Герман Садулаев - The Maya Pill

But three females, also topless, were crawling on their hands and knees on the floor around Jean’s feet. I recognized one of them, the deputy warehouse director; the others were apparently administrative assistants or accounting clerks. The women were caressing Jean, and one of them was already undoing his pants. All of this was entertaining enough to watch, of course, and it was tempting to stay and see out the orgy, but I turned and headed for the walk-in freezer in search of the warehouse director.

Sure enough, there he was, wandering around between the racks in the walk-in cooler, wearing a quilted coat and an army cap with earflaps.

I went up to him and said, cautiously, “Good afternoon, Victor Stepanovich. How are things going here? Everything okay?”

“Huh?… Ah, it’s Maxim!”

“Maximus.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, forget it.”

“Is something the matter?”

“The matter?”

“Well, I mean… in general… it’s just that… you’ve… you’ve got so much stuff coming in! Where am I supposed to put it all?”

“Have you been unloading potatoes from Holland today?”

“Yes we have! But were can we put them all? Look around you, they’re everywhere! Potatoes here, potatoes there, potatoes everywhere! We’ve got nowhere left!”

Victor Stepanovich gestured wildly at the racks, which were completely empty, and at the empty corners of the walk-in. Then he grabbed me by the sleeve with his right hand and led me to the exit, describing semicircles in the air with his left.

“They’re clogging up the aisles! And the loading dock. Potatoes!”

“Victor Stepanovich!”

“Why are there so many potatoes?”

“Victor Stepanovich!”

“Enough for a whole year! Where can we put them all?”

“Victor Stepanovich! There are no potatoes here! None whatsoever!”

“What do you mean, no potatoes?”

“Where is the box, Victor Stepanovich? The box with the rat poison?”

“Oh, the box, yes… Lina called and said something.”

All right. So Lina had called and told them about the box. Who asked her to get involved? Honestly.

“So? Where is it? Is it still sealed?”

“Yes, it is. It’s in the foreman’s booth. But it’s just that… it got a little torn.”

“What do you mean, torn??”

“Well, it just… kind of slipped off the forklift and got a little torn.” Sure it did. Slipped off the forklift. He could have come up with something more original.

Everything was clear now, just about. It wasn’t rat poison—no, the box had some kind of narcotic in it. Or maybe hallucinogens, LSD or something along those lines. Some potato-dealers, those Dutch. And everyone out here had popped their fill of whatever it was. That’s our guys for you. Call over from the main office and warn them that one of the boxes has rat poison in it, and they immediately want to try some. To hell with them. I’ll just check out the box and its contents and be on my way.

“I see how things are. And I just might not say anything back at the office about what’s going on out here. But I’ve been instructed to bring the box back—the supplier is coming all the way from Holland tomorrow to pick it up.”

Victor Stepanovich said that the box was in the foreman’s booth, and then he turned and trudged back into the walk-in to resume his count of the pallets with their nonexistent potatoes. I went back to the booth and flung open the wooden door.

During my brief absence, Jean and the ladies had made significant progress. Jean’s blue work pants were down by his knees, and the two administrative assistants (or accounting clerks) were hard at work down there, doing the “double helicopter” maneuver. The deputy director was stationed a little higher up, with Jean’s face pressed between the two white mounds of her breasts.

The comradely group didn’t react to my presence, which I can’t say surprised me in the least. I glanced around the booth. A metal cabinet containing work clothes stood against the opposite wall. The cupboard doors were covered with posters of naked women. A rickety table stood against the wall by the window, with some dirty mugs and glasses on it. I glanced under the table and there it was: a torn carton with big letters printed on the outside—PTH IP—followed by some numbers.

I crouched down and carefully slid the box out. Some little pink pills spilled from the tear. I scooped up a handful and took a close look. The pills were round, about the size of a No-Spa tablet, but without the diagonal stripe. Each pill had three letters printed on its surface, the same ones as on the box: PTH. Quite a sophisticated rat poison, with its own logo, evidently aimed at attracting a loyal consumer base—oh, right. Obviously, their rat-poison story wasn’t worth a second thought.

“Right, if you have no objection, we’ll just be on our way.”

No one was listening.

There was a roll of packing tape and a pair of scissors on the windowsill. I quickly patched the tear, picked up the box, and prepared to make my exit. I took a couple of seconds to inspect the additional gallery of glossy whores on the inside of the door, and it suddenly occurred to me that the security guards wouldn’t let me through the front gate without documentation for the box.

Jean was still in his private paradise, in the tender care of what he no doubt imagined to be nubile houris. I couldn’t bring myself to drag him back down to our fallen world, fraught as it is with misery and delusion. Felt sorry for the boy. He would come to before long, and when his vision cleared he would notice the accounting clerks’ bowlegs and bulgy noses and the deputy director’s advanced age and life-scarred, hangdog air.

I rummaged around and soon found what I needed in a drawer of the table next to the metal cupboard: a pen, an invoice form, and an official stamp.

In the same drawer there were some torn condom wrappers—the special kind for anal sex—and then some kind of powder, and a bunch of other junk. I decided to postpone thinking about any of this until later. Elbowing the tea-yellowed mugs on the table to one side, I quickly filled in the invoice—“Samples for the central office, 20 kg.”—scrawled a fancy-looking signature, and stamped the page.

I stuffed the invoice into the side pocket of my jacket and carried the box out of the booth.

On the way out I gave the deputy director a little spank on her generous behind, just for laughs. She didn’t notice.

I passed through security and crossed the road to the parking lot, unlocked the car with the remote, nestled the box gently onto the back, got into the driver’s seat, turned on the music, and started back toward the office.

The office?

No way!

To hell with Cold Plus and its demented Dutchmen. Up Beelzebub’s ass with my boring, monotonous, humiliating job. Straight to the flames of hell with my slavery and beggary. To hell with them !

I inched along in the flow of skittish cars, reviewing on my internal screen the filmstrip of my life, from my very first memories to the present day. A story of almost unrelenting poverty and need.

The few exceptions cluster at the very beginning of the show. Here I am at three or four years of age. I’m wearing a neat little sailor suit and tooling around the playground in an ivory-colored kiddie Cadillac. The car is made of plastic and cheap metal and was assembled in some factory in Hungary, or possibly Poland. It’s pedal-driven; my feet in their light canvas slip-ons propel the car around on the asphalt, a one-kid-power motor under the flimsy hood. My older sister walks along beside me, protecting me and my precious vehicle from thieves and hooligans. The other kids from the apartment building stare at us in mute admiration.