“But this is madness,” I say. “You against the One State. It is the same as stopping up the muzzle of a gun with your hand thinking it will hold back the gunshot. This is pure madness!”
A smile.
“ ‘Everyone must go crazy—as soon as possible.’ Someone else said that yesterday. Do you remember that? Over there …”
Yes, it is in my records. And, consequently, it was, in fact, real. I say nothing and look at her face where the dark cross is particularly distinct.
“I-330, my sweet … while it isn’t too late … Do you want me to give up everything, forget everything and we can go off together, behind the Wall, to be with those people … whoever they are?”
She shook her head. Through the dark windows of her eyes, there, inside her, I saw that the wood-fire was blazing, the sparks and tongues of the fire ascended and there were piled heaps of dry, pitch-black wood. And it was clear to me: it was too late, my words were already redundant …
She stood up, about to leave. If these are the final days, if they are the final minutes … I grabbed her by the hand.
“No! Just a little longer—for the Benef … for the sake of …”
She slowly lifted my hand up to the light—the hairy hand, which I so hated. I wanted to pull it away, but she held it firmly.
“Your hand … See, you don’t know—and few know this—that various women from here, from our city, have occasionally loved those on the other side. You probably have a few drops of sunny forest blood in you. Maybe that’s why I also … you …”
A pause. How strange: my heart is racing so wildly from this pause, from this emptiness, from this nothingness. And I cry: “Aha! You aren’t leaving yet! You aren’t leaving—until you have told me about them—because you love … them—but I don’t even know who they are or where they come from. Who are they? The half we lost? The H2 and the O, which make up H2O—streams, seas, water-falls, waves, and storms all require that these halves are joined together …”
I distinctly remember each of her movements. I remember how she picked up a glass triangle from my table and the whole time I was speaking she pressed its sharp rib into her cheek. A red mark appeared on her cheek, then ripened to a pinkness and disappeared. And, amazingly, I cannot recall her words—especially the beginning—I only recall various separate images and colors.
I know the beginning was about the Two-Hundred-Year War. And then: red on green grass, on dark mud, on the blue of snow and red puddles that never dried up. Then yellow grass, burnt by the sun and naked, yellow, disheveled people and disheveled dogs and, just nearby, the swollen cadavers of dogs, or maybe of people … This, of course, was behind the walls: because the city was already conquered, and our modern petroleum food was available there.
And from sky to ground there were black, heavy drapes and the drapes were swaying: slow pillars of smoke, above the forests, above the villages. A dull wail: a black, infinite procession was being driven into the city—to be saved by force and taught happiness.
“You knew almost all this?”
“Yes, almost.”
“But what you didn’t know, and few do, is that a small group of them survived and stayed to live there, behind the walls. Naked, they went off into the woods. They learned from the trees, the beasts, the birds, the flowers, the sun. They grew hair all over, but under their fur, they harbored hot, red blood. It’s worse for you: you are overgrown with numbers, numbers crawl all over you, like lice. You all need to be stripped of everything and be driven out naked into the forest. Let it teach you to shiver from fear, from joy, from mad rage, from the cold and to pray to the fire. And we, MEPHI, we want …”
“No, wait—‘MEPHI’? What are the ‘MEPHI’?”
“MEPHI? That is the ancient name for he who … You remember: there, on the rock, the image of the youth … ? Or, no: I’d better explain this to you in your own language, you’ll get it faster … So: there are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One tends toward blissful peace, to happy equilibrium, and the other toward destruction of equilibrium, toward torturously constant movement. Entropy: our, or more accurately, your ancestors, the Christians, worshipped it like it was God. But we, anti-Christians, we …”
And in that moment, there was a barely audible whisper of a knock on the door and into the room jumped that same flat-face with the forehead pulled down over his eyes—the one who had brought me notes from I-330 more than once.
He ran right up to us and stopped, breathing heavily through his nose—like it was an air pump—and he couldn’t get out a word: he must have run with all his might.
“Well? What happened?” I-330 grabbed him by the arm.
“They are coming—here …” the air pump finally panted. “The Guardians … with that man. You know, what’s his … the sort of hunchbacked one …”
“S?”
“Yes, yes! They are not far off—in the building. They’ll be here in a second. Quick, quick!”
“Nonsense! There’s still time …” She laughed with sparks and joyful flame-tongues in her eyes.
This was either ridiculous, reckless bravery or this was something I had yet to understand.
“I-330, for the sake of the Benefactor! Don’t you see—this is …”
“For the sake of the Benefactor?” A sharp triangle, a smile.
“Well, for my sake, then … I beg you.”
“Ah, but I still have one matter to discuss with you … Well, fine, then—tomorrow …”
She nodded cheerfully (yes: cheerfully) at me; the other man also nodded, thrusting himself forward from under his overhanging forehead for a second. And I was alone.
Quickly: to my desk. I unfurled my notes and picked up my pen so that they would find me hard at work for the good of the One State. And suddenly every hair on my head was alive, separate, and stirring: what if they pick up one of these pages and read some of these recent records?
I was sitting at the desk, not moving, and I saw how the walls were shaking, how the pen in my hand was shaking, the letters were fluttering, merging …
Should I hide them? But where? Everything is glass. Should I light it on fire? But they would see me from the corridor and the neighboring rooms. And I couldn’t, anyway; I wouldn’t have the strength to destroy this excruciating and possibly most precious piece of myself.
In the distance, down the corridor: voices and footsteps. I just managed to grab a bunch of pages and slip them under myself. Now I was rooted here to the chair, which was oscillating with its every atom, and, under my feet, the decks were pitching up and down …
Scrunched up into a little ball, huddled under the overhang of my own forehead, somehow, from under my brow, I stole a look: they were walking from room to room, beginning on the right-hand end of the corridor, and coming closer and closer. Some ciphers were sitting, frozen stiff, like me; others were leaping up to greet them and widely flinging open their doors—those lucky ciphers! If only I could also …
“The Benefactor is the most enhanced disinfectant, a necessity for humankind, and it has the effect of preventing peristalsis in the organism of the One State …” I dispensed this complete nonsense with my lurching pen and leaned over my desk lower and lower while a crazy blacksmith hammered in my head. And with my back I heard the doorknob rattle. Wind fanned in and the chair underneath me began to dance …
Only then did I summon the strength to tear myself away from my page and turn toward those who had entered the room. (It is so hard to perform farce … oh, who was it today that said something about farces?) S was first into the room: sinister, silent, his eyes rapidly drilling wells into me, into my chair, into the shuddering pages under my hand. Then, a second later: a few familiar, everyday faces at my threshold. One stood out from the rest with her swelling, pink-brown gills …
I recalled everything that had happened in this room half an hour ago and it was clear to me what she would now do … My whole being was beating and pulsing in the (fortunately, opaque) pa
rt of my body under which I had hidden my records.
U walked up to him, to S, carefully tugged on his sleeve, and softly said: “This is D-503, the Builder of the Integral. You’ve heard of him, perhaps? He is always like this, at his desk … Never sparing himself a moment.”
… I never what? What a miraculous, astounding woman.
S started to slide toward me, leaned over my shoulder, over the table. I shielded what I had written with my elbow, but he yelled severely: “I request that you show me what you have there immediately!”
I gave him the piece of paper, ablaze with shame. He read it through and I saw how a smile crawled from his eye and scampered down his face and, slightly stirring its little tail, settled down somewhere into the right corner of his mouth …
“Somewhat ambiguous, but still … Okay then, you can continue. We won’t bother you any longer.”
He began to shuffle—as if across water—to the door, and with each of his steps, my arms, legs, and fingers gradually returned to me, my soul equally distributed itself throughout my body again, and I breathed …
The last thing: U held back in my room, walked up to me, and leaned to my ear with a whisper: “You’re lucky that I …”
Incomprehensible: what did she mean by that?
In the evening, later, I found out: they had taken three ciphers off with them. However, as with all occurrences, no one would talk about it aloud (the instructive influence of our invisible, ever-present Guardians). Conversations, for the most part, concerned the rapid fall of the barometer and the change of weather.
RECORD TWENTY-NINE
KEYWORDS: Threads on a Face. Sprouts. Antinatural Compression.
It’s strange: the barometric pressure is falling, but there is still no wind, just silence. There is a storm up above that has already begun but it is still inaudible to us. Clouds rush along at full steam. There are only a few of them so far: separate, jagged fragments. It is as if some city up above has been overthrown and there are pieces of wall and tower flying down, growing bigger before your eyes with horrifying speed, drawing ever closer. But there are days to go— days of flying through pale-blue infinity—before they crash down to the ground, to us, down here.
It is silent down here. Fine, mysterious, almost invisible threads in the air. They are brought here each autumn from that other place, behind the Wall. They float along slowly and then you suddenly feel something foreign and invisible on your face. You want to wave it away but no, you can’t, there isn’t any way of getting rid of it …
You feel many more of these threads if you walk near the Green Wall as I did this morning. I-330 indicated that she wanted to see me at the Ancient House, in that “apartment” of ours. [I could already make out, from afar, the opaque and red6] mass of the Ancient House when I heard someone’s small footsteps and frequent breathing behind me. I looked around and saw O, who had chased up to me.
She seemed altogether special somehow, consummately and firmly round. Her arms, the cups of her breasts, and her whole body, which were all so familiar to me, had become round and stretched her unif. The fine material would split open at any moment—into the sun, into the light. An image comes to me: in springtime over there, in the green thickets, new sprouts fight their way through the earth just as stubbornly—to yield branches and leaves and to blossom as quick as they can.
She said nothing for several seconds, her blues shining into my face.
“I saw you then, on the Day of the One Vote.”
“I saw you, too …” And just then I recalled how she stood below me, in the narrow thoroughfare, pressing against the wall, and covering her stomach with her hands. I looked, not meaning to, at the round stomach under her unif.
It was obvious that she noticed this as she stood all roundly pink with her pink smile: “I am so happy—so happy … I am full—you see—full to the brim. These days I walk around and hear nothing that goes on around me. I just listen to my insides, inside myself …”
I said nothing. There was something foreign on my face and it was bothering me—I couldn’t free myself of it in any way. And suddenly, unexpectedly, her blues still shining, she grabbed my hand and I felt her lips on my hand … It was the first time in my life I had experienced it. It was some kind of ancient caress that had been unknown to me until this moment, and the shame and pain it caused was such that I (perhaps, even roughly) snatched my hand away.
“Listen—you’ve gone out of your mind! And so much so that in general you … What are you so happy about? Could you possibly have forgotten about what’s in store for you? It may not be right away but in a month, in two months …”
She was extinguished; all her circles caved in, buckled. And inside me, in my heart, was an unpleasant, pain-inducing compression, associated with the feeling of pity. (The heart is nothing other than an ideal pump. It sucks liquid through—compressions and contractions are utterly absurd in the technical sense—and so it is clear that this “love,” “pity,” and the rest, which are said to bring about these compressions, are essentially absurd, unnatural, and sickly too.)
Silence. The cloudy green glass of the Wall was on the left. The dark-red mass was ahead. And these two colors, appearing together, their equal action and reaction, gave me what seemed to me to be a brilliant idea.
“Wait! I know how to save you. I will deliver you from this business of seeing your own child and then dying. You will be able to feed it—you understand—you will watch it grow in your arms and become round and ripen like fruit.”
She started to shake all over and clutched at me.
“You remember that woman … that day, a while ago, on our walk? Well, see, she is here, now, at the Ancient House. Let’s go see her and I will make sure to arrange it all immediately.”
I could already picture the two of us leading her along the corridors—and then there she’d be, among the flowers, the grasses, the leaves … But she stepped backward, away from me, and the little pink horns of her half-moon trembled and curved downward.
“You mean—that woman?” she said.
“Well, I mean …” I became embarrassed for some reason. “Well, yes: that woman.”
“And you want me to go to her—so that I can ask her—so that I … Don’t you dare mention this again!”
Hunching over, she quickly walked off. Then it was as if she remembered something. She turned around and screamed: “And so what if I die?! It’s none of your business—isn’t it all the same to you?”
Silence. Pieces of blue wall and tower are falling from above and growing bigger before my eyes with horrifying speed—but they have yet hours and, perhaps, days to go, flying through infinity. Invisible threads are slowly floating around and settling on my face and, try as I might, I can’t shake them off, I can’t get rid of them.
I walk slowly to the Ancient House. With an absurd, torturous compression in my heart …
RECORD THIRTY
KEYWORDS: The Final Number. Galileo’s Mistake. Wouldn’t It Be Better?
Here is my conversation with I-330 yesterday in the Ancient House (amid the multicolored noise that stifles the logical progress of thought: the red, the green, the bronze-yellow, the white, the orange colors … All the while, under the smile of the snub-nosed ancient poet, frozen in marble).
I am reproducing this conversation letter for letter because it seems to me that it has enormous, critical meaning for the fate of the One State and more: for the fate of the universe. And also because here, you, my unknown readers, may find some justification for my …
I-330, immediately, without any preparation, dumped everything on me: “I know that the Integral’s first test flight is the day after tomorrow. On that day—we will take it into our own hands.”
“What? The day after tomorrow?”
“Yes. Sit down, stay calm. We can’t afford to lose a minute. Among the hundreds who were taken at random by the Guardians yesterday, there were twelve MEPHI. And if we let two or three days go by then they will
be killed.”
I said nothing.
“They will be sending electrical engineers, mechanics, doctors, and meteorologists to you to observe the progress of the test. And on the dot of twelve—remember that—when they ring the dinner bell and everyone goes through to the cafeteria, we will stay behind in the corridor, lock everyone in the cafeteria—and the Integral is ours … You understand that this is necessary—at all costs. The Integral will be a weapon in our hands, which will help everything immediately, quickly, painlessly … Their aeros … ha! They will simply be an insignificant swarm of midges against a hawk. And then: if it is unavoidable, we might have to direct the barrels of the motors downward and they will have only one thing left to do …”
I leapt up.
“This is pointless! This is ridiculous! Isn’t it clear to you yet: you are starting what is called—a revolution!”
“Yes, a revolution! Why is it ridiculous?”
“Ridiculous—because revolutions aren’t possible. Because our—I am talking, not you—our revolution was the last. And there cannot be any more revolutions … Everyone knows that …”
A mocking, sharp triangle of eyebrows: “My sweet, you are a mathematician. More than that, you are a philosopher of mathematics. So then, tell me: what is the final number?”
“What is that? I … I don’t understand: which final number?”
“Well—the last, the highest, the biggest …”
“But, I-330—that is ridiculous. The number of numbers is infinite; which final one do you want?”
“Well, which final revolution do you want then? There isn’t a final one. Revolutions are infinite. Final things are for children because infinity scares children and it is important that children sleep peacefully at night …”
“But what is the point—whatever is the point in all this—for the Benefactor’s sake? What can the point be if everyone is already happy?”