I loved my sister, didn’t I?

It was at that moment that I understood what it meant to be a man. No yelling or hysterics; I didn’t get upset and wasn’t even that surprised. I was already grown up, was a man. Work hard, earn money. The money will go somewhere else, not to you and not for you. Work hard, earn money, and turn it over to women. Man’s burden, white or black, doesn’t matter.

My only reaction was to skip meals and shun my family for three days. I sat in my room and stared at the little pile of coins, the sixty, seventy kopecks I had to show for my whole summer’s labor.

Then came adolescence, classmates, weddings, friends in Adidas tracksuits, bleached-out, rolled-up jeans. Me, though—I was big, awkward, blighted with acne, and everything I wore was cheap, gray, and out of fashion. Someone gave my father a bolt of some generic, coarse fabric and took me to the tailor to have a suit made, to make me look more presentable. It was cheaper that way. He did try, my father. But nothing came of it; I don’t remember why.

I like music, everyone does, I know a lot about various groups and musical styles, always have. But back then, when people offered to swap cassettes I didn’t say anything, just kept my mouth shut. I didn’t have a cassette player: Mine was an ancient reel-to-reel, bought long before for my sister.

But then I graduated and enrolled at the Institute. For my first winter as a student I got one of my father’s old coats, taken in at the seams. It had been pretty decent at one time, but the tailoring was shoddy and it hung on me like an old sack. My family also gave me a big hat that looked ridiculous with the short “diplomat” style coat; the fur was supposedly raccoon but looked suspiciously like dog pelt, badly dyed.

The student life is easy. A student is poor by definition. Back then all or nearly all of us were broke. Of course I was dressed worse than everyone else, but we all chipped in what we could for vodka and shared equally, that’s the main thing, and I felt like I belonged.

Next thing you know I’m married to this wonderful girl Lenochka. No wedding, just a quick trip to the registry office. I’m cooking something in the kitchen of our first-story rented apartment and Lenochka is doing something in the other room. “Bring my watch, babe!” I ask. “Where is it?” My wife’s voice rings like a little bell. “On the bedside table!” I answer.

A minute goes by. Lenochka comes into the kitchen, spreads her empty hands, says “I couldn’t find it, Poppy!”[7] I shake my head in reproach and go into the bedroom myself, with her tagging along. “Here it is!” The watch is right where I said it was, on the “bedside table.”

“Pops, why don’t you label these cardboard boxes so I can tell them apart? Which one do you consider to be the bedside table, which the coffee table, and which the dresser or wardrobe?” Lenochka forces a smile, but a tiny involuntary tear glistens in the corner of one eye. Our room is furnished entirely in empty cardboard banana and apple cartons.

My girl will dump me two years later and marry a guy who makes a living buying up government vouchers. The first thing she’ll do is order some real furniture and a refrigerator for her apartment.

Enough already. The rest is just more of the same. Rare spells of relative solvency and then poverty again, need. Like now, with practically all my money going to monthly interest fees, nothing left to cover gas for my gray Renault, itself bought on credit. Just like the refrigerator, the computer, even the smart phone.

The filmstrip is over.

I thought about the box lying at this very moment on my back seat. Twenty kilos of Dutch pills. Illicit drugs, of course. Wholesale, a batch that big would have to be moved at a rock-bottom price. But even so, it would bring in fifty thousand dollars, minimum.

If it was cocaine, real cocaine, then it would be worth a whole lot more. Pure cocaine would cost one hundred forty a gram, retail. You could find cocaine at eighty a gram, but everyone knows that at that price the powder has been laced with speed or simply ground analgene. Pure cocaine, though, on the market, was one hundred forty a gram.

Each intermediary cranks up the price by a hundred percent or more. So a pusher will sell a gram at seventy dollars, or, say, fifty, to use a round figure. The dealer will charge twenty dollars a gram if the batch is big enough. And if I wanted to push coke to a dealer, I’d offer it to him at ten dollars a gram.

Twenty kilograms would come to two hundred thousand dollars.

But that’s coke. These were some kind of pills, and most likely they wouldn’t sell for that much. And I didn’t even know what the stuff was. Some ecstasy clone, maybe?

I’d have to try some and see. Not just push the pills blind. If it turned out to be crap, my client would beat the shit out of me even before any money changed hands.

All of this was whirling around in my head as I headed back to work. By the time I realized I would have to try the pills myself, I was already on the Obvodny Canal embankment, just down from the Cold Plus office.

I smirked. So long, workplace! And instead of exiting the embankment on the right and heading for the office, I merged into the left lane, crossed the bridge over the Obvodny Canal in the other direction, toward the waterfront, and floored it.

The road was clear. Traffic was jammed up on the opposite side, the one leading from the port to the city. I made it to Kanonersky Island in no time and entered the tunnel.

This is one of the darkest, scariest tunnels in the whole wide world, take my word for it. The Kanonersky Island Tunnel is long, poorly illuminated, unventilated, and filled not with air but pure, unadulterated automobile exhaust.

I recalled one time a few years ago when I actually had to go through the tunnel on foot. I needed to get to the St. Petersburg Customs office, to certify some payments or confirm a certificate of origin, I can’t remember which. It was before I started working at Cold Plus. I used to earn money on the side processing shipping declarations.

I had to get to the customs office, but I’d missed the bus, or maybe there wasn’t a bus—anyway, I had set off walking from Baltic Station in the direction of Kanonersky Island and had entered the tunnel. I think I must be one of very few people who’ve actually made it through that tunnel as a pedestrian.

I pressed up against the wall like the shade of a dead man in Hades; diesel trucks roared past, deafening me. I could hardly breathe; the exhaust made my head spin and dulled my thoughts. I walked on and on, barely managing to put one foot down in front of the other. It seemed like it would never end. Or that I was already dead. “This is all there is. It will go on like this forever,” wrote the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, though at the time I was not thinking of poetry. My mind was completely blank and I just lurched blindly along through the tunnel. And at first I couldn’t believe it when the tunnel finally ended and I emerged, squinting into the faded northern sun suspended in the pale northern sky above the faded northern sea. And this drained, pale world blinded me with its brilliance and color!

This time I entered the tunnel by car and surfaced on the other side within a matter of minutes.

“GIVE ME TWO TABLETS”[8]

I parked in a lot in front of a water treatment plant, descended a set of concrete steps to the shore, and sat on an old tree branch that had fallen near the rippling water.

I knew the place well. I used to go there to wait while the customs officials inspected some document I’d brought, or if I’d shown up during their lunch break. I used to have lunch there myself, whatever I could scrounge up, or takeout from the shop at the bus stop. Those were lean times, even worse than now. But still, I remember those days fondly. I was young, after all. In youth, everything—even poverty—is an adventure. In middle age, poverty is just poverty, pure and simple.

Before clicking on the car alarm I opened the back door and dug around inside the box. I scooped out a few of the pink pills and put them in my jacket pocket. I was in no hurry. And then it occurred to me: What if it was poison, what if it was fatal in the long term? I’m scared of death, but not because I regret leaving life behind; the life I’m leading isn’t worth fighting for. But dying itself is scary. And painful too, probably. Even when the person shows no external signs of suffering, even when it looks like he’s just going to sleep. That’s how it seems to the people around him, sure, but how are they supposed to know what the man himself is experiencing? Maybe every death brings agony and suffering, whether or not anyone else can tell from the outside.

But what will be, will be. I reached into my pocket, took out one of the pills, and held it on my palm. I inspected it for a couple of seconds, then popped it into my mouth and swallowed it. I gave it another moment’s thought, then gulped down a second one for good measure. Based on my body weight, I usually need a double dose of anything.

Done. Now all I had to do was wait for the rush. Or some other, less pleasant effect. I leaned back and closed my eyes, tilting my face up into the feeble sunlight.

I’d only tuned out for maybe a minute or so. But I came to with a jolt. I’m not sure whether what I felt had anything to do with the pills; I might just have dozed off for a moment. One way or another, when I opened my eyes…

…Nothing out of the ordinary.

The gulf water came in little waves that lapped at my feet. Seagulls circled overhead and filled the air with their shrill cries. The northern sun bathed me in warm rays; a cool sea breeze brought fresh air.

I thought, “All is well. Why all the gloom and doom? I’m still young; my whole life is ahead of me. And what I have isn’t all that bad! A steady, well-paying job in an office, some potential for professional advancement. A literary debut. That’s nothing to sneeze at: I’m alive, healthy, and free—all the prerequisites for true Russian happiness. It’s nothing to sneeze at. True success. So chin up. Maintain a positive attitude, and good things will come your way. Right. You know all this already. That demented idea of quitting your job, of selling the pills, it’s pointless. No good can come of it. Just get right back in that car and make a beeline for the office. Blame traffic for the delay. Take the box straight to Cold Plus and hand it over, and everything will be fine. Perfect. It’s just… the potatoes—potatoes everywhere! Viktor Stepanovich is right, we’re ordering too many.”

Lo, before my very eyes: pallets laden with frozen potatoes, row upon row of them, filling the walk-ins and piling up in the warehouse aisles. And when I got into my car, the interior was packed with boxes of potatoes as well, solid stacks of them rising from the back seat to the roof.

But I blinked, and the vision dissipated.

There was just that one box of pills, right where I’d left it on the back seat. It had an unsteady look to it, though; its outlines were blurry and it was sort of hovering a couple of inches above the seat.

It was bound to happen: There I was, standing, waiting for the elevator, all sweaty, the top buttons of my shirt undone, my tie draped over my shoulder, holding that stupid box in my hands, with my face twisted into an idiotic grin (where did that smile come from?). And sure enough, there she was again: the Goddess of Spring, Sex, Fertility, and Related Stuff.

“Making a delivery?” she asked, smiling back at me.

“Yes yes,” I said. “I’m the idea delivery man. I travel from ear to ear through the hallways of the mind, spreading profound thoughts.”

Hardly my best witty banter. But the goddess seemed to appreciate my little word game. She even gave a little wave—see you!—on her way out of the elevator.

Now I have to talk to you about sex.

It’s page 65 already, we’re well into the plot, but not a word yet about sex. People might start to wonder about me.

I declare, being of sound mind and body: I Maximus Semipyatnitsky, am neither a pederast nor a metrosexual (is there a difference?), nor indeed am I into cyber-sex or chat-sex or whatever other perversions. Your basic normal guy. At least I used to be, before I went to work at Cold Plus.

I even have a girlfriend. Had, rather. Not all that long ago.

She packed her things and went home to her mom’s.

To be more precise, she packed my things and threw me out. Because she’d been living in the apartment before I came into the picture; her mother had given us a break on the rent because we were family.

It was really hard for her. I mean the girl, not her mother. Though maybe it was hard for her mom too, how should I know? But it’s more likely she was relieved. Anyway, to hell with her, the mom, serves her right for sticking her nose in. (Forgive me, Lord.)

The girl, I mean. She even cried. “Mack!” she wailed. She was the only one who was allowed to call me that. My name is Maximus, and no one—you hear me?—no one has the right to use nicknames with me: Maxim! Maxi! Max! I’m a human being, not a dog. But she called me Mack, and I let her do it.

So she says, “Mack, Pops, I love you so much, I really do.”

Hear that? She loves me, said so herself.

“Mack, I love you. But I can’t go on this way.”

“Why not?”

“I need sex, wild sex every day, ideally four times a day, every single day, not once every two weeks after some three-hour fight! I can’t go on this way! We both know it. Would it really be better if I started cheating on you, picking up men in clubs, sleeping with guys my girlfriends introduce me to at birthday parties and shish-kebob weekends at the dacha, or screwing some guy from work? I moved in with you so we could have more sex. I mean with each other, you idiot, because I love you, I still do, but I’ll get over it. I thought that if we lived together, nothing would keep us from having sex all the time. I was dreaming of the day! But it turned out just the opposite. First we had sex every day, even when I had my period, then we abstained during my period, and then on Mondays, because Mondays are tough, right? Then the only time left was the weekends, you get so worn out at work. Now even weekends are too much for you. But I’m only twenty-four. I’m still young, I need sex—it’s perfectly normal. So good-bye, Mack! So long, don’t say anything, not a word, just go, it’ll be easier for both of us that way. Just go, Mack!”

Now there’s no one to call me Mack anymore.

On the second floor of the Mega Mart I saw a booth where you could order a T-shirt with any slogan you want written across the front, and I spent a long time trying to make up my mind. There were some great options, all in English: “I Hate Love and Sex,” hm-m-m… too direct, don’t you think? “Sex is boring me to death”—interesting, but too long. “Sex sucks”—just the thing! How come no one ever thought of it before?

Of course, ultimately, I ordered something completely different. Now I have a T-shirt with “Jesus hates me” written across the chest in bold black letters. And if I walk past, and you happen to look at my back, you’ll see: “U2.”

BEAUTY WILL GRAZE THE WORLD

The world is full of ugliness. Yes, this world is ugly. Disgusting, nasty, foul. And of all the creatures populating this sickening world, the most disgusting and nasty are the human beings.

Take any group of people. Will you see a lot of beautiful, classical, or even just generally nice-looking faces? No way. We are surrounded by freaks. Fat, irregular, clumsy, or gaunt, with gray and sallow faces, their cosmetics—cheap or high end—peeling off like old plaster. Crooked, cross-eyed, wrinkled, pimpled, disgusting, revolting creatures.

Take anyone! Aunt Valya? A creature from a nightmare! Uncle Styopa, the wino next door? I’ve seen better looking turds. Those prostitutes on the next block? One look and you’re impotent for life. Coworkers? Where on earth does our company do its recruiting? The formaldehyde room at the Museum of Natural History?

People don’t look at all the way people should. The Winter Garden has statues of creatures that look like people. Some of them are supposedly gods, though we have it on good authority that there are no gods, that sculptors in antiquity used their own friends, neighbors, and acquaintances as models. A centurion served as a model for Mars, the god of war, and a streetwalker posed for a statue of Aphrodite. That’s what people were like back then. Look at the classical sculptures and you’ll get an idea of what ordinary people looked like a mere couple thousand years ago.

Imagine sculpting statues of the gods using your contemporaries as models. You couldn’t even manage a Bacchus or satyr. Not even a parody. Anything you could come up with would be pathetic and disgusting.

A writer is a kind of sculptor. That is why the novel and the epic are dead. Big genres need larger-than-life heroes. All you’ll get from our scrawny and mean souls and ratty, ugly bodies will be cheap comedies à la Petrosyan.[9] Mix in some foul language and a pederast or two and you’ve got a cheap stand-up routine. Even serious writers—take me, for example—just produce superficial, bloggy stuff.

The Eastern gurus taught: Look not into the faces of the worldly. One glance will earn you a berth in hell.

There’s beauty for you.

People are more like animals. The most disgusting and vile ones, in fact. Take a look around: rats, moles, pigs, chickens, frogs—these are our companions.

People are also kind of like Tolkien’s mythical creatures. When I’m out on the street I can categorize them by sight: trolls, gnomes, orcs, and of course goblins. Long-eared, evil elves are also out and about.

Beauty is extremely rare in this world. That’s why it’s so treasured. Beauty commands a high price, in any currency. If you want to find a truly beautiful prostitute, you have to shell out some serious cash. One night will set you back three months’ salary. Anything cheaper is counterfeit, a tasteless sham.

If a person, male or female, is born beautiful, then everything will fall into his or her lap. No other virtues or assets are necessary. With minimal effort you can sell beauty anywhere at top price.

Everyone is willing to pay a premium for true beauty, anytime, anywhere. But we can’t afford true beauty. Admit it, be honest, your life has abounded in sexual adventures, but how many truly beautiful women or handsome men have you slept with in all that time? Three? Two? I wouldn’t be surprised if there hadn’t been a single one.

Long ago, in my distant youth, my classmate Vaska—we called him the Fireman —encapsulated the entire tragedy of our existence, devoid as it is of aesthetic value. We were watching one of the new Russia’s first televised beauty contests, and the Fireman pronounced mournfully, with great profundity, “Damn! And there are guys out there who get to fuck those beauties!”

We find no real perfection around us, and so we compromise and accept half-beauty, cheap imitations. If a girl isn’t disgusting looking, has some marginally decent features, we’re ready to marry her and take care of her for the rest of her life. But even a girl like that is hard to find. So we marry freaks. And we almost love them. Of course we do; we try to be decent human beings.

Still, we always long for beauty, the kind of beauty that we can never really touch.

This fills our lives with suffering—yet another reason for our inner disharmony. We don’t realize that true beauty is incredibly rare, that our chances of coming into contact with it are close to zero.

If we just accepted it, things might be easier. We don’t suffer, for example, from the knowledge that we will never personally make it to Alpha Centauri. Very few people are disturbed by that realization; those of us with some sense, the majority, know that it’s impossible, and so there’s no point in worrying about it.

But it’s different with beauty. Beauty seems so close, so accessible!

Blame technology.

Art, culture, mass media, advertising—they all disseminate myriad images of the sort of beauty that is in fact extremely rare, creating the illusion—and it is an illusion!—that you can find it anywhere.

Photographers ferret out the one and only beautiful girl out of one hundred thousand ugly ones, and they spend days on end photographing her in an infinite variety of poses and angles, against all kinds of different backgrounds. Then they enlarge the photos into posters and suddenly she’s multiplied into a million beautiful girls on billboards, magazine covers, and labels.

But it’s a thin, paper image, a product of technology. As a million duplicated images, she can only exist within various forms of media, whereas there’s only one original version of the real beauty, the actual girl. And she can only belong to one man at a time. Or two. Three, maximum—there are only so many orifices.

But we forget that. We are deluded, led astray by this reproduction of a beautiful image. We cling to the hope that we will see a beautiful girl in real life; that she’s just around the corner or down at the bus stop; we’ll run into her in a store and strike up a conversation, and then we’ll go home and screw, or, in the rare exception, we’ll make her our wife.

In the meantime we sit and wait, we live with our half-beauties, girls we can’t love the way we should because of our belief that perfection is within reach. In the depths of our souls we consider them to be temporary measures, stopgap solutions until the day we meet the Aphrodite reserved for us by fate.

It would be better to accept the truth that rejecting our Claudia for the sake of some future magazine-cover Venus makes about as much sense as not changing the oil in our little Hyundai, figuring that in no time we’ll have our very own Porsche Boxster. Listen, dude, where are you going to get your hands on a two-hundred-thousand-euro Porsche if you still have five years left on the ten-thousand-euro loan you took out for your Accent?

We understand this, and though we dream of a Porsche, we treat our actual car like a member of the family. We don’t have any illusions about trading in the Accent for a Porsche, and yet we cling to the belief that we can plausibly trade Claudia in for Venus.

Venus seems more accessible than the Porsche. There she is, smiling at us from all those advertisements. And unlike a Porsche, absolutely free!

But, listen pals, uh… I don’t want to startle anyone here with an original thought, but nothing in this world comes for free.

Beauty costs money. Real money. More than people like you and me can scrape together in an entire lifetime. If a shitty Boxster is beyond your means, don’t even bother thinking about Aphrodite. Let it go.

To summarize: “Don’t believe what you see in art, in advertisements, in beautiful pictures; forget those unrealizable dreams about happiness and perfection. You will never have all that. Value your wives and girlfriends. Love the one you’re with.”

CHINA TRIP[10]

All of these thoughts were inspired by my encounter with that Venus-Aphrodite, the goddess of all pleasurable things, in the elevator at the office—but only in retrospect. At the time my mind was far from such abstractions. Aphrodite exited on her floor, and I continued on up to mine, with the box in my hands and that idiotic smile plastered on my face. To avoid trouble I stowed the box in the utility room near the tea stash and the cartons of printer paper. The pills had clearly taken effect, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on how, exactly. There had been a shift in my consciousness, but my perceptions hadn’t changed. No spatial disorientation or physical effects—just a light euphoria, a sense of gentle optimism. And those persistent images of Dutch potatoes.

I returned to my desk.

The inbox was full of messages that had arrived during my absence. The usual spam, notifications from the systems administrator, inquiries from branch offices, and a message from my favorite correspondent, the Chinese partner who supplied us with fish.

Their manager’s name was Ni Guan. Or “Eddie.” All Chinese businesspeople who work with foreign partners adopt nicknames. Li, Chan, Su, and Shin become Louis, Victor, Christina, and Tanya—whatever they can come up with. I think that they’re assigned those names back in school, in their foreign language classes.

My guess is that they adopt these names so that we won’t mangle their real ones and defile them with our poor pronunciation. They don’t want to waste time on the pointless and gratuitous labor of explaining their language’s phonetic system: “My name is Li Li. No, they’re different: Li is my first name, and Li is my family name. No, they’re completely different words. My first name Li is pronounced ‘Li.’ But my family name Li is a little longer and a half tone higher: ‘Li.’ A completely different meaning… Fine, okay, just call me Kolya. It’ll be easier for you.”

For the one-hundred-eighth time Eddie reminded me about our overdue payment of four hundred thousand dollars and encouraged us not to decrease our orders during the current quarter. He wrote calmly, without hysterics.

I was always struck by the paradoxical and transcendental attitude of Chinese employees toward their business dealings. The first time I came into contact with them was when I was working for a tobacco company. We were supplying unprocessed tobacco to Russian factories, which were failing gradually under the pressure of competition with transnational corporations. One of these semi-moribund factories was in Omsk. When the company entered into bankruptcy proceedings, I attended a meeting of creditors to represent the company and to try to salvage some portion of their delinquent account, which came to somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars.

Everyone assumed that the dominant voice at the meeting would be the representative of the Chinese National Tobacco Corporation, which had supplied over three million dollars’ worth of raw tobacco to Omsk.

But no one came from China. And they didn’t even submit any claims.

The Chinese had a philosophical attitude toward their client’s insolvency. So it didn’t work out, they thought; it happens sometimes. The world is not perfect. Or, on the contrary, the world is perfect, and the collapse of the Omsk tobacco business is also Tao, the path, part of the universal plan, one chord in the great musical harmony of the world. They wrote off their three million and just kept on doing business.

It’s possible that two or three of the company’s top managers—one for each unrecovered million—were dispatched by firing squad in a public square; that’s something we’ll never know. But they didn’t waste time milling about in the throng at the factory turnstile, didn’t interfere with the executors and court officials conducting the inventory of the factory’s property, and they refrained from hiring local Russian bandits and bureaucrats to solve the problem. Why bother? Too much trouble. It’s all Tao.

Cold Plus’s Chinese partners are also willing to spend years waiting patiently for their unpaid invoices, stoically enduring our never-ending attempts to obtain extra fees and discounts on any pretext, no matter how flimsy; occasionally they’ll even satisfy claims that are utterly without foundation. Just so they can continue supplying their products to Russia.

They have their own logic, their own way of understanding the concept of profit. We plan one or two years ahead, they mark time in centuries. Don’t bother paying now; go ahead, haggle for every kopeck, cheat us. But keep on buying our products, consume more and more of what we have to offer. You’re only cheating yourselves—and your offspring—enslaving yourselves to whatever we produce, destroying your own country’s economy, losing your own capacity to produce things of value. The day will come when we’ll take you with our bare hands…

I thought that it would be interesting to get inside the mind of a Chinese person, to learn what makes him tick. What goes on in the mind of this Eddie?

I typed out our standard formal response about how we “plan to execute payment this month”; and as for the volume of purchases, it was “currently under discussion in our commercial department”; then I slid the cursor over to “Send.” I hesitated for a moment, looking at the monitor, then briskly left-clicked…

What happened next, all of it, was very much like a hallucination, but to this day I’m convinced that what I experienced was real.

I looked into the monitor and my consciousness was sucked out of my skull, like a soft-boiled egg, out through my eyes. The egg metaphor comes to mind because my consciousness turned out to be yellow. A clotty, yellow-orange substance. I slipped through the monitor and down the cable to the processor, whirled along the circuit boards, and spiraled down into the telephone cable. Then I whizzed along the copper veins, leaping and bounding across transformers and switchboards until I burst out of a different monitor, flew upward, and squeezed with some effort into the pair of eyes opposite it.

And now I found myself looking at a screen again—but at my own message, this time, in the inbox.

THE TAO OF THE MID-LEVEL MANAGER

In a low-ceilinged room with a wall of windows facing the street, an old air-conditioner hummed quietly. The higher frequencies of the acoustic spectrum were taken up with the chirping of female interns chattering on the phone and with one another. Only the middle range was relatively quiet. Ni Guan usually tuned his brain to the middle range and basked in its emptiness. Ni Guan had mastered this technique years ago, akin to distinguishing between the high and low frequencies coming over a telephone line. Without it, the sensory overload would cause his head to explode.

Since Ni Guan had tuned out the higher acoustic range, he didn’t hear any ICQ beeps,[11] but the “new mail” icon flashed in the lower right corner of the screen and caught his eye. The message was from Cindy, Ni Guan’s young coworker and assistant, who dealt with contract issues involving the northern barbarians.

Cindy’s real name was Tsin Chi. She was twenty-two. She had a nice figure, was smart and fun to be with, and showered rather more attention and care on Ni Guan than was customary in interactions with a senior colleague.

Ni Guan opened the message and read:

And under the “Thirteenth Ancient Verse” of the Shi Jing, a small postscript was appended: “Ni, shall we go out for a drink after work?”

Ni Guan turned and looked over at Tsin. She was looking straight at him, smiling immodestly. Ni Guan smiled back and shook his head gently, then briskly tapped out another poem from Shi Jing, from memory. The poem, known as “The Cricket,” is from the “Odes of the Tang Kingdom” section:

Ni Guan added a note of his own: “Comrade Tsin, tonight I have to stay late at work. Comrade Luan assigned me to do a report on the contract with the northern barbarians. Speaking of which, send me the memorandum on the interruptions in the timeframes of deliveries to Russia.”

When she got his message, the girl tapped furiously on her keyboard, and within a couple of minutes the “new mail” icon again flashed on Ni Guan’s screen. Ni Guan opened the message and read:

No postscripts appeared after this poem from Odes of the Tang Kingdom. Ni Guan again looked over at Tsin. Comrade Tsin was concentrating on a pile of papers on her desk; her cheeks were slightly flushed, her lips protruding sulkily. Everything about her said “You are a heartless, dry old shell of a man, Comrade Ni!” Or, more precisely, “You are like a withered stalk of wild rice standing alone outside the farmhouse gate, his fruit untouched, when the time of harvest has already passed and his brothers’ white grains have been gathered into sturdy barns; he alone will be buried under cold snow, when the twilight of the year gives way to night and a heavy cloud covers the Mountain of Flowers, Huashan.”

Ni Guan heaved a sigh and resumed his work. From the purchasing manager of the Russian company Cold Plus, who went by the name of Maximus Semipyatnitsky (which was some abracadabra!), came one of his typically dull messages, utterly devoid of meaning. They always read as though they’d been written by some computer program. Blatantly false promises to settle their debt; nothing concrete in response to Ni Guan’s request to confirm the amount of product to be delivered according to their contract with the barbarians, which had given them a discount and advance credit.

Comrade Luan, the senior export manager, would be upset. But it had nothing to do with Ni Guan. Comrade Luan knew that it was the barbarians’ fault; it’s always like this with them. But the gurgling stream would flow down from the mountains, would crumble the rocky cliffs, would carve crevasses in the solid stone, and would make its way inexorably out onto the broad plain, where it would spread into a mighty river, bearing abundance to the lands under the vault of heaven.

So too Ni Guan, with every day he spent in the office, with every e-mail he sent, with every telephone call he made to the barbarian cities, with his patient persistence and imperturbability, would eventually bring prosperity to the Chinese people. Even now, thanks to the work of the Tsin-dao Seafood Export Co, Ltd., Ni Guan’s place of employment, and of thousands of other export companies, millions of Chinese peasants had jobs and could feed their families.

They cultivate everything that can be eaten. They even cultivate fish and seafood, like rice. Ni Guan had visited fish plantations and had seen how they worked. Fish hatchlings were kept in cages made of netting and submerged in flooded meadowlands. Standing waist-deep in the water, peasant workers scooped the fish out, sorted them by size, and moved them into larger cages. They sprinkled fish fodder into the water and cleaned out the cages. Then they harvested the fish, cleaned them, and chopped them up into edible portions.

Peasants working on the fish plantation earn twenty yuan a day! Not all that much, of course, compared to what people make in Europe, but people are no longer dying of starvation. And someday the Chinese peasant will earn more than a farmer in America. This will absolutely come to pass; all they have to do is persist in their patient labors, day in and day out.

Ni Guan recalled one of Mao’s sayings, dating from 1956: “Things develop ceaselessly. It is only forty-five years since the Revolution of 1911, but the face of China has completely changed. In another forty-five years, that is, in the year 2001, or the beginning of the twenty-first century, China will have undergone an even greater change. She will have become a powerful socialist industrial country.”

Who can now say that Mao’s prediction has not come to pass? China has entered the third millennium with unprecedented economic growth. True, some naysayers complain that China betrayed socialism in the process. But Ni Guan understood that permitting capitalist economic activity is merely the wisdom of the water, which always finds its path to the sea, even if the river does take an occasional loop and appears to be flowing in the opposite direction. As long as the Communist Party remains in power, the ideals of socialism will never be consigned to oblivion, and world imperialism is deluded if it wants to gloat that it has forced China off the Red Path.

But there was one other important thing besides the implementation of the Chinese Communist Party’s program, besides the great triumph of Chinese civilization: Ni’s own personal struggle. His own private, sacred duty, a secret that no one knew, not his bosses at the company, not even the Executive Committee of his apartment building, which knows everything about everyone.

Ni Guan was scrimping and saving, denying his own needs, putting money away for the sake of his younger brother, to clear a bright future for him.

Yes, Ni had a brother. That very fact was a crime.

A few years after Ni was born in the town of Suifenhe near the Russian border, China proclaimed the “One Family—One Child” policy. From that time on, any second child would be considered illegitimate. Only in rural villages were people permitted to have two children, and only if the first one was a girl. But the first child in the Guan family was a boy, Ni, and so they could not justify a second, even if they were to move out into the country.

When Ni’s mother became pregnant again, a dark shadow fell over the family. For breaking the law his parents could be punished and demoted at work, and his father could be kicked out of the Party. But his mother refused to have an abortion. She went away to stay with her relatives in a distant province for several months. Ni’s brother was born there and there he remained. They named him Kung, in honor of the great Kung-Fu Tzu.[12] His mother returned home alone, as though nothing had happened. The apartment building’s Executive Committee may have guessed the truth, but they didn’t know for sure, and so there were no consequences.

Little Kung grew up in the countryside without a birth certificate, leaving no paper trail, like three million other Chinese bastards. His mother and father, and Ni himself, were occasionally able to visit him secretly, taking money to their relatives so that they could feed and clothe the boy.

And now Kung was grown up. On his deathbed, Ni’s father entrusted Kung to his older brother’s care, and Ni Guan could never violate this sacred charge. And indeed, Ni was in his brother’s debt; it was because they had concealed Kung’s existence that his parents were able to retain their position in society and Ni was able to graduate from high school and get a higher education. Now Ni Guan’s salary in the export company was much higher than that of peasants and blue-collar workers. He had already managed to save thousands and thousands of yuan.

Soon he would be able to afford a bribe to pay for Kung’s documents. Kung would gain all the rights of citizenship, would have access to health care, and would be able to marry.

All Ni had to do was keep on working. And observe the utmost thrift in everything he did.

If Ni was to marry and start a family, he would no longer be able to put away money, and his brother would remain only a half-person. Which was why Ni Guan was still a bachelor, even though he was already over thirty—not by much, but still…

Ni Guan thought about Tsin Chi. Tsin was a good girl, nice-looking, full of life. Maybe a little too full of life. Ni knew that she liked him. And he liked her too, but what was the hurry? She had only just turned twenty-two, the age at which Chinese girls were permitted to marry. On the streets you could see posters depicting an older couple holding a newborn baby with the slogan “Better later, and later better!” No need for haste when it came to marrying and procreating.

Ni would do the right thing; Ni would right his parents’ wrong; Ni would give Kung a new, legitimate identity. To realize this goal he would work, and then he would sin before the state, would bribe the official in the registry office.

But that would be the end to it: no more criminal acts. Ni Guan would eventually be able to marry and have a child, but not yet. If Tsin wanted, she could be patient and wait with him. If she wasn’t up to it, then all right; to each his own Tao. Everyone treads their own pathway to hell. She could find another guy to marry.

Still, Ni Guan thought that it would be a good idea to have a talk with Tsin, to explain his situation to her, without revealing, of course, his secret. The poor girl didn’t understand why he was avoiding her, and it hurt her feelings.

Ni Guan decided to go out for a smoke; he felt for the packet of cigarettes in his pocket and got up from his desk.

My egg yolk jiggled and slithered out of Ni’s skull—back into the monitor, and from there into the wires, the way it had come. In the next instant I was conscious again, as though waking from a dream, and found myself back where I’d started, in the Import Department of the Cold Plus Corporation.

THE ROAD HOME

The rest of the day passed without incident. I have to admit that until evening I felt as though someone had dumped a bag of dust on my head. That’s how my Khazar grandmother would have put it. Of course, she’d been known to use stronger language too. My brain was foggy, and I saw the world through something like warped bottle glass. If I turned my head, the picture didn’t change right away; the objects in my field of vision left smeared trails of color in their wake as I moved.

The pills were wearing off, presumably.

Without enthusiasm I checked a few invoices from shipping companies, then went out to the Harbin, a Chinese eatery, to utilize fully the lunch hour allotted me by my employment contract.

Why the Harbin? Did it have anything to do with my “business trip” into the head of my distant Chinese colleague?

Maybe yes, maybe no. I often ate Chinese. Not too expensive, and filling, if you get the special, immodestly labeled “Business Lunch,” and ask for a double serving of Hong Kong Fried Rice. I’m good with chopsticks and I use a lot of soy sauce.

In the restaurant, while I sat and waited for my order, my eyes rested on the manager behind the counter, a Chinese man. He worked with sober dignity, writing out the checks with furrowed brow and giving meticulous instructions to the waitresses, Russian girls draped in some colorful garment that was supposed to represent a Chinese national costume. It might have actually been authentic, but on our girls the effect was lost.

The waitresses went from table to table with an expression of excruciating boredom on their faces, taking orders with an air of poorly suppressed annoyance and spite. Russians in general are terrible at service. Griboyedov put it best: “I’m happy to oblige, but serving others makes me sick!” Waiting tables, and service of any kind, makes Russians sick, and they can’t conceal this instinctual nausea even at the prospect of lavish tips.

A trip east gave me the opportunity to experience the difference myself—viscerally, you might say. In an Indian restaurant—I mean, in a real Indian restaurant, in India—a waiter, a young boy, will lick you all over, from head to toe, for a couple of extra rupees. He’ll serve you with enthusiasm; he considers this to be his professional duty. Blame the caste system. The boy is at your beck and call; it wouldn’t cross his mind to dream of becoming a doctor or government official; his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, every last one of them, were in service. He, too, will serve. It is his natural state. If he advances in his career and makes senior waiter by forty, he will consider himself a complete success. He gives practically no thought to the idea of becoming a government minister, say, a deputy, or financier. He might perhaps dream of becoming a movie star; that’s Bollywood at work, poisoning the minds of poor Indians with hopes that can never be fulfilled.

I’m speaking of the hope of becoming someone different here and now, in this life. As far as the next life is concerned, the sky’s the limit; the Indian guy can desire whatever comes into his head.

What is most surprising is that nothing prevents this hereditary servant, this Sudra, from taking pride in his work and respecting himself. He pours his creative spirit into his labors, working with dignity and precision, but without the slightest hint of servility.

Once in India I took a ride with a poor rickshaw driver, negotiating a price beforehand. When I reached my destination, I foolishly gave him more than the sum we had agreed on, just out of spite. The driver took me rather roughly by the sleeve as I was climbing out, and firmly pressed the change into my palm. His entire being said “I need nothing extra, I ask only the set fee established by my union.”

A Russian waiter or waitress, even while serving your food, will always let you know, subconsciously, by way of his or her face or posture, that he or she is doing you an enormous favor. He or she considers his or her current predicament to be a temporary and unnatural state: I may be a student right now, supporting myself by working in this restaurant, but just you wait. I’ll graduate and the moment I do I’ll become a top manager or rich businessman, or at the very least, will marry an oligarch.

Assuming the whole time, of course, that they will achieve this goal in their current lifetime. They have no faith in a future life. It’s not about belief; the possibility of some future life simply doesn’t cross their mind. And at the same time they naively take for the truth the theory that if you “want something badly enough” or if you “just try really hard,” then “everything will work out fine.”

And in fact that is the way it is.

This formula has become the catechism of modern Western man, conveyed through Hollywood films, articles in glossy magazines and books by the ubiquitous and all-knowing Paolo Coelho. But the wise men of the East who originally came up with the formula proceeded from the premise that we have more than one life to live.

True, the art of customer service is not very advanced in Russia. That said, if a Russian starts licking someone’s posterior, then he will find himself getting deeper and deeper in filth, wallowing around in there without the slightest need or profit. And not only that, he’ll fight an army of other guys tooth and nail for the right to lick even deeper. A nationwide case of mass sadomasochism.

I watched the Chinese guy ordering the white girls around and marveled at his skill. He was clearly in his element. Before long the ancient Eastern man will come into his own, and when that time comes, we, white tailless monkeys, lazy self-satisfied creatures that we are, will do his bidding in the utmost tedium and servility.

After work I started to make my way home. The traffic was horrendous as usual; the line of cars barely moved. Some drivers, like me, kept to their own lane, creeping submissively along in short lurches and long pauses, surfing the radio dial and glancing dumbly out the side windows, first right, then left, or fixing a blank stare, devoid of emotion or thought, through their front windshields. Others fidgeted, jockeyed for position, or drove up on the sidewalk, attempting to pass on the right, but at the next stoplight found themselves inevitably in the same position as before, relative to the rest of us.

Without particular rancor I muttered my habitual curses at the impatient ones. You’d think they were all rushing to some super-important, earthshaking appointment, or that every wasted minute was costing them a thousand dollars.

I’m quite sure, though, that they’re simply going home to collapse on their sofa and watch some TV. The more energetic among them might have something to eat first, or engage in sexual activities with their domestic partners. So what’s the big hurry? An hour earlier or later won’t change anything.

Soon everything will be perfect: They’ll fix the roads, fill in all the potholes, lay down new pavement, set up roundabouts, repaint the white lines, add a parking lane so that parked cars won’t clutter up the entire right side of the road, and they’ll construct a triple layer of high-speed beltlines around the city for heavy trucks. And everything will be perfect. Maybe not right away. But someday.

In the meantime, the speed of every individual car in a line of traffic is ultimately reduced to the same average speed as the rest of traffic. Showing excessive individuality just gets some more scratches and dents on your car, and more resentment from everybody else.

Traffic is no different from the rest of life.

KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR

I made it home and parked the car in the improvised for-profit lot next to the supermarket. A polite, solicitous man with an Armenian air about him guided me in between a Volkswagen and a Toyota. The lot was full as usual. I handed the guard (I can’t for the life of me recall his name, let’s call him Ashot) forty rubles, the fee for his services overnight.

I used to park by the entrance to the apartment building but in no time the side-view mirrors were stolen. Savvy neighbors explained that it might have nothing to do with the night security guards, but then again, it might. In general, you could do without paying the forty rubles to the guys running the unlicensed parking lot. But then parts of your car might go missing: windshields, mirrors, fenders, and the like. It’s simpler just to pay.

Sometimes when I came out to get the car at night, there would be no guard at the lot at all. The services of the bottom feeders on site, evidently under instruction from the guys in charge, were strictly limited to making sure nothing was “disappeared” from the cars under their protection. The cars parked at the entrance, though, were fair game.

Anyway, I began parking my car by the supermarket, paying their paltry tribute and enjoying relatively undisturbed sleep at night.

Ashot took the money in his left hand, with an air of sincere regret on his haggard face.

His cell phone rang and he raised it to his ear with the other hand.

“Hello? Hello? Galya? I come today. Money? I bring it. Wait up, don’t sleep, we go to movie. The money? I got some—I bring it.”

Let it be said in his defense that Ashot is the most reliable of all the lot’s watchmen. He does disappear now and then, naturally, but there are times when he spends the whole night pacing from one end of the lot to the other, humming verses of some Armenian song. I’ve seen it myself, quite often.

When our locals are on duty, they might as well not be there at all. They just drink themselves into a stupor and sleep the night away in their jalopy right there on the lot.

It occurred to me that Russian women could organize a movement in support of illegal immigration. Those Galyas, Liubas, Klavas, and Nadyas—ladies who have crossed into their forties and who tip the scales at eighty kilos plus—wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of catching a partner in life who’s occasionally sober, capable of working and bringing home a salary, and of giving her some good times in bed, if it weren’t for these Ashots, Tigrans, Dauds, and Sulemans.

Such ladies should lock arms and come out in full force to confront the assembled demonstrators of the Anti-Immigration Movement, forming an impenetrable wall with their massive breasts. They could say, so you want all these non-Russian elements to leave our country? Fine, out they go. But can you satisfy your womenfolk? How about right now? Bring it on, defenders of the Motherland, give it to us till we can’t take any more. All these dark-skinned immigrants will be out of the picture, so you can plow us every night like Young Communists conquering virgin lands, all night long. Work all day, and then bring home the bacon and potatoes. How do you like that version of Russia, fellow citizens?

That would put an end to the patriotic Russian Orthodox struggle against the so-called black-assed invaders; our valiant warriors would scatter into the alleyways with their tails between their legs, hiking up their ripped trousers with one hand and crossing themselves plaintively with the other.

This is the sort of serious matter that preoccupies me when I’m out walking. Sometimes I even move my lips or laugh out loud. Looking like a real moron.

But it only looks that way. Fact is, I’m pretty smart.

Just sensitive.

Sensitive to people, to life, to justice, truth, and art.

Home at last, I turned on my computer and launched the universal player. Opened the special “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” file and moved all the MP3 files in there onto the player.

I said before that I hate oldies. Well, all except for this one. I never get tired of listening to Bob Dylan’s “Knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” I even have a collection of different cover versions. You can’t imagine how many artists have recorded “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”! I have thirty-nine on my computer: U2 (live concert), Dana Robbins, Bryan Ferry, Randy Crawford, Daniel Lioneye, Wyclef Jean, Roger Waters (yes, you know the one, from Pink Floyd), Warren Zevon, Avril Lavigne (pop crossover!), the Leningrad Cowboys (worth a listen if only for the group’s name), Jerry Garcia, solo, and another one with his band (the Jerry Garcia Band), Calva Y Nada (don’t ask), Seliq (from the album of the same name, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door); and then Ed Robinson recorded it twice, Guns ’n’ Roses seven times, Sisters of Mercy five times (just imagine the Sisters of Mercy snarling out the words!), Eric Clapton seven times (IMHO the best is the one on Crossroads); and then of course Bob Dylan himself—four times. Especially touching is his creaky old man’s voice on the MTV Unplugged version.

And of course I have a DVD of the German movie Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, the story of two guys living with terminal cancer and indulging in a no-holds-barred, hedonistic megabinge before they kick off.

No need to listen to a lot of different songs or read a stack of different books. One is enough, so long as you get to its essence. Take the Hari Krishnas, all they do is sing “Hari Krishna, Hari Rama” and read the Bhagavad Gita, but they each perceive and comprehend more than a full professor.

The main thing is that it be the right song or book. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is the right song. That is my opinion. If Old Bob had written nothing else, the pearly gates would still swing open before him.

When I’m done writing my one and only masterpiece, I’ll just spend the rest of my days working in an office, and my nights drinking beer, like a regular guy. Hmm…

I sipped my beer and meditated to the sound of the song as it cycled through all the different versions. Then I undressed, shut down the computer, and curled up on the sleeper sofa. My insomnia was long gone, a feature of the distant past when I didn’t work in an office from nine to six, led a bohemian lifestyle, and had sex whenever, with whomever.

Within ten minutes I was back in that strange dream about long-lost Khazaria.

FALLING STAR

A falling star appears out of the cosmos and, whipping its tail like a cat, traces a trail across the yawning blackness of the southern sky.

Every night closer, hotter.

Saat lies on his back on a hillock with his hands crossed behind his head and stares up at the sky. Misfortune, the old people would say, woe.

What kind of misfortune can befall Khazaria? You name it. A bad harvest. Or the opposite, one that’s too good—that too is woe. One year the grain grew as tall as a horse. They harvested with sabers, used maces for threshing. Couldn’t eat it all! Piled it on carts until it spilled over the tops, hauled it over the mountains, begged the people on the other side: Take our grain, we have too much! Swap it for your heavy stones! The neighbors traded, helped. Carts clogged the high roads, grain going one way, stones the other. The roads were too narrow, so the carts traveled across the fields. Trampled the rich black earth. No one could get through, on foot or by cart. The milk spoiled in the nomad camps, and mountains of stones filled the cities—nothing to eat or drink! The sick couldn’t get through to the znakhar healers, they fell to the ground between the carts and died there on the road.

No one was left to do the winter plowing and tend the livestock.

The Khazars spent their days carting grain and piling up stones. Weeds overtook the fields, the livestock ran loose. And they still couldn’t get all the grain out! The sheds burst from inside. Attracted by the excess of grain, invisible baby mice multiplied under the floorboards and turned into huge, sleek, nasty adults. They’d attack a man by his shed, gnaw his flesh to the bone, and leave him to groan and rot what was left of his life away. Out of pure malice, but also for a little fun. Every living creature needs more than bread alone. Circuses, the ancient tsar-emperors used to say. Just to entertain themselves; even mice get bored eating the same old thing. So the mice cubs devoured the grain, and famine set in. The Khazars had nothing left—no seed grain, no livestock—for the next spring. They tried to eat the stones, but the stones broke their teeth and ruined their stomachs. Some food is just too heavy.

And death came to Khazaria. Felled multitudes.

Some survived by cleverness; they used the stones to bludgeon the mice, then made fires from the parched weeds, roasted the mice, and ate them.

That’s what too good a harvest year does for you. No, for the poor Khazar, less is more. Just a taste, a splash of gruel in his bowl; leave gluttony to the Murzlas.

The next year it was announced that the Murzlas would save the people and lands from any excess, would take it on themselves. Would haul the surplus grain beyond the hills. Would take non-surplus goods too. All with a covert, sovereign aim: to make the mice multiply in the enemy’s barns, gnaw their bones, sap their strength. And our people would labor and thrive. A clever plan! And the Murzlas would get their just reward: privileges, blue flashers to attach to their mares’ tails, to clear their way on the high road.

If it weren’t for the Murzlas, all would be lost.

And for the Great Khagan too, of course.

Anything can happen. Drought or an excess of rain—both bring woe. Heat will destroy, cold will kill. Misfortune, all.

But worst of all, producing graves, widows, floods of tears, mountains of corpses, the stench of decay…

Is war.

Saat lies on his little hill, stares up at the falling star, thinks thoughts. Hoofbeats. He sits up, sees: A secret sotnya of the Khagan’s horsemen gallops by, in full conspiracy, hunched low over their horses’ withers, making not a sound. They swish their whips, gouging the sides of their horses’ bellies with their heels, urging them on, faster, faster. In their hands, torches of burning pitch.

In the morning a fire in Itil. Two villages burned to ashes, with their people.

The wind whirls bitter smoke across the steppe.

Children weep, wives wail. Men teem in the ashes, seeking their loved ones’ bones. Eyes vacant, dead.

There you have it, fruit of the falling star.

But even that fruit is but the seed of a graver woe.

The shamans disemboweled a duck, extracted its liver for fortunetelling. The liver said that those fires had been set by wicked Chechmeks nesting on high cliffs.

The duck’s liver never lies. Just to be sure, they mashed it with greens and ate it.

Sure enough, it was the Chechmeks.

In the morning, in the squares and bazaars the town criers spread the truth to the Khazar people. They recall and retell all the Chechmek wrongdoings of the past, the long enmity with our people. The Khagan’s words go around to all the households: We will not allow this insult to Khazar unity! We will subdue the evil Chechmeks, restore the eternal and proper order of things.

But for that, troops must be dispatched to the Tatar land, to the cliff-side nests where the Chechmeks lurk, boiling up evil in their cauldrons, honing their hatred on rough whetstones.

They even remember Saat, sniff out the overgrown path to his ragged tent. The requisitions man comes to confiscate all of Saat’s mares for military use. He even takes a little colt, tethers him to the back of his cart. The little creature’s legs are fragile, slender as reeds in the stream, they will break.

Saat wails: What do you need him for, what good is he for military transport? You can’t put anything on his tiny back—the thinnest Chinese silk handkerchief, much less a saddle—try it, it’ll weigh the little horse down to the ground! But the officer silences him, waves the scroll with the Khagan’s requisition order in Saat’s face. The man wants a cute little colt for his own children, is all. Such are the ways of war.

Saat sits, weeps. All night long, cursing the falling star. The star is close—any closer and it will singe his beard.

But his grief for the mares passes by morning. For Saat now has to grieve for himself.

A tysiachnik with a smooth round belly comes and mobilizes Saat, all of him, body and soul. Sends him into a slingshot regiment, issues him a sack on a string and a handful of stones—ammunition.

Troops amass in an endless throng.

Flutes whistle at dawn, the army sets off.

They march for a day, and Itil vanishes behind them.

By the roadside only small settlements. They march on through the night.

A light flickers, or there is only darkness. They march another day. The road leading through the steppe, vast, empty land on all sides, grass rustling in waves like the ocean.

No sign of plow, no trace of man, empty expanse, virgin earth!

Again night, a short rest, then back on the march.

Then the road comes to an end. The men march on over grassland, sun at their backs. March on and on.

After that Saat loses count of the days.

O how vast the Khazar lands! Walk your legs off to the hips, you’ll still not reach the end.

And nothing there. Emptiness. Pustota.

Saat stamps, jiggles his ammunition bag, thinks.

His body is strong but his head is sick. Too much thinking. Thoughts bubble up in his head, like gas in the stomach. Swell up more and more. His eyes bug out and his ears emit clouds of steam. God forbid he blurt something out—things are bad enough already.

Wondrous! In Itil you can’t squeeze through edgewise. Houses press right up against one another. Take turns breathing, there’s not enough oxygen to go around. Here, though, nothing.

Pustosh. Void.

Days on end, no human habitation. Woods, fields, steppe, ravines.

An animal might lope by, a bird in the distant sky.

Not a single Khazar soul, nothing human in sight.

What do we need all this land for? Take some. So much of it, all empty. Pustaya. Empty.

At last the vast horde reaches the cliffside nests of the Chechmeks, at the very edge of the Khazar world.

And the fighting begins.

The time has come. The Chechmeks must pay for their evil deeds. Their dwellings are made of clay and straw like the nests of little birds. The Khazars pulverize the nests with their stones and arrows. The heroic warriors clamber up the cliffs, build fires, and sling Chechmek children into the flames by their hands and feet. You will not forget, O seed of the enemy, the fires of Itil!

They eat meat, drink wine, mark their victory with a raucous celebration, and sink into slumber.

And the Chechmeks creep out of the cliff-side crevasses with their stone knives, slaughter the sentries, and hack off the heads of the sleeping Khazars. By morning the blood runs knee-deep.

Again they take the cliffs, send clouds of smoke into the cliff-side crevasses. The Chechmeks come out shrieking and biting like animals. Arrows soar through the air, spears crackle, corpses pile up in huge heaps. Ten Khazars fall on every square cubit of cliffside, but they take back the Chechmek heights.

But in the night the Chechmeks creep out again with their knives.

Where do they all come from? Do they dwell inside the very stone?

On and on they fight, two springs come and go.

Half the army lies in the earth, but they finally subdue the Chechmeks.

Defend the integrity of the Khazar land.

They choose the meanest Chechmek of all and make him chief, and he kisses the Khagan’s ring.

And then they start off for home. Bearing news to the new Khazar widows and orphans. Even the survivors aren’t whole, some missing an arm or leg. How can they live and provide for a family, crippled like that? Grief, pain, fear, surely the Khagan will care for these brave warriors.

But Saat survives, and with all his parts. Just an injury due to some friendly fire: a stone from a fellow Khazar sling that hit him on the head. Even before that his head hadn’t been all that perfect. It’s just a little worse now, that’s all. And he had had them before, those harmful thoughts. Living in his head like tapeworms in his ass.

Only now they’ve started to expand, gotten a little full of themselves.

Indulging themselves, in fact.

Saat drags himself along through Khazaria and there’s a scraping, a nagging between his ears.

And what did we expect to gain mucking around in all that Chechmek crap anyway? Like we needed their shitty cliff-sides when we have our own vast, rich, fertile land—as much as we could ever want, as much as God has gingerbread. Head out just a little ways from Itil, a verst’s walk, and it will unfold before you, all you could ever possibly need, open lands across all of Khazaria! Plows to lift, horses to ride, womenfolk to screw, and not enough men to do the job! But we went and laid down our bones among the stones of other lands. Poured out our blood, fertilized their earth with our flesh.

Tell me, O Mother—O steppe grasslands, what will become of my Khazaria when a thousand springs have come and gone?