The Maya Pill

by German Sadulaev

  They rode the whole way without a word. Cindy pressed up against Eddie but refrained from any improper touching. She sat demurely with her hip pressed against his, holding his hand. Ni’s eyes clouded over. The mere touch of the girl’s narrow, warm palm filled him with desire.

  The taxi took its time, driving through the entertainment district and the residential area of the city with its blocks of nondescript, identical high-rise apartment buildings. The driver honked apathetically, steering through the thick crowd of cars, motorcycles, bikes, and pedestrians.

  At the entrance to Cindy’s building a gray-haired woman stared mutely at them as they walked in. “From the apartment executive committee, no doubt,” thought Ni. “She’ll file a report. To hell with her!”

  Tsin unlocked her door and they tumbled into a tiny room. The only furnishings were a small sofa bed, a nightstand, and a wooden bookshelf nailed into the wall.

  Ni picked up a book at random. Lyrics by Wang Wei, a Chinese poet from the Tang dynasty period.

  Ni opened the book and read aloud:

  Two hundred thousand concubines

  Had in his harem

  The Yellow Emperor.

  He knew the secret

  Of coupling

  That gives a man

  A woman’s life force.

  The Yellow Emperor

  Took in the life force

  Of all his concubines.

  And, attaining immortality,

  He soared up to the heavens

  Astride a yellow dragon.

  Tsin continued, reciting from memory:

  The emperor’s sister

  Then said to her brother:

  “In our veins flows

  Royal blood.

  But Your Majesty

  Has ten thousand concubines,

  And I only have one husband.”

  Then the emperor gave Shan-in

  Thirty young men for her bed,

  And though they labored day and night,

  Working in shifts,

  Still they had to be replaced every six months.

  And Shan-in grew more beautiful

  With every year,

  Filling with the life force

  Of her thirty concubines.

  Ni Guan continued:

  He holds up

  The Earth and Sky.

  He penetrates the shell’s crevasse

  He enters the jasper cave.

  He moves back and forth,

  He is like unto a golden hammer

  Beating against an anvil

  He spews forth

  A pearly stream;

  He irrigates

  The sacred field of life.

  He himself is a mighty tree

  On this field.

  He is Man

  He is White Tiger.

  He is Lead.

  He is Fire.

  He is West.

  Tsin Chi continued:

  She is Woman.

  She is Yellow Dragon.

  She is Cinnabar.

  She is Water.

  She is East.

  When they flow together

  Quicksilver is born,

  Eternal beginning.

  . . . Outside the window, the rain stopped, then started again, and the northern wind hurled handfuls of ocean water against the glass. Ni and Tsin lay naked on the narrow sofa bed, clinging to each other and smoking Great Wall cigarettes, tossing the butts into an empty Pepsi can.

  “Ni!”

  “Tsin?”

  “Those things you couldn’t tell me about, why you can’t get married, do they have to do with some violation of the Party’s demographic program?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have an illegitimate child? Maybe two or three?”

  “Ten. Like a sailor with a girl and a baby in every port. No, of course not.”

  “So there’s no kid?”

  “There is one, but it’s not mine.”

  “Oh!”

  Tsin asked no more questions. She snuffed out her half-smoked cigarette, propped herself up onto her onto her elbow, and looked out the window.

  “When I was a kid I lived out in the country. There was a poster on the biggest building in the town, which was the school: ‘Fewer children—more pigs!’ I saw that poster every day. And when I learned to read it was the first thing that I read all by myself. It scared me. I’m still scared. Sometimes I have nightmares: I’m in labor, surrounded by doctors. I’m screaming and straining, but then it’s over. The baby cries, but something’s wrong. The doctor in his white coat holds the baby up for me to see, and it’s a piglet. It just gets worse from there. Everyone congratulates me—it turns out there are sixteen piglets in my farrow and that they’re going to send me to Beijing and put me on exhibit at the big agricultural exposition. I also have this other recurring dream: I’m in the maternity hospital, and there are rows of basinets with babies in them, and then these butchers come in with knives, and they chop the babies into pieces and throw them into a big plastic bag, and I see that the babies are pigs. And one of the butchers says that suckling pig is really tasty with sweet-and-sour sauce. It was only when I got older that I wondered what the slogan meant. People think that it means you need to have fewer babies and work harder on the farm, raising pigs and other animals for meat. But it could mean something else, that it’s the babies who eat up the pigs—all those babies will grow up and eat meat, or else eat all the food meant for the pigs, which means, either way, that the more children there are, the fewer pigs. Which means that the Party and the country need pigs more than they need children.”

  “You’re quite an impressionable girl,” said Ni.

  But said nothing about the big poster in his own hometown that read “One more baby, one more grave!” He’d had nightmares too. One where all the children in his class are lined up a row, holding shovels, digging their own graves. And when they look up he sees that their eyes are glazed over, that they’re already dead. And the skin peels off their bodies in long strips that fall to the ground and mix with the dirt. And he realizes that he is also one of those children digging their graves, and that he, too, is dead.

  LOVE, RUSSIAN STYLE

  Semipyatnitsky had lunch in a café on the first floor of his office building, a place he called the Barf Bar. A plate of dubious-looking beef with undercooked rice. He didn’t go to the Harbin today; too hot—24 degrees Celsius!—to drag himself all that way. The heat was unusual for St. Petersburg, and particularly unbearable due to high humidity and all the fumes and automobile exhaust filling the air. Anyway, the mere thought of sweet-and-sour pork made him sick.

  He spent the second half of his lunch hour at his desk. To avoid work-related distractions, Maximus cranked up his MP3 player and put on his earphones. B.G.—Boris Grebenshikov.

  Where I’m from, everyone knew Kolya

  Kolya, everyone’s best friend and pal.

  He taught us to drink,

  And drinking took the place

  of freedom,

  And the jasper root took the place

  Of the compass and life vest.

  In Chinese erotic poetry the “jasper root” served as the conventional metaphor for the male organ. Maximus could have written entire volumes of hermeneutics, interpreting the songs of Grebenshikov’s band Aquarium. Though there’s already a commentary along these lines in Ilya Stogoff’s novel Macho Men Don’t Cry, which hit the seventies generation with the force of revelation.

  And on Sunday morning we go again to the flock

  And receive our blessing:

  Be fruitful and multiply in the dark.

  It’s about life in our day and age, though the meaning is eternal, as always with B.G. To live and strive . . . for what? For whom? For the children. But what will those children be striving for? Where will they be going? And what could be more cruel: to be fruitful and multiply, to create a new being who will not be able to find his own way, and to abandon him without a single indicator of the rig
ht path? Just a stone where three roads meet: Whichever way you choose will cost you dearly . . .

  The song went on, and Maximus listened. Then lunch break was over, and Semipyatnitsky tuned back in to his work.

  The warehouse was refusing to accept two containers of shrimp from Canada.

  Maximus listened patiently to fifteen minutes of telephone hysterics from the warehouse director: There’s no place to put the shrimp, the warehouse is already crammed full of shrimp. Then he hung up and issued an order to his assistant:

  “Sasha, have the containers sent from the port to the warehouse. Today.”

  “But how? There’s no space at the warehouse!”

  “There’s plenty of space. They probably took too many shrimp pills and started hallucinating.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Forget about it. They’ll figure something out—they’ll find a place and unload them there. It’s not the first time.”

  Maximus never indulged the warehouse workers. So they always wanted to rough him up when they ran into him at company get-togethers. They would come at him foaming at the mouth, fists clenched, but their aggression would dissipate when it came into contact with his indifference. And this time Semipyatnitsky recalled vividly what he had seen during his unannounced visit, when he’d gone to retrieve the Dutch pills. This relieved him of the last shreds of whatever sympathy he might have had for the blue-collar Cold Plus employees.

  The working day began to wane. Maximus ducked into the restroom and gulped down a couple of the pink pills. There were still a few left in his jacket pocket. It wasn’t that he particularly needed to get high; rather, a sort of spirit of adventure had come over him, an irresistible desire to test their effects one more time, to see how they would work with another person. That is, how they would work on another person.

  All things considered, and given the way things had been going lately, he was surprised not to find the goddess of sex from the next office over in the elevator waiting for him. She wasn’t in the lobby on the first floor either. Maximus went outside and lit a cigarette near the front door. He was sure that she would turn up.

  Sure enough, five minutes later, there she was, coming out the door. She had a preoccupied air about her, a look of distress, which in no way diminished her allure.

  “Greetings, Sweetie!”

  Maximus was startled by his own lack of self-consciousness. The drug hadn’t had time to take effect yet. It had to be psychosomatic: The mere thought of the pills’ imminent effect dissolved all his inhibitions.

  That was how he used to pick up girls, in his distant, lost youth. Maximus had only two phrases in his repertoire: “Greetings, Sweetie!” and “Got any plans for tonight?” But as he had pointed out at the time, when a friend made fun of his tactics, why bother to think up anything original when these worked just fine? Not every time, objected his friend. Maximus responded that there’s only one absolutely guaranteed method to get a woman into your bed—just grab her and give her the cross-thigh flip.

  The girl gave Semipyatnitsky a surprised look and smiled oh so slightly.

  “Greetings yourself.”

  “Not feeling so well today?”

  “I have a headache.”

  Maximus reached into his pocket, got out a couple of the pills, and held them out to her.

  “These work pretty well. I use them myself.”

  The girl hesitated, but took one nonetheless.

  “Take two. The dose is two. Go ahead—you can take them without water.”

  The goddess complied.

  “My car is over there. Let’s go.”

  “I live pretty far away, in Prosvet, on Enlightenment Prospect.”

  “You’re right, that’s pretty far. Let’s find some place closer.”

  When a man has absolute confidence in what he’s saying and doing, Maximus reflected, there isn’t a woman alive who won’t give in. The goddess climbed into the car. Maximus started the engine and backed out of his parking space.

  “What’s your name, my beauty?”

  “Maya.”

  Maximus gave an approving nod. That’s about what he’d been expecting. Maya had been the name of his first, unrequited love, a girl he’d met in Young Pioneer Camp, when he was little. Not that little, actually. Meaning, if things had worked out differently and if he had been a bit surer of himself at the time, something might have come of it. So this love of his had remained in his memory as an unrealized desire, along with the sensation of his first fully conscious erection.

  Maya is also the name of the Hindu goddess of material nature, of illusion embodied.

  “Maximus Semipyatnitsky. Descendent of the ancient Khazar race, heir of the Great Khagans. Writer of genius. And leading specialist in the Import Department of Cold Plus Company. Though the latter is nothing more than an embarrassing stumble along my world-historical path.”

  “What an honor for a girl as simple and modest as myself!”

  The goddess had perked up, and it showed. Girls like to be amused.

  “Are you from Barnaul?”

  “No, from Karaganda.”

  “I thought it was something like that.”

  “Why? Do I look like some simple country girl?”

  “No. You look beautiful. And only girls from the country are beautiful anymore. Have you ever been to Ireland?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. So let’s go to an Irish pub.”

  Maximus parked in a cozy alley near the pub he had in mind. He figured he could drink his fill and then call a cab.

  “The best cocktail here is called the Irish Flag. See, it’s got three different-colored layers. No, don’t stir it. Just drink.”

  Five pairs of cocktails made their way down the hatch smoothly, encountering no obstacles.

  “Now tell me a story!”

  “What can I tell you, O Khazar writer of genius?”

  “Whatever suits the occasion. How about how your stepfather raped you? We wouldn’t want to violate the conventions of pseudo-psychological novels and movies.”

  “But my stepfather didn’t rape me! I don’t even have a stepfather! Just a mom and a dad, and, sorry to disappoint you, they were absolutely normal people.”

  “The main thing is to not disappoint the reader.”

  “What reader?”

  “Hasn’t it ever seemed to you that your life is being narrated, bit by bit? Don’t you ever see a computer monitor inside your head full of sentences lighting up all by themselves?”

  “Oh, I get it . . . I can see there’s no fooling you. It was my grandfather.”

  “It was your grandfather what?”

  “My grandfather was my first lover, if you can call it that.”

  “Details. We need details. Every last one.”

  “I know. That’s where the devil is, in the details.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I read it somewhere.”

  The girl adopted an appropriately reflective pose, lit a cigarette, affected a nervous air, and began her story:

  “When I was really little, I used to spend a lot of time with my grandpa. My parents worked. My grandpa really loved me and used to spoil me. He used to take me in his lap and kiss me. At first there was nothing unusual about it—it was just a kid and her grandfather, like all children and their grandparents: He’d kiss me on the forehead or the cheeks. Sometimes on my tummy. But later, when I was seven or eight, he started to kiss me down there, lower. A lot lower. And it wasn’t just simple kissing. He tried to poke his tongue in, as far as it would go. And his rough cheeks and chin used to scratch the insides of my thighs. But I put up with it. I really loved my grandpa. He never asked me not to tell, but I knew that it wasn’t the kind of thing you talked about. So it was our little secret. I got older, started going through puberty. And our one-on-one sessions continued. We came up with our own special code names for it. Not the usual stuff—honeybees and flowers and other clichés. No, he would say: ‘I’m most inclin
ed to partake of water from the crystal spring.’ Or: ‘A ray of moonlight is thrusting through the clouds.’ He was an artist at heart, my grandfather—he had a thing for classical Chinese poetry. For the first few years I was only putting up with it all, but with time I began to experience certain sensations, and came to enjoy our sessions. I was fairly shy as a child, didn’t have a lot of friends. I would just hurry home from school and go to Grandpa’s. I’d come in without a word and curl up in a threadbare old armchair. And he would cheerfully ask me about how my day at school had gone, and would sit down on the floor in front of me, lift my skirt, and lower my panties and toss them on the floor. Then he would direct his attention to the ‘spring.’ He would spend a long time down there, a half hour, sometimes a whole hour. If no one interrupted us. And no one would. My parents came back late from work, and my grandmother had died long before—I don’t remember her at all. He would lick his way around my inner parts, which were as yet completely hairless, and I would stroke his gray head. Just like a grownup. He never did anything else with me. I don’t know why—maybe he couldn’t get it up, or maybe he was afraid to hurt or frighten me. But he never asked me to . . . well, you know.”

  “So how did it all end?”

  “It didn’t, really. He just died. For me this was, and remains, the greatest loss of my life. I remember his body in the coffin in our apartment, in the same room that used to be his, and where the two of us used to do what we did together . . . The hearse came—they closed the coffin and took my grandfather to the cemetery. There, in front of the freshly dug grave, they lifted the coffin lid so that his relatives could say their last good-byes. But apparently they’d done a bad job of securing his chin . . . they’d had to bring the coffin down four flights of stairs . . . and the ride in the hearse had involved a fair bit of jostling. Anyway, when they opened the coffin, I saw his face—I was standing right there, closer than anyone else . . . his jaw had shifted to one side, and his long, violet-colored tongue was dangling out of his mouth. The same tongue that . . . well. My legs gave way under me and I fainted. Everyone thought that it was from grief or from horror at the sight of him, but that wasn’t it at all.”