We: New Edition Read online

  The doctor flashed off around the corner. She waited. There was a dull sound of the door closing. Then very, very slowly 1-330, thrusting her sharp sweet needle deeper and deeper into my heart, pressed against me with her shoulder, her arm, her whole body, and we went, she and I, she and I, two as one ...

  I don’t remember at what point we turned into the dark, and in the dark how we went up endless steps in complete silence. I couldn’t see but I knew she was walking along just as I was, with eyes closed, blind, head thrown back, biting her lips, and listening to the music—the music of my barely audible trembling.

  I woke up in one of the countless niches in the courtyard of the Ancient House. There was some kind of earthen fence—the bare rocky ribs and yellow teeth of some dilapidated walls. She opened her eyes and said, “Day after tomorrow at 16:00.” Then she left.

  Did all this really happen? I don’t know. I’ll find out day after tomorrow. The only actual evidence is that the skin is scraped away on the tips of the fingers of my right hand. But today at the INTEGRAL the Second Builder assured me that he himself had seen me accidentally touch a sanding wheel with those fingers—so that’s all it was. Who knows—maybe that was it. It’s very possible. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

  RECORD 18

  Logical Labyrinth Wounds and Plaster Never Again

  Yesterday I lay down and instantly sank to the bottom of sleep, like a ship overloaded and overturned. Issueless depth of heaving green water. At length I swam slowly up from the bottom, and somewhere about halfway to the top I opened my eyes. I see my room, the morning still green and rigid with cold. On the mirrored door of the wardrobe a shard of sun hits me in the eyes. This stops me from putting in exactly all the hours of sleep prescribed by the Table. The best thing would be just to open the door of the wardrobe. But I feel all wrapped up in a spiderweb, with spiderwebs in my eyes, and I haven’t got the strength to get up.

  I get up anyway, open the—and suddenly I see, behind the door, all pink, struggling out of the clothes on the rack: 1-330. By now I was so used to the most unexpected things happening that, so far as I remember, I was not even the least bit surprised. I asked no questions. I just got into the wardrobe at once, slammed the mirrored door shut behind me, and then—panting, quickly, blindly, greedily—became one with I-330. I see it plainly even now: In the dark, through a crack in the door, a sharp ray of sunlight shatters on the floor like lightning, then on the wall of the wardrobe, then higher ... and then this cruel flashing blade falls on 1-330’s open, naked throat ... and I find this so horrible that I can’t stand it, I scream ... and once more I open my eyes.

  My room. Same green frozen morning. A shard of sun on the wardrobe door. I’m in my bed. A dream. But my heart is still beating wildly, shuddering, spurting. The tips of my fingers, my knees, are numb. There can be no doubt: This did happen. And now I don’t know dream from waking. Irrational magnitudes are growing up through everything that is stable, customary, three-dimensional, and all around me something rough and shaggy is replacing the firm, polished surfaces....

  The bell to get up is still a long way off. I lie in the bed thinking ... and a logical chain, extraordinarily odd, starts unwinding itself.

  For every equation, every formula in the superficial world, there is a corresponding curve or solid. For irrational formulas, for my √—1, we know of no corresponding solids, we’ve never seen them.... But that’s just the whole horror—that these solids, invisible, exist. They absolutely inescapably must exist. Because in mathematics their eccentric prickly shadows, the irrational formulas, parade in front of our eyes as if they were on a screen. And mathematics and death never make a mistake. And if we don’t see these solids in our surface world, there is for them, there inevitably must be, a whole immense world there, beneath the surface.

  I jumped up without waiting for the bell and began to run around my room. My mathematics, up to now the only lasting and immovable island in my entire dislocated life, had also broken loose and floated whirling off. So does this mean that that stupid “soul” is just as real as my yuny, as my boots, even though I can’t see them now (they’re behind the mirror of the wardrobe door)? And if the boots are not a disease, why is the “soul” a disease?

  I looked for it but I found no way out of this wild logical thicket. This was a tangle every bit as unknown and terrifying as that behind the Green Wall. These were creatures just as extraordinary and incomprehensible, and they said as much with no words. I imagined that I saw through some kind of thick glass the square root of minus one—infinitely huge and at the same time infinitely small, scorpion-shaped, with that hidden but always sensed sting of a minus sign.... But maybe that is nothing except my “soul,” like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, which would deliberately sting itself with everything that ...

  The bell. Daylight. None of this died or vanished—it was simply covered over by the light of day; just the way visible objects don’t die but are concealed at night by the darkness of night. A light shimmering fog in my head. Through the fog, long glass tables are visible. Spherical heads are slowly, silently chewing in time with one another. From a distance a metronome is ticking through the fog, and I mechanically chew to the familiar caress of its music, counting, along with everyone else, up to fifty: fifty statutory chews for each mouthful. And, still mechanically beating out the time, I go downstairs, and, like everyone else, check off my name in the book as one leaving the premises. But I sense that I’m living separately from everyone else, alone, surrounded by a soft, soundproof wall, and that my world is on my side of this wall.

  But how about this? If this world is only mine, how come it is in these notes? How come these stupid “dreams,” wardrobes, endless corridors are here? I am crushed to see that instead of the elegant and strict mathematical poem in honor of OneState, it’s turning out to be some kind of fantastic adventure novel. Oh, if only this really were just a novel instead of my actual life, filled with X’s, √—1, and degradations.

  On the other hand, maybe it’s all for the best. You, my unknown readers, are most likely children compared to us (we were after all reared by OneState and have consequently attained the highest summits possible for man). And like children, you will only swallow all the bitter stuff I have to give you if it is carefully coated with a thick syrup of adventure.

  Evening.

  Do you know this feeling? When you’re in an aero speeding up through a blue spiral, the window open, the wind whistling, and there’s no earth, you’ve forgotten the earth, the earth is just as far from you as Saturn or Jupiter or Venus? That’s how I’m living now. The wind is in my face and I’ve forgotten about the earth, I’ve forgotten about dear rosy O. But earth exists all the same, and sooner or later I’ve got to glide down and land on it, and I’m just shutting my eyes to the day on my Sexual Table with 0-90’s name on it....

  This evening the distant earth sent me a reminder of itself. In order to carry out the doctor’s orders (I sincerely, sincerely want to get well), I roamed for two whole hours in the desolate glass grid of the avenues. Everyone was in the auditoriums, in accordance with the Table, and only I alone. ... It was basically an unnatural sight. Picture this: a human finger, cut off from its body, its hand ... a separate human finger, running hopping along, all hunched over, on a glass sidewalk. I am that finger.

  And what is strangest of all, most unnatural of all, is that the finger hasn’t got the slightest desire to be on the hand, to be with the others; either like this, all alone, or ... Well, look, there’s no point any longer in my trying to hide it: either alone or with her, with that woman, to empty my whole self into her through a shoulder, through clasped hands ...

  The sun was already setting when I got back home. The rosy ashes of the evening were already on the glass of the walls, on the gold of the spire of the accumulator tower, on the voices and the smiles of the Numbers I passed. Isn’t it odd that the dying rays of the sun fall at precisely the same angle as those coming to l
ife in the morning, but everything is completely different, there’s a different rosiness, now it’s very quiet, with a touch of bitterness, but in the morning it will be once again loud and ebullient?

  But now, downstairs in the vestibule, U, the woman on duty, has just reached under a pile of envelopes covered with rosy ash, pulled out a letter, and handed it to me. I repeat: She’s a very respectable woman, and I’m sure she is very well disposed toward me.

  Still, every time I see those cheeks hanging down like fish gills, I somehow don’t like it.

  As she handed me the letter with her gnarled hand, U gave a sigh. But this sigh caused hardly a stir in the curtain separating me from the world. My concentration was 100 percent focused on the trembling envelope in my hand, which, I had no doubt, contained a letter from 1-330.

  At this point came a second sigh, one so pointed, with a double line beneath it, that I tore myself away from the envelope. Between the gills, and through the shy jalousies of her lowered lids, I saw a tender, embracing, blinding smile. And then:

  “You poor, poor thing ...” She said this with a triple-underlined sigh and a barely detectable nod at the envelope (the contents of which she naturally knew as part of her duty).

  “No, really, I ... I mean, why?”

  “No, no, dear. I know you better than you know yourself. I’ve had my eye on you for a long time now, and I see that you’re in need of someone to go arm in arm with you through life, someone who’s spent long years studying life.”

  All swaddled in this smile, I have the feeling it is the plaster for the wounds with which this letter trembling in my hand is about to cover me. Finally, very quietly, through the shy jalousies, she says: “I’ll think about it, dear, I’ll think about it. And don’t worry ... if I feel that I have enough strength ... but no, I’ll still have to think it over first....”

  Great Benefactor! Don’t tell me that’s going to be my fate. ... Don’t tell me she’s trying to say that ...

  My eyes dazzle, there are thousands of sinusoids, the letter leaps. I walk over to the light, to the wall. Over there the sun is setting, and a sad, dark rose ash of denser and denser light is falling on me, on the floor, on my hands, and on the letter.

  The envelope is torn open, a quick glance at the signature, and a wound: not from 1-330, not from her ... it’s from O. And another wound: In the bottom right corner of the paper is a stain where the ink has run, where a drop of something fell.... I can’t stand smudges, ink or any other kind, it doesn’t matter. And I know that, before, this would have just been unpleasant to me, unpleasant for the eyes, this unpleasant spot. But now ... how come this grayish little spot is like a raincloud, making everything darker and more leaden? Or is this just more “soul”?

  THE LETTER

  You know ... or maybe you don’t know ... I don’t know how to write this—but never mind: Now you know that there will never be a day for me, or a morning, or a springtime, without you. Because for me R is nothing more than ... but you don’t care about this. At any rate, I’m very grateful to him. I don’t know what I would have done, alone, without him, these last few days. During these days and nights I’ve lived through ten or maybe twenty years. My room has seemed round and not square, and endless, round and round and all the same, with no doors anywhere.

  I can’t live without you—because I love you. Because I see, I understand, that you don’t need anybody, anybody on earth, except her, that other one, and ... look, that’s just it, if I love you, then I have to ...

  I just need two or three more days to try and put the pieces of myself back into some semblance of the former 0-90—and then I’ll go and fill out the form myself, that I’m withdrawing my registration for you, and you’ll be better off, you’ll be fine. I’ll never come again. Goodbye.

  O.

  Never again. It’s better that way, of course. She’s right. But why, why ...

  RECORD 19

  Third-Order Infinitesimal A Sullen Glare Over the Parapet

  There in that strange corridor with the wavy dotted line of dull lightbulbs ... or no, not there ... later, when she and I were in that out-of-the-way niche in the courtyard of the Ancient House ... she said, “Day after tomorrow.” That “day after tomorrow” is today, and everyone’s sprouted wings, the day is flying, and our INTEGRAL already has its wings on: They’ve finished installing the rocket engine, and today we put it through a test run. What magnificent, powerful blasts, and for me each one was a salute to her, to the only one, and to this day.

  At the first pass (= shot) some ten or so Numbers from our hangar were caught napping beneath the engine exhaust—absolutely nothing was left of them but some sort of crumbs and soot. I’m proud to note down here that this did not cause a second’s hitch in the rhythm of our work, no one flinched; and we and our work teams continued our rectilinear and circular movement with exactly the same precision as though nothing had happened. Ten Numbers—that is scarcely one hundred-millionth part of the mass of OneState. For all practical purposes, it’s a third-order infinitesimal. Innumerate pity is a thing known only to the ancients; to us it’s funny.

  And it’s funny to me that yesterday I was capable of wasting time thinking about—and even noting down in these pages —some pathetic gray spot, some ink-blot. That’s the same “softening of the surface” that ought to be diamond-hard, like our walls (cf. the old saying: “like peas against a wall”).

  16:00 hours. I didn’t go for the extra walk. Who can tell? She might take a notion to come right this minute, with everything ringing in the sunshine.

  I’m practically alone in the building. Through the sunny walls I have a long view—to the right, left, and down—of empty rooms hanging in the air, repeating one another like mirror reflections. And only along the bluish staircase, hardly inked in by the sun, an emaciated gray shadow slips slowly upward. Now you can even hear the footsteps, and I can see through the door, I can feel that the plaster-smile has been stuck on me. Then it goes past, to another stairwell, and down.

  Click of the intercom screen. I throw myself at the narrow white slot ... and I see some Number I’ve never heard of (male, since it began with a consonant). Elevator hum. Doors slam. In front of me is a Number whose forehead seems to have been carelessly tilted down over his eyes. Very odd impression, as though he were speaking from underneath his brow, where his eyes are located.

  “A letter for you, from her.” This from beneath the brow, from behind the curtain. “She asked that everything, without fail, be done as it’s written here. ”

  Then a searching look round, still from beneath the brow, the curtain. But there’s no one here, I tell you—let’s have the letter! One more look round, he sticks the envelope in my hand, and leaves. I’m alone.

  No, I’m not alone. From the envelope falls a pink ticket and, barely detectable, her scent. It’s her, she’s coming, she’ll come to me. To the letter, quick, to read it with my own eyes, to really believe it all the way....

  What? It can’t be! I read it again, leaping across the lines: “Ticket ... and be sure to let the blinds down, as though I really were with you.... I need them to think that I ... I’m very, very sorry....”

  The letter’s in shreds. A second’s glance in the mirror. I see my broken, distorted eyebrows. I take the ticket, to shred it like the letter....

  “She asked that everything, without fail, be done as it’s written here.”

  My hands weakened, relaxed. The ticket fell out of them onto the table. She is stronger than me, and it looks as though I’m going to do as she wants. But still ... I don’t know. We’ll see. Tomorrow is still a ways off. The ticket’s on the table.

  My broken, distorted eyebrows are in the mirror. If only I had a doctor’s certificate for today, too, to go walk and walk forever around the Green Wall and then come drop in the bed, down to the bottom of it.... But I’ve got to go to auditorium No. 13, I’ve got to screw myself up tight, to sit through two hours, two whole hours, not moving ... when I need to sc
ream and stamp my feet.

  A lecture. It’s very strange that the gleaming apparatus emits not the usual metallic voice but a kind of soft, shaggy, mossy voice. A female voice. Her image as she was in life flits before my mind’s eye: a little bent old woman, like that one at the Ancient House.

  The Ancient House ... and all at once everything shoots up from underneath like a fountain and I have to screw myself as tight as I can to keep from drowning the whole auditorium with a scream. Soft, shaggy words. They go through me, leaving behind only one thing ... something about children, about child husbandry. Like a photographic plate, I register it all with a mad precision that seems to come from someone else, somewhere outside me: a golden sickle of reflected light on the loudspeaker; beneath this, a child, a living illustration, reaching toward the sickle; the hem of its tiny yuny is stuck in its mouth; tightly clenched fist, the little thumb squeezed inside; light, downy shadow; a little crease on the wrist. Like a photographic plate I register it: Now there’s a bare leg hanging over the side, the toes making a rosy fan to step on the air, and in one moment, one moment more, the child will fall on the floor....

  And there’s a woman’s scream. Onto the stage she sweeps with the diaphanous wings of her yuny, grabs the child, brushes the puffy crease at the wrist with her lips, moves it to the center of the table, comes down from the stage. On my internal plate is an impression: rosy mouth-crescent, horns downward, blue saucer-eyes brimming to the edge. It’s O. And I feel as I do when reading an elegant formula—a sudden sense of the necessity, the rightness of this trivial incident.

  She took a seat a little ways behind me and to the left. I looked back. She obediently took her eyes away from the table with the child, turned her eyes toward me, into me, and again: The three of us—she, I, and the table on the stage—we were three points, and through these points were drawn three lines, projections of some unavoidable, some still-hidden events.