nothing. I shall tell you later. He got here by accident. Tell them that I shall be back in about a quarter of an hour.”
The doctor slid around the corner. She lingered. The door closed with a heavy thud. Then slowly, very slowly, piercing my heart with a sharp sweet needle, I-330 pressed against me with her shoulder and then with her arm, with her whole body, and we walked away as if fused into one.
I do not remember now where we turned into darkness; in the darkness we walked up some endless stairway in silence. I did not see but I knew, I knew that she walked as I did, with closed eyes, blind, her head thrown a little backward, biting her lips and listening to the music, that is to say, to my almost audible tremor.
I returned to consciousness in one of the innumerable nooks in the courtyard of the Ancient House. There was a fence of earth with naked stone ribs and yellow teeth of walls half fallen to pieces. She opened her eyes and said, “Day-after-tomorrow at sixteen.” She was gone.
Did all this really happen? I do not know. I shall learn day-after-tomorrow. One real sign remains: on my right hand the skin has been rubbed from the tips of three fingers. But today, on the Integral the Second Builder assured me that he saw me touch the polishing wheel with those very same fingers. Perhaps I did. It is quite probable. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.
Record Eighteen
Logical Debris
Wounds and Plaster
Never Again
Last night as soon as I had gone to bed, I fell momentarily to the bottom of the ocean of sleep like an overloaded ship which has been wrecked. The heavy thicket of wavy green water enveloped me. Then slowly I floated from the bottom upward, and somewhere in the middle of that course, I opened my eyes,—my room! The morning was still green and motionless. A fragment of sunshine coming from the mirror on my closet door shone into my eyes. This fragment does not permit me to sleep, being thus an obstacle in the way of exactly fulfilling the rules of the Tables which prescribe so many hours of sleep. I should have opened the closet but I felt as though I were in a spider web, and cobweb covered my eyes; I had no power to sit up.
Yet I got up and opened the closet door; suddenly, there behind that door, making her way through the mass of garments which hung there, was I-330! I have become so accustomed of late to most improbable things, that as far as I remember I was not even surprised; I did not even ask a question. I jumped into the closet, slammed the mirror-door behind me and breathlessly, brusquely, blindly, avidly I clung to her. I remember clearly even now:—through the narrow crack of the door a sharp sun-ray like lightning broke into the darkness and played on the floor and walls of the closet, and a little higher the cruel ray-blade fell upon the naked neck of I-330, and this for some reason seemed to me so terrible that I could not bear it, and I screamed;—and again I opened my eyes. My room!
The morning was still green and motionless. On the door of my closet was a fragment of the sunshine. I was in bed. A dream? Yet my heart was still wildly beating, quivering and twitching; there was a dull pain in the tips of my fingers and in my knees. This undoubtedly did happen! And now I am unable any more to distinguish what is dream from what is actuality; irrational numbers grow through my solid, habitual, tri-dimensional life; and instead of firm, polished surfaces—there is something shaggy and rough....
I waited long for the Bell to ring. I was lying thinking, untangling a very strange logical chain. In our superficial life, every formula, every equation, corresponds to a curve or a solid. We have never seen any curve or solid corresponding to my square-root of minus one. The horrifying part of the situation is that there exist such curves or solids; unseen by us they do exist, they must, inevitably; for in mathematics as on a screen, strange sharp shadows appear before us. One must remember that mathematics like death, never makes mistakes, never plays tricks. If we are unable to see those irrational curves or solids, it only means that they inevitably possess a whole immense world somewhere beneath the surface of our life....
I jumped up without waiting for the waking Bell and began to pace up and down the room. My mathematics, the only firm and immovable island of my shaken life, this too was torn from its anchor and was floating, whirling. Then it means that that absurd thing, the “soul,” is as real as my unif, as my boots, although I do not see them since they are behind the door of the closet. If boots are not a sickness, why should the “soul” be one? I sought, but I could not find, a way out of the logical confusion. It looked to me like that strange and sad debris beyond the Green Wall; my logical debris too, is filled with extraordinary, incomprehensible, wordless but speaking beings. It occurred to me for a moment that through some strange, thick glass I saw it; I saw it at once infinitely large and infinitely small, scorpion-like with hidden but ever perceptible sting; I saw the square-root of minus one. Perhaps it was nothing else but my “soul,” which like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, was voluntarily stinging itself with....
The Bell! The day began. All I saw and felt neither died, nor disappeared, it merely became covered with daylight, as our visible world does not die or disappear at the end of the day but merely becomes covered with the darkness of night. My head was filled by a light, thin haze. Through that haze I perceived the long glass tables and the globe-like heads busy chewing, slowly, silently, in unison. At a distance, through the haze, the metronome was slowly beating its tick-tock, and to the accompaniment of this customary and caressing music I joined with the others in counting automatically to fifty: fifty is the number of chewing movements required by the law of the State for every piece of food. And automatically then, keeping time, I went downstairs and put my name down in the book for the outgoing Numbers,—as everyone did. But I felt I lived separately from everybody; I lived by myself separated by a soft wall which absorbs noises; beyond that wall there was my world.
Here a thought occurred to me. If that world is only my own, why should I tell about it in these records? Why should I recount all these absurd “dreams” about closets, endless corridors? With great sorrow I notice that instead of a correct and strictly mathematical poem in honor of the United State, I am writing a fantastic novel. Oh! if only it were a novel and not my actual life, full of X’s, square-roots of minus one and down-fallings! Yet all may be for the best. Probably you, my unknown readers, are children still as compared with us. We are brought up by the United State; consequently we have reached the highest summits attainable by man. And you, being children, may swallow without crying all the bitter things I am to give you only if they be coated with the syrup of adventures.
The Same Evening
Are you familiar with the following sensation? You are in an aero and you dash upward along a blue spiral line; the window is open and the wind rushes past your face, whistling. There is no earth. The earth is forgotten. The earth is as far from you as Venus, Saturn or Jupiter. That is how I live now. A hurricane wind beats into my face; I forget the earth, forget rosy, dear O-90. Yet the earth does exist and sooner or later I must plane down to that earth; only I close my eyes to avoid seeing the date at which there is the name O-90 written on my Tables.
This evening the distant earth reminded me of itself. In order to fulfill the recommendation of the doctor (I desire sincerely, most sincerely I desire to be cured), I wandered for two hours and eight minutes over the straight lines of the deserted avenues. Everybody was in the auditoriums, in accordance with the Table. Only I, cut off from the rest, I was alone. Strictly speaking, it was a very unnatural situation. Imagine a finger cut off from the whole, from the hand; a separate human finger, somewhat hunched, running over the glass sidewalk. I was such a finger. What seemed most strange and unnatural was that the finger had no desire to be with its hand, with its fellows. I want either to be alone or with her; to transfuse my whole being into hers through a contact with her shoulder or through our interwoven fingers.
I
