The Maya Pill

by German Sadulaev

  Lina was sitting in a stupor, staring at her phone. Obviously the aftereffects of whatever she’d been doing the night before.

  Semipyatnitsky risked an attempt to rouse her.

  “Lina!”

  The girl shuddered and gave a grunt.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Strange. You look like the ‘before’ picture in an anti-drug campaign. You have that overdose look. Or, worse, like after you got laid for the first time after losing your virginity on graduation night sixteen years ago . . . when was that again, a couple of weeks ago, was it?”

  “Tatar bastard.” But her heart wasn’t really in it.

  “Khazar,” corrected Maximus, as usual.

  “So what did you want?”

  “Oh, I wanted to ask you something. About the potatoes.”

  “So?”

  “Lina, look at these numbers: We import up to thirty tons from a single supplier. And we’re not even the biggest importer of Dutch frozen potatoes. And that’s not counting potatoes imported fresh and sold in supermarkets year ’round. And, think about it, Holland exports to other countries too. Off the top of my head, that would have to come to millions of tons of potatoes every year. It says here that in 1997 Holland produced eight million tons of potatoes. That’s their official statistic. Here in the Black Earth Region two hundred centners per hectare is considered a good yield. But the Dutch supposedly get seven hundred. How do they do it? All right, maybe it has to do with different weight standards. A Russian centner is equal to one hundred kilograms or 0.1 ton, but a German centner is one hundred pfunds, or fifty kilograms, or 0.05 ton. That means that their yield is still 350 centners per hectare—I mean, according to our standard. To get, say, seven million tons of potatoes, you need to plant two hundred thousand hectares. That is, two thousand square kilometers just for potatoes. The territory of the Netherlands is just short of forty-two thousand square kilometers—all right, accounting for rivers and lakes, canals, roads, and cities, there’s enough for that volume of potatoes. But only if all that land is used just for potatoes! But the area also exports all kinds of other agricultural products, from beef to tulips! So where do they grow all that? Where do all those Dutch potatoes come from?”

  “Was all that meant for me?”

  “Don’t act dumb. You know it was.”

  “All right. Okay.”

  “My dad was an agronomist.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you mean, ‘I see’? Answer the question. How can they manage to grow all that in one tiny country?”

  “What makes you so sure they grow them all within their own borders?”

  Maximus froze. Did Lina know about the pills? And here she was acting like it was no big deal.

  But Lina was on a different track:

  “Were you born yesterday? The Dutch and other European vegetables, fruits, and berries are imported from China—everyone knows that!”

  “Everyone-everyone?”

  “Of course! Even our clients! And our clients’ clients, everyone knows. Apparently you’re the only one who doesn’t.”

  “But why do they import the Chinese vegetables into Europe?”

  “What do you mean, ‘why’? Europe is where they put on the labels.”

  “You mean they can’t do that in China?”

  “They can, and some already do. They sell Italian strawberries straight from China. But we don’t want to encourage that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maximus, are you pulling my leg?”

  Lina was completely awake now. Why was Semipyatnitsky interested in these details all of a sudden? He never used to care. But she was basically a decent, patient, person, so she explained it to him decently, patiently:

  “It’s risky, because then you’d have the market flooded with counterfeit labels on counterfeit strawberries.”

  “So Italian strawberries grow in China too?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about Chinese strawberries?”

  “Where else would they grow?”

  “So what’s the difference?”

  “Maximus, what is this, Stupid Questions Day? What’s the difference in what? It’s one thing for an Italian name-brand product to go for five dollars a kilo—it doesn’t matter if it’s produced in China. But it’s something else entirely when someone tries to sell you ordinary Chinese strawberries for four dollars, when the actual price is two dollars, simply because they come in a nice cellophane pack with a fake Italian label!”

  “But it’s the same strawberries!”

  “What do strawberries have to do with it?”

  Semipyatnitsky lapsed into eloquent silence. Lina started tapping on her keyboard, filling out a new order for potatoes.

  Maximus had the overwhelming urge to confide in someone. But who? Then he recalled the letters on his inner monitor.

  He slid open his desk drawer and felt around for his pack of cigarettes and lighter. He draped his smart-card lanyard around his neck and headed outside for a smoke. And a conversation with himself.

  “Mr. Author, are you there?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Let’s work this out.”

  “All right. Work what out?”

  “You know what.”

  “I do. But formulating the question is half the answer.”

  “I don’t need half an answer. Half an answer is worse than no answer at all.”

  “Well put!”

  “I can put it even better! Is there anything at all in the world that’s actually real? Or is it all just pills and hallucinations? And what exactly is a hallucination, anyway? Is it when we see something that doesn’t actually exist, or when what we see does exist, but we don’t see it as it really is? So we think that we’re eating potatoes, but there aren’t really any potatoes at all . . . we’re just taking some pill? Or we think that we’re eating Dutch potatoes, and we are indeed eating potatoes, but they’re actually Chinese, and the only thing Dutch about them are the labels and the drug. And what are we actually buying and eating, anyway, potatoes or labels?”

  “I see . . . All of your questions boil down to the subject of a famous dispute that took place in medieval India, involving three different philosophical schools, whose names . . . well, will mean nothing to you. There were two basic questions. The first was whether the world was real. The second was whether our conception of the world was real.

  “According to the first school, the world wasn’t real, since it lacked any substantial foundation. The world is based on indivisible particles that cannot be weighed or measured. Under the Karmic law of cause and effect—that is, relative and in reaction to living beings’ sinful actions—atoms join together into compounds, which give the appearance of substantiality. So our conception of the world as material is equally unreal. We have been taught that consciousness is a feature of highly organized matter, but the philosophers of the first school believed that matter was a feature of primitively organized consciousness. When a living creature breaks the chain of illusion, the world itself—and its conceptions about the world—cease to exist for it. In other words, there are no potatoes, and no pills either.

  “Adherents to the second school, however, held that the world was indeed real, based in real substance, that is to say Brahma. In essence, they said, Brahma was the only reality. As for our conception of the world as something existing within time and space and occurring in a variety of forms, for them it did not correspond to reality. They cited the example of the rope and the snake: When a man in the dark assumes that a rope is a poisonous snake, his conceptions are illusory, though the rope itself exists. An enlightened individual is not distracted when it comes to reality, and sees everything as it is, as all Brahma. That is, all potatoes and no pills.

  “Theoretically speaking, there is another answer to these basic questions: that the world is unreal, and that only our conceptions about it are real. According to that scheme, there are no potatoe
s, only hallucinogenic pills. But the adherents to this way of thinking were physically annihilated long before this particular dispute began. They were given the opportunity to drink a lethal dose of an elixir made from poisonous mushrooms, after having been told that it was divine nectar. They agreed, and everyone present witnessed a quintessentially physical spectacle: philosophers turning blue and dying in horrible torment.”

  “What about the third school?”

  “What ‘third school’?”

  “You said that there were three philosophical schools participating in the dispute. You set forth the positions of two schools, then mentioned another one that did not take part in the dispute. What did the philosophers of this third school have to say?”

  “Oh, them . . . Well, they said that all of that was of course very interesting. And that under different circumstances they would have participated in those debates with the greatest of pleasure. But when a house is burning is not the time to go through all of its architectural specifications—it’s the time to take foot in hand, so to speak, reason in heart, make a break for it, and start living.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dance and sing. And pray to God to release us from our entrapment in physical matter.”

  “So then what? How did it end?”

  “It didn’t, really. Like all disputes. Both the main schools, and the other group, the ones who were poisoned before they had a chance to participate, are taught in university courses on the history of Indian philosophy. While the third group, to this day . . .”

  “What?”

  “They sing and dance.”

  “Why did you tell me all of this?”

  “That’s funny. I knew why until you asked. Lina is right, today really is Stupid Questions Day.”

  Maximus lit up another cigarette—his fourth. It made the inside of his mouth taste bitter, and he tossed it away after a couple of puffs.

  The inner author continued:

  “I would put it this way: The material world is real. And our conceptions of the world are also real. But the world is made in China, and our conceptions of the world are made in Holland.”

  “But why?”

  “What do you mean, why? To crank up the profit margin!”

  “But why does the world made in China have any need for conceptions about it being made in Holland?”

  “Because this conception of the world is made in Holland.”

  NACH DRACHTEN

  The northern sun peered out from behind the shroud of clouds on the horizon and shone into a little house on the outskirts of the town of Drachten, in the Netherlands. Its gentle rays slid across the cheap Swedish furniture and, observing maximum courtesy, brushed the rumpled face lying there on a green pillow. Peter Nils awoke.

  “Ah, shit,” Mr. Nils cursed, not without pleasure, in English, and stretched out on the orthopedic mattress of the sleeper sofa.

  By the way, it’s incorrect to call the Netherlands “Holland,” as some people do, and we’ve been doing. The provinces of Holland are just a part of the Netherlands, which also includes Friesland. Frieslanders consider themselves to be a different national group and have their own language, which is a close relative to English. Nils was a Frieslander. And he swore only in English.

  Peter Nils was an export manager, responsible for deliveries to Russia by the Frozen French Fries (or FFF) company. People who know their way around frozen food call the company “Triple F.” Triple F is the industry leader for the production and sale of frozen French fries in the Netherlands. According to its own official history, the company traces its roots to the distant, glorious past, to a time even before the Norman Conquest, when pirates invaded and occupied the British Isles. A furore Normannorum libera nos Domine! *

  As the venerable Bede writes in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People: “IN the year of our Lord 449, Martian being made emperor with Valentinian, and the forty-sixth from Augustus, ruled the empire seven years. Then the nation of the Angles, or Saxons, being invited by the aforesaid king, arrived in Britain with three long ships, and had a place assigned them to reside in by the same king, in the eastern part of the island, that they might thus appear to be fighting for their country, whilst their real intentions were to enslave it. Accordingly they engaged with the enemy, who were come from the north to give battle, and obtained the victory; which, being known at home in their own country, as also the fertility of the country, and the cowardice of the Britons, a more considerable fleet was quickly sent over, bringing a still greater number of men, which, being added to the former, made up an invincible army. The newcomers received of the Britons a place to inhabit, upon condition that they should wage war against their enemies for the peace and security of the country, whilst the Britons agreed to furnish them with pay. Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany: Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. The two first commanders are said to have been Hengist and Horsa. Of whom Horsa, being afterwards slain in battle by the Britons, was buried in the eastern parts of Kent, where a monument, bearing his name, is still in existence. They were the sons of Victgilsus, whose father was Vecta, son of Woden; from whose stock the royal race of many provinces deduce their original.”

  The founders of the Triple F Company traced their genealogy either from Hengist or from Horsa, one of them, anyway, thus their start-up capital originated in British war booty.

  The Bede continues his account of the feats of the continental invaders on the isles:

  “. . . In a short time, swarms of the aforesaid nations came over into the island, and they began to increase so much, that they became terrible to the natives themselves who had invited them. Then, having on a sudden entered into league with the Picts, whom they had by this time repelled by the force of their arms, they began to turn their weapons against their confederates. At first, they obliged them to furnish a greater quantity of provisions; and, seeking an occasion to quarrel, protested, that unless more plentiful supplies were brought them, they would break the confederacy, and ravage all the island; nor were they backward in putting their threats in execution. In short, the fire kindled by the hands of these pagans proved God’s just revenge for the crimes of the people; not unlike that which, being once lighted by the Chaldeans, consumed the walls and city of Jerusalem. For the barbarous conquerors acting here in the same manner, or rather the just Judge ordaining that they should so act, they plundered all the neighbouring cities and country, spread the conflagration from the eastern to the western sea, without any opposition, and covered almost every part of the devoted island. Public as well as private structures were overturned; the priests were everywhere slain before the altars; the prelates and the people, without any respect of persons, were destroyed with fire and sword; nor was there any to bury those who had been thus cruelly slaughtered.

  WHEN the victorious army, having destroyed and dispersed the natives, had returned home to their own settlements . . . ”

  According to Triple F’s official version, it was from these victorious warriors, who returned to the continent with their rich booty, that the Frieslander family who founded the frozen potato company in the twentieth century traced their genealogy.

  Historians working on contract for the company left unmentioned the fact that the Vergistus branch of the family on the continent had fallen into decline as early as the twelfth century. The last daughter, heiress to the blood of the noble plunderers, was taken to wife by a fugitive merchant from Khazaria entirely without dowry, like the lowest peasant. For a sack of silver, which made its way into the pocket of the suzerain, the merchant acquired his wife’s family name and established himself in Europe as a nobleman. Soon thereafter his wife died from a sudden infectious illness, and the newly ennobled merchant married a woman of his own tribe, and in the veins of their offspring there flowed not a single drop of English blood.

  In Russian translation, Triple F could very well come across as analogous to “Triple H,” conveying both a Russian e
xpletive and the names the company’s founding fathers: Hengist, Horsa, and Hazars.

  The management of Triple F, as in many other corporations, had long understood that it was not at all necessary to maintain a headquarters in the capital city with its crowding and high real-estate prices. No, you didn’t need to be in a capital in order to stay connected to businesses the world over. Doesn’t the Internet work just as well out in the country, not to mention the telephone? Triple F chose the sleepy little town of Drachten as the site for their central office, 140 kilometers northeast of Amsterdam.

  In Drachten, medieval brick buildings stand side by side with modern glass and concrete structures, and the population (not counting immigrant workers) is under 50,000. In the early 2000s Drachten became world famous when the town government took down all its traffic signals and street signs. From then on, the town’s 20,000 automobiles, along with bicycles and pedestrian traffic, were regulated exclusively by mutual courtesy and deference. And from that time on there hasn’t been a single traffic jam or serious accident with human casualties.

  Peter Nils, himself a pureblood Frieslander with an MBA, easily got a job in the central office of Triple F and had been with the same employer for several years.

  That morning, which was utterly ordinary in all respects, he went into the kitchen, kissed his wife—a somewhat angular and dry lady, who was getting ready to leave for her own job at a telecommunications company—tousled his pudgy son’s hair as the boy headed out the door on his way to school, and, after a breakfast of vitamin-enriched corn flakes with skim milk, backed his blue Toyota out of the garage and headed for the office.

  The trip along the anarchical streets took no more than fifteen minutes, even factoring in the long interval that Peter spent waiting as a little old lady with a white cane crossed the roadway. Nils left his car in the convenient parking lot and proceeded up to the company’s floor, where he entered his tiny but private cubicle, which was partitioned off by a translucent, soundproof glass wall from the rest of the office, where the lower-level employees worked.