Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

‘Yes, everything is reduced to words.’ repeated the Sirruf. ‘As far as I am aware, the most profound revelation ever to visit a human being under the influence of drugs was occasioned by a critical dose of ether. The recipient summoned up the strength to write it down, even though it cost a supreme effort. What he wrote was: "The universe is permeated by a smell of oil.’ You’ve got a long way to go before you reach depths like that. Well, anyway, that’s all beside the point. Why don’t you tell me where you got the stamp from?’

Tatarsky remembered the collector from the Poor Folk bar and his album. He was about to reply, but the Sirruf interrupted him:

‘Grisha the stamp-collector. I thought as much. How many of them did he have?’

Tatarsky remembered the page of the album and the three lilac-coloured rectangles in the plastic pocket.

‘I see,’ said the Sirruf. ‘So there are two more.’

After that he disappeared, and Tatarsky returned to his normal state. He understood now what happens to a person who has the delirium tremens he’d read so much about in the classics of nineteenth-century Russian literature. He had no control at all over his hallucinations, and he simply couldn’t tell which way he would be tossed by the next thought. He began to feel afraid. He got up and walked quickly into the bathroom, put his head under a stream of water and held it there until the cold became painful. He dried his hair on a towel, went back into the room and took another look at its reflection in the window pane. The familiar interior appeared to him now like a Gothic stage set for some menacing event due to occur at any moment, and the divan appeared like some sacrificial altar for large animals.

‘Why on earth did I have to go and swallow that garbage?’ he thought in anguish.

‘Absolutely no reason whatsoever,’ said the Sirruf, resurfacing in some obscure dimension of his consciousness. ‘It really isn’t good for man to go taking drugs. Especially psychedelics.’

‘Yes, I know that myself.’ Tatarsky replied quietly. ‘Now I do.’

‘Man has a world in which he lives.’ the Sirruf said didactically. ‘Man is man because he can see nothing except that world. But when you take an overdose of LSD or dine on panther fly-agarics, you’re stepping way out of line - and you’re taking a grave risk. If you only realised how many invisible eyes are watching you at that moment you would never do it; and if you were to see even just a few of those who are watching you, you’d die of fright. By this act you declare that being human is not enough for you and you want to become someone else. But in the first place, in order to cease being human, you have to die. Do you want to die?’

‘No,’ said Tatarsky, earnestly pressing his hand to his heart.

‘And who is it you want to be?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tatarsky said, crushed.

‘You see what I mean? Just one more tab from happy Holland might not have meant too much, but what you swallowed was something quite different. It’s a numbered issue, an official service document, by eating which you shift across into a different realm where there are absolutely no idle pleasures or amusements. And which you’re not supposed to go wandering about in without an official commission. And you don’t have any commission. Do you?’

‘No,’ agreed Tatarsky.

‘We’ve settled things with Grisha. He’s a sick man, a collector; and he came by the pass by accident… But what did you eat it for?’

‘I wanted to feel the pulse of life,’ Tatarsky said with a sob.

‘The pulse of life? Very well, feel it,’ said the Sirruf.

When Tatarsky came to his senses, the only thing in the world he wanted was that the experience he’d just been through and had no words to describe, merely a feeling of black horror, should never happen to him again. For that he was prepared to give absolutely anything.

‘Again, perhaps?’ asked the Sirruf.

‘No,’ said Tatarsky, ‘please, don’t. I’ll never, never eat that garbage again. I promise.’

‘You can promise the local policeman. If you live till morning, that is.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Just what I say. Do you at least realise that was a pass for five people? And you’re here alone. Or are there really five of you?’

When Tatarsky recovered his senses again he felt he really didn’t have much chance of surviving the night. There had just been five of him, and every one of them had felt so bad that Tatarsky had instantly realised what a blessing it was to exist in the singular.’ and he was astonished how people could be so blind as not to appreciate their good fortune.

‘Please.’ he said, ‘please, don’t do that to me again.’

‘I’m not doing anything to you,’ replied the Sirruf. ‘You’re doing it all yourself.’

‘Can I explain?’ Tatarsky asked piteously. ‘I realise I’ve made a mistake. I realise it’s not right to look at the Tower of Babel. But I didn’t…’

‘What has the Tower of Babel got to do with it?’ the Sirruf interrupted.

‘I’ve just seen it.’

‘You can’t see the Tower of Babel, you can only ascend it.’ replied the Sirruf. ‘I tell you that as its guardian. And what you saw was the complete opposite. One could call it the Carthaginian Pit. The so-called tofet.’

‘What’s a tofet?’

‘It’s a place of sacrificial cremation. There were pits of the kind in Tyre, Sidon, Carthage and so forth, and they really did burn people in them. That, by the way, is why Carthage was destroyed. These pits were also known as Gehenna - after a certain ancient valley where the whole business started. I might add that the Bible calls it the "abomination of the Ammonites" - but you haven’t read the Bible anyway, you only search through it for new slogans.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Very well. You can regard the tofet as an ordinary television.’

‘I still don’t understand. Do you mean I was inside a television?’

‘In a certain sense. You saw the technological space in which your world is being consumed by fire. Something like a garbage incinerator.’

Once again Tatarsky glimpsed the figure holding the glittering strings on the periphery of his field of vision. The vision lasted for only a fraction of a second.

‘But isn’t he the god Enkidu?’ he asked. ‘I was just reading about him. I even know what those strings are he has in his hands. When the beads from the great goddess’s necklace decided they were people and they settled right across the reservoir…’

‘In the first place, he isn’t a god, quite the opposite. Enkidu is one of his less common names, but he is better known as Baal. Or Baloo. In Carthage they tried to sacrifice to him by burning their children, but there was no point, because he makes no allowances and simply cremates everyone in turn. In the second place, the beads didn’t decide they were people, it was people who decided they were beads. That’s why the entity you call Enkidu gathers up those beads and cremates them, so that some day people will realise they aren’t beads at all. Do you follow?’

‘No. What are the beads, then?’

The Sirruf said nothing for a moment.

‘How can I explain it to you? The beads are what that Che Guevara of yours calls "identity".’

‘But where did these beads come from?’

‘They didn’t come from anywhere. They don’t actually exist.’

‘What is it that burns then?’ Tatarsky asked doubtfully.

‘Nothing.’

‘I don’t understand. If there’s fire, then there must be something burning. Some kind of substance.’

‘Have you ever read Dostoievsky?’

‘I can’t stand him, to be honest.’