Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

There was the ringing sound of a glass shattering and then something heavy fell to the floor. Someone started crying loudly.

‘Careful, careful.’ said Timur Timurovich. ‘There now, that’s better.’

Realizing that it was all over, I opened my eyes. By this time I could more or less see. Everything close to me was quite distinct, but objects further away shifted and blurred, and the overall perspective was as though I were sitting inside a large Christmas-tree decoration with the outside world daubed on its inner surface. Timur Timurovich and Colonel Smirnov towered up over me like twin cliffs.

‘Well,’ said someone in the corner. ‘So much for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Just Maria.’

‘I would like to point out,’ said Colonel Smirnov, clearing his throat and turning to Timur Timurovich, ‘the distinctly phallic relevance of the fact that the patient sees dicks everywhere. Did you notice that? The antenna, the rocket, the Ostankino tower?’

‘You military men always take things too literally.’ replied Timur Timurovich. ‘Not everything’s that simple. Russia cannot be grasped by logic, as the saying goes - but neither can it be entirely reduced to sexual neurosis. Let’s not be too hasty. What’s important here is that the cathartic effect is quite evident, even if it is attenuated.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the colonel, ‘the chair’s even broken.’

‘Precisely,’ agreed Timur Timurovich. ‘When blocked pathological material rises to the surface of consciousness it has to overcome powerful resistance, and so it often produces visions of catastrophes or conflicts of various kinds, as we’ve just seen. It’s the clearest possible sign that we’re working along the right lines.’

‘Maybe it’s just the shell-shock?’ said the colonel.

‘What shell-shock?’

‘What, didn’t I tell you about that? Well, when they were shelling the White House, a few of the shells went straight through, in the windows on one side and out of the windows on the other. And one of them landed in a flat just at the very moment when

The colonel leaned over to Timur Timurovich and whispered something in his ear. ‘Well, of course…’ - I could just make out odd words here and there - ‘… to smithereens… under security with the corpses at first, and then we saw something moving… Massive concussion, obviously.’

‘But why on earth have you kept this to yourself for so long, my good fellow? It changes the entire picture,’ said Timur Timurovich reproachfully. ‘I’ve been struggling so hard…’

He leaned down over me, parted one of my eyelids with two fat fingers and looked into my eye. ‘How about you?’

I’m not quite sure.’ I replied. ‘Of course, it was not the most interesting vision I have ever had, but 1… How can I put it? I found the dreamlike facility with which these delirious ravings acquired for several minutes the status of reality quite amusing.’

‘How do you like that?’ asked Timur Timurovich, turning to Colonel Smirnov.

The colonel nodded without speaking.

‘My dear fellow, I was not inquiring as to your opinion, but your condition.’ said Timur Timurovich.

‘I feel quite well, thank you,’ I replied. ‘But I am sleepy.’

This was no more than the simple truth.

‘Then sleep.’

He turned away from me.

‘Tomorrow morning.’ he said to an invisible nurse, ‘please give Pyotr four cc’s of taurepam immediately before the hydraulic procedures.’

‘Can we have the radio on?’ asked a quiet voice in the corner.

Timur Timurovich clicked a switch on the wall, took the colonel by the arm and led him in the direction of the door. I closed my eyes and realized that I did not have enough strength to open them again.

‘Sometimes I think that all our soldiers brave.’ a man began singing in a mournful voice, ‘Who fell on battle’s bloody hills and plains, Were never buried in their native graves, But turned into a soaring flight of cranes…’

At these final words turmoil broke out in the ward.

‘Keep tight hold of Serdyuk!’ yelled a voice right beside my ear. ‘Who put those blasted cranes on? Have you forgotten, or what?’

‘It was you asked for it to be turned on,’ answered another voice. ‘Let’s change channels.’

There was another click.

‘Is the time now past.’ an ingratiating voice asked from the ceiling, ‘when Russian pop music was synonymous with provincialism? Here’s the chance to judge for yourself. The «Inflamed Ovaries» are a rare kind of Russian pop group, consisting entirely of women whose stage gear weighs as much as a «T-90» tank. Despite such ultra-modern features, the «Inflamed Ovaries» play mostly classical music, but in their own interpretation. Listen to what the girls make of a simple fugue in F by the Austrian composer Mozart, who is well known to many of our listeners from the cream liqueur that bears the same name, which can be bought wholesale from our sponsor, the trading firm «Third Eye».’

I heard the beginning of wild music, like the wind howling in a prison chimney, but I was already, thank God, only half-conscious. At first I was overwhelmed by tormenting thoughts about what was happening, and then I had a brief nightmare about an American wearing dark glasses which seemed to continue the story told by the unfortunate Maria.

The American landed his plane in a yard, soaked it with kerosene and set fire to it. Into the flames he threw the crimson jacket, the dark glasses and the canary-yellow trousers, until he was left wearing nothing but the skimpy trunks. Rippling his magnificently developed muscles he searched for something in the bushes for a long time, but failed to find it. Then there was a gap in my dream, and the next time I saw him - horror of horrors! - he was pregnant: the encounter with Maria had obviously not been without its consequences. At that precise moment he was transformed into a terrifying metal figure with a sketchy mask in place of a face, and the sun glinted furiously on his swollen belly.

The melody seemed at first to be floating up the staircase to wards me, briefly marking time before it dashed in desperation on to the landing - that was when I could hear the short moments of quietness between its sounds, Then the pianist’s fingers picked up the tune, set it back on the steps, and the whole thing was repeated one flight of stairs lower. The place where all this was taking place seemed very much like the staircase in house number eight on Tverskoi Boulevard, except that in my dream the staircase extended upwards and downwards as far as the eye could see and was clearly infinite. I suddenly understood that every melody has its own precise meaning, and that this was one of the proofs of the metaphysical impossibility of suicide - not of its sinfulness, but precisely of its impossibility. And I felt that all of us are nothing more than sounds drifting through the air from the fingers of some unknown pianist, nothing more than short thirds, smooth sixths and dissonant sevenths in a mighty symphony which none of us can ever hear in its entirety. This thought induced a profound sadness in me, which remained in my heart as I came plummeting out of the leaden clouds of sleep.

For several seconds I struggled to understand where I actually was and what was taking place in this strange world into which some unknown force had been thrusting me every morning for the past twenty-six years. I was dressed in a heavy jacket of black leather, riding breeches and boots, and there was a pain in my hip where something was sticking into me. I turned over on to my side, reached under my leg and felt the holster with the Mauser, and then I looked around me. Above my head hung a silk canopy with astoundingly beautiful yellow tassels. The sky outside the window was a cloudless blue, and the roofs in the distance glowed a dull red in the rays of the winter sun. Directly opposite my window on the other side of the boulevard I could see a dome clad in tin-plate, which for some reason reminded me of the belly of a huge metal woman in childbirth.