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.
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…”