Maria glanced in the direction of the cockpit. Through the glass she could make out the blond back of Schwarzenegger’s motionless head. At first she thought that he hadn’t noticed anything. Then she thought he must have fainted. She looked around in confusion, saw that the nose of the plane was wavering uncertainly, and immediately her suspicion hardened into certainty. Hardly even aware of what she was doing, she slumped down from the fuselage on to the small flat area between the wings (the stump of the antenna ripped her jacket as she fell) and crawled towards the cockpit.
The cockpit was open. Lying there on the wing, Maria propped herself up and shouted:
‘Arnie! Arnie!’
There was no answer. She fearfully manoeuvred herself on to all fours and saw the back of his head with a single lock of hair fluttering in the wind.
‘Arnie!’ she called again.
Schwarzenegger turned to face her.
‘Thank God!’ Maria exclaimed.
Schwarzenegger took off his glasses.
His left eye was half-closed in a way that expressed an absolutely clear and at the same time immeasurably complex range of feelings, including a strictly proportioned mixture of passion for life, strength, a healthy love for children, moral support for the American automobile industry in its difficult struggle with the Japanese, acknowledgement of the rights of sexual minorities, a slightly ironical attitude towards feminism and the calm assurance that democracy and judaeo-Christian values would eventually conquer all evil in this world.
But his right eye was quite different. It could hardly even be called an eye. A round glass lens looking like a huge wall-eye, set in a complicated metal holder connected to wires that ran out from under the skin, peered out at Maria from a tattered socket surrounded by streaks of dried blood. A beam of blinding red light shone directly out from the centre of the lens - Maria only noticed it when the beam shone into her own eyes.
Schwarzenegger smiled, and the left side of his face expressed exactly what the face of Arnold Schwarzenegger is supposed to express when it smiles - an indefinable boyish quality between mischief and cunning, immediately making it clear that this is a man who will never do anything bad, and if he should happen to kill a few assholes now and then, it’s not until the camera has repeatedly revealed from several different angles what despicable trash they are. But the smile only affected the left side of his face, the right side remained absolutely unchanged - cold, focused and terrifying.
‘Arnold,’ Maria said in confusion, rising to her feet. ‘What are you doing that for? Stop it!’
But Schwarzenegger didn’t answer, and a moment later the plane banked steeply and Maria was sent tumbling along the wing. On the way she banged her face several times against various protruding objects, and then suddenly there was nothing holding her up any longer. She decided she must be falling and squeezed her eyes shut in order not to see the trees and roofs hurtling up towards her, but several seconds went by and nothing happened. Maria realized that the roaring of the engine was still as close to her as ever and she opened her eyes again.
She was hanging under the wing. The hood of her jacket had snagged on the empennage of some protrusion, which she recognized with some effort as a rocket. The sight of the rocket’s swollen head rather reminded her of the antenna she had been handling just a few minutes earlier, and she decided Schwarzenegger must be continuing with his loveplay. But this was too much - her face was probably covered in bruises, and she could taste the blood from a cut on her lip.
‘Arnold,’ she yelled, waving her arms furiously in an attempt to turn towards the cockpit, ‘stop it! I don’t want to do this! Do you hear me? I don’t want to!’
She finally managed to catch a glimpse of the cockpit and Schwarzenegger’s smiling face.
1 don’t want to do this, d’you hear me? It’s hurting me that way!’
‘You won’t?’ he asked.
‘No! No!’
‘Okay,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘You’re fired.’
A moment later his face zoomed back and away from Maria as she was thrust ahead of the plane by a force of unimaginable power; in just a few seconds the plane was transformed into a tiny silver bird which was connected to her only by a long streak of smoke. Maria turned her head to see where she was going and saw the spire of the Ostankino television tower veering towards her. The swollen lump at its centre grew rapidly as she watched and a split second before the impact came Maria had a clear view of some men in white shirts and ties sitting at a table and gazing at her in amazement through a thick pane of glass.
There was the ringing sound of a glass shattering and then something heavy fell to the floor. Someone started crying loudly.
‘Careful, careful.’ said Timur Timurovich. ‘There now, that’s better.’
Realizing that it was all over, I opened my eyes. By this time I could more or less see. Everything close to me was quite distinct, but objects further away shifted and blurred, and the overall perspective was as though I were sitting inside a large Christmas-tree decoration with the outside world daubed on its inner surface. Timur Timurovich and Colonel Smirnov towered up over me like twin cliffs.
‘Well,’ said someone in the corner. ‘So much for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Just Maria.’
‘I would like to point out,’ said Colonel Smirnov, clearing his throat and turning to Timur Timurovich, ‘the distinctly phallic relevance of the fact that the patient sees dicks everywhere. Did you notice that? The antenna, the rocket, the Ostankino tower?’
‘You military men always take things too literally.’ replied Timur Timurovich. ‘Not everything’s that simple. Russia cannot be grasped by logic, as the saying goes - but neither can it be entirely reduced to sexual neurosis. Let’s not be too hasty. What’s important here is that the cathartic effect is quite evident, even if it is attenuated.’
‘Yes,’ agreed the colonel, ‘the chair’s even broken.’
‘Precisely,’ agreed Timur Timurovich. ‘When blocked pathological material rises to the surface of consciousness it has to overcome powerful resistance, and so it often produces visions of catastrophes or conflicts of various kinds, as we’ve just seen. It’s the clearest possible sign that we’re working along the right lines.’
‘Maybe it’s just the shell-shock?’ said the colonel.
‘What shell-shock?’
‘What, didn’t I tell you about that? Well, when they were shelling the White House, a few of the shells went straight through, in the windows on one side and out of the windows on the other. And one of them landed in a flat just at the very moment when
The colonel leaned over to Timur Timurovich and whispered something in his ear. ‘Well, of course…’ - I could just make out odd words here and there - ‘… to smithereens… under security with the corpses at first, and then we saw something moving… Massive concussion, obviously.’
‘But why on earth have you kept this to yourself for so long, my good fellow? It changes the entire picture,’ said Timur Timurovich reproachfully. ‘I’ve been struggling so hard…’
He leaned down over me, parted one of my eyelids with two fat fingers and looked into my eye. ‘How about you?’
I’m not quite sure.’ I replied. ‘Of course, it was not the most interesting vision I have ever had, but 1… How can I put it? I found the dreamlike facility with which these delirious ravings acquired for several minutes the status of reality quite amusing.’
‘How do you like that?’ asked Timur Timurovich, turning to Colonel Smirnov.