Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

‘Yes,’ said Gireiev, ‘but I won’t take any with you. I’m sorry, but you know, after what happened the last time…’

‘But will you give me some?’

‘Why not? Only don’t eat them here, please.’

Gireiev got up from the table, opened the crooked cupboard hanging on the wall and took out a bundle wrapped in newspaper.

"This is a good dose. Where are you going to take them - in Moscow?’

‘No,’ said Tatarsky; ‘in the town I always get a bad trip. I’ll go into the forest. Since I’m already out in the countryside.’

‘You’re right. Hang on, I’ll give you some vodka. Softens the effect. They can bugger up your brains if you take them neat. Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’ve got some Absolut.’

Gireiev picked up an empty Hennessy bottle from the floor, twisted out the cork and began carefully pouring in vodka from a litre bottle of Absolut he’d taken from the same cupboard the mushrooms had been in.

‘Listen, you’ve got something to do with television,’ he said; ‘there was a good joke going round about you. Have you heard the one about the blow job with singing in the dark?’

‘No.’

‘Well, this guy comes to a brothel. He looks at the price-list and sees the most expensive service: a blow job with singing in the dark for fifteen hundred bucks; and he thinks. That’s strange. What could that be? And he buys a ticket. When his turn comes, he finds himself in a dark room and everything seems to go as promised - someone sucks his dick while singing. Afterwards he goes outside and thinks. But that’s impossible! So he goes to a department store and buys a flashlight. Then he borrows another fifteen hundred and goes back to the brothel. To cut it short, everything happens all over again. And just as he’s about to come, he whips out the flashlight and turns it on; and he sees that he’s standing in a giant round room. There’s a stool by the wall, and on top of the stool there’s a giant glass eye.’

Gireiev stopped.

‘So what’s next?’ Tatarsky asked.

‘That’s it. Some people just don’t get it. I mean the joke. A blow job in the dark is something that everyone gets.’

‘Ah… Now I do get it… What d’you think - is that the same eye that’s on the dollar bill?’

‘I never thought about it,’ Gireiev answered.

‘Frankly, this kind of humour’s too glum for me. You have to believe in something.’

Gireiev shrugged. ‘Hope dies last,’ he said. ‘What’s that you’re writing down? The joke?’

‘No,’ said Tatarsky, ‘an idea for work.’ Idea for a poster, he jotted down in his notebook:

A dirty room covered in cobwebs. On the table a still for moonshine, by the table an alcoholic dressed in rags, vsho is pouring his product from a large Absolut bottle into a small Hennessy bottle. Slogan:

Offer to Absolut and Hennessy distributors first, and if they don’t take it, to Finlandia, Smirnoff and Johnny Walker.

"There you go.’ said Gireiev, holding out the bundle and the bottle to Tatarsky. ‘Only let’s agree between ourselves that when you eat them, you don’t come back here. I still haven’t forgotten that time in autumn.’

‘I promise.’ said Tatarsky. ‘By the way, where’s that unfinished radar tower around here? I saw it from the car when we were driving here.’

‘It’s quite near. You go across the field and then the road through the forest starts. When you see a wire fence, just follow it. It’s about three kilometres. Why, do you want to go wandering around it?’

Tatarsky nodded.’I’m not so sure about that,’ said Gireiev. ‘It’s not so bad when you’re clean, but if you’re on the mushrooms… The old men say it’s a bad place; but then, where can you find a good place around Moscow?’

In the doorway Tatarsky turned back and hugged Gireiev round the shoulders. ‘You know, Andriusha.’ he said, ‘I don’t want this to sound sentimental, but thank you very, very much!’

‘What for?’ asked Gireiev.

‘For sometimes allowing me to live a parallel life. Without that the real one would be so disgusting!’

‘Thank you,’ Gireiev replied, ‘thank you.’ He was obviously touched.

‘Good luck in business.’ Tatarsky said, and left.

The fly-agarics kicked in when he’d already been walking along the wire-netting fence for half an hour. First came the familiar symptoms: the pleasant trembling and itching in the fingers. Then looming up out of the bushes came the pillar with the notice: ‘Campfires forbidden!’ that he’d once taken for Hussein. As was only to expected, in the daylight there was no noticeable resemblance. Even so, Tatarsky felt a certain nostalgia as he recalled the story of Semurg the king of the birds.

‘Semurg, Sirruf.’ said a familiar voice in his head: ‘what difference does it make? Just different dialects. So you’ve been guzzling garbage again?’

‘Now it’s started,’ thought Tatarsky; ‘the beastie’s here.’

But the Sirruf gave no further indication of its presence all the way to the tower. The gates that Tatarsky had climbed over were open. There was no one to be seen on the construction site; the trailers were locked and the telephone that used to hang on the sentry’s mushroom shelter had disappeared.

Tatarsky climbed to the summit of the structure without any adventures. In the lift-tower everything was still the same as it had been: empty bottles and a table in the centre of the room.

‘Well,’ he asked out loud, ‘where’s the goddess here?’

There was no reply, nothing but the sound of the autumn forest rustling in the wind somewhere below. Tatarsky leaned against the wall, closed his eyes and began to listen. For some reason he decided it was willows that were whispering in the wind, and he recalled a line from a play he’d heard on the radio: ‘It’s the sisters of sorrow, who live in the willows.’ And immediately he could hear snatches of women’s voices in the quiet murmuring of the trees, sounding like a dim echo of words spoken to him long, long ago that had lost their way among the cul-de-sacs of memory.

‘But do they know,’ the quiet voices whispered, ‘that this famous world of theirs consists of nothing but the condensation of darkness - neither breathing in, nor breathing out; neither right, nor left; neither fifth, nor tenth? Do they know that their extensive fame is known to no one?’

‘Everything is the precise opposite of what they think,’ the quiet voices whispered; ‘there is no truth or falsehood; there is one infinitely clear, pure and simple thought in which the spirit of man swirls like a drop of ink that has fallen into a glass of water. When man ceases to swirl in this simple purity, absolutely nothing happens and life turns out to be merely the rustling of curtains in the window of a long-ruined tower, and every thread in those curtains thinks that the great goddess is with it. And the goddess truly is with it.’

‘Once, my love, all of us were free - why did you have to create this terrible, ugly world?’

‘Was it I who created it?’ whispered Tatarsky.

No one replied. Tatarsky opened his eyes and looked out through the doorway. Above the horizontal of the forest hung a cloud shaped like a heavenly mountain - it was so large that the infinite height of the sky, forgotten already in childhood, was suddenly visible again. On one of the slopes of the cloud there was a narrow conical projection, like a tower seen through mist. Something trembled inside Tatarsky - he recalled that once the ephemeral celestial substance of which these white mountains and this tower consisted had also been within him. And then - long, long ago, probably even before he was born - it had cost no effort at all for him to become such a cloud and float up to the very summit of the tower. But life had squeezed this strange substance out of his soul and there was only just enough of it left to allow him to recall it for a second and instantly lose the recollection.