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…”