Empire V (3 page)

Oh snail!
When climbing to the top of Mount Fuji,
there is no need to hurry …

Taking out a pen, I added:

There are enough snails
on the top of Mount Fuji
as it is.

The rejection letter was the first real reverse of my life. My response to fate's decree was to take a job as a lorry unloader at the supermarket not far from our house.

For the first few days I felt as though I had sunk to the very dregs of existence, below the level at which the laws of Social Darwinism could begin to operate. But I soon came to realise that no chasm, no ghetto, could be deep or isolated enough to insulate one against these laws, because any individual cell in the social organism functions according to principles identical to those of society as a whole. I even recall the circumstances in which this became clear to me (I was at the time teetering on the brink of clairvoyance, although this was to become clear only much later.)

I was watching an English film,
Dune
, in which interstellar travel is accomplished by beings called Navigators who routinely consume a special narcotic that transforms them into a creature halfway between man and pterodactyl. The Navigator would spread his membranous wings, in so doing shrinking space and enabling a flotilla of cosmic ships to transport itself from any part of the cosmos to any other … It occurred to me that somewhere in Moscow a similarly evil species of web-winged creature had spread its wings over our world. People did not notice but continued ant-like to crawl about, preoccupied by their own affairs without realising that they no longer had any affairs to speak of. Excluded from the loop, they had no idea they were already living in another universe where different laws applied.

These laws operated in the world of the unloaders. There was an accepted level of stealing (neither too far below nor too far above the norm) and a common fund of stolen goods from which distributions were made in equitable proportions. One had no choice but to fight for a place nearer the invisible sun – to fight, moreover, not just any old how but according to the prescriptions of a time-honoured choreography of body movements. All in all, it was a place with its own Mount Fuji, however paltry and vomit-spattered.

Here also, I should mention, my social origins were against me. Supervisors took to assigning me to consecutive night shifts, night after night on the trot, and dropping me in it with Management. The prospect of ending up as a loser even among unloaders was intolerable, and the second summer after leaving school I quit the job.

While it lasted, the money I had earned from the supermarket – including my ill-gotten proceeds, which amounted to a tidy sum – left me in a position to maintain a reasonable degree of independence from my mother and to restrict contact with her to a minimum. For all practical purposes, this was confined to a single ritual exchange: every now and again my mother would stop me in the hallway and say, ‘Well, go on then, look me straight in the eye!'

She was convinced that I was using drugs and believed herself capable of determining at any given time whether I was stoned or not. As a matter of fact I did not use any illegal substances at all, but in my mother's eyes I was under the influence of a whole cocktail of narcotics almost every day. Her assessments were based not on any objective measurements such as the dimensions of the pupil or the condition of the whites of the eyes, but on certain specific indices known only to her – which helpfully prevented me from learning techniques to conceal them. For this reason it was impossible to contest my mother's expertise in this field. It was a contest that in any case I declined, aware that the only result would be to provide yet more evidence to support the justice of her attitude. (‘It's dreadful how aggressive you get when you've taken drugs!')

In addition to these gifts, my mother possessed remarkable powers of hypnosis. It was enough, for instance, for her to say, ‘See, there you go again, gabbling your words,' for me to begin doing exactly that, although I had not hitherto even known what the expression meant. Therefore, whenever my mother got too much for me, I would clam up and leave the house for hours at a time.

One summer's day we had our usual row about my taking drugs. On this occasion, it was unusually stormy and I felt I absolutely had to get out of the house. As I went through the door, I lost control and said: ‘That's it. I won't live here any longer.'

‘Good news,' replied my mother from the kitchen.

Needless to say, neither of us really meant it.

It was nice in the centre of town, quiet and not too many people around. I wandered through the little streets between Tverskoi Boulevard and the Garden Ring. I was not thinking very clearly, but it occurred to me that the reason Moscow in summer is so beautiful owes less to its streets and its buildings than to the obscure promise of escape it harbours. This promise was all around – in the breeze, in the fluffy white clouds, in the puffballs floating down from the poplar trees that this year had flowered early.

Suddenly my attention was attracted to an arrow drawn in green chalk on the pavement. Beside it, written in the same green chalk, were the words

Your chance to join the elite
22.06 18:40–18:55
A genuine unrepeatable opportunity

My watch showed a quarter to seven. Also, it was 22 June, the day of the summer solstice. The arrow, already all but erased by the feet of passers-by, was obviously part of a game someone was playing. But whoever the instigator was, it was a game I felt drawn to play.

I looked around. The few passers-by were absorbed in their own affairs and no one paid any attention to me. Neither was there anything of interest to be seen in the windows of the nearby buildings.

The arrow pointed towards a shabby archway into a courtyard. I went through and saw another green arrow pointing to the farthest corner, this time with no accompanying inscription. I went on a few paces and saw a small, depressed-looking yard with two old cars, a large waste container and a back door in the middle of a painted brick wall. On the asphalt in front of the door was another green arrow.

There were more arrows on the staircase. The last was on the fifth floor, and it pointed towards a steel-reinforced back door to a large flat. The door was half-open. Holding my breath, I looked through the crack and immediately recoiled in fright.

A man was standing in the semi-darkness behind the door. He held in his hands an object that looked like a blowtorch but I saw no more because something he did caused everything to go black.

At this point, my memory of what had occurred reached a point which was in such close alignment with the present that I remembered where I was – and came back to myself.

MITHRA

I was standing upright at the Swedish parallel bars. I desperately needed to go to the toilet. Also, there was something odd about my mouth. Inspecting it with my tongue, I discovered that the upper incisors had been extracted and in their place were two holes in the gum. I must have spat out the teeth while unconscious, because there was no trace of them in my mouth.

I sensed vaguely that the room contained another living creature besides myself, but since my eyes refused to focus I could see nothing in front of me except an indistinct smudge. The smudge was trying to attract my attention, uttering muffled sounds and repeating the same movements over and over again. Suddenly my eyes regained their focus and I saw before me a man I had never seen before, dressed in black. He was passing his hand in front of my face, testing whether I reacted to the change in light. Seeing that I had come back to my senses, the stranger inclined his head in a gesture of welcome and said: ‘Mithra.'

I assumed that was his name.

Mithra was a tall, scrawny young man with a piercing gaze, a pointy Spanish-style beard and barely detectable moustache. A faintly Mephistophelean air hung about him, one which might, however, perhaps have undergone a recent upgrade, increasing the level of tolerance. This particular devil would not necessarily shrink from a good deed provided it had a reasonable prospect of accelerating progress towards his evil goal.

‘Roman,' I croaked in reply, and turned my eyes to the sofa along the wall opposite.

It no longer supported a corpse. The blood on the floor had also vanished.

‘Where is …?'

‘They've taken him away,' said Mithra. ‘A tragic event, alas, that took us completely by surprise.'

‘What was his mask for?'

‘The deceased had been rendered unsightly as a result of an accident.'

‘Why did he shoot himself?'

Mithra shrugged. ‘No one knows. The deceased left a note to the effect that you are to succeed him.' He measured me up and down with a thoughtful look. ‘And that seems to be the case.'

‘I do not want to,' I said quietly.

‘Do – not – want – to?' repeated Mithra, stretching out the words.

I shook my head.

‘I don't understand,' he said. ‘By rights you should be extremely happy. After all, you are an advanced young man. You must be, otherwise Brahma would not have chosen you. You just haven't yet understood how fortunate you are. Forget all your doubts. In any case, there is no way back … You'd do better to tell me how you are feeling in yourself?'

‘Bad,' I said. ‘Head hurts terribly. And I need to go to the toilet.'

‘Anything else?'

‘Some of my teeth seem to have fallen out. The upper incisors.'

‘We'll check everything out now,' said Mithra. ‘One second.'

In his hand appeared a short glass test tube with a black stopper. It was half filled with a clear liquid.

‘This vessel contains some red liquid from a man's veins diluted with water. The concentration is one part to a hundred …'

‘Who was the man?'

‘You'll see.'

I did not understand what Mithra meant by this.

‘Open your mouth,' he directed.

‘Is there any danger?'

‘None at all. Vampires are immune to any diseases transmitted by red liquid.'

I did as I was told, and Mithra carefully deposited on my tongue a few drops from the test tube. I could detect no difference between the liquid and ordinary water: if there was anything alien it, it had no taste.

‘Now rub your tongue against your upper gum, inside the teeth. You will see something after this. We call it the personality map.'

I touched the palate with the tip of my tongue. Now I could feel something extrinsic. It was not painful, more of a slight tingling, as if from a low-powered electrical current. I took my tongue several times round the palate, and suddenly …

Had I not still been strapped to the bars, I would have lost my balance. Without warning I experienced a blindingly powerful sensation, unlike anything I had previously known. I was seeing, or more accurately feeling, another human being from the inside, as if I had myself become him, as sometimes happens in dreams.

Inside the aurora-borealis-like cloud within which the apparition presented itself to me, I could distinguish two contrasting zones, repulsion and attraction, dark and light, cold and hot. The zones overlapped at multiple points forming overlays and archipelagos so that the intersections sometimes resembled islands of warmth in a frozen sea, at other times icebound lakes in a temperate landscape. Everything in the zone of repulsion was unpleasant and painful – all the things this person did not like. The attraction zone, by contrast, contained all that gave him reason to live.

I was looking at what Mithra had called his ‘personality map'. Indeed, I could sense an invisible path threading through both zones, hard to describe but nevertheless palpable, like rails along which, insensibly and involuntarily, the attention slid. It had been formed by traces of the mind's habitual pathways, a furrow worn by repeated thoughts, a meandering trajectory of the mind's daily cognitive processes. By studying the personality map for a few seconds it was possible to penetrate the subject's most salient characteristics. I did not need Mithra to explain this to me; it was as if I had known it all along.

This particular individual worked as an IT engineer in a Moscow bank and harboured a multiplicity of secrets, some of them shameful, which he kept from other people. But the most insidious, the most secret and humiliating of all his problems, was his inadequate grasp of Windows.

He hated it, and had been hating many a version of this operating system for more than a decade already – as a long-term convict in the camps learns to hate several generations of guards. The depth of his hatred verged on the comic, to the extent that when Windows Vista came on stream he would be upset by hearing the Spanish expression ‘
hasta la vista
' when he went to the cinema. Everything connected to his line of work was to be found in his zone of repulsion, and in the centre of this zone fluttered the flag of Windows.

At first I thought that sex was the nodal point of the zone of attraction. But when I looked more closely, I saw that the chief source of joy in this particular life was, in fact, beer. Stated simply, the man lived to drink good German beer immediately after sex, and for this was ready to endure all the horrors of fate. He may not have known himself what for him was the key to life, but to me it was as clear as day.

I cannot claim that the stranger's life was opened to me in its entirety. It was more as though I stood at the half-open door of a darkened room, tracing by the light of a torch the images depicted on its walls. Whenever I allowed the light to linger on a particular picture it would momentarily expand and then dissolve into hundreds of others; this pattern was repeated again and again. Theoretically I could have accessed every single one of the memories, but there were simply far too many of them. After a while the images faded, as though the battery in the torch was exhausted, and everything grew dark.

‘Did you see?' asked Mithra.

I nodded.

‘What did you see?'

‘A computer specialist.'

‘Describe him.'

‘Like a set of scales,' I said. ‘Beer on one side, Windows on the other.'

Mithra showed no surprise at this strange phrase. He took a few drops of the liquid into his mouth and for a few seconds moved his lips back and forth.

‘Yes,' he assented. ‘Windows Ex Pee …'

The response did not surprise me. It was one of the ways our computer expert had demonstrated his special loathing of this particular version of the operating system marketed as XP.

‘What was I seeing?' I asked. ‘What was it?'

‘What you have been experiencing was your first degustation, your first tasting. In the weakest possible concentration. Had the solution been at full strength, you would have lost all knowledge of who you yourself really are, and if that had happened everything would take much longer to accomplish. Until you get used to it, it can produce a severe psychic trauma. But you will only have as strong a reaction as that in the initial stages; later you'll get used to it … In any case, my congratulations. You are now one of us. Or at least, almost one of us.'

‘Forgive me for asking,' I said, ‘but who are you?'

‘I am your friend and comrade. I'm a little older than you. I hope we are going to be friends.'

‘In the light of our future friendship,' I said, ‘might I ask you to do me a friendly service in advance?'

Mithra smiled. ‘But of course.'

‘Could you untie me from these wall bars? I need to go to the toilet.'

‘By all means,' said Mithra. ‘I ask your pardon, but I had to be certain that everything in the procedure had gone according to plan.'

When the straps binding me fell to the floor, I attempted to take a step forward but would have fallen over had Mithra not caught hold of me.

‘Steady on,' he said. ‘You may have problems for a while with your vestibular apparatus. It takes a few weeks for the Tongue to take root fully … are you able to walk? Shall I help you?'

‘I can walk,' I said. ‘Where is it?'

‘Down the corridor on the left. By the kitchen.'

The bathroom appointments were consistent with the style of the rest of the apartment: a museum of Gothic sanitaryware. Sitting on a black throne with a hole in the middle, I tried to compose my thoughts. But in this I was unsuccessful: my thoughts simply refused to be corralled into any sort of coherence. It was as if they had vanished somewhere. I felt no fear, no excitement, no concern for what would happen next.

Emerging from the toilet, I realised that no one was keeping guard over me. There was no one in the passage, nor in the kitchen. The back door through which I had entered the apartment was only a few paces from the kitchen. But the strangest thing of all was that the idea of flight did not occur to me. I knew that I was going to return to the room and continue my conversation with Mithra.
Why have I no desire to escape?
I thought.

The reason was that in some way I knew that to do so would not be right. In my efforts to understand why this should be so, I discovered something very odd indeed. My mind seemed to have developed a centre of gravity of its own accord, a kind of black sphere implanted so ineradicably that nothing could threaten the balance of a soul so equipped. Located in this sphere was the faculty of reviewing and assessing all possible options for acceptance or rejection. The prospect of flight had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

The sphere wanted me to return, and this being what the sphere wanted, I complied. It was not an instruction; all the sphere had to do was tilt in the direction of the desired decision, and I followed the inclination.

So that was why Mithra allowed me to leave the room
, went through my mind.
He knew I would not run away
.

I deduced that the source of Mithra's knowledge was his possession of a similar sphere.

‘What is it, exactly?' I asked when I returned to the room.

‘What are you referring to?'

‘I've got some kind of nucleus inside me. Everything I try to think about now passes through it. It's as though I have lost my soul.'

‘Lost your soul?' Mithra asked. ‘What do you need it for, anyhow?'

Evidently, confusion was written all over my face. Mithra burst out laughing.

‘Is your soul the same thing as you, or is it not you?' he asked.

‘In what sense?'

‘In the literal sense. Is what you call your soul you, or something else?'

‘I suppose it is myself … or maybe not – perhaps it is something separate.'

‘Let's look at this logically. If your soul is not you but something other, why should you bother about it? But if it
is
you, how could you possibly lose it, when here you are?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I see you can talk anybody into anything.'

‘And we'll teach you to do so, as well. I know why you're in such a stew about it.'

‘Why?'

‘Culture shock. According to human mythology, anyone who becomes a vampire loses his or her soul. That is nonsense. You might just as well say that a boat loses its soul when it is fitted with an engine. You haven't lost anything. You have only gained. But you have gained so much that everything you knew previously has been so compressed as to become virtually non-existent. That is why you feel you have lost something.'

I sat on the sofa that only a short while ago had supported the corpse of the masked man. Normally I would feel most ill at ease sitting in such a place, but the heavy black globe inside me was quite indifferent.

‘It's not actually a sense of loss,' I said. ‘I don't even feel that I am I any more.'

‘Correct,' replied Mithra. ‘You are not you now, you are another. What you sense as a nucleus is your Tongue. Before you it lived in Brahma. Now it lives in you.'

‘I remember,' I said. ‘Brahma told me that his Tongue would transfer to me.'

‘But don't run away with the idea, please, that you have Brahma's Tongue. Brahma was the servant of the Tongue, not the other way round.'

‘Whose Tongue is it now?'

‘You cannot say it is anyone's. It belongs to itself. The vampire's person is divided between the head and the Tongue. The head is the human side of the vampire, the social person with all his or her accumulated baggage and impedimenta. But the Tongue, the other centre of the personality, is the more important. It is the Tongue that makes you a vampire.'

‘But what, exactly, is it?'

‘The Tongue is another living creature, one from a higher plane of nature. The Tongue is immortal and moves from one vampire to another, or rather from one person to another, like the rider of a horse. But it can exist only in a symbiotic relationship with a human brain. Take a look at this.'