With all my strength, as though clutching at a straw, I gripped the arms of the chair and asked – only to hear myself, the other self, the old one, “Where… where did you get this… this poison?”
“Oh, this! A certain doctor, one of my…”
“ ‘One of my…’? ‘One of my’ – what?” And suddenly the other leaped out and yelled, “I won’t allow it! I want no one but me. I’ll kill anyone who… Because I… Because you… I…”
I saw – he seized her roughly with his shaggy paws, tore the silk, and sank his teeth into… I remember exactly – his teeth…
I don’t know how, but I-330 managed to slip away. And now – her eyes behind that damned impermeable shade – she stood leaning with her back against the wardrobe and listened to me.
I remember – I was on the floor, embracing her legs, kissing her knees, pleading, “Now, right this minute, right now…”
Sharp teeth, sharp mocking triangle of eyebrows. She bent down and silently unpinned my badge.
“Yes! Yes, darling, darling.” I hurriedly began to throw off my unif But I-330 just as silently showed me the watch on my badge. It was five minutes to twenty-two and a half.
I turned cold. I knew what it meant to be seen in the street after twenty-two and a half. My madness vanished as if blown away. I was myself. And one thing was clear to me: I hate her, hate her, hate her!
Without a good-by, without a backward glance, I rushed out of the room. Hurriedly pinning on the badge as I ran, skipping steps, down the stairway (afraid of meeting someone in the elevator), I burst out into the empty street.
Everything was in its usual place – so simple, ordinary, normaclass="underline" the glass houses gleaming with lights, the pale glass sky, the motionless greenish night. But under this cool quiet glass something violent blood-red, shaggy, rushed soundlessly. And I raced, gasping, not to be late.
Suddenly I felt the hastily pinned badge loosening – it slipped off, clicking on the glass pavement. I bent down to pick it up, and in the momentary silence heard the stamping of feet behind me. I turned – something little, bowed, slunk out from around the corner, or so it seemed to me at the time.
I rushed on at full speed, the air whistling in my ears. At the entrance I stopped: the watch showed one minute before twenty-two and a half. I listened – there was no one behind me. Obviously, it had all been a preposterous fantasy, the effect of the poison.
It was a night of torment. My bed rose and sank and rose again under me, floating along a sinusoid. I argued with myself: At night numbers must sleep; it is their duty, just as it is their duty to work in the daytime. Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense… And yet, I could not and could not.
I am perishing. I am unable to fulfill my obligations to the One State… I…
Eleventh Entry
Topics: No, I cannot, I’ll simply write, without a plan
Evening. A light mist. The sky is hidden by a milky-golden veil and you cannot see what is above, beyond it. The ancients knew that God – their greatest, bored skeptic – was there. We know that there is only a crystal-blue, naked, indecent nothing. But now I do not know what is there: I have learned too much. Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith. I had had firm faith in myself; I had believed that I knew everything within myself. And now…
I stand before a mirror. And for the first time in my life – yes, for the first time – I see myself clearly, sharply, consciously. I see myself with astonishment as a certain “he.” Here am I – he: black eyebrows, etched in a straight line; and between them, like a scar, a vertical fold (I don’t know whether it was there before). Steel-gray eyes, surrounded by the shadow of a sleepless night. And there, behind this steel… it turns out that I have never known what is there. And out of “there” (this “there” is at the same time here and infinitely far), out of “there” I look at myself – at him – and I know: he, with his straight eyebrows, is a stranger, alien to me, someone I am meeting for the first time in my life. And I, the real I, am not he.
No. Period. All this is nonsense, and all these absurd sensations are but delirium, the result of yesterday’s poisoning… Poisoning by what? – a sip of the green venom, or by her? It does not matter. I am writing all this down merely to show how strangely human reason, so sharp and so precise, can be confused and thrown into disarray. Reason that had succeeded in making even infinity, of which the ancients were so frightened, acceptable to them by means of…
The annunciator clicks: it is R-13. Let him come; in fact, I am glad. It is too difficult for me to be alone now…
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).