Luckily, I was already just twenty steps away – here was the sign with golden letters – OFFICE OF THE GUARDIANS. On the threshold I stopped, took a deep gulp of air – as much as I could hold – and entered.
Inside, in the corridor, there was an endless queue of numbers, some with sheets of paper, others with thick notebooks in their hands. Slowly, they would move – a step, two – then stop again.
I rushed along the queue. My head was splitting, I grabbed people by the elbow, pleaded with them as a sick man pleads to hurry, to give him something that would end his torment in a single moment of sharpest pain.
A woman with a belt drawn tightly over her unif, the bulging hemispheres of her rear end continually moving from side to side, as though she had eyes in them, snorted at me, “He has a bellyache! Take him to the toilet – there, the second door on the right…”
They laughed at me, and from this laughter something rose up in my throat, and in a moment I’d scream, or… or…
Suddenly, someone seized me by the elbow from behind. I turned: translucent, winglike ears. This time, though, they were not pink, as usual, but scarlet. His Adams’s apple was jumping up and down in his throat – another second, and it would break the thin sheath of skin.
“Why are you here?” he asked, quickly boring into me.
I clutched at him. “Quick – let’s go to your office… I must… immediately – about everything! It’s good it will be you… It may be terrible that it has to be you, but it is good, it’s good…”
He also knew her, and this made it still more agonizing for me, but perhaps he, too, would shudder when he heard, and then we would be killing her together; I would not be alone that dreadful last moment of my life…
The door slammed shut. I remember: a piece of paper stuck to the door below and scraped against the floor while it was closing. Then a strange, airless silence covered us as though a glass bell had descended on the room. If he had said a single word – no matter which, even the most trivial – I would have burst out with everything at once. But he was silent.
And, straining till my ears hummed, I said, without looking up, “It seems to me I have always hated her, from the very first. I fought against… But no, no, don’t believe me: I could and did not want to save myself, I wanted to perish – this was more precious, more desirable than anything else… I mean, not perish, but so that she… And even now, even now, when I know everything… You know – you know that I was summoned by the Benefactor?”
“Yes, I know.”
“But the thing He told me… You understand – it was as if… as if the floor were to be pulled this moment from under you, and you, and all around you, all that’s on this table – the paper, the ink – the ink would spurt, and everything – a shapeless blot…”
“Go on, go on! But hurry. Others are waiting outside.”
And then, breathless, confused – I told him everything I’ve written down here. About the real me, and the shaggy me, and what she told me that day about my hands – yes, that was when it all began… And how I had not wanted to fulfill my duty, how I deceived myself, how she had gotten false medical certificates, and how the corrosion in me grew from day to day, and about the corridors below, and how – out there, beyond the Wall…
All this in disconnected lumps and fragments – I panted, I lacked words. The crooked, doubly curved lips offered me the needed words with a dry grin-I nodded gratefully: Yes, Yes… And then – what did it mean? – then he was speaking for me, and I merely listened: “Yes, and then… That’s how it was, exactly, yes, yes!”
I felt my neck, around the collar, turning cold as if from ether, and I asked with difficulty, “But how – but you couldn’t have known – not this…”
His grin – silent – more and more crooked…
Then, “But, you know, there was something you’ve tried to keep from me. You named everyone you saw behind the Wall, but you’ve forgotten one. Do you deny it? Don’t your remember – for a second – a flash – you saw… me? Yes, yes, me.”
A pause.
And suddenly, with lightning, shameless clarity, I knew: he – he was also one of them… And all of me, all of my pain, all that, in utter exhaustion, with a final effort, I had brought here, as if performing a great feat – all this was merely as ridiculous as the ancient anecdote about Abraham and Isaac. Abraham – in a cold sweat – has already lifted the knife over his son, over himself – when suddenly there is a voice from above: “Don’t bother! I was only joking…”
Without tearing my eyes away from the increasingly crooked grin, I pressed my hands against the edge of the table and slowly, slowly rode away, together with my chair; then suddenly – as though gathering all of myself into an armful – I dashed out blindly, past cries, stairs, mouths.
I don’t remember how I got downstairs. I found myself in one of the public toilets in an underground station. Above, everything was perishing, the greatest and most rational civilization in history was collapsing, but here, by someone’s irony, all was as it had been – beautiful and still. And just to think that all of it was doomed, that grass would overgrow all of it, and only “myths” would remain…
I moaned aloud. And at that moment I felt someone gently stroking my shoulder.
It was my neighbor, who occupied the seat on my left. His forehead – an enormous bald parabola; on the forehead, yellow illegible lines of wrinkles. And those lines were about me.
“I understand you, I understand you very well,” he said. “Nevertheless, you must calm yourself. Don’t. All of this will return, it will inevitably return. The only important thing is that everyone must learn about my discovery. You are the first to hear it: according to my calculations, there is no infinity!”
I stared at him wildly.
“Yes, yes, I am telling you: there is no infinity. If the universe were infinite, then the mean density of matter in it should equal zero. And since it is not zero – we know that! – it means that the universe is finite; it is spherical in form, and the square of the cosmic radius, Y2, equals the mean density multiplied by… Now this is the only thing I need – to compute the digital coefficient, and then… You understand: everything is finite, everything is simple, everything is calculable. And then we shall conquer philosophically – do you understand? And you, my dear sir, are disturbing me, you are not letting me complete my calculation, you are screaming…”
I don’t know what shook me more – his discovery, or his firmness at that apocalyptic hour. In his hands (it was only now that I noticed it) he had a notebook and a logarithmic table. And I realized that, even if everything should perish, it was my duty (to you, my unknown, beloved readers) to leave my notes in finished form.
I asked him for some paper – and it was there that these last lines were written…
I was about to put the final period to these notes, just as the ancients put crosses over the pits where they had thrown their dead, when suddenly the pencil shook and dropped from my fingers.
“Listen.” I tugged at my neighbor. “Just listen to me! You must – you must give me an answer: out there, where your finite universe ends! What is out there, beyond it?”
He had no time to answer. From above, down the stairs – the clatter of feet…
Fortieth Entry
Topics: Facts. The Bell. I Am Certain
It is day. Bright. Barometer, 760.
Can it be true that I, D-503, have written these two hundred pages? Can it really be true that I once felt – or imagined that I felt – all this?
The handwriting is mine. And now – the same handwriting. But, fortunately, only the handwriting. No delirium, no absurd metaphors, no feelings: nothing but facts. Because I am well, I am entirely, absolutely well. I smile – I cannot help smiling: a kind of splinter was pulled out of my head, and the head feels light, empty. Or, to be more precise, not empty, but free of anything extraneous that might interfere with smiling (a smile is the normal state of a normal man).