Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

The space wasn’t entirely empty, though. Beneath their feet lay the usual collection of bottles, and there were a couple of old car tyres, a crumpled door from a Lada and other assorted quasi-mechanical garbage of the kind that always accumulates beside garages.

And, next to them, there was a jet fighter.

Although it took up almost all of the space, it was the very last thing that Maria noticed, probably because for several seconds her brain filtered out the signals it was receiving from her eyes as a hallucination. Maria felt afraid.

How could a plane get in here? she thought. On the other hand, how could Schwarzenegger have got here? But even so, this is really strange.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘A model A-4 «Harrier» jump-jet vertical take-off and landing pursuit craft,’ said Schwarzenegger.

Maria saw the famous dimples in his cheeks again -Schwarzenegger was smiling. She frowned slightly, drawing her frizzy eyebrows together, and the fear in her heart was replaced by a feeling of jealousy for this immense insect of glass and metal, which clearly occupied quite as important a place in Schwarzenegger’s heart as she did herself.

He approached the plane. Sunk in thought, Maria remained standing on the spot until she was jerked forward in turn - rather as if Schwarzenegger were a tractor and she were some piece of agricultural machinery casually hooked on to it.

‘But there’s only room for one,’ she said when she caught sight of the back of the seat through the glass canopy.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Schwarzenegger, and in a single light movement he lifted her up and sat her on the wing.

Maria drew in her legs and stood up on the angled aluminium surface. A gust of wind fluttered through her clothes, and she thought how well romantic roles had always suited her.

‘What about you?’ she asked.

But Schwarzenegger was already in the cockpit. He had clambered in with amazing speed and agility, and Maria realized it must have been a montage sequence or a piece of slick editing. He stuck his head out of the cabin and smiled, gesturing to her with his thumb and forefinger joined to form a ring; Maria decided she could think of it as her wedding ring.

‘Sit on the fuselage,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘at the base of the wings. Don’t be afraid. Imagine it’s a carousel. Imagine you’re sitting on one of the horses.’

‘You mean, you’re going to…’

Schwarzenegger nodded.

His dark glasses gazed straight into the depths of Maria’s soul and she realized her fate was being decided right here and now. She was being tested, there was no doubt about it: the woman worthy of standing beside Schwarzenegger could not be some feeble coward good for nothing more than multi-episode domestic and sexual intrigue. She had to be able to meet mortal danger face to face without betraying her feelings with anything more than a smile. Maria tried adjusting her expression accordingly, but felt that the smile turned out a little contrived.

‘Great idea,’ she said. ‘But won’t I get cold?’

‘It won’t take long,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘Get up.’

Maria shrugged and took a cautious step towards the point where the fuselage protruded above the flat surface of the wings like the curved spine of a fish, and then sat down on it neatly.

‘No,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘you can ride side-saddle when we go to my ranch in California. Right now you had better sit the ordinary way, or the wind’ll blow you off.’

Maria hesitated for a moment. ‘Look the other way,’ she said.

Schwarzenegger smiled with the left corner of his mouth and turned away. Maria threw her leg over the aluminium crest and straddled the fuselage. Underneath her the metal was cold and slightly damp with dew; she hoisted herself up slightly in order to tuck the hem of her jacket underneath her, and suddenly had the strange sensation that the very tenderest parts of her body had been flattened across the angular hips of a metal man lying on his back - some mutant cross between the iron Dzerzhinsky toppled by the wind of change and a robot from hell. She shuddered, but the brief hallucination disappeared abruptly, to be replaced by the feeling that she was sitting on a frying-pan which had just been taken out of the fridge. She was feeling worse and worse about what was happening.

‘Arnold,’ she called, ‘are you sure we ought to do this?’

She usually reserved these words for entirely different circumstances, but this time they just seemed to come out on their own.

‘It was you who wanted to soar up into the sky,’ he said, ‘but if you’re afraid…’

‘No,’ said Maria, pushing aside her fear, ‘I’m not afraid in the slightest. It’s just that I’m being such a bother to you.’

‘No bother,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘It’s going to be very noisy, better put your earphones on. What is it you’re listening to, anyway?’

‘Jihad Crimson,’ said Maria, settling the small pink pads on her ears.

Schwarzenegger’s face froze absolutely still. A strange flickering red light ran across the lenses of his dark glasses - Maria thought it must be the reflection of the leaves falling from the maple trees that stood just behind the garages.

‘Arnie,’ she called.

The corner of Schwarzenegger’s mouth twitched a few times, and then he seemed to recover the power of movement. He turned his head with difficulty, as though it were rotating on a bearing clogged with sand.

‘Crimson Jihad?’ he asked.

‘Jihad Crimson,’ answered Maria. ‘Nushrat Fatekh Ali Khan and Robert Fripp. Why?’

‘Nothing,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘it’s not important.’

His head disappeared into the cockpit. Underneath her, somewhere deep in the plane’s metal belly, she heard an electrical hum that expanded in the space of just a few seconds into a monstrous loud roaring until it seemed to Maria that she could feel the foam-plastic pads being forced into her ears. Then she was tilted smoothly over to one side and the garages drifted down and away behind her.

Swaying from side to side like a boat, the Harrier rose up vertically into the air - Maria had not even been aware that aeroplanes could fly like that. She thought that if she closed her eyes it might be less frightening, but her curiosity proved stronger than her fear, and in less than a minute she had opened them again.

The first thing she saw was a window moving straight towards her. It was so close already that Maria had a perfectly clear view of a tank turning the muzzle of its gun in her direction from the screen of the television in the room. The tank on the screen fired, and at that precise moment the plane banked steeply and soared away from the wall. Maria almost slid across on to the wing, and she squealed in fear, but the plane soon righted itself.

‘Hold on to the antenna!’ shouted Schwarzenegger, poking his head out of the cabin and waving to her.

Maria looked down. Protruding out of the fuselage directly in front of her was a long metal form with a rounded, slightly swollen tip - it was strange that she hadn’t noticed it before. It looked like a narrow vertical wing, and it immediately roused immodest associations in Maria’s mind, although its dimensions were significantly larger than any encountered in real life. One glance at this powerful protuberance was enough to quell her fear and replace it with a joyful inspiration that had always been so lacking with all those languid Miguels and drunken Ivans from the television.

Everything was quite different this time. The rounded swelling -at the tip of the antenna was covered with small holes which reminded her slightly of a shower head and at the same time set her thinking of strange, non-terrestrial forms of life and love. Maria pointed to it and glanced inquiringly at Schwarzenegger. He nodded and gave a broad smile, and the sun glinted on his teeth.