Through the left-hand wall I can see: a woman hurriedly unbuttons her unif in front of the mirrored door on the closet. And for a second, in dimness: eyes, lips, two sharp pink knots. Then the blinds fall, and instantaneously everything is like it was yesterday, and I don’t know what this “one last thing” means and I don’t want to think about it, I don’t want to! I want only one thing: I-330. I want her to be with me, each minute, every minute, alone with me. And what I wrote just now about the One Vote is all irrelevant, not what I meant, and I want to cross it all out, tear it up, and throw it out. Because I know (call it blasphemy): the only holiday is when I am with her, when she is near me, side by side. Without her, tomorrow’s sun will only be a little tin circle and the sky will be tin, painted blue, and I myself will be …
I grab the telephone receiver: “I-330, is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me. How late is it?”
“Is it too late? I wanted to ask you … I want you to be with me tomorrow. My sweet …”
I say “my sweet” very quietly. And for some reason a moment this morning at the hangar flashed through my mind: for a joke they had put a timepiece under the hundred-ton hammer. There was a swing, a gust of wind in my face, and then: a hundred-ton-tender touch of the delicate timepiece.
A pause. It seemed to me that I could hear there—in I-330’s room—someone whispering. Then her voice: “No, I can’t. You’ll see: I would have … No, I can’t. Why? Tomorrow you’ll see.”
NIGHT
RECORD TWENTY-FIVE
KEYWORDS: Descent from the Skies. The Greatest Catastrophe in History. An End to the Known.
Before the proceedings began, when everybody stood up and the solemn, slow canopy of the Hymn, the hundreds of pipes of the Music Factory and the millions of human voices swayed above our heads … I forgot everything for a moment. I forgot the alarming thing I-330 had said about today’s holiday; I forgot, seemingly, about her altogether. I was now that same little boy that once cried about the tiny and barely noticeable spot on his unif. Even if no one here sees the indelible black spots on me now, I know that the criminal that I am has no place among these wide-open, honest faces. Ah, if only I’d stand up right now and choke and scream out everything about myself. Then there would be an end to it—bring it on! Just for one second to feel clean and mindless, like this baby-blue sky.
All eyes were raised up high: to the morning blueness, chaste, not yet dried of its nighttime tears. There, above, was a dot, barely visible, sometimes dark, sometimes clothed in rays of light. It was Him, descending from the skies to us, the new Jehovah on his aero, as wise and kind and cruel as the Jehovah of the Ancients. He was getting closer with every minute and He could probably see us already: a million hearts offered up to Him on high. And I joined Him mentally, to see all this from above: the concentric circles of the tribunal contoured with fine, light-blue dotted lines like the circles of a cobweb strewn with microscopic suns (our shining badges); and the white, wise Spider would now sit at the center of it—the Benefactor, clad in white—who wisely binds us by our hands and feet with His benefactorly threads of happiness.
His magnificent descent from the skies was complete. The brass of the Hymn fell silent, everyone sat down and right then I understood: the whole delicate cobweb is drawn tight and quivering, and on the verge of ripping should anything unlikely happen …
Rising slightly, I looked around and my glance was met by affectionate, anxious eyes, all skipping from face to face. One cipher raised a hand and signaled to another with a hardly perceptible wiggle of his fingers. Then came a finger signal reply. And another … I understood: they were the Guardians. I understood: they are anxious about something, the cobweb is drawn tight, quivering. And inside me, like a radio receiver tuned to the same frequency, there was a corresponding quiver.
A poet was reading a pre-election ode on the stage but I couldn’t hear a word of it—only the rhythmical swinging of the hexametric pendulum, which was bringing us ever closer to the appointed hour. And I was feverishly flicking through the rows of faces, one after the other—like pages—but I still couldn’t see the one I was specifically looking for; and I must find it as quickly as possible because in a moment the pendulum would tick again and then—
It’s him. Of course. Pink wing-ears rush along by the stage and a running body, reflected as the dark, twice-bent loops of the letter “S,” is gliding across the glistening glass; he was heading somewhere through the intricate passages between the tribunals.
S and I-330: there is some kind of thread (between them, I mean. There has always been some kind of thread between them, to my mind; I still don’t know what kind but one day I will untangle it). I snagged him with my eyes; he was a little ball rolling away with a thread trailing behind him. Then he stopped, he …
Like a strike of high-voltage lightning: I was pierced and tied up in a knot. In our row, all of forty degrees away from me, S had stopped and bent over. I saw I-330, and, next to her, the repulsive, African-lipped, and smirking R-13.
My first thought was to fling myself over there and scream at her: “Why are you with him today?! Why didn’t you want to be with me?!” But my hands and feet were strongly entangled in the invisible, beneficial cobweb; clenching my teeth, I sat like I was made of iron, not taking my eyes off her. Even now I can feel the sharp physical pain in my heart. I remember thinking to myself: if there can be physical pain from a non-physical cause, then it is clear that …
A conclusion, unfortunately, eluded me. I seem to recall that something about a “soul” flashed past and some senseless ancient phrase flew by: “a tortured soul.” And I froze: the hexameter had fallen silent. Something was starting to happen … what was it?
The customary five-minute pre-election break. The customary pre-election silence. But this wasn’t the usual prayerly, reverential silence: this was like ancient times, before the invention of the Accumulator Tower, when the untamed sky still raged with “thunderstorms.” This was like the moment before an ancient thunder-storm.
The air was transparent cast-iron. It made you feel like you had to breathe with your mouth stretched wide open. My hearing, strained to a painful extent, was recording: a mouse-gnawing, uneasy whisper somewhere behind me. Not raising my eyes, I can still see those two—I-330 and R—next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, and those strange, shaggy hands that I hate so much are trembling on my knees …
Everyone held the timepieces of their badges in their hands. One. Two. Three … five minutes … and from the stage, a slow, cast-iron voice: “I ask those who vote ‘Yes’ to please raise your hands.”
If only I could look him straight in the eye, like before, with devotion: “Here I am, my whole self. My whole self! Take me!” But I couldn’t now summon the courage. With effort, as if all my joints had rusted, I raised my hand.
The rustling of millions of hands. Someone’s stifled “Ah!” And I could feel that something had already started and it was falling headlong, but I didn’t understand what it was, and I didn’t have the strength to—I didn’t dare look …
“Who says ‘No’?”
This was always the most magnificent moment of the holiday: everyone continues to sit, immobile, joyfully bowing their heads to the beneficial yoke of the Cipher of ciphers. But now, to my horror, I heard another rustling: a very light sound, like a sigh, but more audible than the brass pipes of the Hymn earlier. It’s like the last sigh of a person’s life—barely audible—and yet everyone’s faces blanch on hearing it, and cold drops appear on their foreheads …
I raised my eyes and …
In the hundredth part of a second, the hairspring of a clock, I saw: thousands of hands wave up—“No”—and fall again. I saw I-330’s pale face, marked with a cross and her raised hand. My vision darkened.
Another hairspring; a pause; quiet; a pulse. Then—as though signaled by some sort of crazy conductor—the whole tribune gave out a crackle, screams. A whirlwind of soaring unifs on the run, the figures
of the Guardians rushing about in panic, someone’s heels in the air in front of my very eyes, and, next to the heels, someone’s wide-open mouth, bellowing an inaudible scream. For some reason, this cut into me more sharply than anything else: thousands of soundlessly howling mouths, as though on a monstrous movie screen.
And, also on the screen, for a second, somewhere below me, I saw the whitened lips of O: she stood, pressed against the wall of a passage, shielding her stomach with arms folded in a cross. And then she was gone—washed away—or I just forgot about her, because …
This is not on a screen anymore—it is inside me myself, inside my squeezed heart, in my throbbing temples. Above my head to the left, R-13 suddenly leapt onto a bench: sputtering, red, and mad. In his arms was a pale I-330, with her unif ripped from shoulder to breast—blood on white. She clung tightly to his neck, and with gigantic bounds from bench to bench—repulsive and deft, like a gorilla—he carried her to the top.
It was like a fire incident in ancient times—everything became crimson—and there was only one thing to do: jump and catch up with them. I can’t myself explain now where I got the strength for it, but I thrashed through the crowd like a battering ram—over someone’s shoulder—over benches—and I was nearly there—and then I grabbed R by the collar: “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare, you … Get!” (Thankfully, my voice wasn’t audible, since everyone was yelling for themselves, everyone was running.)
“Who? What is all this? What?” R turned, trembling, his lips spattering—he probably thought that he had been grabbed by one of the Guardians.
“What? Right now— You can’t, I won’t allow it! Let her go— right now!”
But he only smacked his lips angrily, shook his head, and ran on further. And then I—I am extremely ashamed of recording this but I think I must nonetheless, I must, I must record everything, so that you, my unknown readers, can learn the history of my sickness in its entirety—then I swung and hit him on the head. You hear that? I hit him! I remember it distinctly. And I also remember: a feeling of some sort of liberation, a lightness in my whole body from having delivered this blow.
I-330 quickly crawled down out of his arms.
“Go away!” she screamed at R. “Can’t you see? He … Go away, R, go away!”
R, baring white, African teeth, spattered some word into my face, dived off, and disappeared. And I picked I-330 up into my arms, tightly squeezing her to me, and bolted.
The heart inside me was beating, it was enormous, and such a tempestuous, hot—such a joyful wave was unleashed with each beat. And so what if something had been smashed into smithereens—it doesn’t matter! Just to carry her like this, carry her, carry her …
EVENING. 22:00
It is with difficulty that I hold this pen in my hand: such is the immense fatigue after all the head-spinning events of this morning. Can it be true that the safeguarding, age-old walls of the One State have caved in? Can it be true that we are again shelterless in the savage state of freedom—like our distant predecessors? Can it be true that there is no Benefactor? “No” … on the Day of the One Vote … “No”? I am ashamed, pained, and scared for them. But who are “they”? And who am I: “they” or “we”? How will I know?
So: there she was, sitting on a bench, being warmed by the sun on the very highest tribunal, to which she had been carried. From her right shoulder down, the beginning of a miraculous, incalculable curve is exposed; and there was the finest, little red snake of blood. It was as though she didn’t notice the blood or her exposed breast … no, it was more than that: she saw it all but this was exactly what she needed right now—if her unif had been buttoned up, she would have ripped it open herself, she would have …
“And tomorrow …” She is breathing greedily through gritted, sparkling, sharp teeth. “… And tomorrow—who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don’t know and no one knows—it’s all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.”
Down below, there is frothing, rushing, screaming. But all that is far away, and getting farther away because she is looking at me, she is slowly pulling me into her through the narrow, golden windows of her pupils. She does this for a long time, saying nothing. And it reminds me for some reason of that time when I looked through the Green Wall and I saw someone’s strange, yellow pupils, and how birds were hovering above the Wall (or was that on a separate occasion?).
“Listen: if nothing happens tomorrow, nothing in particular— I will take you back there—you understand?”
No, I don’t understand. But I am nodding my head, saying nothing. I have dissolved, I am infinitely small, I am a dot …
When all is said and done, this dotty state has its logic (these days): there are more uncertainties in a dot than anything else; it only takes a push or a jiggle for it to turn into thousands of different crooked lines, hundreds of shapes.
I am scared of being jiggled: what will I turn into? And I’m thinking that everyone is the same as me, scared of the smallest movement. Here, now, as I write this, everyone is sitting, taking refuge in their glass cages and waiting for something. In the corridor you can’t hear the usual buzzing of the elevator at this hour, you can’t hear the laughter, the footsteps. Occasionally I see: people walking along the corridors on their tiptoes, in twos, looking around, whispering …
What will tomorrow bring? What will I turn into tomorrow?
RECORD TWENTY-SIX
KEYWORDS: The World Exists. A Rash. 105 Degrees.
Morning. Through the ceiling: the sky has its usual strong, round, and red-cheeked appearance. I think I would have been less surprised if I had seen some unusual quadrilateral sun overhead, people in multicolored clothing made of bestial wool, and opaque stone walls. Could it be that the world—our world—still exists? Or is this just inertia, the generator is turned off but the gears are still rumbling and spinning: two rotations, three rotations, and it will freeze on the fourth …
Are you familiar with this strange condition? It is night and you have fallen asleep and then you open your eyes in the blackness and suddenly: you have become lost and you start to feel around quickly, quickly looking for something familiar and solid—the wall, the lamp, the chair. I felt around just like that in the State Gazette —quickly, quickly—and here is what I found:
YESTERDAY, THE LONG AND IMPATIENTLY AWAITED DAY OF THE ONE VOTE TOOK PLACE. FOR THE 48TH TIME THE BENEFACTOR, WHO HAS PROVEN HIS UNSHAKABLE WISDOM MANY TIMES OVER, WAS UNANIMOUSLY CHOSEN. THE CELEBRATION WAS CLOUDED BY A SLIGHT
DISTURBANCE WROUGHT BY THE ENEMIES OF HAPPINESS, WHICH, NATURALLY, DEPRIVES THEM OF THE RIGHT TO BECOME BRICKS IN THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE ONE STATE, RENEWED YESTERDAY. IT IS CLEAR TO EACH OF US THAT TAKING THEIR VOICES INTO ACCOUNT WOULD BE AS RIDICULOUS AS TAKING THE ACCIDENTAL COUGHS OF SICK PEOPLE IN A CONCERT AUDIENCE AS A PART OF A MAJESTIC, HEROIC SYMPHONY …
Oh, the wisdom of it! Can it be, after all, in spite of everything, that we are saved? Could there be any objections to this most crystalline syllogism?
And then, these two lines:
TODAY AT 12:00 THE JOINT SESSION OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE BUREAU, THE BUREAU OF MEDICINE, AND THE BUREAU OF GUARDIANS WILL TAKE PLACE. IN THE COMING DAYS AN IMPORTANT STATE ACT WILL BE EFFECTED.
Yes, the walls are still standing—here they are—I can feel them with my hands. And the strange feeling that I am lost, that I don’t know where I am, that I have lost my way, has already gone, and it’s not half-surprising that I see a blue sky, a round sun, and everyone, as usual, going off to work.
I walked along the avenue especially purposefully and loudly, and it seemed to me that everyone else was doing the same. But here at the crossroads, I turn the corner and I see: everyone is sort of strangely skirting around a space at the corner of the building— as though some sort of pipe had burst in the wall and cold water was spraying everywhere, making it impossible to walk along the sidewalk.
Five, ten paces more and I was a
lso drenched with the cold water, rocked and knocked off the sidewalk … On the wall, approximately two yards up, written on a square piece of paper, the incomprehensible poison-green letters:
MEPHI
And underneath it, an S-like curved spine and wing-ears transparently fluttering in rage or anxiety. He was stretching his right hand up, and his left arm, behind him, was helpless like a hurt, broken wing. He was jumping up to tear down the piece of paper but couldn’t as he was just not close enough.
Everyone who was passing by probably had the same thought: “If I … me, one of many … go up and help him … won’t he think that I am guilty of something and that is the reason I want to … ?”
I admit: I had that very same thought. But I remembered how many times he had been my real guardian angel, how many times he had saved me and so I dared to go up, reach up my arm, and tear down the piece of paper.
S turned around and quickly-quickly his gimlets were into me, to my depths, where he found something. Then he raised his left eyebrow and with this eyebrow, nodded at the wall, where “MEPHI” had hung. And the tail of his smile flashed at me—it was actually rather cheerful, to my surprise. But then again, what’s there to be surprised about anymore? Given the choice of the agonizingly slow-rising temperature of the incubation of an illness or a rash with a 104-degree fever, a doctor will always prefer the latter: at least the illness is clearly present. The “MEPHI,” which broke out on the wall today, is a rash. I can understand this smile …5