Герман Садулаев - The Maya Pill

The sensor reads my Smart Card and records the times of my arrival in the morning, my departure at the end of the day, my lunch and restroom breaks, and my other personal time, which must not exceed one half hour per day, total. There are fines for tardiness, for leaving work early, and for exceeding the allotted break time.

I passed through the turnstile, swiped the heavy metal door open with my Smart Card, and walked past the secretaries’ desks to the Import Department. My desk is next to the door, so people are coming and going behind my back all day long.

Could be worse. This girl I know works in marketing for an office furniture company. Her desk is right in the middle of the showroom. It has a price tag on it. So while she’s sitting there doing her work, customers keep coming up to her desk and opening and closing the drawers, peering underneath and feeling the legs (of the table), and knocking on the desk with everything but their teeth to test the quality of the veneer. She says that she’s gotten used to it and doesn’t even notice them anymore.

The Import Department is a medium-sized rectangular room with a windowless interior wall; a glass partition separating Import from IT; a partition between the Department and the corridor; and the building’s external wall, which has three windows (no AC). There are twenty-four other desks with twenty-four employees (besides me) working at them. The desks are jammed right up next to each other, with narrow aisles leading to the printers, the fax machine, and the copier. Pretty near constantly, all twenty-four employees are yelling into their phones, competing with one another to be heard. A couple of hours into the workday, my head starts to throb from the racket; by lunchtime the oxygen in the room is depleted and we’ve switched over to a carbon-dioxide diet, like plants. We haven’t yet mastered the art of photosynthesis, though, so what we’re exhaling is not oxygen, but the same gas we’re breathing in, only more concentrated. The windows are open year-round, but that doesn’t help: The dense, stifling atmosphere in the room blocks any fresh airflow; if you put a candle on the windowsill, the flame would stand utterly still and vertical, without the slightest movement, like the consciousness of a yogi in a profound meditative state. If fresh air somehow manages to break through, the draughts infect one third of the office population with a whole smorgasbord of upper-respiratory ailments.

My job title is Leading Specialist. That’s a great jumping-off place for a career if you’re twenty-five. For a man of thirty-five it’s the kiss of death, a complete dead end.

I am thirty-five.

That morning I thought about it again, and my soul felt like… like a herd of scratching cats. Or, rather, it was more like if the cats had spewed their liquid and solid excrement directly into my soul, and the scratching I felt was them trying to clean up after themselves. Have you ever seen a cat scratching at the linoleum after he’s peed on it, imagining that he’s covering the evidence?

I tossed my faux-leather briefcase onto my desk, on top of a heap of random papers, sank onto my chair, and, forming the classic Anglo-American fuck-you gesture, jabbed the computer’s ON button with my middle finger. It started booting up, and the monitor went white. The face of Jessica Simpson flashed briefly before me (the intermediary desktop graphic I’d installed)—but then the screen showed the standard corporate interface for my workplace, that is, the Cold Plus Corporation.

First thing, I clicked on the bat image to check my e-mail. Everyone else in the department uses Windows Outlook; I’m the only one with The Bat. An involuntary extravagance. The IT People simply forgot to switch my e-mail program over when they installed the office system. I like The Bat.

The program reminds me of Grebenshikov’s song about the Yellow Moon. It also makes me think of vampires and Pelevin’s Empire V . But the real advantage is that when you forward letters from contractors to colleagues, they arrive as though they were sent directly from the original sender—no middleman—so you don’t have to deal with the fallout.

Several dozen new messages popped up, and as usual I began with the spam. Spam has its own special patterns. A couple of months ago I was being bombarded with ads for Viagra, Vuka-Vuka, and other miraculous substances purporting to enhance male potency. Then I kept getting information about a unique, brand-new method for mastering English. Last week I received an invitation to acquire real estate outside Moscow: a two-story mansion on a two-thousand-square-meter lot on the Rublev side, for a mere one-and-a-half million dollars. Clearly my virtual status is rising. Give it a little time and the circle will close back in on itself; I’ll start getting invitations to enroll in professional development courses for sales managers.

I was just about to delete the next message, but realized just in time that it was from our Dutch supplier of frozen French fries, forwarded to me by our Department Import Manager. The letter was an answer, and as I first thought, just the latest installment in a listless dialogue we’d been having with them about compensation for a loss, to the tune of eight hundred dollars, that Cold Plus had suffered in the Russian port because the forty-foot container had exceeded the maximum stipulated gross weight.

In the previous message, the Dutch export manager had denied responsibility, citing several lengthy provisions from INCOTERMS-2000, [3] The compilation of standards and conditions for international trade. and had repeated three times that, insofar as we were following FCA delivery standards, [4] FCA (free carrier) conditions for delivery specify that the seller fulfill his obligations. “we are not the shipper.”

I had put the message aside for several days, biding my time until the mood was right, and after my next regular meeting with the Import Director to go over the different flights, I was blessed with inspiration and composed a response in my best English:

Dear Sir ,

I’m quite astonished by your letter. Actually, I get a kind of strange feeling while reading in your message the repeated statement that you are not the shipper of your goods. My poor brains are totally collapsed and I’m wondering: who the hell are you? If you are truly not the shipper then who the hell is the shipper? Aliens, maybe? Or Jesus Christ Himself? Or, as we used to say in Russian, might it be Pushkin? Ah , sorry, in case you don’t know, Pushkin was a guy who wrote poetry and stuff in the nineteenth century or something. You may ask: why Pushkin? I’m thinking the same thing .

In every Bill of Lading related to every consignment of your goods I see your company mentioned as the shipper. But you are so convinced that you are not, that I’m starting to doubt my own eyes .

Or maybe you are just missing the meaning of the words? English is not your native language, you may not understand everything clearly. In that case please go buy any dictionary, or glossary, whatever, and find the word “shipper.” Learn it and we’ll go on with our fantastically entertaining conversation .

Sincerely yours, with best regards, as ever, your well-wisher , Maximus R. Semipyatnitsky .

Thinking back to this message, I realized that I’d laid it on a little thick. So now I’d get some kind of reprimand. I didn’t want to read the message, so I shouted across three desks to the Import Manager for Potatoes, catching her just as she hung up her phone.

“Lina! What the hell is he writing now? This time, that he’s not selling, just looking?”