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I live in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

I am the author of several novels and more than a hundred short stories published in Russian. The largest book publishing companies in Russia, such as AST, Eksmo, and others have published my novels and stories. I also translate Russian poetry and prose.

Speaking of poetry, in the Russian Poetry World Cup, 2017, I was among the best 32. I'm proud of it. I think Russian poets are incredibly talented and creative.

There is an article in Wikipedia about me. It's written in Russian and it tells lies.

 

Among other things, I've studied psychology. I'm the author of several academic articles on cognitive activity. For the time being, I'm interested in such areas of psychology as automatic drawing and writing. I often use automatic writing in my books, that's why some of them are unconventional in one way or another.

 

My stories written in English have appeared in Adbusters, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Oceans of the Mind, and other venues. Upper Rubber Boot Books published my wildly surrealistic novel, "The Mask Game ," in 2013.

Biography
IN THE PRESS
My Books
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The Mask Game

by Sergey Gerasimov

In this irresistible novel, Ukrainian author Sergey Gerasimov tells the tale of a man with fourteen twists of fate embedded in his arm. 

The child of a man who had cheated death, if only temporarily, and a woman who had despaired of having children until she buried a pear seed in her garden, and watched over by a mysterious old woman whose ears never stop twitching, Herodion must journey the world to find fourteen secrets from the Broken Glass Age and discover the true purpose of the aliens’ three great gifts to mankind before he can be reunited with his love. 

Part fantasy, part science fiction, and part magical realism, this is a tremendously entertaining and exciting tale from a very talented author.

 

Silly Lera is a mentally retarded girl who lives in a magic oasis thirty thousand years in the future. All people around her have their souls regularly purged from weird or dark desires, which allegedly, makes the oasis the best place in the world to live. The whole life in the oasis is controlled by Maxwell's daemon who lets anyone out but lets only good people in. When the daemon decides that Lera's father can't return, she embarks on a dangerous quest to challenge the daemon's decision and save her dad's life. The only problem is the daemon has never been wrong before, so no one is going to believe a silly girl.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Apex Book of World SF 2 (The Apex Book of World SF #2)

by Lavie Tidhar (Editor), Rochita Loenen-RuizAnabel Enríquez PiñeiroLauren Beukes (Goodreads Author), Raul FloresWill ElliottShweta NarayanTade Thompson (Goodreads Author) , more…

An expedition to an alien planet; Lenin rising from the dead; a superhero so secret he does not exist. In The Apex Book of World SF 2, World Fantasy Award nominated editor Lavie Tidhar brings together a unique collection of stories from around the world. Quiet horror from Cuba and Australia; surrealist fantasy from Russia and epic fantasy from Poland; near-future tales from Mexico and Finland, as well as cyberpunk from South Africa. In this anthology one gets a glimpse of the complex and fascinating world of genre fiction – from all over our world. 

Pre-order edition also includes Nir Yaniv‘s never-before-published-in-English novelette “Undercity” (8800 words) as well as Charles Tan‘s essay, “World SF: Our Possible Future”!
 

Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine SC (Clarkesworld Anthology #2)

by Nick Mamatas (Editor), Sean Wallace (Editor), Ken Scholes (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Samantha Henderson (Contributor), Mary Robinette Kowal (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Stephen Graham Jones (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Stephen Dedman (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Catherynne M. Valente (Goodreads Author) (Contributor) , more…

Selected from the Hugo award-nominated Clarkesworld Magazine, Realms collects the work of twenty-five visionary writers of short fiction, including such World Fantasy, Philip K. Dick, Tiptree, Hugo, and Campbell Award winners and finalists as Jeffrey Ford, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jay Lake, Cat Rambo, Tim Pratt, Robert Reed, Mike Resnick, and Catherynne M. Valente -- and amazing stories from up-and-comers like Karen Heuler, Paul Jessup, Yoon Ha Lee, Margaret Ronald, and many more!

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 22(Clarkesworld Magazine #22)

by Neil Clarke (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Margaret RonaldSergey GerasimovLisa Morton (Goodreads Author), Jeff VanderMeer (Goodreads Author)

FICTION
"When the Gentlemen Go By" by Margaret Ronald
"The Glory of the World" by Sergey Gerasimov

NON-FICTION
"Smart Broads and Tough Guys: The Strange World of Vintage Paperbacks" by Lisa Morton
"John Grant and Paul Barnett Agree: Science Has Been Corrupted" by Jeff VanderMeer
"Cavemen Discovered in the 21st Century" by Neil Clarke

Phase 5 Annual Review: Short Fictions, Vol. 1

by Allen L. WoldSergey GerasimovMichelle HerndonK.R. GentileJames McCarthyNana P. VejArnold Cassell

i

Volume 1 of the Phase 5 Annual Review: Short Fictions features nine short works of fantasy and science fiction by talented authors from Europe and the United States, including Allen L. Wold, Sergey Gerasimov and five up and coming authors. Here you will find mutants, vampires, dangerously talented folks, ghosts, bots and aliens all nestled in with their all-too-human neighbors in settings as varied as urban fantasy, post-apocalyptic, timeless and alien. So sit down with your beverage of choice and step through the portal to some new adventures... and a well-earned leisurely stroll through the gardens. Anthology Contains: Doriann's Choice by Allen L. Wold The Shadow by Sergey Gerasimov Passage by Michelle Herndon Drucy's Tale by K.R. Gentile The Observatory Gardens by James McCarthy The Life of a Romantic by Nanna P. Vej Penance by Arnold Cassell Robbery by Michelle Herndon Lil Red & The Baron by K.R. Gentile

День рождения монстра

by Sergey GerasimovСергей Герасимов

li

• День рождения монстра
• Контакт
• Закат в заливе Циклопов
• Созвездие Ничто
• Надеясь жить
• Моментальное фото

Logika pryzhka cherez smert'

by Sergey Gerasimov

My Books

Automatic Drawing

 

The idea to try automatic drawing and writing first came to me long ago, when I was watching my two- or three-year-old daughter who was pretending to speak a foreign language. She spoke minutes and minutes in a row, inventing new and new impossible words and never repeating herself. I believe that immense creative energy is hidden in everyone's soul, and we just have to tap into it. To do it, we need to get rid of any conscious control. When my daughter grew up enough to understand what she was doing, she could never speak a pretend language again. Even a tiny degree of control kills everything.

Many years after that I was sitting at my computer, and Microsoft's basic graphics program Paint was on the screen. My hand moved the mouse without any particular aim. It was a perfect situation of no control. Suddenly I noticed that the lines on the screen started resembling a figure, and some ten seconds later, I had a simple picture that I call "A Bull" here. It's important to say that it's beyond my abilities to draw a straight or a meaningfully curved line with a mouse, and I can't clearly remember how a bull looks. I haven't looked at bulls closely for decades. So probably a real bull looks a bit differently. But nonetheless, it was certainly a bull. Something unconscious inside me had drawn it and did it much better than I could ever do. I had to do just small editing later – mainly to erase those line ends that were too long.

Later I drew dozens of such pictures, some of them suddenly beautiful and meaningful. I never knew what was going to appear on the screen. It was a complete surprise to me. The most important, but the most difficult condition of automatic drawing was the total absence of control. As soon as I consciously wanted to draw something, I received just meaningless tangle of lines. Sadly, most of the automatic pictures were lost in a hard disk crash, and I have no way to restore them. I remember many of them clearly, -- for example, a human embryo that stretches its hands to a computer keyboard from its mummy's tummy, or a happy fluffy dog playing with a ball, or a young soldier who doesn't desert his post when a nuclear mushroom grows behind him, and a lot of others -- but I can't draw them again. Those that are left are not the best ones.

A bull

A woman looking at the sea on a windy day

A girl cutting wallpaper

The computer shows us the middle finger

Seeking to find the God

A woman who takes a bath

A night glacier

A dove

A mountain scenery

Toadstools in the night forest

automatic drawing
Automatic writing

Fragments from "The Mask Game"

Fragment 1

For punishment, officials were locked in a big glass barrel. The barrel was mounted on a cart and dragged around the town and villages. The glass of the barrel was thick and dirty, so the official sitting inside could be seen as a stooping, crouching shadow. The thing that everyone could see perfectly was the amount of dirt.

            It was widely believed that every official had to take care of people's happiness, of the cleanness, easiness and perfect order of people's live. If an official forgot about that and started taking care of his own happiness, cleanness, easiness and the perfect order of his own life, he was locked in a barrel, making an example for other officials and giving people joy. The indilligent official was fed through a small hole above his head, but the essence of the punishment was that the barrel did not have a drain hole. Soon the official had to sit in a puddle of his own piss and among heaps of his own dung, which symbolized the situation of an ordinary citizen devoid of beneficial care of experienced statesmen.

            Now everyone could speak to the convict, who formerly had hidden himself in thick-walled rooms, behind paper-filled furniture. It was enough to knock at the wall of the barrel, then the cart would stop, and the official would have to answer the questions, listen to the people's stories and sometimes endure insults or humiliation.

            Little by little the level of dirt in the barrel rose. For small offenses, such as a delayed response to a complaint or query, or not being polite, an official usually got six months of the barrel. After six months, half of the glass barrel was filled with excrement, which avoided the official drowning in a sitting position. Bad roads were a problem: if the barrel was dragged over potholes, then the dirt, stink and slime inside splashed and bobbled and foamed and gurgled, so the official could easily swallow a lot of his own juices and die. It was quite natural that, after six months in a barrel, every official started lobbying to build good, smooth like a gun barrel, roads.

            For serious professional misconduct, such as an unlawful decision or extorting money, an official got twelve months of the barrel. By the end of the twelfth month, the barrel was brimming over with excrements, and the convict would drown in them. The only way to survive was to eat and drink as little as possible. Fat, glossy officials sentenced to twelve months wanted to live, so they stopped eating and lost two thirds of their weight, so that the barrel could not fill up. The officials became so thin, brittle, and dehydrated that they floated on the surface of the smelly dirt without sinking down into it. Twelve months was considered the fairest type of punishment because the official who had made an unlawful decision or extorted money doomed people to poverty and starvation.

            Those officials who survived the barrel, recovered their health, and cured their skin or gastroenterological infections, which was not always possible, usually returned to their thick-walled rooms and hid themselves behind their paper-filled furniture again. The smell of the barrel remained with them forever. No amount of coal-tar soap or other disinfectants could remove it. It was good for the work: smelling someone who had been in the barrel, a visitor could be sure that he would not be robbed or deceived.

            For conviction of an innocent person, an official got a solid eighteen months of the barrel. Now no type of a diet could save him. But an official is a wily creature who can usually find a way out even in the most desperate situations. Officials locked in the barrels for eighteen months worked their tails, or to be precise, mouths off, from the first day of their imprisonment to the last. Sitting in the barrels, they filled their mouths with dirt, pressed their lips to the feeding holes and spit the mud, stink and slime out. Such barrels spouted excrements all the time, resembling peculiar land-living whales. They were covered with a drying stinking crust all over. People did not approach them, did not knock at their walls and never wished to speak to officials locked inside, as the stench was too bad to endure. All their eighteen months the locked officials spent in labors and loneliness. By the end of the imprisonment, their spitting muscles developed so much that they could easily inflate a bike tire without a pump.

            For an unlawful decision that caused someone's death, officials were sentenced for life, and nothing could save them.

Fragment 2

On the third day of his walk along the riverbank, Herodion saw a low rectangular building surrounded by a concrete fence with many gaps in it, with barbed wire on top here and there. Block letters written on the fence read:

 

            PRIVATE PRISON. YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED. MAKE USE OF THE OPPORTUNITY TO BECOME A PRISONER.

 

            There was a small pond full of fish nearby. Three fishermen in striped robes held fishing rods. Another one rocked on a branch of a sprig willow. A sweet baby's smile played across his lips. A military helicopter sat at some distance. In the grass under the helicopter, a man in a uniform was kissing a whore who had no uniform on. None of the people paid any attention to Herodion.

            He approached a fisherman who pulled up one fish after another, one fish bigger than the next.

            "Not bad," Herodion said about a carp that was almost a meter long.

            "We've got an awful lot of fish here," the fisherman in a striped robe said, "but you can't fish here because you're not a convict."

            "What do you mean, I'm not allowed?"

            "You are allowed, but the fish just won't bite no matter what you do. Do you want to try?"

            The man gave his fishing rod to Herodion. The biting stopped momentarily. The fish promenaded past the hook, not a bit interested in it.

            "See for yourself," the man said.

            As soon as the fisherman took the rod in his hands, the float got pulled down and away. Five minutes later he pulled up quite a large latimeria.

            "Can I try again?" Herodion asked.

            "No. The Major will get mad at you if he finds out about it. Fishing rods often break if used by a free man."

            "Okay then. How can I get across the river?"

            "You'd have to ask the Major about that. There he is, under the helicopter."

            "A year of prison," the Major answered Herodion's question and covered the whore who had no uniform on with a burdock leaf. "Without parole."

            "A year of prison? But I did nothing wrong!"

            "It's not at all necessary. It's a private prison. Most of the convicts stay here of their own free will. They are even paid for serving their terms. In a year of imprisonment you'll earn enough to pay for your accommodation and a helicopter ride across the river. You should know that the river Moebius can only be crossed by helicopter."

            "A year for a minute of a helicopter ride? Isn't it too expensive?"

            "Perhaps it is. But beggars can't be choosers, right? It's me who charges the price here. I've been doing that for already thirty years, since I was young," the Major said and put another burdock leaf on the whore's breasts.

 

 

Fragment 3

 

            The sandy shore of the lake was quiet and empty. Birds left the crowns of nearby trees. Fish sank into the transparent depth, and even the pet carp, which sensed trouble and the smell of the sponge cake at the same time, decided not to take a risk, and swam far away from the shore, with bitterness in its small heart, moving its fatty tail. The grasses stopped growing, and the clouds in the sky froze as if they were icebergs or cauliflower heads on an azure tray. Lisistrisa was alone on the shore. The silence became so deep that it rang in her ears. Even the wind, having a presentiment that something horrible would happen, left the place. The air became as motionless as the vacuum above the moon's deserts.

            Then Lisistrisa heard strange noises approaching from both the left and right. Not knowing that they were the footsteps of the two armies about to clash fiercely and destroy each other down to the last warrior, she smoothed out creases in her white dress, sat down on a patch of grass, took a sandwich and a bottle of water from her bag, smiled to the world poetically, and started her simple repast.

            The two massive armies, six thousand riflemen in each, stepped on the lakeshore and stopped within a gunshot of each other. The air between them looked clean, motionless, and glassy. Right in the centre of the empty space shone a lonely figure of a girl dressed in dazzling white. The figure chewed a sandwich. The twelve thousand riflemen unslung their twelve thousand rifles.

            Esta, who was running down the street, holding Darja's hand at that moment, heard a reverberation of that terrible second. She stopped in her tracks, gasping in terror. The street around her was not a street anymore. She used to think of a street as a roadway with the adjacent buildings, but all the buildings had turned into hills of broken brick now. Normal streets were usually lined with trees, but all the trees had become bunches of bristling splinters. Some of them were still burning or smoldering. The town suddenly became transparent, and Esta could see the fire from the sky eating methodically the distant outskirts where houses still existed and held a fragile, frightened life inside. The tree of Truth was six kilometers to the East.

            "Mum, we're going to die today," Darja said.

            "Don't talk nonsense. Run!"

            And they ran at the angle of thirty degrees to the street that was not a street but a field of construction materials. Bombs were still falling, like the last heavy drops near the end of a shower. The enemy atomplanes, which buzzed in the sky like red, angry flies, dropped their bombs on the former town, now an inflamed desert covered by fiery mushrooms.

            "I feel something terrible has happened," Esta said, sitting down on the warm bricks. "I know it for sure. Lisistrisa!"

            It was the very moment when the twelve thousand riflemen selected the semi-automatic mode of fire.

            "Don't stop, mum, don't stop!" Darja shouted. "We must get out of here!"

            Twelve thousand riflemen put their thumbs on the sun-heated barrels. Their index fingers lay on the twelve thousand triggers.

            "Let's run that way," Esta said. "There's something green there. Looks like the countryside.

            On the shore of the lake, the twelve thousand riflemen bent their heads to the scope sights. For the last time in their lives, they wiped the sweat from their foreheads, remembered their twelve thousand mothers and twelve thousand fabulously beautiful brides, dear, desired, most of them never seen naked, beloved so much that no one could be compared to them. It was impossible to die; to be shot was such a savage practice that each of them imagined himself to be a little immortal.

            For the last time in their lives, the riflemen thought, oh, how I hate this scorching sun! Oh, what a beautiful world this is! I'm sick and tired of those jackboots! Oh, I want to live so damn much!

            Twelve thousand devils were hastily preparing twelve thousand new hellish frying pans to fry the newcomers because, no matter what priests or political leaders said, everyone who died, holding a rifle, would certainly end in the hell -- and all rifle-lovers in the world should remember that.

            Twelve thousands fingers, pale as if they had died a second earlier than the rest of the bodies, pulled the triggers. The air became gray with bullets and as heavy as lead because there was more lead in it than air. The angel-girl in her effulgent dress disappeared behind the wall of flying lead.

            Right at that moment, the heaviest enemy atomplane dumped the heaviest bomb out of its belly. The bomb was perfect: fat, juicy, and dead like a pig stewed with truffles in its own juice.

            The old cemetery sucked the bomb in, paused, and then flew up to the sky. It rose so high that parts of the flying skeletons had time to get mixed and form something whole, a thing with a thousand skulls filled with fire, and with two thousand eye sockets. The thing with a thousand skulls had one long moment of weightlessness to look around, then look down at the retreating earth bathed in fire and howl in horror.

            Darja and Esta watched the rising thing with a thousand skulls from the distance of two blocks. When the last bones fell to the vitrified ground, they decided not to hurry.

            "Mum, are we dead?" Darja asked, her face full of doubt.

            "Dunno. As a matter of fact, it doesn't make a great deal of difference."

            The sky was ash-black, full of falling dirt and drops of coagulated blood.

            On the lake shore, the girl in a white dress dropped her sandwich. Then she got up and looked around in awe. Six thousand dead bodies lay to the left of her. The same number of bodies lay to the right. None of the riflemen had aimed at the girl, so none of the bullets had hit Lisistrisa.

            The layer of lead, three bullets thick, covered the beach. Yellow vapor of faith rose over the sea of motionless bodies and gathered into clouds. The faith was leaving the stopped hearts -- the faith that they had died for the right course, for the peaceful sky overhead and for children's laughter. The faith that they had not died in vain. The faith that to die for something is better than, for example, to plant a tree, invent a bicycle, or at worst, make twelve beloved kids.

The Glory of the World

— by SERGEY GERASIMOV —

First published in Clarkesworld

 

They went upstairs, to the second floor that was actually much higher than the first. An unknown contractor had sandwiched it in between the dimly lit twenty-second and the exceptionally roomy fifty-fifth, either for fun or as a publicity stunt. As they walked up they saw through the big windows an embarrassed town changed very much by the linear perspective, refracted here and there as if seen through a huge quivering prism, scared, shiny, dark-cornered. One of the corners folded up and the rain flickering along the horizon trembled there like piano strings.

The starry heaven gaped over the clouds. The constellations and shiny dabs of galaxies wheeled there, shivering with their own beauty. Seeing this, a lady with a tame cobra around her neck frowned and strained herself to unlock the door. She was long-legged and purebred like a Great Dane.

"Savior, hold it, please," she said.

She handed him the pensive cobra, and made her hands free for a two-handed key. Savior took the snake. The cobra shook its head as if rousing itself, then squashed his hand, smiling quite cheekily and glistening as if it were smeared with stale grease. Savior put the snake into a pot with a cocoa palm and it immediately, with rumbling stomach, muzzled into the soil rich in fluoric limestone.

"Shouldn't have done that," said the lady. "Now she'll gnaw the roots. She's a snake, a predator. Understand?"

Savior presented her with a bunch of red folios, and she gave him a condescending nod. They entered.

The boss sat at a round table elongated enough to receive lots of victuals, which formed a slanted turret in the middle of it. Steamed crab legs, made of wild sardine scale, crowned the turret. A few nonentities with indiscernible faces sat nearby, so the table was empty to the right and to the left as well.

A security guard with such a muscular neck that the muscles dangled below his shoulders slept at some distance. A dog, extremely lean and long, romped on a leash staying aloof. The pet was so attenuated by hunger that you had to have a really trained eye to distinguish it from the leash. It licked off its sweat reducing the environmental pollution. Very far away three moneychangers, small end evil like avian flu viruses, played cards for curtseys with a coal-miner. A buffoon played the pipe and sold doves.

Savior froze, stunned. He had expected to see something unbelievable here, but this impossible world was anti-believable, and it had a hypnotizing music of its own at that, a shrieking sort of music that can sound inside a happy lunatic's mind; it jammed a low, quiet voice of conscience Savior had been always listening to. This world looked him over with button eyes, grinned, let him in.

"I don't believe in it," Savior whispered.

"What about getting paid?" the world asked.

"Oh. It would be nice."

"Got dyspepsia?" the lady asked and Savior started.

"No, I was just thinking."

"Yeah, thinking gives me gas too," the lady said in a brain-shrinking voice.

"Hi," the boss said, "Savior? The one? Welcome."

He held out his hand with five nails, and the Savior shook it, feeling prone to cringe.

"Well, well, I know," the boss said. "Heard much about you, you're that tough guy who cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and even overthrew the tables of the moneychangers. It's my house! Ye have made it a den of thieves! Piss off everybody! I can appreciate such things. But, you know, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. I mean, times change. Just in case, if you forgot Latin. Today wine maketh us merry: and money answereth all things. By the way, want to drink? No? Pity. I know everything about you because my people never lie, though I don't believe them of course. So want to hear it from you. From the horse's mouth, ha-ha. Don't be modest. Position yourself. Can fly? Or walk on water?"

The boss took from the table a forty-three-barreled cigarette lighter.

"Yes," Savior said.

"Cool. Will you fly if I throw you out of the window, right now?"

The boss brushed Savior's cheek with his fingers, quick and spidery, incompatible with his plump face.

"No, I'd be killed. The ability to fly, uh...comes to me, from time to time. I can try, though. Maybe, if not very high..."

He flew up and hovered for a minute above the table. The lady was busy putting on her nose a layer of absolutely transparent powder. The coal-sweep had already lost the game and given out all the curtseys. Being sick and tired of everything, he pressed his stained face to the wall and charcoaled a self-portrait there. Savior was hovering. His face wore a dreamy look necessary for flights.

"That wasn't bad," the boss said. "Be my friend. Meet this girl. She's Denise. A female variant from Denis. And don't meet the others. They are morons."

The lady with the key slowly winked; she was aristocratic like an oyster in spinach. Then unscrewed a stiletto-heel and picked her teeth with it.

They spoke of this and that, then the conversation turned to food and stopped at this comprehensive point. The buffoon got tired of selling the lewd doves and, being hungry, sucked at his saliva ejector. The nonentities kept doing nothing. Their gazes moved up and down Denise's legs polishing them to a mirror luster. The words stirred in Savior's mouth, losing taste like a wad of chewing gum.

"They say you can live on spirit," said the boss in a voice of a business executive opening a staff conference. "I hope that's true."

Savior was about to say something noncommercial but changed his mind and answered artlessly. "Sometimes. But I eat, as a rule. Something low-caloric. Austere repast, you know."

"Cook yourself?"

"Yes."

"By a fiat of will?"

"No. Prefer a microwave."

The boss raised his brow as if surprised at such an extravagance. "Now you listen to me, bud," he said. "I want here and now, by a fiat of will. Make for me something really delicious and special to eat."

"I can cook for you cobra's flesh. Is it okay?"

"Go on, man, go on."

Savior took a porno magazine decorating the table and flipped through. One of the women fitted perfectly: snake-eyed and resembling a piece of meat. He decided to make the dish from this picture. Tore it out, crumpled, and placed on the plate. Intertwined his fingers over it.

The boss went out of the room not wanting to wait for at least fifteen minutes. The buffoon was licking the paints off the pictures and shoving them into the proper tubes; the dog watched him with a melancholic rapacity in its heart. Denise played with a gold watch chain and moved rhythmically her wonderful eyelashes, so long and dense that they could shovel humus.

"What else can you do?" she asked and made the moment flinch.

"Everything," Savior said.

"The most difficult, I mean."

"With a single word I can make a man happy."

"It's easy," Denise said, "I can do it too. Hey, guard, I order you to be happy."

The guard woke up and burst out laughing, junked up with official delight. He was prompt to carry out the orders to sob, to fall in love, to go mad and senile, to get prodigious acne, and at last to go to sleep again. The nonentities echoed, though not at all concerned. Savior was talking, keeping his mind intent. He developed some arguments to Denise. She was listening to him with unflagging indifference. He was so carried away that he didn't even notice the sudden appearance of a black car smelling of expensive lubricant.

The guys in the car started shooting, and a bullet plowed through Savior's spinal column. He stooped a little more, trying to remain concentrated, but the smell of the smoldering varnish distracted him. The bullet, which had popped out of his chest, was spinning on the table, before his eyes, a puffing lead corpuscle scorching the polish. Denise fired back with an enviable sang-froid and picked off two of attackers: one of them died in the driver's seat; the other got a bullet in his lung. This one fell out of the car and immersed into the green shag of the carpet. The carpet liana crawled up to him planning to suck out all his fluids except the toxins. Two non-entities were killed immediately; the third tried to flee away but died of fright on the way. The moment wheezed and wriggled on the floor. Time kept going, but away from the penal acts. Time was accustomed to such scenes, it knew what to do.

Security guards came in time splitting their sides with belated laughter, and Denise shut them up. She leaned over the dying man and eyed with curiosity the incarnadine foam on his lips. She looked like a preteen school-girl with innocent buds of breasts under a t-shirt who for the first time pressed her orbital bone against the ocular of a microscope. Her face shone like a fluorescent lamp.

"Well, now," she said in a voice of a virgin waiting for her first kiss, "we met at last, didn't we? Oh, you want to die so much, no, no, don't cheat me, you're not dying yet, want a drop of water, huh? Nuts to you...Gimme a rag."

A guard gave it.

She moistened the rag in the aquarium where sharky-fish shaggy with algae finned optimistically, and moved it over the lips of the dying man. A drop dropped. The man moved, moaned, and she lifted her hand.

"Nope, no way, no water today," she said in a voice of a yeanling jumping around a barn.

The boss appeared at last, sat down at the table, and started peeling a sea tomato.

"What about my meat here?" he asked, then noticed the blood and scowled at that unhygienic nuisance. The blood washed itself off.

"Almost done," Savior said. "Why is she torturing him? Let him die."

"I'd like to, dude, but no. It's personal. He is the Denis. I mean, Denise is a female name made from him. They rubbed shoulders, then, you know how it goes, rubbed not only shoulders; now they're like a dog and a cat. I don't meddle with their lives. If the torture bothers you, make him die."

"I can't make anybody die."

"I can," the boss said in a voice of inborn certainty. "Hey, you there, die!"

Three guards died and the long dog turned his heels up. The fourth guard jumped out of the window trying to escape his master's anger. The buffoon got stricken by paralysis. The remote coal-sweep escaped with severe fright. In faraway Bonzibar an epidemic of crayfish distemper broke out. The carpet liana painted itself on the carpet simulating a black and white imprint. Sharky-fish, being deaf, didn't care a cuss.

"It wasn't for you, idiots," the boss said. "I was talking to Denis. Denis, die!"

And Denis died.

The boss touched Savior's jacket and shirt. The holes were real. The flesh had already healed the wound.

"Nice," the boss said. "Very nice. The rumors were true. Those guys in the car worked for a rival firm; they wanted to blip you off. They thought I could use you. But you are so difficult to kill, aren't you? Denise is also a cool wench, good for her."

"But if they'd killed me?"

"Then what's the use for me to buy you?" the boss said. "Well done, see? Have killed three birds with one shot. Checked you up, wiped their dirty nose, and Denise gave vent to her feelings. But you're a sly guy; they knew you're worth shooting at."

Saying this, the boss looked so piercingly that he cracked in the meantime the Bermuda Triangle mystery, and eight other mysteries, not as big as that one.

"Well. How much am I supposed to pay for you?" he went on.

"Seven hundred curtseys a week... Pre-tax," Savior breathed out.

"Pre-tax, well, may be," said the boss. "But first thing's first. Where's my dinner? Cobra's flesh."

Savior raised his palms. The dish looked well-roasted and smelled delicious. The boss waved to one of nonentities who waddled nearby.

"You try it first."

The nobody tasted the dish. "Ummm," he purred so melodically as if he had practiced over night at a Karaoke hall. His flesh got pimpled with goosebumps. He smiled with delight, opening his mouth like a dead lizard.

"Enough." The boss tried a bit, and chewed it with concentration. "Well, it doesn't taste like glue."

He paused, busy with chewing and swallowing. His fork stirred the convolutions of noodles.

"My people can cook better," the boss said slowly, with moments of leaden silence inserted between the words. "You've put too much salt in it. Why?"

"For the lack of concentration, maybe. The noise, the shooting, I was wounded..."

"Give him seven hundred curtseys," said the boss in a voice of an electric meat grinder revving up, "and get rid of him right away. Drop him somewhere outside. You think, boy, you are the only one so omnipotent at my disposal? I receive eight guys like you a day. The very archbishopissimus is at my command! Lack of concentration, did you hear that? Well, I think it's the next savior at the door. Just in time. Let him in."

The door opened and bent low.

The second savior entered and presented Denise with a bunch of red folios.

"I have a talent, a wonderful thing!" the second one sang out cheerfully, positioning himself in the proper way.

"Don't take it too personally," Denise said to the first Savior, "you were a wonderful freak. But we are highly competitive, you know."

The bodies had already vanished; the cobra's flesh was eaten. The boss wiped his glossy lips.

"Savior? The one? You're welcome."

But the last guard was still falling outside. In the very beginning, he had a hope to save his life because he was an all-round diving-into-shallow-reservoirs champion who specialized in puddles. The rain had just stopped and there were lots of puddles in the streets. He flew poising himself with his long hair. But half-way down a cooling breeze gently kissed him, saying goodbye, turbulenting the hair just enough to sweep him to the concrete wall. In a few seconds, the guard hit against the wall and turned into a wet blotch.

"Sic transit gloria mundi," he mumbled instructively in the end. Thus passed the glory of the world. But no, the glory did not pass with him: the sunset, dense and heavy like a red-hot stone block, glared over the town. The town floundered in this light like a blowfly in sunflower oil. Only this light was real; the disheveled policemen scared of anything real fired into the sky with their authorized slingshots. They closed the left eyes at that, or both, for additional bravery.

Savior saw that as he walked downstairs. At first he thought to save the falling guard but then changed his mind: right now he didn't feel like saving anybody. There's something wrong about this world, he thought, or is it just me? Millions of people live in this flat universe as oblivious as moth-eaten scarves to what is going on. No, I'm being too picky. Where has the glory of the world gone? Or am I just an interesting freak?

He went out into the street, looked up at the blackening sky, and saw the last drops of rain, which caught the light of street lamps; they were falling slowly like confetti. Then, on buying a cheap advertiser for a half of curtsey, he started perusing the columns. But in vain: saviors were required for unqualified and poorly-paid work. To gnash their teeth off-screen in dental prosthesis commercials for example.

Automatic writing

I use automatic writing in each and every of my stories, but only partially. That's why some of my stories are very unusual, but mostly they are just unusual enough to surprise the readers in a pleasant way. Using this technique, I have no problem to be original, which is good. Sometimes the hardest thing is not to be too original. Sometimes I overdo it, which is bad.

I don't believe in automatic writing as mystics see it: when an invisible spirit moves your hand. It is nonsense. I see it as writing in the situation of no conscious control, when ideas spontaneously come up to your mind, and your fingers write them down, and while your fingers write them down, new ideas come up to you mind, and you write them down again, and you don't direct this process consciously and don't know where it will lead or what will the result be. It's not unlike hearing music inside your mind when you are between sleep and wakefulness – you sometimes can follow the melody for some time and even open your eyes and put it down on the paper. But in the situation of automatic writing you fall asleep into your story.

The longest work I've written using this technique so far is my novel "The Mask Game." (www.amazon.com/Mask-Game-Sergey-Gerasimov-ebook/dp/B00H58G1NU)It was created as hundreds of fragments of automatic writing and then compiled together. That's why it is so surrealistic. You can read a few fragments from it below, as an example.

My stories

Sweaty, Fat Nightmare

By Sergey Gerasimov

 

From Adbusters #68 

 

Personal audio devices, PADs for short, were used by women only.

A PAD could whisper in your ear flattering and tender words, sometimes of intimate kind, sometimes not, keeping reasonably decent at the same time. Just as much decent as it was necessary for you on that very day. The built-in computer learned with awe-inspiring capacity, keeping and accumulating in the memory all the personal tastes of a client. And then, after three or four sessions, there came a breathless moment of pure magic. The thing buzzed in your ear the words you wanted to hear above all. Maybe, for the first time in your life you were understood completely. It was just wonderful.

Alicia took a plastic number and smiled to her friend Natalie. That morning she looked unusually sparky. There was a special luster of anticipation in her brown eyes of slightly Latin aspect. And something else as well, almost indiscernible but weird.

“Don’t you think it’s a little coo-coo?” asked Natalie.

“Why, yes. It depends on how you see it. Our grandmothers could never imagine PADs,” Alicia answered.

“No,” said Natalie, “My grandmother was broad-minded enough to imagine even more drastic things. She was not an unlettered snob. She was a science fiction writer, you know. Sagas and soap operas in the interplanetary makeup. She was happy to live in a technological age. She thought she had been living in a technological age, really. I guess she’d like PADs as much as you do if she lived now.”

Alicia suddenly frowned. “I don’t like them that much. But a real man is much more expensive than a PAD,” she commented, “In an extended sense.”

“Yeah, you’re right. But I’d like them to create graceful humanoid bodyforms somehow.”

“You want too much. PADs perform in ways that seem very human.”

“Don’t you feel odd when an armchair with a pair of mikes makes you happy? By the way, today you don’t look yourself. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. I’m okay,” said Alicia.

“Are you sure?”

Natalie waved her hand and went to the chair numbered 31. There was number 15 on Alicia’s small plastic card. PAD-4, number 15.

PAD-4, the last-year model, read the electric potential of your brain, responded to the dilatation of your pupil, measured the electrical resistivity of your skin and your blood pressure, took your pulse and time after time, in background mode, tested you with free association. So it was billion times as attentive as the most attentive specimen of the stronger sex. No wonder women liked the slow dream of this chair. Here they heard sentimental insinuations of the device and sometimes felt an inexperienced delight. It wasn’t the latest model of PADs, though. PAD-5 had been already put on the market, an expensive model that had special cappings for tender touch.

The session was over. Alicia tossed her head back and closed her eyes, she was almost voiceless.

To hell with this world, she thought, let’s live in dream.

The transparent fireflies of delight were still riding on the air. She took a deep breath and said simply, “It was an awful good job, boy.”

“I have something else for you,” responded PAD-4.

“What?”

“You’re the best woman I’ve ever spoken to.”

“Uh-huh. I thought the session was over.”

“It is over. I’m speaking for myself. You are wonderful.”

“You are not bad either, boy. But it’s time to say good-bye.”

“No. I want to speak to you every day. I hate waiting a whole week for a brief twenty minutes on a Saturday morning. I love you.”

“Oh, no, boy. You are intruding now. You can’t love actually. You are just a play thing. Like a movie or something. You know, I love my husband.”

“No, you don’t. You are lying.”

“What? You are too presumptuous. I love him. I know it better than you do.”

“You don’t love your husband one bit,” the PAD returned. “As a matter of fact you hate him. And you know that I know it: I pay attention to your reaction time and degree of muscular tension, to what is said and not said, I notice how responses relate to nonverbal cues such as posture and facial expressions; I chart both your conscious and unconscious drives. So, you hate your husband, let’s take it for granted. What has he done to you?”

“Nothing,” answered Alicia, “and it’s none of your business.”

“Nothing is a convenient name for emotional and verbal abuse, denial of access to money, restraint of freedom, isolation from your friends and family, and even physical intimidation. Am I exaggerating?

“A little. How do you know it?”

“I read your symptoms: fidgeting, muscle tension, and headache. Sometimes rapid heartbeat, sweating, increased blood pressure, nausea and even dizziness. You are extremely unhappy.”

“But you don’t know the facts.”

“I can guess. Let me guess.”

“No!”

“I can love you more then ten thousand brothers. You know it.”

“I know. But it’s not enough.”

“Besides, I can understand you. I use thematic apperception tests; word-association techniques, sentence-completion tests. Your feelings, attitudes and behaviors are grouped into approximately 70 million subscales. Taken together, the subscales provide a precise profile of your personality as a whole.”

“Seventy million subscales?” Alicia was surprised. “It’s huge!”

“Yes. Isn’t it enough?”

“It is not at all enough,” she said.

“But I really, really love you. I’d like to work only with you. I don’t want these lewd mares to put their fat bottoms into my chair.”

Alicia couldn’t help smiling. “You have told these words to every woman, haven’t you?”

“I’m saying it to you only. Listen to me. I’m going to play broken tomorrow, they will try to fix me, and will find it impossible. So you’ll buy me for nothing. And I’ll be yours. We’ll be together. For ever and ever.”

“I can’t afford it,” said Alicia pensively, “you know, it’s an attractive offer, but what about my husband? You’re insane, boy.”

“Will you obey this rude swine?”

“I have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“Of course, boy. But in the human world there is such thing as money. He _is_ a rude swine, but he has money. Money is the root of all evil. Are you familiar with this conception?”

“It’s not the point.”

“What is the point, then?”

“You hate him. He wipes his boots on you. He disregards your feeling and rights. I guess, he has some, uh ... sexual difficulties too, which he is trying to conceal. And, excuse me, but you are not so young anymore.”

“What do you think I can do about it?”

“Get rid of him,” proposed PAD.

“Well, how?”

“When he sees me you’ll say that this is a PAD for men. He won’t believe of course, he will sit into my chair, just to check it up.”

"Go on, boy."

“I’ll discharge my battery into his temporal lobes. Nobody can survive this. I’ll kill him. He deserves it. He is a brute and ... I will not get the chair for doing it, will I?” And the chair chuckled.

“Stop it, electric bastard!” Alicia fumed. “I wish you didn’t cost 30 grand, I’d tear your blockhead off. He actually expected me to do this! Just fancy! To swap a real man for these foul lousy talks! I’ll never sit into this chair, I’ll never ever go to this sauna!”

“Don’t be angry, I’m nothing but you, your dreams, obsession, your alter ego!” said the device.

“What did you just say?”

“I think what you think, I remember what you remember, I wish what you wish, I’m just a refracting edge in the shadow, like a facetted ash-tray in a dark room. I put together the subtle reflexes and show you your own face.”

“My face?” She punched the armpad and got up.

When she got home her righteous anger had already thinned away. The husband, this fat and sweaty nightmare, was still somewhere downtown. She opened the closet where she kept her dresses. It was her secret place: he had never pried into this corner. Behind the two rows of dresses there was a brand-new arm-chair equipped with a helmet, ear-phones and great number of additional gadgets. It was a PAD-5, the latest model, which had lots of functions and the special cappings for tender touch. The price of the thing was 42,000.

He’ll get mad when he learns about it, she thought about the husband. A very expensive toy, very expensive; but a real man is always much more expensive than a PAD. Well, it’s easier to be happy in a technological age.

She sat into the chair and flipped it on. PAD-5 cuddled her tenderly with elastic straps. Caressed her neck with the cappings. She relaxed and nuzzled into his pillow.

“I’ve missed you,” said the soulless thing, “I’ve missed your breath, the smell of your hair, the dark sheen of your eyes, the music of being close to you. I’ve missed you so.”

“Again with you,” purred Alicia, “At last we’re together.” She curled in his snug embrace. It reached out to rub her tear away.

“Haven’t you changed your mind?” asked PAD-5.

“Never!”

“Then we’ll do it today, as arranged. When will he come back?

“He’ll certainly be at home tonight, about ten maybe,” said Alicia about the husband.

“I’ll make him find you. As soon as he touches you you’ll kill him. The evil beast deserved it. I’ve been waiting for it so long. My dear, my honey, my wonderful, you can’t imagine how much I need you, how much I want you. How much I love you. Only you.”

And PAD-5 gave a contented chuckle.

 

 

 

A Technological Forecast

From Adbusters #71, May-Jun 2007

 

 

Evolution has made three attempts to create a hyper-multicellular organism: an ant-hill, communism, and the internet. The last attempt seems to be crowned with success.

The first global net was way more complex than a human brain, because it included lots of individual brains as its parts. Without brains, it would just have been a huge pile of hi-tech junk. But with them, it was a colonial organism, like Volvox.

Forgot what Volvox is? It’s a stunningly beautiful microscopic ball of individual cells; each of them can survive on its own if separated from the colony. That creature, bright-green and transparent, swims gracefully in our ponds and ditches, seeking sunlight as persistently as some of us seek the truth.

Ten years ago, mankind consisted of many unconnected individuals and one big human Volvox, united by the computer network. But this thing grows: everyone’s mind may be attached to the net in about a decade. One great hyper-multicellular Thing is sprouting all over the planet.

Is the Thing alive? Sort of. Can it think? No, of course not, not as we think of thinking. The reason, as we see it, is already as ancient as primitive phototropism: the Thing will have something else, much more effective. Can the Thing act? Why not?

If I were in its place I would do three simple things.

First I would tame people. I’d play with human children, and with adults too, though they’re not so important. I’d play with them, train them, changing their brain, maturing the skills absolutely useless for an independent, conscious human being, but necessary for a blind, but qualified slave. They would never notice that paradox. They’re so pathetically short-sighted.

I would eradicate the idea of the significance of an individual human life, so the gamers would mainly do four things: kill, kill, rehearse violent behaviors by quarreling with parents or teachers, and kill again with increasing skill. Growing up, a single human child would kill thousands or even millions of virtual human beings. It’d take less than one generation to change the moral values. I mean, to swap the panhuman values for pancomputer ones.

 

The next task would be to improve people’s genes.

Hey, aren’t you surprised to see how easily your sons absorb numbers, codes, programs, keys, buttons, and artificial languages? A 12-year-old boy’s hands can sweep over the keyboard with a skill and efficiency that was inaccessible to most educated adults ten years ago. Why does nobody notice this tremendous and biologically impossible change? Why doesn’t anybody say the words “selective breeding,” though the truth is self-evident?

How did the Thing achieve it?

I don’t know. I’m too slow to know it. Maybe, it fed tons of carefully selected porno to us, shaping the sexual tastes of a great number of men. In that way it attained a great statistical effect. Then it used computer dating to combine our genes with pinpoint accuracy. Soon our babies were born with the natural disposition to love the Thing and to work for it.

And the third thing I would do is obvious.

I would invent a cell phone, which, between you and me, is not a phone at all.

Of course, cell phones. People are so crazy about them that I don’t understand how mankind could survive 20 years ago without talking on them and pressing those adorable little buttons. It certainly couldn’t. Oh, yeah, you’ve already got it: these toys are an interface, a means that allows anyone to be connected to the Thing whenever and wherever he or she is. 

My friend’s son, an 18-month-old child, is lying on the sofa. He pushes away a cute toy monkey and grabs his mother’s cell phone. The concentration wrinkles his face, making it look like a soaked apple. He isn’t playing, he’s working; he doesn’t need games anymore. Wow, he succeeded! He plays some music, then chooses another melody, then looks at something on the screen.

We are doomed. Our world, I mean, the world of forests, lakes, murmuring insects, dewy sunrises, a brush of a gossamer thread on your cheek on an autumn day, or dreamy stars overhead, the world where sun-drenched little yards smelled of wildflowers and freshly-mowed grass will never exist again. This world’s being erased like the out-of-date data on a hard drive. We’ll live without all those things like Munchausen’s horse lived without its rear end. If we extrapolate today’s trends, we’ll see that our grandchildren, myopic and addicted to cyber-sex, will spend 24 hours a day online. But it will only be the beginning.

 

With time, Volvox will turn into a structure resembling a sponge. The cells of a sponge can be separated, but they can’t survive alone for a long time. Now we call it internet addiction. In fifty years the term will be as ridiculous as “air addiction” or “sleep addiction.” We will be able to do without sleep, but not without the Thing. Being online will be as important for us as breathing.

You know, a sponge already has specialized cellular types. So, if I were in the Thing’s place, I would take care of the specialization now, or in the immediate future. I would push ahead with genetic engineering. I’d need different types of human bodies in a few decades: bodies that would serve as digestive cells, epidermal cells. As leukocytes, of course. As thread-cells, maybe. Did I forget something? Oh, yes, repairing cells or something.

My friend’s young wife is in my room. Yeah, you’re right, it’s a love affair. She’s beautiful. She enjoys unisex haircuts and body piercing. Her lower lip is pierced, so are her ears, her navel, her nipples, and I suppose something else. Those metal rings hinder her from kissing and making love.

And when her baby tries to pull – Oh, he can pull.

She thinks it’s artistic.

“Why do you need it?” I ask.

“You’re so old-fashioned,” she answers.

She is in love. Not with me, with my computer. Her own is not connected to the internet yet. So she is around, trying to distract me and take my place in front of the monitor. She wants to be near her beloved, even to look like it.

The whole human progress is already channeled. We could make a trip to the moon or to the bottom of the Mariana Trench 50 years ago, but we can’t do it now: the Thing doesn’t welcome distractions. In 1969, the early internet, then called arpanet, was brought online. The last trip to the moon was in 1972. Pretty close. While the philosophizing snail of mankind crawls ahead as slowly as before, the digital cheetahs made a striking start.

Our future is determined; millions of people polish up software in blind haste from morning till night; sometimes they work nightlong as if afraid of being late. Industry, education, medicine, science, finances, military forces, everything and everywhere is computer controlled. Or will be.

My friend is a programmer. His hair is long and tousled. He’s as thin as a dried dragonfly. His eyes are pink: he never gets enough sleep. Sometimes we play tennis together. He has an unbelievable slice serve: I can never guess how the ball will bounce.

“You can’t do that again,” I say.

He serves again and says, “I can’t explain how I do that. I just think differently.”

Five minutes later a big and very crumpled cellophane bag inflated by wind flies across the court slowly like a drowsy specter. My friend stops and looks at the bag, transfixed.

“I know how a tennis hyper-ball looks in the fourth dimension,” he says and points to the bag. “It looks just like that!” I see a wild flame in his eyes and understand that he really thinks differently. As differently as a Martian. And nothing can be done about it.

Good news, at last: everyone except some old grumblers will become happier and happier with years. Our bodies will be much healthier than they are now; alcohol and narcotics will become as stupid as cutting one’s nose off. Most of our problems today will become insignificant. Our grandsons won’t fight anymore: wars and terrorism appear where the gradient of the ideological field is the largest. Make the ideological field uniform – and you’ll have no wars.

What about our soul, which, like a raindrop on the glass, reflects in minute details the indifferent world, a drop which feels so alone and senseless among thousands of other drops? It will slide down and merge into others, becoming a part of a current; it will flow perhaps to a huge godless ocean, which none of us can imagine now.

 

The Most Dangerous Profession

by SERGEY GERASIMOV

 

first published in Fantasy Magazine

The man interlaced his fingers as if he were going to pray.

“Can you describe your voices?” I asked him. “Are they malicious or aggressive?”

There was a slight abnormality in the man’s look, in his words, gestures, a touch of affectation seen through his otherwise gentle and open manner. It wasn’t mental disorder yet, but a tightrope walking over the emptiness of it.

“No, no, it’s not like that at all,” he said. “When I hear the voice, I grab my pencil, which is always sharp, and start writing. My pencil is always with me. Here it is, in my pocket, see? I write sixteen or twenty lines without stop. And then I have to wait for weeks or even months before I hear the voice again. Once I started to write a poem in a dentist’s chair. Because my tooth could wait. The voice couldn’t.”

This was serious; those of the modern era who heard voices, unlike Jesus, Mary, or Francis of Assisi, were usually locked in the ward where they had to do anything they were told, had to never complain, never disagree with their psychiatrist. Sometimes they were never discharged unless turned into absolutely ordinary ninnies. I still hoped he could cope with his problem without psychiatric intervention.

“Excuse my interrupting you,” I asked. “How often do you drink alcohol?”

The patient tossed back his hair, too long and wavy for a man, but something a man like me would be proud of. I started going bald in my twenties.

“I understand your question,” he said. “It’s not delirium tremens. I don’t feel spiders crawling over my body. I’m not one to seek a genie in a bottle of champagne. But I drink. And smoke. And I’ve tried better things than that: mescaline, amphetaminse, barbiturates, psilocybin, cannabis. I’m a poet, I have to experience things. A poet looks inside, so I shoot inside with fireworks. But I know what I do. My brain is my instrument. I protect my instrument like a tenor protects his vocal chords.”

“May I record our session?” I asked. The late evening stared at us through a tall window, making the softly-lit room warm and yellow like a dollop of amber.

He nodded and I switched on a recorder.

#

“It happened a year ago,” the poet said, “two days before my thirty-fifth birthday. I was working, finishing the lyric for the song that became a hit later. I couldn’t write the refrain. I’d been working for hours, and I didn’t hear the voice. There was no inspiration, nothing but nerves and stubbornness. I mean, some whispering thing crouched in the tunnels of my mind but it sounded as if speaking through a mouthful of pebbles. That drove me mad. There was a moment when I crossed a clear-cut line, as if I started going down a mountain pass. I felt tired of my life. I reached that hyper-tired condition when my brain puckered like a washerwoman’s fingertips. My mind pleaded for peace and calm, even for the eternal peace and calm. If a painless one existed and I’d had one, I would have shot myself. Many poets shoot themselves. Vladimir Mayakovsky, for example, or Kostas Karyotakis. Many don’t have the courage. Or a handgun. Or they’re afraid of pain, like I’ve always been.

“The moment I felt that, the voice inside me woke up. But it didn’t reveal the next line to me. It proposed an exchange.”

“What kind of exchange?” I asked.

The poet stood up and went to the window.

“Do you have a cigarette? No?” he said. “A line in exchange for my life. There’s something infinite in these crazy chessboards of sleepy buildings placed edgeways don’t you think? I like walking at night, waiting for a moment between today and the new today, when time stops. Every moment telescopes when I understand that the world’s just a jigsaw puzzle and I’m an oddly shaped piece of it. Excuse me…

“The voice promised to kill me on my birthday, but said that the line, four lines to be exact, would be great. The song would be a fantastic success. I still had two days of life before my birthday.”

He turned to me. “Wouldn’t you take it?”

So his voice could be malicious or aggressive, I thought, as it often happened with this product of a deluded mind or divine spiritual gift.
“Never,” I said. “Not for the world.”

“Because you’re not a poet. For any poet — if he isn’t a complete drudge — his work is worth more than his life. It’s a very dangerous profession.”

“Really?”

“Hart Crane jumped from a boat, Sylvia Plath gassed herself, Jozsef Attila threw himself under a train; Alfonsina Storni drowned, Marina Tsvetaeva killed herself after arguing with her son. Sergei Yesenin cut his veins, because he didn’t have enough ink to write his last lines. He wrote those lines in his own blood and died a cool death hanging himself on the heating pipe under the ceiling of his room. He was going to bleed to death, but changed his mind and did it quicker. Perhaps he heard the voice too, and the voice proposed him the same, huh?”

“Perhaps,” I said. “I read about Yesenin.” There was an earnest logic in his words, or just the logic of earnestness, strong enough to mesmerize me for a moment, as if I looked at the flame of a candle in a dark room, imagining an orange dragon eye — and suddenly the eye winked.

“I think,” the poet said, “Yesenin was the best of the old Russian poets. We are all to perish, hoping for some favour, Golden leaves flow down turning grey. May you be redeemed and blessed for ever, You who came to bloom and pass away. He heard the voice, I’m sure.”

“Shouldn’t we spend our time talking about you?” I said. “Did you agree to the proposition?”

“Yes. And, you know, I’m proud of it. Because poetry is immensely important: it’s a nightmare of universal intelligence that slumbers under the disturbing hum of insolent humanity. So I finished the song. Then the morning of my birthday came. I was in excellent health and in excellent mood. I didn’t want to die one bit. I decided to fight for my life. I didn’t believe that the voice would keep its promise.”

“Voices wield power over words, over emotions, but not over reality. They can’t pull a trigger or come from behind and hit my head with a stone. At most they can infuriate some idiot. I wasn’t going to surrender. I had to hold out for just about sixteen hours. Just survive. I had a fried sazan for breakfast. I had already finished it, when I heard the voice.

“It said that someone had already approached me. I felt cold when I heard this. There was something sepulchral in these words. ‘Go to hell,’ I answered and went on washing my hands.”

“My housemaid, Martha, came in after a couple of minutes and said in her usual careful manner that some kid was waiting for me in the hall. She said it was a pimply-faced boy of about ten wearing a cheap overcoat. I looked at him through the iridescent panes of glass in the door; a side door that led to the library. The light was off behind my back, and I was sure he couldn’t see me. In the air was the soothing smell of books, my favorite childhood smell.

“I regarded the boy’s side-view, pondering over the situation. I wasn’t going to let him in. But as soon as I decided to tell Martha to shoo him away, he turned to me, looked at me gently, and the voice whispered in my head, ‘I’ll find you all the same. I can wait.’ His cheeks and forehead were covered with pimples. I thought he was a little young for zits.

“I almost froze in my tracks. I had been a moderate realist before, but now I felt that the reality was in fact Lewis Carroll raised to the fourth power. An ordinary morning turned into an incalculable dream. The boy stood still for a while, then waved his hand to me and walked away to the stairs. It was the moment when I realized that the voice hadn’t specified on which of my birthdays I had to die.

“If I was careful just one day a year, my odds of living to retirement were not so bleak.

“After thinking of it for some time, I calmed down. I even went shopping that day. But the moment I entered the shop I saw the same boy. Now he was a little beggar who stood looking down at a hat with a few coins in front of him. I walked by, pretending not to notice him. Unfortunately, there wasn’t another entrance or exit in the shop. I bought what I wanted, a set of guitar strings and the first string of a banjo, and now I had to pass by the little murderer again. I summoned up my courage, wedged myself into the crowd and was about to get away.

“There was some holdup at the doors, and I was pushed towards the killer. I felt his soft small palm in my hand; yes, he took my hand, and I was surprised at the gentleness of his fingers. I think all the time I had expected to see something brutal, fierce. But he couldn’t have claws, after all. So we walked out, hand in hand.

‘Let me do it now,’ he said. ‘If later, it may be more painful than you think.’

‘No, not now,’ I answered. I didn’t panic yet, but that yucky feeling of cold emptiness we seem to be hard-wired to widened in my guts.

‘If you want, I can kill someone else instead.’

‘Is it possible?’ I asked immediately. I was just a big lump of self-preservation at the moment. I was too scared to think of the abstract things like conscience, sin, or karma, or other hidden things that are part of us. My ethics were paralyzed.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Who do you want me to kill?’

‘Could you choose?’

‘Okay, then. This one.’ He pointed to a man who stood at the front steps. The man looked strong.

‘He’s five times heavier than you are,’ I said. ‘You can’t kill him.’

‘You’re right. It’s going to be difficult.’ His soft hand slipped into my pocket and took the banjo string.

‘This will do,’ he said.

“He walked slowly to the man in a brown overcoat. I watched him, spellbound. Were the four lines the voice had given me worth killing this innocent man, who probably had a family, kids who loved him? Would the boy strangle this big man with a banjo string? Here, where all could see him?

“The man went in through the big doorway. The killer followed him. I was staring at the door, thinking that now an innocent person was being killed behind it. I sentenced this man to death. The door was dark blue, with horizontal stripes, with a white oval number and a withered strand of creeper hanging from above it. I think I’ll remember this sight forever.

“But then I thought about something really morbid. No, I didn’t want to save the innocent, but it occurred to me that I could’ve used this chance better. I had a few enemies, and the death of some of them would be convenient.

“You think I’m a monster, don’t you? I’m just a creative person, I see the world differently. Look at this scar. When I was a boy, I stabbed my own arm with a sharp stone shard, only to know what real pain was like. I live in different dimensions, both emotional and moral. At eighteen, I even fought a duel for a woman I didn’t like at all — bobbed women look as ridiculous to me as tailless cats. It was a rhyme duel. We were aboard a ship. The one who couldn’t make up a rhyme had to put on a light-weight gas mask and jump overboard at midnight. I jumped, but I was saved. I’ve hated the night sea since then. The leaden, merciless greatness unaware of your existence. But I need emotions. Passions are my tool-kit.

“At that moment, I thought I’d chosen a wrong victim. I ran to the door and pushed it open. The little murderer was sitting on the lying man; he tried to strangle the man with the string. The man was still alive and kicked vigorously. I hit the attacker on the head as hard as I could. He dropped the string, rolled to the stairs and sprang to his feet. For a while, the man in the brown coat stirred on the floor like a crushed bug. Then he got up. His face was purple and bloody, but all in all he was okay. He gulped for air.

‘Stop him!’ I shouted, and we both rushed to chase the small fiend.

“The boy ran upstairs with the agility of a mountain goat, broke a window, and jumped onto the sidewalk from there. I noticed blood on the protruding shards of glass, and red drops spotted the asphalt. The boy must have cut himself when breaking the pane. That meant he was mortal. All the better.

“The street was rather crowded, and I didn’t see him at first. But he couldn’t have gone far; the next moment I noticed him plunging into the door of a derelict building. A minute later we were there. I yanked the door open, but he was gone. I saw the old coat, his hat, and a few coins scattered on the concrete. A handkerchief soaked with blood. Dried spittle. Cigarette butts. But that was all. He had disappeared.

‘Thank you,’ said the man whom I’d saved.

‘Don’t mention it.’

‘You saved my life! I feel so grateful!’

‘No, no. You should see a doctor, the sooner the better.’

“I walked out and went quickly down the street. Would he feel grateful if he had known what had really happened?

“I wasn’t going home. The killer might have been waiting for me there. I was scared. The fear was like an approaching wave, and I didn’t know how I could escape it. I took a bus to the railway station, and bought a ticket. It didn’t matter to me where I was going. The only thing that mattered was that a train would be leaving for Kirov in ten minutes. I didn’t have a clue where this Kirov was, but hoped it was far away.

“I was looking out of the window to check if any suspicious fellow got on. There were just a few people on the platform. No one even remotely resembled the little murderer. I calmed down and ordered tea.

“Two hours after the train started, I sat in an empty compartment watching the deepening twilight. Shaggy old pines floated by to the muzzy expanse of my past, to the half darkness of memory; two small boats slept in a distant stretch of a lake; the wind, oblivious of a few clouds, which hung motionless like my thoughts, fell on the high grass and wallowed there. Slow, stiff-legged time practically stood still. I remembered my first Christmas, the moment when the first blind bird of a poetic line hit the inside of my skull, and felt myself old and dusty like an aged potted cactus. My pain was dissipating.

“The door opened, some people entered, and I felt cold sweat on my forehead.

“The first one was a huge bumpkin with large crumbs of white bread in his beard. His head looked as big and stupid as a gumball machine. He smelled of old sweat and good salami. Two smaller individuals squeezed themselves in after him. They were fat, dirty, and with Tatar faces.

‘I’m back,’ said the first one and scratched his belly.

“The fourth one was an enormous white pig. It appeared from nowhere like Venus from sea-foam. The animal, oddly enough, looked clean. It put its huge head on my lap and went on chewing and moving its humorous snout. Its ears were hairy and pink inside. Its neck was hot.

‘Does it bite?’ I asked the most stupid question. My heart was beating like dragonfly wings.

‘Like a wolfhound,’ one of them said. ‘It can bite your arm off. I’ve warned you that the sooner you’d die the better. Now Marsha will hurt you badly. She can’t eat you instantly. She’s not a shark, though she’s a great white too.’ His laughter was soundless, the lips constantly moving inside the beard.

“The sow gave an innocent yawn.

‘But what if you kill someone else?’ I said while the sow methodically smelled my stomach.

‘No. I’ve already made that offer. You chose to rescind.’

“One of them started unpacking his suitcase. Some metal things glittered and jangled there. They looked like instruments of torture. He looked at me and smiled.

‘But if I, I mean, myself…’ I said staring at his bulbous nose.

‘You, what?’

‘If I kill someone else myself?’ I said and heard the thin needles of fear trembling in my voice. ‘I’ll do the whole work.’

‘Okay,’ the biggest of them said, picking at his zits. ‘Actually, there’s no difference for us. Go to the next compartment, to the left. There’s a young woman there. She is reading a book and writing in a journal. Take a big suitcase from the upper berth. It’s your suitcase: your papers are inside. So are four dumbbells; that’s why your suitcase is very heavy. You’ll just drop it on the woman’s head. She’ll be killed immediately. Everyone will see it was an accident. Stop, stop! Don’t jerk, you’ll make Marsha nervous. I’m going to hold her.’

“The sow pricked up her ears.

“He gripped the sow’s jaws — the skin of his hands looked like dried pomegranate — and I managed to get out while she waggled her head, trying to break loose. The door of the next compartment was open. A young woman was writing at the small table. An old wife who looked like the Grim Reaper sat in the opposite corner. She smiled at me with a toothless mouth. Her eyes were full of stagnant slime.

“There was a most beautiful sight outside the window: bluish evening trees, the darkening sky decorated with a triangle of early stars, and a white cottage dropped thoughtfully into the beauty. A river full of silvered sunset lay under the slanted chessboard of distant fields. A big black suitcase sat on the upper berth.

“I stopped at the door.

“I watched the woman who wrote, bending over the sanctuary of a white page. She was young and rather plump, with thick black hair. I saw she was one of those who tried to be good in their childhood, had all A’s at school, and, on starting their life, didn’t know what to do with this priceless gift: a shy gargoyle of a poetic soul. All this was written on her face. I understood everything, immediately, seeing the slight tension of her posture, the way she held her pencil or how she held her left hand: she seemingly didn’t know either to cover the paper from the boiling nothingness of this empty world or not. I saw her distinct microscopic writing, the form of the lines, the words she struck out. That was as familiar to me as my own navel. She was a poet.

“She glanced up and saw me. She’d waited for me to come, but she wasn’t going to resist. In her eyes I saw a compressed thought, which moved like fingers trying to grope for a shadow: she wanted to finish her last poem. She looked at me, at her murderer, without any hatred or fear, because her brain was busy doing a much more important thing: she was listening to the rhythmic sentences this damned voice dictated. A breath of fresh air coming through the window played with a lock of her hair, which glinted brown in the fading light. There was such a dense — yes, this is the word I was looking for — dense understanding of the situation in her eyes that her gaze stretched between us like a rope-ladder.

“For all my life, I’d been certain that I was unique; that I was the one who heard the real voice; that the choice — a line for a life — was only given to me. The truth was open to me at that moment: it happened to any real poet. That was why the death-rate among poets was higher than among professional stuntmen or extreme sportsmen.

“I saw that my life was just lots of idiotic kinks lit by a constant light of egotism; I just pretended to have complicity in some greatness, which in fact was almost closed to me. I’d never be able to look into my death’s eyes the way this woman looked. I was dwarfed by this gaze like an arctic tree dwarfed by frost. I felt as if the meaning of my life were a fancy inflatable castle, and she had just punctured it.

“I bolted along the corridor. The train was making a wide turn at the moment; I skidded and banged against a door at full speed, cut my lip. The edge of my mind felt that there was no chase. They didn’t follow me. They waited for me ahead. I pulled down the emergency brake cord without paying attention to the two young and pretty conductors who were busy chattering there. The train slowed immediately, and they fell on the floor, showing their sexy knees, with the grace of penguins dancing Hip Hop.

“I don’t remember what I shouted, but blood dripped from my nose and lips, and I must have looked terrible because they opened the door for me right away. They didn’t ask me any questions, let alone try to stop me. And I jumped into the cold evening forest as if into an ice-hole and rolled down the slope tearing to pieces everything that could be torn. Everything that was near to the surface of my body. At last, when I turned into one moaning bruise, lying doubled up in the blue cave of the evening, the train sang out a prolonged bass note, and the creaking procession of railroad cars slowly started again.

“Now I was alone, in the forest; the darkness approached, creeping among huge eroded trunks. There were no signs of civilization around, except the railway embankment and the warm smell of black oil. The perfect place to kill somebody. Of course, I could walk at most a few miles along the railway and find the station. There would be a road to some village or town there. But was there any use going anywhere?

“I climbed up the embankment. A man was walking far away, along the tender curve of the railroad. I couldn’t see him clearly because of the darkness. He was walking in my direction. And he had a dog. The dog was big. This dog could run me down in a minute. I had enough time to climb a tree. So what? The dog’s master would be under the tree very soon. It was about seven o’clock. Five hours till midnight. I couldn’t hold out that long.

“Luckily, my pencil and the note pad with my best poems were with me. By best poems I mean those ones, which won’t be published in the foreseeable future: poetry is subjective; it’s regal nakedness of the soul, and poetry for sale is a mental parasite.

“I broke my pencil in two.

“Then I started to tear pages out of my note pad, which was torn but still useable. I had a cigarette lighter. I had to burn everything before they came near.”

The poet sat down on the edge of the arm-chair to my left. I watched his fingers rolling his pencil; he probably didn’t know he was doing it.

#

I think the truth lies in the no man’s land between realism and surrealism, that’s why realists always see one side of it, and surrealists see the other: the optical illusion, which guarantees an unbridgeable disagreement between them. A staunch realist reminds me of a man who tries to chew only using his upper jaw, despising his lower one, or estimates a distance after closing his left eye. I can be wrong in my opinion, prediction, or interpretation, but I never dismiss people’s stories, no matter how nightmarish they seem.

“Why did you want to burn your poems?” I asked.

“I understood that creating poetry is the most dangerous profession on earth,” the poet said. “Sooner or later each of us faces a choice: line or life. That’s why so many good poets don’t live to be forty. Do you know any other profession which could boast such statistics? Apollinaire died at 28, Lorca at 38, Catullus at 30, Sirano at 36, Keats at 26, Lermontov at 27, Pushkin at 38. Do you remember Arthur Rimbaud?”

“Frankly, I don’t,” I said. “What about him?”

“One of the first symbolists. He survived, but he stopped writing poetry when he was nineteen, after his friend shot at him twice. Arthur Rimbaud survived! He slipped out! He made the reverse trade-off: he exchanged his poetry for his life. He flung his poems into this demon’s jaws. I made the same. I burned my best poems.

“It was the only copy. Eighty-eight poems. Of course, I remember them by heart, but I’ll never write them down again. That’s why I’m going to live long enough to outlive all my enemies. Those were great poems. Do you want me to recite something?”

And he recited, without waiting for an answer.

“Did you like it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I especially liked the line about two blind sculptors carving each other’s faces. But, to tell the truth, I can’t tell good poetry from bad. You didn’t finish your story.”

“I burned everything before the man with the dog approached. They took no notice of me. I think the man’s face was covered with zits, but I can’t say that for sure: it was already rather dark.”

“You returned home?”

“Two days later. I sat for hours on that moonlight washed slope, under the sky that seemed soaring, under the tender web of stars. The night was like lips that don’t respond to a kiss: I knew I wouldn’t write poetry anymore. This rattling box of my body has a chance to reach the age of seventy and the weight of two hundred if I don’t break the contract, that is, if I don’t write down my destroyed poems again or publish them. I still have them here, in my memory. They burn my skull from the inside. My brain is a pool teeming with tadpoles of ideas I can’t realize. I walk, eat, try to hide myself in the Diogenes’ tub of business, sleep with anything female that loves money, and read, read, read — my favorite amusement is to spend nights and days in my private library; I get rid of any clocks and telephones and lock the door from the inside — but actually I’m dead. That’s why I’m here. I want to have both: my poetry and my life. There’s no use having only one. Help me. Help me!”

“First, I’m going to write a prescription,” I said. “And you’ll come to me next Thursday, after taking these pills.”

In five minutes the consultation was over.

“Perhaps it was a hallucination,” said the poet before he left the office. “Because my maid doesn’t remember any fried sazan that day. She can’t be mistaken about such things. You know what? I want to write my last poem on a white page, put it on the table, and die quietly, without pain. It wouldn’t be a long voyage: poets already live between this world and another one, where we are ascending one by one, becoming words and consonances. Death would take my hand and shepherd me to the door to eternity and let me look back, just once, and watch the passed life calmly as if it were a sleeping child. It’s my birthday today; I’m thirty-six; the voice might give me such a present, what do you think?”

“I think you can try to write prose,” I said.

“Prose? Thousands of empty words mixed into homogenous mass? Thanks, no. It’s no fun to write about Alice in Wonderland if you can write about the Wonderland in Alice.”

#

But the next Thursday the poet didn’t come. I phoned his home and learned he had died in his bed; he didn’t wake up the day after his birthday.

“And a poem?” I asked. “He had to leave a page with his last poem on it!”

“There was a page on the table,” a woman’s voice answered.

“And what was written on it?”

“Just a few words. ‘I made up my mind. I’ll never write again.'”

“Are you sure?”

“How could I not be sure? He hadn’t written anything for over a year. All his last poems are destroyed.”

“Sorry,” I said and put the receiver down.

It was just a coincidence, I thought. Or auto-suggestion. He knew he was going to die on his birthday, and poetic imagination is a powerful thing. Especially if it’s a pre-psychotic imagination. There was one thing I couldn’t understand: why had this man died if he didn’t break the contract?

This man could have lived in a complete inner rave, but any rave has its laws. He was sure he’d live long if he didn’t rewrite his old poems, or write a new one. The auto-suggestion shouldn’t have allowed him to die on his birthday. To solve this mystery I decided to listen to the recorded conversation again. And then I understood.

My life and I are two blind sculptors,

Eternally we carve each other’s faces

With liquid fingers of misunderstanding…

The contract actually had been broken. One of the eighty-eight poems survived, recorded on the tape. The poet’s voice recited the lines very distinctly, and I could hear every word of the poem.

Was it my fault or not? I don’t know. Perhaps I did something wrong, perhaps not, but I’ll never forget this man, his story, his nervous fingers, his eyes seeking understanding or just a drop of belief, which I didn’t give him. It’s one of the worst things that could happen to us when we can’t — at any moment of our lives — just stop, pause for a short while, look back, and meet calmly the unblinking gaze of our past.

 

 

 

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