Two-Dimensional Shadow

Incurable Soul

I have not written anything for several days, I don’t know how many. All the days are one day. All the days are one color—yellow, like parched, fiery sand. And there is not a spot of shadow, not a drop of water… On and on endlessly over the yellow sand. I cannot live without her, yet since she vanished so incomprehensibly that day in the Ancient House, she…

I have seen her only once since that day, during the daily walk. Two, three, four days ago—I do not know; all the days are one. She flashed by, filling for a second the yellow, empty world. And, hand in hand with her, up to her shoulder, the double-bent S and the paper-thin doctor. And there was a fourth one—I remember nothing but his fingers: they would fly out of the sleeves of his unif like clusters of rays, incredibly thin, white, long. I-330 raised her hand and waved to me. Over her neighbor’s head she bent toward the one with the ray-like fingers. I caught the word Integral. All four glanced back at me. Then they were lost in the gray-blue sky, and again—the yellow, dessicated road.

That evening she had a pink coupon to visit me. I stood before the annunciator and implored it, with tenderness, with hatred, to click, to register in the white slot: I-330. Doors slammed; pale, tall, rosy, swarthy numbers came out of the elevator; shades were pulled down on all sides. She was not there. She did not come.

And possibly, just at this very moment, exactly at twenty-two, as I am writing this, she stands with closed eyes, leaning against someone with her shoulder, saying to someone, “Do you love?” To whom? Who is he? The one with the raylike fingers, or the thick-lipped, sputtering R? Or S?

S… Why am I constantly hearing his flat steps all these days, splashing as through puddles? Why is he following me all these days like a shadow? Before me, beside me, behind—a gray-blue, two-dimensional shadow. Others pass through it, step on it, but it is invariably here, bound to me as by some invisible umbilical cord. Perhaps this cord is she—I-330? I don’t know. Or perhaps they, the Guardians, already know that I…

Suppose you were told: Your shadow sees you, sees you all the time. Do you understand me? And suddenly you have the strangest feeling: your hands are not your own, they interfere with you. And I catch myself constantly swinging my arms absurdly, out of time with my steps. Or suddenly I feel that I must glance back, but it’s impossible, no matter how I try, my neck is rigid, locked. And I run, I run faster and faster, and feel with my back—my shadow runs faster behind me, and there is no escape, no escape anywhere…

Alone, at last, in my room. But here there is something else—the telephone. I pick up the receiver. “Yes, I-330, please.” And again I hear a rustle in the receiver, someone’s steps in the hall, past her room—and silence… I throw down the receiver—I can’t, I can’t endure it any longer. I must run there, to her.

This happened yesterday. I hurried there, and wandered for an hour, from sixteen to seventeen, near the house where she lives. Numbers marched past me, row after row. Thousands of feet stepped rhythmically, a million-footed monster floated, swaying, by. And only I was alone, cast out by a storm upon a desert island, seeking, seeking with my eyes among the gray-blue waves.

A moment, and I shall see the sharply mocking angle of the eyebrows lifted to the temples, the dark windows of the eyes, and there, within them, the burning fireplace, the stirring shadows. And I will step inside directly, I will say, “You know I cannot live without you. Why, then…” I will use the warm, familiar “thou”—only “thou.”

But she is silent. Suddenly I hear the silence, I do not hear the Music Plant, and I realize it is past seventeen, everybody else is gone, I am alone, I am late. Around me—a glass desert, flooded by the yellow sun. In the smooth glass of the pavement, as in water, I see the gleaming walls suspended upside down, and myself, hung mockingly head down, feet up.

I must hurry, this very second, to the Medical Office to get a certificate of illness, otherwise they’ll take me and… But perhaps that would be best? To stay here and calmly wait until they see me and take me to the Operational Section—and so put an end to everything, atone for everything at once.

A faint rustle, and a doubly bent shadow before me. Without looking, I felt two steel-gray gimlets drill into me. With a last effort, I smiled and said—I had to say something—“I… I must go to the Medical Office.”

“What’s the problem, then? Why do you stand here?”

Absurdly upside down, hung by the feet, I was silent, burning up with shame. “Come with me,” S said harshly. I followed obediently, swinging my unnecessary, alien arms. It was impossible to raise my eyes; I walked all the way through a crazy, upside-down world: some strange machines, their bases up; people glued antipodally to the ceiling; and, lower still, beneath it all, the sky locked into the thick glass of the pavement. I remember: what I resented most of all was that, for this last time in my life, I was seeing everything in this absurdly upside-down, unreal state. But it was impossible to raise my eyes.

We stopped. A staircase rose before me. Another step, and I would see the figures in white medical smocks, the huge, mute Bell…

With an enormous effort, I finally tore my eyes away from the glass underfoot, and suddenly the golden letters of MEDICAL OFFICE burst into my face. At that moment it had not even occurred to me to wonder why he had spared me, why he had brought me here instead of to the Operational Section. At a single bound I swung across the steps, slammed the door firmly behind me, and took a deep breath. I felt: I had not breathed since morning, my heart had not been beating—and it was only now that I had taken my first breath, only now that the sluices in my breast had opened…

There were two of them: one short, with tubby legs, weighing the patients with his eyes as though lifting them on horns; the other paper-thin, with gleaming scissor-lips, his nose a finest blade… The same one. I rushed to him as to someone near and dear, mumbling about insomnia, dreams, shadows, a yellow world. The scissor-lips gleamed, smiled.

“You’re in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.”

A soul? That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word. We sometimes use the words “soul-stirring,” “soulless,” but “soul”…?

“Is it… very dangerous?” I muttered.

“Incurable,” the scissors snapped.

“But… what, essentially, does it mean? I somehow don’t… don’t understand it.”

“Well, you see… How can I explain it to you?… You are a mathematician, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then—take a plane, a surface—this mirror, say. And on this surface are you and I, you see? We squint against the sun. And here, the blue electric spark inside that tube, and there—the passing shadow of an aero. All of it only on the surface, only momentary. But imagine this impermeable substance softened by some fire; and nothing slides across it any more, everything enters into it, into this mirror world that we examined with such curiosity when we were children. Children are not so foolish, I assure you. The plane has acquired volume, it has become a body, a world, and everything is now inside the mirror—inside you: the sun, the blast of the whirling propeller, your trembling lips, and someone else’s. Do you understand? The cold mirror reflects, throws back, but this one absorbs, and everything leaves its tracer-forever. A moment, a faint line on someone’s face—and it remains in you forever. Once you heard a drop fall in the silence, and you hear it now…”

“Yes, yes, exactly…” I seized his hand. I heard it now—drops falling slowly from the washstand faucet And I knew: this was forever. “But why, why suddenly a soul? I’ve never had one, and suddenly… Why… No one else has it, and I…?”

I clung even more violently to the thin hand; I was terrified of losing the lifeline.

“Why? Why don’t you have feathers, or wings-only shoulder blades, the base for wings? Because wings are no longer necessary, we have the aero, wings would only interfere. Wings are for flying, and we have nowhere else to fly: we have arrived, we have found what we had been searching for. Isn’t that so?”

I nodded in confusion. He looked at me with a scalpel-sharp laugh. The other heard it, pattered in from his office on his tubby feet, lifted my paper-thin doctor, lifted me on his horn-eyes.

“What’s the trouble? A soul? A soul, you say? What the devil! We’ll soon return to cholera if you go on that way. I told you” (raising the paper-thin one on his horns) “—I told you, we must cut out imagination. In everyone… Extirpate imagination. Nothing but surgery, nothing but surgery will do…”

He saddled his nose with huge X-ray glasses, circled around and around me for a long time, peered through the bones of my skull, examining the brain, and writing something in his book.

“Curious, most curious I Listen, would you consent to… to being preserved in alcohol? It would be extremely useful to the One State… It would help us prevent an epidemic… Of course, unless you have some special reasons to…”

“Well, you see,” said the thin one, “Number D-503 is the Builder of the Integral, and I am sure it would interfere with…”

“U-um.” The other grunted and pattered back to his office.

We remained alone. The paper-thin hand fell lightly, gently on my hand, the profile face bent close to mine. He whispered, “I’ll tell you in confidence—you are not the only one. It was not for nothing that my colleague spoke about an epidemic. Try to remember—haven’t you noticed anything like it, very much like it, very similar in anyone else?” He peered at me closely. What was he hinting at? Whom did he mean? Could it be…?

“Listen.” I jumped up from the chair.

But he was already speaking loudly about other things. “As far as your insomnia and your dreams, I can suggest one thing—do more walking. Start tomorrow morning, go out and take a walk… well, let’s say to the Ancient House.”

He pierced me with his eyes again, smiling his thinnest smile. And it seemed to me—I saw quite clearly a word, a letter, a name, the only name, wrapped in the finest tissue of that smile… Or was this only my imagination again?

I could barely wait until he wrote out a certificate of illness for that day and the next. Silently I pressed his hand once more, and ran out. My heart, fast and light as an aero, swept me up and up. I knew—some joy awaited me tomorrow. What was it?

Seventeenth Entry

TOPICS:

Through the Glass

I Am Dead

Corridors

I am completely bewildered. Yesterday, at the very moment when I thought that everything was already disentangled, that all the X’s were found, new unknown quantities appeared in my equation.

The starting point of all the coordinates in this entire story is, of course, the Ancient House. It is the center of the axial lines of all the X’s, Y’s and Z’s on which my whole world has been built of late. Along the line of X’s (Fifty-ninth Avenue) I walked toward the starting point of the coordinates. All that had happened yesterday whirled like a hurricane within me: upside-down houses and people, tormentingly alien hands, gleaming scissors, sharp drops falling in the washstand—all this had happened, had happened once. And all of it, tearing my flesh, was whirling madly within, beneath the surface melted by a fire, where the “soul” was.

In order to carry out the doctor’s prescription, I deliberately chose to walk along two lines at right angles instead of a hypotenuse. I was already on the second line—the road along the Green Wall. From the illimitable green ocean behind the Wall rose a wild wave of roots, flowers, branches, leaves. It reared, and in a moment it would roll and break and overwhelm me, and, instead of a man—the finest and most precise of instruments—I would be turned into…

But fortunately between me and the wild green ocean was the glass of the Wall. Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man’s inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall Man ceased to be a savage only when we had built the Green Wall, when we had isolated our perfect mechanical world from the irrational, hideous world of trees, birds, animals…

Through the glass the blunt snout of some beast stared dully, mistily at me; yellow eyes, persistently repeating a single, incomprehensible thought. For a long time we stared into each other’s eyes—those mine-wells from the surface world into another, subterranean one. And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?

I raised my hand, the yellow eyes blinked, backed away, and disappeared among the greenery. The paltry creature! What absurdity—that he could possibly be happier than we are! Happier than I, perhaps; but I am only an exception, I am sick.

But even I… The dark-red walls of the Ancient House were already before me, and the old woman’s dear, ingrown mouth.

I rushed to her: “Is she here?”

The ingrown mouth opened slowly. “Which ‘she’?”

“Oh, which, which! I-330, of course… We came here together that day—by aero…”

“Oh, oh, I see… I see…”

The rays of wrinkles round the lips, sly rays from the yellow eyes, probing inside me, deeper and deeper. And at last, “Oh, well… She’s here, she came a little while ago.”

She’s here. I saw a shrub of silvery-bitter wormwood at the old woman’s feet. (The courtyard of the Ancient House is part of the museum, carefully preserved in its prehistoric state.) A branch of the wormwood lay along the old woman’s hand and she stroked it; a yellow strip of sunlight fell across her knees. And for an instant, I, the sun, the old woman, the wormwood, and the yellow eyes were one, bound firmly together by some invisible veins, and, pulsing through the veins, the same tumultuous, glorious blood…

I am embarrassed to write about this now, but I have promised to be completely frank in these notes. Well, then: I bent and kissed the ingrown, soft, mossy mouth. The old woman wiped her lips and laughed.

I ran through the familiar, dim, echoing rooms— for some reason directly to the bedroom. And it was only at the door, when I had already seized the handle, that suddenly the thought came, What if she is not alone? I stopped and listened. But all I heard was the beating of my heart—not within, but somewhere near me.

I entered. The wide bed—smooth, untouched. The mirror. Another mirror in the closet door, and in the keyhole—the key with the antique ring. And no one.

I called quietly, “I-330 Are you here?” Then, still more quietly, with eyes closed, scarcely breathing, as though I were already on my knees before her, “Darling!”

Silence. Only the drops falling hurriedly into the washstand from the faucet. I cannot explain why, but at that moment it annoyed me. I turned the faucet firmly and went out. Clearly, she was not there. That meant she must be in some other “apartment.”

I ran down the wide gloomy stairway, tried one door, another, a third. Locked. Everything was locked except “our” apartment—and that was empty…

And yet, I turned back again without knowing why. I walked slowly, with difficulty; my shoes were suddenly as heavy as cast iron. I clearly remember thinking: It’s a mistake to assume that the force of gravity is constant. Hence, all my formulas…

The thought broke off: a door slammed downstairs, someone’s steps pattered quickly across the tiles. I—light again, lighter than light—rushed to the rail, to bend over, to say everything in one word, one cry—“You”…

I turned numb: below, etched against the dark square shadow of the window frame, swinging its rosy wing-ears, the head of S was hurrying across.

Lightning-fast, without reason (I still don’t know the reason), I felt: He must not see me, he must not!

On tiptoe, pressing myself into the wall, I slipped upstairs, toward the unlocked apartment.

A moment at the door. His feet stamped dully up the stairs, he was coming here. If only the door… I pleaded with the door, but it was wooden, it creaked, squealed. I stormed past green, red, the yellow Buddha; I was before the mirrored door of the wardrobe: my face pale, listening eyes, lips… Through the tumult of blood, I heard the door creaking again… It was he, he…

I seized the key; the ring swayed. A flash of memory—again an instant thought, bare, unreasoning, a splinter of a thought: “That time I-330…” I quickly opened the closet door; inside, in the darkness, I shut it tightly. A step, and the ground rocked under my feet. Slowly, softly, I floated down somewhere, my eyes turned dark, I died.

Later, when I sat down to record these strange events, I searched my memory and looked up some books. Now, of course, I understand it: it was a state of temporary death, familiar to the ancients, but—as far as I know—entirely unknown among us.

I have no idea how long I was dead—perhaps no more than five or ten seconds. But after a time I revived and opened my eyes. It was dark, and I felt myself going down and down… I stretched my hand and tried to grasp at something—it was scraped by a rough, rapidly moving wall. There was blood on my finger—clearly all this was not the product of my sick imagination. What was it, then?

I heard my broken, quivering breath (I am ashamed to confess this, but everything was so unexpected and incomprehensible). A minute, two, three—down and down. Finally, a soft thud; that which had been dropping under my feet was now motionless. In the dark I found a handle, pushed it; a door opened. Dim light Behind me I saw a small square platform speeding up. I rushed to it—too late: I was trapped there—but where this “there” was I did not know.

A corridor. The silence weighed a thousand tons. Along the vaulted ceiling, lamps—an endless, shimmering, trembling line of dots. The place was a little like the “tubes” of our underground, but much narrower and made not of our glass but of some ancient material. A thought flashed through my mind—the memory of the underground shelters where our ancestors supposedly hid during the Two Hundred Years’ War… No matter, I must go.

I must have walked some twenty minutes, then turned right. The corridor was wider here, the lamps brighter. A vague humming sound. Perhaps machines, perhaps voices, I could not tell, but I was near a heavy opaque door—the sound came from behind it.

I knocked. Then again, louder. The hum ceased. Something clanked, and the door swung open, heavily, slowly.

I don’t know which of us was more astonished: before me stood my blade-sharp, paper-thin doctor.

“You? Here?” And his scissor-lips snapped shut And I—as though I had never known a single human word—I stared silently without comprehending what he was saying. He must have been telling me to leave, because he quickly pushed me with his flat paper stomach to the end of the brighter section of the corridor, then turned me around and gave me a shove from the back.

“But, sorry… I wanted… I thought that I-330… But behind me…”

“Wait here,” the doctor snapped, and vanished.

At last! At last she was near me, here—and what did it matter where this “here” was? The familiar, saffron-yellow silk, the bite-smile, the veiled eyes… My lips, hands, knees trembled; and in my head, the silliest thought: Vibration is sound. Trembling must make a sound. Then why isn’t it audible?

Her eyes opened to me—all the way; I entered…

“I could not bear it any longer! Where have you been? Why?” I spoke quickly, incoherently, as in delirium, without tearing my eyes away from her. Or perhaps I merely thought this. “There was the shadow—following me… I died—in the closet… Because your… that one… he speaks with scissors… I have a soul… Incurable…”

“An incurable soul! My poor dear!” I-330 laughed—sprayed me with laughter, and the delirium was over, and drops of laughter rang, sparkled all around, and everything, everything was beautiful.

The doctor appeared again from around the corner—the marvelous, magnificent, thinnest doctor.

“Well.” He stopped beside her.

“It’s nothing, it’s all right! I’ll tell you later. A mere accident…… Tell them I shall return in… oh, fifteen minutes…”

The doctor slipped away around the corner. She waited. The door closed with a dull thud. Then I-330 slowly, slowly pressed against me with her shoulder, arm, all of her, plunging a sharp sweet needle deeper and deeper into my heart, and we walked together, the two of us—one…

I don’t remember where we turned off into darkness, and in the darkness—up a flight of stairs, endlessly, silently. I could not see, but I knew: she walked just as I did, with closed eyes, blind, her head thrown back, her teeth biting her lips—and listened to the music, to my barely audible trembling.

I came to in one of the innumerable nooks in the yard of the Ancient House. A fence—bare, rocky ribs and yellow teeth of ruined walls. She opened her eyes and said, “The day after tomorrow, at sixteen.” And she left.

Did all this really happen? I don’t know. I will learn the day after tomorrow. There is only one real trace—the scraped skin on my right hand, on the tips of my fingers. But the Second Builder has assured me that he saw me touch the polishing wheel by accident with those fingers, and that is all there is to it. Well, it may be so. It may be. I don’t know—I don’t know anything.

Eighteenth Entry

TOPICS:

A Logical Jungle

Wounds and Plaster

Never Again

Yesterday I went to bed, and instantly sank into the very depths of sleep, like an overturned, overloaded ship. A heavy, dense mass of swaying green water. And then I slowly rose from the bottom, and somewhere in the middle depths I opened my eyes: my own room, morning, still green, congealed. A splinter of sunlight on the mirrored door of the closet, flashing into my eyes, preventing me from punctually fulfilling the hours of sleep prescribed by the Table of Hours. It would be best to open the closet door. But all of me seemed wrapped in cobwebs; the cobwebs even spread over my eyes; I had no strength to rise…

And yet I rose and opened—and suddenly, behind the mirrored door, struggling out of her dress, all rosy, I-330. By now I was so accustomed to the most incredible events, that, as I recall, I was not even surprised and asked no questions. I quickly stepped into the closet and breathlessly, blindly, greedily united with her. I can see it now: through the crack in the darkness, a sharp ray of sunlight breaking like a flash of lightning on the floor, on the wall of the closet, rising higher… and now the cruel, gleaming blade fell on the bare outstretched neck of I-330---And this was so terrifying that I could not bear it I cried out, and opened my eyes again.

My room. Morning, still green, congealed. A splinter of sunlight on the closet door. Myself—in bed. A dream. But my heart still hammered madly, quivered, sprayed pain; aching fingers, knees. There was no doubt that all of it had happened. And I no longer knew what was dream and what reality. Irrational values were growing through everything solid, familiar, three-dimensional, and instead of firm, polished planes I was surrounded by gnarled, shaggy things…

It was still long before the bell. I lay thinking, and an extremely odd chain of logic unwound itself in my mind.

Every equation, every formula in the surface world has its corresponding curve or body. But for irrational formulas, for my V-1, we know of no corresponding bodies, we have never seen them… But the horror of it is that these invisible bodies exist, they must, they inevitably must exist: in mathematics, their fantastic, prickly shadows-irrational formulas—pass before us as on a screen. And neither mathematics nor death ever makes a mistake. So that, if we do not see these bodies in our world, there must be, there inevitably must be, a whole vast world for them—there, beyond the surface…

I jumped up without waiting for the bell and rapidly began to pace the room. My mathematics— until now the only firm and immutable island in my entire dislocated world—has also broken off its moorings, is also floating, whirling. Does it mean, then, that this preposterous “soul” is as real as my unif, as my boots, although I do not see them at the moment? (They are behind the mirrored closet door.) And if the boots are not a disease, why is the “soul” a disease?

I sought and could not find a way out of this wild thicket of logic. It was the same unknown and eerie jungle as that other one, behind the Green Wall, inhabited by the extraordinary, incomprehensible creatures that spoke without words. It seemed to me that I was seeing through thick glass something infinitely huge and at the same time infinitely small, scorpionlike, with a hidden yet constantly sensed sting—the V-1… But perhaps this was nothing else but my “soul,” which, like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, voluntarily stung itself with everything that…

The bell. It was day. All of this, without dying, without vanishing, was merely covered by the light of day, just as visible objects, without dying, are covered at night by the darkness. A vague, quivering mist filled my head. Through the mist I saw the long glass tables, the spherical heads chewing slowly, silently, in unison. From afar through the fog I heard the ticking of the metronome, and in time to this familiar, caressing music I mechanically counted to fifty along with everyone else: fifty prescribed chewing movements for each bite. And, mechanically, in time to the ticking, I descended and marked off my name in the book of departures—like everyone else. But I felt I lived apart from everyone, alone, behind a soft wall that muted outside sounds. And here, behind this wall— my world…

But then, if this world is mine alone, why does it go into these notes? Why record all these absurd “dreams,” closets, endless corridors? I am saddened to see that, instead of a harmonious and strict mathematical poem in honor of the One State, I am producing some sort of a fantastic adventure novel. Ah, if it were really nothing but a novel, and not my present life, filled with X’s, V-1 and falls.

However, perhaps it is all for the best. You, my unknown readers, are most probably children compared to us, for we have been brought up by the One State and hence have reached the highest summits possible for man. And, like children, you will swallow without protest everything bitter I shall give you only when it is carefully coated with the thick syrup of adventure.

In the evening

Are you familiar with the feeling of speeding in an aero up and up the blue spiral, when the window is open and the wild wind whistles past your face? There is no earth, you forget the earth, it is as far from you as Saturn, Jupiter, Venus. This is how I live now. A storm-wind rushes at my face, and I have forgotten the earth, I have forgotten the sweet, rosy O. And yet the earth exists; sooner or later one must glide back to it, and I merely shut my eyes before the day for which her name—O-90— is entered in my Sexual Table.

This evening the distant earth reminded me of its existence.

Obeying the doctor’s instructions (I sincerely, most sincerely want to get well), I wandered for two hours along the glass deserts of our precise, straight avenues. Everyone else was in the auditoriums, as prescribed by the Table of Hours, and only I was alone… It was essentially an unnatural sight: imagine a human finger cut off from the whole, from the hand—a separate human finger, running, stooped and bobbing, up and down, along the glass pavement. I was that finger. And the strangest, the most unnatural thing of all was that the finger had no desire whatever to be on the hand, to be with others. I wanted either to continue thus—by myself, or… But why try to conceal it any longer—to be with her, with I-330, once again pouring all of myself into her through the shoulder, through the intertwined hands…

I returned home when the sun was already setting. The rosy ash of evening glowed on the glass walls, on the golden spire of the Accumulator Tower, in the voices and smiles of the numbers I met. How strange: the dying rays of the sun fall at exactly the same angle as those flaring in the morning, yet everything is altogether different The rosiness is different: now it was quiet, just faintly tinged with bitterness, and in the morning it would again be seething, resonant.

Downstairs in the lobby, U, the controller, took a letter from under a pile of envelopes covered with the rosy ash and handed it to me. I repeat: she is a perfectly decent woman, and I am certain that her feelings toward me are most friendly. And yet, every time I see those sagging, gill-like cheeks, they somehow set my teeth on edge.

Holding out the letter with her gnarled hand, U sighed. But her sigh just barely ruffled the curtain that separated me from the world; my whole being was centered on the envelope that trembled in my hands—undoubtedly containing a letter from I-330.

A second sigh, heavily underscored by two lines, made me break away from the envelope. I looked up: between the gills through the bashful blinds of lowered eyelids—a sympathetic, enveloping, clinging smile. And then, “My poor, poor friend,” with a sigh underscored by three lines and a barely noticeable nod at the letter, the contents of which she was, of course, in the line of duty, familiar with.

“No, really, I…But why?”

“No, no, my dear, I know you better than you know yourself. I have long been watching you, and I can see that you need someone marching hand in hand with you through life who has been a student of life for many years…”

I felt myself all plastered over by her cloying smile—the plaster that would cover the wounds about to be inflicted by the letter trembling in my hands. And finally, through the bashful blinds, almost whispering, “I shall think about it, my dear, I shall think about it. And be assured: if I feel myself strong enough… But no, I must first think about it…”

Great Benefactor! Am I to… does she mean to say that…

There were spots before my eyes, thousands of sinusoids, and the letter jumped in my hand. I walked to the wall, nearer to the light. The sun was dying, and the dismal, dark rose ash fell, thickening steadily, upon me, the floor, my hands, the letter.

I tore the envelope, and quickly—the signature, the wound: it was not I-330, it was… O. And still another wound: a watery blot on the lower right-hand corner of the page—where the drop fell… I detest blots, whatever the reason for them—ink, or… anything else. And I know that formerly I simply would have been annoyed, my eyes would have been offended by that annoying blot. Why, then, was this gray little spot now like a cloud, turning everything darker, more leaden? Or was this again my “soul”?

The letter

You know… or, perhaps, you do not know… I cannot say it properly, but it does not matter: now you know that without you there will be no day, no morning, no spring for me. Because R is to me only… but this is of no interest to you. At any rate, I am very grateful to him. Without him, alone, these past days, I don’t know what I would have… During these days and nights I have lived ten or perhaps twenty years. And it seems to me that my room is not rectangular, but round and endless—around and around, and all is the same, and no doors anywhere.

I cannot live without you—because I love you. Because I see, I understand: today you don’t need anyone, anyone in the world except her, the other one, and… you understand—just because I love you I must…

I need only two or three days to put together the pieces of me into some semblance of the former O-90, and then I will go and tell them myself that I withdraw my registration for you. And you must feel relieved, you must be happy. I shall never again… Farewell.

O.

Never again. Yes, it is better that way, she is right But why, then, why…

Nineteenth Entry

TOPICS: