Герман Садулаев - The Maya Pill

“This is the longest light I’ve ever…” muttered Maximus, baffled, to himself.

“I know, you’re about to ask: ‘What about the deposit?’” the agent rattled on. “I have great news for you! No initial expenditures are required! Absolutely no material investments on your part. You won’t believe me—you’ll ask, ‘How can that be? Is it really possible?’ And I will answer, ‘Yes!’ But only here and now, and only through our company! What you will provide is absolutely without material substance; in a certain sense, it doesn’t even exist! You have it, but you’re not using it—you don’t even notice it! And what will you get in return? Completely tangible, material things! Those very things that you’re striving to acquire by going to work every day and performing hard labor that will bring you nothing in return. All we need from you is sound, air, an empty concept, fluff! Thinner than a hair! And even that, I repeat, absolutely nonmaterial investment is not required up front—no! And not in installments, either! Only later, only at the very end, when you’ve already fully savored all the riches that our contract will provide you!”

Maximus’s head was spinning; he felt numb all over. The huckster clearly was taking advantage of his weakened state.

“Well, what do you say? I see you’re ready! Just sign here and here. Use this pen!”

A syringe sprang out of the old man’s jacket sleeve, and he poked it into Maximus’s free hand, drawing a tiny drop of blood.

“Oh, how clumsy! Please forgive me!” chirped the old man.

The syringe instantly mutated into a massive pen with fake gilding, and wedged itself between Semipyatnitsky’s writing fingers.

But the pain brought Maximus to his senses. Stunned, he stared at the tiny red spot on his hand and then raised his head and shrieked to the people standing next to him at the crosswalk, involuntary witnesses to Semipyatnitsky’s conversation with the street hawker.

“Help! This maniac stabbed my hand! He’s probably spreading AIDS!”

The crowd recoiled. A few girls, who had evidently heard urban myths about men who went around spreading the virus by sticking needles into people in nightclubs, started screaming at the top of their voices.

At that moment a beat-up Gazelle municipal passenger van emerged from the line of vehicles on the street and squealed to a halt right in the middle of the crosswalk’s zebra stripes.

“Oh here’s my ride!” announced the old man joyfully, as though nothing had happened. “So pleasant to chat with you! Bye! Until we meet again!”

And with that he sprang through the open door into the empty back of the van. The briefcase was gone; instead, he was clutching a shopping bag against his belly, crammed full of red vegetables that looked something like turnips. The turnips were shaped like human hearts and were throbbing, or at least it looked that way to Maximus. But the door slid shut and the van lurched into motion. The driver, a brunet with a long hook-nose, cast a brief venomous glance Semipyatnitsky’s way.

One eye was green, the other was made of glass.

The Gazelle merged back into traffic and disappeared. The walk light flashed green, and Maximus joined the crowd walking briskly across the street. The pedestrians jostled one another carelessly, as though they had forgotten that one of them had perhaps just been infected with an incurable, highly contagious disease.

The gilded pen was gone, and there was no sign on Maximus’s hand of the red spot. But he wondered: How do one-eyed men get chauffeur’s licenses and jobs driving passenger vans? It doesn’t exactly fill you with faith in public transportation, does it?

That morning, the usual spirit of liveliness reigned in the office…

The words came naturally, or, rather, they arose spontaneously and appeared on the monitor of Maximus’s inner consciousness.

“Now that’s a nice turn of phrase!” he thought. “‘The spirit of liveliness reigned.’”

The fact that somebody was writing down every detail of his life, day after day, evidently didn’t surprise or trouble Semipyatnitsky. His only concern was that the author’s style be up to snuff, and that he acted in a professional manner.

Maximus lowered himself onto the chair in front of his computer, turned it on, and gathered up several sheets of paper from the desk, going through them while giving himself over to abstract and mournful thoughts.

First Pelevin, now this Herbalife devil, it’s like something out of Bulgakov… what next? Gogol? Quite the eclectic mix. Or, as they say these days, fusion . Yes, Maximus, your life is profoundly derivative—you can find every detail in Franz Kafka, who, by the way, was the favorite writer of Vladislav (Aslanbek) Surkov (Dudaev), who had such a friendly chat with you that time in an office in the Kremlin.

Semipyatnitsky recalled his dreams of Khazaria, especially the last one, and he asked himself: Who would be our present-day Khagan and who would be our Bek? Surkov the Khagan, and Putin the Bek? Or the reverse: Putin the Khagan and Surkov the Bek? A fat red line of letters appeared and began scrolling across the internal monitor of Maximus’s consciousness, interrupting these musings:

“You idiot! Weren’t you told in no uncertain terms that you are the Khagan? What does Dudaev have to do with it?”

“All right, but who’s the Bek, then?” Maximus tried to make his little contribution.

“The Cat in the Hat!”

His Inner Author was obviously not interested in having a constructive dialogue. Maximus would have to get to work. Begin, as always, by sorting the mail and purging spam. Today’s spam contained messages that seemed particularly deranged. Maximus read:

Stuck in a boring, unfulfilling job? Thwarted in your life’s dreams? Betrayed by your lover? No friends? Living a life without meaning, purpose, devoid of even the simplest pleasures?… Why not try NARCOTICS?

That’s no solution. Better just kill yourself.

But what really caught Maximus’s eye was the footnote at the end:

This is a public service announcement. Sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Health and Social Welfare.

The next message was an insurance ad, aggressively infernal in tone:

Better dead than poor! Sell a kidney and invest the proceeds in optional medical insurance!

And another one, an offer from a hard-currency broker:

While you were wasting time on porn sites, the Arabian dirham gained two points against the Japanese yen. Would you rather throw your life away on photographs of virtual-reality whores or make money on the forex market and buy yourself any whores you want—real ones? The decision is yours!

But the next message was the most interesting of all:

We are NOT trying to sell you imaginary real estate on the moon for real money. We are NOT trying to trade you a bottle of vodka for your share in the socialist economy of a great country. We are NOT trying to persuade you to vote for that band of carpetbaggers masquerading as the government. Simply turn over your mythical “soul,” and in exchange you will receive a real Visa Gold card with $30,000 worth of overdraft protection!

Maximus smirked maliciously and dispatched the entire batch of spam into the trash.

There was a short message from Peter, writing from Holland, in English as usual. It had a businesslike, even dry, tone: “Hi Maximus! It was great to meet you in Saint Petersburg. Hope our conversation and disputes will help us strengthen our companies’ business relationships. Best regards, Peter.”

The letter’s tone gave Semipyatnitsky the impression that Peter was biting his own elbows out of fear that he’d said too much when he was in St. Petersburg, terrified that Maximus would get him in trouble.