Герман Садулаев - The Maya Pill

Sure enough, five minutes later, there she was, coming out the door. She had a preoccupied air about her, a look of distress, which in no way diminished her allure.

“Greetings, Sweetie!”

Maximus was startled by his own lack of self-consciousness. The drug hadn’t had time to take effect yet. It had to be psychosomatic: The mere thought of the pills’ imminent effect dissolved all his inhibitions.

That was how he used to pick up girls, in his distant, lost youth. Maximus had only two phrases in his repertoire: “Greetings, Sweetie!” and “Got any plans for tonight?” But as he had pointed out at the time, when a friend made fun of his tactics, why bother to think up anything original when these worked just fine? Not every time, objected his friend. Maximus responded that there’s only one absolutely guaranteed method to get a woman into your bed—just grab her and give her the cross-thigh flip.

The girl gave Semipyatnitsky a surprised look and smiled oh so slightly.

“Greetings yourself.”

“Not feeling so well today?”

“I have a headache.”

Maximus reached into his pocket, got out a couple of the pills, and held them out to her.

“These work pretty well. I use them myself.”

The girl hesitated, but took one nonetheless.

“Take two. The dose is two. Go ahead—you can take them without water.”

The goddess complied.

“My car is over there. Let’s go.”

“I live pretty far away, in Prosvet, on Enlightenment Prospect.”

“You’re right, that’s pretty far. Let’s find some place closer.”

When a man has absolute confidence in what he’s saying and doing, Maximus reflected, there isn’t a woman alive who won’t give in. The goddess climbed into the car. Maximus started the engine and backed out of his parking space.

“What’s your name, my beauty?”

“Maya.”

Maximus gave an approving nod. That’s about what he’d been expecting. Maya had been the name of his first, unrequited love, a girl he’d met in Young Pioneer Camp, when he was little. Not that little, actually. Meaning, if things had worked out differently and if he had been a bit surer of himself at the time, something might have come of it. So this love of his had remained in his memory as an unrealized desire, along with the sensation of his first fully conscious erection.

Maya is also the name of the Hindu goddess of material nature, of illusion embodied.

“Maximus Semipyatnitsky. Descendent of the ancient Khazar race, heir of the Great Khagans. Writer of genius. And leading specialist in the Import Department of Cold Plus Company. Though the latter is nothing more than an embarrassing stumble along my world-historical path.”

“What an honor for a girl as simple and modest as myself!”

The goddess had perked up, and it showed. Girls like to be amused.

“Are you from Barnaul?”

“No, from Karaganda.”

“I thought it was something like that.”

“Why? Do I look like some simple country girl?”

“No. You look beautiful. And only girls from the country are beautiful anymore. Have you ever been to Ireland?”

“No.”

“Me neither. So let’s go to an Irish pub.”

Maximus parked in a cozy alley near the pub he had in mind. He figured he could drink his fill and then call a cab.

“The best cocktail here is called the Irish Flag. See, it’s got three different-colored layers. No, don’t stir it. Just drink.”

Five pairs of cocktails made their way down the hatch smoothly, encountering no obstacles.

“Now tell me a story!”

“What can I tell you, O Khazar writer of genius?”

“Whatever suits the occasion. How about how your stepfather raped you? We wouldn’t want to violate the conventions of pseudo-psychological novels and movies.”

“But my stepfather didn’t rape me! I don’t even have a stepfather! Just a mom and a dad, and, sorry to disappoint you, they were absolutely normal people.”

“The main thing is to not disappoint the reader.”

“What reader?”

“Hasn’t it ever seemed to you that your life is being narrated, bit by bit? Don’t you ever see a computer monitor inside your head full of sentences lighting up all by themselves?”

“Oh, I get it… I can see there’s no fooling you. It was my grandfather.”

“It was your grandfather what?”

“My grandfather was my first lover, if you can call it that.”

“Details. We need details. Every last one.”

“I know. That’s where the devil is, in the details.”

“How’d you know?”

“I read it somewhere.”

The girl adopted an appropriately reflective pose, lit a cigarette, affected a nervous air, and began her story:

“When I was really little, I used to spend a lot of time with my grandpa. My parents worked. My grandpa really loved me and used to spoil me. He used to take me in his lap and kiss me. At first there was nothing unusual about it—it was just a kid and her grandfather, like all children and their grandparents: He’d kiss me on the forehead or the cheeks. Sometimes on my tummy. But later, when I was seven or eight, he started to kiss me down there, lower. A lot lower. And it wasn’t just simple kissing. He tried to poke his tongue in, as far as it would go. And his rough cheeks and chin used to scratch the insides of my thighs. But I put up with it. I really loved my grandpa. He never asked me not to tell, but I knew that it wasn’t the kind of thing you talked about. So it was our little secret. I got older, started going through puberty. And our one-on-one sessions continued. We came up with our own special code names for it. Not the usual stuff—honeybees and flowers and other clichés. No, he would say: ‘I’m most inclined to partake of water from the crystal spring.’ Or: ‘A ray of moonlight is thrusting through the clouds.’ He was an artist at heart, my grandfather—he had a thing for classical Chinese poetry. For the first few years I was only putting up with it all, but with time I began to experience certain sensations, and came to enjoy our sessions. I was fairly shy as a child, didn’t have a lot of friends. I would just hurry home from school and go to Grandpa’s. I’d come in without a word and curl up in a threadbare old armchair. And he would cheerfully ask me about how my day at school had gone, and would sit down on the floor in front of me, lift my skirt, and lower my panties and toss them on the floor. Then he would direct his attention to the ‘spring.’ He would spend a long time down there, a half hour, sometimes a whole hour. If no one interrupted us. And no one would. My parents came back late from work, and my grandmother had died long before—I don’t remember her at all. He would lick his way around my inner parts, which were as yet completely hairless, and I would stroke his gray head. Just like a grownup. He never did anything else with me. I don’t know why—maybe he couldn’t get it up, or maybe he was afraid to hurt or frighten me. But he never asked me to… well, you know.”

“So how did it all end?”

“It didn’t, really. He just died. For me this was, and remains, the greatest loss of my life. I remember his body in the coffin in our apartment, in the same room that used to be his, and where the two of us used to do what we did together… The hearse came—they closed the coffin and took my grandfather to the cemetery. There, in front of the freshly dug grave, they lifted the coffin lid so that his relatives could say their last good-byes. But apparently they’d done a bad job of securing his chin… they’d had to bring the coffin down four flights of stairs… and the ride in the hearse had involved a fair bit of jostling. Anyway, when they opened the coffin, I saw his face—I was standing right there, closer than anyone else… his jaw had shifted to one side, and his long, violet-colored tongue was dangling out of his mouth. The same tongue that… well. My legs gave way under me and I fainted. Everyone thought that it was from grief or from horror at the sight of him, but that wasn’t it at all.”