We: New Edition Read online

  She is silent. Suddenly all I hear is silence. Then suddenly I hear the Musical Factory and I understand that it’s already past 17:00, that they all left long ago, that I’m alone, I’m late. All around is a glass desert suffused with the yellow sun. In the smooth glass surface I see, like a reflection in water, the shiny walls turned upside down, and I too hang there upside down, a ridiculous figure.

  I’ve got to go at once, right this minute, to the Medical Bureau and get a certificate that I’m sick, or else they’ll take me and ... But that might even be the best thing. Just stay here and wait quietly until I’m seen and they take me to Operations—to end it all right away, pay my debt immediately.

  A light rustling noise and the shadow with the double curve stood before me. I didn’t have to look to sense the two steel-gray drills quickly boring into me. With all my strength I managed to smile and say (you had to say something): “I ... I’ve got to go to the Medical Bureau.”

  “So what’s the matter? Why are you standing there?”

  Turned upside down like an idiot, hanging by my feet and burning with shame, I said nothing.

  S said sternly: “Follow me.”

  I went obediently, swinging the useless arms that belonged to someone else. I couldn’t raise my eyes. The whole time I was walking in a wild world turned on its head. There were machines bottom up and people like those at the other end of the earth with their feet glued to the ceiling, and down below was the sky, clamped onto the thick glass of the pavement. What hurt most, I remember, was that this was the way I was to see it for the last time in my life—upside down, not the way it should be. But I couldn’t raise my eyes.

  We stopped. There were steps in front of me. One step more, and I’d see figures in white coats, doctors, and the huge silent Bell....

  Finally, with all the effort of a spiral drive mechanism, I tore my eyes away from the glass beneath my feet—and suddenly my face is flooded with the golden letters MEDICAL.... Why had he brought me here and not to Operations, why had he spared me? At the moment, this didn’t even cross my mind. I was over the threshold in one bound and slammed the door behind me and ... took a deep breath. I felt I hadn’t breathed since early morning, that my heart had not beat—and only now for the first time I took a breath, only now the floodgates in my chest opened....

  There were two of them. One, shortish, with legs like mileposts, used his eyes as though they were horns to toss the patients. The other was extremely thin, had lips like scissors and a nose like a blade. It was him.

  I threw myself toward him as though we were relatives, right onto the scissors, muttering something about insomnia, dreams, a shadow, a yellow world. The scissor-lips flashed a smile.

  “You’re in bad shape. It looks like you’re developing a soul.”

  A soul? That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word. We sometimes used expressions like “soul-mate,” “body and soul,” “soul-destroying,” and so on, but soul ...

  “That’s ... very dangerous,” I murmured.

  “Incurable,” the scissors snipped.

  “But ... what is really going on? I don’t ... I can’t understand. ”

  “You see ... how can I put this? You’re a mathematician, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay ... take a flat plane, a surface, take this mirror, for instance. And the two of us are on this surface, see, and we squint our eyes against the sun, and there’s a blue electric spark in the tubing, and—there—the shadow of an aero just flashed by. But only on the surface, only for a second. But just imagine now that some fire has softened this impenetrable surface and nothing skims along the top of it any longer—everything penetrates into it, inside, into that mirror world that we peer into with such curiosity, like children—and I assure you, children aren’t so dumb. The plane has taken on mass, body, the world, and it’s all inside the mirror, inside you: the sun, the wash from the aero’s propeller, and your trembling lips, and somebody else’s, too. And, you understand, the cold mirror reflects, throws back, while this absorbs, and the trace left by everything lasts forever. Let there be only once a barely noticeable wrinkle on somebody’s face, and it’s in you forever; once you heard a drop fall in silence —and you hear it right now. ”

  “Yes, yes ... that’s right,” I said, and I grabbed his hand. “I just heard it. From ... the faucet of a washbowl ... drops slowly dropping in silence. And I knew that would be forever. But, still, why a soul all of a sudden? There wasn’t one for such a long time, and now suddenly ... How come no one else has one, and I ... ?”

  I held on all the harder to that thinnest of hands. I was terrified of losing my lifebelt.

  “Why? But why don’t we have feathers? Or wings? Nothing but the shoulder blades where wings would be attached? Why, because we no longer need wings. We’ve got aeros. Wings would only be in the way. Wings are for flying, but we have nowhere to fly to, we’ve already flown there, we’ve found it. Isn’t that right?”

  I nodded my head, in a daze. He looked at me and gave a sharp laugh, like a lancet. The other one, hearing this, stamped out of his consulting-room on his milepost legs and tossed me and my thin doctor on the horns of his eyes.

  “What’s going on? A soul? Did you say, a soul? What the hell! Next thing you know we’ll have cholera again. What did I tell you? [He tossed the thin one on his horns.] I told you so.... We should operate on all of them, on the imagination. Extirpate the imagination. Surgery’s the only answer ... nothing but surgery....”

  He pulled on some X-ray glasses, walked around me for a long time, peered through the bone of my skull into my brain, and kept on jotting down stuff in his notebook.

  “Extremely, extremely curious! Listen—would you by any chance agree to our ... preserving you in alcohol? For OneState that would be an extraordinary ... it would help us ward off an epidemic. That’s of course if you have no special reasons to ...”

  “But you see,” said he, “Number D-503 is the builder of the INTEGRAL. And I’m sure it would violate ...”

  “Ah,” muttered the other, and milestoned it back to his consulting-room.

  The two of us were left alone. The paper-thin hand lay lightly and caressingly on mine. The face in profile leaned over to me, and he whispered: “I’ll tell you this as a secret, between us. You aren’t the only one who has it. It’s no accident my colleague mentioned an epidemic. Just think a moment—haven’t you yourself noticed someone else with something like this ... very like it, very close ... ?” He fixed me with his gaze. What was he hinting at? Who? Surely he couldn’t mean ...

  “Listen ...” I jumped up from the chair. But he’d already begun talking loudly about something else: “... And as for the insomnia, these dreams of yours, I can only advise one thing—that you spend more time walking. Start right away tomorrow, and take a walk early in the morning, say, over to the Ancient House, for instance. ”

  He pierced me again with his eyes and gave his thinnest smile. And it seemed to me that I saw, very clearly, wrapped up in the thin fabric of that smile, a word ... a letter ... a name, the only name ... Or was that again just imagination?

  I could hardly wait for him to write me a certificate of illness for today and tomorrow, after which I shook hands with him, firmly, saying nothing, and ran outside.

  My heart was light and fast as an aero, and it was carrying me up and up. I knew that some sort of happiness was waiting for me tomorrow. But what sort?

  RECORD 17

  Through Glass I Died Hallways

  I’m totally confused. Yesterday at the very moment when I thought I’d worked it all out, found the value of every X, new unknowns turned up in my equation.

  The coordinates of the whole business all begin, of course, with the Ancient House. The X, Y, and Z axes that recently began serving as the basis of my whole world all start there. I was walking along the X-axis (59th Avenue) toward the place where the coordinates start. What happened yesterday turns in me like a gaudy whirlwind: the upside-down house
s and people, the tormentingly strange hands, the flashing scissors, the keen drops falling in the washbowl—that’s how it was, or how it was once. And all this, tearing my flesh apart, is twirling there, beneath the surface melted by fire, where the “soul” is.

  In obedience to the doctor’s prescription I deliberately did not choose to walk along the hypotenuse but took the other two legs of the triangle. Now I’d reached the second of them, the curving road that runs along the base of the Green Wall. From out of the boundless green ocean beyond the Wall a savage wave of roots, flowers, branches, leaves rushed at me, rose up on its hindquarters, would have swamped me, would have turned me, a man, that most delicate and precise of mechanisms, into ...

  But fortunately, between me and the wild green ocean was the glass of the Wall. O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! It is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall. Man ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that Wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals....

  Through the glass, dim and foggy, the blunt muzzle of some beast looked at me, its yellow eyes insistently repeating one and the same thought, incomprehensible to me. We looked each other in the eye for a long time—through those shafts connecting the surface world to that other beneath the surface. And then a little thought wormed its way into my head: “And what if yellow-eyes, in his stupid, dirty pile of leaves, in his uncalculated life, is happier than us?”

  I waved my hand, the yellow eyes blinked, backed off, vanished in the foliage. Pathetic creature! How ridiculous—him happier than us! Happier than me—that could be, all right. But then I’m simply an exception, I’m sick.

  And then, I ... I already see the dark red walls of the Ancient House—and the dear old woman’s sunken mouth. I rush toward her as fast as I can: “She here?”

  “She who?”

  “Who?! 1-330, of course ... We came together that time ... in the aero....”

  “Ah, yes ... Yes, yes, yes ...”

  Wrinkle-rays around her lips, shifty rays in her eyes, which bored into my insides, deeper and deeper, until she finally brought out: “Okay, I guess she’s here. Came not long ago.”

  Here. At the old woman’s feet I noticed a bush of silvery bitter wormwood (the courtyard of the Ancient House is a museum, too, which they maintain in the prehistoric form). The wormwood had stuck out a twig to the old woman’s hand and she was caressing the twig, and a yellow stripe of sunlight lay across her knees. And for one second: I, the sun, the old woman, the wormwood, the yellow eyes—we all blended into one, were all bound forever by veins through which flowed one common, stormy, magnificent blood.

  I’m ashamed to write about this now, but I promised to hold absolutely nothing back in these notes. So here goes: I bent over and kissed that sunken, soft, mossy mouth. The old woman wiped it away and laughed.

  I set off at a run through the familiar, slightly cramped, echoing rooms and, for some reason, went straight to the bedroom. I was already at the double doors and had grasped the handle before I suddenly thought: “And suppose she’s not alone in there?” I stopped and listened. But all I could hear was ... a kind of thudding, and not in me but somewhere near me ... my heart.

  I went in. The wide bed, still made. The mirror. Another mirror in the wardrobe door, and in the keyhold there—the key with the ancient ring. And nobody.

  I called softly: “I-! You here?” And then even softer, with my eyes closed, not daring to breathe, as if I were on my knees in front of her: “I- ... ! Darling!”

  All was quiet. Only water dripping fast from the faucet into the white basin of the washbowl. Right now I can’t say why, but that annoyed me. I gave the handle a hard turn and went out. She wasn’t here. That was clear. So that meant she was in some other apartment.

  I ran down the wide gloomy stairs to the floor below and tried one door, a second, a third: all locked. Everything was locked with the single exception of that one apartment, “ours,” and there was no one there.

  All the same, I headed back there, I myself don’t know why. I walked slowly, I had trouble walking, the soles of my shoes had suddenly turned to cast iron. I distinctly remember thinking: “It’s a mistake to consider the force of gravity a constant. Which means that all my formulas ...”

  Just at this point, there was an explosion. All the way downstairs I heard a door slam and someone’s feet pounding across the flagstones. Suddenly I was light again, nearly weightless, and rushed to the banisters, where I leaned into one word, one shout, trying to put everything into it ... “You!”

  I froze. Down there, inscribed in the dark square of the shadow cast by the window sash, was the head of S, its winglike ears swinging.

  I arrived like lightning at one single naked conclusion, without premises (even now I don’t know the premises): “He must absolutely not see me, not for anything.”

  And pressing myself against the wall, I crept upstairs on tiptoe to the unlocked apartment.

  A second’s pause by the door. He was dully clumping up the stairs, toward me. Everything was riding on the door! I pleaded with the door, but it was wooden, it creaked, it squeaked. Things flew past in a whirlwind—green, red, the yellow Buddha—and I stood before the mirrored door of the wardrobe: my pale face, eyes intent, lips ... Through the noise of my blood I hear the door squeak again.... That’s him, him.

  I grabbed for the key of the wardrobe door, and the ring started swinging. That reminded me of something—another momentary, naked conclusion without premise. Or only a part of a conclusion: “That time 1-330 ...” I quickly open the wardrobe door, I’m inside, in the dark, I shut it tight behind me. I take one step, and something gives beneath my feet. I slowly, softly floated off in some downward direction. Everything went black. I died.

  Later on when I came to write down all these strange happenings I rummaged about in my memory and in books and now I understand, of course. That was the condition of temporary death, familiar to the ancients and, so far as I can tell, completely unknown among us.

  I have no idea how long I was dead, probably not more than five or ten seconds, but a certain amount of time passed before I was resurrected and opened my eyes. It was dark and I felt myself going down, down.... I put out my hand, grabbed, and scratched a rough wall that was flying past, which left blood on my finger—obviously this was not just some game of my sick imagination. But what was it, then?

  I could hear my unsteady breathing, coming out as though it were a dotted line (I’m ashamed to admit all this—but everything was so sudden and confusing). A minute passed ... two ... three ... and I was still falling. Finally there was a soft bump. Whatever it was that had been falling beneath my feet was now still. Groping about in the dark, I found some sort of handle, gave it a push, a door opened, there was a dim light. I turned and saw behind me a small square platform that was going up very fast. I made a dash but was too late. I was cut off here. Where here was, I did not know.

  A corridor. A thousand pounds of silence. Lightbulbs on the curved vaults made an endless, twinkling, swaying dotted line. It looked a little like the “tubes” of our subways, only much narrower and not made of our glass but some other ancient material. I had a momentary image of the caves where people are supposed to have hidden out during the 200-Years War.... But anyway, it was time to go.

  I reckon that I walked about twenty minutes. I turned right and the corridor got wider, the lights brighter. There was some kind of vague humming sound. It could have been machines or it could have been voices ... I couldn’t tell ... only I was standing next to a heavy opaque door and that’s where the humming was coming from.

  I gave a knock, and then a second knock, louder. It got quiet behind the door. There was a clank, and the door began to open, very slow and heavy.

  I don’t know which of us was more stunned—I was looking at my thin, blade-nosed do
ctor.

  “You? Here?” he said, and his scissor-lips clicked. And as for me, it was like I’d never known a single human word. I said nothing, just looked at him, and understood absolutely nothing of what he was saying to me. Probably that I had to get out of there, because then he pushed me with his flat paper belly to the end of that better-lighted corridor, and gave me a shove in the back.

  “Excuse me, I wanted, I thought that she, that 1-330 ... But behind me ...”

  “Stay here.” The doctor cut me off and disappeared.

  Finally! Finally she was here nearby ... and who cared where this here was? The familiar saffron-yellow silk, the bite-smile, the eyes hidden behind blinds ... My lips, my hands, my knees were all trembling ... and an idiotic thought crossed my mind: “Sound is vibration. Trembling ought to make a noise. How come I can’t hear it?”

  Her eyes opened to me—wide open—I entered....

  “I couldn’t stand it any longer! Where were you? Why ...” I said, never taking my eyes off her for a second. What I was saying sounded delirious, quick, disconnected, and maybe I wasn’t even saying it, just thinking it. “The shadow ... behind me ... I died ... out of the wardrobe ... Because that doctor of yours ... he speaks with scissors, says I’ve got a soul ... says it’s incurable....”

  “An incurable soul! You poor thing!” 1-330 burst out laughing. And her laughter splashed all over me, the whole delirium passed, and little sequins of laughter were flashing and how ... how wonderful it all was.

  The doctor unfolded himself from around the corner again—the wonderful, magnificent, paper-thin doctor.

  “Well ...” said he, stopping next to her.

  “It’s okay, okay! I’ll tell you later. He just happened ... Tell them I’ll be back in ... fifteen minutes.”