“Stay cheerful, Greeny. I’ll definitely pay you a visit. I’m just a little beat right now, after the Mermaids. . . .”
As he spoke, Botvinik took a yellow plastic rhomboid out of the pocket of his robe and dropped it on the floor. Uncle Pete raised one eyebrow, but didn’t say anything, and followed Botvinik and his bodyguards to the door. A minute later he came back on his own, picked up the yellow rhomboid, kissed it, and said:
“Girls, this is a chip from our casino. Twenty-five thousand bucks. Five thousand for each of you and a commission for me. Now do you see where you’re working?”
When Uncle Pete left, the praying mantis appeared to Lena and asked:
“????”
“It’s money,” Lena explained. “There isn’t anything like that yet at your stage of development.”
“????”
“That’s the oligarch Botvinik,” Lena replied. “He’s got lots and lots of money.”
“!!!!”
Lena sensed that the mantis thought Botvinik was a threat. To understand what the matter was, she had to open the door in her mind again, and the mantis’s strange feelings filled her consciousness.
This time she learned a lot that was new.
Apparently, near the very end of its life, a praying mantis started to fly (this was nature’s way of making its old age interesting). During its flight, it was sometimes attacked by a sinister black shadow that tried to swallow it. There was nothing terrifying about this; on the contrary, for some reason that Lena didn’t yet understand, to die like that seemed like a blessing. But the rules of life required the mantis to fight for existence and dodge the bats, by randomly changing its direction of flight. That was why the mantis had a hollow cavity in its body — a kind of resonance chamber, a special “ear of darkness.” Its function was to spot the approach of danger from a distance. And right now that ear sensed a threat.
Lena finally understood.
“Silly you,” she said. “It’s not a real bat. It’s just a tattoo on his shoulder. Besides, you couldn’t have seen it, he was wearing a robe. How do you know about it?”
From the answer, Lena realized that the mantis had seen the tattoo in the magazine photograph — it had been imprinted on her memory. But the problem wasn’t the tattoo, the problem was that the ear of darkness had heard darkness. It was very hard to understand exactly what the mantis meant and what it wanted. Its wordless feelings passed straight through Lena’s consciousness like a rippling rainbow and disappeared.
“Can you say it in words?” Lena asked, frustrated.
“Yes,” the mantis suddenly said in a human voice. “Only they’ll be your words, not mine. But if you like, I can speak with your words and thoughts.”
The mantis had a baritone voice that sounded both confident and confidential at the same time, a voice borrowed from a FM radio announcer Lena often listened to. Lena guessed that the mantis had found this voice in her memory too.
Only they didn’t get a chance to talk — the shift was over.
•
The next time Botvinik brought his “guys,” as he had promised. There were three of them, apart from him, all wearing fluffy bathrobes, and to judge from their flushed faces and wet hair, they had just been through some kind of hydrotherapeutic procedure. They brought a deck of cards and paper to write on.
One visitor made quite a serious impression on Lena. Unlike the others, he didn’t have bare legs sticking out from under his robe, but general’s trousers with a broad red stripe. But it wasn’t just the stripes. He reminded her somehow of the major in the blotchy camouflage suit who gave them their injections before the shift — but he didn’t simply have the same kind of face; he seemed to represent an extreme development of that human type (if you locked fifty hungry and ferocious majors in a dark basement and opened the door a week later to let out the only survivor, and then raised him to the rank of general for the next twenty years, you’d get something like this man). But strangely enough, beside Botvinik’s flushed features, that scary face seemed childishly defenseless.
The other two had a dejected air — one was a sturdy guy with a beard, who looked like a sectarian engineer, and the other one kept turning his curved back toward Lena before she could get a good look at him. Both of them behaved fawningly — they were probably petty subordinates of some kind.
If Botvinik remembered Lena at all, he didn’t show it.
After removing the hors d’oeuvres and drinks from the table, the visitors settled down on the circular divan and started playing Preference. Soon one of them asked for the “muzak” to be turned off, and until the end of the shift Lena and her friends enjoyed the forgotten delight of idle silence, broken only by the voices of the players.
Lena listened to the conversation. It was about something strange.
Gradually she began to understand that the visitors were discussing the Combat NLP technology that had been such a total mystery to the author of the article in Eligible Bachelors of Russia.
“I’m trying to polish up the seventh form,” the general announced. “First alignment and control, then disruption of the stereotype, then elision and apposition, right?”
“Right,” Botvinik agreed.
“But last time, Misha, you said the seventh form had to include complete disruption of the stereotype. What does ‘complete’ mean?”
“There’s also partial disruption, General.”
“But what’s the difference?”
“A theoretical explanation would be too long and complicated. Let me give you a specific example. Complete disruption is, for instance, ‘Go suck your fucking mother’s dick.’ And partial disruption would be, ‘Go suck an old rabbit’s dick.’ But note that ‘Go suck a retired groundhog’s dick’ is complete disruption of the stereotype again. Get it?”
“What’s so hard to get?” the general said with a sinister chuckle. “But tell me, Misha — does it have to be elision first and then apposition? Or can it be the other way around?”
“However it comes out,” said Botvinik. “Don’t get too hung up on the theory, Comrade General. Combat NLP is a practical skill. Above all, keep trying it on the punching bag. Feel out the sensitive points.”
The general turned to the stocky man with a beard.
“Hear that, old Fartov! Shall we practice a bit?”
“I’m not old Fartov, Comrade General,” the man replied morosely. “My name’s Perov.”
“Prickov-Dickov! Before you go correcting your elders, take it out of your ass, you dumb chickenshit. Open that beak again and I’ll wallop your bald-headed dick so hard, there’ll be nothing left but the cock-a-doodle-doo, and they’ll find your dick behind the wardrobe, you fucking mongrel’s condom. Whose brains do you think you’re rinsing your dick in, you fucking marketologist? Do you know how many of your kind have died on my dick?”
“Offensive words, Comrade General,” the bearded man responded, looking indifferently through his cards. “Cruel and unjust. What kind of marketologist am I? I’m an expert.”
“Well, how was it?” the general asked, turning to Botvinik.
“Definitely C-grade. The alignment was fine, but then you ran off the tracks.”
The general frowned.
“Hang on, Misha,” he said. “There’s something I’m not getting here. Did I rupture his stereotype or didn’t I?”
“Of course not,” Botvinik replied. “You never even got to that. You’re not rupturing his stereotype, you’re putting him in a negative double bind.”
“A double bind?” the general exclaimed in surprise. “That’s when there are two contradictory suggestions, right? But where?”
“You told him, ‘Take it out of your ass.’ So just think like he would for a moment. If he takes it out of his ass, you’ll be asking for him from the escort company in five minutes’ time. So he’s got an internal conflict. He’s got no time to worry about stereotypes.”
“So how do I get out of it?”
Botvinik tho
ught for a moment.
“Remove the threat. Restore hope. Let’s say, instead of just ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo’, give him ‘A quiet cock-a-doodle-doo for Escort magazine.’ Only you have to make sure the dick behind the wardrobe comes at least eight hundred milliseconds after the information packet with the cock-a-doodle-doo, so the prefrontal cortex has already had time to process that. Don’t talk so fast. Then we can get by all right.”
The general scratched his chin thoughtfully.
“But that bit about finding his dick behind the wardrobe,” Botvinik continued in a different tone of voice, warm and slightly ingratiating, “was very competent and subtle, Comrade General. I’d even call it talented, for Christ’s sake. Because here we have complete disruption of the stereotype on the subconscious level.”
“Why on the subconscious level?” the general asked, frowning again.
“It’s obvious. Think for yourself. How does his dick get behind the wardrobe? Only from out of the subconscious. The client hasn’t had enough time to comprehend anything yet, and there you have a breach like the gash in the side of the Titanic. And then you throw two more pricks in through the breach to reinforce the impact, so there’s no way he can ever slip off the hook. I couldn’t have thought that up myself. It has the style of a real strategist. A military head is a military head, true enough.”
The general cleared his throat benevolently.
“Do you always analyze everything that deeply?”
“I don’t analyze any longer,” Botvinik replied. “It’s all intuitive. You gradually develop this kind of clear channel of maximum effectiveness that you can sail along without even thinking. It comes with experience.”
“I should note that down on the flowchart,” said the general.
Botvinik waved his cards
“Forget about flowcharts! They’ll be no use when you’re attacking someone for real. What is Combat NLP? It’s spontaneity, direct sensory impact. As my sensei used to say, it should leave the smell of burnt feathers. There was a time I used to work from the head too — I used to think, I’ll disrupt the stereotype, and then the job’s almost done. But that’s intelligentsia-style thinking. You have to work from the heart and rupture his asshole, not his stereotype. This method works when you apply it constantly, unconsciously, like breathing. . . .”
These philological novelties were too complicated for Lena, and she soon stopped following the conversation. Then she saw the praying mantis again.
First her hands seemed to be folded together in front of her chest, as usual, and then the triangular head appeared in the air. It was closer now than before, and Lena noticed yellowish spots of light glittering in the mantis’s central eyes. She finally realized what those three eyes had been reminding her of all this time — they were arranged like the circular blades of her father’s electric razor.
“What are those yellow lights?” she asked. “That shining?”
“That’s the truth,” the mantis replied in the same voice it had started using the last time. “If you have questions, you can ask the lights and you’ll see everything.”
Lena pondered. She had no more serious questions about life left — everything had been clear for a long time. Only rhetorical questions came to mind.
“Why is everything here arranged like this?” she asked.
The answer immediately appeared in the mantis’s eyes.
It was startling — the way the swirling patches of light and spots of color formed into something like a short cartoon film with a very clear meaning. This meaning wasn’t directly connected with the picture, but somehow it found its way through to her consciousness.
Lena saw something like a bloody cherry pit. The pit was gradually covered by flesh, then skin, and then it was covered by tufts of white fluff. Incredibly beautiful crystalline snowflakes started appearing on the ends of the tufts — but by that time the strange fruit on which they were growing had completely rotted away, and the snowflakes showered down into the darkness with a sad tinkling sound.
“Do you understand the meaning?” the praying mantis asked.
“I do,” Lena replied. “Here, everything new and good always starts with some detestable crime. And when this new, good thing yields fruit, the detestable crime yields fruit too and the result is that everything gets jumbled up together and dies. It’s something premeval, sad, and inevitable — it’s always been that way here and it always will be. But what’s going to happen to the snowflakes?”
When the mantis showed her, Lena had to take several deep breaths to pull herself together.
“But do we have to go there?” she asked pitifully. “Can’t we go somewhere else?”
The patches of light in the mantis’s eyes went out.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
“Remember, you showed me, right at the beginning,” Lena replied. “That place . . . how can I put it . . . that flowing stillness. I can see in all directions at once, and there’s such peace in everything, and I don’t feel afraid of anything anymore.”
“You’re talking about the world of praying mantises,” said the mantis. “Are you sure you want to go there?”
“Of course,” Lena whispered.
“To become a praying mantis, you have to pass an exam. Then you can be born and die in our world as many times as you like.”
“What kind of exam?”
“You’ll have to transgress the bounds of human morals,” the mantis replied.
“Well, that’s no problem,” said Lena. “We’re used to that. What do I have to do?”
“Next time,” said the mantis and disappeared.
The end of the shift was gradually approaching.
The card players who had stayed for so long cursed loudly every time the table with the cards and the score sheet disappeared under the floor and then reemerged covered in fruity splendor again. Even Perov the punching bag demonstrated his mastery of Combat NLP — he went down on all fours beside the hole in the floor and yelled into it.
“Lousy queers! Don’t touch the cards! I’ll kill you fuckers if you mix the cards up again!”
But this time around Botvinik didn’t even glance at Lena.
•
The major in the dappled uniform stood in the corner of the dressing room, winding up the ribbon of ampoules again, pretending he was counting them for the second time. Lena had long suspected that he deliberately came into the dressing room half an hour before the injection in order to watch her and the other girls getting changed.
The injection gun was sticking out of the waist of the major’s camouflage trousers, and Lena found herself contemplating certain extremely unpleasant associations suggested by that. If not for Uncle Pete, who had also unexpectedly come to inspect his troops, she would have insisted on the injection gun being washed with soap, but she didn’t want to start a squabble in front of the boss.
Uncle Pete was in an excellent mood — he was smoking a cigar, dropping the ash on a black t-shirt that said:
CCI General Directorate
“Girls,” he said when the major had loaded the injection gun, “an announcement. Today Lena has an exclusive client, Mikhail Botvinik.”
Though Lena had been expecting to hear this, she suddenly felt nervous and dropped the jar of malachite cream on the bench.
“Supposedly he’d just flown off to London,” Uncle Pete continued, “and suddenly decided to come back. So you must have sung well, Lena. Or kept silent well, I don’t know. He phoned — he’ll be here in two hours.”
“I won’t go,” Lena said and burst into tears.
Uncle Pete didn’t even pretend to take that seriously.
“What’s all this, Lena,” he drawled lazily, “have you totally flipped? You’ll earn enough to pay for half an apartment in a single stroke. And you’ll earn your Uncle Pete here enough for a quarter of a dacha plot. Stop playing the silly girl. All things are good in moderation.”
“That’s right, Lena,” said Vera, pulling
the green lamp shade of a wig onto her head — I would have thought you would be jumping for joy, way up to the ceiling. But instead you throw a sulking fit. I’d scratch your eyes out for a client like that, honest.”
However, Lena had already come to her senses.
“Okay,” she said. “I don’t have to sing, right?”
“You don’t,” replied Uncle Pete, “but the other girls have to pull out all the stops. Vera, you’re in charge of the music today. Let’s have something lyrical instead of that purring. Or you can choose something yourself. Have you calmed down?”
That question was meant for Lena.
“Yes,” she answered. “Can I have two injections today? Just to make certain.”
“Make certain of what?” Uncle Pete asked and giggled.
Lena shrugged and put on a cool expression.
Uncle Pete looked at the major.
“I sign for every ampoule,” said the major. “By number and date. You can sign for it if you want.”
“I’ll sign, what’s the problem?” Uncle Pete agreed. “You can see the girl’s nervous. What if Botvinik suddenly asks her to stand like a praying mantis and she can’t do it? Just to avoid any slipups, heh-heh . . .”
While the first injection had always felt to Lena like a cool fountain spraying into the back of her head, the second one was like a gust of arctic wind that instantly transformed all the water in the fountain into little crystals of ice. Lena knew right away that she now had a second pair of legs and an ear of darkness. The sensation was very clear, and she had to concentrate all her willpower to convince herself that it was only the usual somatic hallucination that followed the injection.
“Girls,” she said, hiding her second pair of legs behind the first, “Just don’t look when Botvinik comes, all right?”
“All right,” Asya answered for all of them and smiled approvingly.
The praying mantis appeared in front of her soon after she climbed up on the pedestal and set her hands against the upper block of malachite. This time Lena could see his head far more distinctly than usual. She noticed little notches in the antennae that protruded from the region of the central eyes. And now the real world — the Malachite Hall and her friends standing on their pedestals — seemed blurred and approximate.
The Hall of the Singing Caryatids Page 7
