Once upon a time there was a wonderful vodka, distilled from the finest potatoes in all the land. It was so potent that it made drinkers weep hopelessly in awe. The purest sensation of drunkeness could be achieved, a magical haze of inebriation so pure that in lieu of a hangover one could awaken with a rainbow on one’s lips and a song in one’s heart. Many wondered how this product could ever exist on our Earthly lands. It surely could only have been a manufacture of the heavens, brewed from well within the pinpricks of light of the telling constellations above. Crowds thronged the streets, in cobblestoned squares fountains glistened with the produce, lecherous drunks tumbling in and rising bleary eyed, arms outstretched to the heavens, sticky like the Gods of Fermentation.
In the twinkling of a maladjusted eye, as is the way of us humans, the chance of making money from such an elixir was noted. Those that owned the vodka happily sold it on wholesale, pocketing a profit that reduced their need to sell one-by-one in so demeaning a manner to the proles. Realising that their stock of golden potatoes would not last forever, and ravenous for profit, they cultivated, cheaper, weaker potatoes. Others did the same, for imitation was the purest form of flattery.
As time went on, the potatoes that were used grew more and more dubious. Specimens with strange clots on their surfaces, patches of green, coarse skins like the roughened soles of a primitive soldier, all were used. The vodka-makers subtly mixed in their cheap vodka with the pure elixir to hide their tracks. And yet, in all the euphoria around, no one noticed. Indeed the finest vodka-tasters in all the land had been invited into these spin-offs’ premises, induced with hefty bribes to slap their seal of approval onto the bottles. Even those that had started with this pure and godly liquid remixed their vodka, sold it on at higher prices, labelled as pure, which it then passed onto more and more wholesalers. The public, emboldened by the heady mix, started to hoard the vodka, they too realised its potential, they quickly shifted from consumer to speculator. They locked the vodka in their cellars, confident of its value, having a sip now and then but mainly just letting it burgeon invisibly in value, tucked away. From below, the warm glow of wealth would seem to prise itself between floorboards, and couples would give themselves knowing glances of security, of happiness, of faith that all was good and that they were only slightly plastered.
The seams of the pockets of the vodka-makers started to burst, laden with coins that pulled their pockets out of shape, endlessly expanding like the stomach of a donkey pumped full of falafel by some kind of hideous Arabic snack fetishist. Their pockets dragged behind them, driving great divets into the road, and the gilt-edged sparkle they left behind left no one in any doubt of the accumulation of riches being attained. More and more of this luscious vodka was being produced, far out-stripping any reasonable supply of golden potatoes. The vodka-makers, lusting after more money to wreck their trouser pockets, resorted to more and more dilution of the original luscious vodka, mixing all manner of ingredients, until the substance was barely recognisable. But the people saw that the vodka-tasters had endorsed it, and the other merchants saw that the labels were thus genuine, and the happy trade and bingefest carried on unabated.
The vodka was traded abroad, so that now it was not only a potent drink with which the population could gorge itself with but many riches from abroad – brilliant contraptions of the latest technology, the most sumptuous of foods – honey-infused beetles stuffed into snakes stuffed into geese stuffed into cows stuffed into elephants stuffed into a blue whale, dragged ashore using great cogs constructed from the finest steel and powered by the purest of fuels, dreamed up by alchemy, and paid for with the proceeds of the vodka.
Then one day, a bellyache occurred. It afflicted only an individual a first, but then more and more people were struck down. Their locations were so random that the only similarity that could be gleaned with any certainty was that they had all touched the vodka. Even tracing the batch was of no use, everything had been so thoroughly mixed that any barrel at any time could spread the contagion. Who could be certain that their ‘pure vodka’ had not been infected with the same incipent ingredient as that which provoked the illness? Suddenly the warm glows of wealth from beneath the floorboards turned to dark shadows. People tried to ignore their cellars, they turned away from their hoards as a source of shame. They offloaded their barrels to the highest bidder, and as time went on each bid fell and fell. The first surly hints of distress, evidenced in the simple shaking of the head of a doctor at a bedside, grew into a vortex of panic. No one trusted anyone else – for a barrel that looked as if it might yield the elixir of purest joy could yet be mixed with the foulest of belly-aching substances, joyriding mischievously within its liquid.
Soon, the barrels were being tipped down drains, into the sea. The very choppy waters which had supported vessels of trade became soiled with the stain of a nation’s shame. A currency of vodka degenerated into a fool’s gold, offloaded by all those abroad, no longer entrusted with storing value. The very money with which the vodka-sellers had rutted the roads grew worthless, poisonous even. Exasperated, no longer able to feast on dolphin imported from this or that colony, or to trade vodka for silken clothes of jaw-dropping sumptuousness, the King minted more and more coins. And as he did so, the wealth of each coin seemed to dissipate. The folk felt more laden with money than ever, and yet poorer than they could ever have conceived. Their sense of wealth dwindled by the day. Long after the vapours of vodka had finished rising from the drains and ports, the sense of doom persisted.
People stayed in their homes, those that could afford to have homes, others still made the streets their homesteads. Folk who had made an honest living, far away from the tainted glory of the vodka, found that their trade had in fact survived on overspill from the vodka orgy, from the spend-happy merchants and vodka-hoarders that had whimsically crossed their threshold, and now even these honest thousands were thrown out of work. And all around, people stood staring fixatedly on their palms as if some lost story or moral might be etched there. And still others rooted around in the waste that was left, searching for something real to cling to that might wish the invisible collapse that followed the invisible fortune away. Searching for a single pinprick of light in the burnt black canvas.
