Герман Садулаев - The Maya Pill

I like music, everyone does, I know a lot about various groups and musical styles, always have. But back then, when people offered to swap cassettes I didn’t say anything, just kept my mouth shut. I didn’t have a cassette player: Mine was an ancient reel-to-reel, bought long before for my sister.

But then I graduated and enrolled at the Institute. For my first winter as a student I got one of my father’s old coats, taken in at the seams. It had been pretty decent at one time, but the tailoring was shoddy and it hung on me like an old sack. My family also gave me a big hat that looked ridiculous with the short “diplomat” style coat; the fur was supposedly raccoon but looked suspiciously like dog pelt, badly dyed.

The student life is easy. A student is poor by definition. Back then all or nearly all of us were broke. Of course I was dressed worse than everyone else, but we all chipped in what we could for vodka and shared equally, that’s the main thing, and I felt like I belonged.

Next thing you know I’m married to this wonderful girl Lenochka. No wedding, just a quick trip to the registry office. I’m cooking something in the kitchen of our first-story rented apartment and Lenochka is doing something in the other room. “Bring my watch, babe!” I ask. “Where is it?” My wife’s voice rings like a little bell. “On the bedside table!” I answer.

A minute goes by. Lenochka comes into the kitchen, spreads her empty hands, says “I couldn’t find it, Poppy!” [7] Translator’s note : The word mak (as in the nickname “Mack”), in Russian, means “poppy,” as in the poppy plant. I shake my head in reproach and go into the bedroom myself, with her tagging along. “Here it is!” The watch is right where I said it was, on the “bedside table.”

“Pops, why don’t you label these cardboard boxes so I can tell them apart? Which one do you consider to be the bedside table, which the coffee table, and which the dresser or wardrobe?” Lenochka forces a smile, but a tiny involuntary tear glistens in the corner of one eye. Our room is furnished entirely in empty cardboard banana and apple cartons.

My girl will dump me two years later and marry a guy who makes a living buying up government vouchers. The first thing she’ll do is order some real furniture and a refrigerator for her apartment.

Enough already. The rest is just more of the same. Rare spells of relative solvency and then poverty again, need. Like now, with practically all my money going to monthly interest fees, nothing left to cover gas for my gray Renault, itself bought on credit. Just like the refrigerator, the computer, even the smart phone.

The filmstrip is over.

I thought about the box lying at this very moment on my back seat. Twenty kilos of Dutch pills. Illicit drugs, of course. Wholesale, a batch that big would have to be moved at a rock-bottom price. But even so, it would bring in fifty thousand dollars, minimum.

If it was cocaine, real cocaine, then it would be worth a whole lot more. Pure cocaine would cost one hundred forty a gram, retail. You could find cocaine at eighty a gram, but everyone knows that at that price the powder has been laced with speed or simply ground analgene. Pure cocaine, though, on the market, was one hundred forty a gram.

Each intermediary cranks up the price by a hundred percent or more. So a pusher will sell a gram at seventy dollars, or, say, fifty, to use a round figure. The dealer will charge twenty dollars a gram if the batch is big enough. And if I wanted to push coke to a dealer, I’d offer it to him at ten dollars a gram.

Twenty kilograms would come to two hundred thousand dollars.

But that’s coke. These were some kind of pills, and most likely they wouldn’t sell for that much. And I didn’t even know what the stuff was. Some ecstasy clone, maybe?

I’d have to try some and see. Not just push the pills blind. If it turned out to be crap, my client would beat the shit out of me even before any money changed hands.

All of this was whirling around in my head as I headed back to work. By the time I realized I would have to try the pills myself, I was already on the Obvodny Canal embankment, just down from the Cold Plus office.

I smirked. So long, workplace! And instead of exiting the embankment on the right and heading for the office, I merged into the left lane, crossed the bridge over the Obvodny Canal in the other direction, toward the waterfront, and floored it.

The road was clear. Traffic was jammed up on the opposite side, the one leading from the port to the city. I made it to Kanonersky Island in no time and entered the tunnel.

This is one of the darkest, scariest tunnels in the whole wide world, take my word for it. The Kanonersky Island Tunnel is long, poorly illuminated, unventilated, and filled not with air but pure, unadulterated automobile exhaust.

I recalled one time a few years ago when I actually had to go through the tunnel on foot. I needed to get to the St. Petersburg Customs office, to certify some payments or confirm a certificate of origin, I can’t remember which. It was before I started working at Cold Plus. I used to earn money on the side processing shipping declarations.

I had to get to the customs office, but I’d missed the bus, or maybe there wasn’t a bus—anyway, I had set off walking from Baltic Station in the direction of Kanonersky Island and had entered the tunnel. I think I must be one of very few people who’ve actually made it through that tunnel as a pedestrian.

I pressed up against the wall like the shade of a dead man in Hades; diesel trucks roared past, deafening me. I could hardly breathe; the exhaust made my head spin and dulled my thoughts. I walked on and on, barely managing to put one foot down in front of the other. It seemed like it would never end. Or that I was already dead. “This is all there is. It will go on like this forever,” wrote the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, though at the time I was not thinking of poetry. My mind was completely blank and I just lurched blindly along through the tunnel. And at first I couldn’t believe it when the tunnel finally ended and I emerged, squinting into the faded northern sun suspended in the pale northern sky above the faded northern sea. And this drained, pale world blinded me with its brilliance and color!

This time I entered the tunnel by car and surfaced on the other side within a matter of minutes.

I parked in a lot in front of a water treatment plant, descended a set of concrete steps to the shore, and sat on an old tree branch that had fallen near the rippling water.

I knew the place well. I used to go there to wait while the customs officials inspected some document I’d brought, or if I’d shown up during their lunch break. I used to have lunch there myself, whatever I could scrounge up, or takeout from the shop at the bus stop. Those were lean times, even worse than now. But still, I remember those days fondly. I was young, after all. In youth, everything—even poverty—is an adventure. In middle age, poverty is just poverty, pure and simple.

Before clicking on the car alarm I opened the back door and dug around inside the box. I scooped out a few of the pink pills and put them in my jacket pocket. I was in no hurry. And then it occurred to me: What if it was poison, what if it was fatal in the long term? I’m scared of death, but not because I regret leaving life behind; the life I’m leading isn’t worth fighting for. But dying itself is scary. And painful too, probably. Even when the person shows no external signs of suffering, even when it looks like he’s just going to sleep. That’s how it seems to the people around him, sure, but how are they supposed to know what the man himself is experiencing? Maybe every death brings agony and suffering, whether or not anyone else can tell from the outside.