Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

First a werewolf makes himself believe that his tail is growing. And the emerging tail, which in wolves is the same kind of hypnotic organ as it is in foxes, exerts a hypnotic influence on the wolf’s own consciousness, convincing him that he really is undergoing transformation and so on until he is completely transformed into a beast. Technologists call this positive feedback.

Alexander’s transformation always began in the same way: his body curved over, as if some invisible cable joining his tail and his cranium were being drawn taut. Now I’d realized what was happening. While foxes directed energy at other people, wolves trained it on themselves, inducing a transformation, not in others’ perception, but in their own, and only afterwards, as a consequence, in that of others.

Can we call such a transformation real? I have never completely understood the meaning of this epithet, especially since every historical age fills it with its own meaning. For instance, in modern Russian the word ‘real’ is employed in four basic ways:

1. as a battle cry uttered by bandits and FSB agents during the ritual change-over of the roof , or protection provider.

2. a jargon term used by the upper rat and oligarchy in conversations about their offshore accounts.

3. a technical term applied to immovable property.

4. a widely used adjective with the meaning ‘having a dollar equivalent’.

The latter meaning makes the term ‘real’ a synonym for the word ‘metaphysical’, since nowadays the dollar is an occult, mystical unit based entirely on the belief that tomorrow will be like today. And mysticism is something that should be practised not by were-creatures, but by those who are professionally obliged to do it - the PR consultants, political technologists and economists. That is why I did not wish to call the werewolf’s transformation ‘real’ - if I did, it might give the impression that it involves cheap human black magic. But two things were undoubtedly true:

1. a wolf’s transformation was qualitatively different from a fox’s illusion, although it was based on the same effect.

2. the lupine metamorphosis consumed an immense amount of energy - far more than we foxes expended on a client.

That was why wolves could not remain in their bestial body for long, and folklore linked their transformation with various forms of temporal limitation - the hours of darkness, the full moon or something of that kind.

I remembered the strange sensation I had experienced while hunting - when for the first time in my life I became aware of the relict radiation from my tail, directed at myself. But exactly what suggestion had I been implanting in my own mind? That I was a fox? But I knew that without any suggestion . . . What was going on? I felt as if I were standing on the threshold of something important, something that could change my entire life and lead me, at long last, out of the spiritual impasse in which I had spent the last five hundred years. But, to my disgrace, the first thing that I thought about was not spiritual practice at all.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but the first thought that came into my mind was about sex. I remembered Alexander’s coarse grey tail and realized how to raise our erotic sensations to a totally new level. It was all very simple. The mechanisms for influencing consciousness employed by foxes and wolves were identical in all major respects - the only elements that differed were the intensity of suggestion and its target. I, so to speak, served my client champagne and it made him tipsy. Alexander swallowed an entire bottle of vodka all on his own, which made everyone else around horrified. But the effective substance, alcohol, was the same.

And so, by combining our resources, we could mix lots of very different cocktails out of champagne and vodka. After all, sex is more than just the simple conjunction of certain parts of the body. It is also a connection between the energies of two beings, a joint trip. If we could learn to combine our hypnotic impulses in order to immerse ourselves in an amorous illusion together, I thought, we could set ourselves up with our own tea for two , in which every drop would be worth its weight in polonium.

There was only one problem. First we had to agree on what we wanted to see. And not just in words - words were an unreliable prop. If we relied only on them, we could imagine the final destination of our journey very differently. Some ready-made image was required, one that would serve as the starting point for our visualization. For instance, a picture . . .

I tried to imagine an appropriate classical canvas. But unfortunately, nothing interesting came to mind - all I could recall was Picasso’s early masterpiece An Old Jew and a Boy . Many years earlier I had used a postcard of that picture as a bookmark in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life , which I simply couldn’t get through, and ever since then I had remembered every detail of those two sad, dark figures.

No, pictures were no good. They didn’t give any idea of how an object appeared in the round. Videos would be much better. And Alexander has such a big television, I thought. Surely it ought to be put to good use?

There’s a kind of chewing gum that comes with cards showing pairs of loving couples in various humorous situations. These drawings are captioned ‘Love is . . .’ and I often used to see them stuck to the walls in lifts and cinemas. If I wanted to draw my own version of these cartoons, it would show a wolf and a fox sitting in front of a TV with their tails intertwined.

The technology of a miracle proved to be simpler than I was expecting. It was enough to bring our hypnotic organs together in any pose that allowed us to do it. Only our tails had to touch: we had to follow what was happening on the screen, and any closer proximity was a hindrance.

It developed into a ritual surprisingly quickly. Usually he would lie down on his side, with his legs hanging down on to the carpet, and I would sit down beside him. We set the film going and I caressed him until the transformation began. Then I put my legs up on his shaggy side, we joined our antennas together, and what began then was totally insane, something that no tailless creature could ever understand. Sometimes the feelings were so intense that I had to apply a special technique to calm myself and cool off - I looked away from the screen and recited part of the ‘Heart Sutra’ to myself, a mantra as cool and deep as a well: I could dissolve any emotional upheaval in those Sanskrit syllables. I liked to look at the way our tails combined - the red and the grey. As if someone had set fire to a rotten billet and it had been engulfed by dancing flames and sparks . . . But I never shared this simile with Alexander.

However, while the technical aspect of the whole thing proved to be elementary, the choice of a route for our outings always involved arguments. Our tastes didn’t just differ, they belonged to different universes. In his case it was hard even to speak of taste in the sense of a definite system of aesthetic guidelines. Like a schoolboy, he liked everything to be heroic and sentimental, and he made me sit for hours watching samurai dramas, westerns and something that I simply couldn’t stand - Japanese cartoons about robots. And then in our dream we played out the secondary love themes that the directors had had to use to provide at least some respite between the killing and the fighting. Actually, at first it was quite interesting. But only at first.

As an experienced professional, I soon wearied of the standard quickies - I had induced more dreams on that subject than mankind had made porn films about itself. I liked to roam through the terra incognita of modern sexuality, to explore its border regions, the backyard of social morality and mores. But he wasn’t ready for that, and although no one in the world could have witnessed our joint hallucinations, he was always stopped dead by his internal sentry.