Виктор Пелевин - Buddha's Little Finger

‘So how’s it feel? What’s it like?’

‘It’s hard to say.’

‘Give us a rough idea. Is it like smack?’

‘Nowhere near it,’ Volodin said with a frown. ‘Compared with this smack is a heap of crap.’

‘Well then, kinda like coke, is it, or speed?’

‘No, Shurik. No, no, don’t even try comparing it. Just imagine you’ve done a bundle of speed and you’re tripping out - say you’ll be tripping for a day. You’ll want a dame and the whole works, right?’

Shurik giggled.

‘And then you’ll be coming down for a day. And you’ll probably start thinking - what the fuck did I need all that for?’

‘Yeah, it happens,’ said Shurik.

‘But with this gear, once it gets to you, it stays with you for ever. And you won’t need any dames, and you won’t get any munchies. No coming down. No cold turkey. You just keep praying for the trip to go on and on for ever. Get it?’

‘Like, heavier than smack?’

‘Way heavier.’

Volodin leaned over the camp-fire and stirred the branches around. It immediately flared up, as strongly as though petrol had been poured into the fire. The flames were strange - they gave off various-coloured sparks of unusual beauty, and the light that fell on the faces of the three men sitting there was also unusual, rainbow-coloured and soft, with an astonishing depth.

They could be seen very clearly now. Volodin was a plump, roundish man of about forty with a shaved head and a small, neat beard - his appearance was that of a civilized Central Asian bandit. Shurik was a skinny, fidgety little man with blond hair who made a lot of small, meaningless movements. He didn’t look very strong, but his constant nervous twitching betrayed something so frightening that beside him the muscle-bound Kolyan looked like a mere wolfhound puppy, in short, if Shurik typified the elite type of St Petersburg mobster, then Kolyan was the standard Moscow hulkodrome whose appearance had been so brilliantly foretold by the futurists at the beginning of the century. He seemed to be nothing but an intersection of simple geometrical forms - spheres, cubes and pyramids - and his small streamlined head was reminiscent of that stone which according to the evangelist was discarded by the builders but nonetheless became the cornerstone in the foundation of the new Russian statehood.

‘There.’ said Volodin, ‘now the mushrooms have come on.’

‘Whoah.’ Kolyan confirmed. ‘And then some. I’ve turned blue all over.’

‘Yeah.’ said Shurik, ‘that sure don’t feel like nothing. Listen. Volodin, was all that stuff for real?’

‘All what stuff?’

‘All that stuff about fixing yourself up a trip that lasts all your life… So you just stay high all the time.’

‘I didn’t say all your life. The concepts in there are different.’

‘You said yourself as you’d be tripping all the time.’

‘I didn’t say that either.’

‘Kol, didn’t he say it?’

‘I don’t remember,’ mumbled Kolyan. He seemed to have dropped out of the conversation and to be occupied with some’ thing else.

‘Then what did you say?’ asked Shurik.

‘I didn’t say all the time.’ said Volodin. ‘I said «for ever». Keep your ears open,’

‘So what’s the difference?’

‘The difference is where that high starts, there isn’t any more time.’

‘What is there then?’

‘Grace.’

‘And what else?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Can’t quite get me head round that somehow,’ said Shurik. ‘Just hanging there in empty space, is it, this grace?’

‘There’s no empty space there either.’

‘Then what is there?’

‘I told you, grace.’

‘You’ve lost me again.’

‘Don’t bother about it,’ said Volodin. ‘If it was that easy to get your head round, half of Moscow would be tripping for free right now. Just think about it - a gram of cocaine costs one hundred, and here this is free, for nothing.’

‘Hundred and fifty,’ said Shurik. ‘Nah, something’s not right here. Even if it was tough to bend yer head round, people’d still know about it and they’d be tripping. They figured out how to make speed out of nose drops, didn’t they?’

‘Use your brains, Shurik,’ said Volodin. ‘Just imagine you’re dealing cocaine, right? One gram for one hundred and fifty bucks, and you get ten greenbacks from each gram. And in a month you sell, say, five hundred grams. How much is that?’

‘Five grand,’ said Shurik.

‘So now imagine some scumball has cut your sales from five hundred grams to five. What have you got?’

Shurik’s lips moved as he quietly mumbled some figures.

‘A limp prick, that’s what,’ he answered.

‘Exactly. You could take your whore to McDonald’s one time, but as for snorting anything yourself - forget it. So what would you do with a scumball who set you up like that?’

‘Blow him away,’ said Shurik. ‘Obvious.’

‘So now do you see why nobody knows about it?’

‘You reckon the dope pushers keep things tight?’

‘There’s far more to it than just drugs,’ said Volodin. ‘There’s much bigger bread tied up in this. If you break through into this eternal high, then you don’t need any wheels, or any petrol, or any advertisements, or any porn, or any news. And neither does anyone else. What would happen then?’

‘Everything’d be fucked,’ said Shurik, glancing around him. ‘All of culture and civilization. Clear as day, that is.’

‘So that’s why nobody knows about the eternal high.’

‘But who controls the whole business?’ Shurik asked after a moment’s thought.

‘It works automatically. It’s the market.’

‘Don’t you go giving me any spiel about the market,’ Shurik said with a frown. ‘We’ve had it all before. Automatic. Yeah, well it’s automatic when that suits, or you can make it single-shot. Or you can put the safety catch on. Someone’s got all the trumps, that’s all. Maybe we’ll find out who later, in about forty years, not before.’

‘We’ll never find out,’ said Kolyan, without opening his eyes. ‘Come on. Just think about it. When a guy’s got a million greenbacks, he just sits back and takes it easy, and anyone who starts to spread the dirt about him gets dropped straight off. And the guys who’re holdin’ trumps or got the real power are way heavier than that! The most we can do is take out some hulk, or torch some office, and that’s it. Nothin’ but garbage men, we are, clean up the small stuff. But those guys can bring in the tanks if they can’t fix anythin’ by spielin’. And if that don’t do it, they’ve got planes, an atom bomb if that’s what it takes. Just look what happened when the Chechens stopped shellin’ out, came down on them like a ton of bricks, didn’t they? If they hadn’t copped on at the last moment, they wouldn’t be able to shell out for nothin’ no more. And remember the White House. How could we ever come on to Slav-East like that?’

‘You give over with yer White House,’ said Shurik. ‘Dopey bastard. We’re not talking politics. We’re talking about the eternal high… Listen… Really now… They said on the box that all of them in the White House were going around stoned out of their skulls. Maybe they twigged about this eternal high? And they wanted to tell everyone about it on the telly, so they went after Ostankino, only the cocaine mafia wouldn’t let them through… Nah, now me marbles is slipping.’

Shurik put his hands around his head and fell silent.

The forest around them was filled with trembling, mysterious rainbow lights, and the sky above the clearing was covered with mosaics of incredible beauty, unlike anything a man encounters in his gruelling, normal everyday existence. The world around them changed, becoming far more meaningful and animated, as though it had finally become clear why the grass was growing in the clearing, why the wind was blowing and the stars were twinkling in the sky. But the metamorphosis affected more than just the world, it affected the men sitting by the fire as well.