Герман Садулаев - The Maya Pill

The credit is sure to be there at the end of the clip. Like a label, like a toe tag at the morgue.

“Earthly glory is like a toe tag on a corpse.”

Some Buddhist lama said that, I think. I don’t remember his name either. But I do remember the quote, more or less. I like it. I didn’t even bother to write it down in my special notebook (you have one of those too, don’t you?); it just stuck in my mind. And it’s true. A man dies, and all that’s left is a slab with his name and the high points of his biography: He was born, studied somewhere, got married, won eight Oscars, and then died.

This hag should have kicked the bucket long ago. Or left show business and spent her final days sitting on a bench in front of her house, or puttering around in her garden. Anything but gyrating up there on stage in front of everyone. She’s an old lady, same age as Marilyn Monroe would be now, probably, but Marilyn died at the right time. This one, though, just keeps on singing. Won’t shut up. Dances too.

I can’t wrap my head around that. You’ve already shown what you’ve got, said everything you can say, and earned huge piles of money; why keep on writhing around on stage like a clown? Go over your bank statements, count your money, and enjoy the rest of your life.

I always liked Britney Spears. Now there’s someone who did it right! I recall her debut. A nymphet, a pedophile’s dream, in a school uniform and flimsy little white skirts. She danced on a dock by the sea. Sang words of love, first love, pure, timid, and innocent love. And the planet quivered, pierced through by an ultrasound wave of unprecedented force—the sound of men’s balls buzzing, the whole world over.

She made it big, became a superstar, sold millions of albums, earned millions of dollars, got up on stage with the whole world watching and sucked face with Madonna. And then sent everything to the devil.

Started having babies, eating sandwiches, getting fat, and vandalizing cars in parking lots, pounding on their hoods like a madwoman.

Of course, malevolent critics will remind you, before this she bombed in the movie Crossroads , ruined her personal life, started in on alcohol and drugs. But, hey, up theirs. They’re just jealous.

No, Britney isn’t like that old bag, who will cling to the stage till the day she dies. Look at her, a veritable cyborg! After all the plastic surgery, liposuctions, and implants, there’s nothing left of her original body. Like the robot cop from that movie. Robocop , that’s it. Robo-singer.

The Russian stage has its share of this particular brand of mutant. When they come out on stage for the Police Day concert, it’s downright terrifying. These aren’t real people, they’re some sort of pale zombie who’ve risen up from their dank graves, called forth by some voodoo sorcerer who fed them a poisonous powder. Or pills, maybe.

To hell with that kind of career! Everyone has to die someday. Sure, you have to be in the right place at the right time to strike it rich. But you also have to know when to make your exit.

Every year new stars appear on the stage. What happens to the old ones? Nothing—they’re still up there too. If things keep going on like this, there won’t be any room left for the living; all the space will be taken up by walking corpses. The devil should definitely reconsider the terms of his standard contract.

There’s no place for the living among the dead, just as there’s no place for the dead among the living. I learned that from my wise old grandmother.

What the hell is this song about, anyway? I can’t get it out of my head. The zombie is howling mournfully. What is she really trying to say? Probably something like.

Like, say, her love is over, but she has to go on living. I will survive . So many songs by women can be boiled down to that one idea. But what I hear is:

Yes, that’s more like it. And I do believe:

Love that lasts till death, to the grave, is a fairy tale, an illusion, a lie. Love after the grave, though—that’s real, it gives me hope. Lines from my own song, something I wrote when I was sixteen:

I think that I sang that song once, drunk, to a one-eyed old man, shitface drunk himself, on Zayachy Island near the Peter and Paul Fortress. And he shoved a piece of paper into my hand with his phone number on it, told me to call, promised that he would find me a band, would set up an audition, would make me a star.

Of course I didn’t call. People say all kinds of things when they’re drunk.

Or, no, maybe what she means is exactly what she’s saying:

If so, it’s clearly autobiographical; the song must be about her experiences after the zombie master hauled her out of the grave.

Though I died too, in a certain sense. I died for the world of advanced capitalism and industrial-trade corporations, the day I walked out of Cold Plus.

The heroes of my favorite books always had “something in reserve” waiting for them before they told everyone to go to hell and set out to pursue their own destinies. Something to “tide them over” for a while.

But when I wrote my resignation and walked out on the company that had fed me, for better or worse, for so many years, I had no savings. Just debts. I stepped into emptiness, pustota .

Jumped without a parachute, as one of my friends put it. He’d been complaining to me about his life for as long as I could remember. He didn’t love his wife, his job was monotonous and boring, and he was stuck out in some provincial town. I suggested he quit, give everything up at once and move away.

He answered, “I’m already too old to jump without a parachute.” Too old. And he wasn’t even thirty!

But I jumped. It wasn’t a big deal, just a completely meaningless little act of protest. The least a man can do if he wants to live his own life. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t scared.

When I quit my job without even picking up my last paycheck, I didn’t have the slightest idea how or on what I would live. All I had in my wallet was small change enough to cover my immediate needs.

But God, or fate, or the devil—one of them anyway, or maybe all of them together—come to a man’s aid when it’s time to make a big decision. The next day I went to the bank, which I hadn’t visited for along time, and learned that some money had been transferred to my account—a commission for this deal I’d made with some Chinese guys for a friend of mine, using my Cold Plus connections. I took some of it out in cash and went to the supermarket, which was practically empty (it was early and all the usual shoppers were at work). The only people there were stay-at-home wives, retirees, and a couple of young people doing their shopping. I went up and down the aisles and gathered food and drink, four plastic bags full, using up almost all my money.

I left the car outside my building, went up to my apartment, and put all the groceries away neatly on the kitchen shelves and in the refrigerator. Grains on one shelf, save for pasta, which got its own place; processed foods in the freezer; milk products in the fridge door; cheese and butter in the upper rack closest to the freezer; jars of jam and other preserves on the next shelf down; and then finally, on the bottom, fresh vegetables and salad greens. That would last me a week.