Babylon

by Виктор Пелевин

  ‘There’s someone here who drives one,’ said Azadovsky. ‘I’ve seen it in the parking lot.’

  Morkovin looked up at Tatarsky.

  ‘But… But…’ Tatarsky mumbled, but Morkovin just shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘forget it. Give me the keys.’

  Tatarsky took his car keys out of his pocket and submissively placed them in Morkovin’s open hand.

  ‘The seat-covers are new,’ he said piteously; ‘maybe I could take them off?’

  ‘Are you rucking crazy?’ Azadovsky exploded. ‘D’you want them to drop us to fifty megahertz so we have to dismiss the government and disband the Duma again? Bloody seat-covers! Use your head!’

  The telephone rang in his pocket.

  "Allo.’ he said, raising it to his ear. ‘What? I’ll tell you what to do with him. There’s a camera crew going out into the country straightaway - to film a bombed car. Take that arse-hole, put him in the driver’s seat and blow him up. Make sure there’s blood and scraps of flesh, and you film it all. It’ll be a lesson for the rest of them, with their black PR… What? You tell him there isn’t anything in the world more important than what’s about to happen to him. He shouldn’t let himself be distracted by minor details. And he shouldn’t think he can tell me anything I don’t already know.’

  Azadovsky folded up his phone and tossed it into his pocket, sighed several times and clutched at his heart.

  ‘It hurts,’ he complained. ‘Do you bastards really want me to have a heart attack at thirty? Seems to me I’m the only one in this committee who’s not on the take. Everybody back to work on the double. I’m going to phone the States. We might just get away with it.’

  When Azadovsky left the room, Morkovin looked meaningfully into Tatarsky’s eyes, tugged a small tin box out of his pocket and tipped out a pile of white powder on the desk.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘be my guest.’

  When the procedure was completed, Morkovin moistened his finger, picked up the white grains left on the table and licked them off with his tongue.

  ‘You were asking’, he said, ‘how things could be this way, what everything’s based on, who it’s all controlled by. I tell you, all you need to think about here is to cover your own ass and get your job done. There’s no time left for any other thoughts. And by the way, there’s something you’d better do: put the money into your pockets and flush the envelopes down the John. Straightaway. Just in case. The toilet’s down the corridor on the left…’

  Tatarsky locked himself in the cubicle and distributed the wads of banknotes around his pockets - he’d never seen such a load of money at one time before. He tore the envelopes into small pieces and threw the scraps into the toilet bowl. A folded note fell out of one of the envelopes - Tatarsky caught it in mid-air and read it:

  Hi, guys! Thanks a lot for sometimes allowing me to live a parallel life. Without that the real one would be so disgusting! Good luck in business, B. Berezovsky.

  The text was printed on a laser printer, and the signature was a facsimile. ‘Morkovin playing the joker again,’ thought Tatarsky. ‘Or maybe it’s not Morkovin…’

  He crossed himself, pinched his thigh really hard and flushed the toilet.

  CHAPTER 14. Critical Times

  They were shooting from the bridge, the way they do these things in Moscow. The old T-80s only fired at long intervals, as though the sponsors, short of money for shells, were afraid it would all be over too quickly and so they wouldn’t make the international news. There was apparently some unwritten minimal requirement for reports from Russia: there had to be at least three or maybe four tanks, a hundred dead and something else as well - Tatarsky couldn’t remember what exactly. This time an exception must have been made because of the picturesque visual quality of the events: although there were only two tanks, the quayside was packed with television crews with their optical bazookas blasting out megatons of somnolent human attention along the river Moscow at the tanks, the bronze Peter the Great and the window behind which Tatarsky was concealed.

  The cannon of one of the tanks standing on the bridge roared and the same instant Tatarsky was struck by an interesting idea: he could offer the people in the Bridge image-service the silhouette of a tank as a promising logo to replace that incomprehensible eagle of theirs. In a split second - less time than it took for the shell to reach its target - Tatarsky’s conscious mind had weighed up the possibilities (‘the image of the tank symbolises the aggressive power of the group and at the same time introduces a traditional Russian note into the context of cosmopolitical finance’) and immediately the idea was rejected. "They’d piss themselves,’ Tatarsky decided. ‘Pity, though.’

  A shell caught Peter the Great in the head, but it didn’t explode, passing straight on through and continuing its flight roughly in the direction of Gorky Park. A tall plume of steam shot up into the air. Tatarsky remembered that the head of the monument contained a small restaurant complete with full services and facilities, and he decided the blank must have severed a pipe in the heating system. He heard the TV crews yelling in delight. The swirling plume made Peter look like some monster knight out of Steven King. Remembering how the rotting brains of the monster in The Talisman had dribbled down over its shoulders, Tatarsky thought the resemblance would be complete if the next shell severed a sewage pipe.

  Peter’s head was defended by the Defence of Sebastopol committee. They said in the news that didn’t mean the city, but the hotel, which was being fought over by two mafia groups, the Chechens and the Solntsevo mob. They also said the Solntsevo mob had hired stuntmen from Mosfilm and set up this strange shoot-out in order to attract TV coverage and generally inflame anti-Caucasian feeling (if the abundance of pyrotechnics and special effects was anything to go by, it had to be true). The simple-minded Chechens, who weren’t too well versed in the protocol of PR campaigns, hadn’t figured out what was going on, and they’d hired the two tanks somewhere outside Moscow.

  So far the stuntmen were returning fire and giving as good as they got - there was a puff of smoke in the hole beside Peter’s ragged eye and a grenade exploded on the bridge. A tank fired in reply. The blank struck Peter’s head, sending fragments of bronze showering downwards. For some reason every new hit made the emperor even more goggle-eyed.

  Of all the participants in the drama the only one Tatarsky felt any sympathy for was the bronze idol dying slowly before the glass eyes of the TV cameras; and he didn’t feel that very strongly - he hadn’t finished his work, and had to conserve the energy of his emotional centre. Tatarsky lowered the blinds, cutting himself off completely from what was going on, sat at his computer and re-read the quotation written in felt-tip pen on the wallpaper over the monitor:

  In order to influence the imagination of the Russian customer and win his confidence (for the most part customers for advertising in Russia are representatives of the old KGB, GRU and party nomenklatura), an advertising concept should borrow as far as possible from the hypothetical semi-secret or entirely secret techiques developed by the Western special services for the programming of consciousness, which are imbued with a quite breathtaking cynicism and inhumanity. Fortunately, it is not too difficul to improvise on this theme-one need only recall Oscar Wilde’s words about life imitating art.

  ‘The Final Positioning’

  ‘Sure" said Tatarsky, ‘that’s not too difficult.’ He tensed as though he was about to leap into cold water, frowned, took a deep breath and held the air in his lungs while he counted to three, then launched his fingers at the keyboard:

  We can sum up the preceding by saying that in the foreseeable longer term television is likely to remain the primary channel for the implantation of the customer’s schizo-units in the consciousness of the Russian public. In view of this, we regard as extremely dangerous a tendency that has emerged in recent times among the so-called middle class - the most promising stratum of viewers from the point of vie
w of the social effectiveness ofteleschizomanipulation. We are referring to total abstinence or the conscious limitation of the amount of television watched in order to save nervous energy for work. Even professional television writers are doing it, because it is an accepted maxim of post-Freudianism that in the information age it is not sexuality that should be sublimated, so much as the energy that is squandered on the pointless daily viewing of television.

  In order to nip this tendency in the bud, for this concept it is proposed to employ a method developed jointly by MI6 and the US Central Intelligence Agency for neutralising the remnants of an intellectually independent national intelligentsia in Third World Countries. (We have proceeded from the initial assumption that the middle class in Russia is formed directly from the intelligentsia, which has ceased thinking nationally and begun thinking about where it can get money.)

  The method is extremely simple. Since every television channel’s programming contains a fairly high level of synapse-disrupting material per unit of time…

  There was a boom outside the window, and shrapnel drummed across the roof. Tatarsky drew his head down into his shoulders. Having re-read what he’d written, he deleted ‘synapse-disrupting’ and replaced it with ‘neuro-destrucnve’.

  …the goal of schizosuggestology will be achieved simply as a result of holding the individual to be neutralised in front of a television screen for a long enough period of time. It is suggested that in order to achieve this result one can take advantage of a typical feature of a member of the Intelligentsia - sexual frustration.

  Internal ratings and data from secret surveys indicate that the biggest draw for the member of the intelligentsia is the erotic night-time channels. But the effect achieved would be maximised if instead of a certain set of television broadcasts the television receiver itself were to achieve the status of an erotic stimulus in the consciousness of the subject being processed. Bearing in mind the patriarchal nature of Russian society and the determinative role played by the male section of the population in the formation of public opinion, it would seem most expedient to develop the subconscious associative link: ‘television-female sexual organ’. This association should be evoked by the television itself regardless of its make or the nature of the material being transmitted in order to achieve optimal results from schizomanipulation.

  The cheapest and technically simplest means of achieving this goal is the massive oversaturation of air time with television adverts for women’s panty-liners. They should be constantly doused with blue liquid (activating the associations: ‘blue screen, waves in the ether, etc.’), while the clips themselves should he constructed in such a way that the panty-liner seems to crawl on to the screen itself, implanting the required association in the most direct manner possible.

  Tatarsky heard a light ringing sound behind him and he swung round. To the accompaniment of a strange-sounding, somehow northern music, a golden woman’s torso of quite exceptional, inexpressible beauty appeared on the television screen, rotating slowly. ‘Ishtar,’ Tatarsky guessed; ‘who else could it be?’ The face of the statue was concealed from sight behind the edge of the screen, but the camera was slowly rising and the face would come into sight in just a moment. But an instant before it became visible, the camera moved in so close to the statue that there was nothing left on the screen but a golden shimmering. Tatarsky clicked on the remote, but the image on the television didn’t change - the television itself changed instead. It began distending around the edges, transforming itself into the likeness of an immense vagina, with a powerful wind whistling shrilly as the air was sucked right into its black centre.

  ‘I’m asleep,’ Tatarsky mumbled into his pillow. ‘I’m asleep…’

  He carefully turned over on to his other side, but the shrill sound didn’t disappear. Raising himself up on one elbow, he cast a gloomy eye over the thousand-dollar prostitute snoring gently beside him: in the dim light it was quite impossible to tell she wasn’t Claudia Schiffer. He reached out for the mobile phone lying on the bedside locker and croaked into it: ‘Allo.’

  ‘What’s this, been hitting the sauce again?’ Morkovin roared merrily. ‘Have you forgotten we’re going to a barbecue? Get yourself down here quick, I’m already waiting for you. Azadovsky doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’

  ‘On my way,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I’ll just grab a shower.’

  The autumn highway was deserted and sad, and the sadness was only emphasised by the fact that the trees along its edges were still green and looked just as though it was still summer; but it was clear that summer had passed by without fulfilling a single one of its promises. The air was filled with a vague presentiment of winter, snowfalls and catastrophe - for a long time Tatarsky was unable to understand the source of this feeling, until he looked at the hoardings installed at the side of the road. Every half-kilometre the car rushed past a Tampax advertisement, a huge sheet of plywood showing a pair of white roller skates lying on virginal white snow. That explained the presentiment of winter all right, but the source of the all-pervading sense of alarm still remained unclear. Tatarsky decided that he and Morkovin must have driven into one of those psychological waves of depression that had been drifting across Moscow and its surroundings ever since the beginning of the crisis. The nature of these waves remained mysterious, but Tatarksy had no doubt whatever that they existed, so he was rather offended when Morkovin laughed at him for mentioning them.

  ‘As far the snow goes you were spot on,’ he said; ‘but as far as these wave things are concerned… Take a closer look at the hoardings. Don’t you notice anything?’

  Morkovin slowed down at the next hoarding and Tatarsky suddenly noticed a large graffito written in blood-red spray paint above the skates and the snow: ‘Arrest Yeltsin’s gang!’

  ‘Right!’ he said ecstatically. ‘There was the same kind of thing on all the others! On the last one there was a hammer and sickle, on the one before that there was a swastika, and before that, something about wops and nig-nog s… Incredible. Your mind just filters it out - you don’t even notice. And the colour, what a colour! Who dreamed it all up?’

  ‘You’ll laugh when you hear,’ answered Morkovin, picking up speed. ‘It was Malyuta. Of course, we rewrote almost all the texts - they were much too frightening - but we didn’t change the idea. As you’re so fond of saying, an associative field is formed: ‘days of crisis - blood could flow - Tampax -your shield against excesses’. Figure it out: nowadays there are only two brands selling the same volumes they used to in Moscow, Tampax and Parliament Lights.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ said Tatarsky, and clicked his tongue. ‘It just begs for the slogan: ‘Tampax ultra-safe. The reds shall not pass!’ Or personalise it: not the reds, but Zyuganov - and according to Castaneda, menstruation is a crack between the worlds. If you want to stay on the right side of the crack… No, like this: Tampax. The right side of the crack…

  ‘Yes,’ said Morkovin thoughtfully, ‘we should pass these ideas on to the oral department.’

  ‘We could bring up the theme of the white movement as well. Imagine it: an officer in a beige service jacket on a hillside in the Crimea, something out of Nabokov… They’d sell five times as many.’

  ‘What does that matter?’ said Morkovin. ‘Sales are just a side effect. It’s not Tampax we’re promoting; it’s alarm and uncertainty.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We have a crisis on our hands, don’t we?’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Tatarsky, ‘of course. Listen, about the crisis - I still don’t understand how Semyon Velin managed to delete the entire government. It was all triple protected.’

  ‘Semyon wasn’t just a designer.’ replied Morkovin. ‘He was a programmer. D’you know the scale he was working on? They found thirty-seven million in greenbacks in his accounts afterwards. He even switched Zyuganov’s jacket from Pierre Cardin to St Lauren. Even now nobody can figure out how he managed to break into the oral director
y from our terminal. And as for what he did with neckties and shirts… Azadovsky was sick for two whole days after he read the report.’

  ‘Impressive.’

  ‘Sure it was. Our Semyon had a roving eye, but he knew what he was getting into. So he decided he needed some insurance. He wrote a program that would delete the entire directory at the end of the month if he didn’t cancel it personally, and he planted it in Kirienko’s file. After that the program infected the entire government. We have anti-virus protection, of course, but Semyon thought up this fucking program that wrote itself on to the ends of sectors and assembled itself at the end of the month, so there was no way it could be picked up from the control sums. Just don’t ask me what all that means - I don’t understand it myself - I just happened to overhear someone talking about it. To cut it short, when they were taking him out of town in your Mercedes, he tried to tell Azadovsky about it, but he wouldn’t even talk to him. Then everything defaulted. Azadovsky was tearing his hair out.’

  ‘So will there be a new government soon?’ Tatarsky asked. ‘I’m already tired of doing nothing.’

  ‘Soon, very soon. Yeltsin’s ready - tomorrow we’ll discharge him from the Central Kremlin Hospital. We had him digitised again in London. From the wax figure in Madame Tussaud’s - they’ve got it in the store room. It’s the third time we’ve had to restore him - you wouldn’t believe the amount of hassle he’s given everyone - and we’re finishing off the NURBS for all the others. Only the government’s turning out really leftist; I mean, it’s got communists in it. It’s those schemers in the oral department. But that doesn’t really bother me much - it’ll only make things easier for us. And for the people too: one identity for the lot and ration cards for butter. Only so far Sasha Blo’s still holding us back with the Russian Idea.’

  ‘Hold hard there,’ Tatarsky said, suddenly cautious; ‘don’t frighten me like that. Who’s going to be next? After Yeltsin?’