“Wait,” Peretz said. “Wait. Randy, you say they lie there . . . What else do they do? They can’t just lie there and that’s all.” Maybe they live underwater and swim to the surface, like we go out onto a balcony from smoke-filled rooms into the moonlit night, closing our eyes and letting the cool air wash over our faces—then maybe they just lie there. Just lie there, and that’s all. Relaxing. And talking languidly and smiling at each other . . .
“Don’t argue with me,” Randy said, staring at Bootlicherson. “Have you ever been in the forest? Never been in the forest, and you run your mouth.”
“That’s silly,” Bootlicherson said. “What would I do in your forest? I have a pass for your forest. Whereas you, Randall, have no pass. Please show me your pass, Randall.”
“I never saw these mermaids myself,” Randy repeated, addressing Peretz. “But I do believe in them. Because the boys talk about them. Even Candide talked about them. And Candide, now, he knew everything about the forest. He walked through the forest like he was going on a date—he knew everything in there by feel. And he died in there, in his forest.”
“If he did die,” Bootlicherson said meaningfully.
“No ifs about it. A man takes off in a helicopter, and there’s no word for three years. There was an obituary in the paper, there was a wake—what else do you want? Candide got smashed up, of course.”
“We know too little,” Bootlicherson said, “to assert anything with any degree of certainty.”
Randy spat and went up to the counter to get another bottle of buttermilk. Bootlicherson bent down to Peretz’s ear and, glancing around cautiously, whispered, “You should be aware that there were classified instructions regarding Candide. I consider it my prerogative to inform you, since you’re an outsider . . .”
“What instructions?”
“That he’s to be presumed alive,” Bootlicherson said in an audible whisper, and moved away. “Nice, fresh buttermilk today,” he pronounced loudly.
The cafeteria filled with noise. People who were done with breakfast were getting up, moving their chairs out of the way, and heading to the exit; they spoke loudly, lit cigarettes, and threw the matches onto the floor. Bootlicherson kept looking around balefully, and addressed everyone who walked past with “What odd behavior, ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, we’re having a conversation . . .”
When Randy returned with a bottle, Peretz said, “Did the garage foreman actually say that he wouldn’t let me use a car? He was probably just kidding?”
“Why would he be kidding? He’s very fond of you, Signor Peretz. He’ll miss you, and what’s in it for him? Say he does let you go, what good does that do him? He wasn’t kidding.”
Peretz bit his lip. “Then how can I leave? There’s nothing left for me to do here. And my visa is ending. And then I’m simply ready to leave.”
“You know,” said Randy, “get written up three times and you’ll be out on your ass in no time. They’ll get you a special bus, wake the driver up in the middle of the night—you won’t even have time to pack your stuff. Know how the boys do it? First time they get written up, they get demoted. Second time they get written up, they get sent into the forest for their sins. And the third time they get written up—good-bye and good riddance. Say I wanted to quit, I’d down half a bottle and punch this guy in the face.” He pointed to Bootlicherson. “Now they take my bonuses away and I’m driving a manure truck. Then I do what? I down another half a bottle, and punch him in the face again. Then they take me off the manure truck and send me to the biological research station to chase microbes. But I don’t go to the biological research station, I down another half a bottle and punch him for the third time. And that’s it for me. I’m fired for hooliganism and I get sent off within twenty-four hours.”
Bootlicherson wagged a finger at Randy. “You’re spreading misinformation, Randall, you’re spreading misinformation. First of all, there has to be at least a month between the incidents, otherwise all of the aforementioned behavior will be treated as a single episode, and the offender will simply be incarcerated, with no case being initiated within the Administration. Second of all, after the second offense, the guilty party would immediately get sent into the forest accompanied by a guard, so they would be denied the opportunity to commit the third offense at their discretion. Don’t listen to him, Peretz, he doesn’t understand these things.”
Randy drank some buttermilk, grimaced and grunted. “That’s true,” he admitted. “I screwed up . . . It wouldn’t do. My mistake, Signor Peretz.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Peretz said sadly. “I can’t assault a man for no reason, anyway.”
“Well, you don’t have to, errr . . . assault him,” said Randy. “You could, say, give him a light kick in the, err . . . rear. Or just shove him.”
“No, I can’t do it,” Peretz said.
“That’s too bad,” said Randy. “Then you’re in trouble, Signor Peretz. Here’s what we’ll do. Come to the garage tomorrow morning around seven, get into my cab, and wait for me. I’ll drive you.”
“Really?” Peretz cheered up.
“Sure thing. I gotta haul scrap metal to the Mainland tomorrow. We’ll go together.”
Suddenly someone in the corner shrieked in a horrible voice, “Look what you’ve done! You’ve spilled my soup!”
“People should be easy to understand,” said Bootlicherson. “I can’t figure out why you want to leave, Peretz. No one wants to leave but you.”
“That’s how it always is with me,” Peretz said. “I always do things backwards. And anyway, why should people be easy to understand?”
“People should be nondrinkers,” Randy announced, belching. “Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t drink,” Bootlicherson said. “And the reason I don’t drink is very easy to understand: I have liver disease. So you can’t trap me, Randall.”
“The most surprising thing in the forest,” said Randy, “is the swamps. They are hot, OK? I can’t stand them. Just can’t get used to them. I skid off the road, get stuck, then I sit there in my cab and can’t get out. It’s like hot cabbage soup. Steam comes off it, and it smells like cabbage soup, I’ve even tried it, but it didn’t taste good—maybe it wasn’t salty enough. No, people don’t belong in the forest. And what the hell is the point, anyway? They keep going through machines like they’re throwing them in a lake—they sink, they get more, they sink, they get more . . .”
A wealth of fragrant greenery. A wealth of colors, a wealth of smells. A wealth of life. And it’s all alien. It’s not completely unfamiliar, it’s recognizable, but it’s genuinely alien. That’s probably the most difficult thing to accept—that it manages to be alien and familiar at the same time. That it’s a product of our world, the flesh of our flesh, but that it has cut ties with us and doesn’t want to know us. That’s how a Homo erectus would probably feel about us, his descendants—bitter and afraid.
“When the order comes,” Bootlicherson proclaimed, “we won’t send in your crappy bulldozers and ATVs, we’ll send in something real, and in two months, we’ll turn it all into, um . . . a smooth, flat paved lot.”
“You would,” Randy said. “You’d turn your own dear dad into a paved lot if you had half a chance. To keep things simple.”
There was a loud buzzing noise. Windows rattled in their frames, and at the same time, an earsplitting bell rang above the door, the lights on the wall began to flicker, and a large neon sign saying IT’S TIME TO GO! lit up above the counter. Bootlicherson rose hurriedly, reset his watch, and ran off without saying a word.
“Well, I’m off,” Peretz said. “Time to work.”
“It sure is,” Randy agreed. “High time.” He took off his jacket, carefully rolled it up, pushed the chairs together, and lay down, putting the jacket under his head.
“So tomorrow morning at seven, then?” Peretz said.
“What?” Randy asked sleepily.
“I’ll come by tomorrow morning at seven.”
/> “Come by where?” Randy asked, tossing and turning on the chairs. “Damn things slide apart,” he muttered. “How many times do I have to tell them: get a couch . . .”
“To the garage,” Peretz said. “To your truck.”
“Ohhh . . . Sure, sure, come along, we’ll see. These things are difficult.” He pulled his knees up, crossed his arms over his chest and stuck his hands into his armpits, and began to breathe heavily. His arms were hairy, and there were tattoos visible beneath the hair. The writing said THAT WHICH DESTROYS US and NEVER LOOK BACK. Peretz walked toward the exit.
He used a wooden plank to cross a huge puddle behind the building, went around the mound of empty tin cans, squeezed through a crack in the wooden fence, and went into the Administration building through the service entrance. The hallways were cold and dark, and the place smelled of tobacco, dust, and old paper. There was no one around, and he couldn’t hear anything through the faux leather upholstered doors. Peretz walked up the narrow stairs to the second floor, holding on to the dingy walls since there was no railing, and walked up to a door beneath a flashing WASH YOUR HANDS BEFORE WORK sign. The door was adorned with a big black M. Peretz pushed the door open and felt a certain astonishment upon finding himself in his office. The office wasn’t actually his, of course—it belonged to Kim, the head of the Scientific Guard—but that was the office in which Peretz had a desk, and this desk now stood along the tiled wall on one side of the door. As usual, half of the desk was occupied by the Mercedes arithmometer, which was still beneath its cover. Meanwhile, Kim’s desk now stood by the large, clean window, and Kim himself was already working: he was sitting, hunched over, and examining a slide rule.
“I wanted to wash my hands,” Peretz said, bewildered.
“Wash away, wash away,” Kim said, nodding. “There’s the sink. This will be very convenient. Now everyone will come visit us.”
Peretz went up to the sink and began to wash his hands. He washed them with cold and hot water, two types of soap, and a special grease-absorbing paste; he scrubbed them with a loofah and with an assortment of brushes of varying stiffness. Then he turned on the electric dryer and held his damp pink hands in the whistling stream of hot air.
“At four in the morning, they announced that we were being transferred to the second floor,” Kim said. “And where have you been? With Alevtina?”
“No, I was at the precipice,” said Peretz, sitting down at his desk.
The door opened, and Proconsul rapidly walked into the room, gave a friendly wave of his suitcase, and disappeared behind the curtain. They heard the creak of the stall door and the click of the bolt. Peretz took the cover off the arithmometer, sat motionless for a moment, then walked over to the window and threw it open.
You couldn’t see the forest from here, but the forest was present. It was always present, although you could only see it from the cliff. If you were anywhere else in the Administration, it was obscured by something. It was obscured by the cream-colored buildings of the engineering workshops, and by the four-story garage that housed employees’ personal vehicles. It was obscured by the stockyards of the subsidiary farms, and by the clothes hanging by the laundromat, whose dryer was constantly broken. It was obscured by the park with its flower beds and pavilions, its Ferris wheel, and its alabaster statues of bathers, which were now completely covered in scribbled graffiti. It was obscured by the villas with their ivy-covered porches and their television antennae. And from here, a window on the second floor, you couldn’t see the forest because of the brick wall—as yet unfinished, but already quite tall—that was being constructed around the flat one-story building of the Penetration Through Engineering Team. You could only see the forest from the cliff, but you could only defecate on the forest from the cliff, too.
But even a person who had never in his life seen the forest, who hadn’t heard of the forest, hadn’t thought about the forest, hadn’t been afraid of it, and hadn’t fantasized about it—even a person like that could easily guess that it existed, simply because of the existence of the Administration. I, for one, have long thought about the forest, argued about the forest, and seen it in my dreams, but I never even suspected that it actually existed. And I was convinced of its existence not when I first set foot on the cliff but when I read the sign by the door: THE ADMINISTRATION FOR FOREST AFFAIRS. I was standing in front of this sign, suitcase in hand, dusty and parched after the long trip, reading and rereading it and feeling weak in the knees, because I now knew the forest existed, and therefore, everything I had hitherto thought about it was nothing but a figment of a weak imagination, a pale and feeble lie. The forest existed, and this enormous, gloomy building concerned itself with its fate . . .
“Kim,” said Peretz, “will I really never get into the forest? Because I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“And you actually want to get in there?” Kim asked distractedly.
Hot green swamps, timid, nervous trees, mermaids lying on the surface of the water in the moonlight, relaxing after their mysterious activities in the depths, cautious inscrutable natives, empty villages . . . “I don’t know,” said Peretz.
“You shouldn’t be allowed in there, Perry,” Kim said. “Only people who’ve never thought about the forest should be allowed in there. People who’ve never given a damn about it. Whereas you care about it too much. The forest is dangerous for you, because it will fool you.”
“Maybe,” Peretz said. “But I did only come here to see it.”
“Why do you want the bitter truth?” said Kim. “What are you going to do with it? And what are you going to do in the forest? Weep for a dream that has become fate? Pray for everything to be different? Or, even worse, start changing what there is into what there should be?”
“So why did I come here, then?”
“To convince yourself. Do you really not realize how important that is—convincing yourself? Others come for other reasons. To measure the number of cubic meters of firewood in the forest. Or to discover the bacteria of life. Or to write a thesis. Or to get a pass—not to go in the forest with, but just in case: it might come in handy one day, and not everybody has one. And the ultimate conceit is to shape the forest into a magnificent park, like a sculptor shapes a marble block into a statue. And then to keep pruning it. Year after year. So it doesn’t become a forest again.”
“I need to leave,” Peretz said. “There’s nothing for me here. Somebody needs to leave, either me or all of you.”
“Let’s do some multiplication,” Kim said, and Peretz sat down at his desk, found a jury-rigged power outlet, and plugged in the arithmometer. “Seven hundred ninety-three five hundred twenty-two by two hundred sixty-six zero eleven . . .”
The arithmometer started rattling and jerking. Peretz waited until it calmed down, then haltingly read out the answer.
Kim called out more numbers and Peretz entered them in, pressing the multiplication and division keys, adding, subtracting, and taking roots. Everything went on as usual.
“Twelve by ten,” Kim said. “Multiply.”
“One zero zero seven,” Peretz recited mechanically, then he caught himself and said, “Wait a minute, it’s wrong. It should be one twenty.”
“I know, I know,” Kim said impatiently. “One zero zero seven,” he repeated. “And now take the square root of ten zero seven.”
“Just a moment,” Peretz said.
The bolt behind the curtain clicked again, and Proconsul emerged looking pink, fresh, and satisfied. He started to wash his hands, simultaneously singing “Ave Maria” in a pleasant voice. Then he declared, “What a marvel the forest is, my friends! And how criminally little time we spend talking and writing about it! And yet it is worthy of being written about. It elevates us, it awakens our loftiest sentiments. It encourages progress. It is like a symbol of progress itself. And yet we still cannot curtail the spread of inappropriate stories, rumors, and jokes. We’re conducting practically no pro-forest propaganda. People say and think God knows what about
the forest.”
“Seven eighty-five multiplied by four thirty-two,” Kim said.
Proconsul raised his voice. His voice was loud and resonant—the arithmometer became inaudible. “‘Can’t see the forest for the trees.’ ‘A babe in the woods.’ ‘Our neck of the woods.’ That is what we must struggle against! That is what we must eradicate. Take you, Monsieur Peretz, why haven’t you joined the struggle? You could make a detailed and goal-oriented presentation about the forest to our club, but you haven’t. I’ve been watching you and waiting for a long time, to no avail. What’s the issue?”
“But I’ve never been in there,” Peretz said.
“Doesn’t matter. I’ve never been in there either, but I gave a lecture, and judging by the response I got, it was an extremely useful lecture. What matters is not whether you’ve been in the forest—what matters is peeling away the layers of mysticism and superstition from the facts, laying bare the crux of the matter by tearing off the garments in which it had been clad by the philistines and the opportunists.”
“Two times eight divided by forty-nine minus seven times seven,” said Kim.
The arithmometer started working. Proconsul raised his voice again. “I did this as a philosopher by training, and you could do it as a linguist by training. I’ll suggest some propositions, and you can expand on them in the context of the latest advances in linguistics . . . By the way, what was the subject of your thesis?”
“It was ‘The Characteristics of the Style and Rhythm of Female Prose in the Late Heian Period,’ based on Makura no sōshi,” Peretz said. “I’m afraid that—”
“Fantastic! That’s just what we need. And make sure to emphasize that there are no swamps or bogs, only magnificent mud baths; there are no jumping trees, only the products of a highly advanced science; there are no natives or savages, only an ancient civilization of men, proud and free, with noble ideas, modest yet mighty. And please, no mermaids! No lilac fog, no purple prose—excuse the bad pun . . . This will be fantastic, Mr. Peretz, this will be wonderful. And I’m very glad you know the forest, you can share your personal impressions. My lecture was also good, but I’m afraid it was a little theoretical. I used the meeting minutes as my primary source. But you, as a forest scholar—”