We: New Edition Read online

  What was not to understand? I remember thinking: “He looks dumb and asymmetrical, but how straight his mind thinks.” That’s why he’s so close to me, to the real me (I still regard the former me as the real one; this present me is of course nothing but some illness).

  R must have read my thoughts from my expression. He threw his arms around my shoulders and started laughing.

  “Oh, you ... Adam! Oh, and by the way, about your Eve...”

  He rummaged about in his pocket, brought out a small notebook, and began turning the pages.

  “Day after tomorrow ... no, in two days, O has a pink ticket to come to your place. How’s that with you? Same as before? Do you want her to ... ?”

  “Yes, sure. That’s clear....”

  “I’ll tell her. Because you see ... she’s ... shy. Honestly, what a story. Me? I’m just a pink-ticket item with her, but you ... And she’s not telling who that fourth one is that crawled into our triangle. Come on, you old lecher ... tell us who it is. Confess!”

  Inside me a curtain went up, and ... the rustle of silk, a green bottle, lips ... and apropos of nothing, out of the blue, the words—if I’d only held them in!—burst out of me: “Tell me, did you ever by any chance try nicotine or alcohol?”

  R bit his lips and gave me a sideways glance. I could hear his thoughts as clearly as if he’d said it: “You are a friend, all right, but still ...” What he actually said was:

  “Well, how to put it ... ? Me personally—no. But I did know one woman ...”

  “I-330!” I shouted.

  “What ... ? You, too? Are you with her, too?” He burst out laughing, choked, and spluttered.

  The way my mirror was hung, I could see myself in it only across the table. From where I was sitting in the armchair, all I saw was my forehead and eyebrows.

  And what the real me saw in the mirror was a skewed prancing line of eyebrows and what this real me heard was a wild, disgusting shout: “What do you mean too?! What is this too? No, wait ... I demand an answer!”

  Negro lips stretched, eyes bulging.... I, the real I, grabbed the other me, wild, hairy, panting, by the neck, and said to R: “Forgive me, for the Benefactor’s sake! I’m sick, no sleep, don’t know what’s wrong with me....”

  The thick lips smiled fleetingly: “Yes, yes, I understand! I know all about that—theoretically, of course. Goodbye!”

  From the door he bounced back like a black ball to the table and tossed a book onto it: “My latest. Meant to leave it and nearly forgot. Bye!” (Wet B) Bounced out.

  Alone—or with “him,” the other me. Sitting legs crossed in the chair, I watch with curiosity, from some other “there,” my own self tossing on the bed.

  Why, why, for three whole years, were 0 and I such good friends, only to have one word about her, 1-330, spoil ... ? Maybe that nonsense about love and jealousy is not just in stupid old books. And me, of all people! Equations, formulas, figures, and now ... I don’t get it. None of it. Tomorrow I’ll see R and tell him that I ...

  That’s a lie. I won’t. Not tomorrow, not the day after—never. I can’t. I don’t want to see him. Finished! End of our triangle.

  I’m alone. Evening. A little foggy. Milky-gold cloth over the sky. What’s beyond it? If only one could know. And know who I am, what I am.

  RECORD 12

  Limitation of Infinity Angel Reflections. on Poetry

  I keep on thinking I’m getting well, that I can get well. I slept like a rock. None of those dreams or any other sign of illness. Dear 0 is coming to me tomorrow, and everything’s going to be like a circle: simple, correct, within certain limitations. The word doesn’t scare me-limitation. The highest thing in Man is his reason, and what the work of reason comes down to is the continual limitation of infinity, dividing infinity up into convenient, easily digestible portions: differentiation. This is exactly what constitutes the divine beauty of my element, mathematics. And this beauty is precisely what that woman will never understand. But never mind that ... I don’t know what made me think of her.

  These thoughts come to me in time with the measured, metrical beat of the subway wheels. In my head I was keeping time with the wheels and with R’s poetry (the book from yesterday) when I sensed that somebody from behind was carefully bending over my shoulder and looking at the open page. Not turning around, just with the corner of my eye, I see the pink wings of the protruding ears, the double bend ... him! I didn’t feel like disturbing him, so I pretended not to notice. How he turned up, I don’t know. I don’t think he was in the car when I got on.

  This occurrence, completely insignificant in itself, had a very good effect on me. It strengthened me, I’d say. It’s so nice to feel that someone’s keeping a sharp eye on you, kindly protecting you from making the slightest mistake, the slightest misstep. This may sound sentimental, but the same analogy occurs to me: the guardian angels that the ancients dreamed about. So much of what they merely dreamed about has materialized in our life.

  At the moment when I sensed the guardian angel behind my back, I was enjoying a sonnet titled “Happiness.” I don’t think I’d go wrong in saying that this is a thing of rare beauty and deep thought. Here are the first four lines:Forever enamoured are two plus two,

  Forever conjoined in blissful four.

  The hottest lovers in all the world:

  The permanent weld of two plus two. ....

  And so on in the same vein, about the wise, permanent happiness of the multiplication table.

  Every genuine poet is bound to be a Columbus. America had existed for ages even before Columbus, but only Columbus was able to find it. The multiplication table existed for ages before R-13, too, but only R-13 was able to find a new Eldorado in that virgin forest. No, really: Does there exist any happiness that is wiser, more cloudless, than what can be found in that marvelous world? Steel rusts. The ancients’ God created ancient-that is, prone to error-man, and so erred himself. The multiplication table is wiser and more absolute than the ancient God. It never—repeat, never—makes a mistake. And there’s nothing happier than figures that live according to the elegant and eternal laws of the multiplication table. No wavering, no wandering. Truth is one, and the true path is one. And that truth is two times two and that true path is four. And wouldn’t it be absurd if these two happily, ideally multiplied twos started thinking about some kind of freedom, that is, about some mistake? For me it’s axiomatic: R-13 has latched onto the most fundamental, the most ...

  At this point I again felt, first on the back of my neck and then on my left ear, the warm, tender breath of my guardian angel. He’d evidently noticed that the book on my knees was shut and my thoughts far away. So what? I’m ready right this minute to spread the pages of my brain open for his inspection: This is just a peaceful, joyous feeling. I remember that I even turned around, I deliberately looked him right in the eyes, as though asking for something, but he did not understand, or didn’t feel like understanding, and didn’t ask me anything. But I’ve still got this: You, my unknown readers, you will be told everything (right now you are just as dear, as close, and as unapproachable, as he was at that moment).

  Here was the path I had to take: from the part to the whole. The part was R-13. The magnificent whole was our Institute of State Poets and Writers. How could it have happened, I wondered, that the ancients did not immediately see how completely idiotic their literature and poetry was. The immense majestic power of the artistic word was squandered for absolutely nothing. It’s simply ridiculous—everybody wrote about whatever popped into his head. It’s just as stupid and ridiculous as the fact that the ancients let the ocean go on dumbly beating against the shore around the clock, and the millions of kilogrammeters locked up inside the waves went for nothing but kindling lovers’ emotions. We’ve taken the waves’ sweet nothings and turned them into electricity ... taken a mad crashing foaming beast and turned it into a domestic animal. In just the same way we’ve tamed and saddled what used to be the wild nature of poetry. Poetry to
day is not some impudent nightingale’s piping—poetry is government service, poetry is usefulness.

  Take our famous “Mathematical Rhymes”—if we hadn’t had them in school, could we possibly have conceived such a sincere and tender love for the four rules of arithmetic? And the “Thorns,” that classical image. The Guardians are the thorns on the rosebush, protecting the gentle State Flower against all rude contact. Who could be so stony-hearted as to resist the sight of innocent children’s lips murmuring, like a prayer, the lines:Ninny, Ninny, grabbed a rose,

  Got a thorn stuck in his nose,

  Served him right, the silly imp!

  Ninny, Ninny, home did limp.

  And how about the “Daily Odes to the Benefactor”? Who can read them without bowing his head reverently before the selfless labor of this Number of Numbers? Or the terrible, blood-red beauty of the “Flowers of Judicial Verdicts”? Or the immortal tragedy, “Late for Work”? Or the bedside book of “Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene”?

  The whole of life, in all its complexity and beauty, has been etched into the gold of words.

  Our poets no longer soar into the Empyrean; they’ve come down to earth. They go along in step with us to the stern mechanical march of the Musical Factory. Their lyre consists of the morning hum of electrical toothbrushes, the spark’s ominous snap in the Machine of the Benefactor, the grandiose echo of the OneState Anthem, the intimate sound of the crystal bright chamber pot at night, the exciting clatter of lowering blinds, the merry voices of the latest cookbook, and the barely audible whisper of the street membranes.

  Our gods are here below, with us, in the Bureau, in the kitchen, in the shop, in the toilet. The gods have become like us—ergo, we’ve become like gods. And we’re headed your way, my unknown planetary readers, we’re coming to make your life divinely rational and precise, like ours.

  RECORD 13

  Fog Familiar “You” An Absolutely Inane Occurrence

  I woke at dawn and my eyes took in a pink, strong firmament. Everything was good and round. 0 would come in the evening. I was already well ... no doubt of that. Smiling, I fell asleep.

  The morning bell sounds. I get up, and everything is totally different: through the glass of the ceiling, the walls, everywhere, all over, throughout everything—fog. Insane clouds of it, now heavier, now lighter, now closer, and there’s no more telling earth from sky, everything flying, melting, falling, nothing to grab hold of. There are no more buildings. The glass walls have dissolved in the fog like salt crystals in water. Looking from the pavement you’d see the dark figures of people in the buildings like particles suspended in some delirious, milky solution. They hang down low and then higher, and then still higher, on the tenth floor. And smoke everywhere, like some fire raging in complete silence.

  Precisely at 11:45 I deliberately glanced at the clock so as to grab hold of the figures-the figures, at least, would save me.

  At 11:45, before going, in accordance with the Table of Hours, to my regular physical labor, I ran by my room for a second. Just then the phone rang. The voice was a long, slow needle into my heart.

  “Oh good, you’re at home. I’m glad. Wait for me on the corner. We’ll go ... but you’ll, see where we’re going.”

  “You know very well that I’m going to work right now.”

  “You know very well that you’re going to do as I tell you. Good-bye. See you in two minutes.”

  Two minutes later I was standing on the corner. I had to show her that she was not in charge of me-OneState was. “Do as I tell you.” And she was sure I would-you could hear it in her voice. Well, now I was going to have it out with her for sure.

  Gray yunies woven out of damp fog hastily swam into existence near me, and the next minute dissolved in the fog. I didn’t take my eyes off the clock. I was the second hand, sharp and trembling. Eight minutes passed. Ten. Three minutes to twelve, two ...

  I knew it. I was already late for work. How I hated her. But I had to show her....

  On the corner in the white fog. Blood. Cut with a sharp knife. It was her lips.

  “It looks like I’ve kept you waiting. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You’re already late.”

  How I ... But she was right. It was already too late.

  I looked silently at her lips. All women are lips, nothing but lips. Some are pink, supple, round—a ring, a tender shield against the whole world. And then these: A second ago they didn’t exist, and now suddenly, made by a knife, the sweet blood still dripping ...

  Closer—she leaned against me with her shoulder, and we made one, she blended into me—and I knew: This is how it has to be. I knew this with every nerve, every hair, with the sweet pain of every heartbeat. And what a joy it was to give in to this has to be. A piece of iron probably feels just as glad to submit to the precise, inevitable law and clamp onto a magnet. A stone thrown up in the air hesitates for a moment and then plunges down headlong to the earth. And after the final agony a man is glad to breathe his !ast—and die.

  I remember that I smiled in a vacant way and, for no particular reason, said, “Foggy ... very.”

  “You like the fog?”

  She’d switched to the familiar form of “you”—an ancient, forgotten form ... the “you” a master used to his slave. It was slowly sinking into me, but sharp: Yes, I am a slave, and that is also how it has to be, also good.

  “Yes, good,” I said aloud to myself. And then to her, “I hate the fog. I’m afraid of the fog.”

  “That means you love it. You’re afraid of it because it’s stronger than you, you hate it because you’re afraid of it, you love it because you can’t master it. You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.”

  Yes, that’s right. And that’s why, that’s exactly why I ...

  The two of us walked along as one. Somewhere a long ways off through the fog you could hear the sun singing, everything was supple, pearly, golden, pink, red. The whole world was one immense woman and we were in her very womb, we hadn’t yet been born, we were joyously ripening. And it was clear, unshakably clear, that all of this was for me: the sun, the fog, the pink, the gold—for me.

  I didn’t ask where we were going. It didn’t matter, just so we were going, going, ripening, burgeoning and supple....

  “Well, here we are,” said 1-330, stopping at an entrance. “The person on duty just now happens to be one.... I spoke about him when we were in the Ancient House.”

  Trying not to lose that thing that was ripening, I read the sign from a distance, with my eyes only: “Bureau of Medicine.” I understood everything.

  Glass room full of golden fog. Glass rows of colored bottles and jars. Wires. Bluish sparks in tubes.

  And a little man, extremely thin. He was like something cut out of paper, and no matter which way he turned, he was nothing but profile, sharp and chiseled. His nose, a flashing blade; his lips—scissors.

  I couldn’t hear what I-330 was saying to him. I looked at how she was saying it. And I felt myself smiling blissfully, helplessly. The blades of the scissor-lips flashed and the doctor said, “Yes, yes. I understand. A most dangerous disease—I don’t know one more dangerous.” He gave a laugh. With his thin paper hand he quickly wrote something down and gave it to 1-330. Wrote something else, gave it to me.

  These were notes certifying that we were sick, that we could not show up for work. I was stealing my labor from OneState. I was a thief. I was headed for the Benefactor’s Machine. But I was indifferent to all that, it was far away, as though in some book. I took the sheet of paper without a moment’s hesitation. I knew—my eyes, my lips, my hands, all knew that this is how it had to be.

  In a half-empty garage at the corner we took an aero. As before, 1-330 sat at the wheel, shoved the starter to “Forward,” we lifted off the ground and floated away. And it all followed along after us: the pink-gold fog, the sun, the razor-thin profile of the doctor, suddenly so dear and close. Everything used to revolve around the sun; now I knew it all revolved around me—slowly,
blissfully, squinting its eyes.

  The old woman was at the gates of the Ancient House. Same dear, sunken mouth, with wrinkles like rays. Probably sunken all these days, and only now opened up and smiled.

  “Ah, you scamp! None of this working like everybody else ... but it’s okay. If anything happens, I’ll run and tell you. ...”

  The heavy, squeaking, opaque door closed, and at that instant my heart opened, painfully and wide, still wider-all the way open. Her lips met mine, I drank, drank, tore myself away, silently looked into the eyes opened wide on me ... and again ...

  The half-light of the rooms, blue, saffron-yellow, dark green morocco, the Buddha’s golden smile, gleaming mirrors. And my old dream, so understandable now: everything saturated with the golden-pink juice, and now at any moment it will spill over and splash ...

  It was ripe. Helplessly, like iron and magnet, sweetly yielding to the immutable precise law, I emptied myself into her. There was no pink ticket, no accounting, no OneState, there was no me. There were only the dear, sharp, clenched teeth, there were the golden eyes opened wide on me, and through them I slowly penetrated inside, deeper and deeper. And there was silence. Only in the corner, thousands of miles away, drops were dropping into the basin and I was the universe, and between one drop and another were eras, epochs ...