The Streamlined Banana

He scored the tickets for his childhood buddy—but the artsy grad whore hated the play anyway. And the performance by the ticket-getter? Sneered at too.

This brings us straight to the temptation of power over man: a topic perfectly laid out in Nikolai Berdyaev's book, Of the Slavery and Freedom of Man.

Pavlik, like any other 'ruler’, is nothing but a slave to his own slaves and a prisoner of his own insurmountable fears. Which absolutely coincides with the conclusion presented in a couple of books written by myself—to whom, and now, attention!—the name of Berdyaev was not even known at the time. If two men say the same thing independently of each other, no one beats another.

And it's a fact: the conclusion matched Berdyaev's almost word for word. What does that prove? What's meant to be will be. If our guy Popov doesn't invent the radio, some Italian dude named Marconi is going to do it instead.

Science knows plenty of double-shot discoveries. Just look at the Joule-Mariotte physics law—though don't bring that up around lit professors: let's be merciful toward the humanities crowd. Anyway, Petik is dealing the hands, the bald-headed mob boss. But thanks to philosophy, he knows a kingpin's status is a total illusion: you can't escape being a slave that way.

To sweeten his Damoclean pill, he wires cash to his mom with her sensual mouth, and his dad—Doctor Pavlik, that shorty with the washed-out eyes. He even grants a lifetime pension to the incorruptible communist woman who flunked him on his Dialectical Materialism exam: freeing him from college for good.

Which is exactly why he turned into the motherboard of the black market. He logs client data into his brain-database without a keyboard: the copy-paste is done straight through the ears on his head—shaven to a gloss.

He organizes charitable foundations for his failed alma mater, where instead of Scientific Communism, they now rot people's brains with the exact same kind of useless horse-shit—only this time with a fancy English accent. Out of equally groundless impulses: theater tickets to secure his childhood buddy’s access to the grad-school whore’s hole—with a bohemian rococo curl.

But this is just shameless determinism: the exact repulsive stuff Berdyaev hates. The childhood buddy, fresh off his handout for that grad-school donut hole, crawled right back to the pub. Drunk on free beer, he started crying again: 'What are you doing, Petrushka? We're free now! It's the crazy 90s! Where are you steering the ship?'

The deadbeats with their brains screwed by the philology department don't know the first damn thing about determinism. For our top-tier slave, a step to the left or a step to the right is a concept just as unthinkable as the entirety of Dialectical Materialism—whether you swallow it in one big heap or take it in tiny, pre-measured portions.

And that's the 'hook' they applied to pull down the curtain on number ten. Now I can finally lay out all my real grievances against this so-called manufacturer of S*hole.

Yeah, 'so-called.' Don't get mad, Avdeyka: determinism is determinism! If you hadn't done it, some hack named Sandulnikov would have written this exact trash, word for word. The time had just come for this text-muck to hatch out. Then the phone rings: 'Alright, Sandulnikov, turn it in—we’ll consider.’

That’s exactly why you, and I, and we, and y’all, and they—anyone in our batch and all together—are 'so-called' treading our way under the exact same determinism: along our separate pre-destined tracks.

Now answer me this—do you honestly consider yourself a writer? You were dealt a spectacular, Dionysian ace right in your card-buy: the wild nineties! Even with your ragged, telegraphic scribbling, think of the massive historical strata you could have cracked open: in passing, on the fly—like a lacey openwork structure.

A great superpower gets scammed with vouchers. The people are brainwashed by the MMM pyramid scheme. Street punks are renamed 'organized crime.' The Colombian cartel is looking to buy a nuclear sub: opening up routes around the US Coast Guard. Sí, amigo!

The three emissaries from overseas were fucking stu… they barely recovered from the shock. You could literally fly a military helicopter from a base near Moscow straight to a secret helicopter plant: and all for a measly fifty bucks!

Striking while the iron was hot, they chartered the biggest plane on earth for a flight to Latin America: packing it full of helicopters. They only got popped right on the runway—some errand-boy general from state security ratted the deal out to the mob. So they hauled those overseas smugglers straight to a sit-down with federal-level thieves-in-law.

But right there, one of the go-betweens started playing them for fools: claiming that he himself was Escobar, in the flesh. Naturally, he scored instant respect and an immediate order for a sack of 'snow'—but he dug his heels in and declared: 'I don't even negotiate for anything less than half a ton.’

Long story short, the mob bosses give their go-ahead for the giant cargo plane to take off. The middlemen stayed behind for a while to take tourist photos at a naval base in the Kola Bay—posing with the captain right in front of a nuclear sub. Naturally, the fleet's high command approved it: just so the cartel bosses in Colombia would believe this wild streak of luck.

But the deal went completely belly-up. One of that notorious trio of go-betweens, while transporting the down payment—ten million greenbacks—went straight on the lam. They still haven't caught that Cuban son of a bitch: a man with his own private jet and a couple of backup yachts.

But a million IZh motorcycles still made it to South America anyway: sold at the price of cheap plastic scooters. Right behind the helicopters.

And instead of that—or anything remotely like it—you're seriously giving me the last name of the theater director where you supposedly dragged that artsy whore?!

Holy fucking cow! You're a champion of caution, Avdey!

11

I have a granddaughter of some kind… Though, perhaps, it’s the other way around—a grandniece. I still have system glitches when it comes to rooting inside-family terminology: an insatiable bookworm named Eva.

She has read absolutely everything she could lay her hands on—both in the near and far abroad. Her mother has already thrown up her hands, abandoning her duty to supervise the child's reading list as required by parental control guidelines.

One day Eva sauntered up to me, too: 'Uncle Seryozha, give me something to read.' But what the hell am I supposed to give her? I'm pretty cleaned out in that department: a Chambers dictionary from the previous century and a couple of stray collections autographed by local-variety poets. But just try saying no to a girl who's half a head taller than you and of such beauty that… though wait, that’s just the birthmark of family nepotism waking up inside me and fighting to grab the microphone…

Long story short, I gave her a little book: Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. She brought it back in a week, saying: 'I don't get it.' What's to get? Same as a poet—just running it in prose.

So I dumped Roger Zelazny on her—the father of modern fantasy. Found his book in an empty minibus. Looked at a few pages and saw why Roger's baby was treated like a foundling bastard. I was raised to treat books as sacred: otherwise, I'd have tossed that premature freak…

I mean, think about it: he spends half the book walking up a mountain. Every page and a half, he fights off a horse or foot patrol, then recharges—meaning he stuffs his face, usually with wine and a smoke—and keeps tramping.

'Evusika,' I tell her, 'here is the absolute peak of fantasy production across all times and nations—however, on one condition: make sure I never have to look at it again…' Wait, what the hell was I talking about again?…

Oh, right! Eva’s into the acoustic guitar now; she posts videos on YouTube of herself playing Spanish music, and she won’t even look at books anymore. At least, that’s what her mom told me. Say what you want, but there really is a magical power load inside these goddamn fantasies…

And yet, this eleventh 5-to-6-page quota actually managed to stir up some human sparks inside me—I even remembered Eva, even though among my relatives I go by the call-sign 'The Iceberg.' It’s all thanks to the horse-shit written by our Scumblower: where that stray professor is huffing and puffing, dragging himself up a hill near a Czech village just so he can wash down some sandwiches with slivovitz plum brandy.

The Greek pub owner hooked him up with that booze for acts too nasty to list even with an 18+ warning. Also possibly, old Avdey just forgot what exactly Anonymous did to score that bottle. Or maybe the size of that 'service' just stuck out past the standard 5-to-6-page limit: who knows, there are plenty of options…

Beside the booze name, number eleven laid bare the modern trick for cranking out fiction. It's dead simple: you watch a metronome sway and type it out like a comic strip. Tick!—confessing to a priest. Tock!—backyard childhood. Tick!—the priest. Tock!—the dacha. Tick!—the Greek. Tock!—college days. Tick!—slivovitz.

Running things that way—one tick per page quota—he clicked his way straight to number eleven. That's where he proved to the Greek that our local blog-smearers are top-tier when it comes to political updates: their flair for comedy is frontier-free. He tells a joke about Brezhnev's grandson, whose idiot parents named him after his granddad. When he grew up, the cops beat the crap out of him at the station so he wouldn't treat the police like brainless fools. They asked him like civilized people: 'Who are you?' And he shoots back, smug as hell: 'I'm Leonid Brezhnev!'

But wow—what a cautious old cat! He didn't even drop a bearded joke without adding a disclaimer: an online check proved it’s a lie. Now if Lyonya B. sues him, he's got an alibi—fighting defamation against an innocent kid.

Still, old Avdey has grown up stylistically. One of these days he'll finally hit the high bar: Youth magazine, vintage Soviet era.

For me, the USSR is still what it always was: four clumsy BLOCK letters swapped lately for ‘sovok’. Giving trashy nicknames to the dead is just bad taste. That word 'sovok' is a quote from S*hole—used by Avdey to build some street-cred when he was hunting for side-gigs in liberal circles—undercover.

But in the very next paragraph, our cautious little friend warns us that the word 'sovok' actually offends him, and that the USSR had plenty of things we can only dream of now… No, he didn't list the dreams: but he reeled in the veteran vote anyway. Slippery kid.

What else stands out about this political briefing to fill his page quota? The speaker's knack for picking at scabs while staying out of trouble. He drops a list of names of guys whacked in plane crashes, then goes completely radio silent—hey, maybe it really was just bad weather.

Then again, to fill a whole 5-to-6-page quota with chewing sandwiches isn't exactly stylish—even when you wash them down with slivovitz. Avdey was forced to keep cranking his hurdy-gurdy.

In this specific tick, Pavlik already weighs a whopping hundred and a half kilos; though diabetic, he still goes on to eat like there’s no tomorrow. Now he treats the anonymous professor to a joyride jet flight: straight to the Yamal Peninsula—the taxi stand is based at Vnukovo-2.

Mid-flight, the oligarch finally rats out his childhood buddy. The name 'Slavik' pops out ripping the anonymous mask, and he's immediately prodding Slavik to go make up with Katya. This move—our heavyweight friend believes—will restore the holy glory of power. In his opinion, if Big Brother just says sorry to Ukraine, total world peace and happiness will be back for good.

"Give Crimea back to them?" Professor Slavik asked with a sarcastic smirk—and got an instant hit right in the gut by the weather conditions. The plane was being tossed around like a wood chip in a whirlpool. (A comparison concocted solely by the critic, mind you—and one for whose creative liberties Mr. Scumblower bears absolutely no legal, financial, or moral responsibility.)

Most of the crew crawls out of the cockpit. Goosebumps, full of sheer shock, go off to feel the flight attendant up—driving her crazy. The plane tries to land wing-first—classic Avdey’s logic—gets thrown a hundred meters back up, and only lands safe on the second try. The stewardess’ ghostly pale shows right through her makeup. Pavlik is grumpy.

Now, what? Anyone in the audience still clueless about the horrid follow-up to any attempt at repeating that stupid Black-Sea-peninsula jest at home? Hope you’ve smartened up.

Expertly aware of how these metronome page quotas work, I'll bet: in a couple of clicks, our little buzz-fly Katya will show up to tear Slavik away from that grad-school whore. Any takers on that bet?

12

Any seriously self-respecting thinker comes into contact with numerology—one way or another. This chalice did not pass me by either. I had to work hard on creating a personal numerology system. Well, what can I say? At least it turned out solid. And it still serves me to this day. Secretly. Otherwise, it would be way too risky. If the orthodox believers in official astrology and numerology ever caught a whiff of my DIY operations, they would have lynched me years ago.

The text-assembler of the product S*hole doesn’t miss showing a passerby’s interest in digits—alas, only at a primitive, circular-loop level, as previously noted. Yet for now, the topic isn’t him, but my numerology: where "12" signifies a "nutshouse" in every astrological sense of the word. And this so-called "novel" immediately complies with the strictly digital prediction.

And no matter what—sheer naivety or flat-out stupidness—permeates the system of a man who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, he’ll smash-bang fit right into the grid foreseen by my numerology for ganders of his ilk. I mean, where the hell else is he gonna go? Yes, Avdey went ahead and turned out quite a wild mix once again.

Chugging slivovitz straight from the bottle, the hero of his S*hole trudges down the hill—this time without any sandwiches: "The Polyane sat upon the hills, then they came down, and from that arose the Russian land…"

Everything follows the ancient, primitive loop. That’s exactly what hills are for to a Slav—you climb up, you sit for a bit, and you trudge back down. And if anyone is offended by this conclusion, it simply means that their “innermost core” is better suited for structural engineering.

Obedient to the pattern—chugging Slovak vodka, leaving face-prints in the Czech mud of the Sudeten Mountains—Slavik was making his descent: in the finest traditions of Russian vacationing.

(These are the absolute ABCs of the writer’s trade: first, you must thoroughly roll your character around in whatever muck happens to be handy—which triggers a reflexive empathy in the reader, to shift eventually into an instinct-level fondness.)

While at it, on he goes to rat Pavlik out—whose patronymic is Tarasovich (aha!), with roots stretching all the way back to Chersonesus (get it?). And that Petik Tarasovich is a case of total erectile dysfunction.

Well, he’s not an outright eunuch with everything sliced radically off. Yet now it’s painfully obvious to even a stray hedgehog that the future erotic charge of S*hole—18+ rating: the consumer’s drooling in rightful anticipation!—has become a distinct load on solely Slavik’s shoulders.

(The sympathies among the menopausal segment of the audience are now concentrating—and growing exponentially.)

To somehow justify his presence, Petik Tarasovich Pavlik hammered a crazy messianic idea into his head: global Slavic unification within one vast common Russian womb where everyone will fit. Based on preliminary math, anyway. Even the tech nerds who prefer engineering to history books. Absolutely everyone—as long as their family roots smell vaguely Slavic: Roger of the Irons, Chuck of the Polyane, or even guys from Montenegro. Anything goes.

The announcement date for this grand project is Anno Domini 2018—that’s exactly where our former "Anonymous," now known as Slavik, is broadcasting from. A hell of a lot has changed over the past one and a half five-year plans, but our Scumblower still possesses those raw blogging instincts that are simply impossible to keep sane.

The hyper-patriots, of course, are practically tripping over themselves to show that our cause is just and that victory will be ours—exactly like in any other… Caution! If you call the consumer-co-op SMO a "war," you risk hitting nasty changes in your daily diet and lifestyle.

In a text assembled in year three of the war on chassis of a plot about a peaceful 2018, any hack drooling over a government prize-loaf is forced to show exactly who his chestnut horses are hoof-thumping and whinnying for.

To cheat the tricky timeline, Scumblower stitched patches with cryingly white thread. Careless? No way. He wanted everyone to see exactly whose line he's marching in.

"She'd better stay away from the bucha," Pavlik says—only a total idiot wouldn't see "Bucha" has a capital B here. Paired with his barked orders to run back under Mother Russia's wing, his hunt for the Big Book Award cash pot is completely exposed. Stark naked. Who cares that pan-Slavism is a dead corpse of brain-dead impotence? The state gets a new, prize-winning puppet speaker.

"Nationalism, which at its core is an erotic seduction, always feeds on lies and cannot do without them. A lie is already found in national conceit and arrogance, which is so ridiculous and stupid from the outside..."—so wrote Nikolai Berdyaev back in his day. And yet here we are: watching our literary text-assembler drool over those exact same ancient, state-funded lies just to secure a spot at the prize-trough. Some things never change.

Then erotic Slavik—Berdyaev says eros and nationalism are twins, meaning both can act with brains turned off, but that's enough quoting for now—messed up the suspension bounce on a police jeep parked on an empty dirt road. In the back seat, they were playing the "in-out" game straight out of Burgess's A Clockwork Orange—guess that 18+ warning wasn't a lie after all!

Avdey's desperate attempts to write nature descriptions got dumped into this page-quota slush, too. Let's be fair: he strained as hard as he could. As the great humanist Mark Twain once said, let's "draw a curtain of charity" over the final result.

Though "the voluptuous moon" is a total goldmine. If he'd given it a "sensual mouth" slapped on Pavlik's mom, he'd have pocketed every single pervert in the book clubs.

Once back in the village—sloshed in full—the professor began harassing Father Jiri. His booze-dunked brain turned the clean-shaven priest into God Himself. Demanding the Almighty listen to his love drama, he rambled about Katya. Shouting for the All-Knowing to figure out if he scored with her on the first shot, the second shot, or how at all: "No tomorrows! Listen here, who do you think I'm talking to!"

Next rolled the inescapable after-the-second-mug Slavic egocentrism—with its pan smeared in abundant snot. Then he went ahead and smashed some goddamn glass or whatever to smithereens. Right on cue: the priest's wife trotted in in a plush bathrobe.

But Jiri is a total boss—clean-shaven or not, he showed her exactly who is god and king in a Czech household. She didn't even dare to peep.

Saint father sent Slavik upstairs to sleep it off. The guy blacked out until three. Then, he woke up to hear some hanged German dude stomping his heels on the attic floor.

What a killer cliffhanger! Like I said: where there's a 12, there's a guaranteed nutshouse—99 proof.

13

At first, it was total darkness and soaking wet—and the spirit hovered over the waters in the dark. Back then, storytellers had balls. They blasted whatever hit them straight out. Not anymore. Now we need an audience just to get high enough to make Great Art. We need a public like air, even if it's fake—sucked out of our own thumb or dug out from our own dirty kneecap.

Therefore, citizens of the court, I ask you to show mercy and leniency toward my client, Avdey. Yes, for several 5-to-6-page quotas in a row now—completely ignoring the reader—he has been babbling exclusively with Jiri. But who among us is without sin? This is just the kind of era we live in now… Every cricket walks a straight line, even on his own personal perch. They are seized by the terror that if you stumble in the wrong direction, one of two things awaits you: you either get bashed over the head, or you fail to get your prize check.

And is it easy? Just ask your own damn self. To balance on that fucking tightrope while every single one of your limbs is shaking—along with that "authority" you've grown around your bellybutton?

It was easy for Bulgakov to loudly declare: "Follow me, reader!"—without even bothering to ask, out of his naively trusting innocence, whether that reader had any ties to unchecked foreign-agent networks or maintained active exchange of SMS text messages with relocants evading the army draft. He just called out to any random person without a security clearance from the Organs. He wasn't scared of Godzilla cockroaches.

But my client was left with a pathetically meager choice: a priest in the quantity of exactly one piece. Furthermore, citizens of the jury, I ask you to take into consideration that he does not practice it in every single 5-to-6-page quota in a row. Rather, he strictly follows the rules of homeopathy—picking up this male-to-male connection at metronomically measured intervals.

To this we can also append a mitigating circumstance: a bottle of slivovitz plum brandy. Which was exactly what prompted the defendant Scumblower—alias Slavik, alias Avdey’s alter ego—to turn the character named Jiri into a chronic symbol to substitute for the orthodox jargon of "God." Avdey acted in a hazy state of mind inflicted by an unaccustomed product. In everyday life he's modest, doesn't rename God into "Jiri," and sticks to plain old whiskey.

A stroke of luck, an unprecedented bonus fell into the lap of Avdey Scumblower—he found himself among the official witnesses to the volcanic explosion of Dionysian energy during the avalanche-like collapse of the Soviet Union. "Blessed is he who visited this world in its moments of fateful destiny…!"—as the nineteenth-century Russian poet Tyutchev dryly observes.

And so, in this thirteenth 5-to-6-page quota, Scumblower releases his joker onto the field—a character with the call-sign "Slavik," a graduate of the philology department. But what exactly has this future laureate of the Big Book Award presented his reader with?

After all, people read books for a sole purpose: to re-experience personal emotions, to empathize with a character, and to compare their own live experience with the fate dealt to the protagonist by their inventor. So what exactly have readers been offered here? What the hell have they been treated to?

Ha! Bone appetite—here's the house special: a powdered wart on some university hag's face as she screams at a loser with a pathetic little beard. For the main course: that same thin-bearded jerk shouting with a mob marching down Tverskaya: "Down with the CPSU!"

This kitchen nightmare is served with a side of finely chopped half-allusions and half-hints from newspapers forty years old. Back when the TV endlessly drummed out names of political puppets. Names that not even retirees remember now.

Behold! This is what counts as literature today. Beautiful, mother-fucking prose! Just the fizzle of a sparkler tossed half-burnt into a glass of water to join the drowned bodies from the previous lines. Yeah, he sparkled within the limits of safe risk. But the August Coup, the tanks on Manezhnaya, the pipe barricades outside the White House? Fizzle—fizzle—fizzle! They might misinterpret it and shove it where the sun don't shine.

By the way, Rust—the guy Scumblower claims broke the USSR by landing a crop-duster on Red Square—later proved to be a petty creep with a massive ego. Working as a civilian orderly in a German hospital, he forced himself on a nurse because he was The Mathias Rust. He told her to check out the huge knife in his hand—right while that same "voluptuous" (!) moon was floating outside the window.

Don't mind that I'm a skinny, coughing geezer—my head works fine. I saw long ago that this is what the times demand. This cheap style is the best way to push clock hands forward. In a circle. The question of art has become a production-line question, dear comrades! Our factory workers are fully capable of finding deep enough solutions. Hooray, comrades! (Prolonged applause, turning into a standing ovation lasting at least 17 minutes.)