The enormous dial at the pinnacle of the Tower was a face: bending over through the clouds and spitting down seconds, waiting indifferently. And at exactly 13:06, a commotion occurred in the quadrilateral. All this was quite close to where I stood; I could see the minute details and I clearly remember a thin, long neck and the tangled mess of light blue veins on his temples, like rivers on the geographical map of a small, unknown world, and this unknown world was a young cipher by the looks of him. He must have noticed someone in our row: he got up on his tiptoes, extended his neck, and stopped. One of the guards cracked him with the bluish spark of an electrical whip; he yelped thinly, like a puppy. And then there was a distinct crack, approximately every two seconds— a yelp—a crack—a yelp.
We continued walking rhythmically, like Assyrians, and looking at the graceful zigzag of the sparks, I thought: everything in human society is boundlessly perfecting—just as it should. The whip of the Ancients was such an ugly implement—but look how much beauty …
But then, like a nut coming off an engine at full throttle, a thin, stubbornly supple female figure ripped away from our row with a scream: “Enough! Stop it!” and threw herself right into the quadrilateral. This was like the meteor 119 years ago: the whole walk froze and our rows, like the gray crests of waves, were bound by an unexpected frost.
For a second I saw her as an outsider, like everyone else: she was already not a cipher—she was only a person; she existed only as the metaphysical substance of insult, inflicted toward the One State. But one of her movements—a turning, a curve to the left—and it was suddenly clear to me: I know, I know this supple, whiplike body—my eyes, my lips, my hands know her. At that moment I was absolutely sure of it.
Two guards moved to cut her off. For a second, one clear reflective patch of street was visible but their trajectory was cutting through to it and in a second they would catch her … My heart stalled and then stopped and I threw myself at this patch without considering whether it was: possible, impossible, ridiculous, rational …
I felt thousands of eyes on me, wide with horror, but this just gave more reckless, joyful strength to the wild, hairy-handed person that had torn itself from me, and he ran all the faster. But after two steps, she turned around. Before me was a trembling, freckle-spattered face with ginger eyebrows … Not her! Not I-330.
A mad, gushing joy. I wanted to scream something like: “There she is! Get her!” But I hear only my own whisper. And a heavy hand on my shoulder. I’m being held, led, I attempt to explain to them …
“Listen, but you see, you must understand that I thought that it …”
But how could I explain everything about myself, everything about my sickness, as I have done in these records? I piped down and went along submissively … A leaf, torn from its tree by an unexpected gust of wind, falls obediently, but along the way it twists, clinging to each familiar branch, shoot, and twig: that is how I clung to each mute sphere-head, to the transparent ice of the walls, to the light blue needle of the Accumulator Tower stuck up into the clouds.
At the moment when blank curtains were definitively prepared to separate me from the whole wonderful world, I saw, in the near distance: a familiar colossal head was gliding over the mirrored street, flapping his pink arm-wings. A familiar flattened voice: “I consider it my duty to bear witness to the fact that cipher D-503 is sick and not able to regulate his feelings. And I am certain that his enthusiasm was natural indignation …”
“Yes, yes.” I latched on. “I even screamed: ‘Get her!’ ”
From behind, over my shoulder: “You didn’t scream anything.”
“Yes, but I meant to—I swear to the Benefactor, I meant to.”
For a second, I was riveted by his gray, cold, gimlet eyes. I don’t know if he saw that I was telling the (almost) truth, or if he had some secret purpose in taking mercy on me at this point, but as soon as he had written a short note and given it to one of the ciphers holding me, I was free again—that is, rather, I was included again in the well-constructed, infinitely stretching Assyrian rows.
The quadrilateral containing the freckled face and the temples with the geographical map of light blue veins was hidden behind the corner, forever. We walk—one million-headed body—with a humble joy in each of us, similar, I imagine, to what molecules, atoms, and phagocytes experience. The Christians of the ancient world (our only predecessors, as imperfect as they were) also understood this: humility is a virtue and pride is a vice; “WE” is divine, and “I” is satanic.
So here I am, in step with everyone now, and yet I’m still separate from everyone. I am still trembling all over from the agitation I endured, like a bridge after an ancient train has rumbled over it. I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn’t it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?
It may be, after all, that I am not a phagocyte, calmly going about its business of devouring microbes (with light blue temples and freckles). It may be that I am a microbe, and maybe I am one of thousands among us, still pretending, like me, to be phagocytes …
What if today’s essentially irrelevant occurrence—what if all this is only the beginning, only the first meteorite in a whole series of rumbling, burning rocks, spilling through infinity toward our glass paradise?
RECORD TWENTY-THREE
KEYWORDS: Flowers. The Dissolution of a Crystal. If Only.
They say that there is a kind of flower that blooms only once a century. Then couldn’t there be one that flowers only once every thousand years—or once every ten thousand years? Maybe there are and we just don’t know it because today is itself that once-in-a-thousand-year moment.
Intoxicated with bliss, I walk down the staircase to the monitor and abruptly, before my eyes, everywhere around me, thousand-year buds silently burst open. Everything is blooming all around me: chairs, boots, golden badges, electric lamps, someone’s dark shaggy eyes, the faceted columns of the banisters, a handkerchief dropped on the steps, the little monitor desk, and, over that little desk, the tender brown-spotted cheeks of U. Everything is unusual, new, tender, pink, moist.
U takes my pink ticket, and over her head, through the glass of the wall, the moon hangs from an invisible branch, light blue and fragrant. I point to it with my finger and say triumphantly: “The moon—do you get it?”
U looks at me and then at the digits on the ticket and I see that familiar, very charmingly chaste gesture: adjusting the pleats of her unif between the corners of her knees.
“You have, my dear, an abnormal, sickly look about you—since abnormality and sickliness are the same thing. You are ruining yourself—and no one will tell you so.”
This “no one,” of course, equates with the cipher on the ticket: I-330. Sweet, marvelous U! You, of course, are right: I am imprudent, I am sick, I have a soul, I am a microbe. But what if blooming is a sickness? What if it is painful when a bud bursts? And don’t you think that spermatozoids are the most frightening of all microbes?
I am upstairs in my room. I-330 is in the wide bowl of the chair. I am on the floor, hugging her calves, my head on her knees; we are saying nothing. Silence, a pulse … I am a crystal, and I am dissolving in her, in I-330. I feel it clearly, totally: a melting, the melting of the polished facets that confine me in space. I am disappearing, dissolving in her knees, in her. I am becoming ever smaller and simultaneously ever wider, ever bigger, ever unbounded. Because she is not she, but the universe. And for a second I am one with this chair by the bed, suffused with joy. The grandly smiling old woman at the doors of the Ancient House, the wild jungle beyond the Green Wall, some kind of silver wreckage dozing like the old woman against a black background, and the slamming of a door in the far distance—all this is within me and together with me, listening to the beating of my pulse and flying through this blissful second …
With a ridiculous, muddled flood of words, I attempt to tell her that I am a crystal and that there is a door inside me and that I feel like a happy chair. But such nonsense comes out that I stop. I am just embarrassed and suddenly …
“Sweet I, I’m sorry! I can’t understand it at all—I’m talking such nonsense …”
“How do you know that nonsense isn’t a good thing? If human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily precious could have come from it.”
“Yes …” (I think she is right—how could she not be, right now?)
“And for one of your nonsenses in particular, for what you did yesterday on the walk—I love you even more—even more.”
“But why have you tortured me, why haven’t you come to see me, why did you send your pink tickets, why did you make me do …”
“Well, maybe I needed to test you. Maybe I needed to know that you would do everything that I wanted you to do—that you are totally mine?”
“Yes, totally!”
She took my face—all of me—into her palms and raised up my head: “So, tell me, how are those ‘duties of the honest cipher’ going? Hmm?”
Sweet, sharp, white teeth: a smile. There, in the wide bowl of the armchair, she is like a bee: both a sting and honey are inside her.
Yes, duties … I mentally flick through my recent records: it’s true, there aren’t any thoughts anywhere about what, essentially, I was supposed to have gone and done …
I say nothing. I smile rapturously (and probably goofily, too), I look at her pupils, skipping from one to the other, and in each of them I see myself: I am tiny, millimeterly, confined in these tiny, iridescent dungeons. And then, once again: bees, lips, the sweet pain of blooming …
In each of us ciphers, there is an invisible, quietly ticking metronome, and we can tell time with a precision of within five minutes without looking at a clock. But at that point in time, the metronome in me had stopped; I didn’t know how much time had passed and, alarmed by this, I grabbed my badge with its timepiece from under my pillow …
Thank the Benefactor: twenty minutes to go! But minutes are laughably short, dock-tailed, and they are running away on us while I have so much to tell her—everything, all about myself, about the letter from O, about that awful evening when I gave her a child and something about my childhood years, about the mathematician Pliapa, about √-1, and about how I cried bitterly that first time at the Day of the One Vote because there was a spot of ink on my unif.
I-330 raised her head, leaned on her elbow. Two long, sharp lines at the corners of her mouth, the dark angle of her raised eyebrows: a cross.
“Maybe, on that day …” She stopped, and her eyebrows grew darker still. She took my hand and squeezed it hard. “Say you won’t forget me; will you remember me forever?”
“Why are you like this? What are you talking about, I, my sweet?”
I-330 said nothing and her eyes were already looking past me, through me, far away. I suddenly heard the wind slapping against the glass with its gigantic wings (I imagine this was happening all that time, but I had only just heard it), and, for some reason, I was reminded of the piercing birds above the Green Wall.
I-330 shook her head—shedding something. She brushed up to me with her whole self—just like an aero springing when it touches down for that second before actually landing.
“Now, hand me my stockings. Quick!”
The stockings had been flung on my table, on the open page of my records (page 193). In our haste, I brushed against the stack of paper, and the pages spilled and couldn’t be put back in order—but, more to the point, if they were put back in order, then it wouldn’t be the real order anyway; there would still be thresholds, iambs, and X’s.
“I can’t do this,” I said. “You’re here, right now, near me, and yet it’s as though you’re behind an ancient, opaque wall: I can hear rustlings and voices through the wall but cannot make out the words, I don’t know what is there. I can’t stand it. You are always not quite telling me everything—you haven’t once told me where I was that day when I found myself at the Ancient House, what those corridors were, and why the doctor—or perhaps none of it ever happened?”
I-330 laid her hands on my shoulders, slowly, and penetrated my eyes deeply.
“You want to know everything?”
“Yes, I want to. I have to.”
“And you won’t become too afraid to follow me anywhere, all the way—wherever I may take you?”
“Yes, wherever!”
“Good. I promise you, when the holiday is over, that is, if … Oh, yes, and how is your Integral? I always forget to ask—is it almost done?”
“No. What do you mean by ‘that is if ’? Again: that is if what?”
She (already at the door): “You’ll see for yourself …”
I am alone. The only thing that remains of her is a barely audible scent, something like that sweet, dry, yellow dust from beyond the Green Wall. And another thing: question-hooks, like those that the Ancients used for fishing (the Prehistoric Museum), were firmly lodged in me.
… Why did she suddenly ask about the Integral?
RECORD TWENTY-FOUR
KEYWORDS: The Limits of a Function. Easter. Everything Crossed Out.
I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.
Well, one thing is clear: in order to establish the true value of a function, one must take it to its limits. And it is clear that yesterday’s ridiculous “dissolution into the universe,” taken to its limits, is death. Because death is exactly that: the ultimate dissolution of my self into the universe. And hence, if “L” signifies love and “D” signifies death, then L = f(D)—that is, love is a function of death …
Yes, exactly, exactly. That is why I am afraid of I-330, I struggle with her, I don’t want—but how can “I don’t want” and “I want” coexist in me? And the most hideous part of this is: I want yesterday’s blissful death again. The hideousness of it is that, even now, when the logical function has been integrated, when it is obvious that it is implicitly composed of death, I still want her, my lips, my hands, my breast, every millimeter of me …
Tomorrow is the Day of the One Vote. She will be there, of course, and I will see her, but only from afar. From afar—that will be painful, because I need her, I am uncontrollably drawn toward her, her hands, her shoulders, her hair … But I actually want this pain—bring it on.
Great Benefactor! What absurdity to want pain. Who doesn’t understand that pain is negative, a component that decreases the sum that we call happiness? And, consequently …
Well, you see, there are no more “consequentlies.” Pure and bare.
EVENING
Through the glass windows of the building: a windy, feverishly pink, uneasy sunset. I have turned my chair around so this pinkness is not in front of me and I’m flicking through my records. And I can see: I forgot again that I am not writing this for myself but for you, my unknowns, whom I love and pity, for you who are still plodding along in distant centuries, below.
So, on to the Day of the One Vote, a great day. I have always loved it, since childhood. I imagine it is something like the day the Ancients called “Easter.” I remember that the day before it, we would make mini-hour-calendars for ourselves and we would cross out the hours with such glee, one by one. One hour closer was one hour less to wait … If I could be sure that no one would see it, I would (I cross my heart) carry one of these mini-calendars around with me even now, and I would follow it to see how many hours were left until tomorrow, when I will see, though from far away …
(An interruption: they brought me a new unif, straight from the workshop. According to cus
tom, we are all given new unifs for tomorrow. In the corridor, there are footsteps, joyous cries, noise.)
I continue. Tomorrow I will see all the same sights that repeat themselves from year to year and are newly exciting every time: the mighty chalice of unanimity, the reverentially raised hands. Tomorrow is the day of the annual election of the Benefactor. Tomorrow, once again, we will offer the Benefactor the keys to the unshakable stronghold of our happiness.
It goes without saying that this does not resemble the disordered, disorganized elections of the Ancients, when—it seems funny to say it—the result of an election was not known beforehand. Building a government on totally unaccounted-for happenstance, blindly—what could be more senseless? And yet still, it turns out, it took centuries to understand this.
It is hardly necessary to say it but in this, as in everything else, there is no place for chance and unexpected events are not possible. And the election itself is more symbolic in nature: to remind us that we are a unified, mighty, million-celled organism, that we—using the words of the “Evangelists” of the Ancients—are one Church. Because the history of the One State does not know a single instance in which, on this day of rejoicing, even one voice dared to disturb the magnificent unison.
They say that the Ancients conducted elections in some kind of secrecy, hiding like thieves; several of our historians even confirm that they appeared at the election festivities completely masked. (I imagine this fantastic, gloomy spectacle: nighttime, a square, figures in dark cloaks stealing along a wall; the crimson flame of torches cowering in the wind …) Why would all this mystery be necessary? Even today it is not understood conclusively; the likeliest explanation is that elections were connected to some sort of mystical, superstitious, maybe even criminal rites. For us, there is nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of: we celebrate election day in the daytime, openly and honestly. I see everyone vote for the Benefactor; everyone sees me vote for the Benefactor—and it couldn’t be any different, since “I” and “everyone” are the unified “WE.” As ennobling, sincere, lofty, and furthermore expedient as this is, so the Ancients’ thievish “mystery” was cowardly. And if you even suggest the impossible, that is, that there could be some dissonance in the usual homophony, then the invisible Guardians are here, among our ranks: at any moment, they can stop ciphers who are falling into error and save them from their next false step—and save the One State from them. And then, one last thing …