The Maya Pill

by German Sadulaev

  “Ah, no worry. See, these bags are all we have.”

  “Oh, fantastic! You are traveling light!”

  “It’s true.”

  The Dutchmen were indeed traveling light, just three small carry-ons. Maximus tucked the bags in his minuscule trunk, hustled his guests into the car, and set off. The three visitors spent the entire trip to the office chattering loudly in their own language, which Maximus didn’t understand. They only reverted to English when they had one of the standard tourist questions for their driver:

  “Do you always have traffic like this?”

  “What you see now we call the open road. Real traffic will start in couple of hours.”

  “Oh, horrible! Nick and Joseph have to fly back to Europe this evening.”

  “They’d better plan to leave extra time before departure. And you?”

  “Me? I’m going to Moscow. I have a ticket for the train tonight.”

  That meant that the two dumber ones would go back to Europe today, and Petya would head for Moscow on the night train. Which one of them would take the pills? How would they do it, and where would they take them? Well, thought Maximus, everything will become clear at the office.

  Three people would be meeting with the Dutch visitors: the Import Director, Diana Anatolyevna—whose acquaintance we’ve already made; the Commerce Director; and someone from Marketing. Maximus was not invited. Management decided what, how much, and how, to import; all the Import Department did was carry out the orders that came down from Management, whatever it took.

  They called Maximus only after the meeting in the conference room was over, and for the obvious reason.

  Diana Anatolyevna dialed Maximus’s number on the internal line and asked:

  “Semipyatnitsky, where’s that box with the rat poison?”

  “I’ll bring it right away, Diana Anatolyevna.”

  “That’s not necessary. Just tell me where it is and the secretaries can bring it.”

  “No, I can do it, it’s no problem at all, Diana Anatolyevna.”

  Maximus had given up on the idea of pilfering the pills and starting his own drug-dealing business. But he still wanted to know what sort of pills they were and what the Dutch guys intended to do with the box. As he carried it into the room, Maximus was hoping to learn which of the three visitors would take charge of it.

  The Dutch didn’t disappoint. While Maximus was in the room, Peter immediately took out a large opaque bag with string handles and dropped the box inside, smiling happily.

  Maximus resolved to demonstrate an even greater sense of company spirit and asked the Import Director, “Diana Anatolyevna, is someone taking our guests to the airport?”

  “Yes, Maximus, we’ve already reserved a taxi. But Peter will be leaving later, he’s taking the night train to Moscow.”

  “Really? So he’ll be here by himself? Does he have anything to do until then?”

  Maximus made it seem as though he hadn’t known that Peter was leaving separately from his colleagues. It looked as though he was trying to come up with a pretext to slip out of the office for a while. And maybe get some extra money to cover entertainment expenses.

  The Import Director intercepted his feeble scheming.

  “Don’t worry, the guys from Commerce will take Peter around to some supermarkets to see how the merchandising is going. I’m sure that you have more important work to do than drive them around town.”

  “Yes, Diana Anatolyevna, you’re right. I’m up to my ears in work. May I go now?”

  “Of course, thank you very much.”

  “All right . . . well, if anything comes up and our esteemed partner could use my help . . .”

  Maximus turned to Peter and switched back to English:

  “Do you have my mobile number?”

  “Yeah.”

  “After you finish with inspections of retail, please call me. This evening I’ll be at your disposal.”

  “Oh, how nice! Sure, I’ll call you.”

  Diana Anatolyevna exchanged quizzical glances with the Commerce Director. On his own initiative, Semipyatnitsky was volunteering to devote his free time to hosting the company’s partner. It wasn’t like him. Maximus had never shown any particular zeal for Cold Plus—he just clocked in, did his work, and left the moment the little hand reached six; on the weekends he either turned off his cell phone or simply ignored calls from the office.

  * Revolutionary song.

  DON’T GET SHAT ON

  A computer game. Maximus thought it up, put together a description, and some guy from IT made it a reality—virtual, anyway.

  It operates on a very simple principle, like all those other rudimentary games for computers and smart phones and the like, where the goal is to gather pieces of fruit or, perhaps, dodge flying balls.

  The theme, though, is what’s original. The interface, as Maximus designed it, consists of eight outhouses arrayed across the lower part of the screen, on what is supposed to represent the ground, with bombs falling down from the “sky.” The player uses the cursor to move his avatar back and forth from right to left. When he presses Enter, for example, the avatar goes into one of the outhouses; pushing Shift makes him drop his pants and sit on the toilet; Page Down elicits a big number two.

  The challenge of the game is that the bombs fall in random patterns onto one of the eight outhouses. If a bomb lands on an outhouse while your avatar is inside, that’s the end, and you receive the following message: “Game Over. You got shat on, Loser!” If the avatar manages to complete his business successfully, though, and run out of the outhouse before it gets bombed to smithereens (Page Up: He gets up and pulls up his trousers; Escape: He gets out), he earns a point, which flashes in the lower left of the screen. The inscription appears: “Congratulations, Shitter! One Point!”

  The graphics are pretty simple. The avatar has a beard and is wearing camouflage combat fatigues. The outhouses have a rustic look to them. The musical accompaniment is a MIDI file playing some patriotic tripe or other. (Go ahead and search for patriotic tripe on YouTube. We’ll wait.) When a bomb hits one of the outhouses there’s a hissing sound and an explosion, and every successful shit comes with a sort of ineffable creaking sound.

  The game has a few different levels. On the first and most elementary, the bombs fall one at a time, and it’s a simple enough matter to get your guy to shit successfully, gain a point, and move him to the next outhouse. As the levels advance, however, the bombs fall faster and faster, and the player has to gauge the intervals correctly and make lightning-fast decisions about where to shit next.

  In order to move up to a higher level, the player has to accumulate eight points—one for each outhouse. An hour after closing time, when the aggrieved-looking janitress came to empty Maximus’s trash basket, he had advanced to level three. Once he even managed to get to level four. The game had six levels in all, but it took a great deal of focus and diligent practice to get past four.

  Maximus’s cell phone rang, interrupting his game: The ringtone was a polyphonic version of the melody of the Russian (Soviet) National Anthem. It was Peter calling to report that he was free and back at his hotel. Semipyatnitsky gathered his things, went down to the parking lot, got in his car, and headed along the embankment to Nevsky Prospect.

  The evening traffic had dissipated, and the road was relatively clear. Maximus drove in the middle lane, his favorite, without undue haste. Vicious jeeps and arrogant sedans whizzed by on both sides. Go ahead, thought Semipyatnitsky, torture yourselves, pedal to the metal, what you don’t know is that the traffic police are lurking around every corner, brandishing their bristly clubs. Semipyatnitsky liked that bit about the bristly clubs, and he smiled to himself.

  When Maximus drove up, Peter was waiting on the street outside the hotel. He was holding only a small overnight bag; apparently he had left the box of pills in his room. On his way over, Maximus had thought about trying to sneak into Peter’s brain, as he had done with Ni Guan. But he resolved t
o utilize the traditional, tried and true Russian method to get information: Ply his guest with vodka. Once drunk, Peter would readily reveal whatever secrets he was keeping locked up in his Dutch brain. There wasn’t much time before Peter’s train, not a minute to lose.

  Semipyatnitsky offered to show Peter St. Petersburg’s most famous feature, the monument to Peter the Great, who had opened the window to Europe. Maximus himself had always felt that it would have been better for the tsar to install actual doors, so that people wouldn’t have to keep climbing to Europe through a window, but he withheld this insight from his guest.

  They arrived at the Bronze Horseman. Peter naturally asked Maximus to take a few photos of him with the statue in the background, and then Maximus, as though the idea had just occurred to him, suggested casually that they stop into the bar across the street. And his guest, with an equally spontaneous air, agreed.

  If you know Petersburg, then you know that this bar can be none other than the Tribunal. Yes, that’s the one, where girls—some plump and unattractive, others gangly and awkward—sit on tall revolving stools at the bar, casting welcoming glances at the foreign tourists who come in. Somewhere nearby sits their so-called mamka, a bulky woman of forty-five or thereabouts, who hasn’t changed her makeup since the age of twenty, when she herself was sitting on a stool just like those she now oversees, back at the Intourist Hotel bar.

  Ultimately, everyone has a right to a career. You may be just a simple low-level manager today, but before you know it twenty-five years will go by, and you’ll become a respected supervisor yourself, applying all those sensitive leadership skills you’ve picked up, mentoring the youngsters in sales. In honor of your lost youth and of the thorny path you followed to the top, you’ll wear the very same bright-yellow necktie as when you began; jabbing at it with your gnarled finger, you’ll harangue your subordinates: “Listen, guys, I wasn’t born a supervisor, I started out just like you, and you too—at least some of you, the very best—will also get promoted someday, if you work with diligence and enthusiasm.”

  But yes—the Tribunal, where couples who drop in off the street and drunken Finns alike listen to live music in the smaller room on the left, or gyrate to disco music on the dance floor to the right, or else stare in silence at the strippers hired from the White Breeze Agency: shockingly beautiful, exquisite, and inaccessible, as though their heavenly bodies had descended to earth from some heavenly body.

  Of course, everything is relative, including the inaccessibility of celestial strippers.

  Maximus and Peter claimed a table near a small podium with a pole rising from the center, where with twitching fingers a blonde girl toyed with a thin string around her hips, which was evidently supposed to be standing in for an undergarment, but fell far short.

  Maximus watched the show, but his heart wasn’t in it. He’d just been to Omsk, Russia’s sex capital, where in one joint he’d recruited all seven dancers for a private session, with two more summoned in for an encore, and your basic run-of-the-mill stripper had no more appeal for him. After the sincere and remarkably accessible Omsk girls, none of the beauties from Moscow, Petersburg, Minsk, or any other city could measure up.

  The Omsk strippers had finished Maximus off right in his pants; he hadn’t made it past the third one, who straddled his lap, grinding and gyrating rhythmically on his priapal bulge; he came and immediately panicked that she would call in the bouncer to throw him out, pervert that he was, but all she did was smile as though she’d just aced an exam. “Why did I hold back?” wondered Maximus at the time. And proceeded to climax five more times in that one night.

  The icy beauties of St. Petersburg had no such power over Maximus.

  But Peter stared at the stripper’s legs and licked his arid chops.

  Maximus ordered a carafe of Absolut. They refrained from excess conversation. Semipyatnitsky kept pouring the vodka. Peter downed his shots before the ice could melt, frowning and staring at the podium as girl after girl stepped up with each new song.

  “Do you like Russian girls?” Maximus asked politely in English.

  But rather than responding with equal politeness, making observations about the exceptional beauty of Russian girls, etc., Peter got right to the point:

  “Yeah. Could you arrange for her to visit my hotel? If you know what I mean . . .”

  “Nothing is impossible, dear Peter. Nothing is impossible in this fucking world. But some things are costly. Very costly. That’s the truth.”

  “How much?” he asked impatiently.

  Maximus had noticed a grim-looking guy near the podium, who was obviously with the girls; he shrugged, got up, and went over to him. Now, the White Breeze girls aren’t prostitutes. They get paid two or three hundred dollars a dance, and have no particular need to put out for just anybody. They earn more than enough for their tuition and sports car payments. But if the money is good . . .

  In a couple of minutes Maximus came back and reported:

  “Six hundred.”

  “What?”

  “Euros. Per hour.”

  “This is . . . ridiculous!”

  “Whatever.”

  Baffled, Peter looked away from the podium and surveyed his surroundings. Maximus understood his surprise: It’s a basic principle of business that goods ought to be cheaper in their country of origin. Russian girls are exported to bordellos all over Europe, where they cost a hundred or a hundred fifty euros at most. Once you take away customs fees and transportation and operational expenses, the price in Russia ought to be half that at most. But no, it turns out that Russian girls are more expensive in Russia than in Europe. At least the ones with a good shelf life.

  Maximus hastened to comfort his foreign colleague:

  “See, they’re not professionals. Just dancers. It’s like a side business for them. They don’t do it too often, only when they get a really good offer.”

  “Really . . . ”

  “Sure. But you could get another girl for fifty Euros or something. Look over there.”

  “You mean . . . ”

  “Yeah, those.”

  “No, they’re ugly.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do! In Thailand I could get a super model for fifty euros! Not an animal like that . . . Maybe we can negotiate? I’m ready to pay fifty euros, but I want one of the dancers.”

  Maximus caught himself looking at Peter as though he were a complete idiot. He said nothing and just shook his head.

  Their carafe was already half-empty, and Maximus decided that it was time to redirect the conversation to the matter at hand, which would also serve as a handy distraction from the question of the girls’ fee.

  “Peter, I hope we’re good friends now.”

  “Sure we are!”

  “In Russia we ask each other after each bottle of vodka, Do you respect me?”

  “Yes, I do! But why are you asking this strange question?”

  “It’s a kind of ritual. Say it in Russian: ‘Ty menia uvazhaesh?’”

  “Ty . . . menya . . . ”

  “Uvazhaesh? Do you respect me?”

  “Ty mena uvadjaesh?”

  “Great! And yes, I respect you: Ya tebia uvazhaiu.”

  “Ya . . . teba . . . uvadjaiu . . .”

  “So that means you’re respecting me and I’m respecting you. We’re respecting each other. Therefore we’re drinking together. Let’s drink!”

  “Cheers!”

  Maximus and Peter drank another glass of vodka each.

  “That being the case, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to fuck over your friend, whom you respect, Peter.”

  “Never, I’ll never do that, Maximus!”

  “So, please, tell me about the pills.”

  “What pills?”

  “Those pills, Peter, pink pills in the box I brought you today, fucking pink pills.”

  “Fucking pills?”

  “Yes, fucking pills!”

  “Fucking pills?”

  “Come o
n, talk to your friend about the pills!”

  “Fucking pills! Fuck those pills! It’s a fucking business!”

  “No kidding, drug dealing is . . . ”

  “What . . . ?”

  Peter even sobered up slightly, glanced right, then left, and lifted his index finger to his lips, making the international sign for “let’s keep it between us.”

  “No, Maximus. No drugs. Drugs are not our business. Our business is potatoes.”

  “Then why are you smuggling pills . . .”

  “The pills are potatoes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The fucking pills are fucking potato pills. Our business. Haven’t you seen the ads? PTH-IP. Positive Thinking—Illusory Potatoes. That is what our pills are. First you have to think positive. To be a happy consumer. Then you can dream of particular goods.”

  It was Maximus’s turn to be flabbergasted. Peter explained, speaking enthusiastically and loudly:

  “Can you believe that we really grow these millions of tons of potatoes for feeding the entire world in our little country? Imagine—how could it be possible? Have you ever been to Holland? We have no space for farms. But we’re great at chemistry.”

  “You mean, we’re swallowing these pills and hallucinating potatoes?”

  “Hallucinating, yes. But you don’t have to swallow them . . . it’s a complicated process . . . sometimes it’s enough to smell . . . or hear a commercial . . . radio waves . . . though pills are best. I’m not much into details. I’m just a salesman. Our engineers know better . . . you think of eating potatoes . . . and you even get fat because of it . . . then you buy another pill to lose weight . . . and again . . . full circle . . . that’s our business . . . and everyone does it, in Europe.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Sure, some people are selling the illusion of cars, others are selling the illusion of designer clothes, or drinks . . . You drink but only get thirstier. Everything is like that. We produce ideas, thoughts, illusions. Ever since Marx and Freud. And now we can concentrate ideas into pills. For easier transportation and consumption.”