Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

He raised his eyes to the wall of the toilet as though in hopes of an answer there. Traced on the tiles in red felt-tip pen were the jolly, rounded letters of a brief slogan: ‘Trapped? Masturbate!’

Going back to the bar, he sat further away from the TV personalities and attempted to lean back and enjoy it. But it didn’t work for him - it never did. The repulsive Moscow cocaine, cut almost to nothing by the unwashed hands of a long chain of dealers, deposited an entire bouquet of medicinal smells in his nasopharynx - everything from streptocide to aspirin - and triggered an intense, stressful trembling in his body. They did say the powder they took a hundred and fifty dollars a gramme for in Moscow was not cocaine at all, but a mixture of Estonian speed with an assortment of Russian pharmaceuticals. As if that wasn’t enough, for some reason half of the dealers always wrapped the powder in a glossy advertisement for the Toyota Camry cut out of some magazine, and Tatarsky was tormented by the unbearable suspicion that they made a fat living not just at the expense of other people’s health, but by providing a PR service as well. Every time Tatarsky asked himself why he and others paid all that money in order to subject themselves once again to a humiliating and unhygienic procedure, the only explanation he could come up with went as follows: people weren’t sniffing cocaine, they were sniffing money, and the rolled-up hundred-dollar bill required by the unwritten order of ritual was actually more important than the powder itself. If cocaine was sold in chemists’ shops for twenty kopecks a gramme as a mouthwash for toothache, he thought, then nobody but punks would sniff it - the way it was, in fact, at the beginning of the century. But if some ether-based glue sniffed by juvenile junkies cost a thousand dollars a bottle, all the gilded youth of Moscow would be delighted to sniff it, and at presentations and buffet luncheons it would be tres chic to waft the volatile chemical vapours around yourself, complain about your brain neurons dying off and disappear for long periods into the toilet. Youth fashion magazines would devote revelatory cover stories (written, of course, by Sasha Blo) to the aesthetics of the plastic bag that was placed over the head for this procedure.

‘Oho!’ Tatarsky exclaimed, smacked himself on the forehead, took out his notebook, opened it at the letter ‘C’, and noted down:

Youth market colognes (all manufacturers). Link them with money and the Roman emperor Vespasian (tax on lavatories, the saying ‘Money doesn’t smell’). Example:

MONE Y DOES SMELL! "BENJAMIN" THE NEW COLOGNE FROM HUGO BOSS

Putting away his notebook, he felt that the peak of the loathsome sensation had passed and he was quite strong enough to walk as far as the bar and get himself a drink. He wanted tequila, but when he reached the barman for some reason he ordered Smirnoff, which he normally couldn’t stand. He downed one shot right there at the bar, then took another and went back to his table. In the meantime he’d acquired a companion, a man of about forty with long, greasy hair and a wild beard, dressed in a crazy kind of embroidered jacket - in appearance he was a typical former hippy, one of those who had failed to find a place for themselves either in the past or in the present. Hanging round his neck was a large bronze cross.

‘Excuse me,’ said Tatarsky, ‘I was sitting here.’

‘So be my guest,’ said his new neighbour. ‘Don’t need the entire table, do you?’

Tatarsky shrugged and sat facing him.

‘My name’s Grigory,’ his neighbour said affably.

Tatarsky raised his weary eyes to look at him. ‘Vova.’ he said.

Catching his glance, Grigory frowned and shook his head in sympathy.

‘You’ve got the shakes bad,’ he said. ‘Snorting?’

‘A bit,’ said Tatarsky. ‘Just now and again.’

‘Fool,’ said Grigory. ‘Just think about it: the mucous membrane of the nose - it’s as good as the exposed surface of the brain… And did you ever think about where that powder came from and who’s been sticking his body parts in it?’

‘Just this moment,’ Tatarsky confessed. ‘But what’s all this about body parts? What other body parts can you stick in it except your nose?’

Grigory glanced around, pulled out a bottle of vodka from under the table and took a quick swallow from it.

‘Maybe you’ve heard of an American writer called Harold Robbins?’ he asked, hiding the bottle away.

‘No,’ answered Tatarsky.

‘A total arsehole. But all the English teachers read him. That’s why there are so many of his books in Moscow, and the children’s knowledge of the language is so bad. In one of his novels there was this black guy, a professional fucker who pulled rich white dames. So before the procedure this black dude sprinkled his…’

‘OK, I get it,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I’m going to be sick now.’

‘…his massive black dong with pure cocaine,’ Grigory concluded with satisfaction. ‘You might ask: what’s this black dude got to do with anything? I’ll tell you. I was re-reading Andreiev’s "Rosa Mundi" recently, the part about the soul of the nation. Andreiev says it’s a woman and she’s called Navna. Then afterwards I had this vision - she’s lying there like she’s sleeping on this white rock, and leaning over her there’s this vague black figure, with short little wings, you can’t see his face, and he’s just giving her it…’

Grigory pulled an invisible control column in towards his stomach with his hands.

‘You want to know what it is you’re all using?’ he whispered, leaning his leering face close to Tatarsky. ‘Exactly. What he sprinkles on himself. And at the moment he sticks it in, you’re all shooting up and snorting. When he pulls it out, you all go running off trying to find more… And he just keeps on sticking it in and pulling it out, sticking it in and pulling it out…’

Tatarsky leaned down into the gap between the table and the counter and puked. He glanced up cautiously at the barman: he was engaged in conversation with some customers and didn’t seem to have noticed anything. Looking around, Tatarsky noticed an advertising poster on the wall. It showed the nineteenth-century poet Tyutchev wearing a pince-nez, with a glass in his hand and a rug across his knees. His piercingly sad gaze was directed out of the window, and with his free hand he was stroking a dog sitting beside him. The strange thing was, though, that Tyutchev’s chair wasn’t standing on the floor, but on the ceiling. Tatarsky looked a little lower and read the slogan:

RUSSIA - NO WAY IS THERE TO UNDERSTAND HER NO WAY HER SECRET SOUL TO RENDER SMIRNOFF

Everything was calm. Tatarsky straightened up. He was feeling significantly better.

Grigory leaned back in his chair and took another swig from his bottle. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he asserted. ‘Life should be lived cleanly.’

‘Oh, yes? And how’s that done?’ Tatarsky asked, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin.

‘Nothing but LSD. Only via the gut and always with a prayer.’

Tatarsky shook his head like a dog that has just clambered out of the water. ‘Where can you get it?’

‘What do you mean?’ Grigory was offended. ‘Just you come round here.’

Tatarsky obediently got up, walked round the table and sat beside him.

‘I’ve been collecting for eight years,’ said Grigory, taking a stamp album out from under his jacket. ‘Take a look at that.’

Tatarsky opened the album. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘Look at all those different ones.’

‘That’s nothing,’ said Grigory. ‘What I’ve got here’s just for swapping and selling. I’ve got two shelves of these albums back at home.’