She was a sensation. She left her mouth open all the time as though in a sort of open-mouthed humming. She moved just as awkwardly as always, as though deciding to hold out one arm and then the other, alternating them, and deciding to smile now and then as she pretended to sing, but she looked beautiful anyway. The music made it so…made it flowing. Also she was dressed in gray (with yellow earrings and beads) as though to make herself a part of that landscape we often saw as we listened. I knew nobody would make fun of her, whisper about her afterward, or imitate her behind her back.
She was accompanied on the piano by the leader of the chorus, who was pretty good at improvising around what the mite was doing. I thought it was a good thing she had the accompaniment, for it made the music a little less strange and that seemed safer. There was less chance of the mite’s being discovered.
Everybody sat back, just as the two of us always did, feeling the vibrations of it and no doubt seeing those landscapes. After ten or so minutes of it they clapped and shouted for more and my sister pricked the mite once again and pretended to sing for ten more minutes and then said that was all she could do. Afterward everybody crowded around and asked her how she had learned to do it. Of course she got first prize.
After that she didn’t exactly have friends, but she had people who followed her around, asked her all sorts of questions about her singing, interviewed her for the school paper. Some people wanted her to teach them how to do it, but she told them she had a special kind of throat, something that would be considered a defect by most, but that she had learned to make use of it.
Because of her I became known at school, too. I became the singer’s brother. I became the one with the knowledge of secrets, for they did sense a secret. There was something mysterious about us both. You could see it in their eyes. Even I, Twinkle Toes, became mysterious. Talented because close to talent.
After that she was asked to sing a lot though she always said she couldn’t do it often. “Keep them wanting more,” she told me, “and keep them guessing.” Sometimes she would come down with a phony cold just when she’d said she would sing and the auditorium was already filled with people who’d come just to hear her.
But something stranger than love…more than love began to happen between my sister and the mite. Or, rather, the mite was the same, but my sister’s relationship with it changed. That first performance she’d pricked it too hard. A whitish fluid had come out of it, dripped down one side and dried there, making the yellow fur matted…less attractive. She felt guilty about that and said so. “I’m such a butcher,” she said, and she seemed to be trying to make up for it by finding special foods that it might like. She even brought it caviar, which it wouldn’t touch. And she wanted punishment. Sometimes she would ask it to sting her. “Go ahead,” she’d say. “I deserve it. And you have a right to do it and I don’t care if you do, I’ll love you just the same. Matt, Matt, Matt, Matty,” she said, and it occurred to me perhaps it was a name she’d made out of mite. She had called it sometimes Mite, Mite, and now had made it clearly male with Matt. “My Matt,” she said, “all mine.” I was out of it completely except as watcher and listener. Its song had not suffered from the wounding. It just had more difficulty moving itself about. My sister had tried to wash the white stuff off, but that had only smeared it around even more, so that the mite was now an ugly, dull creature with, here and there, one or two yellow hairs that stuck out. “Sting me,” my sister said, “bite me. I deserve it.”
Now she would lie on her bed with her blouse pulled up and let it crawl on her stomach. It moved with difficulty, but it always moved, except now and then when it seemed to sit contentedly on her belly button. “I don’t deserve you,” she’d say. “I don’t deserve one like you.” And sometimes she’d say, “Take me. I’m yours,” spread-eagled on her bed and laughing as though it were a joke, but it wasn’t a joke. Sometimes she’d say, “You love me. Do you really? Don’t you? Do you?” or, “Tell me what love is. Is it always small things that once could fly? Is it small things that sting?”
I sat there watching. She hardly seemed to notice me but I knew it was important that I be there. Even though beneath contempt, I was the observer she needed. I saw how she let it crawl up under her blouse or down her neck and inside her bra, how she giggled at its tickle or lay, serious, looking at the ceiling.
In the cricket cage she’d placed a velvet cushion and she’d hung the cage over her bed by a golden-yellow cord.
“I’m your only friend,” she’d say. “I’m your keeper, I’m your jailer, I’m your everything, I’m your nothing,” and then she’d carefully place the mite in its cage and I would know it was time for me to leave.
At school she became known as an artist with a great future and she walked around as though it were true, that she was an artist, that she could dress differently from anyone else, that she was privileged and perhaps a little mad. “I live for my art,” she’d say, “and only for that.” She stopped doing her homework and said it was because she practiced her music for hours every day.
I told her she might be found out. “Can you live with this secret forever?” “Not to sing is to die,” she said and it was as though she had forgotten it wasn’t she who sang. “I will die,” she said, “if I can’t sing.”
“What if it dies or stops singing? It might. It’s not that healthy by the looks of it.”
“Why are you asking me this? Why do you want to hurt me?”
“I’m scared of what’s happening.”
“Love always scares people who don’t know anything about it, and art does too. I’ll always be this…in the middle of the song in the middle of my life. In the middle. No end and no beginning. I had a dream of such a shining rain, such silver, such glow, as if I were on the moon, or I were a moon myself. Do you know what it’s like to be a moon? I was a moon.”
But I knew that she was frightened too, of herself and of her love, and I thought that if I weren’t there she’d not be this way, that I was the audience she played to, that without me she’d not believe in her drama. Without me there’d be no truth to it.That night…the night I thought of this, I stayed away from our evening of music. I went back to my nature books and, it was true, she did need me. She brought me back with a bribe of chocolate. I even think her sexual dreams, as she ignored me and stared at the ceiling, were of no pleasure to her without me there to be ignored. I did come back, but I wasn’t sure how long I would keep doing it.
And she was, in her way, nice to me then. To show her gratefulness, she bought me a little book on bees. The next night she threw it at me while I sat, again, in her chair and she lay on her bed. “It’s nothing,” she said, “but you might like it.”
“I do,” I said, “I really do,” because I knew she needed me to say it and I did like it.
“I’m going to give a program all my own,” she told me then. “It’s at school, but it’s for everybody in town and they’re charging for it and I’m to get a hundred dollars even though it’s a benefit for band uniforms. It’s already beginning and I haven’t even tried. I just sat here and didn’t do my homework and everything’s beginning to come true just as I’ve always wanted it to.”
I began to feel even more frightened thinking of her giving a whole program. We’d never had the mite sing more than about forty minutes at a time at the very most. “Well, I won’t be there,” I said. I had never challenged her directly before, but now I said, “And I won’t let you do this, but if I can’t stop you, I won’t be there.”
“Give me back that book,” she said.
I was sorry to lose it, but I gave it back. I would be sorrier to lose her. It was odd, but the higher she went with this artist business, and the higher she got in her own estimation, the more she, herself, seemed to me like the mite: torn wings, broken legs, sick, matted fur…
“It’s just like you,” she said. “This is my first really big moment and yo
u want to take my pleasure in it from me.” But I knew that she knew it wasn’t at all like me. “You’re jealous,” she said, and I wondered, then, if that were true. I didn’t think I was but how can you judge yourself?
The mite inched along her desk as we spoke and I had in mind that I should squash it right then. Couldn’t she see the thing was in pain? And then I saw that clearly for the first time. It was in pain. Maybe the singing was all a pain song. I couldn’t stand it any longer, but she must have seen something in my face for she jumped up and pushed me out the door before I hardly knew myself what I was about to do…pushed me out the door and locked it.
I thought about it but there was no way that I could see how to stop her. I could tell everybody about the mite, but would they believe me? And wouldn’t they just go and have the concert anyway even if they knew it was the mite that sang? Maybe that would be an even greater draw. I had lost my chance to put the creature out of its misery. My sister wouldn’t let me near it again. Besides, I wasn’t sure if what she said wasn’t true, that she’d die if she couldn’t sing…if she couldn’t, that is, be the artist she pretended to be.
She was going to call her program MOON SONGS. There would be two songs with a ten-minute intermission between them. I decided I would be there, but that she wouldn’t know it. I would stand in a dark corner in the wings after she had already stepped on stage.
The concert began as usual, but this time I was changed and I could hear the pain. It was a pain song. Or perhaps the pain in the song had gotten worse so that I could finally understand it. I didn’t see how my sister could bear it. I didn’t see how anyone in the audience could bear it, and yet there they sat, eyes closed already, mouths open, heads tipped up like blind people. As I listened, standing there, I, too, tipped my head up and shut my eyes. The beauty of pain caught me up. Tears came to my eyes. They never had before, but now they did. I dreamed that once everything was sun, but now everything was moon. And then I forced my eyes to open. I was there to keep watch on things, not to get caught up in the song.
We…she never made it to the intermission. After a half hour, the song became more insistent. It was louder and higher pitched and I could see my sister vibrating as though from a vibrato in her own throat that then began to shake her whole body. Nobody else saw it. Though a few had their eyes open, they were looking at the ceiling. The song rose and rose and I knew I had to stop it. My sister sank to her knees. I don’t think she pricked the mite at all any longer. I think it sang on of its own accord. I came out on the stage then and no one noticed. I wanted to kill the mite before it shook my sister to pieces, before it deafened her with its shrieking, but I saw that the string that held it to her earlobe was turned and led inside her ear. I pulled on it and the string came out with nothing tied to it. The mite was still inside. My sister was gasping and then she, too, began to make the same sound of pain. The song was coming from her own mouth. I saw the ululations of it in her throat. And I saw blood coming from her nose. Not a lot. Just one small trickle from the left nostril, the same side where the mite had been tied to the left ear.
I slapped her hard, then, on both cheeks. I was yelling, but I don’t think anybody heard me, least of all my sister. I shook her. I hit her. I dragged her from the stage into the wings and yet still the song went on and the people sat in their own dream, whatever it was. Certainly not the same dream we’d always seen before. It couldn’t be with this awful sound. Then I hit my sister on the nose directly and the song faltered, became hesitant, though it was still coming from her own mouth and nowhere else. Her eyes flickered open. I saw that she saw me. “Let me go,” she said. “Let us go. Let us both go.” And the song became a sigh of a song. Suddenly no pain in it. I laid her down gently. The song sighed on, at peace with itself and then it stopped. Alive, then dead. With no transition to it…both of them, my sister and the mite, stopped in the middle.
I never told. I let them diagnose it as some kind of hemorrhage.
In many ways my life changed for the better after that. I lived for myself, or tried to, and, the year after, I became tall, and thin, and pale, and dark like my sister and nobody called me Twinkle ever again.
Victor Pelevin (1962– ) was born in Moscow and attended the Moscow Institute of Power Engineering and the Gorky Institute of Literature. His earliest short story appeared in 1989, and his first book was the collection The Blue Lantern and Other Stories (1991), which won Russia’s Little Booker Prize. His first novel, Omon Ra (1992), earned comparisons to Gogol and Bulgakov and already showed what The New York Times would later describe as “the kind of mordant, astringent turn of mind that in the pre-glasnost era landed writers in psychiatric hospitals or exile.” Later stories have been collected in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia (1994). Pelevin’s work draws on tropes of science fiction, mythology, folklore, mysticism, and conspiracy theories—always with a strong sense of absurdity and satire. Pelevin’s stories are usually tales of injustice, but they are also tales in which imagination has the power to overcome bitter realities. “The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII” is an early story that was included in The Blue Lantern.
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF SHED NUMBER XII
Victor Pelevin
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
IN THE BEGINNING was the word, and maybe not even just one, but what could he know about that? What he discovered at his point of origin was a stack of planks on wet grass, smelling of fresh resin and soaking up the sun with their yellow surfaces: he found nails in a plywood box, hammers, saws, and so forth—but visualizing all this, he observed that he was thinking the picture into existence rather than just seeing it. Only later did a weak sense of self emerge, when the bicycles already stood inside him and three shelves one above the other covered his right wall. He wasn’t really Number XII then; he was merely a new configuration of the stack of planks. But those were the times that had left the most pure and enduring impression. All around lay the wide incomprehensible world, and it seemed as though he had merely interrupted his journey through it, making a halt here, at this spot, for a while.
Certainly the spot could have been better—out behind the low five-story prefabs, alongside the vegetable gardens and the garbage dump. But why feel upset about something like that? He wasn’t going to spend his entire life here, after all. Of course, if he’d really thought about it, he would have been forced to admit that that was precisely what he was going to do—that’s the way it is for sheds—but the charm of life’s earliest beginnings consists in the absence of such thoughts. He simply stood there in the sunshine, rejoicing in the wind whistling through his cracks if it blew from the woods, or falling into a slight depression if it blew in from over the dump. The depression passed as soon as the wind changed direction, without leaving any long-term effect on a soul that was still only partially formed.
One day he was approached by a man naked to the waist in a pair of red tracksuit pants, holding a brush and a huge can of paint. The shed was already beginning to recognize this man, who was different from all the other people because he could get inside, to the bicycles and the shelves. He stopped by the wall, dipped the brush into the can, and traced a bright crimson line on the planks. An hour later the hut was crimson all over. This was the first real landmark in his memory—everything that came before it was still cloaked in a sense of distant and unreal happiness.
The night after the painting (when he had been given his Roman numeral, his name—the other sheds around him all had ordinary numbers), he held up his tar-papered roof to the moon as he dried. “Where am I?” he thought. “Who am I?”
Above him was the dark sky and inside him stood the brand-new bicycles. A beam of light from the lamp in the yard shone on them through a crack, and the bells on their handlebars gleamed and twinkled more mysteriously than the stars. Higher up, a plastic hoop hung on the wall, and with the very thinnest of his planks Number XII recognized it as a symbol o
f the eternal riddle of creation which was also represented—so very wonderfully—in his own soul. On the shelves lay all sorts of stupid trifles that lent variety and uniqueness to his inner world. Dill and scented herbs hung drying on a thread stretched from one wall to another, reminding him of something that never, ever happens to sheds—but since they reminded him of it anyway, sometimes it seemed that he once must have been not a mere shed, but a dacha, or at the very least a garage.
He became aware of himself, and realized that what he was aware of, that is himself, was made up of numerous small individual features: of the unearthly personalities of machines for conquering distance, which smelled of rubber and steel; of the mystical introspection of the self-enclosed hoop; of the squeaking in the souls of the small items, such as the nails and nuts which were scattered along the shelves; and of other things. Within each of these existences there was an infinity of subtle variation, but still for him each was linked with one important thing, some decisive feeling—and fusing together, these feelings gave rise to a new unity, defined in space by the freshly painted planks, but not actually limited by anything. That was him, Number XII, and above his head the moon was his equal as it rushed through the mist and the clouds….That night was when his life really began.
Soon Number XII realized that he liked most of all the sensation which was derived from or transmitted by the bicycles. Sometimes on a hot summer day, when the world around him grew quiet, he would secretly identify himself in turn with the “Sputnik” and the folding “Kama” and experience two different kinds of happiness.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 104