Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

‘Bom-bom-bom,’ the swaying sailors rumbled dully. The soloist stretched out his hands from his heart towards the camera and sang in a clear tenor:

My motherland gives me

For getting it right

My fill of her fizzy,

Her birch-bright Sprite!

Tatarsky crushed his cigarette into the ashtray with a sharp movement.

‘Motherfuckers.’ he said.

‘Who?’ asked Morkovin.

‘If only I knew… So tell me then, what area do they want to move me into?’

‘Senior creative in the kompromat department; and you’ll be on standby when we have a rush on. So now we’ll be standing, shoulder to shoulder, just like those sailors… Forgive me, brother, for dragging you into in all this. Life’s much simpler for the punters, who don’t know anything about it. They even think there are different TV channels and different TV companies… But then, that’s what makes them punters.’

It happens so often: you’re riding along in your white Mercedes and you go past a bus stop. You see the people who’ve been standing there, waiting in frustration for their bus for God knows how long, and suddenly you notice one of them gazing at you with a dull kind of expression that just might be envy. For a second you really start to believe that this machine stolen from some anonymous German burgher, that still hasn’t been fully cleared through the customs in fraternal Belorussia but already has a suspicious knocking in the engine, is the prize that witnesses to your full and total victory over life. A warm shiver runs up and down your spine, you proudly turn your face away from the people standing at the bus stop, and in your very heart of hearts you know that all your trials were not in vain: you’ve really made it.

Such is the action of the anal wow-factor in our hearts; but somehow Tatarsky failed to experience its sweet titillation. Perhaps the difficulty lay in some specific after-the-rain apathy of the punters standing at their bus stops, or perhaps Tatarsky was simply too nervous: there was a review of his work coming up, and Azadovsky himself was due to attend. Or perhaps the reason lay in the increasingly frequent breakdowns of the social radar locating unit in his mind.

‘If we regard events purely from the point of view of image animation,’ he thought, glancing round at his neighbours in the traffic jam, ‘then we have all our concepts inverted. For the celestial Silicon that renders this entire world, a battered old Lada is a much more complicated job than a new BMW that’s been blasted with gales for three years in aerodynamic tunnels. The whole thing comes down to creatives and scenario writers. But what bad bastard could have written this scenario? And who’s the viewer who sits and stuffs his face while he watches this screen? Most important of all, could it all really only be happening so that some heavenly agency can rake in something like money from something like advertising? Certainly looks like it. It’s a well-known fact that everything in the world is based on similitudes.’

The traffic jam finally began to ease. Tatarsky lowered the window. His mood was completely spoiled; he needed live human warmth. He pulled out of the stream of cars and braked at the bus stop. The broken glass panel in the side of the shelter had been patched over with a board carrying an advertisement for some TV channel showing an allegorical representation of the four mortal sins holding remote controls. An old woman was sitting motionless on the bench under the shelter with a basket on her knees, and sitting beside her was a curly-headed man of about forty, clutching a bottle of beer. He was dressed in a shabby, padded military coat. Noting that the man still seemed to possess a fair amount of vital energy, Tatarsky stuck out his elbow.

‘Excuse me, soldier,’ he said, ‘can you tell me where the Men’s Shirts shop is around here?’

The man looked up at him. He must have understood Tatarsky’s real motivation, because his eyes were immediately flooded with an ice-cold fury. The brief exchange of glances was most informative - Tatarsky realised that the man realised, and the man realised Tatarsky realised he’d been realised.

‘ Afghanistan was way heavier,’ said the man.

‘I beg your pardon, what did you say?’

‘What I said was’, the man replied, shifting his grip to the neck of the bottle, ‘that Afghanistan was way heavier. And don’t you even try to beg my pardon.’

Something told Tatarsky the man was not approaching his car in order to tell him the way to the shop, and he flattened the accelerator against the floor. His instinct had not deceived him - a second later something struck hard against the rear windsow and it shattered into a spider’s web of cracks, with white foam trickling down over them. Driven by his adrenalin rush, Tatarsky accelerated sharply. ‘What a fucker,’ he thought, glancing round. ‘And they want to build a market economy with people like that.’

After he parked in the yard of the Interbank Committee, a red Range-Rover pulled up beside him - the latest model, with a set of fantastical spotlights perched on its roof and its door decorated with a cheerful drawing of the sun rising over the prairie and the head of an Indian chief clad in a feather headdress. ‘I wonder who drives those?’ Tatarsky thought, and lingered at the door of his car for a moment.

A fat, squat man wearing an emphatically bourgeois striped suit clambered out of the Range-Rover and turned round, and Tatarsky was amazed to recognise Sasha Blo - fatter than ever, even balder, but still with that same old grimace of tormented failure to understand what was really going on.

‘Sasha,’ said Tatarsky, ‘is that you?’

‘Ah, Babe,’ said Sasha Blo. ‘You’re here too? In the dirt department?’

‘How d’you know?’

‘Elementary, my dear Watson. That’s where everybody starts out. Till they get their hand in. There aren’t all that many creatives on the books. Everyone knows everyone else. So if I haven’t seen you before and now you’re parking at this entrance, it means you’re in kompromat. And you’ve only been there a couple of weeks at most.’

‘It’s been a month already,’ Tatarsky answered. ‘So what’re you doing now?’

‘Me? I’m head of the Russian Idea department. Drop in if you have any ideas.’

‘I’m not much good to you" Tatarsky answered. ‘I tried thinking about it, but it was a flop. You should try driving around the suburbs and asking the guys on the street.’

Sasha Blo frowned in dissatisfaction.

‘I tried that at the beginning,’ he said. ‘You pour the vodka, look into their eyes, and then it’s always the same answer:

"Bugger off and crash your fucking Mercedes." Can’t think of anything cooler than a Mercedes… And it’s all so destructive…’

‘That’s right,’ sighed Tatarsky and looked at the rear window of his car. Sasha Blo followed his glance.

‘Is it yours?’

‘Yes it is,’ Tatarsky said with pride.

‘I see’ said Sasha Blo, locking the door of his Range-Rover; ‘forty minutes of embarrassment gets you to work. Well, don’t let it get you down. Everything’s still ahead of you.’

He nodded and ran off jauntily towards the door, flapping a fat, greasy attache case as he went. Tatarsky gazed after him for a long moment, then looked at the rear window of his car again and took out his notebook. "The worst thing of all’, he wrote on the last page, ‘is that people base their intercourse with each other on senselessly distracting chatter, into which they cold-bloodedly, cunningly and inhumanly introduce their anal impulse in the hope that it will become someone else’s oral impulse. If this happens, the winner shudders or-giastically and for a few seconds experiences the so-called "pulse of life".’