Thirty-eighth Entry

Topics: I don’t know – perhaps only one: A Discarded Cigarette

When I awakened, the brightness hurt my eyes. I closed them tightly. In my head – a strange, caustic, blue haze. Everything as in a fog. And through the fog: But I didn’t turn on the light! How…

I jumped up. At the table, her chin resting on her hand, sat I-330, looking at me with a wry smile…

I am writing on this table now. Those ten or fifteen minutes, brutally twisted into the tightest spring, are long past And yet, it seems to me, the door has just swung shut behind her, and it’s still possible to catch up with her, to seize her hands – and she may laugh and say…

I-330 sat at the table. I rushed to her. “You, you! I was – I saw your room – I thought you…”

But in mid-word I tripped against the sharp, immobile spears of lashes. I stopped, remembering: this was how she looked at me that day, aboard the Integral. And yet I must now, in a single second, find a way of telling her – of making her believe – or else it will be never…

“Listen to me – I must… I must tell you… everything… No, just a moment – I have to take a drink…”

My mouth was dry as though lined with blotting paper. I tried to pour some water, and I couldn’t. I put the glass down on the table and seized the pitcher with both hands.

Now I saw: the blue smoke was from her cigarette. She brought it to her lips, inhaled, greedily swallowed the smoke, as I the water, and said, “Don’t. Be silent. It does not matter. You see, I came anyway. They are waiting for me below. And you want our last minutes to…”

She flung the cigarette down on the floor, leaned backward with her whole body over the arm of the chair (the button was there, on the wall, and it was difficult to reach). And I remember how the chair tilted and two of its legs were lifted from the floor. Then the shades fell.

She came over, embraced me, hard. Her knees through her dress – the slow, tender, warm, all-enveloping poison…

Then suddenly… It sometimes happens that you have sunk completely into a sweet, warm dream – and suddenly you’re stung by something, you start, and you are wide awake… So now: the trampled pink coupons on the floor in her room, and on one – the letter F, and some figures… They tangled within me into a single knot, and even now I don’t know what the feeling was, but I crushed her so that she cried out with pain…

Another minute – of those ten or fifteen on the dazzling white pillow – her head thrown back with half-closed eyes; the sharp, sweet line of teeth. And all that time, the persistent, absurd, tormenting intimation of something that must not be… that must not be remembered now. And I press her ever more tenderly, more cruelly – the blue spots from my fingers deeper, brighter…

Without opening her eyes (I noticed this), she said, “I heard that you were at the Benefactor’s yesterday. Is that true?”

“Yes, it is.”

Then her eyes opened, wide – and I took pleasure in watching how rapidly her face paled, faded, disappeared: nothing but eyes.

I told her everything. Except – I don’t know why… No, it isn’t true, I know – except for one thing – the words He had spoken at the very end, that they had needed me only…

Gradually, like a photographic image in the developer, her face emerged: her cheeks, the white line of her teeth, her lips. She rose, went over to the mirrored closet door.

Again my mouth was dry. I poured myself some water, but it nauseated me. I put the glass back on the table and asked, “Is this what you have come for – you needed to find out?”

The sharp, mocking triangle of eyebrows raised to the temples looked at me from the mirror. She turned to say something to me, but said nothing.

There was no need. I knew.

Bid her good-by? I moved my – alien – feet, caught at the chair – it fell prone, dead, like the other one, in her room. Her lips were cold, as cold as, once upon a time, the floor here, near my bed.

And when she left, I sat down on the floor and bent down over her discarded cigarette.

I cannot write any more – I do not want to any more!

Thirty-ninth Entry

Topic: The End

All this was like the final grain of salt dropped into a saturated solution: rapidly, bristling like needles, the crystals began to form, congeal, solidify. And it was clear to me: all is decided-tomorrow morning I shall do it. It is the same as killing myself – but perhaps this is the only way to resurrection. For only what is killed can be resurrected.

In the west, the sky shuddered every second in a blue spasm. My head burned and hammered. I sat so all night, falling asleep only at seven in the morning, when the darkness was already drawn out, turning green, and I could see the bird-strewn roofs.

I awakened at ten – there had evidently been no bell today. A glass of water – last night’s – stood on the table. I gulped it down greedily and ran out: I had to do it quickly, as quickly as I could.

The sky was empty, blue, all of it eaten away by the storm. Jagged corners of shadows, everything cut out of blue autumn air – thin – too fragile to be touched, or it will snap, be pulverized to flying glass dust. And the same within me: I must not think, I must not think, I must not think, or…

And I did not think. Perhaps I did not even see properly – merely registered. There, on the pavement, branches from somewhere, their leaves green, amber, crimson. Up above, crossing each other’s paths, birds and aeros tossing this way and that. Here – heads, open mouths, arms waving branches. All this must have been shouting, cawing, buzzing…

Then empty streets – as if swept clean by plague. I remember tripping on something unbearably soft, yielding, yet motionless. I bent down – a corpse. It lay on its back, its bent legs spread apart like a woman’s. The face…

I recognized the thick, Negroid lips, which even now still seemed to spray me with laughter. With tightly shut eyes, he laughed into my face. A moment – I stepped across him and ran – because I could bear it no longer, I had to get it over with quickly, or else, I felt, I would snap, warp like an overloaded rail…

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…