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…