Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

I realized that these orange tunnels were more than just structures in space, they were simultaneously information and will. The entire world had been transformed into an immense self-operating program, like a computer program, except that the hardware and the software couldn’t be told apart. Mikhalich himself was an element of the program, but he possessed freedom of movement in relation to its other components. And his attention was moving through the program towards its beginning, towards a hatch behind which there was something terrible lurking. Mikhalich went flying into the final orange tunnel, reached the hatch and resolutely flung it open. And the terrible thing that was behind it burst out and went hurtling upwards - towards the light of day, up into the room.

I looked at Mikhalich. He was coming back to life, but in a strange, menacing kind of way. The corners of his mouth were trembling - little spots of either saliva or foam had appeared on them - and I could hear a sound like growling from somewhere in his throat. The growling kept getting louder, and then Mikhalich’s body twitched and arched, and I sensed that in another second the mysterious, terrible power from the bottom of his soul would burst out and be free. I had no time to hesitate - I grabbed the bottle of champagne, swung it hard and hit him on the head.

To look at, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Mikhalich slumped down in the chair again, and the bottle didn’t even break. But in his internal dimension, with which I was still in contact, something remarkable took place. The bundle of evil power that was rushing up and out from his inner depths lost control and crashed into a complex combination of thought-forms filling the orange tunnel. There was a flash, with pulsating stars and stripes of flame receding all the way to the horizon like the markings on an infinitely long runway. It was blindingly beautiful and reminiscent of a news report I saw in the 1960s of a trimaran speed-boat that crashed: the speedboat lifted up off the water, performed a slow, thoughtful loop-the-loop and shattered into small fragments against the surface of the lake. Almost the same thing happened this time, only instead of the speedboat it was the lake that was smashed into tiny pieces: the transparent structures filling the orange tunnel fell to pieces and went flying off in all directions with a melodic tinkling sound, fading, shrinking and disappearing. And then the whole universe of orange tunnels went dark and disappeared, as if the electricity lighting it up had been cut off. All that was left was a man lying limply in a chair and a melodic sound that was repeated over and over again until I realized it was the phone.

I answered it.

‘Mikhalich?’ a man’s voice asked.

‘Mikhalich can’t come to the phone right now,’ I said. ‘He’s very busy.’

‘Who’s that?’

I couldn’t think of any short and simple answer. After a few seconds of silence the person on the other end of the line hung up.

What a crazy idea that was - to change the name of the KGB. One of the greatest brand names ever was simply destroyed! The KGB was known all over the world. But not every foreigner will understand what the FSB is. One American lesbian who hired me for the weekend kept confusing ‘FSB’ and ‘FSD’ all the time. ‘FSD’ is ‘female sexual dysfunction’, an illness invented by the pharmaceutical companies in order to launch the production of the female version of Viagra. Sexual dysfunction in women is a bluff, of course: in female sexuality it’s not the physical aspects that are important, so much as the context - candles, champagne, words. And to be completely honest about it, the most important condition for the modern female orgasm is a high level of material prosperity. You can’t solve that with a pill - as Bill Clinton said: It’s the economy, stupid. But I’m digressing again.

Although the name of the KGB was changed, the personnel remained the same as before, disciplined and tough. Any normal man would have been out cold for a long time after a blow like that from a bottle. But Mikhalich started to come round quite soon. Perhaps that was because he received the blow in an altered state of consciousness - when the physical properties of the body are transformed, as any alcoholic can testify.

I realized he was conscious when I tried to take the key to the door out of his pants. When I leaned down over him, I saw he was looking at me with his eyelids half open. I jumped back immediately. I was frightened by what had happened to him after the injection - I’d never seen anything like that before, and I didn’t want to take any risks.

‘Phone,’ Mikhalich whispered.

‘What about the phone?’

‘Who . . . who . . .’

‘Who called?’ I guessed. ‘I don’t know. Some man or other.’ He groaned. Amazing. After a blow like that an ordinary man would have been more concerned about the eternal questions. But this one was thinking about telephone calls. As the Soviet poet Tikhonov wrote, ‘If we could make nails out of these men, everyone in Russia would have a happier life’ (he later changed this to ‘there would be no stronger nails in all the world’, but the rough draft was exactly that, I’ve seen it).

‘Give me the key,’ I said, ‘it’s time I was going.’

‘Wait a bit,’ Mikhalich sighed, ‘talk.’

‘I don’t talk to junkies.’

‘Don’t get clever . . .’

He spoke with an effort, leaving long pauses - as if every sentence were a high mountain he had to climb.

‘Oh, sure,’ I said in an offended tone. ‘Don’t get clever. That’s what they said to Liuska too. And then when her client died on the sakura branch, she was arrested. Her lawyer said it was peritonitis, an unfortunate accident. But the investigator stuck the rupture of the colon on her, unpremeditated murder. Bung them three grand, then it’ll be unpremeditated, otherwise you take the full rap. Give me the key, or you’ll get it again. And I don’t give a damn if you are from the FSB. Nothing will happen to me, it’s self-defence.’

And at that I picked up the bottle again.

He made a sinister sort of sound - like a water sprite laughing somewhere in the depths of his millpond. Then he tried to say something, but all that came out was:

‘Sit . . . si . . .’

‘Listen, I’m asking you nicely one last time,’ I said, ‘give me the key!’

‘Bitch,’ he said surprisingly clearly.

These officers are such boors, you know. They simply can’t talk to a girl in a civilized manner. I raised the bottle to hit him again, and at that point the door behind my back opened.

Standing there in the doorway was a tall young man wearing a dark raincoat with the collar turned up. He was unshaven, sullen and very good-looking — I noted that without any kind of personal involvement, with the cold eye of an artist.

The only thing that spoiled him a little were the arrogant, angry creases beside his lips. They didn’t actually make me dislike him, though, they just seemed to establish some distance. But even with those arrogant creases he looked very, very attractive indeed. I’d say he was just a little bit like the young Tsar Alexander Pavlovich - as I recall he also had a fierce, wolfish look during the years immediately after he ascended the throne.

I was struck by the expression of his face. I don’t know how to explain it. As if someone had been living with toothache for many years and become accustomed to taking no notice of it, even though the pain tormented him every single day. He had the kind of glance that’s hard to forget as well: those greyish-yellow eyes imprinted themselves on your retinas and looked straight down into your soul for a few seconds. But the most significant thing about this face, I thought, was that it was a face from the past. There used to be a lot of faces like that around in the old days, when people believed in love and God, and then that type almost disappeared.