Empire V

by Victor Pelevin

  At the same time I discovered the secret of my new teeth. They were, as I have already said, of perfectly normal size and shape and differed from my own only in being slightly whiter. As I learned, the teeth do not themselves puncture the victim’s skin but generate an electrical discharge, something like the piezoelectric sparks from the crystal in a cigarette lighter. The electrical rods are the glands housed in the vampire’s soft palate in the region of his second brain, approximately where his tonsils used to be. After the electrical discharge, a minute area of vacuum appears just above the small wound in the bitten person’s skin, into which a few drops of blood are drawn. The bite is accompanied by a sharp but practically imperceptible jerk of the head: this is the vampire catching the drops of blood in flight and applying them with his tongue to his palate, after which degustation commences. Ideally there should be no visible signs on the victim’s skin at all. In the worst case one or two drops of red liquid may fall, but there has never been any instance of blood actually flowing. To the victim the process is completely harmless.

  As well as this information, the preparation contained some instructions along the lines of ‘how to comport oneself when carrying out a bite’. This advice was of a purely tactical nature.

  The vampire is recommended to act as though preparing to say something in a low voice to the victim. Care must be taken not to suggest to onlookers that he is about to spit in the victim’s ear, or whisper indecencies, or inhale the scent of another person’s perfume, or other such invasions of privacy: there could be as many interpretations as there are guardians of public morality.

  All this lay in the future for me.

  There is a painting by the artist Deineke, ‘Fliers of the Future’, which depicts young lads on the seashore gazing up at the sky where they see the faint contours of an aeroplane. Were I to paint a picture of ‘The Vampire of the Future’ it would look like this: a pale youth sitting in a cavernous armchair in front of the black hole of an empty fireplace, staring in fascination at a photograph of a bat.

  FIRST BITE

  Mithra telephoned to find out how things were going.

  ‘Fair, I suppose,’ I said grumpily. ‘Only thing is, fair in a way I don’t particularly care for.’

  ‘Colourfully put,’ chuckled Mithra. ‘The Tongue does make for interesting conversationalists. But what I can’t understand is why you’re in such a mood. Surely you realise you’ve become a completely different person? Far better educated, more developed? On a different intellectual plane from what you were?’

  ‘Maybe, but this enviable new person has a raft of questions to which no one wants to give him answers.’

  ‘Just wait a bit, you’ll soon know more than you bargained for. All in good time. Speaking of which, it’s time I tipped you off about something. So it doesn’t come as too much of a shock.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked in alarm.

  Mithra laughed.

  ‘Anyone would think you’re in shock already. Your first bite is coming up. When exactly I don’t know, but you won’t have long to wait.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll be able to manage it,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ replied Mithra. ‘You’ll find your fiddle will play itself. You’re frightened of the new, that’s all. There’s really nothing to be afraid of. A joyful moment in your life is approaching. Your first time is … I can’t begin to describe it. All I can tell you is that it will leave you with blissful memories.’

  ‘What do I have to do?’

  ‘Nothing, I told you. Just wait. Your spirit will tell you when the time comes.’

  I cannot say that I found this parting advice very encouraging. It reminded me of the Japanese custom whereby the samurai, on taking possession of a new sword, must go to the outskirts of the town at night and behead the first person he meets. I felt oppressed, fearing that I might have to do something of the sort. But the Tongue maintained its passive calm, and the reassuringly solid weight at the centre of my soul soothed me like an ice cube held against the forehead … I grant that the phrase ‘at the centre of my soul’ has an odd ring about it – after all, the soul has no such thing as a centre. But that is a normal soul; my soul did have a centre.

  When it came, the event was nothing like what I had supposed. My first vampiric experience had less to do with Thanatos than with his long-term partner Eros. All the same, I would not go so far as to describe it as pleasant.

  One afternoon, immediately after my lesson with Baldur, I lay down for a nap. On waking some hours later, I felt a sudden impulse to go out for a walk. I put on jeans and my Simpsons t-shirt – I sometimes used to wear it for my shifts at the supermarket – and left the apartment.

  The town was bathed in evening sunshine. I wandered along the street, vaguely discontented. First I felt like smoking a cigarette, though I had never had the habit. Then I thought I might go for a pint of beer, but that was another thing I did not normally like to do. Precisely what it was I craved I did not know, but I definitely wanted to do something. And then, without warning, it became clear.

  I cannot explain how I selected my target. All I know is that at a certain moment it was there. It came about like this: I saw a girl walking towards me. She had on a light-coloured dress with a check pattern, and carried a white handbag. As she passed me she looked me in the eye. I turned and followed her without a moment’s hesitation.

  I knew what was happening. I seemed not to be in charge of my actions; the Tongue had taken control of my will. I distinctly remember feeling like a horse being ridden into battle by a veteran cavalryman. All the terrified animal wants to do is turn tail and run away, but the spurs digging deep into its flanks give it no choice – just as I had no choice – but to go into action promptly and effectively.

  Coming up behind the girl I leaned towards her as though to call out to her. Instinct made me open my mouth as if to draw in a gulp of air; I saw the shell of her ear close to me, and then something strange occurred. I heard a faint click, my head involuntarily jerked back – and I knew the deed was done.

  An onlooker, no doubt, would have seen the episode like this: a young man goes up to a girl intending to ask her a question, opens his mouth, bends towards her ear – and suddenly sneezes. Embarrassed he slackens his pace.

  She did not turn round, simply drew up her shoulders nervously, and a tiny pink spot appeared on her neck. The bite had been expertly accomplished: not a drop of blood was to be seen on the skin. Fighting the desire to sit down on the pavement and close my eyes in exhaustion, I continued to follow her.

  At that time I did not know that to bite a person of the opposite sex for the first time is an experience as extraordinary as one’s first kiss. The Biblical expression ‘knowing’ a woman is actually no more than a euphemism for having sex with her. Only a vampire can truly know a woman. And when he does, his eyes are opened to an astounding secret, one which the ordinary person, capable of perceiving only his or her half of the truth, can never know in its entirety.

  The fact is – and it is something of which mankind generally remains in ignorance – that the coexistence of the two sexes is an extraordinary, hilarious but completely invisible absurdity. People’s knowledge of the inner life of members of the opposite sex is based on all kinds of gibberish – ‘secrets of her heart’ gleaned from a cheap wall calendar or, even worse, ‘how to manipulate the male superego’ as promoted in magazines like Marie Claire. This inner life is usually portrayed by one sex employing terminology tailored to its own understanding of the other: thus men appear as bearded, bullying, coarse versions of women, and women as idiotic dickless males who know nothing about driving a car.

  The truth is that men and women are much farther apart than either side can possibly imagine. The extent to which they differ is almost impossible to put into words. The essence of the difference lies, needless to say, in the hormonal composition of the red liquid
.

  Think of the situation in this way: our world is populated by two types of drug user, each addicted to extremely strong psychotropic substances producing radically different effects. The hallucinations affecting each type are diametrically opposed, yet the subjects are obliged to live in permanent conjunction with one another. For this reason they have learned to indulge jointly in fundamentally different individual trips, relying on an elaborate form of etiquette that allows each side, despite the fact that the same words mean different things to them, to behave as if it understood the other.

  It may be objected that all this is familiar territory to any transsexual who has undergone a sex-change operation and taken a course of hormone injections. Not necessarily so. Transsexuals alter their inner state by degrees, as a voyager across the ocean gradually forgets who he is and where he has come from. Vampires, however, are able to transport themselves from one configuration to the other in a matter of seconds …

  The girl I had bitten remembered having seen me in passing, and I knew she liked what she had seen (it was exactly as though I was looking at my own reflection in a mirror endowed with emotions). This at first surprised me, and then I found it embarrassing. Finally, my thoughts found themselves impelled in a direction neither entirely proper nor, ultimately, under my control.

  We turned into Bolshaya Bronnaya Street. Walking a pace behind her I shamelessly explored the twists and turns of her memory and invented ways to use what I discovered there. By the time we approached Pushkin Square, my plan was complete.

  Overtaking her and marching ahead about ten metres, I halted, turned round and went back towards her with a broad smile on my face. She looked at me in astonishment, and continued on her way, past me. I waited a little and then repeated the manoeuvre: overtaking, turning back and smiling. She smiled in response and again walked past me. When I repeated the exercise a third time, she stopped and said:

  ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘Don’t you recognise me?’

  ‘No. Who are you?’

  ‘Roma.’

  I gave my real name, because I knew she had not recalled the name of the person I had decided to impersonate.

  ‘Roma? Roma who?’

  This was the moment I put my stolen ace of spades on the table. ‘The Quiet Azure guest house. New Year. Room with the Christmas tree and the lights out. Everyone else had gone out to let off fireworks. Do you honestly not remember?’

  ‘Ohhh …’ – she even had the grace to blush – ‘that was you?’

  I nodded. She hung her head and we walked on.

  ‘I’ve never in my life been as drunk as that,’ she said. ‘I’m really ashamed. Took me ages to get back to normal.’

  ‘For me,’ I lied brazenly, ‘it’s still one of the happiest memories of my life. That may sound exaggerated, but it’s true. I kept ringing you afterwards. Many times.’

  ‘What number did you ring?’

  I spelt out the number of her mobile phone, changing the last two numbers from 18 to 19. That was the way she always changed them herself when she felt awkward declining to give her number but unwilling to say the real one – then it would always be possible to say that her companion had misheard.

  ‘You mean you still remember it?’ she said in surprise. ‘You must have written it down wrong. It should end with 18.’

  ‘Oh hell,’ I said. ‘Why does this always happen to me? Listen, can’t we celebrate meeting up again like this?’

  The rest was easy. First we went to a café on Tverskaya Street, then to another café, where I had to bite her once more in order to clarify what we could talk about while we were eating (this time a couple of tiny drops of blood did remain on her neck). I talked only about things that interested her and said only things she wanted to hear. It was not difficult.

  I felt myself a Casanova. I had no conception of doing anything wrong. The difference between my behaviour and the standard pick-up approach was as described by St Paul: whereas the ordinary male sees everything through a glass, darkly, I saw it face to face. I knew exactly what to say and how to say it. It was like playing cards and being able to see what was in my opponent’s hand. Yes, it was cheating. But the aim of people in this game is usually not to win but to yield to each other while taking care not too openly to breach the code of good manners.

  We went for a walk, during which I never drew breath. It ‘just so happened’ the route we took led us back to where she lived, in a Stalinist skyscraper on Uprising Square. I knew there was no one else at home. Of course, we had to go up ‘for a cup of tea’. Even the phase of courtship I generally find most problematical, the transition from chatting up to the actual business – something I never learnt how to finesse with any skill or elegance – proceeded this time without undue clumsiness.

  Where I was ambushed was in an area I had least expected. Had it not been for the ennobling influence of the lessons on Discourse, I am sure I would never have been able to articulate what happened.

  The glum, commonplace act of love, performed not from mutual desire but as a routine operation (which is how it most often takes place) always brought to my mind our electoral system. After enduring interminable torrents of lies, the voter is finally allowed to insert the only real – and pathetic – candidate into an indifferent niche, which has already seen so much tampering, doctoring and rigging it no longer cares two hoots about the outcome. The voter is then supposed to persuade himself that this boring performance has been precisely the event that turns the whole world delirious with ecstasy.

  But I knew that on those rare occasions when the procedure is crowned with success (here I am referring not to elections but to the other matter), something occurs which is categorically of a different order. A moment can come about when two separate beings fuse together in a single electrical circuit to become as one body with two heads. An example taken from the world of heraldry would be the ancient Byzantine coat of arms depicting an orthodox chick in the act of enforced union with the turkey which has sneaked up on it from behind.

  On this occasion the moment I speak of occurred. And in that second she understood everything about me. I do not know what exactly it was that she sensed, but I was unmasked, there was no question of it.

  ‘You … you …’

  Pushing me away she sat on the edge of the bed. Her eyes were wide open with such naked horror that even I was frightened.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘What was that?’

  It was useless to try to bluff my way out of it. I could not tell her the truth, because she would not have believed it, and I could think of no satisfactory lie. I had no desire to bite her a third time in order to find a way of extricating myself from the situation. Getting out of the bed, I silently put on my black Simpsons t-shirt.

  A minute later I was hurtling down the staircase, screeching like a shot-down bomber – although this particular bomber was falling rather quietly since I certainly had no desire to attract attention.

  I felt no remorse. My only regret was finding myself in such a stupid position. The fact that I had twice bitten her neck did not seem to me at all reprehensible. The mosquito, I thought, is surely not to be condemned for being a mosquito. I knew I had not turned into a monster, at least not yet. This made it all the more alarming that any woman might now find me a monster.

  The following evening Mithra rang up.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘how did it go?’

  I recounted my inaugural bite and the adventure that followed, omitting only the way it had all concluded.

  ‘Well done,’ said Mithra. ‘Congratulations. You are now almost one of us.’

  ‘What’s this “almost”? Wasn’t that the Great Fall?’

  Mithra laughed.

  ‘What are you talking about? You’re only just cutting your teeth. What sort of a Great Fall could that be? No, there is another thing that must
happen, and it’s the most important of all …’

  ‘When?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry. Get the most out of the tail end of your life as a human.’

  These words sobered me up.

  ‘Tell me honestly,’ continued Mithra, ‘about this girl. Did nothing unexpected happen?’

  ‘Yes, something did,’ I confessed. ‘Just at the end. She realised there was something not right about me and took fright. As if she had seen the devil.’

  Mithra sighed.

  ‘Now you know. It’s probably a good thing it happened like that. You are not the same as other people, and you should always keep that in mind. There can never be genuine closeness between you and a human being. Never forget that. And don’t expect miracles.’

  ‘How can a human being recognise me for what I am?’

  ‘There’s no way she can,’ replied Mithra. ‘The only exception is the situation in which you found yourself.’

  ‘So, will it always be like that when …’

  ‘No, it won’t,’ said Mithra. ‘It’s easy enough to dissemble. Loki will teach you how.’

  ‘Who’s Loki?’

  ‘He’s your teacher for the next stage of the course. But be careful: what we have been talking about is a taboo subject among vampires. It’s never to be spoken openly about even with your instructors. Sexual dissembling is an essential craft but it’s explained in a different way.’

  ‘What is this next course?’ I asked. ‘I thought I was about ready to be admitted to society.’

  ‘Loki’s course is the final stage,’ said Mithra. ‘I swear it on my red liquid. As regards social life, you ought to check your postbox. There’s a letter for you.’