Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

‘All right,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way our chat’s going, it’s time for me to introduce myself.’

An official ID card appeared on the table in front of me, open. I read what was written in it very carefully, then compared the photograph with his face. In the photograph he was wearing a uniform jacket with epaulettes. His name and patronymic were Vladimir Mikhailovich. He was a colonel in the FSB.

‘Call me Mikhalich,’ he said with a smirk. ‘That’s what people who know me well call me. And I hope we’re going to get to know each other very well.’

‘To what do I owe the pleasure, Mikhalich?’ I asked.

‘One of our consultants complained about you. Apparently you upset him. So now you’ll have to recompensate for it. Or recompense for it. Do you know which is right?’

He had a stereotypical appearance: a strong chin, steely eyes, a shock of flaxen hair. But a certain trapezoidal quality in the plebeian proportions of his features made his face look like the West’s cliche of its Cold War opponent. Movie characters of that kind usually drank a glass of vodka and then ate the glass as a snack, muttering through the crunching that it was ‘an old Russian custom’.

‘Fuck it,’ I muttered. ‘A freebee?’

‘Hey,’ he said, offended, ‘don’t you confuse the FSB with the pigs. You’ll get your money all right.’

‘How many of you are there?’ I asked in a tired voice.

‘Just one . . . Well, two at the most.’

‘And who’s the other one?’

‘You’ll see in a moment. And don’t worry, I won’t cheat you.’

He pulled out the drawer of the table and took out a box with all sorts of medical bits and pieces - little jars, cotton wool and a pack of disposable syringes. One syringe was loaded - the bright-red cap on the needle made it look like a cigarette someone has dragged on so furiously that the flame has extended all the way along it.

‘I not shooting up with you,’ I said. ‘Not even for quintuple fees.’

‘You fool,’ he said merrily, ‘who’s going to give you any?’

‘And I want the money up front. Who knows what you’ll be like in half an hour?’

‘Here, take it,’ he said and threw me an envelope.

Members of the Russian middle class often give me dollars in an envelope - the same way they get them when they receive their ‘unofficial’ salaries. It’s exciting. As if you’ve been raised aloft on the wheel of social insight and offered a glimpse of the intimate linkages in your Homeland’s economic mechanism . . . I opened the envelope and counted the money. The promised triple fee was there, plus another fifty dollars. Effectively the same level of pay as at the National. A client like that ought to be cherished - or at least I ought to pretend to cherish him. I smiled enchantingly.

‘Okay, if I have to recompense, I’ll recompensate. Where’s the bathroom.’

‘Just wait, will you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got plenty of time. Sit tight.’

‘I . . .’

‘Sit tight,’ he repeated and started rolling up his sleeve.

‘You said there’d be another one. So where is he?’

‘Just as soon as I shoot up, he’ll be here.’

He put a rubber strap round his biceps, then clasped and unclasped his fist several times.

‘What are we shooting?’ I enquired morosely.

I had to know what to prepare myself for.

‘We’re taking a ride down the Kashirksy Highway.’

I realized the syringe was full of ketamine, an extremely powerful psychedelic that only a psychopath or someone trying to commit suicide would ever inject into a vein.

‘What, intravenously?’ I asked, unable to believe it.

He nodded. I suddenly felt afraid. I couldn’t even stand the ketamine junkies who injected it into the muscle. That stuff had a gloomy kind of effect on them. They became like trolls from beyond the grave, crushed by the weight of some eternal curse - like soldiers in the ghost army in the final episode of The Lord of the Rings . And this guy was about to take it intravenously. I didn’t even know anyone did that. That is, I knew for certain that sane people didn’t do it. A second stiff in less than a month was definitely the very last thing I needed. It was time to clear out.

‘Listen, why don’t I give you the money back,’ I said, ‘and we’ll call it a day.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘It’s okay for you, you’ll be dead. But they’ll drag me round the courts. I’d better go.’

‘I said sit tight!’ Mikhalich growled.

He got up, went over to the door, locked it and put the key in his pocket.

‘Get up and you’ll regret it. Understand?’

I nodded. He came back to the table, sat down and took a strange device that looked a bit like a Soviet-designed paper-punch out of his medicine box. The device consisted of two semi-circular plates connected by a simple mechanism. There was a large rubber sucker attached to the lower plate, and the upper one was stamped with a star and an inventory number, like a pistol. Mikhalich brought the two plates together, licked the rubber sucker obsessively and stuck the device on his forearm. Then he set the syringe in the gap, carefully introduced the needle into a vein and checked - the liquid in the syringe had turned dark-red. Then he touched a little lever on the strange device, and it started ticking very loudly. Mikhalich frowned as if he was about to take a leap into water, set his feet wide apart, bracing them more firmly against the floor, and pressed the plunger all the way into the syringe.

Almost immediately his body went limp in the armchair. For some reason it suddenly occurred to me that that was the way the high priests of the Third Reich had left the world. I listened to the mechanical ticking in alarm - as if it were a bomb that was just about to explode. After a few seconds there was a click, and the paper-punch and syringe sprang off his arm and fell on the floor beside the chair. A small drop of blood appeared in the crook of Mikhalich’s elbow. A clever little invention, I thought. And then it suddenly hit me.

I have to explain one thing. I can’t read people’s thoughts. And no one can, because people don’t have anything resembling a printed text inside their heads. Not many people are capable of noticing that ripple of thought that runs incessantly across the mind - even in themselves. So reading somebody else’s thoughts is like trying to make out something written on muddy water by a pitchfork in the hands of a madman. I don’t mean the technical difficulty involved, but the practical value of the procedure.

But thanks to our tail, we foxes often find ourselves in a kind of sympathetic resonance with somebody else’s consciousness - especially when that other consciousness is performing an unexpected somersault. It’s rather like the reaction of peripheral vision to a sudden movement in the dark. We see a brief hallucination, a bit like an abstract computer-animated cartoon. This kind of contact is no use for anything at all, and most of the time our minds simply filter out the effect - otherwise it would be impossible to ride in the Metro. Usually it’s weak, but when people take drugs it’s amplified - that’s why we can’t stand drug addicts.

When FSB colonels inject ketamine intravenously, strange things happen to them. The ‘ride down the Kshirsky Highway’ was no metaphor, but a rather realistic description: although Mikhalich’s limp body looked like a corpse, his consciousness was hurtling along some kind of orange tunnel filled with spectral forms that he skilfully avoided. The tunnel kept branching sideways and Mikhalich chose which way to turn. It was like a bobsleigh - Mikhalich was controlling his imaginary flight with minute turns of his feet and hands that were invisible to the eye, not even turns really, simply microscopic adjustments of the tension in the corresponding muscles.