Nestor, meanwhile, waxes lyrical – on the harmony of proportion and form, on the symmetry of properties and of the laws of physics. He is most eloquent, but I barely hear a word he says. I look at the screen and tormentedly, intensely try to remember.
My thoughts marshal themselves into formations and lines; they begin to obey me. “Goldstone’s potential!” I exclaim. In my excitement, my mouth goes dry. I cough and continue, “The simplest scalar approximation…” – but here Nestor makes a sign, and the figure disappears.
“Okay, okay,” he waves his hand. “Let’s not concentrate on your past misfortunes…”
“Just a minute, put it back up!” I almost cry. “I need it, I’ve finally remembered…”
“The session is over,” says Nestor with a shrug. “We’ll be seeing each other in a few hours.”
And with that, the screen goes blank. Here in Quarantine, they’re obviously not into long farewells.
Chapter 4
I am half sitting, half lying in my armchair, looking at the wall opposite and thinking over what I’ve heard. Nestor’s bluntness rankles; I swear at him under my breath, quite colorfully – realizing nevertheless that I can do nothing to change his manner. Recollections emerge and fade; my memory is readying itself for a huge leap. Fragments of formulas flash through my head – teasing, dissolving before I can catch their meaning. A long Lagrangian[9] emerges with a complex sum in square brackets, followed by an equation, which makes me uneasy. On the right-hand side is the already familiar integral; there is clearly something wrong with its upper limit… It’s difficult to keep everything in my mind – I need to write it down, to reflect!
Breathing out sharply, I get up, again amazed at the obedience of my unreal body, and carry out a thorough examination of the bedroom. I go up to one wall, then another, tapping and probing; I kneel down, I run my fingers along the surface of the floor and look into the corners. Then I crumple the thick curtains in my hand, its fibers tickling my skin. The material is strange but quite real and doesn’t appear to be fake. The room is not completely sterile – I find specks of dust, fragments of a pencil and some other detritus. It has all the hallmarks of a place that has been abandoned by its previous occupant. One could make it cozy again, get accustomed to it, domesticate its walls and its contents… I examine my hand, tapping the windowsill with my palm and then try to pinch myself, to scratch my skin with my fingernail. Yes, I feel pain, but I can’t decide whether it’s real or not. It seems my nerve impulses are being generated sparingly, just enough to register the sensation but not to convey it in its entirety.
Regardless, I continue my search. Nothing new is revealed – no secret doors or cubbyholes behind the mirror, no false compartments in the back of the chair. Then I open the wardrobe, push the clothes to one side, inspecting each shelf, and here I get lucky. In the lower-left corner, I discover a compartment full of diverse items, among which are two notepads and a set of pens. This is an important find – I have a strange feeling that I’ve almost wished them into existence, but I decide not to think about this yet. Slamming the wardrobe, I sit down at the table and try to record at least something of the fragments flickering in my head. I have a little success – just a few symbols and a summation sigma. The subintegral function has completely gone, and the Greek theta sign – I now know it stands for some angle – leans sideways on its own. “Mierda, bloody Nestor,” I mutter. No one can hear me. After sitting for another ten minutes, I draw a female silhouette and write underneath it, “Tina.” Then I scribble right next to it, “Elsa,” and drum my fingers on the table…
The inset touchpad suddenly comes alive; squares and arrows appear. It’s a plan of the room with a large menu above it. I jab at random – the curtains on the window draw to a close, and twilight sets in. “Hmm,” I say thoughtfully and have a more serious crack at working out the buttons.
The control panel is quite confusing; some of the commands remain unclear. Nevertheless, I get the hang of most – I learn how to change the view outside the window, the color and translucence of the curtains, the room temperature and humidity. I discover the music console and spend a long time going through the tracks and styles. Then I experiment with the patterns on the wallpaper, which all remind me of the same thing – hazy milk spirals in a coffee cup. It’s evidently a hint; I think about it, then try to draw something distantly familiar – swirls of hoarfrost or a perfectly formed snowflake – but to no avail. In irritation, I turn the walls a smooth light-orange color, switch off the music and get up – suddenly feeling an urge to see Elsa.
My roommate is sitting on the sofa in the living room – embroidering something on a piece of light-colored fabric. She has clearly also found something in her wardrobe that takes her fancy.
“Hello, hermit! What were you two discussing for so long?” Elsa exclaims, pretending to be angry, but I know she is glad to see me. She looks good in a mustard-colored skirt and a gray sweater, an amber necklace around her neck and a bracelet of the same kind on her wrist.
I walk over and sit down next to her. Elsa immediately pulls back a little – ice maiden! She smiles at me – cordially, politely, but somehow detachedly – and says, “This is going to be our tablecloth. I like things to have a personal touch.” She puts her embroidery down on the couch between us and looks at me inquiringly, “Well, how are you? Coping okay? How’s your memory?”
I admit that I have nothing to boast about.
Elsa tries to reassure me, “Don’t worry. It’ll come – I was the same; at first I couldn’t remember anything except for that helicopter and the granite cliffs below it. And then in an instant: the explosion, the ball of flame… It’s good it happened so fast – I didn’t even have time to be scared. And twenty-four hours later, I couldn’t stop remembering – both in my dreams and sitting right here. The resort where I was staying, my neighbors from the same building… They organized this helicopter ride over the mountains and dragged me along with them, assholes… And then everything else came rushing back: my childhood, my youth. I would go up to the window and see images – not the projected ones but things that had happened in my past. Nestor helped too, of course – he is such a kind, attentive man. You know, a man of his word!”
I give her a sidelong glance, feeling annoyed – surely it can’t be jealousy? I turn away, angry at myself, and ask with a studied indifference, “Have you asked him to explain what Quarantine is? For some reason, my counselor-friend isn’t inclined to expand on the subject.”
“Yes, he mentioned something,” Elsa shrugs. “Something about an anabiosis, an illusion… A mass illusion – sounds credible. It’s fairly easy to believe.”
“Easy…” I say, pondering. “And what about the structure of the world? Individual universes, each with its own physics? The metabrane that is always nearby.”
Elsa grimaces, “What, what? No, nothing like that. My Nestor is too tactful; he wouldn’t try to confuse me. And he cares about me – he chooses my dreams for me. I write everything in a diary – do you keep a diary? You should start; it’s a good habit!”
“Another counselor…” I think to myself and try to make a joke about it, “I tried drawing a fractal instead. It didn’t go well though.”
Elsa waves her hand, “Don’t get smart; I don’t know what that word means. Have you noticed by the way that we’re speaking the same language? But we can’t read the phrases on each other’s lips…”