“But … what specifically is at the source of all this? I can’t even begin … to imagine.”
“Well, you see … it is as if you … you’re a mathematician, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, take, for instance, a plane, a surface, like this mirror here. And on this surface—here, look—are you and I, and we are squinting at the sun, and see the blue electrical spark in that tube. And watch—the shadow of an aero is flashing past. But it is only on this surface for just a second. Now imagine that some heat source causes this impenetrable surface to suddenly grow soft, and nothing slides across it anymore but everything penetrates inside it, into that mirror world, which we used to look into as curious children—children aren’t all that silly, I assure you. The plane has now become a volume, a body, a world, and that which is inside the mirror is inside you: the sun, the whirlwind from the aero’s propeller, your trembling lips, and someone else’s trembling lips. So you see: a cold mirror reflects and rejects but this absorbs every footprint, forever. One day you see a barely noticeable wrinkle on someone’s face—and then it is forever inside you; one day you hear a droplet falling in the silence—and you can hear it again now …”
“Yes, yes, exactly …” I grabbed his hand. I could hear the faucet in the sink slowly dripping its droplets in the silence. And I knew that they would be inside me forever. But still, why—all of a sudden—a soul? I never had one—never had one—and then suddenly … Why doesn’t anyone else have one, but me?
I squeezed harder on the skinny hand: I was terrified to let go of this lifeline.
“Why? And why don’t we have feathers or wings but just scapulas, the foundation of wings? It’s because we don’t need wings anymore—we have the aero; wings would only be extraneous. Wings are for flying, but we don’t need to get anywhere: we have landed, we have found what we were seeking. Isn’t that so?”
I nodded my head in dismay. He looked at me, laughed sharply, javelinishly. The other one, hearing this, stumpily stamped through from out of his office, tossed the skinny doctor up with his hornlike eyes, and then tossed me up, too.
“What’s the problem? What, a soul? A soul, you say? Damn it! We’ll soon get as far as cholera. I told you”—the skinny one was horn-tossed again—“I told you, we must, everyone’s imagination— everyone’s imagination must be … excised. The only answer is surgery, surgery alone …”
He struggled to put on some enormous X-ray glasses, and walked around for a long time looking through my skull bone at my brain, and making notes in a notebook.
“Extraordinary, extraordinarily curious! Listen to me, would you agree … to be preserved in alcohol? This would be, for the One State, an extraordinarily … this would aid us in averting an epidemic … If you, of course, don’t have any particular reasons not …”
“You see,” the other one said, “cipher D-503 is the Builder of the Integral, and I am certain that this would interfere …”
“Ah,” he mumbled and lumped off to his cabinet.
And then we were two. A paper-hand lightly, tenderly lay on my hand. A face in profile bent toward me and he whispered: “I’ll tell you a secret—it isn’t only you. My colleague is talking about an epidemic for good reason. Think about it; perhaps you yourself have noticed something similar in someone else—something very similar, very close to …” He looked at me intently. What is he hinting at—at whom? It can’t be that—
“Listen …” I leapt from my chair. But he had already loudly begun to talk about something else: “… And for the insomnia, and your dreams, I can give you one recommendation: walk more. Like, for instance, tomorrow morning, go for a walk … to the Ancient House, for example.”
He punctured me again with his eyes and smiled thinly. And it seemed to me: I could clearly and distinctly see something wrapped up in the fine fabric of his smile—a word—a letter—a name, a particular name … Or is this again that same imagination?
I was only barely able to wait while he wrote out my certification of illness for today and tomorrow, then I shook his hand once more and ran outside.
My heart was light, quick, like an aero, and carrying, carrying me upward. I knew: tomorrow held some sort of joy. But what would it be?
RECORD SEVENTEEN
KEYWORDS: Through the Glass. I Died. Corridors.
I am utterly perplexed. Yesterday, at the very moment when I was thinking that everything had been untangled, that I had found all the X’s, a new unknown quantity arose in my equation.
The origin of the coordinates for this whole story is, of course, the Ancient House. The X, Y, and Z axes that emerge from this point have been the coordinates of my world in recent days. I walked on foot along the X axis (Fifty-ninth Avenue) to the origin of the coordinates. Yesterday’s colorful whirlwind was inside me: upside-down buildings and people, my torturously extraneous arms, the flashing scissors, the sharply dripping droplets in the sink—these things had happened, once upon a time. And they were lacerating my flesh, energetically rotating in there, behind the surface that had been melted by some heat source, where the “soul” resides.
In order to fulfill the doctor’s recommendation, I purposefully chose to walk, not along the hypotenuse, but along the two perpendiculars. And here I was on the second perpendicular: a section of the circular street at the foot of the Green Wall. From the boundless green ocean behind the Wall, a wild tidal surge of roots, flowers, twigs, leaves was rolling toward me, standing on its hind legs, and had it flowed over me I would have been transformed from a person—from the finest and most precise of mechanisms—into …
But, happily, between me and this wild, green ocean was the glass of the Wall. Oh, the great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They may just be the greatest of all inventions. Mankind ceased to be wild beast when it built its first wall. Mankind ceased to be savage when we built the Green Wall, when we isolated our perfect, machined world, by means of the Wall, from the irrational, chaotic world of the trees, birds, animals …
Through the glass—foggy and dim—I saw the stupid muzzle of some kind of beast, his yellow eyes, obstinately repeating one and the same incomprehensible thought at me. We looked at each other for a long time, eye to eye, through the mineshafts from the surface world to that other world, beyond the surface. But a thought swarmed in me: what if he, this yellow-eyed being—in his ridiculous, dirty bundle of trees, in his uncalculated life—is happier than us?
I waved my hand, the yellow eyes blinked, moved backward, and disappeared into the leaves. Poor being! How absurd: he being happier than us! It may be that he is happier than me, yes; but I, of course, I am an exception, I am sick. And, even I …
I can already see the dark-red walls of the Ancient House and the sweet, overgrown, old-woman mouth. I rush to the old woman as fast as my legs could carry me: “She here?”
The tightly sealed mouth opened slowly: “And who is that— she?”
“Oh, well, ah, who? Well, I-330 of course … We were here together, remember, on the aero …”
“Ah—right … okay-okay-okay …”
Her wrinkles were rays around her mouth and her yellow eyes emitted sly rays too, probing into me, deeper and deeper. And finally: “Well, fine, okay … she is here, she came through here not long ago.”
She’s here, I saw: at the old woman’s foot was a shrub of silver-bitter wormwood (the courtyard of the Ancient House is thoroughly preserved in its prehistoric appearance—it is a museum, after all). The wormwood had extended a branch toward the hand of the old woman and the old woman was stroking the branch on her lap. There were yellow streaks of sun. And in a blink: I, the sun, the old woman, the wormwood, the yellow eyes—we were all one, we were firmly connected by veins of some sort, and through these veins runs one communal, tempestuous, majestic blood …
I am now ashamed to write about this, but I promised in these records to be candid to the end. So here’s what happened: I stooped down and kissed the overgrown, soft, moss
y mouth. The old woman wiped her lips and began to laugh.
For some reason I went straight—at a run through the familiar, half-dark, echoing rooms—to the bedroom. I grabbed the doorknob as soon as I was at the door and suddenly: what if she isn’t alone? I stood and listened closely. But I only heard: a knocking around—not in me, but somewhere near me—it was my heart.
I went in. A wide, undisturbed bed. The mirror. Another mirror on the door of the closet and there, in the keyhole: the key with the antiquated key-ring. And nobody.
I quietly called out: “I! Are you here?” I said, and then again even more quietly, with closed eyes, not breathing, as though I was kneeling in front of her: “I! Sweetness!”
Quiet. Only the hurried dripping of water from the faucet into a white teacup in the sink. I cannot now explain why but this was not pleasant for me: I forcefully turned off the faucet and walked out. She is not here: that is clear. And that means she is in some other “apartment.”
I ran down the wide, twilight staircase, pulled at one door, the next, and then a third: locked. Everything was locked, except for the one, “our” apartment, and there was nobody in there …
All the same, I went up there again—I myself don’t know why. I walked slowly, with difficulty: the soles of my feet had suddenly become cast-iron. I distinctly remember the thought: it is a mistake that the force of gravity is a constant. Therefore, all my formulas …
Then—an explosion: a door slammed all the way downstairs, someone rapidly stamped along the flagstones. I—light again, lighter than ever—flung myself at the banister and leaned over to cry out everything, with one word, with one cry, “You!”
And I was numb: below, inscribed on the dark square of the shadow from the window frame, S’s head flew by flapping its pink wing-ears.
A lightning flash: there was only one naked conclusion, without a basis (I still don’t know the basis of this conclusion). And it was: I must not—by any means—be seen by him.
On tiptoes, pressing against the wall, I slid upward to the unlocked apartment.
A second’s pause at the door. He was dully stamping up here. If only for that door! I pleaded with the door, but it was wooden: it started to creak and then howled. I passed through the whirlwind of green, red, the yellow Buddha, and I was in front of the mirror on the door of the closet: my pale face, my eyes listening hard, my lips … and I can hear—through the noise of my blood—the door creaking again … It is him, it’s him.
I grab at the key in the door of the closet and the key-ring swings. This reminded me of something—yet another instantaneous, naked conclusion without a basis—or more likely, it was a splinter of a conclusion: that time when I-330—I quickly open the door to the closet and I am inside, in the darkness. I shut it tight. I take one step—the floor is rocking under my feet. I slowly, softly start swimming downward. There was a darkening in my eyes, I died.
Later, when it came to writing down all these strange events, I rummaged through my memory and through my books, and now I understand it, of course: this was the condition of temporary death, familiar to the Ancients, but, as far as I know, completely unknown among us.
I have no concept of how long I was dead, probably five to ten seconds overall, but after some time I was resurrected and opened my eyes: it was dark and I could feel descent, descent … I put my hand out to grab hold and I was scratched by a rough wall quickly slipping up and away. There was blood on my finger and it was clear that all this was not a game of my sick imagination. But what was it then?
I heard my trembling breathing like a dotted line (I am ashamed to admit to this—but everything was so unexpected and inexplicable). A minute—two, three—all in descent. Finally, a soft bump: whatever it was that was falling from under my feet was now motionless. In the darkness I groped around and found some sort of handle, pushed on it, and a door opened into dim light. I saw: a smallish square platform quickly fly up behind me. I dashed at it, but it was too late: I was stranded here … wherever this “here” was—I didn’t know.
A corridor. A thousand-pound silence. There were lamps along the rounded vault of the ceiling, in an endless, twinkling, flickering, dotted line. It looked a bit like the “tubes” of our subterranean rail, but only much narrower and not made from our glass but from some kind of ancient material. Caves flashed through my mind, where people had apparently saved themselves in the time of the Two-Hundred-Year War … Never mind: I have to move forward.
I walked, I would guess, about twenty minutes. I turned right. A wider corridor, brighter lamps. There was a kind of vague drone. It may be machines, it may be voices—I didn’t know anything but that I was next to a heavy, opaque door and the drone was coming from it.
I knocked, and I knocked again—louder. Things quieted down behind the door. Something clanked, the door slowly, heavily opened to me.
I don’t know which of us was more dumbfounded … my blade-nosed, skinny doctor stood in front of me.
“You? Here?” And his scissor blades slammed together. But I—it was as though I had never known even one human word—I was mute. I looked at him and didn’t understand anything of what he was saying to me. It must have been something about me having to leave: because he quickly forced me back to the end of this brighter corridor with his planar, paper-thin stomach, then turned me around and pushed me at the back.
“If you please … I wanted to … I thought that she, I-330 … But behind me …”
“Stand here.” The doctor cut me off and disappeared.
Finally! Finally she is somewhere nearby. She is here—so it does, after all, matter where “here” is. The familiar, saffron-yellow silk, a smile-sting, lowered blinds for eyes … My lips, hands, knees are trembling and in my head is the silliest thought: “Vibrations produce sound. A tremble must make a sound. Why, then, isn’t it audible?”
Her eyes uncovered themselves to me, opened wide and I went inside …
“I could not stand it any longer! Where were you? Why?” I didn’t tear my eyes away from her for a second, I was talking as if I were delirious—rapidly, unconnected (and it may be that I was only thinking it all). “A shadow was behind me … I died—in the closet … Because that man, your … says with his scissors that I have a soul … and it’s incurable …”
“An incurable soul! My poor dear!” I-330 burst out laughing. Her laughter splashed me, the delirium passed, and everything sparkled, our chuckles were tinkling, and how … how good everything was.
The doctor appeared from around the corner again—the miraculous, wonderful, skinny doctor.
“Well.” He stopped next to her.
“Everything’s fine, everything’s fine! I’ll tell you later. He accidentally … Tell them that I will be back in … about fifteen minutes …”
The doctor flashed back around the corner. She waited. A muffled bang of the door. Then slowly, slowly, deeper and deeper I-330 plunged a sharp, sweet needle into my heart, pressing up to me with her shoulder, her arm, every part of her, and we walked off together, together as a twosome—a onesome …
I don’t remember where things contracted into darkness but in the darkness we went up steps, endlessly and silently. I didn’t see it but I knew: she walked just like I did—eyes closed, blind, head thrown back, teeth biting lips while listening to the music of my barely audible tremble.
I regained consciousness in one of the countless nooks of the courtyard of the Ancient House by some kind of fence, made of earth, and the naked, rocky ribs and yellow teeth of a collapsed wall. She opened her eyes and said: “The day after tomorrow at 16:00.” She left.
Had all this really happened? I don’t know. I will find out the day after tomorrow. The only real evidence: there is torn skin on my right hand, at the tips of my fingers. But today, at the Integral, the Second Builder assured me that he himself had seen me accidentally touch the polishing wheel with these fingers—and that was the whole reason for it. That may be true, indeed. Very possibly. I don’t know??
?I don’t know anything.
RECORD EIGHTEEN
KEYWORDS: Logical Jungles. Wounds and Plaster. Never Again.
Yesterday I lay down—and I sank at once into the depths of a dream, like a capsized and overladen ship. A muffled, heaving mass of green water. And slowly I am rising to the surface from the depths and somewhere in the middle deepness, I open my eyes: my room, a still-green, stiffened morning. A stripe of sunshine went into the mirrored door of my closet—and then into my eyes. This interferes with any precision in fulfilling the hours of sleep prescribed by the Table of Hours. The best thing would have been to open the closet door. But it was as if I was in a cobweb and there was a cobweb in my eyes, I didn’t have the strength to get up …
All the same I got up, opened it, and suddenly I saw: I-330 behind the mirrored door, disentangling herself from her dress, all pink. I was now so used to such utter improbabilities that, as far as I remember, I didn’t get surprised at all and I didn’t ask a thing: I went into the closet, slammed the mirrored door behind me, and, panting—quickly, blindly—I greedily united with I-330. I can see even now: coming through a slit in the door, into the darkness, there was a sharp sun-ray fracturing like lightning on the floor, on the wall of the closet, and higher up—and this cruel, sparkling blade fell on I-330’s outstretched, bare neck … and there was something so scary about this for me that I couldn’t restrain myself and I screamed—and then I opened my eyes.
My room. The stiffened morning, still green. A stripe of sunshine on the door of the closet. I am in bed. A dream. But my heart is still beating energetically, quivering, gushing, and the tips of my fingers and my knees are aching. It had all undoubtedly happened. But I don’t know: which is dream and which is reality. Irrational quantities are sprouting through everything solid, usual, and three-dimensional, and instead of hard, polished planes, something gnarled and shaggy is surrounding me …