Герман Садулаев - The Maya Pill

“Hallucinating, yes. But you don’t have to swallow them… it’s a complicated process… sometimes it’s enough to smell… or hear a commercial… radio waves… though pills are best. I’m not much into details. I’m just a salesman. Our engineers know better… you think of eating potatoes… and you even get fat because of it… then you buy another pill to lose weight… and again… full circle… that’s our business… and everyone does it, in Europe.”

“Everyone?”

“Sure, some people are selling the illusion of cars, others are selling the illusion of designer clothes, or drinks… You drink but only get thirstier. Everything is like that. We produce ideas, thoughts, illusions. Ever since Marx and Freud. And now we can concentrate ideas into pills. For easier transportation and consumption.”

He fell silent and let his forehead drop to the sticky tabletop. Maximus stared in stunned silence into the space above the heads of the drinkers and dancers. He’d always suspected something along those lines. But still, what Peter had said filled him with anguish and spite.

Semipyatnitsky shook Peter awake and told him it was time to go to the train station. The foreigner obediently got out his credit card. Maximus didn’t bother to protest and used Peter’s card to pay for the vodka, even signed the slip for him. The waiter averted his eyes tactfully, an act that earned him a reward to the tune of one hundred rubles, cash, from Maximus’s own wallet.

Rather than get behind the wheel in his state, Semipyatnitsky flagged down a cab and settled Peter in the back seat. The latter quickly came to his senses once he’d lowered the window and taken a few breaths of fresh air. Maximus asked whether he needed to stop by the hotel to pick up his things.

“No,” answered Peter. “I’ve already checked out.”

When they got to the station, Maximus, with poorly concealed spite, said to his newfound friend.

“You know what, Peter? Next time, why don’t you get a girl for fifty euros and not worry about any six-hundred-euro girls? I’ll tell you a secret: There’s no difference!”

“Why not?”

“I’ll explain. Have you ever heard anyone talk about the ‘mysterious Russian soul’?”

“I think I’ve heard something of the sort…”

“Let me tell you about this mystery of ours. The fact is, you can never fuck a Russian girl.”

“No, I’ve fucked them many times…”

“You didn’t. It was a dream. Every Russian girl learns the knack from her mother. She takes your money and you fuck yourself while dreaming about Russian girl. So what’s the difference, after all? Why pay a lot of money for it?”

“Ah…”

“That’s not all. You can just save your money and fuck yourself alone in your hotel room for free, there’s no need to invite a Russian girl in and pay even five euros. All you’ll be doing is masturbating either way. Don’t let Russians cheat you.”

“This is… shocking to me…”

“Yes, my friend. You can never really fuck Russia. Only in your dreams…”

The victorious host made its way homeward, flowed across the Khazar steppe in the direction of Itil-City…

Dissipating into smaller rivulets along the way. Meet a widow and set up house; build a mud hut and march no more. A man gets tired of war. The generals, all Murzlas, had galloped off ahead on their spirited steeds, changing horses when their mounts got tired, hastening to the city to pick up their medals from the Khagan, along with deeds to conquered lands for pillage. But the common soldiers just dragged themselves along—what’s the rush? They’d already spent more time marching than fighting. They spent four springs on the march. They stopped, took breaks: Hunt down steppe gophers, shake the apples off a tree, catch fish in the river using your trousers as a trap. There was nothing else to eat.

And the process dissipated even more.

Only a few made it back to Itil.

And with them Saat. No interest in widows, gophers. Maybe he figured they would give him back one of his mares now that the war was over.

They arrived at the city walls. No welcoming ceremonies, no laurel wreaths and flute bands playing music, no sweet congratulatory speeches. Initially the people inside even refused to open the gates. They shouted, “What are you, a band of gypsies?” The march home had run them ragged: They were filthy, covered in rags, bedraggled.

Of course they were. Four years of war will do that to you. But then good people let them in. Maybe they thought, What’s the point of them dying out there in the steppe, they might come in handy for cleaning the slop ditches or hauling stones to pave our courtyards.

The horde entered Itil, and—holy shit!—you wouldn’t recognize it; it had become a completely different town. Not a single Khazar left.

A feral people, a mass of black and yellow.

Little shops piled up everywhere, one on top of the other, daytime for trade, nighttime for dancing—the bad kind. And their language, it’d destroy your tongue. Sort of like Khazar, but strange, the sounds all twisted. And who was maintaining order? You could get clubbed in the back of the head just walking down the street. Chechmek sotnyas prancing around everywhere. Executive and judicial branches all rolled up in one. Their chief, the one who kissed the Khagan’s ring, now stood on every street corner, embracing the Khagan. Statues, that is.

The Khagan himself was nowhere to be seen. Voiced his will through the Chechmek. People were whispering: There’s no Khagan, only the word itself remains: Khaganate! But no Khagan.

Maybe there had never been one.

What about the Murzlas? Where were they?

Gone, gone to the lands beyond the sea, gone to the places where they’d taken all that grain, poured it into their own barns and bins. Grain makes the man.

Abandoned the Khazar land.

So they weren’t Khazars after all, but a different people, nomadic.

Saat made his way home to his tent, and there were new people living there, children running and crawling like kittens in the yard, howling. Guess he wasn’t going to get back his mare. Home full of strangers. Who needed him now? And where could he go?

Saat sat on a hill, mourned.

The falling star?

Passed him by.

The events of the previous day—the Dutch pills and the trip into Ni Guan’s head—had shaken Maximus out of his usual dazed state, his preoccupation with the mundane: his commute to work every morning, his beer drinking and TV every night. The mind-body interface in his brain had shifted, something had changed forever. And there was something alarming in that change.

The day after his excursion with Peter was Saturday, and he didn’t have to be at work. Semipyatnitsky slept until noon. Just before awakening he had the next dream in his Khazaria series, a sad little installment.

Maximus took a shower, boiled himself four eggs for breakfast (lunch?), and decided to take a drive. Somewhere, anywhere. One of his magazines had an article in it about an archaeological site, a three- or four-hour drive away. Though of course he had to figure out where he’d left the car.

Maximus dressed, went out, and hailed a taxi heading downtown. He found the car right where he had left it the night before, near the Tribunal. Untouched by thieves, hooligans, or the tow truck. A good omen. And Semipyatnitsky headed north.

The Murmansk Highway begins just after Vesyoly. At the city line the driver encounters a row of Cyclopean bulletin boards advertising the Mega Mart. After that the road broadens out into a divided highway with a tree-lined median, but that lasts only as far as Sinyavino. The road that continues on to Murmansk after Sinyavino bears little resemblance to a national highway. Resembles it even less than that string on the stripper’s hips resembled panties. Narrow, just one lane going each way, no stripe down the middle. Nightmarish pavement, nothing but potholes. Maximus clutched the wheel, shuddering as trucks roared past his window a mere arm’s distance away, pondering the sobering truth that this transport artery was the only road linking an entire oblast to the rest of Russia. Other than that there was one railroad line and a seaport that iced up every winter. That was all. Considering the high cost of railway tariffs it was clear that most of Murmansk oblast was supplied by truck transport using this one narrow, pitted road. And there are so many other regions like this in Russia, essentially cut off from the capitals! And no one cares. Not until one of them rises up and demands its independence or one of their neighbors starts to show too much interest. There was that incident where the Finns claimed a village, and the president offered them the ears of a dead donkey instead. But we’re talking about an entire oblast here. Do we really need to keep it? Well, if so, you’d think they’d at least put down a decent road.