Twenty minutes later

On the plane surface of the paper, in the two-dimensional world, these lines are next to one another. But in a different world they… I am losing my sense of figures: twenty minutes may be two hundred or two hundred thousand. And it seems so strange to write down in calm, measured, carefully chosen words what has occurred just now between me and R. It is like sitting down in an armchair by your own bedside, legs crossed, and watching curiously how you yourself are writhing in the bed.

When R-13 entered, I was perfectly calm and normal. I spoke with sincere admiration of how splendidly he had succeeded in versifying the sentence, and told him that his trochees had been the most effective instrument of all in crushing and destroying that madman.

“I would even say—if I were asked to draw up a schematic blueprint of the Benefactor’s Machine, I would somehow, somehow find a way of incorporating your verses into the drawing,” I concluded.

But suddenly I noticed R’s eyes turn lusterless, his lips turn gray.

“What is it?”

“What, what! Oh… Oh, I’m simply tired of it Everyone around talks of nothing but the sentence. I don’t want to hear about it any more. I just don’t want to!”

He frowned and rubbed the back of his head-that little box of his with its strange baggage that I did not understand. A pause. And then he found something in the box, pulled it out, opened it. His eyes glossed over with laughter as he jumped up.

“But for your Integral, I am composing… That will be… Oh, yes, that will be something!”

It was again the old R: thick, sputtering lips, spraying saliva, and a fountain of words. “You see” (“s”—a spray) “…that ancient legend about paradise… Why, it’s about us, about today. Yes! Just think. Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative. Those idiots chose freedom, and what came of it? Of course, for ages afterward they longed for the chains. The chains—you understand? That’s what world sorrow was about For ages! And only we have found the way of restoring happiness… No, wait listen further! The ancient God and we—side by side, at the same table. Yes! We have helped God ultimately to conquer the devil—for it was he who had tempted men to break the ban and get a taste of ruinous freedom, he, the evil serpent. And we, we’ve brought down our boot over his little head, and—cr-runch! Now everything is fine—we have paradise again. Again we are as innocent and simple-hearted as Adam and Eve. No more of that confusion about good and evil. Everything is simple—heavenly, childishly simple. The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians—all this is good, all this is sublime, magnificent, noble, elevated, crystally pure. Because it protects our unfreedom—that is, our happiness. The ancients would begin to talk and think and break their heads—ethical, unethical… Well, then. In short, what about such a paradisiac poem, eh? And, of course, in the most serious tone… You understand? Quite something, eh?”

Understand? It was simple enough. I remember thinking: such an absurd, asymmetrical face, yet such a dear, correct mind. This is why he is so close to me, the real me (I still consider my old self the true one; all of this today is, of course, only a sickness).

R evidently read these thoughts on my face. He put his arm around my shoulders and roared with laughter.

“Ah, you… Adam! Yes, incidentally, about Eve…

He fumbled in his pocket, took out a notebook, and turned the pages. “The day after tomorrow… no, in two days, O has a pink coupon to visit you. How do you feel about it? As before? Do you want her to…”

“Of course, naturally.”

“I’ll tell her so. She is a little shy herself, you see… What a business! With me, it is nothing, you know, merely a pink coupon, but with you… And she would not tell me who the fourth one is that broke into our triangle. Confess it now, you reprobate, who is it? Well?”

A curtain flew up inside me—the rustle of silk, a green bottle, lips… And inappropriately, to no purpose, the words broke out (if I had only restrained myself!): “Tell me, have you ever tasted nicotine or alcohol?”

R compressed his lips and threw me a sidelong look. I heard his thoughts with utmost clarity: You may be a friend, all right… still… And then his answer: “Well, how shall I put it? Actually, no. But I knew a certain woman…”

“I-330,” I shouted.

“So… you—you too? With her?” He filled with laughter, gulped, ready to spill over.

My mirror hung on the wall in such a way that I could see myself only across the table; from here, from the chair, I saw only my forehead and my eyebrows.

And now I—the real I—saw in the mirror the twisted, jumping line of eyebrows, and the real I heard a wild, revolting shout: “What ‘too’? What do you mean, ‘too’? No, I demand an answer!”

Gaping thick lips, bulging eyes. Then I—the real I—seized the other, the wild, shaggy, panting one, by the scruff of the neck. The real I said to R, “Forgive me, for the Benefactor’s sake. I am quite ill, I cannot sleep. I don’t know what is happening to me…”

A fleeting smile on the thick lips. “Yes, yes! I understand, I understand! It’s all familiar to me… theoretically, of course. Good-by!”

In the doorway he turned, bounced back toward me like a small black ball, and threw a book down on the table.

“My latest… I brought it for you—almost forgot it. Good-by…” The “b” sprayed at me, and he rolled out of the room.

I am alone. Or, rather, alone with that other “I.” I am sitting in the chair, legs crossed, watching with curiosity from some “there” how I—my own self—writhe in the bed.

Why, why is it that for three whole years O and R and I have had that fine, warm friendship, and now—a single word about the other one, about I-330… Is it possible that all this madness—love, jealousy—exists not only in those idiotic ancient books? And to think that I… Equations, formulas, figures, and… this! I don’t understand anything… anything at all… Tomorrow I shall go to R and tell him that…

No, it isn’t true, I will not go. Neither tomorrow, nor the day after tomorrow—I shall never go. I cannot, I don’t want to see him. It is the end! Our triangle is broken.

I am alone. Evening. A light mist. The sky is hidden behind a milky-golden veil. If only I could know what is there, above it! If only I could know: Who am I, what am I like?

Twelfth Entry

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