Sparklies.
This story was originally written by Diego Kolinski, a Portuguese exchange student 1998. I found it scribbled on an infinitely long roll of birch tree paper in the village of Post-Sklepiki by Rostov. The other side of the roll said “I don’t need anything” (“мне ничего не нужно”) twelve million times.
They say we have a “Sparklies problem” in my hometown. That’s a lie. The real problem is stupid people who take Sparklies. Me and my friends, for instance.
I got introduced to Sparklies by a sad and lonely man of 84, a war veteran. He was mainly troubled with the painfully dismal lack of understanding from the ignorant masses, namely, us. We often gathered in the town hall, a bland gray mass of mumbling human flesh and one day he came in and said "I don't know about that, but I know a lot about carrying flour sacks from one room to another." So for the rest of the night we discussed flour sacks.
It was a beautiful night because he gave us Sparklies to go along with the flour sack stories. We all swallowed a couple of star-shaped pills and life started making sense.
The veteran said he had a friend who took Sparklies every day for a week and wrote two best-selling books as a result. You can’t buy them here because they’re banned as drug propaganda, but in the rest of the world his books have long replaced Dostoevsky and Proust.
One of them was an account of a homosexual love affair between a young aspiring journalist and his deranged editor.
The young aspiring journalist got so hammered at the editorial meeting that somehow ended up going out on a date with a 60-year old gentleman, who incidentally was his editor. They laughed and danced under the moonlight and decided to spend the rest of the night in a fancy restaurant. It was then that the journalist saw the face of his date in the mesmerizing brim light of the electric lamp hanging from the ceiling. It was a huge lamp and it was glooming over him uncomfortably low, painting the faces of the crowd in ugly colors. The lamp had to go. So the journalist reached for it. Somehow it wasn't quite as low as his eyes told him, so he got up on the chair. The next step was the table. Excited and frustrated, he grabbed the chair and planted it on the table in front of his date, got up and jumped for the lamp. That moment he realized that the lamp was hanging way up high for any human to reach and collapsed. He was thinking about it while the smell of his editor’s dead body gradually escorted him to unwelcome sobriety.
The rest of the book was entirely dedicated to all the thoughts that passed through the journalist’s mind as he was taking his repose. Here’s one of the more striking passages:
“I thought of donuts. I wondered if the whole cop-eating-donuts stereotype ever happened to work as passive advertisement for the pastry or the other way. What about the police? Perhaps a young boy would buy a donut to grow up a dashing policeman. Then he turns 18, robs a liquor store and gets his teeth kicked in by a man with a donut in one hand and a handgun in the other. The 18-year old would never buy another donut”.
The other book was also a love story and it was an unconventional one too. Again, the main hero was an aspiring young journalist, though this time he was straight and his date was ten years old. In my country it is perfectly legal to have sex with ten year-olds, so abroad it was considered “taboo subject.” Here it’s plain boring.
The novel started with the journalist walking down the street and desperately trying to come up with a theme for the next article. His writer’s block was ripped in two by a voice from the right side. A truly angelic voice called out his name.
He turned and saw what appeared to be the most beautiful girl in the world. The most beautiful girl in the world stood there in front of him looking surprisingly friendly. He loved thinking about the day he meet the most beautiful girl in the world. Usually after 9pm and before 12am. That's when he tried to fall asleep.
Anyway, she greeted him and stood smiling right there in front of me. Flames of passion engulfed the aspiring young journalist head to toes and dragged him to the 9th circle of hell (which that day was also the 9th floor of heaven, as the book scrupulously mentions.) Stuck between these two faraway places he gazed up in the sky and the sky looked down on him.
The big sky was not too big to care, it ripped itself in two and asked the journalist if he was a man or a mouse. He thought for a second and lied.
‘I'm a mouse,’ he said.
To further prove his point, the journalist took out a pack of cheese from his bag and avidly bit into it. If you might wonder, it was Australian Cheddar, the one you get at Whole Foods for 5.49.
The rest of the book is very boring, but supposedly “covers A to Z of human relationships.” Not my words, words of some famous reviewer from the New Yorker.
The night I tried Sparklies for the first time, the veteran was talking about Australian Cheddar and the country in general. This is what he said:
‘Australian cows breed in mysterious ways. Imagine a field of flowers. That thing does not exist in Australia. Instead, they have barns. I mean, we all do, but for each American flower field there are at least four barns in Australia.
There, in the barns, wild flowers grow. Not any ordinary wild flowers too, those are so called Cowbellies. A Cowbelly flower looks like your regular tulip, only extraordinary huge and coated with black and white polka dots.
Once a Cowbelly reaches it's full size, pour some milk on it and the miracle takes place: the flower rips itself apart and gives birth to a full-grown cow!’
Apparently, Sparklies come from Cowbellies too. You just have to gather young Cowbellies and blend them with Aspirin in a mixer.
We asked if the veteran brought the Sparklies we had from Australia. He said that his writer friend did and shared a few dozen along with the recipe with him. That was the birth of ‘Sparklies problem’ in my hometown.
The writer, on the other hand, had no problems at all. He travelled around Italy and France and made love to all the young aspiring journalists he met on the way. One of them asked him how many Sparklies does it take to come up with a great idea. The writer said ‘put three Sparklies in a blender, mix it with Aspirin and add a tablespoon of carrot juice, et voila, you have the story in your mind!’
That was an obvious lie, the veteran said, because there’s already Aspirin in Sparlkies, so adding more would make it plain lethal. We sat in silence and wondered how many young aspiring journalists the writer killed with his recipe.
In fact, we never tried mixing Sparklies with anything, for it was strong enough on its own. The veteran kept bringing us more pills that his famous writer friend sent him from Australia and we munched on them happily.
Then one day the veteran died, but Sparklies kept coming. I think this should’ve been the official start of the so-called ‘Sparklies problem’, but we are all too lazy to care and none of us is an aspiring young journalist to dig into the problem and investigate.
Diego died of heroin overdose in Rostov a few years after this story was finished. He tried to get it published in The New Yorker, but the young aspiring journalist was denied instantly: they didn’t want to deal with birch tree paper.
All the other stories written mainly in Portuguese during this period were carefully copied by the family of the deceased and a few of them got published in local papers. In fact, there is a cafe in his hometown that named one of their dumpling dishes after Diego. They are round and crispy and have bits of celery and pork inside.
PS. As I learned, Diego suffered from amnesia, which might be why he refused to give names to his characters.
PPS. It’s not legal to have sex with children in Portugal, Diego definitely made this part up.