Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

It’s best not to exceed your own limits, because a hallucination that is not strong enough to subdue another person’s mind gives the whole game away. The mechanism involved is complicated, but the external result is always the same - when a person suddenly escapes from hypnotic control (slips off the tail, as we say), he suffers a seizure, with unpredictable consequences. More often than not he tries to kill the fox, who is entirely defenceless just at that moment.

The point is that our sport involves a certain provocative detail. In the non-working state, our tails are really small, and so we hide them between our legs. For the antenna to work at full power, it has to be unfurled. To do this, you have to lower your trousers (or raise your skirt) and spread your tail into a fiery-red plume. This increases the power of suggestion by several orders of magnitude, and that’s the way all serious questions are decided.

The need to expose yourself could give rise to awkward and ambiguous situations, but - fortunately for foxes - there is one helpful feature to the process. If you can expose yourself quickly enough, the subject will forget everything that he has seen. There’s a kind of twilight zone, ten or twenty seconds that disappear from the memory, and we have to manage the manoeuvre within that time frame. They say the same thing happens when someone faints - when they come round, people don’t remember what happened immediately before their fainting fit.

And now for the final thing I ought to tell you. We eat ordinary food (fairly close to the Atkins Diet). But in addition to that, we are capable of directly assimilating the human sexual energy that is released during the act of love - whether real or imaginary. And while ordinary food simply maintains the chemical equilibrium of our bodies, sexual energy is like our most important vitamin, the one that makes us enchanting and eternally youthful. Is this vampirism? I’m not sure it is. We simply pick up what the irrational human being carelessly discards. And if he is so profligate that he actually kills himself, does that mean that we’re to blame?

In some books it says that foxes don’t wash - supposedly, that’s how they can be recognized. It’s not because we’re dirty creatures. It’s just that the excess sexual energy transfuses us with the immortal nature of the primordial Yang principle and our bodies clean themselves through the corresponding influx of Yin. The faint odour that our skin gives off is actually extremely pleasant and reminiscent of Essenza di Zegna eau de cologne, except that it is lighter and more lucid - without that hot, sensuous breath of the mistral in the distant background.

I hope that now the reasons for my actions will be clearer. And so, I turned on the water, so that my client would hear the noise, then unfastened my trousers and lowered them slightly to free my tail. And then, trying not to hurry, I counted to three hundred (a notional five minutes) and opened the door.

Popular expositions of the theory of relativity often ask the reader to compare the pictures that would be taken by two cameras - one in an independent system of coordinates and the other on the head of an astronaut. In our case it would be more correct to say ‘in the head’ rather than on it. What would the camera in the Sikh’s head have shown? The door of the bathroom opened and the girl of his romantic childhood dreams stepped into the room. With a blindingly white towel wrapped round her body.

After she came out of the bathroom, the girl went over to the bed, threw back the blanket and dived under it, blushing ever so slightly: everything pointed to the fact that she hadn’t been in the business long and still hadn’t acquired the professional shamelessness of the trade. That was what the Sikh saw.

I don’t know if the rooms in the National have cameras set in an independent system of coordinates. The staff there claim that they don’t. But if they did have, then they would have shown the following:

1. the girl wasn’t wearing any towel. She hadn’t even thought of getting undressed, but merely slightly lowered her trousers, releasing the red plume of her tail.

2. the girl didn’t walk into the room, she crawled into it on all fours and her tail swayed in the air before freezing above her back in a ginger question mark.

3. she looked less like a bride than a beast prepared to pounce - there was a fierce, intense look in her green eyes and there wasn’t even a trace of a smile on her face.

4. since in modern Russian the word ‘bride’ signifies something very close to ‘a beast prepared to pounce’, there is no contradiction here anyway.

The Sikh looked at me, raised his eyebrows and swayed on his feet. When a person is overwhelmed by the hypnotic shock, a shadow of something like faint revulsion passes across his face, like when a bullet just clips someone’s skull: if anyone has seen the documentary footage of Vietnamese executions, then he’ll know what I mean. Only after my bullet the client doesn’t fall down.

With a smile on his face, the Sikh staggered towards the empty bed, pulling off his jacket on the way. I waited until he had made himself comfortable in it, then sat on the chair beside it and opened my handbag.

I’m trying to improve myself morally, and so I avoid looking at the client once the paid time has begun. I feel ashamed even to describe what happens to a man during his encounter with a fox. Ashamed above all for the man, since he looks quite terrible. And a little awkward for myself too, since all this doesn’t just happen of its own accord.

I’m not writing for the yellow press, so I won’t go into the scabrous details, but simply say that a man’s behaviour is especially unattractive when he starts to realize his sexual fantasies. The fact that he is performing alone increases the obscenity of it to the second power. And if the man concerned is wearing a blue turban and is so hairy that his beard seems to cover his entire body, then it is quite fair to say it is raised to the third.

Maintaining an illusion is considerably easier than breaking into someone else’s mind in order to establish it. Everything is decided in the first moment, after that it’s all pretty routine. But even so, while the client is in the world of his illusions, it’s best not to go too far away from him, because you have to perform the functions of a nurse. As I’ve already explained, looking at the patient is rather unpleasant, so I usually take a book with me, and that was what I did this time. I settled down beside the bed and opened Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time , which includes a lot of interesting things about various systems of coordinates. I’ve already read the book from cover to cover several times, but I still haven’t got fed up with it, and every time I laugh as if I were reading it for the first time. I even have a suspicion that it’s a postmodern joke, a kind of scam. The very name Stephen Hawking is suspiciously reminiscent of another horror writer by the name of Stephen King. But the horrors here are of a different kind.

The Sikh turned out to be relatively quiet. He muttered something in his native language and squirmed about in the very centre of the bed. There was no need to be concerned that he might fall out on to the floor. But even so, like a good nurse, I glanced at the patient occasionally. When he got fed with embracing the upper half of an empty space, he started pressing himself against it from the side. Then he moved back to the top again.

It’s hard to get used to this sight. People have muscular spasms, and at such moments the client looks as if he really is lying on an invisible body. His entire weight is supported on his awkwardly twisted wrists, or sometimes on his fingers. Normally a man could never deliberately hold himself in that position for even a few seconds, but in a trance he can stay in it for hours. Similar phenomena are repeatedly described in the literature on hypnosis, so nobody will give me a Nobel Prize for the discovery. And I don’t need human fame anyway. I don’t need anything from human beings except love and money.