Sergey Gerasimov

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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