Buddha's Little Finger

by Виктор Пелевин

  8

  ‘But just why exactly did you think they were like shadows?’ Timur Timurovich asked.

  Volodin twitched nervously, but the tight straps securing his arms and legs to the garrotte prevented him from moving, There were large drops of sweat glistening on his forehead.

  ‘I don’t know.’ he said. ‘You asked me what I was thinking just at that moment. Well, I was thinking that if there was any external observer around there to watch, he’d probably have thought we weren’t real, that we were nothing but flickering shadows and reflections from the flames - I told you there was a camp-fire. But then you know, Timur Timurovich, it all really depends on the observer

  The camp-fire in the clearing had barely begun to blaze and was not yet giving enough tight to disperse the gloom and illuminate the figures sitting around it; they appeared to be no more than blurred spectral shadows cast on an invisible screen by the branches and sods of earth lying beside the fire. Perhaps, in a certain higher sense, that is precisely what they were - but since the last of the local neo-Platonists had abandoned his shame at possessing a body shortly before the Twentieth Party Congress, there was no one to reach such a conclusion within a radius of at least one hundred miles.

  It would be better, therefore, to state the facts simply - sitting in the semi-darkness around the camp-fire were three hulking brutes. Their appearance, moreover, was such that if our neo Platonist were to have survived the Twentieth Congress and all of the insights that ensued therefrom, and to have emerged from the forest and approached the fire to discuss his topic with the new arrivals, he would very probably have suffered severe physical disfigurement as soon as the word ‘neo-Platonism’ disturbed the silence of the night. The signs that suggested this to be the case were numerous.

  The most significant among them was the ‘Toyota Harbour Pearl’ amphibious Jeep standing close by; another was the immense winch on its bonnet - an item of absolutely no use whatever in normal life, but frequently to be found on the vehicles of gangsters. (Anthropologists who have devoted their efforts to studying the ‘New Russians’ believe that these winches are used as rams during the settling of accounts, and certain scholars even see their popularity as an indirect indication of the long-awaited resurgence of the spirit of the nation - they believe the winches fulfil the mystical role of the figureheads that once decorated the bows of ancient Slavonic barks.) In short, it was clear that the people who had arrived in this jeep were not to be trifled with, and it would be best not to risk uttering any superfluous words in their company. They were talking quietly among themselves.

  ‘How many bits does it take, eh, Volodin?’ one of them asked.

  ‘That depends on you,’ Volodin answered as he unwrapped a paper bundle on his knees. ‘For instance, I take a hundred at a time already. But I’d recommend you start with about thirty.’

  ‘And that’ll do it?’

  ‘That’ll do it, Shurik,’ said Volodin, dividing up the contents of the bundle, a dark heap of something dry and brittle, into three unequal portions. ‘You’ll end up running all over the forest trying to find a place to hide. And you’ll be running too, Kolyan.’

  ‘Me?’ the third person sitting by the fire asked in a deep bass. ‘And just who am I gonna be runnin’ away from?’

  ‘From yourself, Kolyan. From your own self,’ Volodin answered.

  ‘I ain’t never run away from no one,’ said Kolyan, picking up his portion with a hand that looked like the body of a toy dump truck. ‘You better watch your mouth. Why’d I wanna run away from meself? It don’t make no sense.’

  ‘I can only explain it by using an example,’ said Volodin.

  ‘Give us an example, then.’

  Volodin thought for a moment.

  ‘Okay, just imagine some low-life scum comes into our office, sticks all his fingers up in the air and says we should be sharing. What would you do then?’

  ‘I’d drop him,’ said Kolyan.

  ‘You what? Right there in the office?’ Shurik asked.

  ‘That don’t matter. They gotta pay for givin’ us the fingers.’ Shurik slapped Kolyan on the shoulder, then turned to Volodin and said reassuringly, ‘Course not in the office. We’d set up a shoot’

  ‘Okay,’ said Volodin. ‘So you set up a shoot, right? And then what happens? Let Kolyan answer.’

  ‘Clear enough,’ Kolyan responded. ‘We goes round there, and when that jerk turns up I says - right mate, give us all the dirt on yerself He starts jawin’, and I waits a minute and nods my head, like, and then I blow him away… Yeah. And then all the rest too.’

  He looked at the tiny mound of dark garbage on his palm and asked, ‘Just swaller it, just like that?’

  ‘Chew it properly first,’ said Volodin.

  Kolyan dispatched the contents of his palm into his mouth.

  ‘Smells like mushroom soup,’ he stated.

  ‘Swaller it,’ said Shurik. ‘I’ve eaten mine, no problem.’

  ‘So you blow him away,’ Volodin said thoughtfully. ‘So what if he gets the drop on you two first?’

  Kolyan pondered for a few seconds, working his jaws, then he swallowed and said confidently, ‘Nah, he won’t.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ said Volodin, ‘Where are you going to drop him, right there in his wheels, from a distance, or will you let him get out?’

  ‘I’ll let him gerrout,’ said Kolyan. ‘It’s only woodentops as drops jerks in their wheels. Holes everywhere, blood too - why go spoilin’ a nice set of wheels? The best kind of hit is when he comes over to our wheels.’

  ‘Okay, so let’s take the best case, imagine he’s already got out of his wheels and comes over to yours and you’re just about to blow him away, when you see…’ Volodin paused significantly, ‘when you see it isn’t him standing there, but you. And you’ve got to blow yourself away. Don’t you reckon you might drop a marble or two?’

  ‘Sure I would.’

  ‘And when your marbles are bouncing, it’s not really chicken to kick into reverse?’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘So you’d cut and run, because it wouldn’t be chicken?’

  ‘if it ain’t chicken, sure.’

  ‘So it turns out you’d be running away from yourself. Get it?’

  ‘Nah,’ Kolyan said after a pause, ‘I don’t get it. If it ain’t him, but me, then where am l?’

  ‘You’re him.’

  ‘Then who’s he?’

  ‘He’s you.’

  ‘Nah, I just don’t get it,’ said Kolyan.

  ‘Well, look,’ said Volodin, ‘can you imagine there’s nothing at all on every side of you, nothing but you? Everywhere?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kolyan. ‘I’ve been that way a coupla times from smack. Or after basing, don’t remember which it was.’

  ‘Then how are you going to blow him away, if there’s nothing around you except you? No matter which way you deal it, you end up planting lead in yourself. Dropped your marbles, haven’t you? Right. So instead of blasting him, you do a runner. So now try figuring that by numbers. Seems to me like you’ll end up running away from yourself

  Kolyan thought for a long time.

  ‘Shurik’ll blow him away,’ he said, eventually.

  ‘That means he’ll hit you. You’re all there is.’

  ‘How come?’ cut in Shurik. ‘if I’ve still got all me marbles in place, I’ll blow the right guy away.’

  This time Volodin had to think longer and harder.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t explain it that way. That’s not a good example. Just hang about a bit till the mushrooms come on, and then we’ll have another go.’

  The next few minutes passed in silence. The threesome sitting by the fire opened a few cans of food, sliced some salami and drank some vodka, but it was all done without speaking, as though the words usually spoken to accompany such actions were petty and out of place against the background of something dark and unexpressed which united all present.

  After the vod
ka the three men smoked a cigarette each, still without speaking.

  ‘How’d the spiel get on to that track anyway?’ Shurik suddenly asked. ‘I mean, like, about the shoot and the marbles?’

  ‘Volodin was sayin’ as how we would end up runnin’ away from ourselves through the wood when the mushrooms came on.’

  ‘Ah. Got you. Listen, why do they say that, «come on»? Where is it they come on from?’

  ‘You asking me?’ asked Volodin.

  ‘You’ll do right enough,’ answered Shurik.

  ‘I’d say they come on from inside,’ Volodin said.

  ‘How’s that then, you mean they’re sitting in there waiting all the time?’

  ‘Yeah, kind of. You could put it like that. And not just them, actually. We’ve got every possible high in the world inside us… Every time you down something or shoot up, all you do is set some part of it free. There’s no high in the drug, it’s nothing but powder or a few chunks of mushroom… it’s like the key to a safe. Get it?’

  ‘Hea-vy,’ Shurik said thoughtfully, for some reason circling his head around clockwise.

  ‘Yeah, real heavy,’ Kolyan agreed, and the conversation died for a few minutes.

  ‘Listen,’ Shurik put in again, ‘is there a lot of high down there inside?’

  ‘An infinite amount,’ Volodin said authoritatively. ‘An inexpressibly and infinitely large amount, there’s even a high you can’t tune into out here.’

  ‘Fuck me… You mean inside’s like a safe and this high’s stuck inside it?’

  ‘Roughly speaking, yeah.’

  ‘And can you blow the safe? Like, so as to get a lift outta the high inside it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You have to devote your entire life to it. Why do you think people go into monasteries and live all their lives there? You think they spend their time beating their heads off the walls? They’re on this incredible trip, the likes of which you couldn’t get out here from a fix for a grand in greens. And no stopping - get it? Morning, noon and night. Some of them even when they’re asleep. On and on for ever.’

  ‘Then what they trippin’ on? What’s it called?’ asked Kolyan.

  ‘It has various names. In general, I suppose you could call it grace. Or love.’

  ‘Whose love?’

  ‘Just love. When you feel it, you stop asking whose it is, what it’s for, why it exists. You just stop thinking altogether.’

  ‘And you’ve felt it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Volodin, ‘I’ve been there.’

  ‘So how’s it feel? What’s it like?’

  ‘It’s hard to say.’

  ‘Give us a rough idea. Is it like smack?’

  ‘Nowhere near it,’ Volodin said with a frown. ‘Compared with this smack is a heap of crap.’

  ‘Well then, kinda like coke, is it, or speed?’

  ‘No, Shurik. No, no, don’t even try comparing it. Just imagine you’ve done a bundle of speed and you’re tripping out - say you’ll be tripping for a day. You’ll want a dame and the whole works, right?’

  Shurik giggled.

  ‘And then you’ll be coming down for a day. And you’ll probably start thinking - what the fuck did I need all that for?’

  ‘Yeah, it happens,’ said Shurik.

  ‘But with this gear, once it gets to you, it stays with you for ever. And you won’t need any dames, and you won’t get any munchies. No coming down. No cold turkey. You just keep praying for the trip to go on and on for ever. Get it?’

  ‘Like, heavier than smack?’

  ‘Way heavier.’

  Volodin leaned over the camp-fire and stirred the branches around. It immediately flared up, as strongly as though petrol had been poured into the fire. The flames were strange - they gave off various-coloured sparks of unusual beauty, and the light that fell on the faces of the three men sitting there was also unusual, rainbow-coloured and soft, with an astonishing depth.

  They could be seen very clearly now. Volodin was a plump, roundish man of about forty with a shaved head and a small, neat beard - his appearance was that of a civilized Central Asian bandit. Shurik was a skinny, fidgety little man with blond hair who made a lot of small, meaningless movements. He didn’t look very strong, but his constant nervous twitching betrayed something so frightening that beside him the muscle-bound Kolyan looked like a mere wolfhound puppy, in short, if Shurik typified the elite type of St Petersburg mobster, then Kolyan was the standard Moscow hulkodrome whose appearance had been so brilliantly foretold by the futurists at the beginning of the century. He seemed to be nothing but an intersection of simple geometrical forms - spheres, cubes and pyramids - and his small streamlined head was reminiscent of that stone which according to the evangelist was discarded by the builders but nonetheless became the cornerstone in the foundation of the new Russian statehood.

  ‘There.’ said Volodin, ‘now the mushrooms have come on.’

  ‘Whoah.’ Kolyan confirmed. ‘And then some. I’ve turned blue all over.’

  ‘Yeah.’ said Shurik, ‘that sure don’t feel like nothing. Listen. Volodin, was all that stuff for real?’

  ‘All what stuff?’

  ‘All that stuff about fixing yourself up a trip that lasts all your life… So you just stay high all the time.’

  ‘I didn’t say all your life. The concepts in there are different.’

  ‘You said yourself as you’d be tripping all the time.’

  ‘I didn’t say that either.’

  ‘Kol, didn’t he say it?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ mumbled Kolyan. He seemed to have dropped out of the conversation and to be occupied with some’ thing else.

  ‘Then what did you say?’ asked Shurik.

  ‘I didn’t say all the time.’ said Volodin. ‘I said «for ever». Keep your ears open,’

  ‘So what’s the difference?’

  ‘The difference is where that high starts, there isn’t any more time.’

  ‘What is there then?’

  ‘Grace.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Can’t quite get me head round that somehow,’ said Shurik. ‘Just hanging there in empty space, is it, this grace?’

  ‘There’s no empty space there either.’

  ‘Then what is there?’

  ‘I told you, grace.’

  ‘You’ve lost me again.’

  ‘Don’t bother about it,’ said Volodin. ‘If it was that easy to get your head round, half of Moscow would be tripping for free right now. Just think about it - a gram of cocaine costs one hundred, and here this is free, for nothing.’

  ‘Hundred and fifty,’ said Shurik. ‘Nah, something’s not right here. Even if it was tough to bend yer head round, people’d still know about it and they’d be tripping. They figured out how to make speed out of nose drops, didn’t they?’

  ‘Use your brains, Shurik,’ said Volodin. ‘Just imagine you’re dealing cocaine, right? One gram for one hundred and fifty bucks, and you get ten greenbacks from each gram. And in a month you sell, say, five hundred grams. How much is that?’

  ‘Five grand,’ said Shurik.

  ‘So now imagine some scumball has cut your sales from five hundred grams to five. What have you got?’

  Shurik’s lips moved as he quietly mumbled some figures.

  ‘A limp prick, that’s what,’ he answered.

  ‘Exactly. You could take your whore to McDonald’s one time, but as for snorting anything yourself - forget it. So what would you do with a scumball who set you up like that?’

  ‘Blow him away,’ said Shurik. ‘Obvious.’

  ‘So now do you see why nobody knows about it?’

  ‘You reckon the dope pushers keep things tight?’

  ‘There’s far more to it than just drugs,’ said Volodin. ‘There’s much bigger bread tied up in this. If you break through into this eternal high, then you don’t need any wheels, or any petrol, or any adverti
sements, or any porn, or any news. And neither does anyone else. What would happen then?’

  ‘Everything’d be fucked,’ said Shurik, glancing around him. ‘All of culture and civilization. Clear as day, that is.’

  ‘So that’s why nobody knows about the eternal high.’

  ‘But who controls the whole business?’ Shurik asked after a moment’s thought.

  ‘It works automatically. It’s the market.’

  ‘Don’t you go giving me any spiel about the market,’ Shurik said with a frown. ‘We’ve had it all before. Automatic. Yeah, well it’s automatic when that suits, or you can make it single-shot. Or you can put the safety catch on. Someone’s got all the trumps, that’s all. Maybe we’ll find out who later, in about forty years, not before.’

  ‘We’ll never find out,’ said Kolyan, without opening his eyes. ‘Come on. Just think about it. When a guy’s got a million greenbacks, he just sits back and takes it easy, and anyone who starts to spread the dirt about him gets dropped straight off. And the guys who’re holdin’ trumps or got the real power are way heavier than that! The most we can do is take out some hulk, or torch some office, and that’s it. Nothin’ but garbage men, we are, clean up the small stuff. But those guys can bring in the tanks if they can’t fix anythin’ by spielin’. And if that don’t do it, they’ve got planes, an atom bomb if that’s what it takes. Just look what happened when the Chechens stopped shellin’ out, came down on them like a ton of bricks, didn’t they? If they hadn’t copped on at the last moment, they wouldn’t be able to shell out for nothin’ no more. And remember the White House. How could we ever come on to Slav-East like that?’

  ‘You give over with yer White House,’ said Shurik. ‘Dopey bastard. We’re not talking politics. We’re talking about the eternal high… Listen… Really now… They said on the box that all of them in the White House were going around stoned out of their skulls. Maybe they twigged about this eternal high? And they wanted to tell everyone about it on the telly, so they went after Ostankino, only the cocaine mafia wouldn’t let them through… Nah, now me marbles is slipping.’

  Shurik put his hands around his head and fell silent.