Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

And then suddenly, at long last, I started to feel ashamed of my own insensitivity. A man with whom I had, in a certain sense, been intimate, had died, and here I was counting floors and doing fractions. The intimacy may have been arbitrary, hallucinatory and temporary, but it was still appropriate to feel some compassion, even if it was as insubstantial as our intimacy had been. Yet I didn’t feel any at all - my heart flatly refused to generate it. Instead I started thinking again about the reasons for the previous day’s outrageous events:

1. The reason could lie in the astral background of the hotel National, where the dancer Isadora Duncan and the KGB’s founder Felix Dzerzhinsky hung side by side in the photo-gallery of ‘honoured guests’.

2. What had happened could have been a karmic echo of one of those bloody business rituals they’re so fond of in Asia.

3. It was an indirect consequence of India’s recoil from the teaching of the Buddha in the Middle Ages.

4. The Sikh had been a worshipper of the goddess Kali after all - why else would he have shouted ‘kali ma’ as he threw himself out of the window?

I have to explain that sometimes I have as many as five inner voices, with each of them conducting its own inner dialogue: and as well as that, they can start to argue with each other over anything at all. I don’t get involved in the argument, I just listen and wait for a hint at the right answer. These voices don’t have any names, though. In that sense I’m a simple soul - some foxes have as many as forty of these voices with very long and beautiful names.

The old foxes say these voices belong to the souls that we consumed during the primordial chaos: according to legend, these souls made their home in our inner space by entering into a kind of symbiosis with our own essential nature. But that’s probably all just fairy tales, because every one of the voices is mine, although they’re all different. And if you follow the old foxes’ logic, you could say I myself am a soul that someone else consumed some time in the depths of ancient antiquity. All this is no more than pointless juggling with the various summands, it makes no difference to the sum total that is A Hu-Li.

These voices mean that foxes don’t think in the same way as people: the difference is that several thought processes develop in our minds instead of just one. The mind follows several different paths at the same time, keeping an eye open to see which will lead to the light of truth first. In order to convey this peculiarity of my inner life, I designate the various levels of my inner dialogue as 1), 2), 3) and so on.

These thought processes don’t intersect with each other in any way - they’re absolutely autonomous - but my consciousness is involved in each one of them. Some circus performers juggle a large number of objects at the same time. What they do with their bodies, I do with my mind, that’s all. This peculiarity means I have a tendency to draw up lists and break everything down into points and sub-points, even when, from the human point of view, there’s no real need for it. Please accept my apologies if you come across such lists broken down into points in these pages - it’s exactly the way everything happens inside my head.

Picturing the dead Sikh to myself as accurately as I could, I recited the requiem mantra three times and went to reuters.com to find out what was going on in the world. Everything in the world was just the same as it had been for the last ten thousand years. I rejoiced briefly in the headline ‘America Ponders Mad Cow Strategy’ and then went to my mail server.

Together with an invitation to increase the length of my sexual organ and a zip file that I didn’t open, despite the alluring subject of the message (‘Britney Blowing a Horse’), there was a quite unexpected pleasant surprise waiting for me - a letter from my sister E Hu-Li, who I hadn’t heard from for ages.

I had known sister E since the times of the Warring Kingdoms. She was a terrible rogue. Many centuries ago she was famous throughout the whole of China as an imperial concubine by the name of Flying Swallow. As a result of watching her fly, the emperor lived for twenty years less than he could have done. After that E Hu-Li was punished by the guardian spirits, and she began keeping a low profile, specializing in rich aristocrats, whom she milked dry in the peace and quiet of their country estates, away from the eyes of the world. For the last few hundred years she’d been living in England.

It was a very short letter:

Hi there, Ginger,

How are you? I hope everything’s going well. Sorry to bother you for such a trivial reason, but I need to consult you urgently about something. According to my information, in Moscow there’s a Shrine of Christ the Saver that was first demolished completely, leaving not a single stone in place, and then restored to look just the way it used to be. Is this true? What do you know about it? Please answer quickly!

Heads and tails,

E.

Strange, I thought, what’s all this about? But she had asked me to reply urgently. I clicked on the ‘reply’ button.

Hello, Carrot-Top,

Up here in the north everything’s still the same as ever. I’ll write in more detail some time, but meanwhile here’s the answer to your question. Yes there is a Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (that’s the correct form) in Moscow. It was blown up after the revolution and restored at the end of the last century. There really wasn’t a single stone left standing - for a long time there used to be a swimming pool where it had been. But now the swimming pool has been filled in and the cathedral has been built again. The cultural significance of this event is highly ambiguous - at one of the demonstrations I saw the slogan: ‘We demand the restoration of the Moscow swimming pool, barbarously destroyed by the cleptocracy!’ Since I personally have never visited either the first or the second facility, I have no opinion of my own on this subject.

Heads and tails,

A.

I sent the letter and went to the site whores.ru.

It looked very picturesque - even most of the pop-up ads were subject-related:

SEE PARIS AND LIVE!

DUREX ANAL EXTRA STRONG.

SUVs had appeared even among the condoms. The market was seeking out new approaches and niches: I came across ‘Occam’s Razor’ condoms with a portrait of the medieval scholast and the slogan: ‘Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate’ - ‘One should not multiply entities without necessity’. I used to know William of Occam personally. I remember him chasing me round his house in Munich, and two centuries after that the Reformation began - for some reason the two entirely unrelated events have fused together in my memory. But I had no time now for reminiscences - I had to compose an ad for myself quickly, and to do it I had to familiarize myself with already existing examples.

Fortunately, there was a huge number of them. I found one feature of the genre rather amusing: many of the girls brightened up their notices with a few inserts in verse that had nothing to do with the list of services on offer - it was a kind of verbal piercing, and I decided to have a go at it as well.

An hour later my text was ready. A demanding critic might perhaps have described it as an eclectic compilation, but I wasn’t trying to make a name for myself in literary circles. My announcement began like this:

I’m a bright and nimble maid,

Mistress of the intimate trade!

Just the way you like it, a bright smile and slender waist,

Service classical and anal, passion geared to every taste.

The second couplet, separated from the first by an empty line, was not linked to it by rhyme or rhythm - they were like two different earrings in the lobe of one ear. It looked and sounded really authentic, just like what the other girls did. The lines of verse were set in bold script and the information followed: