Victor Pelevin - Helmet of Horror

Ariadne

I think they’re in love.

Monstradamus

According to their names they have to be. Imagine being called Romeo. What else could you do?

Organizm(-:

Take a pack of condoms and go looking for your Juliet.

Nutscracker

Or take a pump-action shotgun and go looking for your Shakespeare.

Romeo-y-Cohiba

Just leave it out, can’t you?

Nutscracker

Romeo, are you still there? We thought you’d gone to bed.

Monstradamus

Ariadne! If you dream about that bronze mushroom again, try to find out what he’s got on his mind.

:-))

Monstradamus

Ariadne, are you awake already?

Ariadne

Where are all the others?

Monstradamus

I don’t know. Sleeping, I suppose. Well then? Did you dream about anything?

Ariadne

Yes.

Monstradamus

Tell me about it.

Ariadne

It was like a lecture. I was sitting in a lecture hall in some educational institution – a technical college to judge from all the pieces of equipment standing along the walls. I can’t say what kind of equipment it was, some pieces had screens like televisions, others looked like scales with a lot of springs and counterweights. The lecture hall looked like an amphitheatre – it sloped down to a board and standing there beside it was the same dwarf who spoke to me by the fountain. Apart from us two, there was no one there. The entire board was covered by a complicated diagram of some kind of device.

Monstradamus

Can you remember what came before that? How you got there?

Ariadne

No. The dwarf waved to me as if I was an old friend and told me they had heard about our wish to discover what was on their master’s mind. He said that would be the subject of the lecture. Everything that happened seemed to be perfectly natural, and I didn’t feel like I needed to ask any questions. Although there were lots of strange things. For instance, the diagram wasn’t drawn on the board with chalk. It was carved into it, like an engraving. I realised that because when the dwarf wanted to correct something in the drawing he took a chisel and began stripping long shavings of plastic off the board and leaving bright lines on it.

Monstradamus

What was it a diagram of?

Ariadne

It was Asterisk’s mind.

Monstradamus

His mind?

Ariadne

Yes. The diagram was called ‘the helmet of horror’ – it was written in big letters above the drawing. But the dwarf repeated very insistently several times that it wasn’t any kind of hat or apparatus, but precisely a mind, although everything about it looked like a drawing of some machine. The main body of the machine was shaped like a helmet. And there was an identical helmet standing on the demonstration table – an ancient bronze headpiece, and underneath it a visor with holes in it curving back inside.

Monstradamus

What do you mean by ‘curving back inside’?

Ariadne

Its lower section ran back inside the helmet through a slit in the middle of the face. And there were some kind of side plates too – everything was very old, green with age. It looked like a Roman gladiator’s helmet – like a bronze hat with a visor. Only this one had horns as well. They came out of the upper section of the helmet and curved backwards. I’d already seen that on the square by the fountain, when Asterisk walked by, only his helmet was bigger and more complicated, with lots of different wires and tubes. The dwarf said this one was a simplified model. What he told me sounded really peculiar.

Monstradamus

Can you tell me about it?

Ariadne

I remember that the helmet of horror consisted of several major parts and a lot of secondary ones. The parts had strange names: the frontal net, the now grid, the separator labyrinth, the horns of plenty, Tarkovsky’s mirror and so forth. The largest element consisted of the now grid and the frontal net. It had two parts that were sometimes fused into a single unit. Its external part, the net, looked like a visor with holes in it, and its internal part, the grid, divided the helmet into an upper section and a lower one, so there was no way you could squeeze even the smallest head into it. The dwarf said the now grid separates the past from the present, because it is the only place where what we call ‘now’ exists. Hence the name. The past is located in the upper section of the helmet, and the future in the lower section.

Monstradamus

That doesn’t seem logical somehow. Maybe it’s the other way round?

Ariadne

No, I definitely remember that. After that the dwarf began explaining how the helmet works. He said you had to grasp the essence of the matter first before going into the details. The helmet’s operating cycle has no beginning, so it can be explained starting from any phase. And so, he said, start by imagining the gentle glow of a summer day caressing your face. That’s precisely how the frontal net, heated by the action of the stream of impressions falling on it, transmits heat to the now grid. The grid sublimates the past contained in the upper section of the helmet, transforming it into vapour, which is driven up into the horns of plenty by the force of circumstances. The horns of plenty emerge from the forehead, curve round the sides of the helmet and intertwine to form the occipital braid, which descends into the base of the helmet. There, below the now grid, the bubbles of hope that arise in the occipital braid are ejected into the region of the future. As they rise, these bubbles burst against the now grid, generating the force of circumstances, which induces the stream of impressions in the separator labyrinth. And the stream of impressions, in turn, is shattered against the frontal net, heating the now grid and renewing the energy of the cycle. The heat he was speaking about when he used the verb ‘to heat’ is different from the kind of heat you get from fire, more like the kind you get from love. He said he was simply using an analogy with something I knew about, so I would be able to imagine what happens. And in the same way the stream of impressions doesn’t actually flow anywhere, the bubbles of hope aren’t really bubbles at all, and so on.

Monstradamus

I couldn’t really say I understood all of that.

Ariadne

I didn’t understand anything at first either, and the dwarf told me to ask questions. I didn’t know where to begin, because everything was equally hard to understand. The last thing he’d mentioned was the bubbles of hope, so I asked why they were called that. The dwarf was a bit embarrassed and said it was the official name, like a formal title. In actual fact it’s not always hope at all, he said, it’s more likely to be fear and apprehension, suspicion and hate, all sorts of nonsense, in fact any of the cud that is chewed on with such habitual stupidity by … But then he broke off, glanced round furtively and muttered something about that not being the right way to put it. And then he went on in the formal lecturer’s voice he’d been using before and said that technically speaking it was correct to call them bubbles of the past. And they were called bubbles because their constant tendency is to expand and occupy the entire volume of the helmet, preventing anything else from appearing in it and leaving no space or opportunity for the recognition of what is actually happening. The dwarf jabbed his pointer at the part of the diagram that showed the kind of vertical coil the horns formed where they came together at the back of the helmet and said that bubbles of hope arise in the occipital braid following the enrichment of past in the horns of plenty. But since past is enriched exclusively with more past, the bubbles of hope consist entirely of past, they are simply past in a different state. Which means that when Asterisk peers into the future, he sees nothing but the past. The lower section of the helmet is required primarily in order to cool the bubbles of hope, a process which endows them with vernal freshness and the elastic resilience of novelty. As they break against the now grid, they generate the force of circumstances, which lifts the past out of the upper section of the helmet into the entry chamber of the horns of plenty and forces it through the separator labyrinth, where the stream of impressions arises.