Ding—the receiver hung up—ding.
U was still lying on the bed, eyes closed, gills widely spread into a smile. I raked her dress up from the floor, threw it at her and, through my teeth: “Well, quick! Quick!”
She drew her waxy body half up onto her elbows; her breasts splashed down her sides and her eyes were round.
“What?”
“Nothing. Come on—get dressed!”
She was all knotted up, tightly clutching her dress, her voice flattened.
“Turn around.”
I turned around, leaning my forehead on the glass. Lights, figures, sparks trembled on the black, wet mirror. No: it is me, the trembling is inside me … Why does He want me? Can it be that He already knows about her, about me, about everything?
U, already dressed, was at the door. Two steps toward her and I squeezed her hand so hard that it was as though I had extracted what I most needed in drops from her hand: “Listen … Her name— you know, to whom did you name her? No? Just tell the truth— I need it … I don’t care whether—just tell the truth …”
“No.”
“No? Well, why … ? You went there to tell them … and?”
Her lower lip was suddenly inside out, like the little boy’s, and from her cheeks, down her cheeks there were droplets …
“Because I … I was afraid, that if she was … that they would have … you would have … you would stop lov … Oh, I can’t— I couldn’t have!”
I understood: this was the truth. A ridiculous, funny, human truth! I opened the door.
RECORD THIRTY-SIX
KEYWORDS: Empty Pages. The Christian God. About My Mother.
It’s strange, my head is like an empty white page: I don’t remember how I got there, how I waited (I know that I waited)—not one sound, not one face, not one gesture. It is as if all the wires between me and the world had been cut.
When I regained consciousness, I was already standing before Him and I was too scared to raise my eyes: I could only see His enormous cast-iron hands on His knees. These hands weighed heavily upon Him, upon His knees. He slowly stirred His fingers. His face was somewhere in the clouds, up above, and since His voice was reaching me from such a height, it didn’t roar like thunder, it didn’t deafen me, but it sounded like a regular human voice.
“So then … You, too? You—the Builder of the Integral? You, to whom it was given to become the greatest conquistador? You— whose name should have begun a new, brilliant chapter of the One State … you?”
Blood had splashed into my head and cheeks. Again a white page: nothing but a pulse in my temples, a resonant voice above— not one word. Only when He had stopped talking did I regain consciousness again and I saw: the hand moved ahundredton-ly, slowly crawling, a finger was fixing toward me.
“Well? Why do you stay silent? Is it so or not? Is ‘executioner’ the word?”
“It is,” I obediently answered. And then I clearly heard each of His words.
“What? You think I am afraid of that word?! Have you ever tried tearing off its shell and looking inside? I will now show you. Remember: a blue hill, a cross, a crowd. Some are up above, spattered with blood, nailing a body to the cross; others are below, spattered with tears, watching. Doesn’t it seem to you that the role of those above is the hardest, the most important? Yes, and were it not for them, would this whole grandiose tragedy have been put on? They were hissed off the stage by the crowd: but then the author of this tragedy—God—should reward them even more heartily. The most merciful Christian, God himself, slowly burning all the recalcitrants in the fires of Hell—is he not an executioner? And were there really fewer burned at the stake by the Christians than Christians who were burned themselves? And yet, understand this, and yet, they glorified this God as a God of Love. Absurd? No, the opposite: it is testimony, written in blood, to the ineradicable good sense of a human. Even then—wild, shaggy as they were—they understood: true algebraic love toward humankind is inhuman—and the sure sign of truth is its cruelty. Like fire—the sure sign of fire is that it burns. Can you show me a nonburning fire? Well—argue the case, dispute me!”
How could I argue? How could I argue when these were my (former) thoughts exactly—only I haven’t ever been able to dress them in such forged, shining armor. I said nothing …
“If this means that you are in agreement with me—then let’s talk like grownups, when the children have gone to bed: about everything right through to the end. I ask you: what have people— from the very cradle—prayed for, dreamed about, and agonized over? They have wanted someone, anyone, to tell them once and for all what happiness is—and then to attach them to this happiness with a chain … What are we now doing, if it isn’t this? The ancient dream about paradise … Remember: in paradise, they don’t know desire, they don’t know pity, they don’t know love. There, angels, the slaves of God, are blissful, with surgically excised imaginations (which is why they are blissful) … And here, just when we have chased down this dream, when we have grabbed it like this—” His hand squeezed: if there had been a rock in it, sap would have sprayed from it. “When all that remains is to skin the kill and portion it out in pieces—at this very moment you—you …”
The cast-iron rumble suddenly cut short. I was all red, like iron on an anvil under a thumping hammer. The hammer, saying nothing, hung over me, and the waiting—this was even … scari …
Suddenly: “How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“You are exactly twice the age of a sixteen-year-old ignorant! Listen: it can’t be that it has actually never entered your head that they—we don’t yet know their names but we are sure that we will get them out of you—that they only need you because you are the Builder of the Integral—only so that, in order to, through you …”
“Don’t! Don’t!” I cried.
It was exactly like shielding yourself with your hand and screaming at a bullet: you can hear your funny “don’t” while the bullet has already burned a hole in you and you are writhing on the floor.
Yes, yes: The Builder of the Integral … yes, yes … And then: the memory of U’s infuriated face with quivering brick-red gills on that morning, when they both were together in my room …
I remember very clearly: I started to laugh and lifted my eyes. Before me sat a bald, Socratic-bald, person, and there were fine droplets of sweat on his baldness.
How simple everything is. Everything is so majestically banal and so simple, it is just funny.
Laughter choked me, shooting out in puffs. I shut my mouth with my palm and violently flung myself out of the room.
Steps, wind, wet, jumping fragments of lights, faces, and while running: “No! Have to see her! Have to see her one more time!”
Then: again an empty white page. I only remember: feet. Not people, but specifically feet: hundreds of feet, a heavy rain of feet stamping arhythmically, falling on the street from somewhere. And a sort of merry, mischievous song, and then a shout (it must have been at me): “Hey, hey! Over here, to us!”
Later: a desert-like square filled all the way to the top with tightly packed wind. In the middle there is a dull, bulky, terrible mass: the Machine of the Benefactor. And an unexpected image arose inside me, echoing up: a bright-white pillow; a head thrown back onto the pillow, with half-closed eyes; a sharp, sweet little stripe of teeth … And all this was sort of ridiculously, horribly connected to the Machine—I know how but I still don’t want to see it or to say it out loud—I don’t want to—just don’t.
I closed my eyes and sat on the steps that went up toward the Machine. It must have been raining: my face was wet. Muffled cries, somewhere far away. But no one hears it, no one hears me cry: deliver me from all of this—deliver me!
If only I had had a mother like the Ancients: my—yes, exactly— my own mother. She would know me as—not the Builder of the Integral, and not cipher D-503, and not a molecule of the One State—but simply a fragment of humanity, a fragment of herself, trampled, squas
hed, thrown away … And whether I am nailing or being nailed—maybe it’s all the same—she would hear what no one else heard, her old-woman lips, overgrown with wrinkles …
RECORD THIRTY-SEVEN
KEYWORDS: Infusoria. Doomsday. Her Room.
Morning at the cafeteria. The cipher on my left seemed spooked and whispered to me: “Well, eat, will you! They’re watching you!”
I smiled, using all my strength. And it felt like some kind of crack on my face: I smile and the seam of the crack splits wider and wider, and gets more and more painful to me …
The next thing was: I had just managed to pick up a little cube with my fork, when instantly, the fork shuddered in my hand and jangled onto the plate. The tables, walls, dishes, and air shuddered and clattered and rang outside with an enormous, round, sky-high, iron din that vibrated through heads and buildings, and then died off, faraway, like fine, barely perceptible circles on the surface of water.
In that instant, I saw blanched faces drain; and mouths that were going at full steam brought to a standstill; and forks frozen in the air.
Then everything went the wrong way, was derailed from age-old tracks, everyone leapt up from their places (not having sung the Hymn), chewing crazily, off the beat, choking and grabbing at one another: “What? What happened? What?” And the disorganized fragments of what was the fine-tuned, great Machine—everyone rained down on the elevators—down the stairway—stairs— a stomp—snatches of words—like tatters of a letter, ripped, swept about with the wind …
They also rained down from every nearby building, and after a minute the avenue was like a drop of water under a microscope: infusoria, locked in the glassy clear drop, darting around wildly, from side to side, up and down.
“A-ha” (someone’s triumphant voice, in front of me). I see: the back of a head and a finger directed at the sky (I very distinctly remember the yellow-pink fingernail and below the fingernail, a white half-moon crawling out of the horizon). It was like a compass: hundreds of eyes, following this finger, were turned up to the sky.
There were clouds fleeing from an invisible pursuit, racing along, crushing one another, jumping over one another; and there were the dark, cloud-tinted aeros of the Guardians with their tubes like hanging black probosces; and, even farther along, there, in the west, there was something that looked like …
At first no one understood what it was—even I didn’t understand. I, for whom (unfortunately) everything is clearer than to everyone else. It looked something like an enormous swarm of black aeros: barely perceptible fast-moving dots, somewhere unbelievably high in the sky. They approached with hoarse, guttural drops of sound from above, and finally: there were birds above our heads. Sharp, black, piercing, falling triangles filled the sky, a storm was beating them down and they settled on the cupolas, on the roofs, on the columns, on the balconies.
“A-ha.” The triumphant head turned around and I saw that it was the overhanging-forehead cipher. But the only remnant of his former self is in those words previously used to describe him. He had somehow crawled out from under that permanently overhanging forehead of his, and on his face—around his eyes, around his lips— bunches of rays were growing like hair. He was smiling.
“You understand?” through the whistle of the wind, wings, cawing, he yelled to me. “You understand? The Wall—they blew up the Wall! Un-der-stand?!”
There were twinkling figures going by, somewhere in the background, with their heads extended out, running inside quickly, into the buildings. In the middle of the street: an avalanche of new, surgically altered ciphers marching over to the west, rapidly and yet somehow slowly (from the burden) …
Hairy bunches of rays around his lips and eyes. I grabbed him by the hand: “Listen: where is she—where is I-330? There, behind the Wall? Or … I need to—are you listening? Right now, I can’t stand it …”
“Here,” he yelled to me drunkenly with happy, strong, yellow teeth. “She is here, in the city, activated. Oh yes—we are activated!”
Who is “we”? Who am I?
There were hundreds just like him surrounding us, having crawled out from under their dark overhanging foreheads, loud, merry, strong-toothed. Swallowing the storm with open mouths, waving these openly visible, peaceful, and benign-looking electrocutors (where did they get hold of them?)—they were moving to the west, behind the new, surgically altered ciphers, but bypassing them on the parallel, on the forty-eighth avenue …
I stumbled against taut ropes of twisting wind and ran to her. Why? I don’t know. I stumbled: empty streets; a foreign, wild city; the incessant celebrating of the avian uproar; doomsday. In several buildings, through the glass of the walls I saw (it cut into me): female and male ciphers shamelessly copulating, without even lowering the blinds, without any tickets, in broad daylight …
A building, her building. The bewildered doorway, all the way open. Downstairs, behind the monitor desk: empty. The elevator was stuck in the middle of the shaft. Panting, I ran upstairs along the endless stairway. A corridor. Quickly—like spokes of a wheel— numbers on the door: 320, 326 … 330, yes!
And through the glass door I see: the whole room was strewn about, messed up, crumpled. A chair had been toppled over in someone’s hurry—facing downward, all four legs up—like a dead dog. The bed: somehow absurdly moved away from the wall at a slant. On the floor: the fallen, trampled petals of pink tickets.
I bent over, picked up one, two, a third: the letter “D” and the digits “503” were on all of them, I was on all of them, melted drops of me, spilled over an edge. And this is all that was left …
For some reason, it seemed that they shouldn’t be like this, on the floor where people could walk over them. I grabbed another handful, put it on the table, smoothed them carefully, looked at them, and burst out laughing.
Before I didn’t know this, but now I know, and you’ll know it, too: laughter comes in different colors. It is only the distant echo of an explosion occurring inside you: it might be festive rockets of red, blue, gold, or it might be shreds of human bodies flying upward …
A name flashed on the tickets that was totally unfamiliar to me. I don’t remember the digits, just the letter: “F.” I brushed all the tickets off the table onto the floor and stepped on them—on myself, with my heel—“Take that—and that!” And I left …
I sat in the corridor, on the windowsill opposite her door, still waiting for something, stupidly, for a long time. Footsteps started to shuffle from the left. An old man: a face, like a punctured, empty bubble, collapsed into creases—and the puncture was sapping something transparent, slowly flowing downward. Slowly, vaguely, I realized: tears. And it was only when the old man was already far off that it occurred to me, and I called out to him: “Listen, listen, do you know where cipher I-330 …”
The old man turned around, recklessly waved a hand and hobbled on.
In the twilight, I returned to my building. In the west, the sky squeezed itself into blanched blue spasms every second and emitted a dull, muffled drone. Roofs were strewn with black, extinguished smolderings: birds. I lay on the bed and I was immediately set upon by wild beasts, a dream smothered me …
RECORD THIRTY-EIGHT
KEYWORDS: (I Don’t Know. Maybe the Keywords Are Simply: A Thrown-Away Cigarette.)
I regained consciousness in bright light—opening my eyes was painful. I squinted. In my head: an acrid, blue puff of smoke, everything was in a cloud. And through the cloud I heard myself: “But I didn’t turn on the light—how is it that …”
I leapt up. Behind the desk, having propped up her chin with her hand, I-330 was looking at me with a smirk …
I am writing at that very desk right now. Those ten, fifteen minutes are already past, cruelly twisted into the most tightly wound band. It’s as though the door has only just closed behind her, and that it may still be possible to catch up to her, grab her hand, and then maybe she would start to laugh and say …
I-330 was sitting behind the de
sk. I flung myself at her.
“You, you! I was—I saw your room—I thought you had—” But halfway through I struck upon the sharp, immobile javelins of her eyelashes and stopped. It came to me: this is exactly how she looked at me then, in the Integral. And now I must immediately, within the space of a second, be able to explain everything to her—in a way that she will believe it, otherwise she never will …
“Listen, I-330, I have to, I have to tell you everything … No, no, I, right now—I just need a sip of water …”
The inside of my mouth was dry, as though coated with blotting paper. I tried pouring the water but I couldn’t. I put the glass down on the table and tightly seized the jug with both hands.
Now I saw: a blue puff of smoke—it was from a cigarette. She brought it up to her lips, pulled on it, and greedily swallowed the smoke as I drank the water—and she said: “Don’t bother. Shut up. It doesn’t matter—you can see: I came anyway. There, downstairs— they’re waiting for me. And you want these last minutes together to be spent …”
She tossed the cigarette to the floor and leaned all the way backward over the armrest of the chair (there was a button on the wall and she had a hard time reaching it). I remember how the chair lurched and two of its little legs came up from the floor. Then the blinds fell.
She walked up and hugged me tight. Her knees through her dress—a slow, gentle, warm poison covering me …
And suddenly … This happens sometimes: you’re deeply plunged into a sweet and warm dream and suddenly something punctures it, you shudder, and your eyes are wide open again … And so it was now: the trampled pink tickets on the floor, in her room—and on one of them, the letter “F” and some digits … They were lumped into one ball inside me and I can’t even say now what feeling it incited in me, but I squeezed her so hard that she cried out in pain …
Another minute of those ten or fifteen on the bright white pillow: a head thrown back with half-closed eyes; a sharp, sweet stripe of teeth. And the whole time I was being reminded of something nagging, ridiculous, torturous, something that I shouldn’t be thinking … that I musn’t think about even now … And I squeezed her, more and more tenderly, more and more cruelly, and the blue spots under my fingers became brighter and brighter …