Free Babylon by Victor Pelevin

Mercedes-600 and two jeeps are parked outside a chic town house. The young man glances at his watch. Change of camera angle: several men in severe dark suits and dark glasses emerge from the mansion - the security guards. They surround the Mercedes from all sides and one of them gives a command over his walkie-talkie. A small fat man with a depraved face emerges from the mansion and looks around in a frightened manner, then he runs down the steps to the Mercedes and disappears behind the dark-tinted glass of the car, and the guards get into the jeeps. The Mercedes starts to move off and suddenly there are three powerful explosions in rapid succession. The cars are scattered in flying debris; the street where they have just been 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 porn 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 porn 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 ambivalence, so to speak, that a common signature such as ‘Ivanov’ 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