We: New Edition Page 21

  I leaned over and picked one up, then another and another: All were marked D-503—I was on all of them—drops of me, melted, spilled over. That was all that was left....

  It somehow seemed impossible to leave them like that, on the floor, to be walked over. I gathered another handful, put them on the table, spread them out carefully, looked at them—and started laughing.

  I’d never known this before, but now I do, and so do you: Laughter comes in different colors. It’s only the distant echo of an explosion inside you. It might come in holiday colors —red, blue, golden rockets. Or it might be the bits of a human body flying out.

  On the tickets I glimpsed a name I’d never heard of. I don’t recall the number, only the letter, which was F. I swept all the tickets off the table onto the floor and stepped on them, on myself, like this, with my heel, and left....

  I sat in the hallway on a windowsill opposite her door and waited, vacantly and long, for I don’t know what. Shuffling footsteps came from the left. An old man with a face like a punctured bladder that had collapsed and folded up, with some kind of clear stuff still oozing slowly out of the puncture. I finally formed the vague idea that these were tears. He’d already moved on a piece when I came to and called him: “Excuse me ... listen, do you happen to know Number I-330?”

  The old man turned, waved his hand in despair, and shuffled on.

  At dusk I went back home to my place. In the west the sky, every second, was going through a pale blue spasm—this was what caused the dull muffled rumble. Birds perched here and there on roofs like black smoldering firebrands.

  I lay down on the bed—and sleep fell on me instantly, like an animal, and smothered me....

  RECORD 38

  (I Don’t Know What Goes Here, Maybe Just: A Cigarette Butt)

  I woke up—the light was so bright it hurt my eyes. I squinted. There was a sort of corrosive blue smoke in my head, everything was in a fog. And through the fog I hear myself saying, “But ... I never turned the light on—how ... ?”

  I jumped up. Sitting at the table, her chin resting in her hand, 1-330 was looking at me with an ironic grin....

  I’m sitting at the same table now, writing. They’re behind me already—ten or fifteen minutes of time savagely compressed into the tightest of springs. But it seems to me she only just this moment shut the door behind her, and I might still catch up with her, grab her hand and—maybe she’ll laugh and say ...

  1-330 was sitting at the table. I rushed to her.

  “It’s you, you! I was—I saw your room—I thought you’d ...”

  But I’d covered only half the distance when I found myself up against the sharp, immovable javelins of her eyelashes and stopped. I remembered her looking at me just the same way that time on board the INTEGRAL. And now I had one second in which to figure out a way to tell her everything so she’d understand ... otherwise there’d never be ...

  “Listen, I-330 ... I’ve got to ... I’ve got to tell you all ... No, wait—I need a sip of water....”

  My mouth was as dry as if it’d been lined with blotting paper. I tried pouring some water, but couldn’t, so I set the glass on the table and grabbed the pitcher with both hands.

  Now I saw the blue smoke came from a cigarette. She put it to her lips, took a drag, greedily inhaled the smoke, just as I was drinking the water, and said: “Don’t bother. Don’t say anything. It doesn’t matter—you see I came anyway. They’re waiting for me downstairs. And you want these last few minutes of ours to be ...”

  She tossed the cigarette on the floor and leaned far over the arm of the chair (the button was on the wall, hard to reach) and I remember how the chair teetered and two of its legs lifted off the floor. Then the blinds fell.

  She came up and threw her arms around me, hard. I could feel her knees through her dress—the slow, tender, warm, all-embracing poison....

  And suddenly ... It sometimes happens that you’re completely sunk in sweet, warm sleep—and suddenly something stabs you, you jump, and your eyes pop wide open again. ... That’s what happened now: I suddenly saw the floor of her room covered with the trampled pink tickets, with the letter F and some kind of figures on one of them ... and they all rolled up inside me into one ball, and even now I can’t say how that made me feel, but I held her so tight that she gave a cry of pain....

  One minute more—out of those ten or fifteen—her head thrust back on the gleaming white pillow, her eyes half closed; the sharp sweet band of her teeth. And the whole time this reminded me of something, something I couldn’t shake off, stupid, painful, something I shouldn’t have thought of—shouldn’t even now think of. And I hold her still more tenderly, more cruelly, my fingers leave still more vivid blue marks....

  She said (and I noticed that she didn’t open her eyes): “They say you were at the Benefactor’s yesterday. Is that true?”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  Then her eyes opened wide, and I was glad to see how quickly her face blanched, faded, and vanished, leaving only her eyes.

  I told her everything. And there was only one thing—I don’t know why, no, that’s not right, I do know—only one thing I held back: what He said at the very end, about them needing me only for ...

  Gradually, like a photograph in the developer, her face began to appear: her cheeks, the white band of her teeth, her lips. She got up and went over to the mirrored door of the wardrobe.

  My mouth was dry again. I poured myself a glass of water, but the thought of drinking it disgusted me. I put the glass on the table and asked: “Is that why you came—because you had to know that?”

  She looked at me in the mirror—the sharp mocking triangle of her brows lifted up toward her temples. She turned to say something to me but said nothing.

  She didn’t have to. I knew.

  Say good-bye to her? I moved my—or somebody’s—feet, hit the chair, it fell over and lay there dead, like the one in her room. Her lips were cold—as cold as the floor here in my room, next to the bed, had once been.

  But when she left, I sat down on the floor and bent over the cigarette she’d thrown there....

  I can’t write any more—I don’t want to!

  RECORD 39

  The End

  All this was like the final grain of salt added to a saturated solution: The crystals, bristling with needles, quickly began to appear, harden, and set. It was clear to me that everything had been decided. Tomorrow morning I would do it. It was the same thing as killing myself—but maybe that’s the only way for me to be resurrected. Because you can’t resurrect something unless it’s been killed.

  In the west the sky was going through a blue spasm every second. My head was on fire and pounding. I sat up the whole night like this and fell asleep only around seven in the morning, when the darkness was starting to thin out and turn green and you could see roofs dotted with birds.

  I woke up and saw it was already ten o’clock (no bell this morning, apparently). The glass of water left over from yesterday was still standing on the table. I thirstily drank the water and ran out: I had a lot to do in a hurry, as soon as possible.

  The storm had reamed out the sky, leaving it blue and empty. The shadows had sharp corners all cut out of the blue autumnal air and were so fragile you were afraid to touch them for fear they’d shatter into glass powder and blow away. It was the same inside me: no thinking, do not think, do not think, or else ...

  And I was not thinking, maybe not even seeing, actually, but merely registering. There on the sidewalk: branches from somewhere with green, amber, crimson leaves. Overhead: birds and aeros rushing about, crossing each other’s paths. There: heads, open mouths, hands waving branches. That must be what is howling, cawing, humming....

  Then, streets as vacant as if some plague had swept through them. I remember stumbling over something unbearably soft and yielding though I still couldn’t move it. I bent over: a corpse. It was lying on its back, legs spread, knees bent, like a woman. The face ...

  I
recognized the thick African lips that even now seemed to be laughing juicily. His eyes were squinted shut and he was laughing right in my face. It took me one second to step over him and run on, because I couldn’t wait, I had to do everything quickly, or else, I felt, I’d break, I’d bend out of shape like an overloaded rail....

  Luckily I only had some twenty steps to go before I came to the sign with the golden letters: BUREAU OF GUARDIANS. At the entrance I stopped, took as big a breath of air as I could, and went in.

  Inside in the hallway was an endless line of Numbers, some with sheets of paper, some with thick notebooks in their hands. They were slowly moving forward—one step, two steps—then stopping.

  I ran along this line, my head killing me, pulling at their sleeves, begging them, the way a sick man pleads with the doctor to give him something that would end it all with an instant of infinite pain.

  Some woman wearing a tight belt over her yuny and above the two fat hemispheres of her buttocks, which she kept moving from side to side as if she had eyes in them, snorted at me: “He’s got a stomach ache! Take him to the toilet—over yonder, second on the right!”

  I got laughed at. This laughter made something rise up in my throat, and I was just about to start shouting or ... or ...

  Suddenly someone grabbed my elbow from behind. I turned around: transparent ears like wings. Except they weren’t pink as usual, but crimson, and his Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down as though it might break out of his thin neck.

  “Why are you here?” he asked, his eyes boring into me.

  I grabbed hold of him: “Hurry! Let’s go to your office. ... Everything—I’ve got to ... right now! I’m glad it’s you.... Maybe it’s terrible that it’s you of all people, but it’s good, I’m glad....”

  He also knew her, which was all the more painful for me, but maybe he’d also shudder when he heard, and we could do the killing together, and I wouldn’t be all alone for that last second....

  The door slammed. I remember that some piece of paper got caught under the door and scraped across the floor when the door was closing, and then a sort of special, airless silence covered us like a bell-jar. If he’d said one word, no matter what, the most meaningless word, I’d have spilled everything right there. But he said nothing.

  I was so tense all over that my ears were ringing. I said (not looking at him): “I think I always hated her, from the very beginning. I was fighting.... But no, no, better you don’t believe me: I could have saved myself and didn’t want to, I wanted to die, that meant more to me than anything. ... I mean, not to die, but for her to ... And even now, even now that I know everything ... You know, do you know that I was called before the Benefactor?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “But what He told me ... You know, it was like having the floor suddenly jerked out from under you—and you, along with everything on the table there, the paper, the ink ... and the ink splashing out and making spots.... ”

  “Get on with it! And hurry. Others are waiting.”

  And then I told him the whole breathless, confused story —everything that’s written down here. About the real me and the shaggy me, and about what she’d said that time about my hands—yes, that was how it all started—and about how I then didn’t want to carry out my duty, and about how I fooled myself, and how she got the phony medical certificates, about how I got more corrupt from one day to the next, and about the corridors down there, and about how ... on the other side of the Wall ...

  All this in incoherent lumps and chunks, with me out of breath, and not able to think of words I needed. The twisted lips with the double bend would smile ironically and pass me the words I wanted and I would thank him and say, Yes, yes ... So then (what was going on?). So he was doing the talking for me and I was just listening: “Yes, and then? That’s just how it was, yes, yes!”

  I felt the skin around my collar getting cold, as if someone had daubed ether on it, and I could hardly bring myself to ask: “But how ... there’s no way you could have ... ?”

  The ironic smile, with no words, got more bent.... Then: “You know—you’ve been trying to hide something from me. Here you’ve named over all the ones you happened to see over there on the other side of the Wall, but you forgot one. You say you didn’t? But don’t you remember seeing over there—just for a second, just in passing—seeing me? That’s what I said. Me.”

  A pause.

  And suddenly it hit me with shameless clarity, like a bolt of lightning to the head: He was one of them. And everything I’d done, all my pains, everything I’d brought here with my last ounce of strength, my great heroic feat—it was all a joke. It was like the ancient story about Abraham and Isaac. Abraham, in a cold sweat, had already raised the knife over his own son, over his very own self, when suddenly there came a voice from on high: “Forget it! I was only joking!”

  Without moving my eyes away from the ironic smile that was getting more and more crooked, I propped my hands against the edge of the table and slowly, slowly, pushed my chair backward, then, all of a sudden, I picked myself up in an armful and dashed out of there, past shouts, steps, mouths....

  How I got downstairs to one of the public washrooms in the subway station I do not remember. Up there above, everything was in ruins, the greatest and most rational civilization in all history had collapsed, but down here someone had had the ironic notion of keeping everything as it was, in splendid shape. And to think that all this was doomed, that it would all be grown over in grass, that nothing would be left of all this but “myths.”

  I groaned out loud. At the same moment, I felt a consoling touch on my shoulder.

  It was my neighbor, who was in the seat to my left. His forehead was a huge bald parabola, written over by the yellow indecipherable lines of his wrinkles. And these lines were about me.

  “I understand you, I understand you completely,” he said. “But still, calm down. Don’t carry on so. This’ll all come back, it’ll come back, no question. The only thing that matters is that everyone should hear about my discovery. You’re the first one I’m telling. I’ve calculated that infinity does not exist!”

  I gave him a wild look.

  “Yes, it’s true what I’m telling you. There is no infinity. If the world were infinite, then the average density of matter in it would equal zero. But since it is not zero—this we know—it follows that the universe is finite. It is spherical in shape and the square of its radius, y2, is equal to the average density, times the ... I’ve just got to calculate the numerical coefficient, and then ... You see, everything is done, everything is simple, everything is calculable. And then we’ll win philosophically, don’t you see? But you, sir, are preventing me from finishing this calculation, your shouting ...”

  What shook me more I don’t know—his discovery or his firmness in this apocalyptic hour. In his hands (I hadn’t seen this until now) he held a notebook and a logarithmic dial. And I understood that even if everything was going to perish, my duty (before you, my unknown readers) was to leave my records in finished form.

  I asked him for some paper, and on it I wrote down these final lines....

  I wanted to put a period, the way the ancients would set a cross over the pits where they piled their dead, but suddenly the pencil jerked and fell out of my hand....

  “Listen!” I grabbed my neighbor. “Listen to me, I tell you! You have to tell me this. There where your finite universe ends—what’s there ... beyond?”

  He didn’t have time to answer. From overhead, on the steps, the pounding of feet ...

  RECORD 40

  Facts The Bell I Am Certain

  It is day. Clear. Barometer at 760.

  Could it be that I, D-503, actually wrote these 225 pages? Could it be that I ever actually felt this—or imagined that I did?

  It’s my handwriting. And it goes on, in the same hand, but fortunately only the handwriting is the same. No delirium, no ridiculous metaphors, no feelings. Just the facts. Because I’m well, I am comp
letely, absolutely well. I’m smiling—I can’t help smiling: They extracted a kind of splinter from my head, and now my head is easy and empty. Or I should say, not empty, but there’s nothing strange there that keeps me from smiling (a smile is the normal state of a normal person).

  The facts are as follows. That evening they seized my neighbor, the one who’d discovered that the universe is finite, and me, and everybody who’d been with us, and charged us with not having the certificate of the Operation, and took us off to the nearest auditorium (the number of which, 112, was familiar for some reason). Here we were strapped to the tables and put through the Great Operation.

  The following day I, D-503, reported to the Benefactor and told him all I knew about the enemies of happiness. Why could this have seemed hard for me before? I don’t understand. Only one explanation: my former illness (soul).

  That same evening, at one and the same table with Him, the Benefactor, I was sitting (for the first time) in the famous Gas Room. They brought in that woman. She was supposed to give her testimony in my presence. The woman was stubbornly silent and kept smiling. I noticed that she had sharp, very white teeth, and that this was beautiful.

  Then they put her under the Bell. Her face got very white, and since she had eyes that were dark and big, this was very beautiful. When they started pumping the air out of the Bell, she threw her head back, and half closed her eyes and pressed her lips together, and this reminded me of something. She was looking at me, holding on tight to the arms of the chair, until her eyes closed completely. Then they pulled her out, quickly brought her to with the help of electrodes, and put her back under the Bell. This happened three times, and she still didn’t say a word. Others that they brought in with that woman turned out to be more honest. Many of them began talking right after the first time. Tomorrow they’ll all go up the steps of the Machine of the Benefactor.