This text, included in ROAR #5, should be available on the ROAR website here, but in case it is not, the text is below.

Pikachu’s Evolving into Raichu
by Ilya Danishevsky

Translated by Anne O. Fisher

All this was written (or rather collected from conversations at neighboring tables, in the metro, or just on the street) a couple of months before mobilization. It’s written in the genre of the Moscow I’m glad to lose, as daily I do my public-facing work, so that I won’t have to remember anything changed on February 24th, and retract any empathy back into myself, so that everything keeps going like it’s going now.

“Music on the Sand” (1)

“She dropped her SIM card, where’d she drop it, what card, her SIM, it slipped into a crack, shit, this crack in the floor, so she’s asking people on Facebook what to do now.” This is how B. (seduced) was spending his evening. They’d met when he said that A. (seducer) had a very cinematic butt—not nice, not hot or anything, but cinematic: several layers of processing. In the course of tonight’s evening he’d found out that when you’re trypophobic you can’t use sponges or look at honeycomb. B. had asked why somebody would look at honeycomb, A. had answered that if seeing them makes you panic, it’s hard to even comprehend how often they pop up—like at a Russian Orthodox church bazaar, for example. And thus he found out that A. visits Russian Orthodox church bazaars, but actually it’s not that A. visits them, it’s that he goes with his mom who visits them, and his mom was born in Kherson — well, you know… let’s not bring everybody down.

A. has nice armpits, thinks B., and also those, like, tattoos, although they’re also a little meh, especially those tentacles sliding down the neck, but the butt’s still the main draw. He’d seen it for the first time at a funeral a week ago, when for the third time he was bringing flowers (a metaphor, since that time he’d realized dead people don’t need flowers; worse, he’d realized everyone will buy themselves their own flowers) for a classmate, and as the widow in a loose black midi dress directed everyone to the plot, he was scrolling through Hornet. He figured he’d be fairly drunk by evening, so why not. Unfortunately, A. had taken it all fairly seriously, and the vintage light on the terrace had also been somewhat onerous, and B. had had to accept he wouldn’t get away with just a BJ in the bathroom. Yeah, he’d have to pay the price: the whole thing about trypophobia, plus Viola who lost her SIM card, and what else?

“How’s your mom?”—well yeah, the one from Kherson, oh man, don’t even ask, basically she supports it, of course (of course), but she’s still a little bit… you know, just a little, because soon there’s gonna be purges here. No way, they won’t mobilize, everything’s gonna be okay, definitely, says B., but I totally get you. B. should’ve kept on listening to how sometimes in the dorm shower A. sees those sponges with the big pores, the rounded bullet wounds that froth up soap suds, and also every summer there’s a chance he’ll scratch a mosquito bite and then it’s like the hole of an open wound… B. thinks it’s a little strange (at first glance) but also logical that a person who has an anonymous butt in profile could turn out, when you meet him, to be anything at all, even a bullet wound, but not… A. goes to the bathroom and disappears from the terrace, the dim yellowish light of Sunday, he has a smile on his face and three sangrias in his belly, B. thinks that Viola really did get herself into a bind, after all, dropping your SIM card (but where did she actually drop it, dammit?!) is almost as crappy as getting a Christmas card from a classmate in Vkontakte. B. thinks about how he recently dreamed of the Cologne Cathedral at night, and isn’t that just as repulsive as everything A. was going on about? The dream Cologne Cathedral didn’t quite look like the real one, which made the dream even more bizarre, you would’ve thought there’d be some kind of fearfulness that the dream would bleed into a nightmare—but no, the dream was completely frigid, flat. A. came back and B. liked his smile, it was as though he’d switched himself into some kind of different mode, been reborn through the urinary tract.

“So what’s with the SIM card?” B. asks. A. laughs so hard in reply that B. feels warm all over, or at least he almost does, so he asks whether A. will be spending the night. Oh, well sure, heh-heh, if I tell the mullah I’m with a girl. “Well, ok,” says B., absolutely everything in their life will be okay.

Lisa Gerrard Decides to Die at Silikatnaya Station (2)

That morning she remembered that at the office party: a) she said she hates the way penises look; b) she’s been sleeping with this normal guy, a protester, whose wife is a big pro-government donor (yes, that’s exactly how she said it); c) she wanted the office party to end as soon as possible, every once in a while it does happen, right, that during a shitty performance the curtain will tear away and just fall down, sometimes killing the actors in especially sad cases; d) she was thinking about painting a couple of pictures that weekend, so she could be a real artist-at-risk, sure, why not. What had happened after that? She’d seen Masha Krasavina, like she always did at times like that, but it was hard to tell—it was either that Masha was alive, or that she was wandering knee-deep in the water of dreams, or else that she was, as the fucking Lacanian nonsense has it, like this dream within a dream… Masha looked old enough to be thirty, although how could she be thirty, she’d still been fourteen then, it had all started because Masha had the biggest tits in the whole district, and she was always cackling at the top of her lungs, god, what gorgeous teeth she had. You could even see how present-day Masha, who would be thirty now, would’ve been a Tinder star a couple years ago, but then today all of a sudden she would’ve*—pfft!*—gone out of fashion, because wartime demands genuine body positivity.

Maybe Masha appears because she’s from Kramatorsk, or rather, because she used to go there to her grandma’s in the summer? Remembering that cackle of Masha’s, it’s right there in front of your face for some reason, as though it were Part Three of Leaving Neverland, damn how she cackled, as though something had happened to her when she was little, such big, such gorgeous tits, like Dita von Teets’s (3). She always appears after a rowdy drunken party when you’re already waking up, and you feel like puking, but the puke doesn’t come, and your body doesn’t want to move, and her cackling. In a few of those dreams Masha Krasavina was a witch and could turn into a German shepherd (it’s easy to imagine Channel One explaining this was exactly what they taught her in Kramatorsk), and for some reason she sometimes raped her male classmates—and sure she was justified, but fucking hell it was creepy. And even when she was in her German shepherd form she cackled, cackled like she was high as a kite.

That time Masha wasn’t quite the same as usual; she usually shows up after you’re completely wasted, to howl inside your head, you can’t tell what she’s saying at first, but then she goes on and on about her guy from Zelik—Zelenograd—who she saw a few times, and who she supposedly even slept with, although nobody believed her (Masha would keep rehashing the details, more maliciously each time, about the smell of his balls, the story was they’d done it after swimming in a river and Masha could smell the scent of rushes on his balls); now she was sitting in a fancy leather office chair in a t-shirt with the word “Sanctions” on it in red letters; Masha Krasavina had no way of knowing what sanctions were because she freaking died (or something like that) in the eighth grade. She wasn’t cackling. She wasn’t smiling. The writing on her t-shirt was bizarrely red.

“Masha?” Viola asked, you know, like in a movie, because naturally it was Masha, her first childhood trauma, much worse than a first love, because, you know, not everyone has a classmate who was killed. “Masha,” nodded Masha. “Why are you like that?” (well, apart from the fact that she, you know, died, a long time ago, abandoned by everyone, but surrounded by that gossip about the guy from Zelik); “Well, I’m not sure how to tell you this, Viola”; “So just say it” (keep it simple, like those school mornings, when our parents listened to Lyube)… Masha was always so vital, so excessive, so natural in her lies about her fuckability, about her first boy, but she disappeared the fall of eighth grade, at first she just wasn’t there, and nobody gave a shit, then people started asking questions, but then the teachers came up with answers, like Masha was evidently sick, and sometimes they had a laugh about Zelik knocking Masha up, but then, finally, after one of the parent-teacher nights, they all told their kids that Masha Krasavina had died, that her body hadn’t been found but her death was a given. And ever since then, the life of the school had changed. Nobody’d given a shit about Masha, but all it took was for her to die, and everything got different, but only until prom, and after that it was the same thing: nobody gave a shit about their dead classmate anymore. Nobody but Viola. Masha always appeared—cackling, loud—after Viola’d been drinking.

So there’s Masha, sitting this time in an expensive leather armchair. Probably for the first time in her life—because she’d died a hell of a long time ago.

Viola asks, “So that guy, from Zelik… was that for real?”

“Nah,” Masha gives a broad grin. “My parents had a deck of cards with men and women doing it in different positions; that was before the Internet, so…”

“Masha.”

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out. You’re drunk again.” “Well, duh.” “What’s up with that?”

“Office party.”

“Office party!” guffawed Masha. “Wanna know what happened back then?”

“Of course I do.”

“Okay.” Masha swiveled the armchair so she wasn’t visible, so it was like it was just the Riesling ringing with her voice in Viola’s head. “I was called into the future on a special mission, they said I was the only one who could do it, I said yes, and they gave me this warhead, they said I had to fire it at Mariupol, supposedly I couldn’t understand that from the past, but here, in the future, it was a vital necessity that I fire it…”

“So what’d you do?”

“What’d I do? I’m just a dumb cunt. I got all lost in thought, started daydreaming, and it fucking blew right in my hands.”

“Yeah?” “No.” “No what?” “I was joking, you dumb cunt.” “So what happened?” (You know, something must’ve happened back then, right?)

“You remember Tolya?” Masha asked. But there’s no way Viola remembered him. “Well, so that’s what happened,” like in a movie. A young girl, and a vo-tech high school student—basically a grown man—and that’s it? Viola remembered the SIM card that had slipped nimbly into a floor crack, and the balls that smelled like rushes, and that’s it?

No, she’s still got a couple hours of hangover ahead of her.

The Cologne Cathedral of Protest (4)

A. wakes up in a fairly cheap apartment way out in Kuzminki from either his mom or Viola calling. “Yeah?” Yesterday he’d done more drinking than screwing. “Listen, I figured it out!” It’s Viola. This nasty light’s coming in through the cheap yellow blinds. Last night they’d gotten back already drunk, B. was talking about his trips to Paris, about having sex with two Black men (he called this “me + 2 n-words”), while A. was coldly condescending to B.’s fourth decade, to all those penises, to all that money, and so he simply licked B.’s butt and balls, he wanted to do more, but B. was drunk and all A. had to do was touch his penis and he came. A. couldn’t get to sleep for a long time, he wandered around the studio apartment, then lay down next to B., and never mind that B. was a little ridiculous with his switching into English, and Italian, and something else; A. felt a sort of primitive liking for him. Actually, A. felt that this is exactly how people with categorically different life experiences end up staying together. B. was saying he’d be leaving soon, but A. knew that wasn’t going to happen, that they might spend the next several years living in this rented apartment. That’s the way it goes, that’s how any youth goes by, when your twenty years rescue the end of his forty-year life, and then you split up, and so forth. That’s what happens to everyone who’s seen that magnificent scene with Meryl Streep in The Hours where she’s completely shattered, broken, there in the kitchen.

“Did you find the SIM card?” “No, of course not, I bought a new one, but listen to this.” “I’m listening.” “So, Wolf Cub, do you remember the thing with Masha? I got the truth!” “Which Masha?” A. tries not to speak too loudly, so he doesn’t wake up B., because… because why? Because he’s in love? Well, probably a little bit, being a young man who always falls in love with every mature man who ends up in his bed. A. felt like telling her that B. is so bad at giving head that it’s funny, it’s infatuating (well—use the words Arina Kholina uses to talk about it); but he hears the genuine worry in her voice.

“Masha?”

“Masha Krasavina.” It sounds as serious as “China refused to support Russia’s special operation,” so he asks again: which Masha. Your boss?

“Masha. My classmate. She died.”

“Today?”

“No! God!” A. goes out into the kitchen and examines it—thinking to himself that this stage set is called “Mom, I’m starting to have a relationship, it’s not love, it’s not even a love affair, it’s a relationship”—“My classmate, who died in eighth grade. I finally know what I want my picture to be about…”

A. knows Viola wants to be an artist because it’s easiest for artists to get out, and he thinks this is lame. What about the ones who bake bread or assemble chairs? What are they supposed to write in their resume for Section 22.2 of German immigration? She has something in mind for that. All in a rush she tells him her plan, that after all those years of codependency with her mom and all that shit she’s finally ready to tell the story of Masha, the story of the Russian ouroboros, where there’s not only no more Masha, but no more you—there never was a you, just because you had the bad luck to be her classmate. Like in that Russian TV series Brigade. A. never thought of leaving, he has his reasons, and he didn’t really like the people who did think of leaving, although of course he made exceptions for some people—“it’s not so cut-and-dried”—and then she said, listen, Wolf Cub, if my life is like tinted windows because of all that stuff, then maybe your life is too, because of me?

A. realized it was hereditary and that last night he’d transmitted it. Had he also contracted something worse?

(1) “Music on the Sand”: the title of a song by Nautilus Pompilius.

(2) The associations of Lisa Gerrard’s otherworldly music contrast with the associations of Silikatnaya Station, a rough commuter district south of Moscow.

(3) Dita von Teets: for the English translation, the author suggested this joking pun on the name of burlesque performer Dita von Teese.

(4) The Cologne Cathedral of Protest: an abstract concept of protest applies equally well to all grand landmarks, but this particular instance relates to this particular landmark.