Герман Садулаев - The Maya Pill

Imagine sculpting statues of the gods using your contemporaries as models. You couldn’t even manage a Bacchus or satyr. Not even a parody. Anything you could come up with would be pathetic and disgusting.

A writer is a kind of sculptor. That is why the novel and the epic are dead. Big genres need larger-than-life heroes. All you’ll get from our scrawny and mean souls and ratty, ugly bodies will be cheap comedies à la Petrosyan. [9] Translator’s note : Evgeny Petrosyan (b. 1945) is a famous Soviet/Russian comedian of Armenian and Jewish ancestry. Mix in some foul language and a pederast or two and you’ve got a cheap stand-up routine. Even serious writers—take me, for example—just produce superficial, bloggy stuff.

The Eastern gurus taught: Look not into the faces of the worldly. One glance will earn you a berth in hell.

There’s beauty for you.

People are more like animals. The most disgusting and vile ones, in fact. Take a look around: rats, moles, pigs, chickens, frogs—these are our companions.

People are also kind of like Tolkien’s mythical creatures. When I’m out on the street I can categorize them by sight: trolls, gnomes, orcs, and of course goblins. Long-eared, evil elves are also out and about.

Beauty is extremely rare in this world. That’s why it’s so treasured. Beauty commands a high price, in any currency. If you want to find a truly beautiful prostitute, you have to shell out some serious cash. One night will set you back three months’ salary. Anything cheaper is counterfeit, a tasteless sham.

If a person, male or female, is born beautiful, then everything will fall into his or her lap. No other virtues or assets are necessary. With minimal effort you can sell beauty anywhere at top price.

Everyone is willing to pay a premium for true beauty, anytime, anywhere. But we can’t afford true beauty. Admit it, be honest, your life has abounded in sexual adventures, but how many truly beautiful women or handsome men have you slept with in all that time? Three? Two? I wouldn’t be surprised if there hadn’t been a single one.

Long ago, in my distant youth, my classmate Vaska—we called him the Fireman —encapsulated the entire tragedy of our existence, devoid as it is of aesthetic value. We were watching one of the new Russia’s first televised beauty contests, and the Fireman pronounced mournfully, with great profundity, “Damn! And there are guys out there who get to fuck those beauties!”

We find no real perfection around us, and so we compromise and accept half-beauty, cheap imitations. If a girl isn’t disgusting looking, has some marginally decent features, we’re ready to marry her and take care of her for the rest of her life. But even a girl like that is hard to find. So we marry freaks. And we almost love them. Of course we do; we try to be decent human beings.

Still, we always long for beauty, the kind of beauty that we can never really touch.

This fills our lives with suffering—yet another reason for our inner disharmony. We don’t realize that true beauty is incredibly rare, that our chances of coming into contact with it are close to zero.

If we just accepted it, things might be easier. We don’t suffer, for example, from the knowledge that we will never personally make it to Alpha Centauri. Very few people are disturbed by that realization; those of us with some sense, the majority, know that it’s impossible, and so there’s no point in worrying about it.

But it’s different with beauty. Beauty seems so close, so accessible!

Blame technology.

Art, culture, mass media, advertising—they all disseminate myriad images of the sort of beauty that is in fact extremely rare, creating the illusion—and it is an illusion!—that you can find it anywhere.

Photographers ferret out the one and only beautiful girl out of one hundred thousand ugly ones, and they spend days on end photographing her in an infinite variety of poses and angles, against all kinds of different backgrounds. Then they enlarge the photos into posters and suddenly she’s multiplied into a million beautiful girls on billboards, magazine covers, and labels.

But it’s a thin, paper image, a product of technology. As a million duplicated images, she can only exist within various forms of media, whereas there’s only one original version of the real beauty, the actual girl. And she can only belong to one man at a time. Or two. Three, maximum—there are only so many orifices.

But we forget that. We are deluded, led astray by this reproduction of a beautiful image. We cling to the hope that we will see a beautiful girl in real life; that she’s just around the corner or down at the bus stop; we’ll run into her in a store and strike up a conversation, and then we’ll go home and screw, or, in the rare exception, we’ll make her our wife.

In the meantime we sit and wait, we live with our half-beauties, girls we can’t love the way we should because of our belief that perfection is within reach. In the depths of our souls we consider them to be temporary measures, stopgap solutions until the day we meet the Aphrodite reserved for us by fate.

It would be better to accept the truth that rejecting our Claudia for the sake of some future magazine-cover Venus makes about as much sense as not changing the oil in our little Hyundai, figuring that in no time we’ll have our very own Porsche Boxster. Listen, dude, where are you going to get your hands on a two-hundred-thousand-euro Porsche if you still have five years left on the ten-thousand-euro loan you took out for your Accent?

We understand this, and though we dream of a Porsche, we treat our actual car like a member of the family. We don’t have any illusions about trading in the Accent for a Porsche, and yet we cling to the belief that we can plausibly trade Claudia in for Venus.

Venus seems more accessible than the Porsche. There she is, smiling at us from all those advertisements. And unlike a Porsche, absolutely free!

But, listen pals, uh… I don’t want to startle anyone here with an original thought, but nothing in this world comes for free.

Beauty costs money. Real money. More than people like you and me can scrape together in an entire lifetime. If a shitty Boxster is beyond your means, don’t even bother thinking about Aphrodite. Let it go.

To summarize: “Don’t believe what you see in art, in advertisements, in beautiful pictures; forget those unrealizable dreams about happiness and perfection. You will never have all that. Value your wives and girlfriends. Love the one you’re with.”

All of these thoughts were inspired by my encounter with that Venus-Aphrodite, the goddess of all pleasurable things, in the elevator at the office—but only in retrospect. At the time my mind was far from such abstractions. Aphrodite exited on her floor, and I continued on up to mine, with the box in my hands and that idiotic smile plastered on my face. To avoid trouble I stowed the box in the utility room near the tea stash and the cartons of printer paper. The pills had clearly taken effect, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on how, exactly. There had been a shift in my consciousness, but my perceptions hadn’t changed. No spatial disorientation or physical effects—just a light euphoria, a sense of gentle optimism. And those persistent images of Dutch potatoes.

I returned to my desk.

The inbox was full of messages that had arrived during my absence. The usual spam, notifications from the systems administrator, inquiries from branch offices, and a message from my favorite correspondent, the Chinese partner who supplied us with fish.

Their manager’s name was Ni Guan. Or “Eddie.” All Chinese businesspeople who work with foreign partners adopt nicknames. Li, Chan, Su, and Shin become Louis, Victor, Christina, and Tanya—whatever they can come up with. I think that they’re assigned those names back in school, in their foreign language classes.