German Sadulaev
THE MAYA PILL
Translated and with an afterword by
Carol Apollonio
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In early spring of the year two thousand and XX from the birth of the prophet Jesus Christ—peace be unto him—I, Maximus Semipyatnitsky, have set pen to paper. My goaclass="underline" to snatch humanity from the talons of Maya, of illusion.
I shall tell the whole truth, reveal hidden verities, openly proclaim treasured secrets. The fortunate among my readers will profit from the knowledge I reveal here and will find their pathway to freedom. The ignorant, though, will reject the path, the blind will pass it by, and the world will crumble and plunge down to hell—as well it should—but my conscience will be clear. I shall fulfill my duty before those who suffer, and in doing so bring benefit unto myself. At the preordained hour I shall soar aloft to higher worlds in an airplane made of flowers, having shaken off the things of the terrestrial earth, its flawed economic system and discriminatory social relations, like dust, from my feet.
PART I
Itil
CROSSROADS
Bald Britney Spears writhed hysterically, slashed her veins, twisted her hospital bedding into a rope, and attempted to hang herself with it. Then she burst into tears, repented, summoned her former husband Kevin Federline, and promised to bear him a third child. Then she sobbed again, invoked the name of Beelzebub, called herself a fake, sought out the best tattoo artist in the United States of America, and had the number 666 branded onto the crown of her head.
Thirteen years ago, a scrawny old man materialized out of thin air in the bedroom of a pudgy girl. The old man looked like a goat and was wearing a baseball cap with “I
NY” on the front. The girl was clutching a curling iron in her hands, pretending it was a microphone, and gyrating in front of her mirror to the sounds of a Madonna tune coming from a cheap cassette player. The old man perched on the edge of a chair and with the muted and watery leer of a jaded pedophile observed the girl’s fleshy thighs bulging out from under her tight white shorts.
The girl glanced over and saw him, but before she could scream the old man reached over and handed her a bunch of pages torn from a school notebook. The pages were covered with elegant handwriting, with Gothic curlicues. The girl quickly skimmed the writing, then looked up at the old man, her big eyes brimming with greed and disbelief.
“What do you want me to do?” asked the girl.
She didn’t know Russian or Latin, or ancient Aramaic—only English, or, rather, American.
The old lecher would have understood her in any language, but he said:
“First just sign the contract.”
He could have answered in any language; he knows Russian, and Latin, and ancient Aramaic, and Greek, and Sanskrit. They say he even knows Albanian.
With the innate clumsiness of an overweight pre-teen, the girl lurched over to her school backpack, emptied its contents onto her bed, and fished out a ballpoint pen of Chinese manufacture.
The old man shook his head: “Blood. This kind of contract must be signed in blood.”
The girl was taken aback, but only for a moment. Staring impudently into the pervert’s eyes, she undid the button and zipper on her white shorts and lowered them to her knees. Then, hiking her gaudy stretch panties over to one side, she poked her finger between her legs and dug around inside. Without taking her eyes off the man’s face, she lifted her stained finger and smeared a crooked, rust-colored cross on the notebook paper with the ink of her first menstrual blood.
The old man gathered up the pages and vanished. Only then did the girl realize that his image hadn’t been reflected in the mirror.
The contract stipulated a thirteen-year term.
You might ask how I came to know these details. I learned them firsthand from one of the parties to the contract. And I’m not personally acquainted with Britney, so you can guess who I mean.
If you’ve read any books about voodoo or know anything about the history of the blues, you know the legend of the Trickster. Outside every city is a crooked crossroads, with a withered tree standing in its southwest corner. Every blues master has visited one of these corners on the night of a new moon. There he met the devil and sold him his soul in exchange for fame and glory. The devil in this particular legend is known as the Trickster, or Deceiver. No one can outwit him; he will steal your soul, dear child, and all you will get in return will be a pile of yellowed newspapers with your photograph on the front page.
The city of St. Petersburg has one of those crooked crossroads, in Vesyoly, at the place where Bloody Bolsheviks Prospect meets International Prostitute Kollontai Street. A withered old tree used to stand there, on the spot now occupied by a Neste gas station.
I used to be in a band with Ilya, who later made it big under the stage name “Devil.” We were coming back late from a rehearsal one dark night. Feeble little stars cowered behind a dirty gauze veil of clouds, and alcoholics, plagued with nightmares, tossed and turned on park benches nearby. The Trickster came coasting along in a burgundy-colored Volga, the deluxe model. He pulled up beside us just as we reached the crossroads, and invited us into his car. I immediately realized what was going on and instructed the old goat to kiss my ass. Mama taught me never to get into cars with suspicious-looking strangers.
But Ilya did. He got into the back seat and struck up a conversation with the old scumbag. Now Ilyukha sings his songs in huge stadiums and has his own TV show. Whereas my three solo albums came out in editions of twenty copies each, total, on cassette.
Not too long ago, the old swindler visited me again. He told me about Britney, and a whole slew of other clients too. He had heard that I’d become a writer, and figuring that this might give him another chance, poked his contract under my nose. It reeked of urine from a railway station toilet.
My response to the Source of All Sin, after censoring out the nonstandard vocabulary, could be distilled down to two English words: get lost. Rebuffed, the tempter spat malevolently onto my kitchen floor, and his saliva sizzled and scorched a hole in the linoleum. It’s still there on the floor, under the cardboard carton that I use as a table for my electric teapot and toaster. You can come over and take a look: With its ragged edges and dark center, it resembles a black hole, like the ones in outer space, and gives off a sulfury smell.
The Adversary was in a pathetic state. He told me a sob story about how he’d been to see K, and P, had dropped in on N, and had even flown out to the middle of nowhere to see G, but everyone had turned him down in more or less insulting terms. The despondent seducer whined that now he would have to make a deal with a client you couldn’t even call a writer, a scribbling hack whose opuses even he couldn’t stand to look at, much less read, and that everyone in hell would mock him, the so-called Master of Evil, when he dragged that sorry-ass soul down there. O, how low he had fallen, after Goethe and Sorokin!
At that point the Prince of Darkness, drained of all hope, dissolved into a pale gray haze that looked like bus exhaust, and wafted southward in the direction of Moscow.
Literary critics had unanimously identified my latest novel as the most insignificant and forgettable book of the year. Most bookstores don’t carry it. Sales experts, following some tyrannical inner voice that they call “the dictates of the market”—though we know that the market has nothing to do with it—loaded the shelves with row upon row of copies of a single book by a different author, which had become a surprise bestseller. They even colonized the bookstore windows, piling up a million more copies in huge stacks that spill over onto the sills.
1
The only inscription in the Khazar language that has been deciphered by scholars. Some linguists believe that it means “All things are possible.” The phrase was found inscribed on a stone stela that, some historians say, stood outside the home of a distinguished family of Khazar merchants; it may have served as their motto. Mainstream scholarship, however, does not recognize the stela, believing it to be a later fabrication; does not recognize the inscription itself, which is an imitation of the Sanskrit Devanagari alphabet; puts no stock in the belief that the inscription is in the Khazar language; and doesn’t think much of the translation either.