We

  The three points: I, she, and that chubby crease of the little fist on the table …

  In childhood, I remember we were once taken to the Accumulator Tower. At the very top level, as I bent over the glass parapet and saw the people-dots below, my heart ticked sweetly: What if I … ? At that thought I only clutched the handrails even tighter. But now I am jumping over the edge.

  “That’s what you want? In complete knowledge of the fact that you would …”

  Her eyes closed, as though directly facing the sun. A wet, glistening smile.

  “Yes, yes! That’s what I want!”

  I snatched the ticket—I-330’s ticket—out from under the manuscript and ran downstairs to the monitor. O grabbed at my arm, yelling something, but I only understood afterward, once I’d returned, what she had been saying.

  She was sitting on the edge of the bed, hands tightly clutched together on her lap.

  “That was … was that her ticket?”

  “What difference does it make? Yes—it was hers.”

  Something crystallized. Most likely, O had simply stirred slightly. She was sitting, hands on her lap, saying nothing.

  “Well? Quick let’s …” I roughly squeezed her arm and red spots (tomorrow’s bruises) formed on her wrists, right on the chubby, childlike crease.

  That was the last of it. With a flick of the switch, all thoughts went out. Then with darkness and sparks, I was over the parapet, on my way down …

  RECORD TWENTY

  KEYWORDS: A Discharge. The Material of an Idea. The Cli f of Zero.

  It was a discharge—that’s the most suitable word for it. Now I see that it had been just like an electrical discharge. Over the last few days my pulse had been getting drier, quicker, and more strained as the poles drew toward each other. There was a dry crackle. Another millimeter later: an explosion. And then, silence.

  I am now very quiet and empty inside like a building after everyone has left, and you are lying alone, sick, and you can hear the distinct metallic rapping of your thoughts so clearly.

  It may be that this “discharge” has finally cured me of my torturous “soul” and that I have become one of us again. At the very least, without all that sickliness, I can now mentally picture O on the steps of the Cube, I can picture her inside the Gas Bell Jar. And if she names my name, there, in the Operation Room, let her. In my final moment I will piously and gratefully kiss the punishing hand of the Benefactor. I have the right to receive punishment according to my relationship to the One State—and I will not cede this right. None of us ciphers should ever dare to refuse this, our single, only—and, as such, valuable—right.

  … Thoughts rapping quietly, metallically, distinctly: a mysterious aero carries me to the blue heights of my favorite abstractions. And here in this cleanest sharp air, I see my rationale about my “rights” burst with a light pop, like a pneumatic tire. And I can see clearly that these ideas about “rights” were merely a throwback from a ridiculous superstition of the Ancients.

  There are clay ideas and there are ideas that have been carved out of gold or out of our precious glass over the ages. And in order to determine the material of an idea, you need only drip strong-acting acid on it. Even the Ancients knew one such acid: reductio ad finem. That is what they called it, apparently. But they were afraid of this poison and they preferred to see anything, be it a clay sky or a toy sky, rather than a blue nothing. We—may the Benefactor bless us—are adults, and don’t need toys.

  So, take the idea of “rights” and drip some acid on it. Even the most adult of the Ancients knew: the source of a right is power, a right is a function of power. Take two trays of a weighing scale: put a gram on one, and on the other, put a ton. On one side is the “I,” on the other is the “WE,” the One State. Isn’t it clear? Assuming that “I” has the same “rights” compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming that a gram can counterbalance a ton. Here is the distribution: a ton has rights, a gram has duties. And this is the natural path from insignificance to greatness: forget that you are a gram, and feel as though you are a millionth part of the ton …

  You, voluptuous, ruddy Venusians, you, smoke-blackened black-smiths of Uranus: I hear your grumble in my own blue silence. But listen: everything that is great is simple. Listen: only the four rules of arithmetic are steadfast and eternal. And it is only the code of morals that resides within these four rules that is great, steadfast, and eternal. This is the ultimate wisdom; this is the apex of the pyramid that people clambered up—red with sweat, kicking and wheezing—for centuries. And from this apex we look down to the bottom and see insignificant worms still churning up something that survives in us from our ancestors. They all look identical from this apex: an unlawful mother, O; a murderer; and that madman who dared to throw his poems at the One State. Their sentences are also the same: an untimely death. This is the very justice that people who lived in stone houses, lit by the rosy, innocent rays of the morning of history, could only dream about; their “God” punished those who disparaged the Holy Church in exactly the same way as he punished those who committed murder.

  You, Uranians, as severe and black as ancient Spaniards (who were wisely capable of burning offenders at the stake): you are silent. I have a feeling that you are with me. But I can hear pink Venusians murmuring something about torture, punishment, and about the return to barbarian times. My dears: I pity you that you are not capable of philosophically mathematical thinking.

  Human history goes up in circles, like an aero. The circles are different—some golden, some bloody—but they are all divided into 360 degrees. They start at zero and progress to 10, 20, 200, 360 degrees, and return to zero again. Yes, we have returned to zero. Yes. But to my mathematically reasoning mind, something is clear: this zero is completely different and new. We departed from zero to the right then we returned to zero from the left, and so: instead of plus zero, we are at minus zero. Do you understand?

  This zero looks like a silent, colossal, narrow, knife-sharp cliff to me. In the ferocious, shaggy darkness, having held our breath, we cast off from the black, midnight side of the Zero Cliff. For centuries, we sailed and sailed, each of us a Columbus, we rounded the whole circle of the Earth, and finally, hooray! Ahoy and everyone’s up the mast: ahead of us is a different, as yet unknown side of the Zero Cliff, lit up by the aurora polaris of the One State, an azure mass, the sparks of a rainbow, the sun … hundreds of suns, billions of rainbows …

  It is only the thickness of a knife that separates us from that other, black side of the Zero Cliff. The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind …

  RECORD TWENTY-ONE

  KEYWORDS: The Duty of the Author. The Ice Swells. The Most Difficult Love.

  Yesterday was her day and again she didn’t appear, and again I got an unintelligible note from her that clarified nothing. But I am calm, completely calm. If I perform absolutely everything just as the note dictates, if I carry the ticket to the monitor and then lower the blinds and sit in my room alone, then it is not, of course, it is not because I don’t have the strength to go against her wishes. How silly! Of course not! It is merely that the blinds separate me from all those plastering, therapeutic smiles and I can write these very pages in peace, for one thing. And second: without her I am afraid I will lose perhaps the only single key to figuring out those unknown quantities (the story of the closet, my temporary death, and all that). And I now feel myself duty-bound to figure them out, even simply as the author of these records, never mind the fact that all unknowns are, in a larger sense, man’s natural enemy. Homo sapiens is only man, in the fullest sense of the word, when his grammar contains no question marks, only exclamation marks, commas, and periods.

  And so today, at 16:00, directed explicitly by what I consider to be my autho
rly duty, I took an aero and went off to the Ancient House again. There was a powerful evening wind. The aero punched through the thicket of air with difficulty; transparent branches whistled and lashed. The city below looked made of pale-blue blocks of ice. All of a sudden, a cloud appears, a quick, slanted shadow. And the ice turns leaden and swollen and, like when standing on the banks of a river in the springtime, you anticipate—any moment now—a cracking, a surging, a twirling, a bolting away. But then the moment passes, and the next does too, and the ice is still, and instead, you yourself are swelling, your heart is beating more anxiously and frequently. (But why am I writing about this, and where do these strange sensations come from? There’s no such thing as an icebreaker that could break the most transparent and most durable crystal that is our life.)

  There was no one at the entrance to the Ancient House. I walked around and saw the old woman-gatekeeper near the Green Wall: her hand was stuck against her forehead, she was looking upward. Up above the Wall: the sharp black triangles of some kind of bird were cawing and throwing their breasts at the solid barrier of electrical waves and then being flung backward, only to try flying over the Wall yet again.

  I see: slanting, quick shadows across her dark face, overgrown with wrinkles, and a quick glance at me.

  “No, no, no one is here! That’s right! And there’s no reason for you to go up there. Yes …”

  But why is there “no reason”? And what is this strange attitude— am I merely someone else’s shadow? Well, maybe you and everyone else are my shadows! Didn’t I populate these pages with all of you? Not long ago they were just four-cornered, white deserts. Without me, would you have ever been seen by all those that I am leading through the narrow footpaths of these written lines?

  I didn’t actually say any of this to her, as you would expect. I know from my own personal experience: it is very cruel to pierce a person with doubts of his three-dimensional reality and suggest any kind of other reality. I just dryly pointed out to her that her task was to open the door and she let me into the courtyard.

  Empty. Quiet. There is a wind over there, behind the walls, far away, just like there was that day when we, side by side, a twosome, a onesome, emerged from the depths, from those corridors—if this had really happened after all. I walked under some stone arches where my footsteps were smacking the gray vaults above and then falling behind me as though another person was treading behind me, at my heels. Yellow walls with redbrick pimples watched me through the dark square lenses of their windows; they watched as I opened the singing doors of sheds, as I looked into corners, down blind alleys and backstreets. I went through a gate in a fence into a vacant lot. These were monuments to the Two-Hundred-Year War: the naked stone ribs and the yellow bare-toothed jawbones of walls coming up from the soil; an ancient oven with vertical pipes; a ship fossilized forever among splashes of stone-yellow and brick-red.

  An impression, indistinct, as though delivered through the thickness of water, at depth: I had seen these yellow teeth before. I started searching around. I was falling into holes, stumbling over stones, rusty paws were grabbing at my unif as sharply salted drops of sweat crawled down my forehead into my eyes …

  Nowhere! I couldn’t find that exit from below anywhere. The exit from the corridors—it just wasn’t here. But then, perhaps that’s a good thing: further proof that it was all just one of my “dreams.”

  Tired, covered with dust and some kind of cobweb, I opened the gate to return to the main courtyard when suddenly from behind: a rustle, squelching footsteps. In front of me stood the pink wing-ears and the twice-bent smile of S.

  He, narrowing his eyes, screwed his gimlets into me and asked: “Taking a walk?”

  I said nothing. My arms became extraneous.

  “So, tell me, are you feeling better now?”

  “Yes, thank you. It seems I am returning to normal.”

  He released me—raising his eyes upward. His head tilted upward and I noticed his Adam’s apple for the first time.

  An aero buzzed up in the air, not high—about fifty meters up. I recognized it as the apparatus of the Guardians with its slow, low flight and the lowered black proboscis of its observing tube. But there weren’t just two or three of them as usual, but somewhere between ten and twelve of them (unfortunately, I have to be limited to an approximate figure).

  “Why so many today?” I mustered the courage to ask.

  “Why? Well … A genuine doctor will start treating a person who is still healthy; someone who might become sick tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in a week’s time. It’s prophylaxis!”

  He nodded his head and flopped off along the stone slabs of the courtyard. Then he turned and said, over his shoulder: “Be careful!”

  I was alone. Quiet. Empty. Far off, above the Green Wall, birds and wind were rushing about. What did he mean by that?

  My aero quickly glided along an airstream. Faint, heavy shadows from the clouds cast themselves below, and the pale-blue cupolas, the cubes of glass ice, turned leaden and swollen.

  EVENING

  I opened my records to deliver to their pages a few, as I see it, useful thoughts (for you, readers) about the great Day of the One Vote, which is approaching rather soon. And I realized: I can’t write right now. I can’t stop listening to how the wind flaps its dark wings over the glass of the walls; I can’t stop looking around in anticipation. Of what? I don’t know. And when those familiar brownish-pink gills appeared in my room, I was very glad, and said so clean-heartedly. She sat down, chastely straightened the pleats of her unif that fell between her knees, immediately pasting smiles all over me—in small dollops over each of my cracks—and I felt good, strongly connected.

  “So, when I went into class today”—she works in the Children-Rearing Factory—“there was a caricature of me on the wall. Yes, yes, I swear to you! They depicted me as sort of fishlike. Maybe I really do …”

  “No, no, no, come now,” I hurried to say. (Up close, in actuality, it was clear that there was nothing there resembling gills at all, and that it was completely inappropriate when I mentioned the gills before.)

  “Yes, well, ultimately, it’s not important. But, you see, it was the deed itself. Of course, I called the Guardians. I love children very much and I consider this kind of cruelty to be the most difficult and highest love—you know what I mean?”

  Absolutely! This intersected with my thoughts so well. I couldn’t restrain myself and I read her an excerpt from Record Twenty, beginning with: “… Thoughts rapping quietly, metallically, distinctly …”

  Without looking, I saw how the brownish-pink cheeks quivered and then moved toward me, closer and closer, and then her dry, hard, sort of prickly fingers were in my hands.

  “Give—give this to me! I will duplicate it and make the children learn it by heart. We need this—not just your Venusians—but us, too—now, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow.”

  She glanced over her shoulder and said very quietly: “Have you heard? They’re saying that on the Day of the One Vote …”

  I leapt up: “What—what are they saying? What about the Day of the One Vote?”

  My cozy walls had vanished. For a second, I felt as though I’d been thrown out there, outside, where a giant wind is rushing about on wings and the slanting, dusky clouds are getting lower and lower …

  U wrapped my shoulders with her outstretched arms, hard and firm (though I noticed: the bones of her fingers were shaking in resonance with my agitation).

  “Please sit down, my dear, don’t worry. It doesn’t matter what they’re saying … And if you need me, I’ll stay close by you that day. I will leave my children at school with someone else and I will be with you, because evidently you, my dear, you are also a child, and you need …”

  “No, no.” I waved. “Not a chance! Then you’ll really think that I really am some sort of baby—that I can’t cope by myself … Not a chance!” (I’ll admit: I had other plans with regards to that day.)

  She sm
iled and the unwritten subtext of her smile was obvious: “Oh, what a stubborn boy!” She then sat down. Her eyes were lowered. Her hands chastely arranged the pleats of her unif that had fallen between her knees—and then, she was on to something different: “I think … that I should make up my mind … for your sake … But I ask you not to hurry me. I still need to think about it a bit…”

  I wasn’t hurrying her. Though I did realize that I should be happy at the prospect—that there is no greater honor than to improve someone’s evening years with yourself.

  … Wings, wings, all night long. I am walking around with my hands protecting my head from these wings. And then there is a chair. But the chair is not one of our contemporary ones, but an ancient model, made of wood. Alternating the movement of its feet like a horse (the right one forward—the left one backward; the left one forward—the right one backward), the chair runs up to my bed, climbs up into it—and I make love to the wooden chair (uncomfortable, painful).

  It is astonishing: it must be possible to concoct some sort of means of treating this dream-disease or making it rational—useful, even.

  RECORD TWENTY-TWO

  KEYWORDS: A Frozen Wave. Everything Is Perfecting. I Am a Microbe.

  Imagine yourself standing on the shore: waves rhythmically rising, rising, and then suddenly they stay there, they set, they freeze. That is how terrifying and unnatural it was when our Table-appointed walk got tangled unexpectedly, it got muddled up and stopped. The last time that something like this happened was 119 years ago, according to the Chronicles, when, in the very midst of the walk, with a whistle and smoke, a meteorite fell from the sky.

  We were walking as we always do, like the warriors of Assyrian monuments: thousands of heads with two united, integrated legs and two integrated, sweeping arms. At the end of the avenue, where the Accumulator Tower was sounding threateningly, we came upon a quadrilateral: guards at the front, behind, and on the sides; three ciphers in unifs in the middle with their golden badges already removed—and everything was terrifyingly clear.