"Victor Pelevin. Babylon (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

standing is hidden by smoke. New camera angle: the young man on the bench
takes a thermos flask and a red mug with a gold band out of his sports bag.
He pours some coffee into the mug, takes a sip and closes his eyes in
ecstasy. Voice-over: 'He brewed it rough and dark. Nescafe Gold. The real
taste explosion.'
The term 'involvement' didn't only come in useful at work. It also
forced Tatarsky to start thinking about just who he was involving in what
and, most importantly of all, just who was involving him in what.
He first began thinking about it when he was reading an article devoted
to cult pom films. The author of the article was called Sasha Blo. To judge
from the text, he should have been a cold and world-weary being of
indeterminate sex, writing in the breaks between orgies in order to convey
his opinions to a dozen or so similar fallen supermen/women. The tone
adopted by Sasha Blo made it clear that de Sade and Sacher-Masoch wouldn't
even have made it as doormen in his circle, and the best Charles Manson
could have hoped for would have been to hold the candlesticks. In short,
Blo's article was a perfectly formed apple of sin, worm-eaten, beyond a
shadow of a doubt, personally by the ancient serpent himself.
But Tatarsky had been around in the advertising business for a long
time now. In the first place, he knew that the only thing these apples were
good for was to tempt suburban Moscow's kids out of the Eden of childhood.
In the second place, he doubted the very existence of cult pom films, and
was only prepared to believe in them if he was presented with living members
of the cult. In the third place, and most importantly, he knew Sasha Blo
himself very well.
He was a fat, bald, sad, middle-aged father of three, and his name was
Ed. In order to pay the rent on their flat, he wrote simultaneoulsy under
three or four pseudonyms for several magazines on any topic. He and Tatarsky
had invented the name 'Blo' together, borrowing the title of a bottle of
bright-blue glass-cleaning fluid they'd found under the bath (they were
looking for the vodka Ed's wife had hidden). The word 'Blo' summoned up the
idea of inexhaustible reserves of vital energy and at the same time
something non-humanoid, which was why Ed used it carefully. He only used it
for signing articles imbued with such boundless freedom and am-bivalence, so
to speak, that a common signature such as Tvanov' or 'Petrov' would have
been absurd. There was a great demand for this ambivalence in Moscow's
glossy magazines, so great indeed that it posed the question of just who was
controlling its penetration. To be honest, even thinking about the topic was
a bit frightening, but after reading Sasha Blo's article, Tatarsky suddenly
realised that it wasn't being implanted by some demonic spy or some fallen
spirit who had assumed human form, but by Ed and himself.
Of course, not just by them alone - Moscow probably had two or three
hundred Eds, universal minds choking on the fumes of the home hearth and
crushed under the weight of their children. Their lives were not one long
sequence of lines of coke, orgies and disputes about Burroughs and Warhol,
as you might have concluded from their writings, but an endless battle with
nappies and Moscow's own omnipresent cockroaches. They weren't obsessed with
arrogant snobbery, or possessed by serpentine carnal lust or cold dandyism:
they demonstrated no tendencies to devil worship, or even any real readiness
to drop a tab of acid occasionally - despite their casual use of the term