Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Speaking very approximately, this third stream of consciousness is also the very essence of the technique ‘contemplating the mind’. All of these practices are preliminary - you have to perform them for a thousand years before moving on to the most important, which is called ‘tail of the void’ or ‘artlessness’. This is a secret practice that is not entirely clear even to foxes like me, who have completed the thousand-years preliminary cycle a long time ago.

And so, I sat in the lotus position, placing my left hand on my knee and my right hand on my tail. I concentrated and began remembering my past - the layers of it that are usually concealed from me by the stream of everyday thoughts. And suddenly, entirely out of the blue, my right hand jerked and tugged. I felt a pain in the base of my spine. But that pain was nothing compared with the stream of repentance, horror and shame for what I had done that flooded over me with such great power that tears sprang to my eyes.

The faces of those who had not survived their encounter with me floated past in front of my face, like yellow leaves drifting past a window in an autumn storm. They emerged from non-existence for only a second, but that second was long enough for each pair of eyes to sear me with a glance full of bewilderment and pain. I watched them, remembering the past, with the tears pouring down my cheeks in two great streams as repentance tore my heart apart.

At the same time I was serenely aware that what was taking place was simply the insubstantial play of reflections, the rippling of thoughts that is raised by the habitual draughts of the mind, and that when these ripples settled down, it would be clear that there were no draughts and no reflections, and no mind itself - nothing but that clear, eternal, all-penetrating gaze in the face of which nothing is real.

That is the way I have been practising for about twelve centuries.

From the very beginning Alexander and I had an unspoken agreement not to pester each other with questions. I wasn’t supposed to ask about things that he couldn’t talk about because of the non-disclosure agreements he’d signed and all the other FSB garbage. And he didn’t ask any unnecessary questions, because my answers might have placed him in an ambiguous position - for instance, what if I suddenly turned out to be a Chinese spy? Things could quite easily have been made to look that way, after all, I didn’t even have an internal passport, and only a fake one for foreign travel.

I wasn’t really happy with this situation: there were lots of things I wanted to find out about him. And I could see he was consumed by curiosity too. But we were getting to know each other gradually, groping our way along - the information was provided in homeopathic doses.

I liked to kiss him on the cheek before he transformed into a beast (I could never bring myself to kiss him on the lips, and that was strange, considering the extent of our intimacy). But then, the caresses didn’t last for long - a few touches were enough to trigger the transformation, and after that kissing became impossible.

For so many centuries a kiss had been simply one element of hypnotic suggestion to me, but now I myself was kissing, even if it was in a childish fashion . . . There was something dreamlike about that. His face was often hidden by a gauze mask, and I had to move it aside. One day I couldn’t stand it any more, I tugged on the lace of the mask that had slipped off his face and said:

‘Maybe you could not put it on when we’re together? Who do you think you are, Michael Jackson?’

‘It’s because of the smell,’ he said. ‘It has a special chemical that doesn’t let smells through.’

‘And what can you smell up here?’ I asked, surprised.

We were sitting by the door to the roof, which was open (he avoided going out of his mirror-walled birdhouse, because he was worried about snipers, or photographers, or avenging lightning from the heavens). Apart from a very faint whiff of exhaust fumes from the street, I couldn’t detect any smells at all.

‘I can smell everything in the world up here,’ he said with a frown.

‘Such as?’

He looked at my white blouse and drew in a deep breath through his nose.

‘That blouse of yours,’ he said. ‘Before you, it was worn by a middle-aged woman who used home-made eau-de-cologne made from Egyptian lotus extract . . .’

I sniffed my blouse. It didn’t smell of anything.

‘Seriously?’ I queried. ‘I bought it in a second-hand shop, I liked the embroidered pattern.’

He drew in another breath of air.

‘And what’s more, she diluted the extract with fake vodka. There’s a lot of fusel oil.’

‘What are you saying?’ I asked, nonplussed. ‘I feel like taking the blouse off and throwing it away . . . So what else can you smell?’

He turned towards the open door.

‘There’s a terrible smell of petrol. Bad enough to give you a splitting headache. And there’s a smell of asphalt, rubber, tobacco smoke . . . And of toilets, human sweat, beer, baking, coffee, popcorn, dust, paint, nail varnish, doughnuts, newsprint . . . I could go on and on with the list.’

‘But don’t these smells get mixed up together?’

He shook his head in reply.

‘It’s more as if they’re layered over each other and contained in each other, like a letter in an envelope that’s lying in the pocket of a coat that’s hanging in a wardrobe, and so on. The worst thing by far is that very often you find out lots of things you absolutely didn’t want to know. For instance, they give you a document to sign, and you can tell that yesterday there was a sandwich with stale salami lying on it. And that’s not all, the smell of the sweat from the hand that gave you the document makes it clear that what it says in the document isn’t true . . .

And so on.’

‘And why does this happen to you?’

‘It’s just the usual lupine sense of smell. It often stays with me even in the human phase. It’s tough. But I suppose it saves me from lots of bad habits.’

‘For instance?’

‘For instance, I can’t smoke hash. And definitely not snort cocaine.’

‘Why?’

‘Because from the first line I can tell how many hours the mule was carrying it up his ass on his way from Colombo to Minsk. And that’s nothing, I even know how many times that ass of his was . . .’

‘Don’t,’ I interrupted. ‘Don’t go on. I’d already got the idea.’

‘And the worst thing is, I never know when it’s suddenly going to overwhelm me. It’s as unpredictable as a migraine.’

‘You poor thing,’ I sighed. ‘What a pain.’

‘Well, it’s not always a pain,’ he said. ‘There are some things about it I really enjoy. For instance, I like the way you smell.’

I was embarrassed. A fox’s body really does have a very faint aroma, but people usually take it for perfume.

‘And what do I smell of?’

‘I can’t really say . . . Mountains, moonlight. Spring. Flowers. Deception. But not a wily kind of deception, more as if you’re having a joke. I really love the way you smell. I think I could breathe that smell in all my life and still keep finding something new in it.’

‘Well that’s nice,’ I said. ‘I felt very awkward when you said that about my blouse. I’ll never buy anything in second-hand shops again.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘But I would be grateful if you’d take it off.’

‘Is the smell that strong?’

‘No, it’s very weak. It’s just that I like you better without any blouse.’

I thought for a moment and then pulled the blouse off over my head.

‘You’re not wearing any bras today,’ he laughed.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I read that when a girl goes to see her young man and something is supposed to happen . . . You know, if she is ready for something to happen . . . Then she doesn’t put one on. It’s a kind of etiquette.’