We
Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin
Date: 2021-03-09 03:44:19+00:00
Keywords: Russian Literature; General; Russia; Classics; Novels; Fiction; 20th Century; Dystopian; Literature; Science Fiction; Dystopia; Science Fiction Fantasy
Description: We (1924) is a dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Written between 1920 and 1921, the novel reflects its author’s growing disillusionment with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War. Smuggled out of the country, the manuscript was translated into English by Gregory Zilboorg and published in New York in 1924. In a series of diary entries, D-503, an engineer in charge of building the spaceship Integral, reflects on life in the One State. In this totalitarian society, people live within glass structures under direct, constant surveillance by the Benefactor and his o
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction by Margaret Atwood

WE Logs:

1.  Announcement. The Wisest Line. An Epic.

2.  Ballet. Quadratic Harmony. X.

3.  Jacket. Wall. The Table of Hours.

4.  The Savage and the Barometer. Epilepsy. If Only.

5.  A Square. Masters of the World. A Pleasant and Useful Function.

6.  An Incident. That Damned “Clear.” Twenty-Four Hours.

7.  An Eyelash. Taylor. Henbane and Lilies of the Valley.

8.  An Irrational Root. R-13. The Triangle.

9.  Liturgy. Iambs and Trochees. The Iron Hand.

10. A Letter. Membrane. My Hairy Self.

11. No, I Can’t, No Brief This Time.

12. Limited Infinities. An Angel. Thoughts About Poetry.

13. Fog. You. A Completely Improbable Incident.

14. “Mine.” Mustn’t. The Cold Floor.

15. The Bell. The Mirroring Sea. I Will Burn Eternally.

16. Yellow. Two-Dimensional Shadow. Incurable Soul.

17. Through the Glass. I Died. Hallways.

18. A Jungle of Logic. Wounds and Bandages. Never Again.

19. An Infinitesimal of the Third Order. Under the Brow. Over the Balustrade.

20. Discharge. What an Idea Is Made Of. Zero Cliff.

21. My Duty as an Author. Swollen Ice. The Most Difficult Love.

22. Frozen Waves. Everything Is Perfected. I Am a Microbe.

23. Flowers. Dissolving Crystal. As Long As.

24. Function Limits. Easter. Cross It All Out.

25. The Descent from the Heavens. The Greatest Catastrophe in History. The End of Everything Known.

26. The World Exists. A Rash. 41°.

27. No Brief—It’s Impossible.

28. Both of Them. Entropy and Energy. An Opaque Part of the Body.

29. Face Threads. Shoots. Unnatural Compression.

30. The Final Number. Galileo’s Mistake. Wouldn’t It Be Better?

31. The Great Operation. I Forgave Everything. Crashing Trains.

32. I Don’t Believe It. Tractors. A Sliver of Humanity.

33. (No Summary, In a Hurry, the Last Thing.)

34. Freedmen. A Sunny Night. Radio Valkyrie.

35. In a Hoop. Carrot. Murder.

36. Blank Pages. The Christian God. About My Mother.

37. Infusoria. Doomsday. Her Room.

38. (Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the Entire Thing Is Just This: A Discarded Cigarette.)

39. The End.

40. The Facts. The Bell. I Am Certain.

Freedom and Happiness by George Orwell

The Stalin in the Soul by Ursula K. Le Guin

Translator’s Note by Bela Shayevich

About the Author

Also by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Margaret Atwood

I didn’t read Zamyatin’s remarkable novel, WE, until the 1990s, many years after I’d written The Handmaid’s Tale. How could I have missed one of the most important dystopias of the twentieth century, and one that was a direct influence on George Orwell’s 1984—which was a direct influence on me?

Perhaps I missed it because I was an Orwell reader but not an Orwell scholar, and a science fiction reader but not a science fiction scholar. When I did finally come across WE, I was amazed by it. And now, reading it again in this fresh, intense translation by Bela Shayevich, I am amazed all over again.

So much in WE seems prophetic: the attempt to abolish the individual by merging all citizens with the State; the surveillance of almost every act and thought, in part through the charming giant pink ears that quiveringly listen to every utterance; the “liquidation” of dissenters—in Lenin’s writing of 1918, “liquidation” is metaphorical, but in WE it’s literal, as those to be liquidated are in fact transformed into liquid; the erection of a border wall that serves not just to prevent invasion but to keep citizens inside; the creation of a larger-than-life, all-knowing, all-wise Big Brotherish Benefactor who may be simply an image or a simulacrum—all these details foreshadowed things to come. So did the use of letters and numbers rather than names: Hitler’s extermination camps had not yet engraved numbers on their inhabitants, and we of this age had not yet become the fodder for algorithms. Stalin had yet to forge the cult of his own personality, the Berlin Wall was decades in the future, electronic bugging had not been developed, Stalin’s show trials and mass purges would not take place for a decade—yet here is the general plan of later dictatorships and surveillance capitalisms, laid out in WE as if in a blueprint.

Zamyatin was writing WE in 1920–21, while the civil war that followed the Bolshevik-dominated October Revolution was still ongoing. Zamyatin himself, having been a member of the movement before 1905, was an Old Bolshevik (a group slated for liquidation by Stalin in the 1930s because they stuck to their original democratic-communist ideals instead of going along with Comrade Stalin’s autocracy)—but now that the Bolsheviks were winning the civil war, Zamyatin didn’t like the way things were going. The original communal committees were becoming mere rubber-stampers for the power elite that had emerged under Lenin and would be solidified by Stalin. Was this equality? Was this the flowering of the individual’s gifts and talents that had been so romantically proposed by the earlier Party?

In his 1921 essay “I Am Afraid,” Zamyatin said: “True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics.” In this he was a child of the Romantic movement, as was the Revolution itself. But the “diligent and reliable officials,” having seen which way the Lenin–Stalinist wind was blowing, were already busying themselves with censorship, issuing decrees about preferable subjects and styles, and pulling out the unorthodox weeds. This is always a dangerous exercise in totalitarianism, since weeds and flowers are likely to change places in the blink of an autocrat’s eye.

WE can be viewed in part as a utopia: the goal of the One State is universal happiness, and it argues that since you can’t be both happy and free, freedom has to go. The “rights” over which people were making such a fuss in the nineteenth century (and over which they continue to make such a fuss now) are viewed as ridiculous: if the One State has everything under control and is acting for the greatest possible happiness of everyone, who needs rights?

WE follows a long line of nineteenth-century utopias that also proposed recipes for universal happiness. So many literary utopias were written in the nineteenth century that Gilbert and Sullivan created an operatic parody of them called Utopia, Limited. A few highlights are Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (a superior human race lives underneath Norway, with an advanced technology, inflatable wings, reason over passion, and females who are bigger and stronger than males); News from Nowhere by William Morris (socialist and equal, with arts and crafts, artistic clothing, and every female a Pre-Raphaelite stunner); and A Crystal Age by W. H. Hudson, in which people not only have beauty and artistic clothing, but are rendered happy, like the Shakers, through having no interest in sex whatsoever.

The later nineteenth century was obsessed with “the woman problem” and “the new woman,” and not a single utopia—and then not a single dystopia—could refrain from tinkering with existing conventions concerning sex. Nor could the U.S.S.R. Its early attempts to abolish the family, to raise children collectively, to allow instant divorce, and, in a few cities, to decree it a crime for a woman to refuse to have sex with a male Communist (nice try, guys!) created such a farcical and shambolic misery that Stalin backpedaled furiously in the ’30s.

But Zamyatin was writing in the early, fermenting period, and it is this cluster of attitudes and policies that WE satirizes. Though people live in literal glass houses, with all of their actions transparent, they lower their blinds modestly for the hour of sex, booked in advance via pink ticket and duly recorded by an older woman in the foyer of each apartment building, according to regulations. But though everyone has sex, only women who meet certain physical specifications are allowed to have children: eugenics was considered “progressive” at this time.

As in Jack London’s 1908 novel, The Iron Heel—a dystopia hoping for a utopian future—and also in Orwell’s 1984, the driving forces of dissent in WE are female. D-503, the male protagonist, begins as a dedicated member of the One State, preparing to send a rocket into the universe with the aim of sharing the One State’s recipe for perfect happiness with worlds unknown. Dystopian characters are prone to journal-writing, and D-503 intends his journal for the universe. But soon the plot thickens, and so does D’s prose. Has he been dipping into Edgar Allan Poe in his more lurid moments? Or the German Gothic Romantics? Or Baudelaire? Possibly. Or his author has.

The cause of this emotional disruption is sex. If only D could stick to his scheduled sexual appointments and his pink tickets! But he cannot. Enter I-330, an angular, individualistic secret bohemian and alcohol-drinking dissident who seduces him in a hidden love nest and leads him to question the One State. She is in sharp contrast to O-90, a round, compliant woman who’s forbidden to have children because she’s too short, and who is D’s registered pink-ticket sexual partner. O can stand for a circle—completion and fullness—or for an empty zero, and Zamyatin chooses both. At first we think O-90 is a nullity, but when she becomes pregnant despite the official veto, she surprises us.

Much has been written about the difference between I-cultures and We-cultures. In an I-culture such as the United States, individuality and personal choice are almost a religion. No accident there: America was initiated by Puritans, and in Protestantism it’s the individual soul vis-à-vis God that’s important, not membership in a universal Church. Puritans were big journal-writers, recording every spiritual blip and bleep: you have to believe in the high value of your soul to do that. “Find your voice” is a mantra in North American writing schools, and that means your unique voice. “Free speech” is taken to mean you can say anything you like.

In We-cultures, on the contrary, why do you need that kind of voice? It’s belonging to a group that’s valued: one should act in the interests of social harmony. “Free speech” means you can say anything you like, but what you like will naturally be constrained by the effects it may have on others, and who will decide that? The “we” will. But when does a “we” become a mob? Is D’s description of everyone going for a walk in unified lockstep a dream or a nightmare? When does the so-harmonious, so-unified “we” become a Nazi rally? This is the cultural crossfire we are caught in today.

Any human being is surely both: an I, special, discrete; and a We, part of a family, a country, a culture. In the best of worlds, the We—the group—values the I for its uniqueness, and the I knows itself through its relationships with others. If the balance is understood and respected—or so we fondly believe—there need not be a conflict.

But the One State has upset the balance: it has tried to obliterate the I, which nonetheless stubbornly persists. Hence poor D-503’s torments. D’s arguments with himself are Zamyatin’s arguments with the emerging conformity and voice-stifling of the early U.S.S.R. What was happening to the bright vision held out by the utopias of the nineteenth century, and indeed by Communism itself? What had gone so wrong?

When Orwell wrote 1984, Stalin’s purges and liquidations had already happened, Hitler had come and gone, the extent to which a person could be reduced and distorted by torture was known, so his vision is much darker than Zamyatin’s. Zamyatin’s two heroines are staunch, like Jack London’s, whereas Orwell’s Julia capitulates and betrays almost immediately. Zamyatin’s character S-4711 is a secret service operative, but his number gives away his alter ego. 4711 is the name of a cologne that originated in the German city of Cologne, which in the year 1288 staged a successful democratic revolt against Church and State authorities and became a Free Imperial City. Yes, S-4711 is actually a dissident, bent on revolt. Whereas in 1984, O’Brien pretends to be a dissident, but is actually a member of the State police.

Zamyatin holds out the possibility of escape: beyond the Wall is a natural world where there are free “barbarian” human beings, covered with—could it be fur? For Orwell, no one in the world of 1984 can leave that world, though he does permit a distant future in which this society no longer exists.

WE was written at a particular moment in history—the moment when the utopia promised by Communism was fading into dystopia; when, in the name of making everyone happy, heretics would be accused of thoughtcrime, disagreement with an autocrat would be equated with disloyalty to the Revolution, show trials would proliferate, and liquidation would become the order of the day. How could Zamyatin have seen the future so clearly? He didn’t, of course. He saw the present, and what was already lurking in its shadows.

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” says Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” WE was a warning to its own place and time—one that was not heeded because it was not heard: the “diligent and reliable officials” took care of that. The courses were not departed from. Millions and millions died.

Is it also a warning to us, in our time? If it is, what sort of warning? Are we listening?

Log 1

BRIEF:

Announcement. The Wisest Line. An Epic.

I am simply copying down the announcement that appeared in today’s One State Gazette word for word:

IN 120 DAYS, CONSTRUCTION OF THE INTEGRAL WILL BE COMPLETE. THE GLORIOUS, HISTORIC HOUR WHEN THE FIRST-EVER INTEGRAL WILL BLAST OFF INTO OUTER SPACE IS NIGH. SOME THOUSAND YEARS AGO, YOUR HERO ANCESTORS VICTORIOUSLY SUBJUGATED ALL OF EARTH TO THE ONE STATE. YOUR CONQUEST WILL BE EVEN GREATER, FOR YOU WILL INTEGRATE THE INFINITE EQUATION OF THE UNIVERSE WITH THE ELECTRIC, FIRE-BREATHING POWER OF OUR GLASS INTEGRAL. YOU WILL ENCOUNTER UNFAMILIAR BEINGS ON ALIEN PLANETS WHO MAY YET LIVE IN SAVAGE STATES OF FREEDOM, AND YOU WILL SUBJUGATE THEM TO THE BENEFICENT YOKE OF REASON. IF THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT WHAT WE BRING THEM IS MATHEMATICALLY INFALLIBLE HAPPINESS, WE WILL BE IMPELLED TO FORCE THEM TO BE HAPPY. BUT WE WILL TRY WORDS BEFORE RESORTING TO WEAPONS.

IN THE NAME OF THE BENEFACTOR, LET IT BE KNOWN TO EVERY NUMBER OF THE ONE STATE:

ALL THOSE CAPABLE OF DOING SO ARE HEREBY REQUIRED TO PRODUCE TREATISES, EPIC POEMS, MANIFESTOS, ODES, OR ANY AND ALL OTHER WRITINGS CELEBRATING THE BEAUTY AND MAGNIFICENCE OF THE ONE STATE.

THESE WILL BE THE INTEGRAL’S FIRST CARGO.

ALL HAIL THE ONE STATE, ALL HAIL THE NUMBERS, ALL HAIL THE BENEFACTOR!

I write this and feel: my cheeks are burning. Yes: to integrating the profound equation of the Universe. Yes: to uncurving the coil of savagery, toward the asymptote, along the tangent—setting it straight: for the line of the One State is straight. Ours is the supreme, divine, exact, and wise straight line—the wisest of all lines . . .

I am D-503, Builder of the INTEGRAL. Just one of the One State’s mathematicians. Accustomed to numbers, it is beyond the powers of my pen to fabricate the music of assonance and rhyme. I will simply try to record what I see and think—or, more precisely, what we think (yes, we—and in fact, WE will be the title of my contribution). But if these texts are to be derived from our life, from the mathematically perfected life of the One State, won’t they, in spite of me, be, of themselves, an epic poem? Yes: I believe and know this.

I write this and feel: my cheeks are burning. This must be what a woman feels when she first senses the pulse of a new little being inside her, tiny and blind. What I’m writing is me and, at the same time, it’s not me. For the many months ahead, this little being will feed on my vital juices, my blood—then, I will tear it away from myself in agony and lay it at the feet of the One State.

But I am ready—just like every, or almost every, one of us. Yes, I am ready.

Log 2

BRIEF:

Ballet. Quadratic Harmony. X.

Spring. Honey-yellow pollen from some flower beyond the Green Wall blows in from the wild, invisible plains. This sweet dust dries out your lips so you have to keep licking them—meaning that probably, every passing woman’s lips must also be sweet (and man’s, too, of course). This somewhat interferes with logical thinking.

But the sky! Blue and unblemished by even a single cloud (the Ancients had such strange tastes! Their poets found inspiration in those disorderly, thick-witted piles of loitering vapor). I love—and I’m sure I can say this for all of us—we love a sterile, immaculate sky like today’s, which makes the whole world look like it’s made of the same immortal, shatterproof glass as the Green Wall and all of our other structures. On days like this, you can see everything down to its bluest depth, things you’ve never noticed before suddenly reveal their essential algebraic formulations—even the things you’re used to seeing every day.

Example: this morning, at the hangar where we are building the INTEGRAL, I was suddenly drawn to the machines. The spheres of the regulators spinning with eyes closed, in sweet oblivion; the cranks a-twinkle, bowing left and right; the balance beam with a proud swagger in its swinging shoulders; the slotting machine bouncing its bit in time with the soundless music. I was suddenly overtaken by the beauty of this grand mechanical ballet glittering in the weightless, pale blue sunlight.

Then I asked myself: why is this beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? Answer: because the movements are unfree. The deeper teaching of this dance lies in its absolute aesthetic bondage, its ideal unfreedom. And if it’s true our ancestors were moved to dance during the most exalted moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), there’s only one conclusion: the instinct for unfreedom has been an organic part of human nature since the beginning of time, and we, in our current way of life, are only now consciously . . .

I’ll finish later: the intercom is clicking. I lift my eyes—it’s O-90, of course. In half a minute, she’ll be here: it’s time for our walk.

Darling O! I’ve always thought that she looks like her name: she’s about ten centimeters short of the Maternal Norm, which makes her every curve that much rounder—the pink O of her mouth, open to my every word. Also: the rounded, plump fold on her wrist, just like a small child’s.

When she came in, the flywheel of logic was still whirring inside me, so, out of inertia, I began to explain the formula I’d just come up with, unifying all of us and dancing and machines.

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, amazing.” O-90 smiled at me rosily. “Spring!”

There she goes again, “Spring” . . . I tell her one thing, and she’s . . . women . . . I fell silent.

Downstairs. The avenue was crowded: when the weather’s like this, we usually use our afternoon Personal Hour for extra walking. As always, the Music Factory was piping the March of the One State with all of its horns. Hundreds—no, thousands of numbers exuberantly stepped to the beat in orderly rows of four. Their blue-gray unifs[*] had golden badges on their chests that were inscribed with each of their numbers. And I—we, the four of us—we were just one of the countless ripples in this mighty torrent. On my left, O-90 (if one of my hairy ancestors were writing this a thousand years ago, he would have probably referred to her with that ridiculous word “my”), and on my right, two numbers I didn’t know, male and female.

A divinely blue sky, tiny baby suns shining in every badge, faces unclouded by the insanity of thoughts . . . Rays of sun—you know? Everything made of the same smiling, radiant matter. And the brass bleating, “Tra ta ta tum, tra ta ta tum,” like brass stairs blasted with sunlight, leading you upward, higher and higher, into the dizzying blue . . .

And then, just like this morning at the hangar, I started seeing everything as though I were seeing it for the first time: the invariably straight streets, the glass of the pavements spraying up sunlight, translucent structures—celestial parallelepipeds, gray-blue numbers marching in fours—all unified in quadratic harmony. A feeling came over me as though it hadn’t been whole generations but I—me—who had vanquished the old God, the old way of life, like I was the one who created all this, and, like a tower, didn’t dare to even move my elbow so I wouldn’t shatter the walls, the cupolas, the machines . . .

Then, from one moment to the next, I leapt through the centuries: from + to −. I suddenly recalled (ostensibly through association by contrast)—a painting I’d seen in a museum: a twentieth-century street, the deafeningly vibrant, chaotic riot of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, colors, birds . . . and they say that that’s how it really was back then, that all of that was real and possible. It seemed so improbable to me now, so unbelievable, I couldn’t contain myself and burst out laughing.

Immediately, an echo—laughter—rang out from my right. I turned my head: the white, extraordinarily white and sharp teeth of an unfamiliar woman’s face beamed directly into my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you had such an inspired look on your face, like you were a mythical god on the seventh day of Creation. You seemed sure that I, too, was your handiwork. What can I say, I’m quite flattered . . .”

She said all of this without a smile, and, I would even say, with a certain reverence (maybe she knew that I was the Builder of the INTEGRAL), but, at the same time, there was also some kind of inexplicable, irritating X factor to her—in her eyes, or maybe her eyebrows—I can’t put my finger on it or assign it any numerical value.

For some reason, I was embarrassed, and, fumbling, I started to try to logically justify why I had laughed.

“It is perfectly clear that the contrast, the unbridgeable chasm between the worlds of yesterday and today—”

“But why unbridgeable?” (What white teeth!) “You can always build a bridge. Just picture it: drums, battalions, columns—they had all of those back then, too—and therefore—”

“So, yes: clearly!” I cried (what an incredible coincidence of thought: she was using almost the exact same words—repeating what I had written just before this walk). “Listen: we even have the same thoughts. Because today, nobody is just some ‘one,’ everybody is ‘one of.’ And we’re all so alike . . .”

She: “Are you sure about that?”

I noticed her eyebrows were up at an acute angle to her temples, like the sharp little horns of an X, which, for some reason, threw me off balance again. I looked to my right and my left. And . . .

To the right of me, I-330 (I now saw her number)—slender, sharp, supple, and stubborn, like a whip. To my left, O, so totally different, all made of curves, with her plump, childlike wrists. Then, at the outer edge of our foursome, the male number I didn’t know, with his body doubly bent, like the letter S. We were all so different . . .

To my right, I-330 seemed to have caught the lost look in my eyes and with a sigh, she continued my thought, “Yes . . . alas!”

Even though, essentially, her “alas” was completely appropriate, once again, something in either her face or her voice . . .

With uncharacteristic gruffness, I countered, “Nothing to alas about. Science marches on and clearly, if not today, then in fifty or one hundred years . . .”

“Even everyone’s noses will be—”

“Yes, noses!” I was practically shouting. “If there is still any reason for envy—even it’s just because I have a snub nose and someone else has—”

“Well, your nose is probably what the Ancients would have called ‘classical.’ But your hands . . . come on, show me your hands!”

I can’t stand it when people look at my hands. They’re all hairy and covered in fur. Stupid atavism. I stretched out my hands and, as impassively as I could, told her, “They’re monkey hands.”

She glanced at them, then back at my face. “What an extremely curious chord they strike.” She looked me up and down like she was weighing me on a scale, the horns on her eyebrows flared up again.

“He’s registered to me today,” O-90 cheerfully, rosily, opened her mouth.

Better she’d kept it shut—what did that have to do with anything? In general, this very sweet O is . . . how should I put it . . . the speed of her tongue is miscalibrated. The delay on the tongue should always be a few seconds over the speed of thought and never the other way around.

At the end of the avenue, the Accumulator Tower bell loudly rang seventeen. Personal Hour was over. I-330 headed away with that S-shaped male number. He commanded a certain respect, and, when I think of it, his face might have even been familiar. I must have seen him before somewhere, I won’t remember where right now.

Parting ways, I—still very X-ish—smiled back at me. “Stop by Auditorium 112 the day after tomorrow.”

I shrugged. “If I happen to be assigned to the auditorium you mentioned—”

“You will be,” she said with mysterious confidence.

This woman gave me the same unsettling feeling as an unresolvable irrational number inexplicably popping up in an equation. I was relieved to have at least a few moments alone with darling O.

We crossed four avenues arm in arm. Then, at the corner, it was time for her to go right, and me to the left.

“I just wish I could come over tonight and put the blinds down. I mean, today, right now,” O shyly lifted her blue crystal eyes up at me.

Silly girl. What could I say? She’d been at my place just the night before and she knew as well as I did that our next Sex Day wasn’t until the day after tomorrow. It was all that same premature thought process, sparks going off too early in the ignition, which can sometimes lead to damage.

I kissed her magical blue eyes, unspoiled by a single cloud, goodbye—two times—no, I will be precise—thrice.

Log 3

BRIEF:

Jacket. Wall. The Table of Hours.

I looked over everything I wrote yesterday and realized: I am not writing clearly enough. I mean, all of it is perfectly clear to any one of us. But who knows: you, unknown reader, to whom the INTEGRAL carries my words, might only be on the same page of the great book of civilization our ancestors reached 900 years ago. You might not know about even the most basic things like: the Table of Hours, the Personal Hour, the Maternal Norm, the Green Wall, and the Benefactor. For me, it feels both silly and tedious to have to describe them all. Like someone writing a novel in, say, the twentieth century, having to also explain what a jacket is, or an apartment, or a wife. But what if that novel had to be translated for savages? Would it be possible to get away without including a note on the concept of “jacket?”

I’m sure that a savage seeing a jacket would wonder, “What is this even for? It just gets in the way.” I also predict that you will react the same way when I tell you that since the end of the Two Hundred Years’ War, none of us have ever been on the other side of the Green Wall.

But, my dear friends, you must take the time to consider things—it’s very helpful. Isn’t it clear: for all of human history, insofar as we know it, humanity has moved away from nomadic existence, evolving toward ever greater degrees of settlement. Doesn’t it follow that the most settled way of life (ours) is also the most perfect (as ours is)? Yes, people once roamed the Earth, roving from pole to pole, but that was in prehistoric times, when there were still nations, wars, trade, discoveries of various Americas. Why would we ever need any of that?

Given: getting used to being this settled took time and effort. During the Two Hundred Years’ War, when all the roads crumbled and grew over with grasses, it must have at first seemed quite inconvenient to live in cities cut off from each other by dense, green wildernesses. But what can you do? When man lost his tail, it must have also taken him some time to learn how to swat away flies without it. He must have at first been quite sad about losing that tail. But today: could you imagine still having a tail? Or see yourself walking down the street naked, without your “jacket” (if you are still wearing “jackets”)? It’s the same thing: I can’t imagine a city unclothed by a Green Wall or a life unadorned by the digital shroud of the Table of Hours.

The Table . . . at this very moment, its violet digits are gazing into my eyes, brimming with tenderness and severity, from the gold screen on my wall. I am involuntarily reminded of what the Ancients called an icon and moved to write poems or prayers (the same thing) devoted to it. Why couldn’t I have been a poet so I could truly sing of thee, O Table, the pulse and heart of the One State!

All of us (and perhaps, even you) have read the greatest surviving classic of ancient literature as schoolchildren: The Train Schedule. But even this, when compared to the Table, seems like a hunk of graphite next to a diamond: they’re made of the same thing, C, carbon, but the diamond is immortal, sparkling and clear. Whose heart doesn’t race as it chugs, thundering through the Schedule? But the Table of Hours turns each of us into the real, six-wheeled, steel heroes of epics. Each morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the very same hour, the very same minute, we, millions of us, rise as one. We millions start working all at the same moment and, at the same moment, we stop—as millions. Then, pouring into a single, million-armed body, at the same Table-appointed second, we raise the spoons to our mouths, go for a walk, go to the auditoriums, the Taylor Exercise Halls, sleep . . .

To be perfectly honest: even we have yet to come up with an absolute solution to the problem of happiness. Twice a day, from 16 to 17 and 21 to 22, our single, powerful organism dissolves into individual cells: these are the Table’s Personal Hours. During them, you might notice some numbers have lowered their blinds for modesty; others are filling the avenues, rhythmically walking up the brass steps of the March; some, like me now, sit at their desks. But—call me an idealist and a dreamer—but I firmly believe: sooner or later, we will find the true general formula for these hours as well, and all 86,400 seconds of every day will finally be accounted for by the Table.

I have heard and read many unbelievable things about the times when people still lived in a free, i.e., unorganized, savage state. But to me, the most inconceivable thing is the fact that the old state—granted, it was in its embryonic form—allowed its citizens to live without anything even approaching our Table: no compulsory walks or precisely regulated mealtimes; people got up and went to bed as they pleased, whenever it occurred to them; some historians have even said that in those days, streetlights were kept on all night and people would walk and ride on the streets at all hours.

This I simply cannot comprehend. No matter how limited their capacity for reason may have been, still—how could they fail to see that that way of life was a form of mass murder, only committed slowly, day in and day out? Their state (out of “humaneness”) forbade the killing of individuals and yet it allowed the half-killing of millions of people at once. Killing one person, that is, decreasing the length of one human life by fifty years, was considered a crime but decreasing the length of all human lives by 50 million years was not. Isn’t that funny? Today, any ten-year-old number can solve this ethical math problem in thirty seconds, while they couldn’t manage to solve it at all with all of their Kants put together (because not one of their Kants thought to create a truly scientific system of ethics, i.e., based on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division).

And isn’t it just as absurd that the state (while daring to call itself a state!) took no control over people’s sex lives? With them, it was whoever, whenever, and however much they wanted—like wild animals, wholly unscientific. Then, just like animals, they would proceed to blindly birth children. Isn’t it completely ridiculous that even when they were capable of breeding crops, poultry, and fish (we have clear data indicating they knew how to do all this), they still failed to reach the final rung on the logical ladder: i.e., breeding children? How could they fail to arrive at our Maternal and Paternal Norms?!

It’s all so ridiculous, so difficult to believe, that I’ve written this down and now I’m afraid: what if you, unknown readers, take me for some mean-spirited joker? What if you think that I’m just making fun of you, pulling your leg with a straight face?

But, first of all: I am incapable of joking. For the implicit function of every joke is a lie. Second of all, this really is how the Ancients lived according to One State Science, and One State Science cannot make mistakes. Besides, how could the state have been logical while people still lived in a state of freedom, i.e., wild animals, monkeys, and herds? What can you expect from people back then when even today, in our era, somewhere deep inside, in the furry depths, you can still hear the wild echo of apes?

Luckily, only rarely. Luckily, these are just tiny breakdowns of minor parts: easy to fix without stalling the great, perpetual progress of the entire Machine. We have the nimble, heavy hand of the Benefactor and the experienced eyes of the Guardians to scrap any bolts that get bent out of shape . . .

Speaking of which, I just remembered: that number from yesterday, bent like an S—I think I have actually seen him coming out of the Bureau of Guardians. Now it makes sense why I instinctively felt respectful of him and embarrassed when that strange woman I-330 started . . . I must confess—that I-330 . . .

The bell is ringing for sleep: it’s 22:30. Until tomorrow.

Log 4

BRIEF:

The Savage and the Barometer. Epilepsy. If Only.

Up until now, everything in life had been clear to me (no wonder I have a certain predilection for this word, “clear”). But today . . . I don’t understand.

First of all: I really was assigned to Auditorium 112, like she said I would be.

Even though the probability of this was:

1,500 | = | 3
10,000,000 | 20,000

(1,500 auditoriums, 10,000,000 numbers). And second of all . . . well, let me begin at the beginning.

The auditorium. A giant, entirely translucent hemisphere, saturated with sunlight, made of expansive glass blocks. Circular rows of beautifully sphere-like, carefully trimmed heads. My heart fluttered, looking around. I think I was searching: would that pink crest—O’s sweet lips—glimmer atop the blue waves of the unifs? Here’s someone’s unusually white and sharp teeth, those look familiar . . . no, no sign of her. This evening, O is coming to my place at 21 so it was perfectly natural that I wanted to see her.

The bell. We got up, sang the Anthem of the One State, and then the loudspeaker appeared onstage, sparkling with gold and the wit of the phonolector.

“Esteemed numbers! Our archaeologists have recently unearthed a book from the twentieth century. In it, a humor writer tells the story of a savage and a barometer. A savage once noticed that whenever the barometer read ‘rain,’ it would rain. So one day, when the savage wanted it to rain, he decided to dig out exactly enough mercury to make it read ‘rain’”—on the screen, a savage in feathers picking mercury out of a barometer: laughter—“you laugh, but don’t you think that the Europeans of that era deserve even more of your ridicule? Just like that savage, the Europeans wanted ‘rain’—rain with a capital R, algebraic rain. But all they could do was stand there in front of their barometers like a bunch of wet chickens. At least the savage had courage and verve and—although, admittedly, savage—logic: he saw the connection between cause and effect. By removing the mercury, he took the first step down this great path, along which . . .”

And here (again: I am writing without hiding anything)—for a while, it was like I’d become waterproof to the invigorating currents spouting from the loudspeaker. I suddenly thought that I shouldn’t have come here (why “shouldn’t have” and how could I have failed to come if I’d been assigned to?). I felt like everything was empty, just a shell. And I was only able to turn my attention back on, with difficulty, when the phonolector turned to the main topic: our music, mathematical composition (the mathematician—the cause; music—the effect), and a description of the recently invented musicometer.

“By simply turning the handle, any one of you can produce up to three sonatas an hour. Now imagine how difficult this was for our ancestors. They could only create after working themselves up into fits of so-called inspiration, an obscure form of epilepsy. And now we present a hilarious illustration of the results they achieved through their efforts: the music of Scriabin, from the twentieth century. This black box”—the curtain opened, revealing their ancient instrument—“this box was called a ‘grand,’ or even a ‘royale,’ which is yet more proof of how all of their music . . .”

And I don’t remember the rest after that, most likely because . . . well, I’ll just say it: because then I saw her, I-330, approaching the box. Perhaps I was simply startled by her unexpected appearance onstage.

She wore a fantastical costume from the ancient era: a skintight black dress, which sharply contrasted against the white of her shoulders and chest, which were bare, and the warm shadow between them, rising and falling with her every breath . . . those blinding, almost sinister teeth . . .

Her smile, like a bite, cast down at us in the audience. She sat and started to play. The music was as wild, fevered, and colorful as everything else about that old life—not a shadow of the mechanical rational. So of course the people around me were right: they were all laughing. But a few . . . and why me, as well—me?

Yes, epilepsy—madness—torment . . . slow, sweet pain—a bite—harder, make it hurt more. And then, slowly, the sun. Not our sun, no blue crystal light evenly shining through glass blocks—no: the wild, rushing, scorching sun—tear everything off—tear it all up into little pieces.

The man sitting next to me glanced sideways to his left—at me—and snickered. For some reason, I very distinctly remember: I saw a microscopic spit bubble pop out onto his lips and burst. That little bubble brought me back to reality. I was myself again.

And, like everyone else, all I could hear was a fumbling, furious clatter. I started laughing. Everything was easy and simple again. The talented phonolector had given too vivid of an example of that savage era, that’s all.

What a pleasure it was to hear today’s music after that racket. (It was demonstrated at the end for contrast.) Crystalline, chromatic tones flowing together and coming apart in infinite rows—summation chords for Taylor’s and Maclaurin’s formulas; whole-toned, quadrangular steps in Pythagorean trousers; the melancholy strains of the dampening oscillating movement; cheerful measures studded with pauses like Fraunhofer lines—the spectral analyses of the planets . . . What grandeur! What unshakable regularity! Next to the frantically free-spirited, one-dimensional music of the Ancients, unregulated by anything but wild fantasies—

As always, we filed out of the wide doors of the auditorium in even rows of four. A familiar double-bent figure flashed past me; I bowed with respect.

Darling O would be with me in an hour. I was feeling good and purposefully excited. At home, I hurried down to the office, handed in my pink ticket, and picked up my permit to use the blinds. We are only allowed to use them on Sex Days. Otherwise, we are always on view, eternally washed by the light within our translucent walls, which seem to be woven from sparkling air. We have nothing to hide from each other. Plus, it makes the difficult and noble task of the Guardians a lot easier. Otherwise—who knows what could happen. It’s quite possible that the bizarre, opaque dwellings of the Ancients are exactly what led to their pathetic, single-celled mindset. “My [sic!] home is my castle”—imagine!

At 21, I lowered the blinds and, at that exact same moment, O came in, slightly out of breath. She stretched out her little pink mouth to me with her little pink ticket. I tore the ticket but couldn’t tear myself from that mouth until the very last moment, 22:15.

Afterward, I showed her my notes and said that I thought it very good what I’d written about the beauty of the square, the cube, and the line. She listened, pinkly and charmingly, until suddenly, a tear slipped from her blue eye, and then another, a third—falling right on the open page (page 30). The ink smeared. Now I will have to rewrite it.

“Darling D, if only you—if only . . .”

Well, what “if only?” “If only” what? And again, her refrain: a baby. Or maybe it was something new, something about . . . about that other woman? Although then it was like . . . no, that would be too stupid.

Log 5

BRIEF:

A Square. Masters of the World. A Pleasant and Useful Function.

Again, something feels off. Again, I am talking to you, unknown reader, as though you were . . . say, my old friend R-13, the poet with his thick, African lips, who knows everybody. Meanwhile, you’re on the Moon, on Venus, or Mars or Mercury—who knows where and who you may be.

Try this: imagine a square—a wonderful, living square. And then imagine asking it to tell you about itself and its life. The very last thing that would occur to the square is to talk about how all of its corners have equal angles: it simply doesn’t notice that, it’s so normal for it, so quotidian. Writing this, I feel like I’m that square. Take, for example, pink tickets and everything else that comes with them—for me, they’re the same as my equal angles, while for you, they’re more glaring than Newton’s binomial theorem.

And so. One of the ancient sages (accidentally) happened to say something wise: “Love and hunger rule the world.” Ergo: in order to rule the world, man must master those masters. Our ancestors finally conquered Hunger, but at a high price: I am talking about the Great Two Hundred Years’ War, waged between the countryside and the city. It’s likely that savage peasants held on to their “bread”[*] as stubbornly as they did as the result of religious superstitions. Then, in the thirty-fifth year before the founding of the One State, today’s petroleum-based food was invented. While it’s true that only 0.2 percent of the world’s population survived, on the bright side, cleansed of its thousand-year-old filth, the face of the Earth has grown quite bright and shining! Now, that remaining zero-point-two percent could finally taste bliss from behind the walls of the One State.

Isn’t it clear: joy and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness. The sacrifice of the numberless victims of the Two Hundred Years’ War would have all been for nothing if any reason for envy remained in our new life. And yet, envy persists: some people have snub noses while others have classical ones (the conversation from our walk), many fight for the love of some while others are unloved by anyone.

Having conquered Hunger (algebraically = the sum of material advantages), the One State began its incursion on the other master, Love. This elemental force was finally conquered, i.e., organized and mathematized, when, nearly 300 years ago, our historic Lex sexualis decreed: “Every number has the right to make use of any other number as a sexual commodity.”

Everything else is just technicalities. You are carefully examined in the laboratories of the Bureau of Sex, they determine the sexual hormone content in your blood, and then you are issued a personal Table of Sex Days. After that, you can petition to use this (or that) number on your Sex Days, and receive the corresponding ticket book (pink). It’s as easy as that.

Clearly: when there are no remaining causes for envy, the denominator of the happiness fraction is brought down to zero and the fraction is converted into a glorious infinity. What had once caused the Ancients numberless senseless tragedies has thus been transformed into a harmonious, pleasant, and useful bodily function, exactly like sleep, manual labor, ingestion, defecation, etc. From this, you can see how the powerful force of logic purifies everything that it touches. Oh, if only you, unknown readers, could also come into the light of this sacred force, if only you could also learn to follow it to its conclusion.

. . . It’s strange, today I described the greatest achievements of human history, breathing the clean, alpine air of pure thought, while inside of me, it remained cloudy, cobwebbed and overcast by some quadrapawed X. Or maybe they were just my paws, after being right here in front of me for so long, my hairy paws. I don’t like talking about them—and I don’t like them: they are a vestige of the savage age. Could it really be that inside of me—

I wanted to cross all this out because it falls outside of the scope of my brief but then I decided: I won’t. Let what I write be like an extremely sensitive seismograph registering the curves of even the most minute mental oscillations: after all, it is sometimes these waves that lead to—

Now, this is even more absurd and it really would be best to strike it from the record: we’ve redirected all of the forces of nature into the proper channels—there can be no catastrophes anymore.

And now it’s completely clear to me: this strange sensation comes from the feeling that I’m like the square I’d discussed at the beginning. And the X isn’t inside of me (that’d be impossible), I’m just afraid that some sort of X might end up in you, unknown readers. But I believe that you will not judge me too harshly. I believe you will appreciate how truly difficult it is for me to write all this, harder than anything has ever been for any author in human history: some wrote for their contemporaries; others, for their descendants; but no one has ever been faced with the task of writing for their distant ancestors or beings just as savage as them . . .

Log 6

BRIEF:

An Incident. That Damned “Clear.” Twenty-Four Hours.

To reiterate: I’ve committed to writing everything down without hiding anything. Because of this, although it saddens me deeply, I’m forced to put down that even today, in our society, the process of the solidification and crystallization of life is not yet complete: we are still several steps short of our ideal. The ideal is (clearly) the point after which nothing else happens, while we . . . and wouldn’t you know it: just today, the One State Gazette said that in two days, there’ll be another Celebration of Justice held in Cube Square. Apparently, some number has once again tried to obstruct the course of the mighty Machine of the State, there’s been another unforeseen and uncalculated occurrence.

On top of this, something has happened to me. Although it was during the Personal Hour, i.e., the time allotted specifically for unforeseen circumstances, but still . . .

Around 16 (more precisely, at ten to 16), I was at home. Suddenly, the phone rang.

“D-503?”—a woman’s voice.

“Yes.”

“Are you free?”

“Yes.”

“It’s me, I-330. I’ll fly over and pick you up. We’re going to go to the House of Antiquity. Okay?”

I-330 . . . she’s the one irritating me, repelling me, practically scaring me. And that was precisely why I said: yes.

Five minutes later, we were already on the aero. The blue majolica of the May sky, the gentle sun on its own golden aero buzzing behind us, not overtaking us nor falling behind. But, up ahead, a cloud whitened on the horizon, like the cheeks of an ancient “cupid,” which bothered me for some reason. The front window was open, letting the wind in, which made your lips dry, so you had to keep licking and thinking about them all the time.

Murky green spots appeared out in the distance, beyond the Wall. Then—down, down, down, your heart drops, it’s like coming down a steep mountain, and finally, there we were at the House of Antiquity.

This entire eerie, fragile, and blind structure is fully enclosed in a glass shell: otherwise, it would have, naturally, given out ages ago. An old woman stood waiting by the glass door, totally wrinkled, especially her mouth: it looked like it had grown over with wrinkles and folds, her lips had migrated inward, and it seemed completely improbable that she could possibly speak. And yet she did. “Have you dearies come to look at the house?” Her wrinkles all beamed (most likely because they came together in rays, which created the semblance of “beaming”).

“Yes, babushka, I felt like seeing it again,” I-330 told her.

The wrinkles beamed brighter. “How about this sun, huh? Well? What? Oh, you little scamp, you rascal! I know what you’re up to! Alright, then: you two go on inside, I’ll just stay out here in the sunshine . . .”

Hmmm . . . it seemed my companion came here often. I felt like I wanted to shake something off myself, like something was in my way: probably that nagging image: the cloud on smooth blue majolica. As we ascended the broad, dark stairs, I-330 said, “I love that old woman.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe for her mouth. Maybe for nothing. Just because.”

I shrugged. She continued, smiling a little, or maybe, not smiling at all. “I feel very guilty about it. Clearly, there should be no such thing as ‘love just because’—it should always be ‘love because,’ love for a reason. All natural forces must be . . .”

“Clearly,” I began, and immediately caught myself on this word and snuck a look at I—had she noticed?

She was looking down somewhere, her eyes were lowered, like blinds.

It reminded me: evening, around 22, walking down an avenue, among the brightly lit, translucent cells, you notice the darkened ones, with their blinds lowered, and inside them, behind the blinds—what was going on in here, behind her blinds? Why had she called me, what was all this about?

I opened the heavy, creaking, opaque door, and we found ourselves in a dark, disorganized space (what was once called an “apartment”). That same antique “royal” musical instrument—a wild, cluttered, crazy jumble of colors and shapes, exactly like their ancient music. A white plane overhead; dark blue walls; the red, green, and orange bindings of ancient books; bronze-yellow—candleholders, a statue of Buddha; rows of furnishings in epileptic disarray, impossible to incorporate into any equation.

I could barely handle this level of chaos, but my companion seemed to have a higher tolerance.

“This is my absolute favorite,” and suddenly, as though regaining her balance, she flashed her biting smile with her sharp white teeth. “I mean: the most ridiculous of their ‘apartments.’”

“Or, to be even more precise,” I corrected her, “states. Thousands of microscopic, eternally warring nation-states, as merciless as . . .”

“Well, yes, clearly,” she replied, apparently serious.

We walked through a room with small children’s beds (in that era, children were also private property). Then more rooms, flashing mirrors, gloomy wardrobes, unbearably gaudy sofas, an enormous “fireplace,” a broad mahogany bed. The wonderful, translucent, eternal glass we have today only appeared in the form of sad, fragile squares—windowpanes.

“And to think, the people who lived here loved ‘just because.’ They burned, they suffered . . .” (again, the lowered blinds of her eyes.) “What a ridiculous, reckless waste of human energy, don’t you think?”

Her words somehow seemed to be coming from me, as if she were speaking my thoughts, but the whole time, her smile held that same infuriating X. Behind her blinds, something was happening inside her that—I don’t know what it was, but it was driving me crazy, trying my patience, I wanted to argue with her, yell at her (yes, yell), but all I could do was agree—there was no other option.

We stopped in front of a mirror. At that moment, all I could see were her eyes. I suddenly had an idea: people are built just as crudely as these chaotic “apartments”—human heads are opaque, with only tiny windows for seeing inside: the eyes. As though reading my mind, she turned to face me. “Well, here are my eyes. Now what?” (This, of course, said without speaking.)

I was faced with two horribly dark windows and an unfathomable, alien life inside. All I could see was fire—as if she had her own “fireplace” burning inside her—and some figures that looked familiar . . .

This was, of course, only natural: I was seeing my own reflection. But there was something about it that looked so unnatural and unlike me (obviously, this was the bewildering effect of the setting)—I had the distinct sensation of having been caught, trapped in this savage cage, sucked into the roiling vortex of ancient life.

“You know what,” she said. “Would you mind stepping out for a minute?” Her voice came from inside, from within the dark windows of her eyes, where the fire was burning.

I went out and sat down. The snub-nosed, asymmetrical face of one of the ancient poets (Pushkin,[*] I think) was looking at me from the shelf on the wall with a sly smile. Why was I just sitting here and obediently tolerating that smile and the rest of this? Why was I here, why did I feel so ridiculous? That irritating, repellent woman, this strange game . . .

I heard the closet door shut, the rustle of silk, and I could barely restrain myself from going in there and—I don’t remember exactly what: I probably wanted to very angrily tell her off.

But she had already come out. She wore a short, ancient, bright yellow dress, a black hat, and black stockings. The dress was made of thin silk and I could clearly tell that her stockings were very long, going up high over her knees, and her open neck, the shadow between . . .

“Listen, you clearly want to be original, but don’t you—”

“Clearly,” she interrupted, “being original means standing out. Thus, being original would disrupt equality . . . And what the Ancients, in their idiot language, called ‘being banal’ for us means: doing your duty. Therefore . . .”

“Yes, yes, yes! Exactly,” I couldn’t hold back. “And there’s no reason, absolutely no reason, for you to—”

She went up to the figurine of the snub-nosed poet and, lowering the blinds over the wildfire in her eyes, in there, behind her windows, she said, this time, I believe, with complete sincerity (maybe to soften me up)—something actually reasonable:

“Don’t you find it incredible that there was a time when people tolerated people like him? And not only tolerated, but even bowed down to them. How slavish of them! Don’t you think?”

“Clearly . . . I mean I wanted to . . .” (that damned “clearly”!)

“Well, yes, I know. But the truth is that these were masters even more powerful than those whom they crowned. Why didn’t they extirpate them from society and kill them off? We . . .”

“Yes, we . . .” I began. And suddenly, she burst out laughing. It was as if I could see her laughter erupt through the air: the resonant, steep, supple but strong—like a whip—curve of that laughter. I remember—I shook with anger. I wanted—to grab her and—I don’t remember what . . . I had to do something—anything. I mechanically opened my golden badge and looked at the time. Ten to 17.

“Isn’t it time to go?” I asked as politely as I could manage.

“And what if I asked you to stay here with me?”

“Listen: do you . . . do you understand what you’re saying? Ten minutes from now, I must report to the auditorium—”

“All numbers are obligated to attend the standard course in arts and sciences,” she continued, using my voice.

Then, she tore back the blinds, raising her eyes: through the dark windows, I saw the flames in her fireplace.

“I know this doctor at the Medical Bureau, he’s registered to me. If I ask him to, he can give you a pass that will say you were sick. What do you think?”

I understood. I finally understood where this whole game had been leading.

“So that’s what you’re up to! You must know perfectly well that like any honest number, it is now essentially my duty to immediately go to the Guardians’ Bureau and . . .”

“But what about unessentially?” (her sharp, biting smile). “I’m awfully curious: will you actually go to the Bureau or not?”

“Are you staying here?” I reached for the doorknob. It was made of bronze and I could hear: my voice sounded just as metallic.

“Will you give me a moment?”

She went up to the telephone and said a number into it. I was so upset, I didn’t take note of it, and then she shouted, “I’ll see you at the House of Antiquity. Yes, yes, alone.”

I turned the cold bronze knob.

“Would you mind if I took the aero?”

“Oh yes, of course! Please, go ahead . . .”

Out there, by the exit, the old woman sat in the sun, daydreaming, like a plant. It was again surprising when she opened her mute, overgrown mouth and asked, “And your . . . did you leave her alone in there?”

“Yes, she’s alone.”

The old woman’s mouth grew over again. She shook her head. Apparently, even her weakened mind comprehended the brazen recklessness and stupidity of that woman’s behavior.

At exactly 17, I was at the lecture. Suddenly, I realized that I hadn’t told the old woman the truth: I-330 wasn’t alone. Perhaps it was the fact that I’d inadvertently lied to the old woman that tormented me and kept me from paying attention. Yes, she wasn’t alone: that was the issue.

After 21:30, I had a Personal Hour. I could have gone to the Bureau of Guardians right then and there and filed a report, but I was so exhausted after that stupid incident. Plus, technically, I have two days to file it. I’ll do it tomorrow: theres’s a whole twenty-four hours.

Log 7

BRIEF:

An Eyelash. Taylor. Henbane and Lilies of the Valley.

Night. Green, orange, blue; a crimson “grand” instrument; a dress, as yellow as an orange. Then the bronze Buddha suddenly raised its bronze eyelids and juice started pouring: out of the Buddha. And out of the yellow dress—juice, dripping out of the mirror, and the large bed began to soak through, and the children’s beds, and now me—a deathly sweet horror . . .

I woke up: even, bluish light; the glass of the walls, the glass chairs, the table all shining. That calmed me down. My heart stopped pounding. Juice, Buddha . . . what is this nonsense? Clearly: I’m sick. I never dreamed before. They say that this was a completely normal and everyday occurrence for the Ancients: dreaming. It makes sense: their whole lives were like a nightmarish carousel: green—orange—Buddha—juice. But we now know that dreams are a serious psychic illness. And I know: my mind has always been a chronometrically regulated, sparkling mechanism without a single bug, but now . . . Now: it’s like there is some kind of foreign object stuck in my brain, like when you get even the thinnest eyelash stuck in your eye: you’re fine, but that one eye with a lash in it doesn’t let you forget about it for a second . . .

The cheerful, crystal bell in the headboard: 7, time to get up. When I look left and right, it’s like I’m seeing myself, my room, my unif, my movements repeated one thousand times over through the glass walls. It’s invigorating: seeing yourself as part of an enormous, powerful whole. And such precise beauty: not a single extraneous gesture, bend, or turn.

Yes, that Taylor was, indubitably, a genius among the Ancients. Although he didn’t reach the conclusion of applying his method to all of life, every step, day and night—he didn’t think to integrate his system from hour zero to twenty-four. But still, how did they manage to write entire libraries about some Kant while barely noticing Taylor, the visionary who managed to see ten centuries ahead of his time?

Breakfast is over. The Anthem of the One State sung in a uniform fashion. Uniformly, in fours, to the elevators. The barely perceptible hum of the motors—and rapidly, down, down, down—my heart sank a little . . . then, suddenly, I recalled my weird dream or maybe, some kind of vague, implicit function of it. Oh yes, on the aero yesterday—the descent. But all that is over now: period. And it’s very good I was so decisive and curt with her.

I got on the underground railway, flying to where the INTEGRAL’s elegant body stood gleaming on the dock, immobile, waiting for fire to breathe life into it. Closing my eyes, I daydreamed in formulas: once again mentally calculating the initial velocity needed to launch the INTEGRAL into space. With each fraction of a second, the mass of the INTEGRAL would change (consuming combustion fuel). The equation turned out very complicated, with transcendental quantities.

As though in a dream: but here, in the solid, numerical world, I felt someone sit down next to me, lightly bumping into me, and say, “Oh, sorry.”

I opened my eyes and at first (my mind still on the INTEGRAL), all I saw was something rapidly flying through space: a head—flying because it had protruding pink wings—ears—on either side of it. And then the curve of the drooping back of the head, the hunched back, double-bent—the letter S . . .

And through the glass walls of my algebraic world—the eyelash was back—the thought of that unpleasant task I have to do today.

“No worries.” I smiled at my neighbor, exchanging bows. The number S-4711 gleamed at me from his badge (no wonder I’d associated him with the letter S from the moment I saw him: it was a visual impression unregistered by my conscious mind). His eyes flashed—two sharp-pointed gimlets, spinning furiously, penetrating my gaze, going down deep into me—soon, they’ll hit the bottom and see what I can’t even admit to myself . . .

Suddenly, the eyelash was perfectly clear: here was one of them, one of the Guardians, and the easiest thing to do was not wait and just come out with everything now.

“I have to tell you something. Yesterday, I went to the House of Antiquity.” My voice was strange, tamped down, flattened. I tried clearing my throat.

“Why, that’s excellent. Visiting the House of Antiquity often provides material for drawing very instructive conclusions.”

“But wait—I wasn’t alone, I was accompanying number I-330, and then . . .”

“I-330? I’m so happy for you. She’s a very interesting, talented woman. With many admirers.”

And of course . . . that time, on our walk . . . maybe he’s even registered to her? No, now I can’t tell him, it’s impossible: that much is clear.

“Indeed! Yes, of course! Very.” My smile stretched wider and wider as I felt more and more awkward and as if: this smile made me feel naked and stupid . . .

The gimlets reached down to my core, swirling, then zoomed back up into his eyes. S, with a double smile, nodded goodbye and slipped toward the exit. I hid behind my newspaper (I felt as though everyone was looking at me) and quickly forgot about the eyelash, gimlets, and everything else because I was so shocked by what I read in the newspaper. A single, short line: “According to credible sources, there is new evidence of an elusive organization striving for liberation from the beneficent yoke of the State.”

“Liberation?” It was beyond belief: humanity’s criminal instincts were clearly alive and kicking. I intentionally use the word “criminal.” Freedom and crime are as inextricably linked as . . . well, the motion of an aero and its velocity: when an aero’s velocity = 0, it doesn’t move; when a person’s freedom = 0, he doesn’t commit any crimes. That much is clear. The only way to eradicate crime is to eradicate freedom. And now, when we’ve only just eliminated it (on the cosmic scale, centuries are, of course, “only just”), suddenly, some kind of miserable imbeciles . . .

No, it doesn’t make any sense: why didn’t I go to the Bureau of Guardians immediately, yesterday? Today, after 16, I will go without fail . . .

At 16:10, I went out and, right away, I ran into O on the corner. She was filled to the brim with pink glee at this chance encounter. “What a simple, round mind. Good for me: she’ll understand and support me . . .” Although really, I didn’t need support: I had firmly decided.

The horns of the Music Factory boomed the March in unison—that same everyday March. It was all so ineffably wonderful—that everydayness, repetitiveness, mirroring!

O grabbed my hand. “Walk.” Her round blue eyes were wide open to me—blue windows inside—and I penetrated within without getting caught on anything: nothing inside—i.e., nothing foreign or extra.

“No, no walk. I need to . . .” I told her where I needed to go. And to my surprise, I saw: the pink O of her lips slumped into a pink crescent moon, horns down—as though she’d got something sour in her mouth. It was infuriating.

“You female numbers—incurably riddled with prejudice. All of you are completely incapable of thinking abstractly. Forgive me, but it’s simply stupid.”

“You’re off to see the spies—yuck! And to think that I got you a sprig of lilies of the valley from the Botanical Museum . . .”

“‘To think?’ Why ‘to think’? So typically feminine.” I angrily (I admit) grabbed her lilies of the valley. “Here’s your lily of the valley, okay? Smell it: it’s nice, huh? I’m begging you to just have enough logic to understand. The lily of the valley smells nice: yes. But you can’t say that about smell itself, the concept of smell, can you? You can’t call smell good or bad. You cannot, okay? There is the smell of the lily of the valley, then there’s the horrible smell of henbane: both of them are smells. They had spies in the ancient state and yes, we have spies, too . . . yes, spies. I’m not afraid of words. But isn’t it clear that their spies were like henbane while ours are like lilies? Yes! Lilies of the valley!”

The pink crescent quivered. I now understand I was wrong, but at that moment, I was positive that she was about to burst into laughter. Which made me shout even louder: “Lilies of the valley! And there’s nothing funny about that—nothing!”

The round, smooth spheres of other people’s heads turned to look as they floated past us. O gently took my hand. “There’s something about you today . . . are you feeling sick?”

My dream—yellow—Buddha . . . It instantly dawned on me: I had to go to the Medical Bureau.

“Actually, I think I am,” I said very happily (this was an inexplicable contradiction: it was nothing to be happy about).

“Then you better go straight to the doctor. You do understand: it is your duty to be healthy—it would be silly to try to prove this to you.”

“Oh, darling O—you’re so right! You are absolutely right!”

So I didn’t go to the Bureau of Guardians: I had no choice, I had to go to the Medical Bureau, instead. They held me there until 17.

In the evening (and they were closed at night anyway)—in the evening, O came over. We did not lower the blinds. We worked on problems from an ancient math book: I find that this settles and clears the mind. O-90 sat over a notebook, leaning her head on her left shoulder, pressing her tongue into her left cheek from the strain of thinking. It was so childlike, so charming. I felt so good inside, simple, precise . . .

She left. I’m alone. I took two deep breaths (it’s very good for you before bed). And then suddenly, there was an unexpected fragrance—it reminded me of something very unpleasant . . . I soon found the culprit: a sprig of lilies of the valley hidden in my bed. Everything started spinning, rising up from the bottom. It was so totally tactless—slipping me these flowers. It’s true: I didn’t go, she was right. But it wasn’t my fault! I was sick.

Log 8

BRIEF:

An Irrational Root. R-13. The Triangle.

A long time ago, in my school days, √−1, the square root of minus one, happened to me. It’s clearly etched in my memory: the sparkling spherical hall, hundreds of little round schoolboys’ heads, and Plyapa, our math teacher. We’d nicknamed him Plyapa: he was pretty worn down and wobbly, so when the technician put the jack in him, the loudspeaker always started with a loud “Plya-plya-tshhhhh,” and then our lesson began. One day, Plyapa told us about irrational numbers. I remember I wept, banged my fists on the table, and wailed, “I don’t want √−1! Get √−1 out of me!” This irrational root burrowed into me like something alien, foreign, frightening, gnawing at me from within—it couldn’t be rationalized or neutralized, it was beyond ratio.

And now, this was √−1 all over again. I’ve looked over everything I have written and it is clear: I’ve tricked myself, lied to myself—done everything in my power to not see the √−1 on the wall. It doesn’t matter if I am sick or anything else: I still could have gone. A week ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice and just done it. Why is it that now . . . why? It happened again today. At exactly 16:10, I was standing in front of the gleaming glass wall. Above me, the letters on the Bureau’s sign shone like the sun, golden and pure. Through the glass, I could see a long line of bluish unifs inside, their faces glowing like candles in an ancient church: they had come to perform a great deed, to sacrifice people they loved, their friends, and themselves on the altar of the One State. And I—I was dying to be among them, to be one of them. But I could not bring myself to do it: my feet were glued to the glass of the pavement—I stood there, dumbly staring, unable to move . . .

“Hey, mathematician, wake up!”

I winced. Before me: black eyes, lacquered in laughter, and thick African lips. The poet R-13, my old friend, and rosy O with him, as well.

I angrily turned around (if they hadn’t distracted me, I would have finally, forcibly extricated √−1 from my being and gone into the Bureau).

“I’m not asleep, and, for your information, I was just admiring,” I said rather sharply.

“Oh yes, of course! You, my friend, should have become a poet instead of a mathematician! It’s not too late! Come over to our side! I could set you up in a snap.”

R-13 talks like he’s drowning in words, they spray out of him, splattering out of those thick lips—every “p,” a fountain, “poet,” a fountain.

“I serve and will continue to serve true knowledge,” I said, furrowing my brow. I don’t like or understand jokes, and R-13 has this stupid habit of joking.

“What good is knowledge? That knowledge of yours is nothing but cowardice. Don’t even try to deny it. All you want to do is put a wall up around infinity, but then, you’d be too scared to even look over the wall. I’m on to you! You’d take one peek and immediately screw your little eyes shut. Don’t try to deny it!”

“Walls are the foundation of everything human—” I began.

R sputtered out a whole fountain and O laughed, as well, roundly and rosily. I waved them off: I don’t care, laugh all you like. I had other things on my mind. I needed to somehow swallow and muffle that damned √−1.

“You know what?” I offered. “Why don’t we all go to my place and do some math problems?” (I recalled yesterday’s quiet hour—maybe there could be another one like it today.)

O glanced at R, and then back at me, round and clear, her cheeks turning the gentle, exciting color of our tickets.

“Well, today I . . . today, I have a ticket to see him.” She gestured at R, “and in the evening, he’s busy . . . so . . .”

R’s wet, lacquered lips smacked amiably. “That’s alright: she and I only need half an hour. Right, O? I’m not big on solving your little problems, anyway—why don’t we just go over to my place and hang around there?”

The thought of being alone with myself, or rather, that new, alien self who, by some strange coincidence, happened to have my same number, D-503, was terrible. So we all went to his place, to R’s. Although he isn’t exact, or rhythmical, and his sense of logic is laughable and distorted, we are good friends. No wonder three years ago he and I chose this same darling, pink O. She now connects us even more strongly than our years together in school.

R’s room. You’d think that everything was exactly the same as in mine: the Table of Hours, the glass of the chairs and the desk, the closet, the bed. However, as soon as we got there, he pushed aside one chair, the other, the surfaces shifted, everything phased out of regulation dimensions, and turned non-Euclidean. R was the same as he ever was. He was always behind in Taylor and math.

We remembered the days of old Plyapa: how we boys would sometimes plaster his glass legs with thank-you notes (we loved our Plyapa). And then our Law Teacher.[*] The Law Teacher was incredibly loud-speaking—like he had a strong gale blowing out of his cone—we kids would yell after him at the top of our lungs. One day, that daredevil R-13 stuffed a bunch of chewed-up paper into his mouthpiece so that when he spoke, spitballs flew out of him. R was punished, of course, and what he had done was terrible, but now, we were laughing about it—our little triangle—including myself, I confess.

“What if he’d been alive like the Ancients’ teachers? That would have been,” and the “b” breached like a fountain out of his thick, smacking lips . . .

The sun came in through the ceiling and walls; sun from above, from the sides, and reflected up from below. O sat on R-13’s lap and tiny droplets of sun sparkled in her blue eyes. I warmed up, came to; the √−1 fell silent, not stirring . . .

“So how’s that INTEGRAL of yours? Are we flying off to visit the aliens anytime soon? Hurry, hurry! Or else we poets will write so much, your INTEGRAL won’t be able to take off! Every day from eight to eleven . . .” R turned his head and scratched it. The back of his head reminded me of a little rectangular suitcase perched on his neck. (It reminded me of that ancient painting, “In the Carriage.”)

I came alive.

“So you’re writing things for the INTEGRAL, too? What are you writing about? Even just today.”

“Today, nothing. I was busy with other things,” he said, spraying his “b” right at me.

“What other things?”

R furrowed his brow. “Wouldn’t you like to know! Well, if you really need to, it was a death sentence. I was poeticizing the verdict. This idiot, one of us poets . . . Sat next to me for two years and seemed totally normal. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he goes and declares, ‘I am a genius!—A genius!—Above the law!’ And the things that he wrote . . . if you could have seen them . . . It’s just too bad!”

His thick lips hung low, the lacquer drained out of his eyes. R-13 hopped up, turned away, and stared off somewhere through the wall. I looked at his tightly shut little suitcase and wondered: what is he going over in there, in that suitcase of his?

A minute of awkward, asymmetrical silence. I didn’t know what was wrong, but there was something.

“Luckily, the antediluvian era of all those Shakespeares and Dostoevskys and whoever else is far behind us,” I said intentionally loudly.

R turned back to face me. His words were still spraying and spilling out of him, but, it seemed to me, the lacquer of cheer in his eyes had vanished.

“Yes, my dear mathematician, we’re so very lucky! We are the luckiest arithmetical average . . . or, as your people say: fully integrated from zero up to infinity, from cretins to Shakespeare . . . exactly like that!”

I don’t know why—it seemed to come out of nowhere, but suddenly, I remembered her, her tone of voice, some very thin thread stretched between her and R (what was it?). The √−1 stirred inside me. I opened my badge: twenty-five minutes past 16. They had forty-five minutes left in their pink ticket.

“Well, I’ll get going now,” and with that I kissed O, shook R’s hand, and went to the elevator.

Out on the avenue, after crossing to the other side, I turned to look back: in the light-filled, sun-drenched glass hulk of the building, here and there, I could see blue-gray, opaque cells with their blinds lowered—cells of rhythmic, Taylorized happiness. I found R-13’s on the seventh floor: he’d already lowered his blinds.

Darling O . . . Dear R . . . He also (I don’t know why “also,” but I am writing whatever I’m writing)—he also has something inside him that isn’t completely clear to me. But still, he, O, and I—we are a triangle—even if it’s not equilateral, it’s still a triangle. We are, to put it in the terms of our ancestors (perhaps you, my planetary readers, will understand this language better), we are a family. And it’s so nice to rest sometimes, even for a little while, to shut oneself off in a simple, sturdy triangle, shutting out everything that . . .

Log 9

BRIEF:

Liturgy. Iambs and Trochees. The Iron Hand.

A bright, solemn day. On days like this, you forget your weaknesses, imprecisions, illnesses—everything turns crystal, faithful, eternal—like our new glass . . .

Cube Square. Sixty-six mighty concentric circles: the tribunes. In sixty-six rows: mute lanterns of faces with eyes reflecting the radiance of the heavens—or perhaps, the radiance of the One State. Blood-crimson flowers—women’s lips. The tender garlands of children’s faces—in the front rows, up close to the action. Deep, solemn, gothic silence.

Judging by the surviving descriptions, the Ancients felt something similar during their “services.” But they were serving their irrational, unknowable God—we are serving our rational and, in the most precise sense, knowable one. Their God gave them nothing but endless, torturous searching: He didn’t come up with anything better than sacrificing Himself for some unknown reason. We sacrifice to our God, the One State, offering a calm, thoughtful, rational sacrifice. Yes, this was the solemn liturgy to the One State, in remembrance of the Two Hundred Years’ War, our baptism by fire, the great celebration of the momentous victory of all over one, of the sum over the unit . . .

Here was one—on the steps of the sun-filled Cube. White . . . and not even white but actually colorless—a glass face with glass lips. He was all eyes—black, sucking, swallowing holes—on the precipice of that terrible world. The golden badge bearing his number had already been stripped away. His hands were tied with a purple ribbon (an ancient custom: apparently because in ancient times, when people would do this not in the name of the One State, the accused would, understandably, feel that it was within their rights to resist, and so their hands were usually fettered with chains). Up above, on the Cube, beside the Machine stood the metallic, motionless figure of the one whom we call the Benefactor. It’s impossible to make out His face from down here: all you can tell is that it is delineated by stately and stern quadrilinear contours. But then, the hands . . . You see it in photographs: they are too close, hands in the foreground turn out gigantic, arresting the gaze—blocking out everything else. Those heavy hands, still calmly lying in His lap, for now—clearly: they were like stones and His knees could barely bear their weight . . .

Then, suddenly, one of these giant hands rose—a slow, iron gesture—and from the tribune, obeying the lifted hand, a number approached the Cube. This was one of the State Poets—he’d drawn the golden ticket: to adorn the celebration with his verse. Divine bronze iambs began thundering down over the tribunes—about the madman with glassy eyes who now stood on the steps awaiting the logical consequence of his insanity.

. . . Fire. In the iambs, buildings roiled, spewing up molten gold, before toppling. Green trees writhed in the flames, bleeding sap—until only black skeletal crosses remained. But then, Prometheus (meaning us) appeared and he:

Yoked fire to the machine, in steel

And fettered chaos in the chains of law.

Everything was reborn in steel: a steel sun, steel trees, steel people. Until suddenly some madman “let fire off the chain again and set it free,” and everything died . . .

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good memory for poetry, but I remember one thing: it would have been impossible to choose more educational and beautiful images.

Another slow and heavy gesture—a second poet appeared on the steps of the Cube. I even rose up out of my seat: I couldn’t believe my eyes! But it really was: his thick lips—it was him! Why hadn’t he said anything, revealing that he was about to receive this high . . . His lips trembled, they were gray. I understood: standing in front of the Benefactor, in front of the entire legion of Guardians—but still: letting yourself get that nervous . . .

Swift, trenchant trochees, as sharp as axes. About an unfathomable crime: blasphemous verses calling the Benefactor . . . no, I couldn’t bear to repeat it.

Afterward, a pallid R-13 returned to his seat without looking at anyone (I would have never expected him to be this shy). For an infinitesimal differential of a second, someone’s face flashed next to his—a sharp, black triangle—and was instantly erased: my eyes—thousands of eyes—looked up toward the Machine. Up there—the third iron gesture of the inhuman hand. Then, stirred by an invisible wind—the criminal began his slow ascent—one step, the next—and finally, the last step of his life—his face to the sky, head thrown back—he’d arrived at his final resting place.

The leaden Benefactor, stony as fate itself, circled the Machine then laid His giant hand on the lever . . . Not a thing stirred, no one dared to breathe: all eyes were on His hand. What a cyclone of flame must be blazing inside Him—the instrument, with the force of hundreds of thousands of volts. What a magnificent destiny!

An immeasurable second. The hand, releasing the current, fell. The unbearably sharp blade of the ray sparked—like a shudder, a barely perceptible crackling in the Machine’s inner workings. The prostrate body—enveloped in faint, glowing smoke—dissolving, melting right before our eyes, with horrifying speed. Then—nothing. All that’s left: a puddle of chemically pure water, which, just a moment ago, was red, beating furiously inside a heart . . .

All of this was simple, each of us knew it all: yes, the dissociation of matter— yes, the simultaneous fission of all the atoms in the human body. And yet, every time, it was a miracle, proof of the Benefactor’s superhuman power.

Above, in front of Him, the flushed faces of ten female numbers, their mouths half-open from excitement, their flowers[*] fluttering in the wind.

In keeping with old tradition, the ten women adorned the Benefactor’s unif, still wet from the sprays, with flowers. With a majestic stride, like a hierophant, He descended, slowly passed among the tribunes—trailing behind Him the delicate white branches of women’s arms, raising a millions-strong storm of voices. Then, the same cries in honor of the legion of Guardians, invisibly present among us, here, in our ranks. Who knows: perhaps it was them, the Guardians, that the imaginations of ancient men presaged when imagining their gentle and terrible “archangels,” who watch over each person from birth.

Yes, there was something from ancient religion, something cleansing, like thunder and storms, in this ceremony. Readers: have you experienced moments like these? I feel sorry for you if you haven’t . . .

Log 10

BRIEF:

A Letter. Membrane. My Hairy Self.

Yesterday was like the paper that chemists use to filter their solutions: all the suspended particles, everything superfluous was left behind on it. In the morning, I came downstairs totally distilled and clear.

Downstairs, in the vestibule, there’s an attendant who sits at the desk, noting the time and numbers of those coming in and out of the building. Her name is U . . . but actually, I better not say her number because I’m afraid of accidentally saying something negative about her. Although she is nothing but a very respectable elderly lady. The only thing I don’t like about her is that her cheeks droop like fish gills (you might think: what’s wrong with that?).

She sat scraping her pen on the paper, and I saw my name, D-503, with an inkblot next to it.

Just as I was about to tell her, she suddenly lifted her head and dripped a smile onto me, just like ink. “There’s a letter for you. You’ll get it, dear—oh yes, you’ll get it soon enough.”

I knew: the letter, which she had already read, now had to go through the Bureau of Guardians (it seems unnecessary to explain this totally natural process), and then I would have it no later than 12. But I was perturbed by that smile of hers, like a drop of ink that clouded my pure solution. So much so that later, at work on the INTEGRAL, I couldn’t concentrate and even made a mistake in my calculations, which never happens.

At 12—the pink-brown fish gills again and a little smile. Finally, the letter was in my hands. I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to read it right then and there. I put it in my pocket and hurried up to my room. I opened it, skimmed it, and sat down from shock . . . It was an official notice stating that I-330 had registered for me and that today at 21, I was to report to her—to the address at the bottom . . .

No: after everything that had happened, after I had so unequivocally demonstrated how I felt about her. On top of that, she didn’t even know: what if I’d been to the Guardians—there was no way for her to know that I had been sick—no, I absolutely could not . . . and despite all this—

My head was spinning, the engine wailed. Buddha—yellow—lilies of the valley—the pink crescent moon . . . Yes, all that plus this—this: O had wanted to stop by today. Should I show her this notice re: I-330? I didn’t know: she wouldn’t believe me (would anyone?), but it wasn’t my fault, I was completely . . . I knew: there’d be a difficult, maddening, entirely logicless conversation . . . Please, no, anything but that! I decided to resolve it mechanically: I would simply send O a copy of the notice.

I hurriedly stuffed the letter into my pocket and, as I was doing that, I was once again drawn to my terrible monkey hands. I remembered how she, I-330, had taken my hand on that walk and studied it. Could she really . . .

Now it was quarter to 21. A white night. Everything greenish and glassy. But this was a different, fragile glass—not ours, not real—a thin and delicate glass shell, and underneath it, everything spinning, whirling, droning . . . I would not be surprised if all of a sudden, the cupolas of the auditoriums slowly arose like domes of smoke and the elderly moon smiled inkily—like the woman at the front desk this morning—all of the blinds in all of the buildings would instantly lower, and behind the blinds—

A strange sensation: I could feel my ribs—they were like metal rods, squeezing me—crushing my heart, my chest was too tight, there wasn’t enough room in it. I found myself standing in front of the glass door bearing the golden number: I-330. She sat with her back to me, writing something. I entered . . .

“Here you go,” I stretched out the pink ticket to her. “I received your notice today so I came.”

“So punctual! Would you give me a minute? Take a seat, I just need to finish something.”

Again, she cast her eyes down at her letter—what was behind her closed blinds? What would she say—what would she do in a moment? How could I find this out, calculate it, when she was a being entirely from beyond—from the wild, ancient kingdom of dreams? I watched her in silence. My ribs felt like metal rods, squeezing me . . . When she speaks, her face is like a sparkling spinning wheel: you can’t make out the individual spokes. But now, the wheel stood still. And I noticed a strange juxtaposition: her dark brows jerked up toward her temples—the mocking, sharp triangle pointing down—and then, the two deep lines from her nose to the corners of her mouth. These two triangles seemed to contradict one another, overlaying her face with that awful, irritating X, like a cross: her face was crossed out by a cross.

The wheel started turning, its spokes blending into each other . . .

“So you never did end up going to the Guardians, did you?”

“I was . . . I couldn’t: I was sick.”

“Uh-huh. Well, that’s what I figured: something was going to prevent you—whatever it was”—a smile of sharp teeth—“But now, you’re all mine. You do recall that, ‘Any number who fails to report to the Bureau within forty-eight hours is considered . . .’”

My heart was beating so hard, it seemed to be bending the metal rods. Like a little boy—stupidly, like a schoolboy, I had been caught. I was stupidly silent. I felt like I’d been entangled in something and couldn’t escape—not with my hands, not with my feet . . .

She stood up and lazily stretched before pressing the button. With a light rattle, the blinds came down from all sides. I was cut off from the world, alone with her.

She was somewhere behind me, by the closet. Her unif rustled, fell to the floor—I listened with my entire body. And I remembered . . . no: it just lit up inside me for 1/100th of a second . . . I’d recently had to calculate the curvature of a new model of street membrane (you can now find these elegant membranes on every corner, recording conversations for the Guardians), and I remembered: the curved, pink, vibrating membrane—an unusual organism with only one organ—the ear: that was me now.

A button snapped on her collar—her chest—lower. The glassy silk rustled over her shoulders, her knees—onto the floor. I heard—and this is even more vivid than seeing—how one foot stepped out, then the other . . . out of the blue-gray pile of silk . . .

The tightly stretched membrane trembled, recording the silence. No: but the hammer kept slamming the rods, with endless pauses between its blows. I could hear her as though I could see her: she was right behind me, pausing to think.

Here: the doors of the closet—here: the bang of a lid—more silk, rustling . . .

“You can look now.”

I turned to face her. She was in an ancient dress—paper thin, saffron yellow: one thousand times more evil than if she’d been wearing nothing at all. Two sharp pink points smouldered through the thin fabric, like two burning embers. Two gently rounded knees . . .

She sat down in the low chair. On the rectangular table in front of her, there was a flask filled with an acid green liquid and two little glasses with stems. Out of the corner of her mouth, smoke was rising from a very thin paper tube, an ancient smoking device (I don’t remember what it’s called right now).

The membrane still trembled. The hammer still beating inside me—against the red-hot rods. I clearly heard every blow and—what if she could hear, too?

But she just sat there calmly blowing smoke, casting cool glances at me, and carelessly ashing—right on my pink ticket.

As cold-bloodedly as I could, I asked, “Listen, if that’s how it is, why did you register for me? Why did you make me come here?”

But it was as though she didn’t hear me. She filled one of the glasses and took a sip.

“Lovely liqueur. Would you like some?”

It dawned on me: this was alcohol. Visions of yesterday flashed through me like lightning: the stone hand of the Benefactor, the unbearable blade of the ray, and there: on the Cube, that prostrate body with its head flung back. I shuddered.

“Listen,” I said, “you know as well as I do: anybody who poisons themselves with nicotine and especially alcohol—the One State will mercilessly . . .”

Her dark brows—cocked up toward her temples—that sharp, mocking triangle. “Quickly eliminating the few is more reasonable than letting the many destroy themselves—degeneracy and all that. It’s all so true, it’s obscene.”

“Yes, obscene.”

“But imagine if a few of these bald, naked truths were sent out into the light of day . . . No, you couldn’t imagine . . . like that devoted admirer of mine—you know the one—imagine him doffing his robes of deceit and showing himself in his true form in public . . . Ha!”

She was laughing. But I could clearly see the bitterness of her lower triangle: two deep creases from the corners of her mouth up to her nose. And for some reason, those lines made it clear: that doubled, hunched, wing-eared man had been with her—just like this . . . Him . . .

Right now, I’m just trying to convey my—clearly abnormal—sensations. As I am writing this, I have come to my senses: all this is right and good, and he, just like any honest number, also has a right to these pleasures—and it would be unjust . . . Well, yes, all this is clear.

I-330 laughed very strangely, for a long time. Then she looked deep into my eyes, into me.

“The most important thing is that I am completely calm with you. You are so sweet—I am sure of it—you wouldn’t think of going to the Bureau and informing on me, telling them that I drink liquor and smoke. You will get sick—or you’ll be too busy—or some other excuse. What’s more: I am positive that in a moment, you will join me in drinking this bewitching poison . . .”

What a rude, sadistic tone. I felt it clearly: I once again hated her. But why “once again?” I’d hated her this whole time.

She tossed back the entire glass of green poison, got up, and, glowing pink through the saffron, took a few steps and stopped behind my chair . . .

Suddenly—her fingers around my neck—her lips against mine . . . no, deeper, more terrifying . . . I swear, I did not see this coming, and maybe, only because it was such a shock . . . Because I couldn’t have—and now I grasp this completely firmly—I couldn’t have wanted what ended up happening.

Her lips were torturously sweet (I presume it was the taste of the “liqueur”)—and now a gulp of that burning poison was poured into me—and another—and another . . . I lifted up off the Earth and, like a lonely, frantically spinning planet, tumbled down, down—down along some uncalculated orbit . . .

I can only provide an approximate explanation of what happened next through more or less fitting analogies.

It had never occurred to me before, but it’s true: we, on the Earth, are always walking on top of the seething crimson sea of fire concealed in its core—in the Earth’s womb. And we never even think about it. But if the thin, uppermost shell underfoot were to suddenly turn to glass and we’d see . . . I turned to glass. I saw: within, inside myself. There were two of me. One was the old me, D-503, number D-503, and the other . . . Before, he had only let the tips of his hairy paws out of their shell, but now, he was fully emerging, the shell cracked, and any moment, it would burst into little pieces and then . . . and then what?

With all my strength, I grabbed onto my anchor—the arms of the chair—and asked, so I could hear myself—my old self, “Where . . . where did you get that—that poison?”

“This? Just a doctor, one of my—”

“‘One of my?’ One of my what?”

And suddenly the other me leaped out and started shouting. “I won’t allow it! I don’t want there to be anyone but me! I’ll kill anyone who . . . Because I . . . I . . .”

I watched it happen: he seized her with his hairy paws, tore her thin silk, and sank his teeth into her—I clearly remember: his teeth.

I don’t know how, but I-330 slipped away. And then—her eyes, concealed by those damned impenetrable blinds—she leaned against the closet, listening to me.

I remember: I was on the floor, embracing her legs, kissing her knees. And begging, “Right now—immediately—right this minute . . .”

Her sharp teeth—the sharp, mocking triangle of her eyebrows. She bent down and silently unfastened my badge.

“Yes! Yes, my darling—darling.” I started hurriedly throwing off my unif.

But then, I-330—still silent—brought the clock on my badge right up to my eyes. It was five to 22:30. I went cold. I knew what this meant—appearing outside after 22:30. All of my madness went out in an instant. I was myself again. And the only thing clear to me was: I hate her! I hate her! I hate her!

Without saying goodbye or turning back, I darted out of the room. Haphazardly reattaching my badge while running down the stairs—the back stairs (I was afraid that I’d run into someone in the elevator)—and jumped out onto the empty street.

Nothing had changed—all of it was still simple, ordinary, balanced: the glass buildings glittering with lights; the pale, glassy sky; a greenish, motionless night. But underneath all this quiet, cool glass, something silently raged, crimson and hairy. Breathless, I raced home, desperate not to be late.

Suddenly I felt that my hurriedly pinned badge was about to fall off—it was undone—and fell, ringing against the glass of the pavement. I bent down to pick it up and, in that silent instant, I heard: somebody’s footsteps behind me. I turned around: something small and crooked was turning the corner. At least that’s how it appeared to me in that moment.

I raced at full speed—all I could hear was the air whistling past. I finally stopped at my door: 22:29. And listened: no one behind me. Nothing but an insane delusion brought on by the poison.

That night was torture. The bed rose and fell underneath me, cresting and crashing, bareback atop a sine wave. I sternly reminded myself: “All numbers are required to sleep at night. This duty is just as important as working during the day. It is essential for working during the day. Not sleeping at night is a criminal . . .” But still, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t.

I’m dying. I am incapable of fulfilling my duties to the One State . . . I . . .

Log 11

BRIEF:

No, I Can’t, No Brief This Time.

Evening. Light fog. The sky is veiled in a milky golden shroud, obscuring whatever’s above us, beyond. The Ancients thought they knew what was up there: their all-mighty, languishing skeptic—God. We know that really, it’s just a naked, obscene, crystal blue nothing. Now I don’t know anymore: I’ve learned too much. Knowledge that is completely certain of its own infallibility is faith. I used to have a firm faith in myself, I believed that I knew all there was to know about me. But now—

I’m standing in front of the mirror. For the first time in my life—yes, the very first time—I see myself clearly, distinctly, consciously, astonished to be aware of myself as some “he.” Here he is: straight black eyebrows; between them, like a scar, a vertical furrow (was that there before?). Steely gray eyes, overcast by the shadow of a sleepless night: and behind that steel . . . it turns out that I’d never really known what was in there. That out of that “there” (which is, simultaneously, right here and in the infinite distance)—out of that “there,” I’m looking at me—and at him, and I firmly know: he—with the straightly drawn brows—is a stranger. I don’t know him, I am just meeting him for the first time in my life. And the real me, the me who’s not him . . .

No: period. All this is nonsense, all of these ridiculous sensations are just delusions brought on by yesterday’s poisoning . . . What did it do to me? Was it those sips of green poison or was it her? Doesn’t matter. I’m only writing this down to illustrate how strangely ensnarled and unbalanced the otherwise sharp and precise mechanism of human reason can become. The same power of reason that managed to even render eternity, which had so frightened the Ancients, into something digestible, as a means to an end . . .

The intercom clicked: R-13. Fine, and I’m even glad: if I had to be alone right now . . .

TWENTY MINUTES LATER

On the plane of a piece of paper, in the two-dimensional realm—these lines are adjacent, but they are from two different worlds . . . I am losing my number sense: twenty minutes—may as well have been 200 or 200,000. And it is so wild: calmly, measuredly, weighing each word, trying to write down what just transpired between me and R. It’s as if you sat down in the chair next to your bed, crossed your legs, and started carefully observing as you—you, yourself—writhed in that bed.

When R-13 came in, I was completely calm and normal. Sincerely moved, I began praising him for how beautifully he had rendered the verdict into trochees, that more than anything else, it was the trochees that had cut down and stamped out that madman.

“I would even say that if somebody asked me to make a schematic sketch of the Benefactor’s Machine, I would definitely—absolutely—find a way to incorporate your trochees into the drawing,” I finished.

Suddenly, I noticed: R’s eyes were losing their luster, his lips going gray.

“What’s wrong?”

“What do you mean? It’s just that . . . well, I’m just sick of it: all anyone wants to talk about is your verdict this, your verdict that. I have nothing to say about it—I’m done. I don’t want to talk about it!”

He frowned and rubbed the back of his head—that suitcase of his with the mysterious luggage inside—what did he have in it? Pause. Then he found something in the suitcase, took it out, unwrapped it—his eyes lacquered with laughter and he leaped up.

“The piece I’m writing for your INTEGRAL—that’s really something!”

And with that, he was his old self again: his lips smacking, spraying, the words splashing out like a fountain.

“Paradise” (the “p,” a fountain), “the ancient legend of heaven . . . So, it’s actually about us, about our life today. Really! Think about it. The man and woman in paradise were given a choice: they could either have happiness without freedom or freedom without happiness—there was no third option. Those blockheads chose freedom—and can you blame them?—but ended up spending the consequent centuries dreaming of shackles. Shackles—yes, shackles—that’s what all their ‘world sorrow’ was really about. And it went on like that for centuries! It wasn’t until we came along that humanity finally figured out how to return to our state of grace . . . No, just listen—listen to the rest! We sit side by side with their ancient God, at the same table. Really! With our help, God has finally beaten the devil—the one who’d originally tempted them into biting into that forbidden, fatal freedom—him! The evil serpent. But we have stomped on his head—bam! And that’s that: we’re back in paradise. Now, we’re as simple and innocent as Adam and Eve. No more confusion about good and evil: it’s all so simple that even a child can understand—just as it should be in paradise. The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians—all this is good, magnificent, beautiful, noble, lofty, and crystalline. Because all these things are here to protect our unfreedom—or, in other words, our happiness. The Ancients would have started judging, classifying things, racking their brains over what is ethical, what is unethical . . . Anyway, that’s enough: a poem about paradise. And the tone has to have gravity . . . Makes sense, right? It’s really something, isn’t it?”

Of course it made sense. I remember thinking, “He might be asymmetrical and funny-looking on the outside, but inside, his thinking is absolutely correct.” That’s why he and I are so close, in the end—I mean, the real me (I still consider the old me the real me—everything I am now is, of course, just an illness).

R seemed to read my thoughts. He put his arm around me and laughed. “Oh you, Adam! And, by the way, about Eve—” He dug in his pocket, took out a notebook, and leafed through the pages.

“The day after tomorrow . . . no: in two days, O has a pink ticket for you. So where are you at? Still the same? Or do you want her to . . .”

“Clearly, of course I am.”

“Okay, I’ll tell her. Otherwise, she, you know, feels shy . . . What a debacle! I’m just a pink ticket to her, but you . . . And she won’t just come out and say that there’s a fourth in our little triangle now. So? Who is it? Confess, you old sinner—tell me!”

A curtain rustled inside me and—silk, the green flask, her lips. Out of nowhere, apropos of nothing, I suddenly blurted (if only I’d held back):

“Listen: have you ever tried alcohol or nicotine?”

R tucked his lips in and studied me from under his brows. I could hear his thoughts clearly, “You may be a friend . . . but still.”

He answered:

“How should I put it? Personally, no. But I once knew a woman . . .”

“I-330!” I shouted.

“What?! You? You’re with her, too?” He overflowed with laughter, he had to come up for breath, looking like he was about to spray everywhere.

My mirror was hanging in such a way that to look at it, you had to do it over the table: from here, from the chair, all I could see was my forehead and eyebrows.

And so I—the real me—saw the straight line of my eyebrows convulsing and leaping and I—the real I, heard my savage, repulsive shout, “What do you mean ‘too’? What ‘too’? No, I demand that you tell me this instant!”

His African lips were agape. His eyes bulged . . . I—the real me—forcefully grabbed this Other me—savage, hairy, and panting—by the scruff of his neck. I—the real me—said, “Please forgive me, R, in the name of the Benefactor. I am completely sick, I haven’t been sleeping. I don’t understand what’s happening to me . . .”

His thick lips broke into a fleeting grin. “Ha ha ha, I do! No really, I do! I know all about these things—I mean, on a theoretical level. Anyway, I’ll be going now!”

In the doorway, he turned and bounced back to the table like a little black ball, leaving me a book. “Here’s my latest . . . I brought it for you and almost forgot. Well, goodbye . . .” he said, spraying me with the “b,” and rolled away . . .

I was alone. Or rather: alone with that other me. I sat down in my chair, put one leg over the other, and, looking out from some “there,” began observing as I—myself—lay writhing on the bed.

Why—why, for three years, O and I—we were so happy—and now, with a single word about her, about . . . Could it really be that all of this madness—love, jealousy—isn’t just something from stupid old books? And, most importantly—me! Equations, formulas, numbers—nothing like this—I don’t understand anything anymore! Nothing . . . Tomorrow, I’ll go and tell R that—

No, it’s not true: I won’t. Neither tomorrow nor the day after—I’ll never go see him again. I can’t, I don’t want to—it’s over! Our triangle’s broken.

I am alone. Evening. Light fog. The sky in a milky gold shroud. If only it was possible to know: what’s up there, beyond? If only I could know: who am I really? Which I is me?

Log 12

BRIEF:

Limited Infinities. An Angel. Thoughts About Poetry.

I keep thinking—I can get better, I will get better. I slept perfectly. No dreaming or any other symptoms of illness. Tomorrow, darling O will come see me and everything will be simple, correct and delimited, like a circle. I’m not afraid of the word “limit.” The task of man’s loftiest faculty, reason, is precisely to ceaselessly limit the infinite, breaking infinity down into convenient, easily digestible portions. Differentials. This is the sacred beauty of my domain, mathematics. And this beauty is exactly what that woman fails to see. But it doesn’t matter—this is a totally random connection.

All of this happening to the measured, metrical beat of the wheels of the underground railway. In my head, I was scanning the rhythm along with R’s poems (the book he left for me yesterday). Then I felt: behind me, over my shoulder, someone was carefully bending over to peer at my open page. Without turning around, out of the very corner of my eye I saw: the pink, protruding pink wings of his ears, the doubled . . . him! I didn’t want to interfere with his work so I acted like I didn’t notice. I don’t know how he got here: I don’t think I saw him when I got on the train.

This circumstance, meaningless on its own, had a particularly salutary effect on me—I would say that it heartened me. It’s just so reassuring to feel someone’s sharp gaze lovingly protecting you from making even the smallest mistake, the tiniest step in the wrong direction. Although it might sound a bit sentimental, I keep thinking about this analogy: the guardian angels the Ancients had dreamed of. So much of what they had dreamed of has come to pass in our reality.

I was enjoying a sonnet called “Happiness” when I felt the guardian angel over my shoulder. I think I will not be mistaken to call it a work of rare beauty and depth. Here are its opening lines:

Two times two are in love for ever

Forever entwined in passionate four

Two times two are the world’s hottest lovers—

Inseparable: two times two making four . . .

And the rest continues in the same vein: the wise, eternal happiness of the multiplication table.

All genuine poets are truly Columbuses. America may have existed for centuries before him, but only Columbus was finally able to discover it. The multiplication table existed for centuries before R-13, but only R-13 managed to find, in this virgin thicket of numbers, a new El Dorado. Truly: is there a happiness wiser or more unclouded than the one that reigns in this wondrous world? Steel rusts; ancient God made ancient man who made mistakes—thus, He Himself was mistaken. The multiplication table is wiser and more absolute than the ancient God: it never—understand: never—makes a mistake. And there are no numbers happier than those who live in accordance with the harmonious eternal laws of the multiplication table. No wavering, no confusion. There is only one truth and just one true path; this truth is two times two—this true path: four. And wouldn’t it be absurd if these happily, perfectly multiplied twos started seeking out some sort of freedom, i.e., clearly—some mistake? For me, it is axiomatic that R-13 managed to capture the most important, the most . . .

At this point, I once again had the sensation—at first, on the back of my head, and then, on my left ear—the tender, gentle breath of a guardian angel. Clearly, he’d noticed that the book in my lap was closed and my thoughts far away. I would have been glad to reveal the pages of my mind to him at that very moment: it would have been so calming and gratifying. I remember: I even turned around and insistently, imploringly looked in his eyes, but he did not understand—or didn’t want to—and didn’t ask me anything . . . All I have left: to keep telling all this to you, unknown readers (you are as dear to me now, and as close and unreachable as he was in that moment).

Here was my path: from the part to the whole. The part—R-13; the greater whole—our Institute of State Poets and Writers. I thought: how could it be that the Ancients were blind to the glaring stupidity of all of their poetry and literature? The enormous, magnificent force of the literary word—wasted, for nothing. It’s simply ridiculous: anyone could write about anything whatsoever. It’s just as ridiculous as the fact that in ancient times, the sea would futilely beat against the shore, day in and day out, and all of the zillions of meter-kilograms of energy in the waves went to waste as mere fuel for heating up lovers’ passions. We’ve harnessed the waves’ sweet nothings into electricity; turned animals rabidly spewing out foam into house pets; and, in the same way, we have also broken and tamed the once wild force of poetry. Today, poetry is no longer the insolent song of the nightingale: poetry is civil service, poetry is utility itself.

Our celebrated Mathematical Nonnuses: how would we fall in love with the four arithmetic functions so tenderly and sincerely without them? And Thorns—a classical image: the Guardians are the thorns on the rose, protecting the delicate State Flower from rough handling . . . Whose heart is so stony that it will fail to be moved at the sight of innocent children’s lips prattling, as though attempting to pray, “The naughty boy did grab the rose/The thorn—it pricked him like an awl/And ouch! The naughty boy ran home,” etc.? And “The Daily Odes to the Benefactor”? Who, having read them, will fail to bow reverently before the selfless work of that Number of Numbers? And the terrible crimson Flowers of Court Sentences? The immortal tragedy, Late to Work? Or the manual, Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene?

All of life, in all of its beauty and complexity, is cast in the gold of words for all of eternity.

Our poets don’t dawdle in the empyrean: they’ve come down to Earth; they march in step alongside us to the stern, mechanical March of the Music Factory; their lyre is the morning buzz of electric toothbrushes and the awesome crackle of sparks in the Benefactor’s Machine; the majestic echo of the Anthem of the One State and the intimate tinkle in the sparkling crystal chamber pot; the rousing rattle of falling blinds, the joyous voices of a new cookbook, the barely audible whispering of the street membranes.

Our gods are right here among us—in the Bureau, the kitchen, the workshop, the bathroom; the gods are like us: ergo, we are like gods. And we are coming, my unknown planetary readers, we’re coming to you, to make your lives as divinely rational and precise as ours . . .

Log 13

BRIEF:

Fog. You. A Completely Improbable Incident.

I woke up at dawn—the strong, solid body of pink in my eyes. Everything was good and round. O would come in the evening. I was definitely better now. I smiled and fell back asleep.

The morning bell—I got up—everything was different: through the glass of the ceiling, the walls, everywhere that I turned—fog through and through. Preposterous clouds, heavier—then lighter, and closer, and now there’s no line between heaven and Earth, everything’s flying, falling, dissolving, nothing left to grab on to. No more buildings: their glass walls diffused into the fog like salt crystals in water. Looking up from the pavement, the dark shapes of people inside resemble particles suspended in a delirious, milky solution—some lower, some higher, and some, higher still, on the tenth floor. And everything’s giving off smoke—as though there’s some silent, roiling fire.

At exactly 11:45: I purposely looked at the clock—at least I could hold on to the digits—maybe those numbers would save me.

At 11:45, before heading to the regular Table of Hours–ordained physical labor, I stopped in my room. Suddenly, the phone rang—a voice like a long awl slowly piercing my heart:

“So you’re home? That’s great. Wait for me on the corner. You and I are going to . . . well, you’ll see where.”

“You know perfectly well that I have work right now.”

“And you know perfectly well that you are going to do exactly as I say. Bye-bye. See you in two minutes.”

Two minutes later, I was standing on the corner. Only because I needed to show her that I was ruled by the One State, not her. “Exactly as I say . . .” She was so sure: I could hear it in her voice. Well, now I would really give her a piece of my mind . . .

Gray unifs woven of cold, wet fog hurriedly wafted past me before abruptly dissolving. I didn’t take my eyes off the clock: I was a sharp, quivering second hand. Eight minutes, ten . . . three minutes to 12, two . . .

Of course. Now I was late to work. I hated her so much! But I needed to show her . . .

On the corner, out of the white fog—blood—slashed with a sharp knife—her lips.

“I seem to have held you up. But it doesn’t matter. Now you’re late, anyway.” So much—but yes: it was already too late.

I silently watched her lips. All women are lips—nothing but lips. Some are pink, supple, and round like a ring, a gentle barrier against the world. But these: a second ago, they weren’t there, and now—slashed with a knife—the sweet blood still dripping.

Closer—she pressed into me with her shoulder—and we became one, she poured into me—and I knew in my heart this was right. I knew it with every last nerve, every hair, every beat of my heart, so sweet it was painful. How happy I was to submit to this “right.” Probably just like a piece of metal glad to obey the precise, inescapable law and sticking itself to a magnet. A stone thrown upward, wavering at the top for a moment then rushing headlong down to Earth. A man in his death throes finally taking his last breath and dying.

I remember: I smiled, bewildered, and, for no reason, said, “Fog . . . very.”

“Do you like fog?”

That ancient, long-forgotten “you,” “you,” as a master would say to a slave—came into me sharply and slowly: yes, I’m a slave, that’s good and right, too.

“Yes, good . . .” I said aloud to myself. And then to her, “I hate fog. I’m afraid of it.”

“Which means you love it. You’re afraid of it because it’s more powerful than you, you hate it because you’re afraid and love it because you can’t subjugate it. After all, the only things you can truly love are things you can’t subjugate.”

Yes, this is true. And this is exactly why—exactly why I . . .

We two walked as one. Somewhere, far away, through the fog, you could almost hear the muffled sun singing, filling everything with a tangible, pearly, golden, rose red. The whole world was one single unencompassable woman, and we were in her womb, still unborn, happily ripening. And it became clear to me, inviolably clear: all of this was for me—the sun, the fog, the rose, the gold—all for me . . .

I didn’t ask where we were going. I didn’t care: I only wanted to walk, and walk, and walk, to ripen, to fill and grow fuller . . .

“And here we are . . .” I-330 stopped in front of a door. “He’s in today . . . I told you about him when we were at the House of Antiquity.”

From afar, with only my eyes, carefully sparing my ripening vision, I read the sign: “Bureau of Medicine.” I understood everything.

A glass room, filled with gold fog. Glass ceilings, colorful bottles and jars. Wires. Bluish sparks in the tubes.

And a man—exceptionally thin. It was as though he’d been cut out of paper, and no matter which way he turned, he was all profile, sharpened to an edge: his nose—a sparkling razor. His lips were scissors.

I didn’t hear what I-330 told him: I watched her speak and felt myself: smiling uncontrollably, blissfully. With a snip of his scissor lips, the doctor said, “Yes, yes. I understand. The most dangerous illness of all—I don’t know any condition more grave,” and laughed, jotted something down with his paper-thin hand and gave it to I-330; another note—gave it to me.

These were permits certifying that we were ill and could not come to work. I was stealing my labor from the One State, I was a thief—headed straight to the Benefactor’s Machine. But all of that felt far away right then, it left me cold, as though it was only something that I was reading about in a book . . . I took the permit, not hesitating for a second. I—my eyes, lips, hands—I knew: this, too, was right.

On the corner, we got an aero out of a half-empty garage, I-330 once again taking the wheel, pushing the starter to Forward, and taking off from the Earth, sailing into the sky. And trailing behind us, everything: golden pink fog; the sun, the razor-thin silhouette of the doctor, who suddenly seemed so close and dear to me. Before, I had thought that everything revolved around the sun; now I knew that everything revolved around me—slowly, blissfully, with my eyes shut . . .

The old woman at the gates of the House of Antiquity. Her dear mouth, grown over with rays of wrinkles. It had probably been grown over all of these days—only now did it open and smile:

“Oh, you bad girl, you! Instead of working like everyone else . . . well, go ahead! If anyone comes, I’ll run and tell you . . .”

As soon as the heavy, creaking, opaque door shut behind us, my heart painfully opened—wider and wider—until it was all the way open. Her lips, mine, I drank and drank, tearing myself away, silently gazing into her eyes, open to me—and again . . .

The twilit rooms, blue, saffron yellow, dark green Morocco leather, the Buddha’s gold smile, the glimmering mirrors. And now—my old dream made so much sense: everything was saturated with golden pink juice, brimming over the edges, about to spray—

It ripened. And inescapably, like metal and magnet, sweetly submitting to the precise, inviolable law—I poured into her. No pink ticket, no calculations, no One State, no me. Only the tender and sharp clenched teeth, golden eyes, wide open to me—and through them, I slowly went deeper inside, deeper and deeper. Then silence—only in the corner—one thousand miles away—water dripped into the basin. I was the universe—eras and epochs stretched between drops . . .

Throwing my unif back on, I bent down to I—drinking her in with my eyes one last time.

“I knew that . . . I knew you . . .” she said very quietly. Then, she quickly sat up, pulling her unif on along with her usual sharp biting smile.

“Well, fallen angel. You’re dead now. You’re not afraid? So long, then! You’ll go back alone. Okay?”

She opened the mirrored door of the closet and looked over her shoulder at me—waiting. I obediently left the room. But I had barely crossed the threshold when I suddenly needed to press up against her again, just with my shoulder—just for a second—no more.

I ran back into the room where she was (probably) still getting her unif on in front of the mirror. I ran in—and stopped dead in my tracks. Here—I could clearly see it—the ancient ring on the key in the closet door, still swinging, but she was nowhere. Where could she go? There’s only one way out of the room—and yet, she wasn’t there. I looked everywhere, I even opened the closet and ran my hands over the colorful, ancient dresses: nobody . . .

I feel so silly, planetary readers, telling you about this completely improbable incident. But what can I do if this is what really happened? And hadn’t the whole day, since morning, been filled with improbabilities? Didn’t all of this seem like a bout of the ancient dream sickness? If so—does it really matter if I add another ridiculous thing to this pile? In any case, I am certain: sooner or later, I will successfully unify all these absurdities into a syllogism. The thought of this reassures me and hopefully reassures you, as well.

. . . I am so full! If only you knew how full I am!

Log 14

BRIEF:

“Mine.” Mustn’t. The Cold Floor.

More about yesterday. I was busy during the Personal Hour before bed and couldn’t write any more last night. But inside me, all of this—it’s like it’s been carved into me, and that’s why it’s especially—probably forever—this unbearably cold floor . . .

In the evening, O was supposed to come over, it was her day. I went down to the office to pick up my blinds permit.

“What’s wrong with you?” the clerk asked me. “You’re strange today . . .”

“I . . . I am sick . . .”

And essentially, it was true: I am, of course, sick. All of this is an illness. And instantly, I remembered: of course, the sick slip . . . I felt for it in my pocket: there it was, rustling. Which meant that all that had really happened, all of it had been real . . .

I stretched out the piece of paper to the clerk. I felt my cheeks burning; without looking, I saw: the clerk looked back at me with amazement.

And then—21:30. The blinds were down in the room to the left. In the room to the right, my neighbor: above a book, the bumpy skin on his head, all covered in knobs, his baldness and forehead—a giant, yellow parabola. I paced and paced, tormented: how could I—after all that—with her, with O? And to my right, I could clearly feel his eyes on me, I clearly saw the wrinkles on his forehead—rows of indecipherable yellow lines. For some reason, I felt that the lines were about me.

At fifteen to 22, a cheerful pink whirlwind blew into my room, a tight pink ring of arms wrapped round my neck. Then: the ring got looser and looser—it broke—the arms fell . . . “You’re different, you’re not the way you were before, you’re not mine!”

“What kind of savage term is this: ‘mine’? I was never . . .” I stumbled: it occurred to me—it’s true, I wasn’t before, but now . . . Now, I was no longer living in our rational world, but in the ancient, delirious one, surrounded by square roots of negative one.

The blinds fell. On the other side of the wall on the right, my neighbor dropped his book from the table onto the floor, and through the tiny, disappearing crack between the blinds and floor, I could see: his yellow hand reached for the book. Everything inside me wished I could grab onto that hand . . .

“I thought—I wanted to see you today on the walk. I have a lot—I have so much to . . .”

Poor, darling O! Her pink mouth—a crescent moon with its horns pointed down. But how could I tell her everything that had happened—if only for the simple reason that it would make her an accessory to my crimes: I knew very well that she couldn’t bear to go to the Guardians and therefore—

O lay down. I kissed her slowly. I kissed that naïve fold on her wrist, her blue eyes were closed, her pink crescent slowly opening, blossoming—I kissed all of her.

And suddenly, I clearly felt: it was all so empty and spent. I have to—and mustn’t. Instantly, my lips went cold . . .

The pink crescent moon trembled, faded and rumpled. She pulled the blanket over herself, wrapped herself in it, and stuck her face into the pillow . . .

I sat on the floor next to the bed—what a fiercely cold floor. I sat in silence. The torturous cold from below—rising up higher and higher. It must be the same, silent cold as up there, in the mute, blue, interplanetary distances.

“Please, understand: I didn’t want to . . .” I mumbled. “With all of my strength . . .”

It was true: I, the real me, didn’t want to. And yet: what words could I use to tell her? How could I explain to her that the metal didn’t want to, but the law of attraction was inescapable and exact—

O lifted her face off the pillow and, without opening her eyes, said, “Get out.” But because of her tears, it came out as “genout,” and for some reason this silly detail cut into me.

Completely shot through with the cold, numb, I went out into the hall. Through the glass—a slight, barely visible mist of fog. But it will probably come down again in the night, enveloping everything. What will this night bring?

O silently slipped past me, toward the elevator—the door banged behind her.

“One minute,” I called out: I was afraid.

But the elevator was already humming down, down, down . . .

She took away R.

She took away O.

And still . . .

And still.

Log 15

BRIEF:

The Bell. The Mirroring Sea. I Will Burn Eternally.

The moment I stepped into the INTEGRAL hangar, I was met by the Second Builder. His face was the same as ever: round and white as a porcelain plate. When he speaks, it’s as though he is offering up something unbearably delectable:

“You’ve deigned to get sick, but yesterday, when we were alone, without your guidance, there was, you could call it, an incident.”

“An incident?”

“Exactly! At the end of the day, after the bell, they started letting everyone out, and get this: the guard at the exit caught an unnumbered person. How he got in—I can’t fathom. They took him to the Operating Room. They’ll make him squeal . . .” (A smile . . . delectable . . .)

In the Operating Room, our best and most experienced doctors work under the direct supervision of the Benefactor himself. They use various devices, the most important of which is of course the famous Gas Bell. Essentially, it’s an old school experiment: you put a mouse under a glass bell jar and an air pump sucks out the air . . . well, and so on. Only, of course, the Gas Bell is significantly more perfect—it employs a variety of gases and, more importantly, it’s not for torturing poor, defenseless creatures, it has a higher purpose: the safety of our One State—in other words, the happiness of millions. Nearly five centuries ago, when the Operating Room was just beginning its work, there were idiots who compared it to the ancient Inquisition, but this is just stupid: it’s like saying a doctor performing a tracheotomy and a highway robber are the same thing just because both of them wield knives that cut people’s throats. Clearly, one is a well-doer and the other, a criminal, one has a + and the other, a . . .

All of this is all too clear, and instantly comprehended, it takes just one revolution of the logic machine, the gears latch onto the minus—and now something else is on top: the ring in the closet, still swaying. The door had obviously just been shut—but no I: she’d disappeared. This, the machine could not process at all. Was it a dream? But I could still feel it: the sweet, mysterious ache in my right shoulder—I, pressing against me right there—by my side in the fog. “Do you like fog?” Yes, and the fog . . . I love everything and everything is springy, novel, amazing, everything is good . . .

“It is all good,” I said aloud.

“Good?” the porcelain eyes bulged out at me. “What’s good about any of this? If that one unnumbered person managed to . . . it means they’re everywhere, all around us, all the time! They’re here—at the INTEGRAL, they’re . . .”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“How would I know? But I can feel them—you know? All the time!”

“Have you heard? They’ve invented a brand-new surgery—it’s for removing the imagination.”

(I really had recently heard about something like that.)

“Yes, I’ve heard. What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s just that if I were you, I would go ask for this surgery.”

Something sour, like a lemon, clearly materialized on the plate. My dear man—he was hurt by the insinuation that he, too, might have an imagination . . . I can’t blame him: a week ago, it would have probably hurt me, too. But now—now, I don’t care: because I know that I have one—I’m sick. And I also know: I don’t want to get better. I just don’t want to and that is that. We were ascending the glass steps. Everything below looked like you could hold it right in the palm of your hand . . .

You, reading these notes—no matter who you may be, the sun is above you. And if you’ve ever been as sick as I am today, you know how it is—how it can be—the sun in the morning: you know this pink, translucent, warm gold. And the air itself—so rosy, everything soaked in the gentle blood of the sun, everything is alive: and all people, alive, and all of them smiling. It could all vanish within an hour—an hour and all the pink blood will drip out, but for now: it’s alive. And I see: something pulsing and opalescing in the glass juices of the INTEGRAL, I see: the INTEGRAL is contemplating its awesome and terrifying future, bearing the heavy load of inescapable happiness that it will carry out there, up to you, the unknown, who eternally sought and never found anything like it. You will find it, you will be happy—you must become happy and you won’t have to wait very much longer.

The hull of the INTEGRAL is almost ready: an elegant, elongated ellipsoid made of our glass—immortal as gold, and supple as steel. I saw: they were reinforcing the glass from within using lateral ribs and longitudinal stringers, building the structural ring. In the stern, they were laying the foundation for an enormous rocket engine. Every three seconds, the INTEGRAL’s powerful tail will blast fire and gas into space—it will rush and zoom through the air—our fiery Tamerlane of happiness . . .

I saw: just as Taylor prescribed, quickly and measuredly, to the same rhythm, like the levers of a single gigantic machine, numbers bent down, stood up, twisted, and turned down below. Their hands held glittering pipes: they cut using fire and soldered with fire, joining glass walls, joints, ribs, and gussets. I watched: enormous cranes of translucent glass slowly glided along the glass rails and, just like the workers, obediently turned, bent down, stretched inside, dropping their loads into the womb of the INTEGRAL. They were just like the numbers: humanized and perfected. This was the loftiest, most astonishing beauty, harmony, music . . . I hurried down—to them—to be among them!

Then, there I was—shoulder to shoulder, at one with them all, possessed by the steely rhythm . . . Measured motions: supple and rounded; reddened cheeks; mirroring foreheads, undarkened by the insanity of thoughts. I sailed along on the mirroring sea. I was at rest.

Then suddenly, one of them turned to me and casually asked, “So: how are you doing? Better today?”

“Better?”

“You know—you weren’t here yesterday. We thought that it might be serious . . .”

His forehead shone with sweat, his smile was innocent—like a child’s.

Blood rushed to my face. I couldn’t, I couldn’t bear to lie to those eyes. I was silent, drowning . . .

From above, beaming round whiteness, the porcelain face popped through the porthole.

“Hey, D-503! We need you up here. The frame’s getting rigid because of the consoles. It’s squaring the tension on the focal points of the joints.”

Without hearing him to the end, I flew up—shamefacedly saving myself by running away. I couldn’t bear to lift my eyes—everything glittered from the sparkling glass stairs underfoot and, with each step, I felt more hopeless: this was no place for me anymore—I was a criminal, poisoned. I could never again become one with the precise, mechanical rhythm or sail along on the calm, mirroring sea. I was doomed to eternally burn, tossing and turning, seeking a corner to hide my eyes—forever, until I finally rally the strength to walk through those doors and—

An icy spark went through me, penetrating to my core: if it were just me—so what, I didn’t matter; but what about her, she, too . . .

I climbed out of the porthole onto the deck and stopped: I couldn’t remember what I was doing there, where I was supposed to go. I looked up. The midday sun, exhausted, blearily hung in the sky. Below—the INTEGRAL, gray glass, inanimate. The pink blood had drained, and now, it was clear to me, all of this had only been my imagination, everything was the same as before, but, at the same time, it was clear that . . .

“Hey, 503, are you deaf? I keep calling you . . . What’s going on?” It was the Second Builder—directly into my ear: he must have been shouting for a while now.

What’s wrong with me? I’ve let go of the steering wheel. The motor’s still running, the aero rumbling and rushing forward, but there is no one at the wheel. I don’t know where I’m flying: down—I’m about to crash, or up—straight into the sun, into the fire . . .

Log 16

BRIEF:

Yellow. Two-Dimensional Shadow. Incurable Soul.

I haven’t written for several days now. I don’t remember how many; all the days have blurred into one. All of them are the same color—yellow: like hot, arid sand, not even the shred of a shadow, nor drop of water, endlessly trudging over the yellow sand. I can’t live without her—and she, ever since she’d so inexplicably disappeared in the House of Antiquity . . .

Since then, I’ve only seen her once, during a walk. Two, three, four days ago—I don’t know: it’s all one long, endless day. She flickered past, filling—for a brief moment—the desolate yellow world. Hand in hand with that double-bent S, who only came up to her shoulder—plus, the paper-thin doctor and a fourth one—I only remember his fingers: they flew out of his unif sleeves like quivers of rays—extraordinarily thin, long, and white. She lifted her hand, waved at me—leaned over S to the one with the quiver fingers. I caught the word “INTEGRAL” then all four of them turned back to look at me. Seconds later, they were lost in the gray-blue sky, leaving me on my own again on the arid yellow path.

That evening, she had a pink ticket for me. I stood in front of the intercom—overflowing with loathing and tenderness, begging for it to click so that I wouldn’t have to wait any longer for I-330 to flash in the blank. The doors kept opening and closing: pale, tall, pink, and tan people kept coming out of the elevator; blinds fell all around me. But: no her. She didn’t come.

Perhaps, at this very moment, 22 on the dot, as I write this, she is closing her eyes and pressing her shoulder into somebody else’s, just like she had against mine, and saying, like she said to me, “Do you like it?” To whom? Who is he? Quiver fingers? Thick-lipped, spraying R? Or is it S?

S . . . For some reason, all these past days, I have been hearing his flat footsteps behind me, sloshing along, as though he were walking through puddles. Why is he always following me like a shadow? In front of me, next to me, and behind, a gray-blue, two-dimensional shadow: people walk through it, step on it, yet it remains, unchanging, beside me, connected to me by an invisible umbilical cord. Maybe the umbilical cord—is her, I? I don’t know. Or perhaps they, the Guardians, already know that I . . .

What if someone were to tell you: your shadow can see you, it’s always watching you? Do you understand? And then suddenly—you get a strange feeling: your arms don’t feel like your own anymore, they get in your way. I keep catching myself thinking that I am waving my arms back and forth like an idiot, like they’re no longer in sync with my feet. Or like I suddenly need to turn around, but no matter what, I can’t—my neck is locked in place. Then I start running and running, faster and faster, but feel that behind me: my shadow keeps running faster and faster, as well—there’s nowhere to hide from it—nowhere . . .

In my room, alone again, finally. But here, I have another problem: the phone. I pick it up again. “Yes, I-330, please.” And in the receiver, I once again hear the light noise, somebody’s footsteps in the hallway—they walk past her room—silence . . . I throw it down—I can’t! I can’t take it anymore! I have to go see her.

That was yesterday. I ran there and spent an entire hour, from 16 to 17, wandering around by her building. Row after row of numbers went by. Thousands of feet, falling in step, like a million-legged Leviathan, heaved, swimming past me. I was alone, wrecked, on a desert island, searching and searching the gray-blue waves.

At any moment, I might see the sharp, mocking slant of her eyebrows jerked up to her temples, the dark windows of her eyes, and inside, by the light of the blazing fireplace, somebody’s shifting shadows. And I’ll go right into her, I’ll call her “you”—“you” and nothing but: “You know I can’t live without you. Why are you doing this to me?”

But she is silent. I hear the silence, and suddenly—the Music Factory: it’s past 17 now, everyone else is long gone, and I am alone, and late. All around me—a glassy desert drowning in yellow sunlight. I see: like in glassy, smooth water—gleaming walls hung upside down and a toppled, pathetic me, hung by his feet.

I have to hurry, right this minute, go to the Medical Bureau—I need a sick note or else I’ll be taken and—although perhaps, that would be the best thing that could happen to me. Remaining here and patiently waiting for them to take notice of me and drag me away to the Operating Room—better to get it all over with, atone for everything all at once.

A light rustling and then, in front of me: a double-bent shadow. Without looking, I felt how swiftly its two steel-gray gimlets drilled into me. I smiled as hard as I could and said—because I had to say something—

“I . . . I need to go to the Medical Bureau.”

“What are you doing then? Why are you just standing there?”

Burning with shame, toppled over, pathetically hung by my feet, I said nothing.

“Follow me,” S said sternly.

I obediently followed, swinging my useless, alien arms. I couldn’t raise my eyes, so the whole time, I walked through a wild world turned on its head: machines standing under their own foundations; opposite men with feet stuck to their ceilings; below, the sky lay imprisoned in the thick glass of the pavement. I remember: the saddest part was that I was seeing it all for the very last time and it was like this—upended, unreal. But I could not raise my eyes.

We stopped. I faced the steps. One step up and I’d see: figures wearing white lab coats, the giant, mute Bell . . .

With force, as though wrenched by a screw mechanism, I finally tore my eyes from the glass underfoot—and suddenly, the gold letters of “Medical” splashed in my face . . . Why had he brought me here instead of the Operating Room, why had he spared me? But at that moment, I didn’t even consider these questions: in a single bound—over the steps—I leaped through the doors and tightly closed them behind me—and sighed with relief. I felt like I hadn’t breathed since that morning, as though my heart hadn’t beaten—and only then, I took my first breath, only then, I released the floodgates inside of my chest . . .

There were two of them: one—short and bollard-legged—eyes that tossed patients up on his horns, and the other one—rail thin, scissor-lipped, with his nose like a razor . . . Him.

I threw myself on him as if he were family, flinging myself right at the razor—something about insomnia, dreams, shadows, the yellow world. His scissor lips sparkled, smiling.

“Sorry to say, but it’s serious! Looks like you have developed a soul.”

A soul? That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word. Sometimes, we said “body and soul” or “lost soul” or “soulful” but soul itself—

“That . . . sounds very dangerous,” I muttered.

“Incurable.” The scissors cut me off.

“But . . . what does this mean? I can’t really . . . I can’t fathom it.”

“You see . . . how should I . . . You’re a mathematician, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Alright. So you have a plane, a surface—this mirror, for instance. You and I appear on the surface—right here—squinting our eyes from the sun, and notice: the blue spark flashing in that tube and now, the shadow of a passing aero. These things are just on the surface, just momentarily. Now imagine: some kind of heat has softened this impermeable surface, and nothing simply glides over it anymore—everything permeates, penetrating into that mirror world, which we peered into as curious children. Believe me, children are not as dumb as you think. The surface has transformed into a volume, a body, a world, and all of this is inside the mirror—inside you—the sun, and the spark from the aero propeller, your trembling lips, and somebody else’s. You see: the cold mirror reflects, casting everything out, while this one soaks everything in, absorbing all traces forever. What had once been a barely noticeable wrinkle on somebody’s face is now inside you for the rest of your life. You heard a drop fall in silence—once—and now, you can still hear it . . .”

“Yes, yes, exactly . . .” I clutched his hand. I could hear it now: the tap dripping into the basin—drops falling into the silence. And I knew it would be with me forever. But why did I suddenly have a soul? I didn’t have it before—never!—then suddenly . . . And why doesn’t anyone else have one, but me . . .

I squeezed his thin hand even harder, terrified to let go of my life-ring.

“Why? Well, why don’t you have wings or feathers but still have your shoulder blades, which are a foundation for wings? Because you don’t need wings—we have our aeros, wings would just get in our way. Wings are for flying, and we have nowhere to fly: we’ve landed, we found what we needed. Isn’t that right?”

I nodded without understanding. He looked at me and sharply burst into laughter that cut like a scalpel. The other one heard and stomped in from his office on his stout bollards, tossing my thin doctor up on his horns, and then me.

“What’s the matter with him? Is it a soul? A soul, you say? What the hell! Next thing you know, it’ll be cholera. I told you”—tossing the thin one up on his horns—“I told you: we have to extract absolutely everyone’s—everyone’s imagination . . . extirpate it. Only surgery can do anything here, only surgery . . .”

He struggled into a pair of giant X-ray glasses and circled me for a long time, examining my brain through my skull bones and taking notes.

“What a curious case! Listen: would you be willing to have your brain preserved? It would be extremely valuable for the One State . . . it could help us prevent an epidemic . . . that is, if you don’t have any particular reason not to . . .”

“Actually,” the other doctor cut in, “number D-503 here is the Builder of the INTEGRAL. Certainly, it would interfere with . . .”

“I see,” the other one lowed and tromped back into his office.

We were alone. His paper-thin hand gently, tenderly rested on mine, his silhouette of a face bent down to mine, and he whispered, “I’ll let you in on a secret: you’re not the only one. It’s not for nothing my colleague here mentioned an epidemic. Try to recall—haven’t you noticed something quite similar in someone else—very similar, very close?” He looked at me intently. What was he hinting at—who? Could it be—

“Wait!” I leaped up from the chair. But now he was loudly talking about something else. “ . . . And for the insomnia, those dreams of yours, the only thing I can recommend is more walking. First thing tomorrow, go on a walk . . . you could even walk down to the House of Antiquity.”

He once again pierced me with his gaze, smiling the thinnest smile. And it seemed like: I could clearly make out a word wrapped in the delicate gauze of his smile—a letter—a name, the only name that mattered . . . or was it just my imagination again?

I could barely contain myself, waiting for him to write me another sick note for today and tomorrow, gave him another firm handshake, and darted outside.

My heart was light and swift, like an aero, lifting me higher and higher. I knew: tomorrow, some joy was in store for me. What would it be?

Log 17

BRIEF:

Through the Glass. I Died. Hallways.

I am completely baffled. Yesterday, just when I thought that the clouds had cleared and all of the Xs were solved, a new unknown appeared in my equation.

The zero point of this whole affair is, of course, the House of Antiquity. Out from that origin: the X, Y, and Z axes on which an entire world was recently built for me. I walked along the X-axis (59th Avenue), on my way to the origin. Inside me, everything from yesterday spun in a garish whirlwind: the upside-down buildings and people, torturously alien arms, gleaming scissors, sharp, falling drops in the basin—yes, all of that happened, once upon a time. And all of it, tearing me up from within, continued to spiral inside me, on the other side of a surface melted by flames—where my “soul” resides.

To comply with the doctor’s orders, I intentionally avoided the hypotenuse and took the legs, instead. Now, on leg two: the circular road that followed along the Green Wall. A rogue wave of roots, flowers, bushes, and leaves rose from the fathomless ocean of green on the other side of the Wall—at any moment, it would swallow me whole, transforming me from a man—the most sensitive and precise of all mechanisms—into . . .

Fortunately, the glass of the Wall stood between me and that wild green ocean. Oh holy and great, the delimiting wisdom of fences and walls! Maybe the greatest of all man’s inventions. Men ceased to be wild beasts once they built the first wall. Men ceased to be wild men once we built the Green Wall and, with this Wall, cut our perfect machine world off from the irrational chaos of trees, birds, and beasts . . .

Through the Wall—vaguely, foggily—the dumb face of some animal watched me with its yellow eyes, intently repeating a thought I could not comprehend. We stood there, gazing into each other’s eyes for a long time—into those shafts from the surface world to the one underneath. And inside me, roiling, the question: what if this yellow-eyed beast, in its hideous, filthy pile of leaves, with its uncalculated life—is actually happier than us?

I flung my hand up, the yellow eyes blinked, inched back, and disappeared into the leaves. Pitiful beast! How completely absurd: the thought that it could be happier than us! Happier than me, maybe—but I’m an exception—I’m sick.

But even I . . . I could already see the dark red walls of the House of Antiquity—and the dear, overgrown mouth of that old woman—I ran to her as fast as my feet would take me.

“Is she here?”

The overgrown mouth opened slowly. “Who do you mean, she?”

“What do you mean who do I mean? I, of course . . . We came here together the other day—on the aero . . .”

“Mm-hmm, yes, yes . . . yes, yes, yes . . .”

The rays of wrinkles around her lips and the wily rays from her yellow eyes worked their way through me, deeper and deeper . . . Finally:

“Well, alright then . . . she’s here, she just got here.”

She was here. I saw: at the old woman’s feet, there was a bush of silvery bitter wormwood (the garden around the House of Antiquity is also part of the museum, meticulously preserved in its prehistoric form). The wormwood stretched out a branch to the old woman’s hand, and the old woman stroked it. A yellow band of sunlight lay across her lap. And for a moment: me, the sun, the old woman, the wormwood, the yellow eyes—we were all one, tightly woven together by some sort of veins, and flowing through these veins—our common, torrid, wonderful blood . . .

It’s embarrassing for me to write about this, but I had promised to be as honest as possible. So I will tell you: I bent down and kissed her overgrown, soft, mossy mouth. The old woman wiped it off, laughing . . .

I ran through the familiar, echoing, half-cramped rooms—for some reason, heading straight to the bedroom. I was already in front of the door, holding the doorknob, when it suddenly struck me: “But what if she’s not alone?” I stopped and listened. All I could hear was the beating, somewhere nearby—not inside me—the thump of my heart.

I went in. The wide bed, untouched. The mirror. And also the closet door mirror and the key with the antique ring in the keyhole. No one.

I quietly called out: “I? Are you here?” And then, even more quietly, with my eyes closed, not daring to even breathe—as though I were in front of her, on my knees, “I! Darling!”

Silence. Only the tap briskly dripping into the basin. I can’t explain why, but I didn’t like it. I firmly shut off the tap and walked out of the room. She wasn’t here: clearly. Which meant that she was in some other “apartment.”

I ran down the wide, gloomy stairway, and pulled on one door handle after another: all locked. Everything but “our” apartment, and there was nobody there.

And still—I went back to it, I don’t know why. I stepped in slowly, with difficulty: my feet had suddenly turned to iron. I distinctly remember thinking, “It isn’t true that gravity is a constant. Therefore, all of my formulas—”

Suddenly—breakthrough: I heard a door slam downstairs and somebody hurrying over the tiles. I was once again light, lighter than air—I ran to the railing—I wanted to lean down and shout the whole truth of my heart in a single word: “You!”

And froze: below, inscribed in the dark square of the shadow of the windowpane, flailing his pink wing-ears, S flickered past.

Like lightning—I was struck by a single, naked—and totally baseless (I still don’t know why I thought this)—conclusion: “He must not see me at any cost.”

On tiptoe, pressing myself to the wall, I crept back up to the unlocked apartment.

A second’s pause at the door. He ponderously plodded up the steps—headed here. I pleaded with the door, but it was wooden—it creaked and let out a squeal. In a flash—green, red, yellow Buddha—and I was in front of the mirrored closet: my pale face, eyes listening, lips . . . I could hear—above the roar of my blood—the door creaking again . . . It was him—him!

I grabbed the key in the door, which sent the ring swaying. That reminded me—another lightning-fast, naked, and baseless conclusion—or rather, the splinter of one, “That time—” I flung the door open—I was inside, in the dark—and shut it tightly behind me. I took a step—something slid underfoot—then I was slowly, softly floating down, my vision went black, and I died.

—

Later, when it was time to write about this peculiar incident, I dug around in my memory, in books—and now I understand: it was only a state of temporary death, familiar to the Ancients and, as far as I know, completely unknown among us.

I have no idea how long I was dead—most likely, five or ten seconds—but it took a while to be resurrected and open my eyes: it was dark and I felt myself going down, down, down . . . I stretched out my hand, trying to grab onto something—got scratched by a rough wall, quickly slipping away—blood on my finger—clearly this wasn’t simply a trick of my delirious imagination. But what was happening?

I could hear my ragged, erratic breathing (I am ashamed to admit this—but all of it had been so sudden and inexplicable). One minute passed, two, three—I kept going lower and lower. Finally, a soft bump: whatever was falling under my feet had suddenly halted. In the darkness, I felt for a door handle, found it, and pushed—the door swung open—into a kind of twilight. I saw: behind me, the small, square platform was quickly rushing back up. I reached for it—too late! I was stuck here . . . wherever this was. I didn’t know.

A hallway. Thousand-ton silence. On each of its rounded arches—small lights in an endless, twinkling, quivering, dotted line. It looked a bit like a “tube” in our underground railway, but a lot narrower and not made of our glass, but some other, ancient material. In a flash, I recalled the underground passageways where people hid during the Two Hundred Years’ War . . . No matter: I had to keep going.

I walked for about twenty minutes. At a certain point, I turned right and the hallway grew wider—the lights brighter. Some kind of vague droning. Could be machines, could be voices—I couldn’t tell, but now—I was in front of a heavy, opaque door: the sound was coming from in there.

I knocked once, again—louder. It grew quiet on the other side. Something clanged, and finally, the door opened, slowly and heavily.

I don’t know which one of us was more shocked—me or the razor-thin doctor.

“You? Here?” With that, his scissors fell shut. And I—it was as though I’d never known a single human word: I was dumbstruck, looking at him and completely not comprehending what he was saying to me. It was probably that I had to leave, because he started rushing to push me back with his flat paper stomach, driving me toward the brighter-lit part of the hallway, turned me around, and gave me a shove.

“I’m sorry . . . I only wanted to . . . I-330, I thought she was . . . but then I saw . . .”

“Wait here,” he snipped and disappeared.

Finally! Finally, we’d be together again, here—who cares where “here” was. The familiar, saffron-yellow silk, the smile like a bite, the blinds down over her eyes . . . my lips trembling, my hands and my knees—I had a very dumb thought, “If sound is vibration, trembling ought to make a sound. Why can’t I hear it?”

Her eyes opened to me—until they were all the way open. I entered . . .

“I couldn’t take it anymore! Where were you? Why . . .” I didn’t take my eyes off hers for a second, rambling feverishly—fast and disjointed—perhaps merely thinking aloud. “The shadow came after me . . . I died—out of the closet . . . because that doctor of yours . . . his scissors told me: I have a soul now . . . There is no cure for it . . .”

“An incurable soul! You poor thing!” I-330 splashed me with laughter, dispersing my fever, droplets of laughter ringing and sparkling all around us—everything became so—so very wonderful.

The doctor reemerged from around the corner—the most wonderful, most incredible, slenderest doctor.

“Well, well,” he said, stopping next to her.

“Oh, it’s nothing! I’ll tell you later. He accidentally . . . tell them that I’ll be back in about . . . fifteen minutes.”

The doctor flicked back around the corner. I-330 waited. The muffled sound of the door closing. Then, achingly slowly, she pressed up against me—her shoulder, her hand, all of her—driving the sharp, sweet needle deeper and deeper into my heart—and she and I walked off, she and I—two—as one . . .

I don’t remember where we turned into the darkness—and through the darkness, we ascended, endlessly, in silence. I couldn’t see, but I knew: she was walking exactly like me—with her eyes closed, blind, her head flung up, biting her lip—listening to the low music of my trembling.

I came to in one of the countless nooks in the House of Antiquity’s garden: some fence sticking out of the ground—bare, stony ribs and the yellow teeth of decaying walls. She opened her eyes and said, “The day after tomorrow at 16.” And with that, she left.

Did any of this really happen? I don’t know. I guess I will find out the day after tomorrow. The only real proof is the scrape on my right hand—skin missing from the tips of my fingers. But then today, at the INTEGRAL, the Second Builder assured me that he saw me accidentally touch a sanding wheel with those very fingers—and that was why. Well, for all I know, that’s possible, too. Very possible. I don’t know—really: I don’t know anything.

Log 18

BRIEF:

A Jungle of Logic. Wounds and Bandages. Never Again.

Yesterday, I lay down and immediately sank to the dreaming depths like an overloaded ship—capsized. A dense green mass of mute, swaying water. I slowly floated up from the bottom and somewhere in the middle depths, opened my eyes: I was in my room, in the still-green, frozen morning. A shard of sun shone directly into my eyes from the mirror on my closet door. It was interfering with my precise execution of sleep during the hours ordained by the Table. The best course of action would be to open the closet door. But I felt like I was covered in cobwebs, like I had cobwebs in my eyes, no strength to get up . . .

Finally, I managed to get out of bed and open the door—and suddenly, in the closet, tangling herself out of her dress, all pink—it was I. I’ve gotten so used to even the most improbable things happening that as far as I can remember, I wasn’t even surprised, I didn’t ask any questions: I threw myself in the closet, shut the mirror door behind me, and breathlessly, blindly, greedily coupled with her. As I see it now: through the crack in the door in the dark—the razor-sharp sunray had splintered into a lightning bolt stretching across the floor, the wall of the closet, above—then that cruel, sparkling razor fell across I’s prone, bare neck . . . I was terrified, I couldn’t help it, I screamed—it woke me up.

My room. The still-green, frozen hours of the morning. A shard of sun on the door of the closet. I was in bed. It was all just a dream. But my heart was still racing, convulsing, spurting blood, buzzing in my knees and fingertips. All of this definitely happened. And now I can’t tell: what was a dream and what was real; irrational values keep rupturing through everything solid, normal, and three-dimensional—instead of hard, polished planes, I am surrounded by things that are gnarled and hairy . . .

There was a lot of time left before the bell. I lay there thinking—and an incredibly strange chain of logic unfurled out of me.

Every equation, every formula in the surface world has a corresponding curve or a solid. For irrational formulas like my √−1, we don’t know the corresponding solids, we’ve never seen them . . . And in that lies the horror—that these solids, though we can’t see them, still exist—they undoubtedly, inexorably must: because mathematics is actually a screen on which we watch their freakish, spiky shadows; neither math nor death can ever make mistakes. If we don’t see these solids in our world, on our surface, another world must exist—it inexorably must—a big, wide other world out there beyond our surface . . .

I leaped up, not waiting for the bell, and spun around my room. My beloved math—up until now, the only stable and unsullied island in my whole new crazy life: it had broken off and was floating away, swirling into the distance. Does this mean that this exasperating soul of mine is just as real as my boots or unif—even when I can’t see them (they are behind the mirrored closet door)? And if boots aren’t an illness, why is my “soul”?

I searched but couldn’t find a way out of this unruly jungle of logic. Its thickets were as terrifying and uncharted as the ones behind the Green Wall—just as baffling and bizarre as creatures that speak without words. I imagined seeing—through thick glass: an infinitely large, and, at the same time, infinitely small, scorpion-like creature, lying in wait with its sensitive minus-sign stinger: √−1 . . . Maybe this was nothing other than my “soul,” like the mythical scorpion of the Ancients who willingly stung itself with everything that . . .

The bell. Daytime. All this—not dying, not dissipating—just slightly concealed by the daylight; like visible objects don’t just disappear under the cover of darkness at night. My head was filled with light, tentative fog. Through the fog, I saw the long glass tables; spherical heads, chewing in unison, slowly and silently. Through the fog, in the distance, I heard the metronome beating, and to the quotidian tenderness of this music, along with everyone else, I mechanically counted to fifty: performing the requisite fifty chewing motions per bite. And, mechanically keeping time, I went down the stairs, wrote my name in the register—just like everyone else. But inside: I was separate from all of them, alone, cut off by a soft wall that muffled all sound, and behind this wall—another world . . .

And well: if I am the only one in this world, then why am I writing about it here? What are these ludicrous “dreams,” closets and endless hallways? I regret to admit that instead of an elegant and strictly mathematical epic honoring the One State, I’m coming out with some sort of flamboyant caper. Oh, if only this was merely a novel, and not my very real life, overflowing with Xs, √−1, and falling.

Anyway, maybe it’s all for the best. Most likely you, unknown readers, are only children compared to us (after all, we were reared by the One State, and therefore achieved the highest heights possible for humanity). And, just like children, you’ll only swallow my bitter pill after it’s thoroughly coated in a thick syrup of thrills . . .

EVENING

Do you know this feeling: you’re in an aero, soaring up a blue spiral, the windows down, wind whirling up at your face—there is no Earth, just a distant memory, as far away as Saturn, Jupiter, or Venus? That’s my life now—the wind’s in my face and I have forgotten all about Earth—all about darling, pink O. And yet, Earth is still there; sooner or later I’ll have to go back to it, I am just closing my eyes to hide from the day her name appears on my Sex Table—O-90 . . .

This evening, the distant Earth sent a reminder. In order to comply with the doctor’s orders (I truly, sincerely want to get better), I wandered the glassy, linear deserts of the avenues for an entire two hours. Everyone else was in the auditoriums, in accordance with the Table, and I was alone . . . really, an unnatural sight. Imagine: a human finger cut off from the whole, the hand—just a single finger, hunched over, running around—bounding over the glass pavement. That finger is me. And what is stranger and even more unnatural, this finger has absolutely no interest in reuniting with the hand, with the others: it either wants to remain on its own or . . . well, I don’t have anything left to hide: or to be with her—that woman, once again pouring all of me into her through my shoulder, through our intertwined fingers . . .

I came home when the sun was already setting. The rosy ash of the evening—on the glass of the walls, on the golden spire of the Accumulator Tower, in the voices of numbers who’d run into each other on the street. Isn’t it strange: the rays of the dying sun fall at the exact same angles as the sun in the morning and yet, everything is completely different, this pink—something else, very soft, just slightly bitter, while in the morning—it will be jingling and buzzing all over again.

Downstairs, in the building lobby. From the bottom of a pile of envelopes coated in pink ash, U, the attendant, took out a letter and handed it to me. Again: this is a very respectable woman and I am positive that she has only the best intentions toward me. And still, whenever I see her jowls, which droop down like fish gills, it is, for some reason, unpleasant.

U sighed as she passed me the letter with her gnarled hand. But this sigh just barely ruffled the curtain between myself and the rest of the world: I was completely transfixed by the envelope trembling in my hands, in which—I was sure of it—there was a letter from I.

She sighed again, so demonstratively, as if she was underlining it twice, and I was forced to look up and saw: between her gills, through the Venetian blinds of her lowered eyes—a tender, smothering, blinding smile. And then: “You poor, poor thing,” another sigh—underlined three times—and a very slight nod toward the letter (which she had naturally already read as part of her duties).

“But no, really, I—why do you say that?”

“No, no, my dear: I know you much better than you know yourself. I’ve been watching you for a long time now and it’s just so clear to me that you need someone to take you by the hand and walk you through life, someone who has studied it for many years now . . .”

I felt: entirely stuck in her smile—it was like a bandage for the wounds that the letter was about to inflict on me. Finally, through the Venetian blinds, extremely softly, “I’ll consider it, dear. I’ll consider it. And have no fear: if I do feel up to it—no, no, I still need to think it over . . .”

Holy Benefactor! Am I really fated to . . . was she really trying to tell me that—

My eyes swam, thousands of sine waves, the letter rising and falling. I tried to get closer into the light, leaning against the wall. The sun was going out and from there—onto me, onto the floor, my hands, the letter—the mournful, dark pink ash grew thicker and thicker.

I tore the envelope, rushing to look at the signature. The first wound: it was not from I, it was from . . . O. Next wound: at the bottom of the page, in the right-hand corner, there was a blurry inkblot—something had dripped on it . . . I can’t stand inkblots—whether it was from the ink running or . . . it doesn’t matter what. And I know that before, it would have just been unpleasant—unpleasant for me to see this unpleasant spot. But why was it that now, this little gray smudge was like a rain cloud looming over everything, making everything so dark and leaden? Or was this just my “soul” acting up again?

The Letter:

You know . . . or maybe you don’t know—I can’t write how I should—oh well: now you know that without you, I can’t have a single day, or morning, or spring. Because for me R is just . . . well, that doesn’t matter to you. Anyway, I’m very grateful to him: without him these past few days—I don’t know what I would have . . . For me, these past few days and nights have been like ten or even twenty years. It’s as though my room is no longer a rectangle, but an endless circle—around and around, everything over and over again, with no door in sight.

I can’t go on without you because I love you. Because I can see and I understand: you no longer need anyone, anyone else in the world, except her, that woman and—please believe me: it is precisely because I love you that I have to—

I only need two or three more days to somehow glue the pieces of myself back into someone at least slightly resembling the old O-90. I’ll go and put in the notice myself, that I’m no longer registered to you, and you will feel better, it will make you happy. I’ll never again—farewell.

Never again. This is, of course, for the best: she’s right. But then, why . . . why am I—

Log 19

BRIEF:

An Infinitesimal of the Third Order. Under the Brow. Over the Balustrade.

In that strange hallway with the quivering dotted line of dim lights . . . or maybe not: it was later, when we were in that forgotten corner of the House of Antiquity garden, she’d said, “The day after tomorrow.” That day is today and everything seems to have wings, the day’s flying by, and our INTEGRAL got its wings, too: they finished installing the rocket engine and ran it and let it idle. What wonderful, powerful roaring! For me, every roar is like fireworks going off in honor of her, my one and only, in honor of today.

A dozen numbers from our hangar got caught gawking directly under the barrel of the engine during the first attempt (= blast)—there was literally nothing left of them, just dust and residue. I am proud to report that the rhythm of our work was not thrown off by this for a second—no one batted an eye; and we, and our machines, went on with our linear and circular motions with the same precision as ever, as though nothing had happened. A dozen numbers are barely one hundred-millionth of the mass of the One State, in practical calculations—an infinitesimal of the third order. Only the Ancients knew arithmetically incorrect pity: we laugh at it.

And it’s funny to me that yesterday I was capable of getting worked up about—and even writing my thoughts down—some measly gray smudge, some little inkblot. All this is my “softened surface,” which should be diamond-hard, instead—like our walls (an ancient expression: “beating your head against a wall”).

SIXTEEN O’CLOCK

I didn’t go on an extra walk: what if she thought that right now, while everything’s jangling with sunlight, was a good time to . . .

I’m practically the only one in the building. Through the sunlit walls, I can see far to the left and the right and down—empty rooms, suspended midair, mirroring one after the other. And only on the blue stairs, barely sketched in the ink of the sun, a feeble, gray shade slowly glides upward. And now I can hear its footsteps—see it through the door—I feel: its smile sticking to me like a bandage—then passing, onto the other stairs—down . . .

The intercom clicks. I fling my entire being into that narrow white blank . . . and . . . some unfamiliar male number (beginning with a consonant). The buzz, the sound of the elevator doors shutting. And there he was: his heavy brow sloppily cocked over his eyes, creating a very strange impression: when he spoke, it was as though it came from under his brow, where his eyes were.

“A letter from her . . .” (from under the brow, like an overhang). “She asked that you do exactly what it says in the letter.”

From under the brow, the overhang—he surveyed the perimeter. Yep, there’s no one, nobody here, hand it over! He looked around one more time, stuck the envelope in my hand, and left. I was alone.

But I wasn’t: a pink ticket fell out of the envelope and with it—just barely—her scent. It was her, she was coming, coming to see me! I hurried to read the letter, to see the words with my own eyes, so I could really believe it . . .

What? Unbelievable! Read it again—skipping over lines, “The ticket . . . you must put your blinds down, as though I am actually there . . . It is imperative for me that they think that I . . . I am very, very sorry . . .”

I tore the letter to shreds. For a moment, in the mirror—my jagged, jumping eyebrows. I picked up the ticket, intending to tear it up, too—

“She asked that you do exactly what it says in the letter.”

My hands went weak and unclenched. The ticket fell on the table. She was stronger than me and it seemed very likely that I would just do whatever she wanted. And anyway . . . anyway: I don’t know—we will see—evening is still a long way away. The ticket stayed on the table.

In the mirror—my jagged, jumping eyebrows. Too bad I don’t have a sick note today: I’d love to walk and walk without stopping, around the Green Wall, then collapse into bed—down to the depths . . . Instead, I have to report to Auditorium 13 and screw myself shut so I can sit still for two—two long hours . . . when all I want is to scream and stamp my feet.

The lecture. It’s very strange, but the voice on the gleaming loudspeaker was somehow soft, furry, and mossy today, instead of the normal metallic. A woman’s voice—in my mind, I can see her, how she had been when she was young—like that little hook of a granny—the one at the House of Antiquity.

The House of Antiquity . . . and all of it comes rushing back—surging up like a fountain—with all of my strength, I have to screw myself shut just to keep from flooding the whole auditorium with my scream. The soft, mossy words went right through me, all I retained was: something about children, bringing up children. I’m like a photographic plate: everything registers on me in strange and superfluous, meaningless detail: the golden gleam on the loudspeaker, shaped like a sickle; under it—a child, a living illustration—stretching its hand toward the sickle; the hem of its microscopic unif in its mouth; its clenched baby fist, squeezing its thumb—with a soft and plump little fold on its wrist. Registered, like a photographic plate: now its bare foot is hanging over the edge, the pink fan of its toes stepping into the air—any moment now, it’s about to—

A woman screamed—a unif swooped onto the stage on invisible wings and caught the child—pressing her lips to its plump fold, moving it into the middle of the table, then coming back down. I captured: the pink crescent moon of her mouth—horns down—blue saucer eyes, filled to the brim. It was O. And I, as though going over some elegant formula, suddenly sensed the logic and necessity of this very minor incident.

She returned to her seat, a little behind me and to the left. I turned around; she obediently turned her gaze away from the child and table and shot it at me, into me, and again: she, me, and the table onstage—three points—and lines were drawn through these three points, projecting into some unavoidable future we could not yet see.

Home—down the green, twilit streets, the streetlights already on, like eyes. I heard myself: tick-tock, tick-tock, like a clock. The hour hands inside me would soon cross the threshold of a certain number and what I would do then would push me past the point of no return. She needs someone to think she is at my place. And I need her—what do I care about what she needs?! I don’t want to be somebody else’s blinds! I just don’t and that’s that.

Behind me, a familiar gait, sloshing, as though walking through puddles. I didn’t even turn around, I already knew: it was S. He would follow me all the way to the door of my building and then he would probably stand there, downstairs, on the pavement, with his gimlets drilled up into my room—until the blinds went down over somebody else’s crimes . . .

He, Guardian Angel, drew the line for me. I decided: no. I decided.

When I came into my room and flipped the switch—I couldn’t believe my eyes: O stood next to my table. Or rather, she hung there like an empty dress with no body in it. She looked like she didn’t have a single spring left in her—her arms and legs, springless—a springless, slumped voice.

“I’m here about my letter. Did you get it? Well? I need to know your answer. I need it now.”

I shrugged. With pleasure—as though everything was her fault—I appraised her blue eyes, filled to the brim—taking my time to respond. And, with pleasure, I stabbed her one word at a time:

“My answer? Well . . . you’re right. There’s no arguing. Right about everything.”

“You mean . . .” (She tried to hide her barely perceptible trembling under a smile—but I saw.) “Well, great! I’ll—I’ll go now!”

But she just hung there over the table. Her eyes, legs, and arms sagging down. The crumpled pink ticket (her’s) still lay on the table. I quickly opened this manuscript—WE—to hide the ticket (perhaps more from myself than from O).

“Look: I am writing everything down. I already have 128 pages . . . I’m very surprised at the way that it’s coming out . . .”

Her voice—or the shadow of her voice: “Do you remember when . . . on page 30 . . . I dripped on it and you . . .”

Her blue saucers overflowed with silent, rushing drops—running down her cheeks, down, racing over the edge. She said, “I can’t, I’m going . . . I’ll never again—so what! The only thing I want is—I need a baby from you—leave me with a child and I’ll go—I’ll go!”

I saw: her whole body was trembling under her unif and any moment, I was about to—I put my hands behind my back and smiled. “What are you talking about? Are you trying to get sent to the Benefactor’s Machine?”

Her words gushed back at me like water over a dam: “I don’t care if I do! At least I will feel it—I’ll get to feel it inside me. At least for a few days . . . I want to see it—just once—that plump little fold—like the one—just like the child onstage today. Just for a day!”

Three points: she, me, and the little wrist with the fold on the stage . . . I remember how once, when I was little, they took us to the Accumulator Tower. At the very top, I leaned over the glass balustrade to look at the people below, they were like tiny specks, and my heart jumped with a sweet thrill, “What if I—?” Back then, the thought only made me tighten my grip on the railing. But now: I jumped.

“Is that what you want? Completely acknowledging that . . .”

Her eyes were shut, as though the sun was shining directly into her face. A wet, glistening smile.

“Yes! Yes! That’s what I want!”

I grabbed the pink ticket from under my manuscript—the one for her—and ran down to the office. O grabbed my hand and shouted something but what—I only understood later, after I had returned.

She sat on the edge of the bed, her hands tightly squeezed in her lap.

“Was that . . . was that her ticket?”

“What do you care? It was—so what?”

Something cracked. Mostly likely, O had just shifted her weight. She sat with her hands in her lap, silent.

“Well? Hurry up . . .” I roughly grabbed her arm, leaving red marks (bruises tomorrow) right on her wrist, on her soft, puffy fold.

That was the end. After that, I turned the switch, my mind switched off—darkness, sparks—flying down over the balustrade . . .

Log 20

BRIEF:

Discharge. What an Idea Is Made Of. Zero Cliff.

Discharge is the best term for it. I can now see that it was exactly like an electric discharge. The pulse of these recent days has been growing drier, quicker, and more intense—the poles are closing in—a dry crackling—another millimeter and: an explosion, then—silence.

Now it is very quiet and empty inside me, like in a building after everyone’s left and you’re lying in bed, alone, sick, and can so clearly hear the metallic plinks of your thoughts.

Maybe this “discharge” has finally cured me, driving out my torturous “soul,” and I’m once again the same as the rest of us. At the very least, I can now picture O on the steps of the Cube, or in the Gas Bell, without feeling anything. And if she names me in there, in the Operating Room—so be it: I will feel grateful to spend my final moments reverently kissing the punishing hand of the Benefactor. As a citizen of the One State, I have the right to receive punishment, and I refuse to give up that right. No number should ever attempt to refuse this one and only—and therefore, all the more precious—right—and none ever dares to.

. . . Quietly, metallically, distinctly, the thoughts keep plinking; an invisible aero carries me up to the azure heights of my favorite abstractions. I see how up here, in this pure and rarefied air, all my thoughts about “rights” gently go pop, like a tire going flat. I clearly see that they’re just the dregs of the Ancients’ ridiculous superstition—their concept of “rights.”

Some ideas are made of clay, while others are for the ages—made out of gold or our precious glass. All you need to determine what an idea is made of is a single drop of a powerful acid. The Ancients knew of an acid like this: reductio ad finem. I believe that’s what they called it; but they were afraid of applying this poison, because they preferred to have at least a bit of sky, even if it was clay, or a toy, rather than just a blue nothing. We—thanks to the Benefactor—are adults. We don’t need toys.

And so, let a drop of it fall on the concept of “rights.” Even among the Ancients, the more adult ones knew that the wellspring of rights is power—that rights are a function of power. So, on two sides of the scale, we have: a gram and a ton, “I” on one, and “We,” the One State, on the other. Isn’t it already clear? The presumption that “I” can have any “rights” with respect to the State is exactly like thinking a gram can equal a ton. From this, we have our regular distribution: the ton gets power and the gram gets duties. And the most natural path from obscurity to greatness: forget you’re a gram and feel the power of being one-millionth of a ton . . .

You plump and ruddy Venusians, Uranians, sooty as blacksmiths—yes, I can hear your grumbling in my blue silence. But please, understand: what’s great is simple. See: only the four rules of arithmetic are infallible and immortal. In order for it to be infallible and immortal—and great—a system of ethics has to be founded on these four rules. This is the ultimate wisdom: the pinnacle of the pyramid people have reached after centuries of scrambling—red, sweating and kicking, gasping for air. From this pinnacle, we look down on whatever survives of the savagery of our ancestors, writhing below like pitiful worms. From this pinnacle, O, an illegal mother, is exactly the same as a murderer, or that madman who dared aim his poetry at the One State. And they all receive the same sentence: premature death. This is the same divine justice that people dreamed of going back to the stone age, by the rosy, naïve light of the dawn of history: after all, their “God” punished disparagement of the Holy Church exactly the same way He punished murder.

Uranians—you are as tough and swarthy as ancient Spaniards, who had the wisdom to burn people at the stake—your silence leads me to think: you are with me. But I hear you, pink Venusians—mumbling something about torture and executions, a return to barbarism. My dear Venusians: I pity you—you are incapable of philosophically mathematical thought.

Human history moves up in circles, just like an aero. Each cycle is different—some golden, some bloody—but all of them have 360 degrees. They all start at zero and then go up through 10, 20, 200, 360 degrees—then back to zero again. And yes, we’ve come back to zero: yes. But, to my mathematical mind, it is clear: our zero is brand new and totally different. We went right from zero but came back around to it from the left. Therefore: instead of positive zero, we have arrived at negative zero. You see?

I see this Zero as a vast, brooding cliff, narrow and sharp as a knife blade. In fierce, furry darkness, with bated breath, we pushed off from the pitch black, night side of Zero. For centuries, we sailed and sailed, like Columbuses, going in circles around the Earth, until, finally, hurrah! A fiery salute—everyone up on the masts . . . Before us: the other, never-before-seen side of the Zero Cliff—visible in the glow of the polar aurora of the One State—an azure hulk, sparks of sun and rainbows—hundreds of suns, billions of rainbows . . .

So what if we’re only a knife’s edge away from the other side of the Zero Cliff? The knife is the strongest, most everlasting, most brilliant of all human inventions. The knife was the guillotine, the universal method for cutting all ties, the path of paradox also follows the knife’s edge—and it’s the only path worthy of the fearless mind . . .

Log 21

BRIEF:

My Duty as an Author. Swollen Ice. The Most Difficult Love.

Yesterday was her day but once again, she didn’t show up, sending another unintelligible note, explaining nothing. But I am calm, completely calm. If I am doing exactly what she asked me to do in her letter, bringing her ticket down to the office then lowering the blinds, just to sit here alone—it is, of course, not because I am too weak to disobey her. Never! Of course not. It’s just that the blinds protect me from all of those bandaging smiles that are supposed to heal me, allowing me to sit here and write this in peace—that’s first of all. Second of all: I’m afraid that if I lose her, I-330, I will lose what is probably the only key to solving all the unknowns (that closet, my temporary death, and so on). And I now feel that it is my duty to solve them, even just as the author of this log, not to mention the fact that unknowns are man’s natural enemy, and Homo sapiens is only human in the full sense of the word when there are no longer question marks in his grammar: only exclamation marks and periods.

And so, to fulfill what I understand as my duty as an author, today at 16, I took out an aero and went back to the House of Antiquity. There was a strong headwind. The aero struggled to break through the aerial thicket, invisible branches of wind whistled around me, whipping the plane. The city below looked as if it were made of thick blue hunks of ice. Suddenly—a cloud swept in, casting a fast, slanted shadow, and the ice became leaden and swollen, like in the spring when you stand on the riverbank waiting: any minute now and all of it will crack into pieces, go spinning, gush forth; but the minutes pass and the ice doesn’t move, and you yourself start to swell, your heart beats faster and harder (but why am I writing about this and where are these strange sensations coming from? After all, there is no icebreaker capable of breaking through the strongest and clearest crystal of all—our way of life . . .).

Nobody at the gates of the House of Antiquity. I went around the back and found the old woman, the gatekeeper, standing next to the Green Wall, shading her eyes with her hand, watching the sky. Over the Wall: the sharp black triangles of some kind of birds: cawing, they flung themselves breast first at the powerful barrier of electric waves—and were thrown back, only to fly at the Wall again.

I saw: over her darkened face, overgrown with wrinkles—their fast, slanting shadows, and a fast glance over at me.

“Nope! Nobody here—no one at all! Yep! And no reason to come. Uh-huh . . .”

What do you mean no reason? And what an idea—talking to me as though I am only somebody’s shadow. Maybe all of you are my shadows. Wasn’t I the one who populated these pages, which were so recently blank, white rectangular deserts, filling them up with all of you? If it weren’t for me, would the readers I’ll lead down the narrow paths of these lines ever know you?

Of course, I didn’t say any of this to her. In my personal experience, the worst thing you can do to someone is make them doubt their own reality—destabilize the feeling that they’re really real, three-dimensional, and not merely a component of some other reality. I dryly reminded her that her job was to open the door and she let me into the courtyard.

Empty. Silent. The wind—far away, beyond the walls, as distant as on that day when we’d walked shoulder to shoulder, two as one, emerging from down below, from the hallways—that is, if any of that really happened. I walked through a row of stone archways. My footfalls slapped against the damp vaults and landed somewhere behind me, as if someone was following me. The yellow walls had red brick pimples and watched me through the dark, square spectacles of their windows, watching me as I opened the singing doors of the sheds, peeked into every niche, corner, dead end. A gate in the fence led out to an empty lot—a monument to the Great Two Hundred Years’ War: bare stone ribs sticking out of the ground, the bared yellow teeth of decaying walls, an ancient oven with vertical pipes—a ship petrified for eternity among puddles of yellow stones and red bricks.

A fleeting feeling: I knew these yellow teeth, I’d seen them before—but where? The memory lay on the ocean floor, I could only see it through a thick mass of water. I started searching. I fell into pits, tripped over rocks, rusted claws grasped at my unif, acridly salty drops of sweat crawled down my forehead into my eyes . . .

Nowhere! I could not find the door out of the underground hallways anywhere—it simply did not exist. And maybe this was for the best: it made it seem all the more likely that all of it had only been one of my awful “dreams.”

Exhausted, covered in dust and cobwebs, I had already opened the gate to go back to the central courtyard when suddenly, I heard a rustling behind me, and sloshing footsteps, and then, in front of me—pink ears, like wings; S’s double-bent smile.

Squinting, he screwed me into his gimlets and asked, “Taking a walk?”

I said nothing. My hands felt in my way again.

“Have you been feeling any better?”

“Yes, thank you. I feel like I’m getting back to normal.”

He released me—lifting his eyes to the sky. With his head back, for the first time, I noticed his Adam’s apple. A small fleet of aeros buzzed low overhead, at about fifty meters. You could tell by how low they flew and their lowered black observation trunks—these were the Guardians’ machines. But it wasn’t just the usual two or three of them, there were between ten and twelve (unfortunately, I can only provide an estimate).

“Why are so many of them out today?” I dared to ask.

“Why? Well . . . a real doctor starts treating their patient when they’re still healthy—the kind who won’t get sick until tomorrow, or the day after, or in a week. It’s prophylactics!”

He nodded and began sloshing away up the stone tiles of the garden. Then he turned back, and over his shoulder, he told me, “Watch out!”

I was alone again. Empty. Silent. High above the Green Wall, the birds darted back and forth in the wind. What did he mean by that?

The aero quickly slid down the airstream back to the city. Light and dark shadows fell from the clouds onto the blue cupolas and cubes of glass ice—leadening, swelling . . .

EVENING

I opened my manuscript in order to enter a few things I think would be useful to know (for you, the reader) about the great Day of Unanimity—it’s coming up. But then I realized: I can’t write that right now. I keep listening in to the wind beating its black wings against the glass of the walls; I keep looking around, waiting. For what? I don’t know. When the familiar brownish-pink gills appeared in my room I was, honestly, very relieved. She sat down, chastely fixed her unif, which had fallen between her knees, and quickly covered me in her bandaging smiles—a strip on each scrape—until I felt pleasantly, tightly bound.

“So when I came into the classroom today”—she works at the Child Rearing Factory—“there was a caricature on the wall. Yes, really, I can assure you! They drew me as some sort of fish. And maybe I really am . . .”

“No, no, please—” I hurried to interject (up close, it’s actually clear that she has nothing resembling fish gills and what I’d said earlier about her gills was completely inappropriate).

“Anyway—that’s besides the point. It’s the fact that they did it. Naturally, I called in the Guardians. Now, I love children a lot, and I firmly believe that the most difficult and noble kind of love is cruelty—do you know what I mean?”

Did I ever! This so intersected with my own thoughts, I couldn’t contain myself, and read her some of my 20th log, beginning from “Quietly, metallically, distinctly, the thoughts keep plinking . . .”

Without looking up, I could see how her brownish-pink jowls quivered as I read, they kept moving in closer to me, until suddenly, her hard, dry, fingers—slightly thorny, even—rested in my hands.

“Give me that! Give it to me! I’ll phonocopy it and make the children learn it by heart. Those Venusians of yours don’t need it as badly as we do—and we need it now, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow!”

She looked around and then very quietly said, “Have you heard: they’re saying that on the Day of Unanimity . . .”

I leaped up. “What—what are they saying? What’s going to happen on the Day of Unanimity?”

My cozy walls were gone. I suddenly felt like I’d been cast out, dumped outside, where an enormous wind raged over the roofs, and dark, crooked clouds loomed lower and lower . . .

U grabbed my shoulders, firmly and decisively (although I noticed: my anxiety was justified—the bones of her fingers were trembling).

“Sit down, my dear, don’t get worked up. People say all sorts of things . . . and anyway, if you should need me—I will be by your side on that day. I’ll leave the children to somebody else and be with you because you, my dear, are also a child, and you also need . . .”

“No, no,” I dismissed her. “Never! I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m some kind of child—that I can’t manage on my own . . . No way!” (I confess: I had other plans for that day.)

She smiled. The subtext of her smile read, “Oh, you stubborn boy!” Then she sat down. Her eyes lowered. Her hands once again coyly straightened the fold of her unif over her knees. Change of subject: “I think that I really ought to decide . . . for your sake . . . no, I beg you, don’t rush me, I still need to think . . .”

I wasn’t rushing her. Although I knew that I should be happy and there is no greater honor than to adorn somebody else’s twilight years with your companionship . . .

. . . All night, I was surrounded by beating wings, walking around and covering my head with my arms to protect myself from these wings. And then the chair. It was not like the ones we use now, but an ancient one, made out of wood. I was moving my legs like a horse (right front leg, left back leg—left front leg, right back leg), when the chair ran up to my bed and climbed on top. I made love to the wooden chair. Painful and uncomfortable.

Incredible: is there really no cure for this dream sickness or any way to make it rational—perhaps, even useful?

Log 22

BRIEF:

Frozen Waves. Everything Is Perfected. I Am a Microbe.

Imagine: you’re standing on the shore, watching the waves rising and falling in unison, when suddenly, after cresting, they stop there and freeze. This is exactly as terrible and unnatural as when our regular, scheduled walk suddenly tripped, stumbled, and came to an abrupt halt. According to our chronicles, the last time anything like this happened was 119 years ago, when, right in the thick of the walk, smoking and whistling, a meteorite fell from the sky.

We were walking the way we always did, like warriors in ancient Assyrian monuments: thousands of heads with two melded, integrated legs—two integrated arms, swinging. There was a quadrangle coming toward us from the direction of the menacing drone of the Accumulator Tower at the end of the avenue: guards at both sides, in the front, and the back; three in the middle—gold numbers already stripped from their unifs—everything already painfully clear.

The giant clock at the top of the Tower looked like a face bending down from the clouds spitting out seconds, indifferently waiting. And then, at exactly 13:06, there was a scuffle within the quadrangle. I was up close and could see everything in the most minute detail. I very clearly remember a long neck and a tangle of blue veins on the temple, like rivers on a map of a small, undiscovered world—this undiscovered world was apparently just a child. He probably saw someone he knew in our ranks: he stopped, got up on his toes, and stretched out his neck. One of the guards cracked the blue spark of his electric whip and the child yelped like a puppy. And then, another sharp crack, about every two seconds—a yelp, a crack—yelp, crack.

We continued our rhythmic walking, like the Assyrians. As I admired the elegant zigzags of the sparks, I mused, “Everything in human society is endlessly perfected—and must be perfected. Ancient whips were such ghastly instruments, while the beauty of ours . . .”

But here, like a cog flying off a machine while it’s running full steam, a thin, supple but taut woman’s figure broke out of our ranks with a shout, “Enough! Don’t you dare!” and charged into the quadrangle. This was exactly like the meteor 119 years ago: the entire walk stopped dead in its tracks, and our rows became like gray waves paralyzed by a snap freeze.

For a moment, I looked at her like a stranger, like anyone else: she wasn’t a number anymore—she was only a person whose whole existence amounted to a metaphysical manifestation of an insult to the One State. But then, I noticed the way she moved—turning, she bent her hip to the left—and I suddenly realized: I know her, I know that body, flexible as a whip—my eyes, my lips, my hands know it—at that moment, I was certain of this.

Two of the guards ran to intercept her. Any moment now, and on this still, clear, mirroring point in the pavement, their trajectories would intersect—they would grab her . . . my heart gulped and stopped short—without thinking: can I, should I, is it reasonable, is it unreasonable—I flew to that spot . . .

I felt thousands of eyes on me, bulging in horror, but this only fed the savage, hairy-handed man who’d burst out of me, filling him with a giddy, desperate energy, making him run harder. Two steps away, she turned around—a quivering face, spattered in freckles, auburn eyebrows . . . It wasn’t her! It wasn’t I!

Wild, splashing joy. I wanted to shout something like, “Take her! Get her!” but barely a whisper came out. I could already feel a heavy hand on my shoulder, I was being held down, led forward, I tried to explain . . .

“But listen, you must understand, I thought it was . . .”

But how could I possibly explain myself or the entire history of my illness as it’s written in these pages? I quieted down and obediently followed . . . A leaf torn off a tree by a sudden blast of wind obediently falls to the ground, but spins as it falls, clutching onto each familiar limb, branch, and twig: I clutched onto each passing, speechless, spherical head, the translucent ice of the walls, the blue needle of the Accumulator Tower piercing the clouds.

In this moment, as a silent curtain was poised to fall on my final act, cutting me off from this beautiful world, I noticed: waving his pink wing-like arms, gliding over the mirroring pavement—the familiar giant head. With the familiar flattened voice, “It is my duty to inform you that number D-503 is ill and in no condition to control his feelings. I am certain he got caught up in this as a result of a natural indignation . . .”

“Exactly,” I grabbed onto his words. “I even screamed, ‘Take her!’”

“You didn’t scream anything,” said a voice from behind me.

“Yes, but I wanted to—I swear to the Benefactor, I wanted to.”

For a second, he pierced me with his cold, gray gimlets. I don’t know if he knew just by looking at me that what I said was (almost) the truth or if he had some sort of ulterior motive for once again showing me mercy, but he simply wrote a short note and handed it to one of the guards holding me, and with that, I was free again—or rather, once more confined in the orderly, endless, Assyrian ranks.

The quadrangle, freckles, and map of blue veins turned a corner, disappearing forever. We walked as a single, million-headed body, each of us clinging to the humble joy that probably also sustains molecules, atoms, and phagocytes. In the ancient world, the Christians understood this, our only (though very imperfect) predecessors. They knew that humility is a virtue and pride, a sin. That WE comes from God, and I—from the devil.

There I was, walking in step with everyone else, but still separate. I was still shaking from that ordeal, like a bridge that’s just been thundered over by an ancient iron train. I could feel myself. But feeling oneself, being conscious of one’s individuality is for an eye with something in it, an abscessed finger, an aching tooth. When an eye, finger, or tooth is healthy, it’s like it’s not even there. Isn’t it clear that self-awareness is nothing but a symptom of disease?

I may not be a phagocyte anymore, calmly and industriously devouring microbes (with blue temples and freckles); I am most likely a microbe now, and probably, there are thousands among us already, still pretending they’re phagocytes, like me—

What if what happened today—an essentially minor incident—is only the beginning? Only the first meteorite in a shower of blasting, blazing stones hurled at our glassy paradise by eternity?

Log 23

BRIEF:

Flowers. Dissolving Crystal. As Long As.

They say there are flowers that only bloom once every hundred years. Then why can’t there be some that bloom once every thousand, or ten thousand years? Perhaps we’ve never heard of them only because their one-in-a-thousand hadn’t arrived until today.

And so, in a drunken rapture, I came down the stairs to the front desk. Everywhere I looked, I saw thousand-year buds silently bursting open before me. The chairs, and slippers, and golden, electric lamps; someone’s dark, shaggy eyes, the faceted columns of the railings, a handkerchief dropped on the steps, and the front desk: all abloom—and drooping over the desk, U’s gently brown, spotted cheeks. Everything was extraordinary, new, tender, pink, moist.

U took my pink ticket. Over her head, through the glass of the wall, I could see the moon, blue and fragrant, hanging down from an invisible branch. I triumphantly pointed to it and said, “It’s the moon—you see?”

U looked up at me, then at the number on my ticket—and I watched her go through her familiar gesture, so charmingly chaste—fixing the fold of her unif, which had fallen between her knees.

“You, my dear, have a sickly, abnormal look—and that’s because sickness and abnormality are one and the same. You’re destroying yourself and nobody wants to tell you—nobody.”

That “nobody” was of course equal to the number on the ticket: I-330. My dear, wonderful U! You’re absolutely right: I’m not thinking clearly, I’m sick, I have a soul, I am a microbe. But isn’t blossoming a disease? Isn’t it painful when a bud bursts open? And wouldn’t you say that a spermatozoid is the most terrifying microbe of all?

Upstairs, in my room. I-330, in the fully bloomed bowl of the chair. I was on the floor with my arms wrapped around her legs and my head in her lap. Saying nothing. Silence, pulsing . . . it was like: I was a crystal dissolving inside her. I could clearly feel as the polished edges delimiting me in space melted, melted away. I was vanishing, dissolving into her lap, into her, becoming smaller and smaller, and also wider, vaster, more unencompassable, because: she isn’t her—she’s the universe. And for a moment, me and this chair next to the bed, inundated with joy—we are one: and the beautifully smiling old woman from the House of Antiquity and the untamed jungles beyond the Green Wall, and some sort of ruins, silver on black, dreaming like the old woman, and somewhere improbably far away the door that just slammed—all of this was beside me, within me, listening to the beat of my pulse as it flew through this rapturous moment . . .

In ridiculous, muddled, waterlogged words, I tried to tell her that I was a crystal and there was a door inside me and that was why I could feel how happy the chair was. But what came out of me was such nonsense that I had to stop out of embarrassment: I . . . and suddenly—

“I, my darling, forgive me! I don’t understand why I’m saying such stupid things . . .”

“What makes you think that stupidity is a bad thing? If people nurtured and cultivated stupidity for centuries the same way they did reason, perhaps something incredibly precious would grow out of it.”

“Yes . . .” (I think she’s right—how could she possibly be wrong at a moment like this?)

“And on top of that, because of that stupid thing you did yesterday, I love you even more today—I really do, even more.”

“But why did you torture me, why didn’t you come, why did you send me your tickets and force me to . . .”

“What if I needed to test you? Maybe I needed to know that you would be willing to do absolutely everything that I wanted. That you are completely mine.”

“I am, completely!”

She took my face—all of me—into her hands and lifted my head. “And what about those ‘duties of any honest number?’ Huh?”

Sweet, sharp, white teeth: her smile. She sat in the blooming bowl of the chair like a bee: full of venom and honey.

Yes, duties . . . I went over my most recent logs in my mind: not even the slightest hint of the thought that really, I was supposed to . . .

I said nothing. My face plastered in an ecstatic (and probably stupid) smile, gazing into her pupils, moving my eyes from one to the other, seeing myself in each one: there I am—teeny-tiny, one millimeter tall—a captive in those baby rainbow dungeons. And then again—bees—lips, the sweet pain of blossoming . . .

Inside each of us numbers, there’s an invisible metronome quietly ticking. Without needing to look at the clock, we always know exactly what time it is within five minutes. But right then, my internal metronome had gone silent—I didn’t know how much time had passed, and, frightened, I grabbed my badge from under the pillow . . .

Praise the Benefactor: twenty more minutes! But minutes are so laughably short and tight, they run away from you, and I had so much to tell her—everything, all about me: O’s letter and that terrible night I gave her a baby; and, for some reason, my childhood—Plyapa the math teacher and √−1 and my first Unanimity Day, how I bitterly wept after finding an inkblot on my unif—on the worst possible day.

I-330 lifted her head and propped her chin in her hand. Two long, deep creases ran up from the corners of her lips, forming a cross with the dark angle of her raised eyebrows.

“Maybe that day . . .” and stopped. Her eyebrows grew even darker. She took my hand and squeezed tightly. “Tell me you’ll never forget me, that you will always think of me.”

“Why are you saying that? What are you talking about, I, darling?”

She didn’t respond. She was already looking past me, through me, her eyes distant. I suddenly heard the wind beating against the glass with its giant wings (this had probably been happening the whole time, but I’d only just heard it), and for some reason, recalled the piercing birds flying over the Green Wall.

I tossed her head like she was shaking something off. Then she pressed her whole body against mine—just for a second—like an aero springing down against the ground before fully landing.

“Get me my stockings! Hurry!”

Her stockings were on the table, lying on top of page 145 of these notes. Rushing to grab them, I knocked down the manuscript, paper flew everywhere and I couldn’t put it all back in order. Even if I tried to, it wouldn’t matter, there’s no real order anyway, it would still be filled with all of these thresholds and pits and Xs.

“I can’t go on like this,” I said. “You’re with me right now, you’re here, but it still feels like you’re really behind an opaque, ancient wall. I can hear voices and movement on the other side, but I can’t make the words out, I don’t know what’s going on in there. I can’t go on like this. You’re always keeping things from me, you never explained where I ended up that time at the House of Antiquity, what those hallways were, why the doctor—or did any of that really happen?”

I put her hands on my shoulders and slowly, deeply entered my eyes.

“You want to know everything?”

“Yes. I do. I have to.”

“And you’re not afraid to follow me anywhere, to the very end, no matter where I may lead you?”

“Yes, anywhere.”

“Okay. I promise: after the holiday, as long as . . . Oh yes: I keep forgetting to ask—how’s the INTEGRAL coming along? Will it be finished soon?”

“No: ‘as long as’ what? You’re doing it again! ‘As long as’ what?”

She (already in front of the door): “You’ll see . . .”

I was alone again. All that was left of her was a faint, lingering perfume like the sweet, dry, yellow pollen from the flowers that grow beyond the Wall. Plus: the questions firmly hooked into me—hooks like the Ancients used to catch fish (Prehistoric Museum).

. . . And why had she suddenly asked about the INTEGRAL?

Log 24

BRIEF:

Function Limits. Easter. Cross It All Out.

I’m like a machine that’s been driven over capacity: my bearings are overheating, another minute and the molten metal will start to drip out—and everything will have been for nothing. Quick—get me cold water, logic. Bucket after bucket, I douse myself in it, but the logic just sizzles off my red-hot bearings and drifts away in an elusive white haze.

Clearly, yes: in order to establish the true value of a function you need to know its limit. And clearly, yesterday’s delirious rambling about “dissolving into the universe,” when taken to its limit = death. Because death is exactly the best possible way for me to most fully dissolve into the universe. Thus, if we take “L,” signifying love, and “D,” for death, then L = f(D)—in other words, love is a function of death . . .

Yes, yes, exactly. That’s why I’m so scared of I, scared of being with her, I don’t want to. But why are “I don’t want to” and “I want to” so close to each other inside me? That’s the horror of it, that all I want is yesterday’s rapturous death again. The horror is that even now, when the logical function is integrated, when it’s obvious that it implicitly contains death, I still want her—my lips, my hands, my chest, every millimeter . . .

Tomorrow is the Day of Unanimity. She’ll be there, too, of course, and I’ll see her, but only from afar. From afar will be painful—I desperately need to—I’m irresistibly drawn to—being close to her, her hands, her shoulder, her hair . . . But I even want this pain: it’s fine, let me have it.

Mighty Benefactor! How absurd to want pain. Everyone knows that pain is a negative. Adding it up, you decrease the total sum of what we call happiness. And therefore . . . and no therefores here. It’s the pure, naked truth.

EVENING

Through the glass walls of the buildings, a windy, feverishly pink, disturbing sunset. I’ve turned my chair so the pink won’t get in my eyes and leafed through these notes. I see: again, I’ve forgotten that I’m not writing all this for myself but for you, unknown readers, with love and pity—for you, who are still stumbling through the distant centuries below.

So I’ll explain the Day of Unanimity, our glorious holiday. I’ve always loved it, ever since I was a child. I believe that for us, it’s something like what the Ancients called “Easter.” I remember how we would make hourly calendars for ourselves on the day before, then eagerly cross out hour by hour in festive anticipation: it was one hour closer, there was one hour less to wait . . . If I could be sure that no one would see it, I swear, I would make myself a little calendar like that now and watch it, seeing how many hours were left until tomorrow, until I could see, although from afar . . .

(I’ve been distracted: they just brought me a brand-new unif, fresh from the workshop. According to custom, we all receive new unifs for tomorrow’s festivities. The hallways are filled with footsteps, happy cries, and noise.)

To continue. Tomorrow I will witness the same spectacle I see every year, newly exciting each time: the mighty Chalice of Unity, hands raised in reverence. Tomorrow is the day of the Benefactor’s annual reelection. Tomorrow we will once again hand the Benefactor the key to the unshakable fortress of our happiness.

It goes without saying that this is nothing like the lawless, disorganized elections the Ancients used to have where—don’t laugh—they didn’t even know the results ahead of time. Could there be anything more inane than building a state on completely haphazard happenstance? And still, it turns out that centuries needed to pass before people could understand this.

Do I need to add that in this, as in everything else, we have no room for randomness? Any kind of unexpected events are completely out of the question. And the election itself is mostly symbolic: it’s to remind us that we are a unified, powerful, million-celled organism—that we, in the words of the ancient Gospels, are one Church. Because there has not been a single case in the entire history of the One State when even a single voice dared to disrupt the grand unison.

They say that the Ancients conducted their elections in secret, hiding like thieves. Some of our historians claim that they attended election festivities completely disguised (I imagine this dark and fantastic spectacle: at night, on a square, figures creeping along the walls in dark capes; the crimson flames of their torches ducking down in the wind . . .). Why did they need all that mystery? We still do not know. Most likely, their elections were tied to some sort of mystical, superstitious, and perhaps criminal rites. We have nothing to hide or be ashamed of. We celebrate our elections openly, honestly, in the light of day. I see everyone vote for the Benefactor; everyone sees me vote for the Benefactor—and could it be any different when “everyone” and “I” are all one “We”? It’s so much nobler, loftier, and more honest than the Ancients’ cowardly, thieving “secret.” Plus: it’s so much more efficient. Because even if we were to imagine the impossible—dissonance in our usual monophony—the invisible Guardians are here, too, among us: they can immediately intercede and save those mistaken numbers from taking their next missteps—and the One State, from them. And finally, one last thing . . .

Through the wall on my left: a woman hurriedly unbuttoned her unif in front of the closet mirror, and, for a moment, in passing: her eyes, her lips, two pointed, pink kernels. And then the blinds fell and instantly, everything from yesterday came flooding back to me, I don’t know what “one last thing . . .” is anymore and I don’t want to think about it at all! All I want is I. I want her to be with me at any and every minute—always, with me and me only. And what I just wrote about Unanimity—all of that was beside the point, it doesn’t matter—I want to cross it all out, tear it up, throw it out. Because I know (this may be blasphemy, but it’s true): it’s only a holiday if she’s there, only with her by my side, shoulder to shoulder.

Without her, tomorrow’s sun will be just a tin disk in the sky, and the sky some tin painted blue, and I . . .

I grabbed the telephone. “I, is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me. It’s so late!”

“I was hoping it isn’t too late. I wanted to ask you . . . I want you to be with me tomorrow. My darling . . .”

“My darling” came out very softly. And for some reason, something from this morning at the hangar flashed in my mind: as a joke, somebody had put a watch under a hundred-ton hammer—it flew up, blowing wind in our faces—then fell at full force, only to stop just above the delicate watch with a hundred-ton tenderness.

Pause. I feel like I can hear somebody whispering in her room. And then her voice: “No, I can’t. Please understand: I would . . . But no, I can’t. Why not? You’ll see tomorrow.”

NIGHT.

Log 25

BRIEF:

The Descent from the Heavens. The Greatest Catastrophe in History. The End of Everything Known.

Before the beginning of the ceremony, when everyone rose and the canopy of the Anthem began to slowly sway overhead—hundreds of horns from the Music Factory and millions of human voices—for a moment, I forgot everything: the distressing things I-330 had said about today’s celebration—I think that I even forgot about her. I was the same little boy who had once cried because of a tiny spot on his unif that only he could see. Even if nobody else could see the indelible black spots I am covered in now, I knew that I was a criminal, that I didn’t belong among these wide-open faces. Oh, if only I could just stand up and shout the whole truth about myself at the top of my lungs. Let that be the end of me—please!—only to feel as pure and mindless as this childlike blue sky, even if just for a moment.

All eyes were lifted to the immaculate morning sky, still moist from the night’s dark blue tears. We watched a barely perceptible spot hovering above us, now dark, now shrouded in sunrays. It was Him, descending to us from the heavens, neo-Jehovah in an aero, as wise and lovingly cruel as the Jehovah of the Ancients. With every moment, He drew closer and our millions of hearts rose higher to meet Him. He could see us. I pictured what He saw: the concentric circles of the tribunes dappled in little blue dots, like the rings of a spiderweb speckled in microscopic suns (our gleaming badges). The wise, white Spider would now alight in the center, clad in the white robes of the Benefactor, having wisely bound us all hand and foot in His beneficent snares of happiness.

His great descent from the heavens was now complete, the final chord of the Anthem silent, and everyone sat. I instantly realized: everything really was just a delicate spiderweb, taut and trembling, ready to tear—any moment, and the unthinkable would happen . . .

Slightly raising myself, I looked around, and met the other eyes filled with restless love, running from face to face. One raised his hand and signaled to somebody with a near-undetectable wave of his fingers. The other signaled back. And another . . . I realized: they were Guardians. I realized: they were worried about something, the spiderweb was taut, trembling. Inside me—as if I was a radio tuned to the same frequency—the same trembling in response.

Onstage, a poet read a preelection ode, but I didn’t hear a single word: only the evenly swinging pendulum of the hexameter. With every swing, some fateful hour drew nearer. I was still feverishly leafing through face after face as if they were pages—still not finding the only one I was looking for, and I needed to do it soon—any moment now and the pendulum would swing and then—

Him—of course, it was him. Down below, racing past the stage, gliding over the sparkling glass, the pink wing-ears, the dark, double-bent loop of an S, the reflection of his body speeding into the twisted passageways between the tribunes.

S and I-330—there was some kind of thread (connecting them—I’ve always thought so; I still don’t know what it is but some day, I will unravel it). I clamped onto him with my eyes as he rolled away like a ball of wool trailing a thread. Then he stopped and . . .

I was struck by high-voltage lightning: impaled, wrenched in a knot. In our row, only forty degrees away from me, S stopped and bent over. I saw I-330 and, next to her, the disgusting, simpering R-13 with his African lips.

My first thought was to fly down there and yell at her, “Why are you with him today? Why didn’t you want it to be me?” But the invisible, beneficent spiderweb tightly bound my hands and feet. Clenching my teeth, I sat still as steel, my eyes glued to the two of them. I can still feel that sharp, physical pain in my heart. I remember I thought, “If there can be physical pain from nonphysical causes, then clearly . . .”

Unfortunately, I failed to reach a conclusion. All I remember is something about the “soul” and then I heard the meaningless ancient phrase, “soul-chilling.” I froze: the hexameters were over. Something was starting . . . but what?

The customary five-minute preelection break. Customary pre-election silence. But today, it was not the usual prayerful, truly holy silence. It was like ancient times, before they had Accumulator Towers and the untamed sky still raged with “thunderstorms.” We were like Ancients before a thunderstorm.

The air was translucent iron. It made you want to open your mouth as wide as you could just to breathe. My painfully strained hearing recorded: somewhere behind me, anxious whispering, like gnawing mice. Without raising my eyes, I could still see I and R—side by side, shoulder to shoulder. My hands—my despicable, alien, hairy hands—shook in my lap.

Everyone was holding and watching their badges. One. Two. Three . . . five minutes . . . Then, a slow, iron voice from the stage: “All those voting ‘aye,’ please raise your hands.”

If only I could look Him in the eye like before and tell Him, truthfully, with devotion: “Here I am. Take me! All of me!” But now I didn’t dare. With great effort—as though my joints were rusted—I raised my arm.

The rustle of millions of rising arms. Someone’s squelched “Oh!” It felt like something had been set off, it was hurtling down now, but I didn’t understand what it was—and I couldn’t bear to—didn’t dare to look—

“Who votes ‘nay’?”

This was the biggest moment in the celebration: everyone kept sitting motionlessly, joyfully bowing their heads to the beneficent yoke of the Number of Numbers. But then, with horror, I heard another rustling: although it was as soft as a sigh, it sounded louder than the bronze horns blaring the Anthem. Like when a man quietly breathes his last breath but everyone near him goes pale and cold drops of sweat glow on their foreheads.

I lifted my eyes, and . . .

It all happened in one hundredth of a second, a hairsbreadth: a thousand hands flew up—“nay”—and fell. I glimpsed I’s pale, crossed-out face, and her raised hand. My eyes went dark.

Another hairsbreadth. Pause. Silence. Pulsing. Then, as though some madman conductor had given a signal, all at once, all the stands erupted in screaming, cracking, flashes of unifs kicked up by running legs, Guardians tore back and forth in confusion, somebody’s heels in my face right in front of my eyes—then, next to the heels, somebody’s wide-open mouth, exploding in a silent scream. For some reason, this hit me harder than anything else: the thousands of silently screaming mouths—like I was watching them on some monstrous screen.

Somewhere far below me, O’s pallid lips flickered onscreen. She was pressed up against the wall of a passageway, covering her belly with her crossed arms—a moment later, she was gone—swept away, or I maybe just forgot about her, because . . .

This was no longer onscreen—it was inside me, in my clenched heart and my throbbing temples. R suddenly leaped over my head, to the left of me, onto a bench—sputtering, red and furious. He was carrying I—pale, with her unif torn shoulder to breast—blood on white. She tightly clung to his neck and in giant bounds—from bench to bench—he carried her up—nasty and agile, like a gorilla.

Everything went red, like an ancient fire. All I knew was I needed to leap to catch up with them. I can’t explain where I got the strength, but I smashed through the crowd like a battering ram—jumping on somebody’s shoulders, on top of the benches—now I was close, I grabbed onto R’s collar: “Don’t you dare! Put her down! Now!” (Luckily, no one could hear me—everybody was running and shouting.)

“What? What is it? What?” he turned around, his lips spraying and shaking—he probably thought he’d been caught by a Guardian.

“What? I won’t let you! I won’t allow it! Drop her!”

But he just angrily smacked his lips, shook his head, and kept running. And I—I’m very ashamed to write this but think I have to: I have to write everything down, so that you, unknown readers, will be fully familiar with my case history—I swung and punched him in the head. Understand? I hit him! I remember it very clearly. And I also remember the feeling of freedom and weightlessness coursing through my entire body afterward.

I-330 quickly slid down from his arms.

“Get out of here!” she shouted to R. “Can’t you see, he’s . . . leave, R, go!”

Baring his white, African teeth, R splattered a word in my face and dived down, disappearing. I lifted I into my arms, pressed her tightly against me, and ran off with her.

My heart raced, it felt huge. With each beat, it sprayed out a torrential, hot blast of joy. So what if something back there was blasted to smithereens—I didn’t care! I just wanted to carry and carry and carry her . . .

EVENING, 22

I can barely hold my pen: I am so utterly drained from this morning’s bewilderment. Have the heaven-sent, centuries-old walls of the One State really crumbled? Are we really homeless again, back in the savage state of freedom, like our distant Ancestors? Is there really no more Benefactor? To vote no—on the Day of Unanimity—no?! I am embarrassed for them, pained and afraid. And who are “they” anyway? Who am I? Do I really know if I’m “one of them” or still “one of us”?

There she was: on a glass bench, warm from the sun, at the very top of the stands where I’d carried her. Her right shoulder and under it, the starting point of a wonderful, incalculable curve, bare; a thin red snake of blood. She either didn’t notice her chest was bare and bleeding or . . . no, she knew, but it was exactly what she needed—if her unif had still been buttoned, she would have torn it open, she . . .

“What happens tomorrow?”

She greedily gulped the air through her clenched, sparkling, sharp teeth. “Nobody knows! Don’t you see? I don’t know and neither does anyone else—no one knows anything! Don’t you understand? Everything known is over! Everything is new now, it’s all unimaginable and unforeseen!”

Below, the crowd was still roiling, running, screaming. But it all seemed so far away and even farther when she gazed at me, slowly pulling me into herself through the miniature golden windows of her pupils. We sat like this for a long time, in silence. And, for some reason, it reminded me of the time when I’d looked into those mystifying yellow pupils on the other side of the Green Wall while the birds swirled overhead (or was that another time?) . . .

“Listen, if nothing crazy happens tomorrow I’ll take you there—do you understand what I’m talking about?”

I didn’t. But I silently nodded. I had dissolved, I was infinitesimally small, I was only a point . . .

After all, being a point has its own logic (today’s logic): a point contains the greatest magnitude of unknowns; if it moves—if it even quivers—it might turn into thousands of different curves, hundreds of solids.

I am afraid to stir: what will I turn into? I think that everyone else is like me, too, afraid of making the slightest move. As I write this, everyone is sitting in their glass cells waiting for something to happen. The hallways, which would usually be filled with the hum of the elevators at this hour, are silent. No laughter or footsteps. Sometimes I will catch glimpses of numbers in twos, looking around, walking down the hall on tiptoe, whispering to one another . . .

What’s going to happen tomorrow? What am I going to turn into?

Log 26

BRIEF:

The World Exists. A Rash. 41°.

Morning. Through the ceiling, the sky is as strong, round, and red-cheeked as ever. I think I would be less surprised if I’d woken up to some bizarre, rectangular sun, people in colorful animal pelts, and opaque stone walls. Can it really be that the world—our world—still exists? Or is this just inertia, the generator is off, but the gears are still turning and plodding along—two or three more rotations, then on the fourth, they’ll come to a standstill . . .

Do you know this feeling? You wake up in the middle of the night, open your eyes in the dark, and suddenly, it’s like you’re lost—you need to hurry, hurry, fumbling through your surroundings, groping for anything familiar and solid—a wall, a lamp, a chair. That’s exactly what I did as I read the One State Gazette this morning—hurry, where is it—and there it was:

YESTERDAY, WE CELEBRATED THE LONG-AWAITED DAY OF UNANIMITY. FOR THE 48TH TIME, THE BENEFACTOR, WHO HAS PROVEN HIS PERFECT WISDOM TIME AND AGAIN, WAS ELECTED UNANIMOUSLY. THE CELEBRATION WAS SULLIED, HOWEVER, BY A MINOR DISTURBANCE CAUSED BY THE ENEMIES OF OUR HAPPINESS, WHO HAVE, NATURALLY, THEREBY BEEN STRIPPED OF THE RIGHT TO BE BRICKS IN THE RENEWED FOUNDATION OF THE ONE STATE. EVERYONE KNOWS THAT COUNTING THEIR VOTES WOULD BE JUST AS RIDICULOUS AS TAKING THE COUGHING OF SICK PEOPLE AT A CONCERT HALL TO BE A PART OF A MAGNIFICENT, HEROIC SYMPHONY . . .

O, wise one! Can it really be that we’re saved, in spite of it all? But what could really counter this totally crystalline syllogism?

And two more lines below:

TODAY AT 12, THERE WILL BE A JOINT SESSION OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE, MEDICAL, AND GUARDIAN BUREAUS. AN IMPORTANT GOVERNMENT ACT WILL BE PUT IN EFFECT IN THE COMING DAYS.

No, the walls are still standing—here they are—I can feel them. And the strange sense that I’m lost, that I’ve strayed, is gone. It’s no longer any surprise that the sky is blue and the sun is round and that everybody is going to work as usual.

I walked down the avenue with an especially firm and resonant stride and, as it seemed to me, so did everyone else. But then, I got to an intersection, turned the corner, and saw: everybody was edging around a building corner very oddly, as though a pipe had burst in the wall and cold water was spraying out and it was impossible to walk past it.

Five, ten more steps—and I was also sprayed by the cold water: it hit me and jolted me off the pavement. About two meters up, there was a rectangular piece of paper stuck to the wall with an unfamiliar word written in acid-green ink:

MEPHI

And below, a back bent like the letter S, with wing-ears, translucently waving from either frustration or anger. Stretching his right arm up, with his left helplessly stuck behind his back—like a sick, wounded wing—he kept jumping to try to tear down the paper—but couldn’t, he always missed by this much.

Probably everyone who walked by had the thought, “If I’m the one who tries to help him, won’t he think that I’m guilty of something and that’s why . . .”

I’ll admit: I had that thought, too. But I then remembered what a true guardian angel he has been, how many times he has saved me, and bravely approached, stretched out my arm, and tore it down.

S turned around, hurriedly drilled his gimlets into me, all the way down to the bottom, until he hit on something. Then he gestured back at the wall with his left eyebrow, winking at the spot where “MEPHI” had hung moments ago. And flicked me the tail of a smile—and a cheerful one, to my surprise. Then again, what’s so surprising? A doctor always prefers fevers and hives to the exhausting, slowly rising temperature of an illness’s incubation: when there’s a fever, at least it’s clear what the illness is. The “MEPHI” that’s broken out on our walls is a rash. I can understand why he’s smiling . . .[*]

The stairs to the underground—and underfoot, on the immaculate glass of the steps—another white piece of paper with “MEPHI.” And on the wall down below, on the bench, and carelessly stuck on the train-car mirror (must have been in a hurry)—everywhere I turned I saw the same terrifying white rash.

Through the silence, the audible hum of the wheels, like the droning of fevered blood. Somebody brushed against somebody’s shoulder—he shuddered and dropped his packet of papers. The number on my left kept reading the same line in the newspaper over and over and over again, the newspaper visibly trembling in his hands. I felt how all around me—in the wheels, hands, newspapers, eyelashes—the pulse was quickening. Maybe today, while I-330 and I went down there, the black line on the thermometer would rise past 39, 40, 41 degrees . . .

At the hangar, it was the same silence, whirring like an invisible propeller far in the distance. The machines stood gloomily still. Only the cranes, very quietly, as though on tiptoe, continued their gliding and bending, grasping blue hulks of frozen air in their claws and loading them into the INTEGRAL’s wing tanks: we are already preparing for its first test flight.

“What do you think? Will we be finished loading in a week or so?” I asked the Second Builder.

His face was like a porcelain plate painted with sweet and gentle blue and pink flowers (his eyes and lips), but today they looked faded somehow, washed out. We were doing the calculations aloud when I was abruptly cut off midword—my jaw dropped: high up under the cupola, on a blue hulk in the claw of a crane, I barely made out a little white square—a piece of paper. My whole body shook—was it from laughter? Yes, I could hear myself laughing (has this ever happened to you—you hear yourself laughing?).

“No, listen,” I caught myself. “It’s like . . . imagine you’re on an ancient aeroplane, at an altitude of five thousand meters, and one of your wings breaks off, and you’re hurtling down, but as you’re crashing, your thoughts are, ‘Tomorrow, from twelve to two . . . then from two to six . . . dinner at six’—isn’t that funny? Because that’s what we’re doing right now!”

The little blue flowers twinkled, then bulged out at me. What if I had been made of glass and he saw that in some three or four hours . . .

Log 27

BRIEF:

No Brief—It’s Impossible.

I was alone in the endless hallways—those very same ones. The mute, concrete sky. Somewhere, water dripped onto a stone. The familiar, heavy, opaque door—dull droning coming from inside.

She said she’d come out to meet me at exactly 16. But it had been five, ten, fifteen minutes past 16 and still: nobody, nothing.

For a moment, I was my old self, afraid of the door opening. These are the last five minutes and if she doesn’t come out . . .

Somewhere, water dripped onto a stone. Nobody. I felt a bittersweet joy: I was saved. I slowly paced up and down the hall. The trembling dotted line of lights on the ceiling grew dimmer and dimmer . . .

Suddenly, from behind me, the door flew open, the sound of quick footsteps softly bouncing off the walls and ceiling—and here she was, on wings, panting slightly from running, breathing through her mouth.

“I knew it! I knew you’d come! I knew: you—you . . .”

The lances of her eyelashes parted, letting me inside and . . . how can I explain what this ancient, ridiculous, and miraculous ritual does to me, when her lips press against mine? What formula could express the whirlwind that flushes everything out of my soul except her? Yes, my soul, yes—go ahead, laugh if you want.

With effort, she lifted her eyes, and, straining, she slowly said, “No, enough . . . Later: right now, let’s go.”

The door opened. Old, worn-down steps. An unbearably colorful hubbub, whistling, light . . .

—

It’s been almost twenty-four hours, all of it has been somewhat distilled inside me now, and still, it is incredibly difficult for me to give even an approximately precise description of everything I saw. It’s like a bomb has gone off in my head and I’m surrounded by a heaping pile of open mouths, wings, shouting, leaves, words, rocks—all jumbled together . . .

I remember my first thought was, “Quick, I have to run back!” Because I could clearly tell: while I had been down there in the hallways, waiting, they had somehow blown up or torn down the Green Wall and everything from the lower world that our city had been so thoroughly purified of had come rushing in, flooding it.

I think I said something of that sort to I. She laughed. “No, silly! We’re just on the other side of the Green Wall.”

I opened my eyes wide and found myself face to face with the things that no living person has seen except through the murky glass of the Wall—diminished, diluted, and blurred one thousand times over.

The sun . . . it was not like our sun, spread evenly over the mirrored surface of our pavements. These were living shards of light, ceaselessly leaping spots, which blinded you and sent your head spinning. And the trees—like candles soaring up to the very heavens, or spiders hunched on gnarled legs; like silent green fountains . . .

Among all this twisting, stirring, rustling, some kind of hairy clump scurrying out from beneath me, I stood chained to the ground, unable to even take a step forward because the ground—it wasn’t flat—it wasn’t flat at all! It was sickeningly soft, yielding, alive, green, and elastic.

I was deafened by it all, I choked—maybe that’s the best word for it. I just stood there with my arms in a death lock around some sort of swaying branch.

“It’s okay, it’s okay! This is just how it feels at first. It will pass. Buck up!”

On the swirling and dancing green net, I saw somebody’s thin profile crop up next to I, like a paper cutout . . . no, this wasn’t just someone—I knew him. I recognized him: the doctor—no, no, I understood everything very clearly. Then I realized: they had both grabbed me under the arms and were dragging me forward, laughing. My legs tangled and slid through the cawing, moss, grass, squawking, branches, trunks, wings, leaves, whistling . . .

And then the trees gave way to a sunlit field and, in the field: people . . . or, I don’t know what to call them, really: maybe it’s more correct to say “creatures.”

This is the hardest part to describe: it lies so far beyond all realms of the believable. I now understood why I-330 had always been so stubbornly tight-lipped: I wouldn’t have believed her anyway, not even her. Maybe tomorrow, I won’t even believe myself or this log.

In the field, around a bare stone that looked like a skull, there was a crowd of three or four hundred . . . people—okay—“people,” there’s no other word. Like at the tribunes, when the first thing you notice are the familiar faces in the crowd, the first thing that leaped out at me was a scattering of our gray-blue unifs. And then, after a moment, around the unifs, simply and distinctly: jet-black, chestnut, golden, dark bay, roan, and white people—by all appearances, people. All of them naked and covered in short, shiny fur—like the kind you might see on a stuffed horse in the Prehistoric Museum. But the females had the very same—yes, yes, exactly the same—faces as our women: gently pink and hairless. And their breasts had no hair on them, either—they were large and firm, stunning geometric forms. The males were only hairless on part of their faces, just like our ancestors.

This was all so extraordinary, so completely beyond anything I could have ever imagined, that I just stood there calmly—I can positively assert that I was completely calm as I stood and watched. Like a scale: once you overload one side, you can keep adding however much else to it, the arrow won’t move anymore . . .

Suddenly, I was alone. I-330 was no longer next to me—I didn’t know how she had disappeared or where she had gone. I was surrounded by them, with their coats glossy and lustrous in the sun. I grabbed on to somebody’s hot, firm, jet-black shoulder: “Excuse me, in the name of the Benefactor, did you happen to see where she went? She was here just a moment ago . . .”

He turned his shaggy, serious brows to me, “Shhh! Quiet.” And he shaggily gestured toward the center, the skull-yellow stone.

Over all of these heads, above everything, I saw her: standing on top of the stone. The sun beat right in my eyes from behind her, turning her into a sharp, coal-black silhouette on the blue canvas of sky. Clouds rolled across the sky over her, but it felt as though it wasn’t the clouds moving, but the stone, and her on top, and the crowd along with her, and the whole field—everything soundlessly gliding along like a huge ship, and, weightless, the Earth underneath us floated away . . .

“Brothers!” she started. “Brothers! All of you know: over there, behind the Wall, in the city, they are building the INTEGRAL. And you also know that the day has come when we will destroy this Wall—and all walls—so the green wind can blow around the whole Earth, from pole to pole. Meanwhile, the INTEGRAL is preparing to carry these walls up there, to the thousands of other Earths that will appear to you tonight as rustling lights through the black leaves of night . . .”

“Down with the INTEGRAL! Down with the INTEGRAL!” Waves, foam, and wind beat on the boulder.

“No, brothers: not down. But the INTEGRAL must be ours. On the day it sets off into the heavens, we will be on it. Because the Builder of the INTEGRAL is with us. He’s left the walls behind and come with me today to be among you. All hail the Builder!”

In the blink of an eye, I was somewhere up high—beneath me, head after head, wide-open mouths, screaming, arms splashing up and falling. It was beyond strange and drunken: I felt myself over everyone else, I was I, a separate entity, a world, I ceased to be an additive component, as I had always been, and became a unit—one.

And there I was with my worn-down, happy, crumpled body, like after making love, at the foot of the stone. The sun, voices from above, I’s smile. Some woman with golden hair, all of her satin and gold and smelling of herbs, stood over me holding a chalice that looked like it was made of wood. She drank from it with her red lips and passed it to me. I greedily drank, closing my eyes, trying to put out the fire inside me—downing the sweet, prickly, cold sparks.

And then—the blood inside me and the entire world started moving one thousand times faster, the weightless Earth spun around me like a tuft of fuzz. Everything seemed light, simple, and clear.

Now I could see the familiar, giant letters written on the stone: MEPHI. For some reason, this was just as it should be: a simple, strong thread that tied everything together. I saw a crudely rendered image—it might have also been on the stone: a winged youth with a transparent body and a smoldering, blindingly raspberry-red coal right where his heart would have been. Again: I understood this coal . . . or rather: I felt it—just as, without hearing them, I could feel each of her words (she spoke from above, from atop the stone)—and felt everyone breathing as one—a feeling like we all had somewhere to fly to as a swarm, like the birds over the Wall . . .

Behind me, from the densely breathing thicket of bodies, came a loud voice, “But this is madness!”

And I think that I—yes, I believe it was me—I jumped up on top of the stone and saw the sun from up there—the heads, the green-toothed saw against the blue, and I cried, “Yes, yes, exactly! Everyone must go mad! As soon as possible! It’s imperative! And I know it!”

I was beside me: her smile, two dark lines, leading up from the corners of her mouth, at an angle; and the coal, like an angel, inside me and, in that instant, it was all light, slightly painful, and wonderful . . .

After that, all I have are the random shards that happened to stick into me.

Slowly, low overhead—a bird. I saw: it was alive, just like me. Like a person, it turned its head to the right, to the left, and bored its round black eyes into me . . .

And: a back, covered in shining fur, the color of ivory. A dark insect with tiny translucent wings crawled down the back—the back twitched to get it off, and then twitched again . . .

Also: the shadows of leaves, woven and latticed. People lay in these shadows, munching on something resembling the legendary food of the Ancients: a long yellow fruit and a piece of something dark. A woman shoved it into my hands, and it was funny: I didn’t know if it was something that I could eat.

Then the crowd again: heads, arms, legs, mouths. Faces jumped out at me and disappeared, popping like bubbles. For a second—or maybe I only imagined it—the translucent wing-ears flew past me.

I squeezed I’s hand as hard as I could. She turned around. “What?”

“He’s here . . . I thought I saw him . . .”

“He who?”

“S . . . Just now—in the crowd . . .”

Her coal-black, thin eyebrows cocked up toward her temples: the sharp triangle, her smile. I didn’t understand: why was she smiling—how could she smile at that?

“You don’t understand, I. You don’t understand what it means if he or any of them are here!”

“You’re silly! Would it ever occur to anyone on the other side of the Wall that we’re here? Remember: did you—did it ever occur to you for a moment that this was possible? They’re looking for us over there! Let them look! You’re hallucinating.”

She smiled, happy and carefree, and I smiled back, the Earth was drunk and happy and light—floating away . . .

Log 28

BRIEF:

Both of Them. Entropy and Energy. An Opaque Part of the Body.

So: if your world looks anything like the world of our distant ancestors, then imagine that one day, you suddenly stumble upon an undiscovered sixth or seventh part of it out in the ocean—some kind of Atlantis—and it is filled with undreamed-of labyrinth-cities, people sailing through the air without wings or aeros, stones that can be lifted just by looking at them—essentially, things that you couldn’t imagine even if you had a case of the dream sickness. That’s how I felt yesterday. Because—you must understand—like I’ve already said, none of us have ever been on the other side of the Wall since the time of the Two Hundred Years’ War.

I know that my duty to you, unknown friends, is to tell you as much as I can about the strange and startling world that was revealed to me yesterday. But I am in no state to return to that yet. More and more things keep happening, a real deluge of events, more than I am capable of collecting: I pull out the hem of my unif and my cupped hands to try to catch it all, but buckets wash past me, and only small drops land on these pages . . .

At first, I heard loud voices on the other side of my door—I recognized hers, I’s—supple, metallic—and the other, as stiff as an ancient ruler—U. Then the door swung open with a bang and shot both of them into my room. Exactly that: shot them.

I laid her hand on the back of my chair and smiled over her shoulder at U with just her teeth. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the other side of that smile.

“Listen,” I told me. “It seems that this woman has made it her job to protect you from me as if you were a little child. Did you give her permission to do this?”

And then the other one, with her quavering gills, “Yes, and he is a child! He is! That’s why he doesn’t see that you’re only doing all this—just so that . . . that it’s all just a farce! Yes! And my duty . . .”

For a moment, the jagged, jumping line of my eyebrows flashed in the mirror. I jumped up, and, barely restraining the other self inside me with his shaking, hairy fists, straining to squeeze each word out through my clenched teeth, I screamed directly into her gills: “Get out of here! Right now! This instant!”

The gills inflated, turning brick red, collapsed, and went gray. She opened her mouth to say something but stopped, and, without saying anything else, slammed it and left.

I threw myself at I. “I’ll never, never—I’ll never forgive myself for that! She dared to accuse you of—you couldn’t possibly think that I think that . . . that she’s . . . it’s all because she wants to register for me but I . . .”

“Luckily, she won’t have time to do that. And even if there were thousands of women like her, I still wouldn’t care. I know that I’m the only one you believe in. Because after yesterday, you’ve seen all of me, everything, just like you wanted. I’m in your hands now and, at any moment, you can . . .”

“I can—what?” and I immediately understood (what). Blood rushed to my ears and cheeks. I screamed, “Don’t you dare! Don’t you ever say anything like that to me again! You know better than anyone else that that was the old me, the new me . . .”

“Who knows what you’re capable of? A person is like a novel: you never know how they’re going to end up until the very last page. Or else it wouldn’t be worth reading . . .”

She patted my head. I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell from her voice that she was looking off somewhere into the distance, her eyes had caught onto a cloud and were slowly and soundlessly drifting off to some unknown place . . .

Suddenly, she pushed me away—firmly and tenderly.

“Listen: I came to tell you that it’s very possible we’re in the final days . . . did you know? Starting today, all auditoriums have been canceled.”

“Canceled?”

“Yes. And when I was walking past, I saw them preparing for something inside. There were tables and medics in white.”

“But what does it mean?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows yet. That’s the worst part. I can just feel it: they’ve switched on the power, the current is running—if not today, then tomorrow . . . but maybe they won’t manage to do it in time.”

I’d lost the thread long ago: who were they and who were we? I didn’t understand what I was supposed to want: for them to have time, or not. All I knew was that I-330 was now walking along the very edge and any moment she might—

“But it’s madness,” I said. “It’s the One State you’re up against. It’s like putting your hand on the muzzle of a gun and thinking you’ll keep it from going off. It’s completely crazy!”

She smiled. “‘Everyone needs to go mad—the sooner the better.’ Somebody said that yesterday. Remember? Out on the other side . . .”

Yes, it was in my log. Therefore, it must have really happened. I watched her face in silence: the dark cross was especially noticeable.

“I-330, darling, before it’s too late . . . do you want me to just drop everything, forget it all, and go live with you out there, beyond the Wall, with the . . . I don’t know what they are . . .”

She shook her head. Through the dark windows of her eyes, I could see that the fire inside her was burning, there were sparks flying up, tongues of flame, heaps of dry logs covered in sap. And I knew: it was too late, my words were powerless to . . .

She got up—she was leaving. And maybe these were the final days, or even the final minutes . . . I grabbed her hand.

“No! Just a little while longer—for the sake of . . . for . . .”

She slowly lifted my hand—my loathsome, hairy hand—up to the light. I wanted to tear it away, but she was holding it tight.

“Your hand . . . You don’t know this—few people do, but there have been women from here, from the city, who have fallen in love with the ones from out there. You must have a few drops of that sunny forest blood in you. Maybe that’s why I—”

She stopped short. It’s so strange how a pause—silence, emptiness, nothing—can make your heart race. Finally, I cried out, “Aha! You’re not leaving yet! You’re not leaving until you tell me about them, because you love . . . them. And I don’t even know who they are or where they come from. Who are they? Our lost other half? The H_2 to our O? That need to be reunited, to make H_2O—streams, seas, waterfalls, waves, storms . . .”

I distinctly remember her every movement. I remember how she picked up my glass triangle from the table and the whole time she spoke, she was pressing its sharp rib into her cheek, leaving a white mark, which filled in with pink and then disappeared. Strangely enough, I can’t remember exactly what she told me, especially in the beginning—all I retained were some disjointed colors and images.

I know: she began with the Two Hundred Years’ War. Then—red on the green of the grasses, on the dark clays, on the blue of the snows—red puddles that wouldn’t ever dry. Then yellow grasses, burned by the sun—naked, yellow, and battered people—wounded dogs—near, or beside swollen corpses of dogs, or, maybe, of people . . . This was, of course, on the other side of the walls: the city had already won. In the city, people were already eating our regular food, made of petroleum.

Heavy black folds reaching up to the sky, swaying over the forests and villages, in torpid columns: black smoke. A mute wail: an endless black procession driven into the city in order to be rescued by force and taught happiness.

“Did you almost know all of this?”

“Yes, almost.”

“But here’s what you didn’t know—only a few people do—a small number of them survived and kept living out there, beyond the walls. Naked, they went off into the forests. They learned how to live from the trees, the animals, birds, flowers, and sun. They grew fur, but under their fur, they held on to their hot red blood. You have it worse: you’re covered in numbers, they’re crawling all over you like lice. All of you need to be totally stripped and driven naked into the woods. Let people learn to shiver from fear, from joy, from uncontrollable rage, from the cold—let people worship fire! And we, the Mephi, we want to . . .”

“Wait, hold on—Mephi? What’s Mephi?”

“Mephi? It’s an ancient name for he who . . . You remember: on the stone, the image of a youth . . . Or no: let me tell you in your language, so you’ll understand faster. The world is ruled by two forces, entropy and energy. One gravitates toward divine peace and joyful equilibrium; the other, toward disrupting the equilibrium, and endless, torturous motion. Our, or rather, your ancestors, Christians, worshipped entropy like a god. While we, anti-Christians, we . . .”

She was interrupted by a barely audible, whispered knock at the door—then that snub-nosed number with the sloped forehead jumped in, the one who had brought me the notes from I.

He ran up to us and stopped, wheezing like an air pump. At first, he couldn’t get a word out: he must have run here as fast as he could.

“What’s going on? What happened?” I-330 grabbed his arm.

“They’re coming here,” the air pump finally panted out. “The guards . . . and he’s with them . . . that one . . . you know . . . the hunched guy . . .”

“S?”

“Yes! They’re in the building. They’ll be here any minute! Hurry, hurry!”

“It’s fine! We’ve got time . . .” She laughed. Happy little tongues of flames leaped in her eyes.

This was either dumb bravado or there was something else going on that I didn’t understand.

“I-330, for the Benefactor’s sake! Please—it’s . . .”

“For the Benefactor’s sake . . .” The sharp, mocking triangle smile.

“Alright then, for my sake . . . I beg you—”

“But I still have one more thing to discuss with you . . . Oh well, we’ll talk tomorrow.”

She cheerfully (yes, cheerfully) nodded to me, and the other one nodded, too, peeking out from under his brow. Then I was alone.

I rushed to the table, opened my log, and picked up my pen. I wanted them to find me busy, writing away for the good of the One State. And suddenly, every hair on my head was alive, separate and wriggling: what if they pick it up and read even a single page of the most recent entries?

I sat at the table, dead still, and saw how the walls were already shaking—the pen shook in my hand—the letters started to wobble and weave into each other . . .

Hide it? But where? Everything’s made out of glass. Burn it? They’ll see from the hallway or other rooms. And then, I couldn’t bear to destroy this tortured and, maybe, most precious piece of myself.

I could already hear the voices and footsteps from down the hall. All I had time to do was to grab the pile of papers and slide them under myself. Chained to my chair, quaking with every atom, and the floor underneath me like the deck of a ship, pitching and diving . . .

I squeezed into a little ball shoved up to the overhang of my forehead, sneaking glimpses of them from under my brow as they passed from room to room, from the right end of the hallway, coming closer and closer. Some numbers sat frozen, like me, while others leaped up to open the door for them—lucky! If only I, too . . .

“The Benefactor is the perfect, most essential disinfectant for all of humanity that no peristalsis in the organism of the One State could ever . . .” I forced this total nonsense out of my shivering pen, bending lower and lower over the table while some mad blacksmith banged away inside my head. I heard the door handle turn with my spine, a puff of wind, and the chair beneath me began to dance . . .

Finally, I forcibly tore myself away from the page to face the numbers who’d come in (it’s so hard to play a farce . . . ugh, who was it today that said something about a farce?). S led the pack—glowering and silent, his eyes rapidly drilling wells into me, my chair, and the pages cowering under my hand. For a second, I glanced back and recognized a few familiar, everyday faces there in my doorway. One of them stood out—heaving, pinkish-brown gills . . .

I remembered everything that had happened in this room just thirty minutes ago, and it became clear to me that she was about to . . . my entire being beat and pulsed in that (fortunately opaque) part of my body that I was using to cover my manuscript.

U approached S from behind, gingerly pulled on his sleeve, and quietly told him, “This is D-503, Builder of the INTEGRAL. You’ve probably heard of him? This is how he always is—hunched over his desk . . . he doesn’t spare himself!”

. . . Who, me? What an incredible, amazing woman!

S glided toward me and peered over my shoulder, over the table. I covered what I had written with my elbow, but he sternly shouted, “Show me what you have written there at once!”

Burning with shame, I handed him the piece of paper. As he read it, I watched a smile slip out of his eyes, scuttle down his face, and, with a slight wag of its tail, settle around the right corner of his mouth . . .

“It’s a little equivocal, but still . . . Go on, then: we’ll get out of your way.”

He sloshed toward the door with his feet like paddles. With each of his footsteps, the feeling slowly began to return to my legs, my arms, and my fingers. My soul unrumpled inside me and I began to breathe . . .

The last thing: U stayed behind in my room. She went up to me, bent down to my ear, and whispered, “You’re lucky I . . .”

I didn’t understand: what was she trying to say? Later, that evening, I learned that they’d taken three numbers. Although nobody said anything about this or anything else that had happened (the educational influence of the invisible Guardians, always among us). Most conversations centered around the quickly falling barometer and change in the weather.

Log 29

BRIEF:

Face Threads. Shoots. Unnatural Compression.

It’s strange: the barometer keeps falling, but there is no wind yet, just quiet. Up there, above us, a storm we can’t hear is already raging. The clouds race along at full speed—so far, there aren’t that many—just scattered, craggy rubble. As though they’re already razing some city up there, and chunks of its walls and towers are tumbling down toward us, heaps of them growing larger with terrifying speed—coming closer and closer—but they still have days to fly through the infinite blue before crashing down to the bottom—to us, below.

Down here, it is silent. Thin, mysterious, almost invisible threads fill the air. Every fall, they blow in from out there, beyond the Wall. They come on slowly, then suddenly, you can feel them: strange and invisible on your face, you try to brush them away, but you can’t, there’s no getting rid of them.

You’ll get a lot of them on you if you walk by the Green Wall, where I was walking this morning: I-330 had asked me to meet her at the House of Antiquity, in our “apartment.” I was already in eyeshot of the opaque and red[*] edifice of the House of Antiquity when I heard somebody’s small, speedy steps and fast breathing behind me. I turned around and saw O, running to catch up with me.

She seemed especially, perfectly, firmly rounded. Her arms, the cups of her breasts, and her whole body, which I knew so well, had curved and now stretched out her unif. It seemed that at any moment she might tear through its delicate fabric and everything would be out in the sun, in the light of day. I imagined: out there, in the wild green jungles, in springtime, the shoots must burst through the soil just as stubbornly, rushing to branch out, grow leaves, and flower.

For several seconds, she said nothing, just bluely shining her eyes in my face.

“I saw you that time, on the Day of Unanimity.”

“I saw you, too.” Instantly, it came back to me—how she had stood there below, in a narrow passageway, pressed to a wall, with her hand protecting her belly. I involuntarily looked down at her belly, round under her unif.

She seemed to have caught me and flushed roundly pink and smiled rosily. “I’m so happy—so incredibly happy . . . I feel so full: I’m full to the brim. It’s like I’m deaf, I go through my days without hearing anything that’s happening around me because I can only hear what’s happening inside . . .”

I said nothing. There was something strange in my face—in my way, bothering me—I couldn’t brush it off. Suddenly, glowing bluer and brighter, she grabbed onto my hand—and I felt her lips on it . . . this—for the first time in my life. Some ancient caress I’d never imagined, from her—it made me feel so painfully embarrassed, I (harshly, even) wrested my hand out of her grasp.

“What are you doing? You’ve lost your mind! Not just this—I mean in general, you . . . What are you so happy about? Can you really be so oblivious to what’s going to happen to you? If not now, then in a month or two . . .”

The light inside her snuffed out. All of her circles sank in and instantly crumpled. It made my heart compress—an unpleasant and even painful sensation, tied to the feeling of pity. (The heart is nothing but an ideal pump. The very idea of calling a pump sucking in liquid compression, or contraction, is completely absurd from a technical standpoint. All this goes to show how essentially absurd, unnatural, and diseased “love” and “pity” and all of those things that cause such compression truly are.)

Silence. The murky green glass of the Wall to my left. The dark red edifice up ahead. And these two colors, added up in my mind, comprised a resultant force: what I thought was a brilliant idea.

“Hold on! I know how to save you. I can save you from having to die as soon as you see your child. You will be able to feed it, do you understand? You can watch it grow in your arms, plump up, and ripen like a fruit . . .”

She started to shake and grabbed on to me.

“Do you remember that woman . . . you know, that one, the one we met on our walk? She’s over there, at the House of Antiquity. Come see her with me and I promise, I’ll take care of everything right away.”

I could already picture I-330 and I leading her through the hallways. Then she would be among the flowers, grasses, and leaves . . . but she backed away from me, the horns of her pink crescent moon quivering and down-turned.

“You mean that woman?”

For some reason, I felt embarrassed. “Well, yes: her.”

“And you want me to go to her—to ask her—so that I . . . Don’t you dare speak to me about this ever again!”

Doubling over, she sped away from me. Then, as though she’d suddenly remembered something, she turned around and shouted back, “So what if I die! It’s none of your business—what do you care?”

Silence. Chunks of blue towers and walls raining down from above—growing larger with terrifying speed. But they still have hours—or days—to fly through the infinite. The invisible threads slowly drift by and land on my face—there’s no brushing them off, no way to get rid of them.

I slowly walked toward the House of Antiquity. My heart filled with absurd, agonizing compression . . .

Log 30

BRIEF:

The Final Number. Galileo’s Mistake. Wouldn’t It Be Better?

My conversation with I—yesterday, at the House of Antiquity—surrounded by colorful noise—red, green, bronze-yellow, white, orange—that drowned out logical thought . . . It all happened under the smile of that snub-nosed ancient poet, imprinted in marble.

I’m reproducing this conversation word for word because I believe it will be of huge, decisive importance for the fate of the One State and even: the universe. Also because you, unknown readers, may find some justification in it for what I will do . . .

I-330 unloaded everything on me immediately without any preliminaries: “I know that the day after tomorrow is the first test flight of the INTEGRAL. That is the day we will commandeer it.”

“What? The day after tomorrow?”

“Yes. Sit down, stay calm. There’s not a minute to waste. There were twelve Mephi among the hundreds randomly arrested by the Guardians yesterday. If we lose two or three more days, they will die.”

I was silent.

“They’re going to send electricians, mechanics, doctors, and meteorologists to observe the test flight. Exactly at noon—remember this—when the bell rings and everyone goes to the mess hall, we will remain in the corridor, lock everyone in, and the INTEGRAL will be ours . . . You must understand: we need to do this at any cost. In our hands, the INTEGRAL will become a weapon that will allow us to settle everything instantly, quickly, and painlessly. Their aeros—ha! They will be measly gnats trying to take down a hawk. And then, if we absolutely must, we can turn the barrels of the engines against them and that will take care of . . .”

I leaped up. “This is unthinkable! It’s preposterous! Don’t you realize that your plan is tantamount to a revolution?”

“Yes! A revolution! What’s so preposterous about that?”

“It’s preposterous because there can be no revolution. Because our revolution—and this is not you, but me speaking—our revolution was the final one. There can be no more revolutions. Everyone knows that . . .”

The sharp, mocking triangle of her eyebrows. “My darling, you’re a mathematician. Moreover, you’re a philosopher of mathematics. Tell me: what is the final number?”

“What do you mean? I . . . I don’t understand: what final number?”

“I mean the last one, the biggest, the highest.”

“But I, that’s a ridiculous question. If the number of numbers is infinite, how could there possibly be a final number?”

“Right. Then what final revolution are you talking about? There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite. Finality is for children: children are scared of infinity and it’s very important that children can sleep at night . . .”

“But what’s the point—what’s the point of all this—for the sake of the Benefactor? What is the point if everyone is already happy?”

“Let’s say . . . Well, okay: say everybody is happy. What happens next?”

“That’s silly! What a childish question. Whenever you tell a story to children, even at the very end, they will always still want to know: what happens next? Why?”

“Children are exceptionally brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are always children. We have to be exactly like children, we must always ask: what happens next?”

“Nothing happens next! It’s done. Period. All around the universe, it is evenly distributed, everywhere . . .”

“Uh-huh, evenly distributed, everywhere! And there you have it: entropy, psychological entropy. Isn’t it clear to you, as a mathematician, that it’s the differences—differences in temperature, contrasts of heat—only they contain life? And if everywhere, all around the universe, there are just equally warm or equally cool bodies . . . they need to collide to make fire, explosions, inferno! We will smash them together!”

“But, I—listen to me, please: that’s exactly what our ancestors did during the Two Hundred Years’ War . . .”

“And they were absolutely right to—one thousand times right. Their only mistake was that afterward, they claimed that they were the final possible number, which doesn’t exist in nature, it simply doesn’t. They made the same mistake as Galileo: he was right that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but he didn’t know that the entire solar system also moves around a central point. He didn’t realize that the real, not relative, orbit of the Earth is not just some naïve circle . . .”

“And what about you?”

“So far, all we know is that there is no final number. Perhaps we, too, will forget. Actually, it’s very likely that we will also forget once we’re old—just like everyone who gets old. And then we will also, inevitably, fall, like the leaves fall in autumn, like you, the day after tomorrow—no, no, darling, I didn’t mean you. You’re with us! You’re one of us!”

She was all fired up, sparking, aglitter—I’d never seen her like this—she embraced me with her whole self, all of her. I disappeared . . .

The last thing she said to me, looking firmly, directly into my eyes, “So remember: at noon.”

“Yes, I remember.”

And with that, she left. I was alone in the roiling, dissonant noise—blue, red, green, bronze-yellow, orange . . .

Yes, noon . . . Suddenly, I had this awful sensation of something foreign getting caught on my face that I couldn’t brush off. Suddenly: yesterday morning, U, and what she had screamed at I . . . Why? How completely absurd.

I hurried out, rushing to get home as fast as I could.

Somewhere behind me I heard the piercing shrieks of the birds soaring over the Wall. Ahead, in the light of the setting sun, the spheres of the cupolas seemed to be made of its crystallized crimson flames, the buildings—enormous flaming cubes, the spire of the Accumulator Tower—a lightning bolt frozen midair . . . and all of this—all this immaculate, geometric beauty—I would now, with my own hands . . . Was there really no other way, no way out?

I walked past an auditorium (I don’t remember what number). Inside, the benches had all been stacked up and tables pushed to the center and covered in sheets of snow-white glass. A pink drop of the sun’s blood lay on the white. All of this hid some unknown, and thus terrible, tomorrow. It is unnatural for a thinking, seeing being to live with so many irregularities, unknowns, Xs. What if somebody tied a blindfold over your eyes and forced you to walk around like that, feeling your way, stumbling, while you knew that somewhere very near by, there was an edge, and if you took even a single step in the wrong direction, all that’d be left of you would be a flattened and mangled piece of meat. Isn’t that me right now?

. . . But what if you didn’t wait for that to happen and simply flung yourself headfirst over the edge? Wouldn’t that be the only right step, instantly resolving everything all at once?

Log 31

BRIEF:

The Great Operation. I Forgave Everything. Crashing Trains.

We’re saved! At the very last moment, when it seemed that there was nothing left to grab on to, and that it was all over . . .

It’s as if you had already climbed the steps to the Benefactor’s terrible Machine, the glass bell jar had already clanged down over you, and, for the last time in your life—quick!—you’d gulped in the blue of the sky with your eyes . . .

Then suddenly: it was all just a “dream.” The sun is pink and happy—and the wall—what joy it is to caress a cold wall—and the pillow—what an endlessly lovely dent your head has left in the pillow, you could look at it all day . . .

This is basically what I went through when reading this morning’s One State Gazette. It had all been a bad dream and now it was over. I had been so small of heart and so unbelieving that I was already considering taking my life. Now I’m ashamed to read over the last few lines from yesterday. But it doesn’t matter: let them stay where they are, as a reminder of the unthinkable thing that might have happened, but won’t . . . yes, won’t!

These words gleamed on the front page of the Gazette:

REJOICE!

FOR HENCEFORTH, YOU ARE PERFECT. UNTIL THIS DAY, YOUR PROGENY, THE MACHINES, HAVE BEEN MORE PERFECT THAN YOU.

HOW SO?

EVERY SPARK OF A DYNAMO IS A SPARK OF THE PUREST REASON. EVERY THRUST OF A PISTON, AN IMMACULATE SYLLOGISM. BUT ISN’T THAT SAME INFALLIBLE REASON ALSO IN YOU?

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PUMPS, PRESSES, AND CRANES IS CLEAR AND CONSUMMATE, LIKE A CIRCLE DRAWN WITH A COMPASS. BUT IS YOUR PHILOSOPHY ANY LESS PERFECTLY CIRCULAR?

THE BEAUTY OF A MECHANISM IS IN ITS UNDEVIATING AND EXACT, PENDULUM-LIKE RHYTHM. BUT AREN’T YOU, WHO HAVE BEEN REARED ON TAYLORIST SYSTEMS FROM BIRTH, JUST AS EXACT AS PENDULUMS?

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE:

MECHANISMS DON’T HAVE IMAGINATIONS.

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A PUMP CYLINDER’S FACE SUDDENLY, IN THE MIDDLE OF WORK, MELT INTO A DISTANT, STUPID, AND DREAMY SMILE? HAVE YOU EVER HEARD A CRANE RESTLESSLY TOSSING AND TURNING AND SIGHING DURING THE HOURS ALLOTTED FOR REST?

NO!

BUT YOU—GO AHEAD, BLUSH!—THE GUARDIANS HAVE SEEN YOUR SMILES AND HEARD YOUR SIGHS WITH EVER INCREASING FREQUENCY. AND—COVER YOUR EYES!—HISTORIANS OF THE ONE STATE HAVE ASKED TO RESIGN SO THEY WOULDN’T HAVE TO RECORD SUCH SHAMEFUL RECENT EVENTS.

BUT THIS ISN’T YOUR FAULT: YOU’RE SICK. AND THE NAME OF THIS ILLNESS IS:

IMAGINATION

IT IS THE WORM THAT GNAWS BLACK WRINKLES INTO YOUR FOREHEAD. THE FEVER THAT DRIVES YOU FURTHER AND FURTHER AWAY, EVEN WHEN “FURTHER” BEGINS PRECISELY WHERE HAPPINESS ENDS. IT IS THE FINAL BARRICADE ON THE PATH TO TOTAL HAPPINESS.

BUT REJOICE: WE HAVE ALREADY BLASTED OUR WAY THROUGH THIS OBSTACLE.

THE PATH IS CLEAR.

THE LATEST STATE SCIENCE DISCOVERY IS THE SEAT OF THE IMAGINATION—A PATHETIC LITTLE NEURAL NODULE IN THE REGION OF THE PONS VAROLII. WITH A SIMPLE TRIPLE X-RAY CAUTERIZATION, YOU WILL BE CURED OF IMAGINATION:

FOREVER.

YOU WILL BE PERFECT. YOU WILL BE EQUAL TO THE MACHINE. THE PATH TO 100 PERCENT HAPPINESS IS CLEAR. HURRY, ONE AND ALL, YOUNG AND OLD, RUN DON’T WALK TO UNDERGO THE GREAT OPERATION! HURRY TO THE AUDITORIUMS WHERE THEY ARE PERFORMING THE GREAT OPERATION! ALL HAIL THE GREAT OPERATION! ALL HAIL THE ONE STATE! ALL HAIL THE BENEFACTOR!

. . . You—if you hadn’t read all this in my log, which resembles some whimsical ancient novel—if this sheet of newsprint, redolent of fresh ink, was trembling in your hands—if you could know like I know that all of this is the realest reality, if not today, then tomorrow—wouldn’t you feel exactly like I do right now? Wouldn’t your head be spinning like mine is? Wouldn’t these terrifying, sweet, icy needles also be running up and down your spine and your arms? Wouldn’t you feel as if you were a giant, Atlas himself, and if you stood up straight, you would instantly bang your head on the glass ceiling?

I grabbed the phone. “I-330 . . . yes, yes: 330 . . .” Then, choking on words from excitement, I cried: “You’re home? Did you read what it said—are you reading it? It’s—it’s . . . It’s amazing!”

“Yes . . .” A long, dark silence. The receiver audibly buzzed as if it was thinking. “I need to see you today. Yes, my place after 16. Without fail.”

Darling! What a sweet darling! “Without fail.” I felt it: I was smiling uncontrollably, and I would carry this smile through the streets like a torch, high over my head . . .

Outside, the wind flew at me. It spiraled, whistled, and lashed me. But it only made me more giddy. Go on, howl your heart out: you’re not tearing down any walls anymore. And the leaden clouds crumbling down from above: you won’t block out the sun, we’ve bolted it to its zenith for all of eternity—we Joshuas, sons of Nun.

On the corner, a tight cluster of Joshuas stood with their foreheads pressed to the glass of a wall. One was already inside, on top of a blindingly white table. Under the white sheet, you could see his bared soles turned out at a yellow angle; white medics bent over his head. One white hand passed another white hand a syringe filled with some unknown fluid.

“And how about you—why aren’t you in there?” I asked no one and everyone.

“Well, what about you?” the sphere of somebody’s head turned back to look at me.

“I will go later. First, I need to . . .”

A little flustered, I stepped away. I really did need to see her, I-330, first. But why “first”? I didn’t have an answer . . .

The hangar. The INTEGRAL: icily blue, sparkling and scintillating. The dynamo purred in the engine room—lovingly, endlessly repeating the same word, over and over—like it was my own special word. I bent down and caressed the long, cold tube of the engine. Darling—my sweet, sweet darling. Tomorrow, you’ll come to life—tomorrow, for the first time, you’ll shudder to life from a burning, fiery blast in your womb . . .

How would I have looked at this mighty glass beast if everything had remained as it was yesterday? If I had known that tomorrow at 12, I would betray it . . . yes, betray . . .

Somebody gently touched my elbow from behind. I turned around: the flat platter face of the Second Builder.

“You already know,” he said.

“What? The operation? Isn’t it something? How everything . . . everything’s happening all at once . . .”

“No, not that. They’ve moved the test flight—we’re not doing it until the day after tomorrow. All because of the Operation . . . We were rushing to get it all done in time for nothing . . .”

“All because of the Operation.” What a silly, limited person. Incapable of seeing past the edge of his plate. If only he knew that if it weren’t for the Operation, tomorrow at 12, he’d be locked in a glass cage, thrashing and climbing the walls . . .

My room, 15:30. I came in and saw U sitting at my table—straight, bony, and hard—with her cheek firmly clamped to her hand. She must have been waiting for a long time because when she jumped up to greet me, there were five little red marks on her cheek from her fingers.

For a moment, that terrible morning flashed in front of my eyes again, when, right on this very spot, she was standing with I, enraged . . . but it was only a moment, then it was instantly washed away by the sun of today. This happens. Like when, on a sunny day, you absentmindedly flip the light switch when you come into your room—the light goes on, but you don’t see it, it’s silly, pathetic, and useless . . .

Without thinking twice, I stretched out my hand to her and forgave everything—she clasped both my hands very tightly, squeezing them in her thorny fingers, her cheeks all aquiver, dangling down like ancient jewelry. She said: “I’ve been waiting . . . I’ve just dropped by for a second . . . I only wanted to let you know how glad I am, how happy I am for you! You understand: in a day or two, you’ll be completely healthy again, you’ll be . . . reborn!”

On the desk, I noticed a piece of paper—the last two pages of yesterday’s writing: they lay where I’d left them last night. If she had seen what I’d written . . . But it doesn’t matter: all of that’s history now, so far behind us, it’s silly, like something you’d see looking the wrong way through a pair of binoculars . . .

“Yes,” I said. “And you know, I was just walking down the avenue and there was someone walking ahead, casting his shadow down on the pavement. The shadow was glowing. I think—no, I am certain—that after tomorrow, there’ll be no more shadows at all, no one and nothing will cast any shadows, the sun will shine right through everything . . .”

Gently and firmly: “You’ve got quite the imagination! I wouldn’t let the children at school get away with talking like that . . .”

And then she went on about the children, about how she took all of them in for the Operation, and how they all needed to be tied down, “You have to love without mercy—yes, mercilessly,” and she would also probably finally make her mind up to go when . . .

She fixed the gray-blue fold in her lap, quickly bandaged me up with her smile, and left.

And, luckily, there was still more sun left today, the sun kept moving along, it was finally 16 o’clock, and I knocked on her door—my heart knocking inside me . . .

“Come in!”

I fell to the floor at the foot of her chair, embracing her legs, head thrown back, gazing into her eyes—one then the other—seeing myself in each one—in each beautiful prison . . .

Out there, on the other side of the wall, a storm was brewing—the clouds grew more and more leaden: so what! My head felt tight, brimming with words, and as they spilled out, I flew off somewhere—who knows where—with the sun . . . No, now we know where I was headed. The planets were flying behind me—ones spraying flames and peopled with fiery singing flowers—mute planets, all blue, with organized societies of rational stones—planets that, like our Earth, have reached the pinnacle: absolute, 100 percent happiness . . .

Then suddenly, from above, “But don’t you think that the pinnacle are the stones united in organized societies?”

And, ever sharper and darker, the triangle, “And happiness . . . What is it really? Desires are something that torment us—right? So clearly, happiness is the absence of all desires, when there are none left . . . What an error, what a dumb prejudice that up until now, we had always inserted a plus sign in front of absolute happiness when obviously, it should be minus—the holy minus.”

I remember I mumbled in confusion, “Absolute minus is 273 degrees . . .”

“Negative 273—exactly. A little cold, but doesn’t this prove that we really are at the pinnacle already?”

Just like she had a long time ago, she was somehow speaking for me, through me, drawing my thoughts out to their conclusions. But there was something so creepy about this—I couldn’t take it—and with great effort, I forced out a “no.”

“No,” I said. “You’re . . . you’re joking . . .”

She laughed—loudly, too loudly, quickly laughed up to an edge and halted . . . turned back . . . a pause.

She got up. Put her hands on my shoulders. Gazed at me for a long time, slowly. Then she pulled me into an embrace, leaving nothing else. Only her sharp, hot lips.

“Well—farewell, then!”

It came as though from afar and took a long time to reach me. Maybe one minute, or two.

“What do you mean . . . ‘farewell’?”

“You’re sick. I’ve driven you to do crime—didn’t that torment you? And now, with the Operation, you will be cured of me. So—that’s farewell.”

“No!” I screamed.

Her mercilessly sharp black triangle on white. “What do you mean, no? Don’t you want to be happy?”

My mind galloped in every direction, two trains of logic collided and started piling on top of each other, smashing and shattering . . .

“Come on, I’m waiting—it’s up to you: the Operation and 100 percent happiness or . . .”

“I can’t live without you, I don’t need to live without you!” I said, or maybe just thought it—I don’t know, but she heard me.

“Yes, I know.” And then, with her hands still on my shoulders, without releasing me from her gaze, “Then it’s goodbye, until tomorrow. Tomorrow at noon: remember?”

“No. They pushed it back a day . . . the day after tomorrow . . .”

“All the better for us. Noon, the day after tomorrow . . .”

I walked alone through the twilit avenues. The wind spun me, pulled me, and chased me along as though I was a piece of paper. Shards of the iron sky falling and falling—they had another day or two to fly through the infinite . . . The unifs of passersby brushed up against me, but I was completely alone. It was clear: everybody was saved, but there was no saving me anymore. I didn’t want to be saved . . .

Log 32

BRIEF:

I Don’t Believe It. Tractors. A Sliver of Humanity.

Do you believe that you’re going to die? Yes, man is mortal and I am a man: therefore . . . I don’t mean like that: I know that you know. What I’m asking is: have you ever had to really believe it, down to your core, not with your mind, but with your body, knowing the fingers holding this page will someday turn ice cold and yellow?

No: of course you don’t actually believe it. That’s why you haven’t jumped out of a tenth-floor window, and you still eat, turn the page, shave, smile, write . . .

Anyway, that—exactly that—was happening to me today. I knew that the little black hand on my clock was ticking away toward a certain moment, that it would count down to midnight and back up again until it crossed some final threshold and then it would come: the unthinkable tomorrow. I knew this was happening, but somehow I still didn’t believe it—or maybe, for some reason, these twenty-four hours seemed like they could go on for twenty-four years. That’s why I still managed to do things, run around answering questions, clambering up the gangway to the INTEGRAL. I could feel how it rocked under my feet as I passed over the water and knew that I needed to grab onto the railing and that the cold glass was there, under my hand. I saw the translucent, living cranes stretch out their beaks, craning their necks, and tenderly, lovingly feed the INTEGRAL its engine’s fearsome, explosive food. And below, in the river, I saw the wind-swollen, blue water tendons and nodes. But, at the same time, all of this was outside me, alien and flat, like a sketch on a piece of paper. So it was strange when the two-dimensional diagram of the Second Builder’s face suddenly started speaking to me. “What’s going on here? How much fuel should we put in the engines? If it’s three . . . let’s see here, three and a half hours . . .”

In front of me, on the half-breadth plan, in the sketch, I saw my hand holding the calculator, the logarithmic dial pointing to 15.

“Fifteen tons. But it’d be better to take . . . yes: let’s do 100 . . .”

I said that because I knew that tomorrow . . .

Watching this scene from outside of myself, I noticed the hand holding the calculator had started to tremble just slightly.

“One hundred? Why would we need that much? Why, that’s enough for a week! What am I saying? More than a week!”

“But . . . who knows what . . .”

I knew.

The wind howled, the air was glutted with an invisible substance, filled to the very top. It was hard to breathe, hard to walk, the hand on the Accumulator Tower clock at the end of the avenue kept straining, inching forward, never stopping. Up in the clouds, the Tower spire was blue and lusterless, sounding a dull wail: sucking down electricity. The horns of the Music Factory wailed.

As always, we walked along in fours, in our even rows. But the rows were somehow unsteady, and—maybe because of the wind—they kept bending and swaying. More and more. We ran into something on the corner and ebbed back as a solid, frozen tangle, breathing fast—then, all at once, everyone grew long goose necks.

“Look! No, over there—look! Hurry!”

“It’s them! It’s them!”

“I wouldn’t do it for anything. No way! I’d rather put my head in the Machine!”

“Shhh! You’re crazy . . .”

On the corner, the door to an auditorium stood open wide and a weighty column of about fifty people was slowly emerging from it. Rather, “people” is not quite the word: they were more like humanoid tractors. It seemed that their feet were heavy forged wheels that turned on invisible axles. A white banner embroidered with a golden sun flapped in the wind over their heads. “We’re the first! We had the Operation! Everyone follow us!”

They slowly, unstoppably plowed through the crowd. It was clear that if, instead of us, there’d been a wall, or a tree, or a building they would have also plowed right through the wall, building, or tree without stopping. They stopped in the middle of the avenue. Linking arms, they unfurled into a chain, facing us. And we—a tensed and bristling knot of heads, stood waiting. Goose necks craning. The clouds. The wind howling.

Suddenly, from the left and the right, the wings of the chain started quickly curving and coming at us—faster and faster—like a heavy machine charging a mountain—surrounding us in a ring—herding us toward the doors, through the doors, inside . . .

Somebody’s piercing cry: “They’re rounding us up! Run!”

Everyone bolted. There was still a small gap in the human chain right by the wall and everyone darted toward it, head first—heads were immediately sharpened into wedges—sharp elbows, ribs, shoulders, and sides. Everyone sprayed out in a fan, like water out of a firehose, scattering stamping feet, flailing hands, and unifs in every direction. Out of nowhere, a double-bent body shaped like an S flashed in front of me with its translucent wing-ears—then he was gone, as though he had fallen through the Earth, and I was alone in the explosion of hands and feet, running for my life.

As I tried to catch my breath in a doorway, my back firmly pressed to the doors, a little sliver of humanity blew into me as if it’d been brought by the wind.

“I’ve been . . . right behind you this whole time . . . I just didn’t want to—I don’t. But I’ll do it, take me . . .”

Tiny round hands on my sleeve, round blue eyes: it was her, O. Then she slipped down the wall and fell to the ground. She lay in a small pile on the cold steps, and I stood over her, stroking her head, her face, with my wet hands. It was as though I were very big and she—very small—a small sliver of me. Totally different from the way that I felt with I-330. I now imagine that it must have been something like what the Ancients felt toward their private children.

Beneath me, she spoke through her hands, covering her face: “Every night, I . . . I can’t—if they cure me . . . Every night, I lie alone in the dark, thinking about the baby—what will it be like, what will I be like . . . I’ll have nothing to live for—do you understand? And you have to—you have to—”

It was a stupid feeling, but I was certain: yes, I had to. Stupid because this duty was yet another crime. Stupid because white can’t also be black, duty and crime cannot be one and the same. Otherwise there is no black or white at all, and color is wholly dependent on the foundational logical premise. And if the premise here was that I had illegally given her a child . . .

“Alright. Just don’t—I said don’t . . .” I said. “You understand: I have to take you to her, like I’d offered, so that she can . . .”

“Yes” (quietly, without moving her hands away from her face).

I helped her up. In silence, each thinking our own thoughts, or perhaps, thinking the same thing, we walked up the darkening street, among the mute, leaden buildings, through the taut, lashing branches of wind . . .

At some translucent, tense point, through the whistling of the wind, I heard the familiar footsteps behind me, sloshing, like they were passing through puddles. I looked around at the corner—among the upside-down clouds racing through their reflections in the pavement—it was S. Immediately, my alien arms started to swing off-beat and I loudly began telling O that tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, will be the INTEGRAL’s first test flight and it’s sure to be unbelievable, miraculous, and awesome.

O looked at me in amazement, round and blue, watching my loudly, uselessly swinging arms. I didn’t let her get a word in—I kept yammering on. Inside, separately—so only I could hear it—the thought feverishly buzzed and pulsed, “I can’t . . . I need to somehow . . . I can’t lead him to I—”

So instead of turning left, I went right. The bridge offered up its submissive back, bent like a slave’s, to the three of us: me, O, and S, walking behind us. Lights streamed down from the lit-up buildings on the other side, breaking into thousands of feverishly leaping sparks sprayed by the mad white foam. The wind droned, as though it were playing a bass string draped low over our heads. And through the bass, always behind us—

We got to my building. O stopped at the door and started to say something—“No! But you promised . . .”

I cut her off and hurriedly pushed her through the door. We were finally inside, in the lobby. Above the front desk, the familiar, anxiously quavering, drooping jowls. All around, a thick huddle of numbers—some kind of argument, heads hanging down over the second-floor railing to watch—running down one by one. Save that for later . . . For now, I hurriedly pulled O into the opposite corner, sat down with my back to the wall (out there, on the other side of the wall, I saw: a dark, big-headed shadow gliding back and forth across the pavement), and took out my notebook.

O slowly settled into her chair as though, under her unif, her body was melting and evaporating, leaving only her empty dress and her empty eyes, sucking everything into their blue void. Her tired voice:

“Why did you bring me here? Did you lie?”

“No . . . Hush! Look over there: do you see, behind the wall?”

“Yes. A shadow.”

“He’s always following me . . . I can’t. Please understand: I just can’t. I’m going to jot down a couple of words and you’ll take them and go without me. I’m sure he’ll stay here.”

Under her unif, her swollen body stirred just a little, her belly got a little more round, and a barely noticeable sunrise, a gentle dawn began to spread over her cheeks.

I thrust the note into her cold fingers, tightly squeezed her hand shut, and drank from her blue eyes one final time.

“So long! Perhaps, someday . . .”

She pulled back her hand. She began slowly walking away, bending over her stomach. She took two steps and quickly turned back—she was in front of me once again. Her lips moved—her eyes—her lips—all of her repeated one word, the same word, over and over—and what an unbearable smile, so painful . . .

And then, this human sliver was at the door, a tiny shadow on the other side of the wall, moving away faster and faster, not turning back . . .

I went up to U’s desk. Nervously and indignantly inflating her gills: “It’s like everyone has gone mad! That one claims he saw some sort of man by the House of Antiquity, completely naked and covered in fur . . .”

Out of the circle of bristling heads: “I did! And I’ll say it again: I did, I saw him!”

“How do you like that? What utter bunk!”

And the way she said “bunk” was so sure and unyielding, I had to ask myself, “These things that have been happening in and around me these past few days—isn’t all of it just a lot of ‘bunk’?”

But then, catching a glimpse of my hairy hands, I remembered her words: “You must have a few drops of that forest blood in you . . . Maybe that’s why I—”

No: fortunately, it’s not just bunk. No: unfortunately, it’s not just bunk.

Log 33

BRIEF:

(No Summary, In a Hurry, the Last Thing.)

The day has come.

Hurry, get the paper: maybe they . . . I read the paper with my eyes (exactly like that: right now, my eyes are like a pen or a calculator, something you hold and feel is a foreign object, a tool).

In large letters, across the entire front page, it read:

THE ENEMIES OF HAPPINESS ARE NOT SLEEPING. HOLD ON TO HAPPINESS WITH BOTH HANDS! TOMORROW, ALL WORK IS CANCELED. ALL NUMBERS ARE TO REPORT FOR THE OPERATION. THOSE WHO FAIL TO APPEAR WILL BE CONDEMNED TO THE BENEFACTOR’S MACHINE.

Tomorrow! Can there—will there—really be a tomorrow?

Out of my everyday inertia, I stretched my hand (another tool) out to the bookshelf to place today’s newspaper into the gilded binder along with the others. As I did this, I wondered, “Why bother? What’s the point? I’ll never return to this room again.”

The newspaper fell to the ground. I stood and looked all around the room, taking in every last inch, hurriedly packing—feverishly stuffing everything I was sorry to leave behind into an invisible suitcase. The table. Books. Chair. I-330 had sat in that chair while I was down on the floor . . . The bed . . .

And then, another minute, two—stupidly awaiting a miracle: maybe the phone will ring and she will say that . . .

No. No miracle . . .

I have departed into the unknown. These are my final words. So long—my unknown, beloved readers, who I have lived with for so many pages, to whom I, a man sick with a soul, revealed his entire being, down to the last ground-up screw and broken spring . . .

I am leaving.

Log 34

BRIEF:

Freedmen. A Sunny Night. Radio Valkyrie.

Oh, if only I’d really smashed myself and everyone else into smithereens, if only I’d actually run away with her, somewhere beyond the Wall, among the bared yellow fangs of the beasts; if only I’d really never returned here ever again. Everything would be a thousand—a million times easier. And now—now what? Go and strangle that . . . But what good would that do?

No, no, no! Get a grip, D-503! Fix yourself onto a firm logical axis—throw all your weight on the lever, if just for a little while—and, like an ancient slave, turn the grindstone of syllogisms until you’ve written down and made sense of everything that has happened . . .

By the time I boarded the INTEGRAL, everyone else had already assembled. Everybody had taken their places, all of the honeycombs of our enormous glass hive were filled. Through the glass of the decks, you could see the tiny ant-people below, beside all the telegraphs, dynamos, transformers, altimeters, valves, needles, engines, pumps, and pipes. In the wardroom, some were bent over tables and instruments—they were probably with the Bureau of Science. And next to them: the Second Builder with two of his assistants.

All three of them looked like turtles, the way their necks were drawn into their shoulders, their faces gray, autumnal, overcast.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“It . . . doesn’t look very good,” one replied with a gray, overcast smile. “Unclear where we’re going to have to land. And in general, it’s not clear . . .”

It was unbearable looking at them—when in one hour, with these very hands, I was going to banish them from the cozy digits of the Table of Hours, tear them away from the maternal breast of the One State—forever. They reminded me of the tragic figures in the “Three Freedmen,” a story every schoolchild knows. In this story, as an experiment, three numbers are released from work for a month and told to do whatever they want and go wherever they please.[*] These unlucky numbers loitered by their workplaces, looking inside with hungry eyes. They spent hours stuck in the city squares, performing the motions their bodies actually required at that time of day: sawing and planing the air, banging invisible hammers, clanging on invisible metal rods. And finally, on the tenth day, they couldn’t take it anymore: they joined hands and walked into the water to the beat of the March, going in deeper and deeper until the water put them out of their misery.

I repeat: it was hard looking at them. I was eager to get out of there.

“I just need to check the machine room,” I said, “and then, we’re off.”

Numbers had questions—what voltage to set for the liftoff, how much water ballast to put in the aft tank. It was like I had some kind of gramophone inside me: it answered everything quickly and precisely while, on the inside, I never stopped thinking my thoughts.

Suddenly, in a narrow corridor, something hit me, right here, inside—that was the moment when everything really took off.

Gray unifs flashed by, gray faces, and for a second, one of them stood out: hair pulled low over his forehead, eyes looking out from under his brow—it was him. I realized: they were here and there was nowhere to run from it all, only minutes were left—some dozens of minutes . . . A microscopic, molecular tremor went through my body (which never subsided until the very end), as though a giant motor had started but the frame of my body was too light to withstand it and all the walls, partitions, cables, beams, and lights—everything shook . . .

I still didn’t know: was she here? But there was no time left—they sent for me to hurry up and come upstairs to the command room: it was time to go . . . where?

Gray, overcast faces. Tense blue veins on the water below. Heavy, cast-iron slabs of sky. My hand felt like iron as I lifted up the command phone.

“Up—forty-five degrees!”

A soundless explosion—a jolt—a raging white and green mountain of water down at the stern. The deck underfoot pushed away, soft and rubbery, and everything down below, all of life as we knew it, forever . . . After a second, everything squeezed together, falling deeper and deeper into some sort of funnel—the bulging ice-blue sketch of the city, the bulbous bubbles of cupolas, the lonely leaden finger of the Accumulator Tower. Suddenly: the cotton curtain of clouds—breaking through them—then nothing but sun and blue sky. Seconds, minutes, miles—the blue was quickly solidifying, filling with darkness, and the stars began to come out like drops of cold, silver sweat . . .

There we were, in the terrifying, unbearably bright, black, starry, sunny night. It was like suddenly going deaf: you can still see the horns blaring, but you only see them—they’re mute, it’s silent. The sun was silent like that.

This was all natural, it was to be expected. We’d left the Earth’s atmosphere. But it had all happened so quickly and unexpectedly that everyone lost their bearings a bit and went quiet. For me—I felt lighter in this fantastical, silent sunlight: it was as though I had winced for the last time, but now crossed the fatal threshold and left my body behind down there below. I was now soaring through a new world where everything was supposed to be unfamiliar and upside down anyway . . .

“Hold fast,” I told the machine room—or rather, it was my internal gramophone—then, with the mechanical hinging of its arm, the gramophone passed the command phone to the Second Builder. Meanwhile, dressed head to toe in that infinitesimal, molecular tremor that only I could hear, I ran down to search for . . .

The door to the mess—the same one that would clang shut and lock in just an hour . . . A stranger stood by the door. He was short, with the kind of face that would melt in a crowd. His only significant feature was his unusually long arms that went down to his knees, as though they’d accidentally been selected from a different set of body parts.

One of the long arms stretched out and barred the door: “Where do you think you’re going?”

It was clear: he didn’t realize I knew everything. So what: maybe that was for the best. I answered with an intentional sharpness, from on high. “I am the Builder of the INTEGRAL. I am in charge of this test flight. Got it?”

No more arm.

The mess. Over the instruments and maps, there were heads: some encompassed in bristling hair—others yellow, bald, and ripe. I took the lot of them in with a single glance and went back out, down the hall, along the gangway, down to the engine room. It was filled with the heat and clatter of pipes, burning with explosions; gleaming levers in a desperate, drunken dance, and the unrelenting, barely noticeable trembling of the needles on the dials, never ceasing for a moment . . .

Finally, there he was, at the tachometer, with his sloping brow over a notebook.

“Hey!” It was so loud in there I had to shout directly in his ear. “Is she here? Where is she?”

In the shadow, from under his brow: a smile. “Her? She’s in the radio telephone room . . .”

I flew there. There were three of them. All of them wore winged audio helmets. She looked a head taller than normal, winged and sparkling, soaring—just like an ancient Valkyrie. It seemed like the giant blue sparks from the radio antenna were beaming directly out of her along with the subtle perfume of ozone and lightning.

“Somebody . . . how about you—” I pointed to her, breathless from running. “I need to send a message down to Earth, to the hangar. Come here, I’ll dictate . . .”

There was a tiny box of a cabin next to the instrument room. We sat at the table side by side. I found her hand and squeezed tightly.

“Now what? What happens next?”

“I don’t know. Do you understand how amazing this is: flying off somewhere without knowing or caring where . . . Now it’s almost noon and—who knows what’s going to happen? And tonight . . . where will you and I spend the night? Maybe it’ll be on the grass, on dry leaves . . .”

She beamed out blue sparks and the fragrance of lightning. The trembling inside me quickened.

“Take this down,” I said to her loudly, still breathless (from running). “Time: 11:30. Speed: 6,800 . . .”

From under her winged helmet, without taking her eyes off the paper, she quietly said, “Last night she came to me with your note . . . I know—I know everything: you don’t have to say anything. But the baby . . . isn’t it yours? I sent her out there—she’s already on the other side of the Wall. She will live . . .”

I was back in the command room. Again, the delirious night with its black starry sky and blinding sun. The hand of the clock on the wall slowly limped from minute to minute. Everything felt like it was in a fog, dressed in the finest, slightest trembling (visible to me alone).

For some reason, I thought that it would be better if everything happened a little lower, closer to Earth.

“Stop!” I shouted into the engine room.

We were still moving forward, but slower and slower, by inertia. Then the INTEGRAL caught on some hair of an instant, hung motionless for a split second—the hair split and the ship started to drop like a stone, faster and faster. And so, in silence, the minutes passing, dozens of minutes—I could hear my pulse. As the hand of the clock in front of me edged closer and closer to 12, it became clear: I was the stone, I-330 was the Earth, I was like a stone flung down by someone—and a stone has an unbearable need to fall, to hit the Earth, so that its shards . . . But what if . . . I could already see the solid blue smoke of the rain clouds below—what if . . .

Nevertheless, the arm of the gramophone hinged out precisely to pick up the phone and give the command, “Slow ahead!” The stone stopped falling. Now only four of the lower auxiliaries wearily snorted—two fore and two aft—just enough to hold up the weight of the INTEGRAL. With a slight shudder, the INTEGRAL firmly stopped in midair, as though it’d been anchored, about a kilometer up from the Earth.

Everyone spilled out onto the deck (it was almost twelve, the lunch bell would ring any moment), and, bending over the glass railing, took great, hurried gulps of the unknown, unwalled world down below. Amber, green, blue: the autumn forest, fields, a lake. At the edge of the blue saucer—bony yellow ruins; a threatening yellow, dried-up finger, which must have been the miraculously surviving steeple of an ancient church.

“Look, look! Over there—more to the right!”

Down there, a fast dot was dashing over the green desert—a flying brown shadow. I had binoculars in my hands and mechanically lifted them up to my eyes. Up to their chests in grass, tails flying, a herd of brown horses were galloping through the fields, and on their backs—those dark-bay, white, and jet black . . .

Behind me, “I’m telling you—I saw a face!”

“Bug off! Tell it to somebody else!”

“Here, take the binoculars . . .”

But by then, they were gone. Only the boundless green desert . . .

And then, filling all of the desert, and all of me, and everyone else—the piercing shudder of the bell: lunch, in one minute—noon.

The world shattered into moments—random, disconnected shards. Somebody’s gleaming gold badge lay on the steps—I didn’t care: it crunched under my heel. A voice: “I am telling you—it was a face!” A dark square: the open door of the mess. Clenched, white, sharp, smiling teeth . . .

Just when the clock began to strike noon, endlessly slowly, not breathing from one strike to the next, the front rows began to inch forward, and suddenly the square was crossed out by two familiar, unnaturally long arms:

“Halt!”

Fingers dug into the palm of my hand—I-330, she was next to me.

“Who is that? Do you know him?”

“But isn’t . . . isn’t that . . .”

He climbed on somebody’s shoulders. Over the hundreds of faces, his hundredth, thousandth, and only face:

“On behalf of the Guardians . . . Those of you who I am saying this to—you can hear me, each of you hears me right now—I want you to know that we know. We might not know your numbers yet, but we know everything else. The INTEGRAL will not be yours! This test flight will be completed and you—you will not dare to stir—you will make sure it’s completed with your own hands. And then . . . But that’s all I wanted to say . . .”

Silence. The glass tiles under my feet went soft, like cotton, and my legs turned to cotton as well. Next to me, her completely white smile, crazy blue sparks. Through her teeth, she spoke into my ear: “You did this? ‘Fulfilled your duty’? In that case . . .”

Her hand ripped out of mine, the angry wings of her Valkyrie helmet were already somewhere far ahead of me. Frozen and silent, I followed everyone else into the mess hall, alone . . .

But it wasn’t me—it wasn’t! I didn’t tell anyone anything, except for these silent white pages . . .

Inside me—inaudibly, desperately, loudly—I screamed this at her. She was sitting across from me at the table and didn’t even deign to glance over. Next to her—somebody’s ripe yellow bald pate. I could hear her:

“‘Nobility’? But my dear professor, even the most basic philological analysis of the word demonstrates that it’s just a prejudice, a vestige of ancient, feudal eras. While we . . .”

I could feel myself going pale—now everyone would see . . . But the gramophone performed the fifty regulated chewing motions per bite and I locked myself inside myself, like an ancient, opaque house, piled stones over the door, and drew the curtains . . .

The command phone was back in my hand. We flew, in an icy, final sorrow—through the clouds, into the icy, starry, and sunny night. Minutes, hours. But apparently, inside me, the logical motor kept feverishly turning, inaudible even to me. Because suddenly, at some point in the blue space I saw: the table, U’s gills drooping over it, a forgotten page of my log. It was all too clear: it could have only been her—I saw it all now . . .

Oh, if only—if only I could get to the radio . . . Winged helmets, the smell of blue lightning . . . I remember loudly saying something to her but she looked right through me like I was glass. Distantly: “I’m busy: I am receiving from below. Dictate it to her . . .”

In the tiny box of that cabin, after a moment of thought, I firmly dictated: “Time: 14:40. Down! Cut the engines. Everything’s over.”

The command room. The mechanical heart of the INTEGRAL had been stopped, we were falling, but my heart couldn’t keep up, it lagged behind, it kept rising up toward my throat. Clouds, then a distant green spot—growing greener and clearer—rushing at us like a whirlwind—the end—

The contorted, porcelain-white face of the Second Builder. He must have been the one who charged at me and pushed me aside. I must have hit my head on something. As I was going dark, falling, I foggily heard:

“Aft engines—full speed!”

A sharp jolt upward . . . I don’t remember anything else.

Log 35

BRIEF:

In a Hoop. Carrot. Murder.

I didn’t sleep at all last night. All night, I lay there thinking about one thing . . .

After yesterday, my head feels like it’s wrapped in tight bandages. Or: not bandages, but some sort of sadistic hoop made of glass steel riveted to my skull. I keep going around and around in the same iron circle: murder U.

Murder U, then go and see her and say, “Do you believe me now?” The most disgusting part is that murder is so dirty, so ancient, breaking somebody’s head in with something—just thinking about it leaves a repulsively sweet taste in my mouth, I can’t swallow my saliva, I keep spitting into my handkerchief, my mouth is dry.

There’s a heavy piston rod in my closet—it cracked after casting and I needed to study the structure of the fracture under the microscope. I rolled my log into a tube (let her read all of me—down to the final letter), put a piece of the broken piston inside it, and headed downstairs. The stairs were endless, each step somehow repulsively slippery, liquid, I had to keep wiping my mouth with my handkerchief . . .

Downstairs. My heart pounding. I stopped and took out the rod and walked over to the front desk—

But U wasn’t there: just an empty, icy surface. I remembered: all work had been canceled today, everyone was supposed to go get the Operation and so of course, she didn’t need to sit there today—no one to sign in and out . . .

On the street. Wind. The sky was made of rushing iron slabs. And just like yesterday: the whole world was broken up into discrete, independent, sharp fragments, and, falling headfirst, each of them stopped for a moment and hung in front of me in midair—and then vaporized.

It was as though the black, precise letters on this page had suddenly shifted, spooked, and run off in every direction—leaving behind only gibberish: spook—dran—offi. The crowd on the street was just as scattered, no longer moving in rows but backward, forward, diagonally, across.

Then there was no one. For a second, a moment froze as it fell: up there, on the second floor, in a cell that hung in midair, a man and a woman stood kissing—her body bent all the way back. For the last time, ever . . .

On a corner, a stirring, spiky bush of heads. Over the heads—separately, in the air—a banner: “Down with the Machines! Down with the Operation!” And, separately (from me), for a moment, I wondered, “Does everyone really have some kind of pain that can only be extricated along with their heart? So that everyone has something they need to do before . . .” For a second, there was nothing else in the world besides (my) animal hand holding the heavy iron tube . . .

Then, a boy: in pure forward motion, a shadow under his lip. His lower lip was turned out like the cuff of a rolled-up sleeve—his whole face was turned out—he was sobbing—running from someone as fast as he could—the sound of trudging feet behind him . . .

The boy jogged my memory: “U must be at school right now. I’d better hurry.” I ran to the closest underground entrance.

At the entrance, somebody running past me yelled back, “They’re not running! The trains aren’t running today! They’re—”

I went down. Total chaos. The sparkle of faceted crystal suns. Heads packed on the platform. An empty train, frozen in place.

And in the silence, a voice. I couldn’t see her, but I knew this taut and supple voice, like a whip, lashing. Somewhere up there, the sharp triangle of her eyebrows was jerked up to her temples . . .

I shouted, “Let me through! Let me through! I have to—”

But then somebody’s pincers clamped onto my arms, my shoulders, riveting me to the spot. Through the silence, a voice: “No! Run upstairs! They’ll cure you up there! They’ll stuff you full of their unctuous happiness until you can’t take any more! Then you can have your peaceful, organized slumber, snoring in time with everyone else—can’t you hear it already? The grand symphony of snoring? Silly man: they want to liberate you from the question marks that writhe and gnaw at you like worms, while you’re down here listening to me instead. Hurry up! Scram! Get the Great Operation! What do you care if I stay here alone? What do you care if I don’t want others to want things for me, if I want to want things for myself, if I want the impossible . . .”

Another voice, slower and heavier: “Aha! The impossible? You mean chasing your stupid fantasies while they wag their tails in front of your nose? No: we’re going to grab that tail and put our foot down on it and then . . .”

“And then you’ll eat it all up and start snoring and you’ll need a new tail in front of your nose. They say the Ancients had an animal like that: they called it the ass. In order to make it keep walking forward, they’d tie a carrot to its head far enough out of its reach that it wouldn’t be able to snatch it with its teeth. But if it got it, it ate it . . .”

Suddenly, the pincers released me and I ran to the center where she was speaking. But, at that very moment, everything began crumbling and pressing in. A shriek from behind, “They’re coming, they’re coming here!” The lights flickered and went out—somebody cut the wires—then came the onslaught, screaming, groaning, heads, fingers . . .

I don’t know how long we rolled around like that in the underground. Finally: steps—dusk—everything getting lighter—and we were back out on the street—all fanning out in different directions . . .

I was alone again. The wind, the twilight—gray and very low overhead. Deep in the wet pavement glass—overturned lights, walls, and figures walking upside down. The unbearably heavy tube in my hands kept pulling me down toward the bottom, into the depths.

Downstairs, U still wasn’t there. Her room was empty and dark.

I went to my room and turned on the light. My temples, tightly bound by the hoop, were pounding. I paced, still chained in that circle, doing rounds between the table, the white scroll on top of it, my bed, the door, the table, the white scroll . . . The blinds were down in the room to my left. To my right: bent over a book—a knobby bald head with a forehead like a giant yellow parabola. The wrinkles on the forehead were like rows of illegible yellow lines. Sometimes, we would make eye contact and it would make me feel like those yellow lines were about me.

. . . It happened at exactly 21. U came herself. The only thing I remember clearly is that I was breathing so loud I could hear myself and kept trying to make it more quiet but couldn’t.

She sat down and fixed her unif over her knees. Pink-brown gills quavering.

“Oh, my dear—so it is true, you were hurt? As soon as I heard, I immediately . . .”

The rod lay in front of me on the table. I jumped up, breathing even louder. She heard me, stopped mid-word, then also stood up for some reason. I could already see the spot on her head, the disgusting sweet taste in my mouth . . . the handkerchief—but I didn’t have it—I spat on the floor.

The number on the other side of the wall, to the right—his rapt, yellow wrinkles—about me. I needed him not to see it—it would be even more disgusting if he watched . . . I pressed the button—so what if I didn’t have the right, did it really matter now? The blinds fell.

She seemed to sense what was about to happen, she understood and ran to the door. But I got in her way—breathing loudly, without lowering my eyes from that spot on her head . . .

“You—you’ve gone mad! You wouldn’t dare!” She inched back and sat, or rather, fell, onto the bed, and, trembling, shoved her folded hands between her knees. Spring-loaded, still binding her tight in my gaze, I slowly stretched my hand out toward the table—only my arm moved—and grabbed the rod.

“Please! I’m begging you! Give me one day! Tomorrow—tomorrow I’ll go and do everything . . .”

What was she talking about? I moved my arm back and—

In my mind, I killed her. Yes, unknown readers, you may rightfully call me a murderer. I am completely sure that I would have brought that rod down on her head if she hadn’t shouted, “For the sake of! Please! I’ll do it! Just let me—”

And tore off her unif with her trembling hands. Her big, yellow, flabby body flopped out onto the bed . . . It was only then that I understood: she thought that the blinds down were because . . . because I’d wanted to . . .

It was so shocking, so dumb, that I burst out laughing. With that, the tightly wound spring inside of me snapped, my arm went slack, and the rod dropped to the floor. I saw for myself that there is no weapon more powerful than laughter: laughter can kill anything, even murder.

I sat at the table laughing—fatal, desperate laughter—I saw no way out of this ridiculous situation. I don’t know how it would have all ended if it’d kept going that way because suddenly, there was a new external factor: the phone rang.

I threw myself at the receiver: could it be her? An unfamiliar voice on the other end: “Just a moment.”

Torturously endless droning. From afar, I could hear heavy steps drawing nearer, growing louder, more iron and then—

“D-503? Uh-huh . . . This is the Benefactor. Report to me immediately!”

Ding—He hung up—ding.

U still lay on my bed, her eyes closed, her gills spread wide in a smile. I scooped her clothes off the floor and tossed them on top of her. Through my teeth: “Well! Hurry up!”

She raised herself on one elbow, her breasts fell to the side, her eyes got round, she went waxen.

“What do you mean?”

“Go! Get dressed!”

She knotted up, tightly clutching her clothes, and, with a crushed voice, she told me, “Don’t look . . .”

I turned around, pressing my forehead against the glass. Lights, figures, sparks quivered on the wet black mirror. No: this was me, the trembling was inside me . . . Why had He called? Did He already know about her, about me, about everything?

U was dressed, standing next to the door. I took two steps toward her and squeezed her hands as though I could squeeze what I really needed out of them, drop by drop. “Listen—her name—you know who I’m talking about—did you tell them her name? No? Tell me the truth—I need to know—I don’t care—I just need the truth.”

“No.”

“No? But why not? If you’d already gone and informed on me?”

Her lower lip suddenly turned inside out, just like that little boy’s, and out of her cheeks, down her cheeks, little drops . . .

“Because I . . . I was afraid that if they took her . . . that it would make you . . . you would stop lo— Oh, I can’t! I couldn’t!”

And I knew that that was the truth. The squalid, ridiculous, human truth! I opened the door.

Log 36

BRIEF:

Blank Pages. The Christian God. About My Mother.

So strange—it feels like there’s a blank white page in my head: how I got there, how I waited (I know that I waited)—I don’t remember any of it, not a single sound, or face, or gesture. It’s as if all the wires between myself and the world have been cut.

When I came to, I was already standing in front of Him, afraid to raise my eyes: all I could see were His giant iron hands lying on His lap. Those hands weighed heavily on Him, His knees bent under their weight. His fingers slowly stirred. His face was up somewhere, in the clouds, and maybe it was because His voice seemed to come down to me from a great height, but it didn’t roar like thunder or deafen me, it sounded like a normal human voice.

“And so—you, too? You, the Builder of the INTEGRAL? You, who were fated to become the greatest of conquistadors? You, whose name should have begun a brilliant new chapter in the history of the One State . . . You?”

Blood rushed to my head, my cheeks—another blank white page: only the pulsing in my temples, the loud voice from above, but not a single word. Only when He went quiet did I come to and see: His hand was moving, as though it weighed a thousand pounds—it slowly crawled upward—and a finger pointed at me.

“Well? Why so silent? Is it true or not? Are you an executioner?”

“It’s true,” I answered submissively. After that, I heard His every word very clearly.

“What—do you think I’m afraid of that word? But have you ever tried taking its shell off and looking inside? I’ll show you. Remember? The blue hill, the cross, the crowd? People on top, spattered in blood, nailing a body to the cross. People below, spattered in tears, watching. Don’t you think that the role of those at the top is the most difficult and most important? If it weren’t for them, would this exalted tragedy have ever been staged? They were booed by the ignorant crowd: but for this, the author of the tragedy—God—ought to have rewarded them all the more generously. And the merciful Christian God himself, who slowly roasted all who disobeyed Him in the flames of Hell—isn’t He an executioner, too? And what was greater: the number of Christians who burned, or the number of people that Christians burned when their turn came? And yet—remember this: nevertheless, for centuries, the Christian God was glorified as the God of Love. Absurd? No, just the opposite: it is a patent for inextricable human reason written in blood. Even when man was hairy and savage, he understood: true algebraic love of humanity is inexorably inhuman, and the inexorable proof of its truth is its cruelty. Just as burning is the inexorable proof of fire. Show me a fire that doesn’t burn! Go ahead—prove me wrong, argue with me!”

How could I possibly argue? How could I disagree when these had been my very own thoughts (before)—only I’d never been able to dress them in such well-wrought, shining armor. I was silent . . .

“If your silence means you agree with me, let’s talk like adults. The children have gone to bed. Let’s get to the bottom of everything. I’m asking you: what have people—from the very beginning of humanity—prayed for, dreamed of, agonized over? It was all so that some day, somebody would tell them once and for all what happiness is, and then chain them to that happiness. And isn’t that exactly what we’re doing? The ancient dream of paradise . . . Remember: in heaven, they don’t know desire, or pity, or love. Heaven is filled with blessed beings with surgically removed imaginations (which is the very reason why they are blessed): the angels, the slaves of God . . . And now, when we have finally caught up to this dream, when we’ve finally got it in our hands, like this”—His hand clenched: if there’d been a stone in it, it would have squirted juice—“when all that is left is to flay the kill and divide it among us—at this very moment you—you . . .”

Suddenly, the iron roar stopped short. I was all red, like metal on an anvil, overheated by a banging hammer. The hammer silently hung over me, awaiting—what could be sca . . .

Suddenly: “How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

“And yet you’re naïve as a sixteen-year-old, someone exactly half your age. Listen: did it really never occur to you that for them—we don’t yet know their names, but I’m certain we’ll get them out of you—that they only wanted you because you were the Builder of the INTEGRAL—only so they could use you to—”

“Don’t! Don’t!” I cried.

It was exactly like trying to block a bullet with your hand: your pathetic “don’t” is still ringing in your ears, but the bullet has already gone through you, you’re already writhing on the floor.

Yes, I am: the Builder of the INTEGRAL . . . Yes, yes . . . Instantly, I saw U’s enraged face, her shuddering brick-red gills that morning when they were both in my room . . .

I remember very clearly: I burst out laughing and lifted my eyes. In front of me, there was a bald man, bald like Socrates, with tiny drops of sweat all over his pate.

It was all so simple. So fantastically banal, so very basic, that you just had to laugh.

I choked on my laughter, it tore out of me in clumps. I threw my hands over my mouth and ran like hell.

The steps, the wind, the wet, leaping shards of lights and faces, running. “No! I have to see her! One last time!”

Here is another blank white page. All I remember is: feet. Not people, just feet—hundreds of them raining down onto the pavement, falling arrhythmically, out of step, a deluge of feet. And some kind of cheerful, puckish song, and then a shout—probably aimed at me: “Hey! Hey you! This way! Come with us!”

Then, a deserted square, filled to the brim with tense wind. In the center—a dark, heavy, terrifying hulk: the Benefactor’s Machine. It evoked this unexpected echo in me: a bright white pillow; a head flung back on it with eyes half-closed: the sharp and sweet strip of white teeth . . . connected to the machine in some ridiculous and awful way—I knew how but didn’t want to see it or say it—I don’t want to and I won’t.

I closed my eyes and sat down on the steps leading up to the Machine. It must have been raining: my face was wet. Somewhere far in the distance, muffled screams. But no one could hear them, no one could hear me screaming: save me from this—save me!

If I only had a mother like the Ancients—my very own, private mother. To her, I would not be the Builder of the INTEGRAL, or number D-503, or a molecule of the One State, but a simple sliver of humanity—a piece of her—beaten, crushed, cast out . . . What does it matter if I’m the one nailing or being nailed—aren’t they the same thing, anyway? Only she would hear what nobody else hears, and her old lips, overgrown with wrinkles . . .

Log 37

BRIEF:

Infusoria. Doomsday. Her Room.

In the morning, in the cafeteria. The number on my left whispered fearfully, “Come on, eat! They’re looking at you!”

With all of my strength, I smiled. My face had a crack in it: smiling made it go deeper—and hurt more . . .

Then: just when I’d finally managed to get a cube on my fork, the fork shuddered and clanged against the plate—and along with it, the tables and walls, and dishes, and air, and everything outside all shuddered and started to shake as some enormous, round metal din, reaching up to the sky, was rising up over our heads, over the buildings, and spreading and dying out in barely perceptible little rings, like ripples through water.

In a flash, I saw faces draining of color, frozen mid-chew, with their forks in the air.

Suddenly, everything flew into motion, went off the rails it’d been on for centuries, everyone leaped up (without singing the Anthem), completely out of sync, still chewing and choking down their food, grabbing each other. “What’s going on? What happened? What was that?” Like the jumbled fragments of a formerly mighty and elegant Machine—everybody rushed to the elevators, the stairs—the steps—stamping feet—tatters of words—like pieces of a torn-up letter blowing away in the wind . . .

Everyone flooded down the same way from all the surrounding buildings, and in a moment, the avenue was like a drop of water under a microscope: imprisoned in the crystal-clear drop, bewildered infusoria lurched side to side, up and down.

“Yes!” I heard somebody’s triumphant voice. I saw the back of someone’s head with a finger pointed up to the sky. I very clearly remember the yellowish pink fingernail with a white crescent moon creeping up from its horizon. It was like a compass: hundreds of eyes followed it up to the sky.

Up there, the clouds raced, pressing against one another, leaping over each other as though vying to survive some invisible chase—the clouds surrounded the dark aeros of the Guardians, with their black trunks hanging down—and even farther out—to the west, something like . . .

At first, no one understood what it was—not even me, who (unfortunately) knew more than anyone else. It looked like a huge swarm of black aeros: barely visible, swift little dots moving at an unbelievable height. Coming closer; hoarse, guttural sounds from above—then finally, the birds swooped in over our heads. They darkened the sky—sharp, black, piercing, falling triangles. The storm was bearing down on them, forcing them to land all over the cupolas, roofs, posts, and balconies.

“Yes! Yes!” the triumphant head turned and I saw that it was the number with the sloped, overhanging brow. But all that was left of his former self was that forehead—the rest of him seemed to have got out from under his permanent overhang and all over his face—around his eyes and lips—there were rays sprouting out like tufts of hair: he was smiling.

“You understand?” he shouted to me through the howling wind, beating wings, squawking. “Do you understand? The Wall—they blew up the Wall! Do you un-der-stand?”

Past us, somewhere in the background, flashing figures—outstretched heads—rushing to get inside, get into the buildings. In the middle of the pavement—the rapid but also somehow slow (from its weight) surge of numbers who’d had the operation, marching out there—to the west.

. . . Hairy tufts of rays around his lips and eyes. I grabbed his hand. “Listen: where is she? Where’s I-330? Is she on the other side, or . . . I need to—you hear me? This instant, I can’t . . .”

“She’s here,” he shouted drunkenly, happily—flashing his strong yellow teeth. “She’s here in the city, executing the plan. Whoopee! We’re really doing it!”

Who is “we”? Who am I?

There were about fifty others around him who’d also come out from under their brows—loud and happy, mouths full of strong teeth. Gulping the storm with their open mouths, waving around tame and not too frightening-looking electrocutors (where had they got them?), they pushed off in that direction as well, to the west, following the numbers who’d had the Operation, but flanking them down the parallel, 48th Avenue.

Stumbling against the taut cables of wind, I ran to her. Why? I don’t know. I stumbled, the streets were empty, it was an alien, savage city, filled with unceasing, triumphant birdsong. Doomsday. Through the glass of the walls—in a few buildings, I saw (it jumped in my eyes): male and female numbers shamelessly copulating without even putting their blinds down, no tickets, in broad daylight . . .

The building—her building. The door stood wide open, dumbfounded. The front desk—empty. Elevator stuck in the middle of the shaft. Gasping for breath, I ran up the endless stairs. The hallway. The numbers on the doors flew by like the spokes of a rapidly spinning wheel: 320, 326, 330—I-330, yes!

Through the glass door: everything in the room was in shambles, overturned, trashed. Her hastily knocked-over chair—facedown, legs in the air, like a dead cow. The bed at an insane angle to the wall. All over the floor—pink tickets scattered like wilted, trampled-on flower petals.

I bent down, picked one up, another, a third: all of them said D-503—all of them were for me—molten drops of me that had spilled out over the edge. This was all that was left . . .

For some reason, I couldn’t just leave them like that, on the floor, for people to walk on. I grabbed another handful and laid them out on the table, carefully smoothing them out, and looked at them all—and laughed.

I didn’t know this before—but I do now, and you’ll know it, too: laughter can be different colors. It is only the distant echo of an internal explosion: it can be festive, red, blue, and gold fireworks or the shreds of a human body sent flying . . .

A completely unfamiliar name flashed on the tickets. I didn’t remember the number, only the letter F. I brushed all the tickets off the table onto the floor, and stepped on them—on myself, with my heel—take that, and that—and left.

I sat in the hallway, on the windowsill across from her door, and kept waiting for something, stupidly, for a long time. Footsteps shuffled in from the left. An old man: a face like a popped, empty bubble—the puncture wound still bleeding a clear liquid that slowly dripped down his head. Slowly, dimly, I understood: they were tears. And only when the old man had already got far away, I came to my senses and called out to him:

“Hold on! Hold on—do you happen to know number I-330?”

The old man turned around, gave me a sad, dismissive wave of his hand, and hobbled off.

At dusk, I returned to my building, home. In the west, every second, the sky convulsed with a light gray shiver—a muted, muffled drone came from out there. The roofs were all strewn in charred, black rubble: the birds. I lay down on my bed, and instantly, like an animal, sleep pounced and smothered me . . .

Log 38

BRIEF:

(Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the Entire Thing Is Just This: A Discarded Cigarette.)

I woke up—my room was so bright, my eyes hurt. I winced. My head felt like it was filled with caustic blue smoke, everything was in a fog, and through the fog, I heard myself thinking, “But I didn’t turn the light on—how . . .”

I jumped up—she was here! I-330, sitting at my table, her chin in her hand, watching me with her mocking grin . . .

I am sitting at the same table now, writing. Those ten or fifteen minutes, wound viciously tight into a spring, are over. It feels like the door only shut behind her a moment ago, that it’s still possible to run after her, grab her, and maybe she’ll laugh and say . . .

She sat at my table. I flung myself at her.

“It’s you! You! I was—I saw your room—I thought you—”

But before I could get to her, I was halted by the fixed, piercing lances of her eyelashes. I remembered: she’d given me that same look when we were on the INTEGRAL. Now I had one second to figure out how to tell her everything in a way that she would believe—now or never—

“Listen, I-330—I need to . . . I need to tell you . . . No, hold on, wait—I just need a sip of water . . .”

My mouth was so dry, it was like it was full of blotting paper. I began pouring myself water and couldn’t: I put the glass down on the table and grabbed onto the pitcher with both hands.

Now I could see: the blue smoke was coming from her cigarette. She raised it up to her lips, inhaled, and greedily swallowed the smoke—just like I did with the water. She said, “Don’t. Don’t say anything. I don’t care. Look: I came to see you anyway. They’re waiting for me downstairs. If you want our last moments together to be . . .”

She tossed the cigarette on the floor, threw all her weight over the arm of the chair (the button was on the wall—hard to reach)—and I remember how the chair tilted back and two of its legs went up in the air. Then the blinds fell.

She came up and tightly wrapped herself around me. Her knees through the fabric of her dress—the slow, sweet, warm poison, covering everything . . .

And suddenly . . . This happens: one moment you’re deep in warm and sweet slumber—the next, something punctures it, you shudder awake, your eyes snap wide open. Exactly that: I remembered the trampled pink tickets all over her floor, and F-something-something on one of them . . . All of them balled up in my mind, I couldn’t put it in words, but I squeezed her so hard, she cried out in pain . . .

Another minute out of these ten or fifteen: her head flung back with half-closed eyes on the bright white pillow; the strip of her sharp, sweet teeth. And all this—a stupid, nagging, torturous reminder of things that I shouldn’t think about, not even now. I squeezed her, more and more tenderly, more and more painfully—leaving brighter and brighter blue marks with my fingers . . .

She said (without opening her eyes, I noticed): “They say you saw the Benefactor yesterday? Is that true?”

“Yes, it’s true.”

Her eyes flipped open, and, with pleasure, I watched how quickly her face paled, disappeared, and evaporated, leaving only her eyes.

I told her everything. But only—I don’t know why—well, no, that’s not true, I do—I skipped one part: what He had said at the very end, that they had only needed me because . . .

Slowly, like a photograph in developer, her face returned: her cheeks, the white strip of her teeth, her lips. She got up and went to the closet mirror.

My mouth was dry again. I poured myself some water, but the thought of drinking revolted me. I put the glass down on the table and asked, “So is that why you came here? You needed information?”

She looked at me through the mirror—the sharp, mocking triangle of her eyebrows, cocked up to her temples. She turned around to say something but didn’t say anything.

She didn’t need to. I knew.

Was it time to say my farewell? I moved my—alien—legs, tripped on the chair—it fell over face down, dead, like the one in her room. Her lips were cold—as cold as the floor had felt right there—here, in my room, next to my bed.

And when she left, I sat down on the floor and bent over the cigarette she had tossed. I can’t write anymore—I don’t want to!

Log 39

BRIEF:

The End.

All this was like one final grain of salt dropped in an already saturated solution: the crystals were quickly set into motion—prickling out into needles, hardening into their final form. I clearly knew: it was all said and done—I would do it tomorrow morning. Same thing as killing myself—but maybe, the only way to be resurrected. After all, only the dead can get up again.

In the west, every second, the sky convulsed in a blue spasm. My head was burning and pounding. I sat up all night and only managed to fall asleep around 7, when the darkness had already retracted, gone green, and the bird-covered roofs came into view . . .

I woke up: it was already 10 (apparently there was no bell today). The glass of water from yesterday still stood on my table. I greedily drank it all down and took off: I needed to get it all over with quickly—as quickly as possible.

The sky was pale blue and desolate, as if it’d been wiped out by the storm. The spiny edges of shadows, everything carved out of thin, blue autumn air—so fragile—frightening to touch: it could crack any moment, bursting into glass dust. Inside me: I can’t think, don’t think, don’t think or else—

So I didn’t think and maybe, didn’t really see, either, just registered images. On the pavement: branches from somewhere, leaves on them—green, amber, and red. Above, crisscrossing birds and aeros. Heads, gaping mouths, arms waving like branches. All of this probably yelling, screeching, and droning . . .

Deserted streets, as though they’d been swept clean by a plague. I remember: I tripped over something unbearably soft, yielding, yet motionless. I bent down: a dead body. He lay on his back with his bent legs spread, like a woman. His face . . .

I recognized those thick African lips, as if even now, they were still spraying laughter. He was laughing at me with his eyes shut. A second later, I stepped over him, took off running—I couldn’t take any more, I needed to hurry up and do it, or else I would snap, collapse, like an overloaded railway tie . . .

Luckily, I was just twenty steps away. I could already see the sign with its golden letters reading “Bureau of Guardians.” On the threshold, I stopped, took a big gulp of air, as much as I could, and went in.

Inside, in the hallway, an endless chain of numbers stood back-to-back clutching papers and heavy notebooks. They slowly edged forward, one or two steps at a time, and then stopped again.

I ran up and down the chain, my head breaking apart, pulling on sleeves, pleading the way a sick man begs for something—anything—to just put him out of his misery in a single, agonized instant.

A woman, tightly bound by the belt on her unif, with two bulging hemispheres in the back that she kept turning from side to side as if she had eyes in them. She scoffed at me, “His stomach hurts! This number needs the bathroom—it’s over there, second door to the right . . .”

And laughter: at me—this laughter made something rise up in my throat, I felt like I was about to scream or . . . or . . .

Suddenly, somebody grabbed my elbow from behind. I turned around: the translucent, winged ears. They were not pink as usual, but crimson: his Adam’s apple twitched—at any moment, it would break through the thin skin on his neck.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, quickly drilling his eyes into me.

I clung to him. “Hurry—your office—I need to tell you everything—this instant! I’m so glad it’s you . . . This could be terrible, but it’s good, it’s a good thing . . .”

It made it more painful that he also knew her, but maybe he’d also shudder once he heard the whole story, and we would be killing together, I wouldn’t be alone in my final moments . . .

The door slammed behind me. I remember: a piece of paper stuck to the bottom of the door and scraped along the floor as it closed. The room felt cloaked in some particular, airless silence, as though we were under a bell jar. If he’d said even one word—no matter which one—any word at all, I would have spat it all out right away. But he said nothing.

I got so tense that my ears started humming and then, I said (without looking at him): “I think that I’ve always hated her, from the very beginning. And I fought . . . then again, no, no, you shouldn’t believe me: I could have saved myself, but chose not to. I wanted to die, it was more precious to me than anything else . . . that is, not death, but that she . . . And even now—even now, when I already know everything . . . Do you—do you know that I was summoned to see the Benefactor?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But what He told me . . . Please understand—it’s like if somebody tore the floor out from under you—you and everything that you have here on your desk—the papers, the ink going flying—ink everywhere—everything turned into one giant inkblot . . .”

“Go on, go on! And hurry up. Others are waiting.”

Tripping over my words, getting lost in them, I told him everything that had happened, everything written down here. About my real and hairy selves, what she’d said about my hands—yes, that was when it all started—and how I hadn’t wanted to fulfill my duty, how I’d lied to myself, how she’d gotten fake sick notes, how I’d become more corroded with each passing day, the underground hallways, and what it was like on the other side of the Wall . . .

All of it came out in ludicrous clumps and clods—I was choking, and when I didn’t have the words, his grinning, crooked, double-bent lips would pass me the ones that I needed. I would nod gratefully: yes, yes, exactly . . .

Eventually (what was happening?) he started speaking for me, while I sat there listening. “Yes, and then . . . Yes, that’s exactly how it was, yes, exactly!”

I started getting cold under my collar, as though I was going under ether, until I finally managed to ask, “But—how could you possibly know all this?”

He smirked, saying nothing, his smirk growing more and more crooked. Then, “You know—you’ve been trying to hide something from me. You’ve named everyone you saw behind the Wall, but you forgot someone. No? But don’t you remember that for a second, there was a flash and you saw . . . me? Yes, really: me.”

A pause.

And suddenly, it was as though I was struck by lightning, right on the head, it became obscenely clear: he—he was one of them, too . . . And all of me, all of my suffering, everything I, on the brink of death, had brought here, with the last of my strength, like an epic hero—all of it was just a joke, like that ancient joke about Isaac and Abraham. Abraham, in a cold sweat, already holding the knife over his son when suddenly, he hears the voice from above, “Don’t worry about it. I was just kidding.”

Without taking my eyes off that ever more crooked grin, I pushed off against the edge of the table and slowly, slowly slid back with the chair. Then I hurriedly gathered myself up and ran for my life, past the shouting, the mouths, and the stairs.

I don’t remember how I ended up down there, in one of the public restrooms in the underground station. Up above, it was all crashing down, the greatest, most rational civilization in history was falling, while down here—it was as if somebody thought it’d be funny if everything was the same as ever, perfect and beautiful. And to think: all this was doomed, it will all be grown over with grasses and only live on in “myths” . . .

I gave a loud, agonized moan. Right then, I felt somebody tenderly stroking my shoulder.

It was my neighbor, on the seat to my left. His forehead, a giant bald yellow parabola, inscribed with illegible wrinkles. These wrinkles were about me.

“I understand you, I really do,” he said. “But still, calm yourself: no need to panic. All of it will come back, it’s completely inevitable. The most important thing is that everyone learns of my discovery. You’re the first person I’m telling: I’ve done the calculations—there’s no such thing as infinity!”

I gave him a wild look.

“Yes, yes, I’m telling you: there’s no such thing as infinity. If the world is infinite, then the average density of its matter must equal zero. But since, as we know, it’s not zero—the universe is finite and spherical and the square of its radius, y^2 = the average density multiplied by . . . I just need to calculate the numerical coefficient and then . . . You see? It’s all totally finite and simple. All of it can be calculated. Then, we will have our philosophical victory—you understand? And you, my honorable neighbor, are keeping me from completing my calculations, you are screaming . . .”

I don’t know what I found more shocking: his discovery or how steadfast he was in that apocalyptic hour. He was holding (I had just noticed) a notebook and a logarithmic dial. I realized: even if everything dies, my duty (before you, my unknown darlings) is to leave behind my completed log.

I asked him for a piece of paper—and on it, I’ve written these final lines . . .

I wanted to put down a period—like the Ancients put crosses over the pits where they threw their dead, but suddenly, the pencil started shaking and fell out of my hand . . .

“Listen!” I grabbed my neighbor. “Listen to me! You must—you have to tell me: at the end of your finite universe—what happens next?”

He didn’t get the chance to answer. From above, down the steps, stamping feet—

Log 40

BRIEF:

The Facts. The Bell. I Am Certain.

Daylight. It’s clear. The barometer: 760. Was it really me, D-503, who wrote these two hundred and sixty pages? Was it really me who once felt—or imagined he felt—any of this?

The handwriting is mine. And what follows is in the exactly same handwriting but, thankfully, only the handwriting is the same. No more delirious nonsense, no crazy metaphors, no feelings: just facts. Because now, I am healthy. I am completely and totally healthy. I’m smiling—I can’t help smiling: a splinter has been removed from my head and now it is empty and light. Rather: not empty, but there is nothing foreign in it that would keep me from smiling (smiling is the normal state of a normal person).

The facts are as follows. That evening, my neighbor who had discovered the finite nature of the universe and I and everyone else without an Operation Certificate were taken to the nearest auditorium (the number was familiar for some reason: 112). We were tied down and finally given the Great Operation.

On the following day, I, D-503, reported to the Benefactor and told Him everything I knew about the enemies of happiness. Why had this seemed so hard to me before? I can’t understand. The only explanation is my former illness (a soul).

In the evening of that same day, I sat at a table with Him, the Benefactor (for the first time) in the famous Gas Room. They brought in that woman. She was supposed to confess in my presence. The woman was stubbornly silent and smiling. I noticed that she had sharp and very white teeth and that this was beautiful.

They put her under the Bell. Her face became very white, and because her eyes were dark and large, this was very beautiful. When they started pumping the air out of the Bell—she flung her head back, half-closed her eyes, and pressed her lips together tightly—it reminded me of something. She looked back at me, digging her fingers into the arms of the chair—and kept looking at me like that until her eyes closed completely. Then they took her out and quickly revived her using electrodes before putting her back under the Bell. This happened three times and still she would not say a word. The others brought in with this woman turned out more honest: many of them started talking after the very first try. Tomorrow they will all go up the steps of the Benefactor’s Machine.

There is no time to waste—the western sectors are still in chaos: wailing, dead bodies, wild animals, and—unfortunately—a great many numbers who have betrayed reason.

But we were able to construct a temporary Wall of high-voltage waves on the transverse, 40th Avenue. And, I hope, we will win. Moreover, I’m certain: we’ll win. For reason must win in the end.

Freedom and Happiness

Review of WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, 1946

Several years after hearing of its existence, I have at last got my hands on a copy of Zamyatin’s WE, which is one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age. Looking it up in Gleb Struve’s 25 Years of Soviet Russian Literature, I find its history to have been this:

Zamyatin, who died in Paris in 1937, was a Russian novelist and critic who published a number of books both before and after the Revolution. WE was written about 1923, and though it is not about Russia and has no direct connection with contemporary politics—it is a fantasy dealing with the twenty-sixth century AD—it was refused publication on the ground that it was ideologically undesirable. A copy of the manuscript found its way out of the country, and the book has appeared in English, French, and Czech translations, but never in Russian. The English translation was published in the United States, and I have never been able to procure a copy: but copies of the French translation (the title is Nous Autres) do exist, and I have at last succeeded in borrowing one. So far as I can judge it is not a book of the first order, but it is certainly an unusual one, and it is astonishing that no English publisher has been enterprising enough to re-issue it.

The first thing anyone would notice about WE is the fact—never pointed out, I believe—that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it. Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalized, mechanized, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence. The atmosphere of the two books is similar, and it is roughly speaking the same kind of society that is being described, though Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories.

In the twenty-sixth century, in Zamyatin’s vision of it, the inhabitants of Utopia have so completely lost their individuality as to be known only by numbers. They live in glass houses (this was written before television was invented), which enables the political police, known as the “Guardians,” to supervise them more easily. They all wear identical uniforms, and a human being is commonly referred to either as “a number” or “a unif” (uniform). They live on synthetic food, and their usual recreation is to march in fours while the Anthem of the Single State is played through loudspeakers. At stated intervals they are allowed for one hour (known as “the sex hour”) to lower the curtains round their glass apartments. There is, of course, no marriage, though sex life does not appear to be completely promiscuous. For purposes of love-making everyone has a sort of ration book of pink tickets, and the partner with whom he spends one of his allotted sex hours signs the counterfoil. The Single State is ruled over by a personage known as the Benefactor, who is annually re-elected by the entire population, the vote being always unanimous. The guiding principle of the State is that happiness and freedom are incompatible. In the Garden of Eden man was happy, but in his folly he demanded freedom and was driven out into the wilderness. Now the Single State has restored his happiness by removing his freedom.

So far the resemblance with Brave New World is striking. But though Zamyatin’s book is less well put together—it has a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarize—it has a political point which the other lacks. In Huxley’s book the problem of “human nature” is in a sense solved, because it assumes that by prenatal treatment, drugs, and hypnotic suggestion the human organism can be specialized in any way that is desired. A first-rate scientific worker is as easily produced as an Epsilon semi-moron, and in either case the vestiges of primitive instincts, such as maternal feeling or the desire for liberty, are easily dealt with. At the same time no clear reason is given why society should be stratified in the elaborate way that is described. The aim is not economic exploitation, but the desire to bully and dominate does not seem to be a motive either. There is no power-hunger, no sadism, no hardness of any kind. Those at the top have no strong motive for staying at the top, and though everyone is happy in a vacuous way, life has become so pointless that it is difficult to believe that such a society could endure.

Zamyatin’s book is on the whole more relevant to our own situation. In spite of education and the vigilance of the Guardians, many of the ancient human instincts are still there. The teller of the story, D-503, who, though a gifted engineer, is a poor conventional creature, a sort of Utopian Billy Brown of London Town, is constantly horrified by the atavistic impulses which seize upon him. He falls in love (this is a crime, of course) with a certain I-330, who is a member of an underground resistance movement and succeeds for a while in leading him into rebellion. When the rebellion breaks out it appears that the enemies of the Benefactor are in fact fairly numerous, and these people, apart from plotting the overthrow of the State, even indulge, at the moment when their curtains are down, in such vices as smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. D-503 is ultimately saved from the consequences of his own folly. The authorities announce that they have discovered the cause of the recent disorders: it is that some human beings suffer from a disease called imagination. The nerve-center responsible for imagination has now been located, and the disease can be cured by X-ray treatment. D-503 undergoes the operation, after which it is easy for him to do what he has known all along that he ought to do—that is, betray his confederates to the police. With complete equanimity he watches I-330 tortured by means of compressed air under a glass bell:

She looked at me, her hands clasping the arms of the chair, until her eyes were completely shut. They took her out, brought her to herself by means of an electric shock, and put her under the bell again. This operation was repeated three times, and not a word issued from her lips.

The others who had been brought along with her showed themselves more honest. Many of them confessed after one application. Tomorrow they will all be sent to the Machine of the Benefactor.

The Machine of the Benefactor is the guillotine. There are many executions in Zamyatin’s Utopia. They take place publicly, in the presence of the Benefactor, and are accompanied by triumphal odes recited by the official poets. The guillotine, of course, is not the old crude instrument but a much improved model which literally liquidates its victim, reducing him in an instant to a puff of smoke and a pool of clear water. The execution is, in fact, a human sacrifice, and the scene describing it is given deliberately the color of the sinister slave civilizations of the ancient world. It is this intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes—that makes Zamyatin’s book superior to Huxley’s.

It is easy to see why the book was refused publication. The following conversation (I abridge it slightly) between D-503 and I-330 would have been quite enough to set the blue pencils working:

“Do you realize that what you are suggesting is revolution?”

“Of course, it’s revolution. Why not?”

“Because there can’t be a revolution. Our revolution was the last and there can never be another. Everybody knows that.”

“My dear, you’re a mathematician: tell me, which is the last number?”

“What do you mean, the last number?”

“Well, then, the biggest number!”

“But that’s absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can’t be a last one.”

“Then why do you talk about the last revolution?”

There are other similar passages. It may well be, however, that Zamyatin did not intend the Soviet regime to be the special target of his satire. Writing at about the time of Lenin’s death, he cannot have had the Stalin dictatorship in mind, and conditions in Russia in 1923 were not such that anyone would revolt against them on the ground that life was becoming too safe and comfortable. What Zamyatin seems to be aiming at is not any particular country but the implied aims of industrial civilization. I have not read any of his other books, but I learn from Gleb Struve that he had spent several years in England and had written some blistering satires on English life. It is evident from WE that he had a strong leaning toward primitivism. Imprisoned by the czarist government in 1906, and then imprisoned by the Bolsheviks in 1922 in the same corridor of the same prison, he had cause to dislike the political regime he had lived under, but his book is not simply the expression of a grievance. It is in effect a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again. This is a book to look out for when an English version appears.

Published in Tribune, 4 January 1946.

The Stalin in the Soul

Sketch for a Science Fiction Novel Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973–7

Our hero, Y., a naval engineer, is in a foreign country when at last the Revolution breaks out at home. Having always been a radical, to the extent of undergoing several arrests, interrogations, jail sentences, and house arrests, he hurries home to greet the dawn of the new day.

A talented writer, he joins a group of young authors who, free of the old censorship, are experimenting with a lively and iconoclastic art. He soon wins a high reputation as a writer. But the period of freedom lasts only a few years. As the revolution consolidates its hard-won victory and solidifies into an effective government, Y. does not solidify with it; he remains a heretic. His stance is independent, ironic, and critical. He accepts no value and no reward without question. Therefore the new government sees him as unpatriotic, destructive, dangerous—just as the old one did. Y. doesn’t mind; he enjoys danger. He goes on writing. At the height of his creative powers, he writes a novel. It is a science fiction novel, a negative Utopia. It is a brilliant testimony against the growing rigidity and authoritarianism of his nation, and a passionate affirmation of liberty. It is a romantic, imaginative, intelligent, powerful, and beautiful book—perhaps the finest science fiction novel ever written. The manuscript must be submitted for governmental approval before publication. It is not approved.

Three years later, a smuggled copy of the manuscript is printed abroad; translations are made and the book appears in many languages—but not his own language in his own land.

Ten years later, worn out by the ceaseless campaign waged against him by bureaucrats and fellow writers currying favor with the government, he requests that the chief of state grant him permission to leave the country. “I beg to be permitted to go abroad,” he writes, “with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men.” Scarcely a humble letter, but his request is granted. He goes to Paris. Those of his friends who stayed home are, one by one, silenced by censorship, or by trial and imprisonment, or execution. Y’s escape is only apparent; he is as silent now as his friends in prison camps or the common graves. He tries to make a living writing movie scripts, but writes nothing of any importance. After seven years of exile, he dies.

Thirty-six years later, fifty-two years after it was written, now in 1973, his great novel has still not been published in his own country.

This is, of course, a sketch for a true novel—a biography. Y. is Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin; his novel, which I do consider the best single work of science fiction yet written, is called WE in English. In Russia it has, in a sense, no name. It does not exist. It was censored.

ON CENSORSHIP BY THE MARKET

Zamyatin’s life was a tragedy; it was also a triumph, because he never used power against his enemies; he never used violence; he was not even vindictive. He spoke up, loud and clear, with wit and courage, as long as he could speak without betraying what he loved; when as an exile he could do so no longer, he fell silent.

He is worth keeping in mind, because in America when we talk about censorship we tend to whine. Radicals whine at the Establishment; the White House whines at the Press—you’re not fair, you’re biased, you suppress the truth—you just wait, I’m gonna get you yet.

The only way to defeat suppression, oppression, and censorship—and where there is institutionalized power, there is censorship—is to refuse it. Not to reply to it in kind—if you try to silence me I’ll try to silence you—but to refuse both its means and its ends. To bypass it entirely. To be larger than it is. That is precisely what Zamyatin was. He was larger in spirit than his enemies, and he consciously refused to let their smallness infect him and decrease his stature. He would not play the dirty little games. He would not admit Stalin into his soul.

To achieve anything like that conscious refusal, one must consider the whole question of censorship urgently and earnestly. The suppression of material called pornographic is only one aspect of the issue and, in my opinion, not a central one; though the recent regressive decision by the Supreme Court has reopened the whole battle on that flank. Again, direct political censorship is, in the United States, only one aspect of the issue. Urgent as it is, when the Government can call anything it likes “Classified” and bury it, when the police and the IRS are used to harass avowed or suspected Marxist writers, again it is not—yet—the central issue. It affects only some of us. What affects every writer, every book published in the United States, is censorship by the market.

We are not a totalitarian state; we continue to be a democracy in more than name—but a capitalist, corporate democracy. Our form of censorship rises from the nature of our institutions. Our censors are the idols of the marketplace.

For this reason our form of censorship is unusually fluid and changeable; one should never feel sure one has defined it. Suppressions occur before one is aware of them; they occur behind one’s eyes.

We have no Zhdanov saying, “You must not criticize the Government; you must not write about unhappy things. You must write about brave soldiers of the Fatherland and happy workers in the hydroelectric plants. You must be a socialist realist, and you must smile.” There are no such orders, no absolute standards, either positive or negative. The only standard, in the marketplace, is Will it sell? And that is inherently a broad, and constantly changing standard.

Where the market reigns, fashion reigns. The fine arts, like the art of costume, cooking, furnishing, etc., become subject to a constant pressure to change, since novelty, regardless of quality, is a marketable value, a publicizable value. It is, of course, a very limited kind of novelty. The skirt up or down two inches; the lapel half an inch wider; the novel’s dead this year, but fictionalized journalism is big; in science fiction, Holocaust is out, but Environment is in. Pop art, so called, was the pure essence of art as commodity: soup cans. Genuine newness, genuine originality, is suspect. Unless it is something familiar rewarmed, or something experimental in form but clearly trivial or cynical in content, it is unsafe. It must be safe. It mustn’t hurt the consumers. It mustn’t change the consumers. Shock them, épater le bourgeois, certainly, that’s been done for a hundred and fifty years now, that’s the oldest game going. Shock them, jolt them, titillate them, make them writhe and squeal—but do not make them think. If they think, they may not come back for the next can of soup.

The almost limitless freedom of form available to the modern artist is, I think, a function of this trivialization of art. If art is taken seriously by its creators or consumers, that total permissiveness disappears, and the possibility of the truly revolutionary reappears. If art is seen as sport, without moral significance, or if it is seen as self-expression, without rational significance, or if it is seen as a marketable commodity, without social significance, then anything goes. To cover a cliff with six acres of plastic film is no more and no less “creative” than to paint “The Creation of Adam” on the Sistine ceiling. But if art is seen as having moral, intellectual, and social content, if real statement is considered possible, then, on the artist’s side, self-discipline becomes a major element of creation. And on the audience’s side, the middlemen begin to fret. The publishers, the gallery owners, the entrepreneurs, the producers, the marketeers, become uneasy. In so far as they are in the business for money, they are happier if art is not taken seriously.[*] Soup cans are much easier. They want products to sell, quick turnover, built-in obsolescence. They do not want large, durable, real, frightening things.

At moments I find the most frightening man now alive to be Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I have lived in the same world as Stalin and Hitler, and in the same country as Joe McCarthy and G. Gordon Liddy, and they have all scared me. But none of them so much as Solzhenitsyn does, because none of them has had his power: the power to make me ask myself, Am I doing right?

I wonder if the reason why we have no Solzhenitsyn in this country (and no Pasternak, no Zamyatin, no Tolstoy) is that we do not believe in the possibility of having one. Because we do not believe in the reality of art. The strange thing about the Russians is that they do believe in art, in the power of art to change the minds of men. That is why they censor it. It is also why they have a Solzhenitsyn. It has been said that every country has the government that it deserves. I would add that every people has the artists it deserves.[*]

SKETCH FOR A NATURALISTIC NOVEL

Our hero, X., was a mathematics teacher in high school, who wrote stories on the side. He sent a couple off to science fiction magazines; they sold, and he began to meet some SF fans. The more he saw of the writer’s life, the better he liked it. So he decided, enough of teaching maths, I am a writer, capital W.

But he had to eat.

So before he got to work on the big novel he planned, he did a potboiler, sword-and-sorcery, since that was selling well, called Vulg the Visigoth. It was successful, and the publisher asked him to make it a series. So he did. And eight years later, he is still writing about Vulg the Visigoth. The latest one, #14, is called The Rape of the Eldritch Ichor.

Revised ending. He started to write his big novel, but a friend told him what good money there was in porn while the boom was still on, and offered to agent his stuff for him. Eight years later he is still writing porn. The latest one is called Deep Armpit.

Revised ending #2. It was not porn, but comic-book continuity. Or true romances? Or international spy thrillers? However, he is still going to write that serious novel, as soon as he has paid for the air conditioner and the electric can opener.

Revised ending #3. He wrote the novel. It was good, and it sold well. But reading it in print he realized that it was not quite the book he had wanted it to be. It was a first novel, and he realized he had a lot to learn; but he knew he could learn. The next book would be better, and the one after that, if he learned his trade, would be the best SF novel yet. But this first one got picked up by a movie studio. They offered him fifty thousand dollars for the rights. When he came to, he packed up and went to Hollywood. And now, eight years later, he is a successful scriptwriter for films and TV. What he writes gets changed a good deal, almost emasculated you might say, before it is produced, but does that matter to a man who makes sixty thousand a year? He has never gotten around to writing the next novel, but he is going to, after he’s paid for the heated swimming pool and the ninth wife.

So after a life of fame and fortune, he dies.

Thirty-six years later, fifty-two years later, his great novel has never been published in his own country. Or in any other country. It never will be. He never wrote it. He accepted the judgment of the censor. He accepted, unquestioningly, the values of his society. And the price of unquestioning acceptance is silence.

PRIVILEGE, PARANOIA, PASSIVITY

The saddest thing about Mr. X. is that he was a free man. We are all free. We are free not only to write fuck and shit, and to spell America with a k; we are free to write what we please. This freedom was won for us by artists and by just men of law and government during the first half of this century, in so far as it was not already established in the Constitution of 1783. It exists. We are free, freer perhaps than any writer or public has ever been.[*]

Recently, I read in Giovanni Grazzini’s fascinating book on Solzhenitsyn the following passage:

The cultural industry, vanity, the resentment felt by intellectuals at seeing power slipping from their hands, have so obscured the vision of Western writers as to make them believe that not being persecuted by the police is a privilege.

I am very slow indeed. I puzzled over that sentence for three days before I understood what Grazzini meant. He meant of course, that it is not a privilege, but a right.

The Constitution, which is a revolutionary document, is absolutely clear on that point. It does not grant us, permit us, allow us freedom of speech. It gives the government no such authority. It recognizes freedom of speech as a right—as a fact.

A government cannot grant that right. It can only accept it, or deny it and withhold it by force.

Ours mostly accepts it; Russia mostly denies it. But we do not have any privilege that Zamyatin did not have. We have, simply, the same inalienable right.

But they have used theirs. They have acted. Have we?

A story of mine once appeared in the magazine Playboy with the byline “U.K. Le Guin.” This is because after the fiction editor had accepted the story, someone else in the firm wrote me asking if they could use the initial of my first name only, saying rather touchingly, “Many of our readers are frightened by stories by women authors.” At the time this struck me as merely funny, and I agreed, even furthering their obfuscation by writing, in the biographical form they sent me for their about-the-authors page, “The stories of U.K. Le Guin are not written by U.K. Le Guin, but by another person of the same name.” I don’t think I thought any more about it than to feel slightly amused, slightly scornful, and to decide, vaguely, that since they paid writers so well they had a right to their little whims. So my work appeared censored. That is, my first name, in other words my sex, was suppressed. The suppression of this single, though rather significant, word is the only instance I know of direct market censorship in my works. There are certainly other effects of market censorship in my works, but I think no direct ones. That is why I mention this one. It was so obvious. And yet I accepted it. To be sure, these things are more obvious now; our consciousnesses have all been raised. But I was a feminist in 1968 . . .[*]

Why couldn’t I see that I was selling out?

When there are no formal rules, no thou shalts and thou shalt nots, it is difficult to notice, even, that one is being censored. It is all so painless. It is still more difficult to understand that one may be censoring oneself, extensively, ruthlessly—because that act of self-censorship is called, with full social approval, “writing for a market”; it is even used by some writers as the test and shibboleth for that most admired state of being, “professionalism.”

Indeed, to distinguish free enterprise from self-censorship takes a most uncomfortable degree of vigilance. And that so easily becomes paranoia.

After all, a book may be rejected simply because it is a bad job. Editors have taste, skill, and standards. The defense of countless utterly inept writers is, “They’re afraid to print my work!” It is very easy indeed to join that crew, and start seeing conspiracies in every rejection slip. How can you be sure?

I know many rumors of books being refused by publisher after publisher because the subject matter was considered dangerous; but I know no facts. Until I do I cannot discuss these cases, I can only hazard a guess concerning certain such cases within the science fiction field: that the books were not “subversive” or “shocking”—whatever that could mean now—but that they were serious, morally, ethically, socially serious, and that this quality of seriousness struck the publisher as a very unsafe investment.

“Serious” is an inadequate word. I wish I could find another, but “sincere” has been murdered by President Nixon, and “authentic” by the fancy critics, and there is no adjectival form of “integrity,” which is the quality I am talking about. Integrity, plus intelligence. An author who thinks out a major subject thoroughly, who feels the subject intensely, and who talks about it clearly, that is what I mean. The word “clearly,” of course, does not imply logic, expository prose, naturalism, or any other specific device; clarity in art is achieved by means that suit the end in view, which may be extremely subtle, complex, and obscure. The skilled use of such means is the artist’s art. And the use of them involves considerable pain.

The recent fantasy bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a serious book, unmistakably sincere. It is also intellectually, ethically, and emotionally trivial. The author has not thought things through. He is pushing one of the beautifully packaged Instant Answers we specialize in in this country. He says that if you think you can fly very fast, why, then you can fly very fast. And if you smile, all is well. All the world is well. When you smile, you just know that that man dying of gangrene in Cambodia and that starving four-year-old in Bangladesh and the woman next door with cancer will feel ever so much better, and they’ll smile too. This wishful thinking, this callous refusal to admit the existence of pain, defeat, and death, is not only typical of successful American writing, but also of Soviet writers who “succeeded” where a Zamyatin “failed”—the Stalin Prize winners, with their horrible optimism. Once you stop asking questions, once you let Stalin into your soul, you can only smile, and smile, and smile.

The smile, of course, may become the grin of despair, the rictus of the skull, an expression fashionable among more sophisticated readers. Recent science fiction, for instance, is full of edifying and hideous pictures of terrible futures—overpopulated worlds where people eat each other in the form of green cookies; post-holocaust mutants behaving in approved Social Darwinist fashion; nine billion people dying various awful deaths by pollution at the rate of a billion per chapter, and so on. I have done this myself; I plead guilty. Because none of this involves real thought or real commitment. The death of civilization, the death of a species, is used the way the death of an individual is used in murder mysteries—to provide the reader a cheap thrill. The writer holds up a picture of overpopulation, or universal pollution, or atomic war, and everybody says Ugh! Agh! Yecchh! That is a “gut reaction,” a perfectly sincere one. But it is not an act of intelligence and it is not a moral act.

Man does not live by gut alone. Reaction is not action.

Novels of despair are intended, most often, to be admonitory, but I think they are, like pornography, most often escapist, in that they provide a substitute for action, a draining-off of tension. That is why they sell well. They provide an excuse to scream, for writer and reader. A gut reaction, nothing further. An automatic response to violence—a mindless response. When you start screaming, you have stopped asking questions.

Despite all disclaimers, it is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atomic bomb, and then puts its hands over its eyes and says, My God, what have I done?

When art shows only how and what, it is trivial entertainment, whether optimistic or despairing. When it asks why, it rises from mere emotional response to real statement, and to intelligent ethical choice. It becomes, not a passive reflection, but an act.

And that is when all the censors, of the governments and of the marketplace, become afraid of it.

But our censors are not just the publishers and editors and distributors and publicists and book clubs and syndicated reviewers. They are the writers, and the readers. They are you and me. We censor ourselves. We writers fail to write seriously, because we’re afraid—for good cause—that it won’t sell. And as readers we fail to discriminate; we accept passively what is for sale in the marketplace; we buy it, read it, and forget it. We are mere “viewers” and “consumers,” not readers at all. Reading is not a passive reaction, but an action, involving the mind, the emotions, and the will. To accept trashy books because they are “bestsellers” is the same thing as accepting adulterated food, ill-made machines, corrupt government, and military and corporate tyranny, and praising them, and calling them the American Way of Life or the American Dream. It is a betrayal of reality. Every betrayal, every lie accepted, leads to the next betrayal and the next lie.

Let Yevgeny Zamyatin, who understood something about truth, have the last word.

A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday’s clock, nor by today’s, but by tomorrow’s. It is a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible from the deck.

In a storm you must have a man aloft. We are in the midst of a storm today, and SOS signals come from every side. Only yesterday a writer could calmly stroll along the deck, clicking his Kodak; but who will want to look at landscapes and genre scenes when the world is listing at a forty-five-degree angle, the green maws are gaping, the hull is creaking? Today we can look and think only as men do in the face of death: we are about to die—and what did it all mean? How have we lived? If we could start all over, from the beginning, what would we live by? And for what? What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons—horizons seen from mastheads, from airplanes; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless “Why?” and “What next?”

What is truly alive stops before nothing and ceaselessly seeks answers to absurd, childish questions. Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken—errors are more valuable than truths; truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow’s stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.

If there were anything fixed in nature, if there were truths, all this would, of course, be wrong. But fortunately, all truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today’s truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.[*]

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution. There is no final number.

Translator’s Note

Bela Shayevich

I would like to express my debt to the many adept and inventive translators who have cleared this path before me. I am particularly grateful for the WEs of Natasha Randall and Clarence Brown, whose interpretive maneuvers were instrumental to my reading of this sometimes opaque and often fragmentary text. I would also like to pay my dues to Gregory Zilboorg, WE’s first English-language translator. Published in 1924, Zilboorg’s WE was its first official appearance in any language. Consulting it, I found that not only does it still feel fresh, but, alas, Zilboorg’s solutions are often more simple and elegant than those of his heirs. So much for reinventing the wheel.

When I was asked to do this translation, I had never read WE. Yes: it was because I was prejudiced. I didn’t want any part in what I imagined would be tedious world-building based on a primitive grasp of technology with maybe a little prudish love-making on the side. It was also because I knew that WE was a precursor to 1984, which I didn’t read for similar reasons—I had no interest in a book routinely deployed as a vaccine against Communism. I was born in the Soviet Union: I didn’t need to hear it from an Englishman (I had no idea that Orwell was a devoted, lifelong socialist, as was Zamyatin).

Naturally, my initial resistance only catapulted me toward greater delight. I would have never guessed I’d encounter a female character as exciting and as complex as I-330 (and I attribute this fact to what I know of Zamyatin’s wife, who inducted him into radical politics). The language—it’s remarkable how that jagged and ruthlessly fat-free early Soviet aesthetic doesn’t grow any less radical or appealing with age. And if there’s still any doubt regarding this book’s artistic value, I can assure you that there is no truer mark of a wild, bona fide work of art than a scene where a chair has sex with a man.

Yes: WE has something for everyone. For leftists, newly invigorated by recent political cataclysms, it’s an invective against rigidity and self-righteousness. The revolution is endless, my comrades. For those who believe in the sleek, open-plan future augured by the proliferation of automation, AI, and algorithms, joyously heralding the merger of man and machine: you cannot mechanize humanity without reducing its faculties. Furthermore, humans will not submit without violent resistance.

I happen to be blessed with a teenage brother, Lev, who has a decidedly more technocentric bent. Lev is a talented pianist, but one evening, he told me that he believed that a time would come when machines played the piano just as well as humans. As a student of the humanities with a fetish for ambiguity and a translator’s resigned reverence for the inexact, I was surprised that the spiritual significance and irreducibility of human irrationality still needed defending. After all, the century between Zamyatin and me has seen a splintering of monolithic beliefs across arts and cultures, the rise of postmodernism, alongside a growing faith in the value of individual, “subjective” experience in the sciences.

“History moves in circles,” said D-503. Of course, he was thinking of spirals, but, in accordance with the One State’s dictates, his thinking was two-dimensional. By this logic, history doesn’t move. But this is exactly how the One State wants its citizens thinking in a “perfectly circular” fashion. Likewise, D-503 ends the book close to where he started it: as a loyal citizen of the One State, glorifier of its triumphs and hater of its enemies, lulled and lobotomized into believing in the absolute and inevitable triumph of “reason.” Is this “perfectly circular”? No: something important had to be lost to achieve this. Is it rational? Of course not: rationality cannot exist without the irrational; reason can only organize at its edges. Returning to the point where this needs to be proven again: we still live under the same capitalist forces that inaugurated man’s mechanization two hundred years ago; that terrified Zamyatin one hundred years later, even as they were deployed in the name of Communism; that continue to rule to this day. They are the ones who want you to think that machines will rescue humanity as they destroy it. Indeed, they are even turning our growing appreciation of individual will and liberty against us, atomizing us, making us weaker to fight them.

As for the piano, my argument was that the only important assessment of art was subjective. We are affected by what is human in art, not a “perfection” that can be replicated by a machine. In WE, this also plays out on the piano: D-503 weeps when he sees I-330 play, even though he is ashamed to be so affected by such irrational, irregular music. While he rejects Scriabin in favor of the smooth waves of the “musicometer,” it is precisely when he sees I-330 play the “royale” that he falls in love with her—just as she had intended. It was not simply the music that made this happen, it was her, the performer, in her skintight black dress, embodying its passion. And it’s me, with my passion, endorsing this argument in my translation and continuing it here, Lev. This book is for you.

And yet, more than anything else, WE is a book against dogma in any direction. Even while resurrecting the Grand Inquisitor’s insurmountable argument about the burden of freedom, it doesn’t resolve it in favor of any doctrine. The protagonist ends his journey happy and enslaved, but he is not the ecstatic sinner finally submitting to the true God—he is a lobotomy victim blankly watching the love of his life get murdered. Ultimately, WE’s answer to the Grand Inquisitor echoes the faith later expressed by anti-Soviet poet Vsevolod Nekrasov:

freedom is
freedom is
freedom is
freedom is
freedom

Yes.

29 June 2020

Northbrook-on-Glenview

About the Author

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN was a Russian novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and essayist who was most famous for his 1921 novel We, which was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Zamyatin arranged for the novel to be smuggled into the West for publication, later leading to his exile from his homeland and establishing his reputation as one of the first Soviet dissidents. He died in Paris in 1937.

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Also by Yevgeny Zamyatin

SHORT STORIES

Big Kids’ Fairytales

The Dragon and Other Stories

Islanders and The Fisher of Men

NONFICTION

A Soviet Heretic: Essays

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

WE. Copyright © 1920 by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Translation and Translator’s Note copyright © 2020 by Bela Shayevich. Introduction copyright © 2020 by O.W. Toad Ltd. “Freedom and Happiness” (review of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin) © 1946 by George Orwell. “The Stalin in the Soul” copyright © 1989 by Ursula K. Le Guin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ecco® and HarperCollins® are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.

Cover design by Elizabeth Yaffe

Cover art: The Gorgon Stare by Michael Kerbow © 2015

Originally published in Great Britain in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd.

FIRST U.S. EDITION

Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-306845-2

Version 08192021

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-306844-5

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*Probably from the ancient “uniforme.”

*This word has survived solely as a poetic metaphor: the chemical composition of this substance is not known.

*Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), considered the greatest Russian poet of all time. Pushkin was of African ancestry. This allusion to him emphasizes his relationship to One State poet R-13, with whom he shares “African” characteristics. Their relationship is the origin of WE’s racism.—B.S.

*Here, we are speaking not of “God’s Law” of the Ancients, but of the Law of the One State.

*Which came, of course, from the Botanical Museum. I personally don’t see anything beautiful about flowers or anything else from the savage world that was chased out beyond the Green Wall long ago. Only things that are useful and rational are beautiful: machines, boots, formulas, food, etc.

*I must say that I only found the precise solution to this smile many days (filled with the strangest and most unusual events) later.

*I was already in eyeshot of the opaque and red—this phrase is missing in the most authoritative Russian manuscript of WE. However, B. Cahvet Duhmal’s 1929 French translation, Nous autres, renders it as “J’apercevais déjà de loin la masse opaque et rouge.” This and Gregory Zilboorg’s original 1924 English-language version have served as the reference points for my translation. —B.S.

*This was a long time ago, in the Third Century after the Table.

*My qualifier, “in so far as they are in the business for money,” clearly exempts many publishers—at least in their fiction and poetry departments—from this accusation. But for the perfect example of what I am talking about, one might look at the creation of a “bestseller” through promotion; or at the publication and distribution habits of several major SF publishers.

*(Author’s note, 1978): This was written in the early 1970s, before Solzhenitsyn left the Soviet Union.

*(Note, 1989). The problem with our freedom, of course, is who “we” are. The freedom “won for us by just men,” for example, was to a large extent freedom for men, not for women. Fortunately, freedom tends away from exclusivity, toward mutuality; as all tyrants know, the more freedom there is the more people want. There couldn’t have been women’s suffrage, historically speaking, if there hadn’t been male suffrage. And as women continue the struggle initiated by just women of the past century to win and hold freedom for ourselves, men will find themselves further liberated in that measure.

*(Note, 1989). Well, I was beginning to be one, anyhow.

*The Zamyatin quotation is slightly condensed and rearranged from the essay “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters” in Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic, edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Contents

Cover
Title Page
Contents
Introduction by Margaret Atwood

WE Logs:

1. Announcement. The Wisest Line. An Epic.

2. Ballet. Quadratic Harmony. X.

3. Jacket. Wall. The Table of Hours.

4. The Savage and the Barometer. Epilepsy. If Only.

5. A Square. Masters of the World. A Pleasant and Useful Function.

6. An Incident. That Damned “Clear.” Twenty-Four Hours.

7. An Eyelash. Taylor. Henbane and Lilies of the Valley.

8. An Irrational Root. R-13. The Triangle.

9. Liturgy. Iambs and Trochees. The Iron Hand.

10. A Letter. Membrane. My Hairy Self.

11. No, I Can’t, No Brief This Time.

12. Limited Infinities. An Angel. Thoughts About Poetry.

13. Fog. You. A Completely Improbable Incident.

14. “Mine.” Mustn’t. The Cold Floor.

15. The Bell. The Mirroring Sea. I Will Burn Eternally.

16. Yellow. Two-Dimensional Shadow. Incurable Soul.

17. Through the Glass. I Died. Hallways.

18. A Jungle of Logic. Wounds and Bandages. Never Again.

19. An Infinitesimal of the Third Order. Under the Brow. Over the Balustrade.

20. Discharge. What an Idea Is Made Of. Zero Cliff.

21. My Duty as an Author. Swollen Ice. The Most Difficult Love.

22. Frozen Waves. Everything Is Perfected. I Am a Microbe.

23. Flowers. Dissolving Crystal. As Long As.

24. Function Limits. Easter. Cross It All Out.

25. The Descent from the Heavens. The Greatest Catastrophe in History. The End of Everything Known.

26. The World Exists. A Rash. 41°.

27. No Brief—It’s Impossible.

28. Both of Them. Entropy and Energy. An Opaque Part of the Body.

29. Face Threads. Shoots. Unnatural Compression.

30. The Final Number. Galileo’s Mistake. Wouldn’t It Be Better?

31. The Great Operation. I Forgave Everything. Crashing Trains.

32. I Don’t Believe It. Tractors. A Sliver of Humanity.

33. (No Summary, In a Hurry, the Last Thing.)

34. Freedmen. A Sunny Night. Radio Valkyrie.

35. In a Hoop. Carrot. Murder.

36. Blank Pages. The Christian God. About My Mother.

37. Infusoria. Doomsday. Her Room.

38. (Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the Entire Thing Is Just This: A Discarded Cigarette.)

39. The End.
40. The Facts. The Bell. I Am Certain.
Freedom and Happiness by George Orwell
The Stalin in the Soul by Ursula K. Le Guin
Translator’s Note by Bela Shayevich
About the Author
Also by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Copyright
About the Publisher

Guide

1. Cover
2. Contents
3. Introduction by Margaret Atwood

III
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104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
I
II
IV