LITMIR.BIZ

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glanced at R-, then serenely and roundly at me; the soft, endearing color of our pink checks came to her cheeks.

      “But today I am … I have a check to him today.” (A glance at R-.) “And tonight he is busy, so …”

      The moist, varnished lips whispered good-naturedly: “Half an hour is plenty for us, is it not, O-? I am not a great lover of your problems; let us simply go over to my place and chat.”

      I was afraid to remain alone with myself or, to be more correct, with that strange new self who by some curious coincidence bore my number, D-503. So I went with R-. True, he is not precise, not rhythmic, his logic is jocular and turned inside out, yet we are… Three years ago we both chose our dear, rosy O-. This tied our friendship more firmly together than our school days did. In R-’s room everything seems like mine: the Tables, the glass of the chairs, the table, the closet, the bed. But as we entered, R- moved one chair out of place, then another—the room became confused, everything lost the established order and seemed to violate every rule of Euclid’s geometry. R- remained the same as always; in Taylor and in mathematics he always lagged at the tail of the class.

      We recalled Plappa, how we boys used to paste the whole surface of his glass legs with paper notes expressing our thanks (we all loved Plappa). We recalled our priest (it goes without saying that we were not taught the “law” of ancient religion but the law of the United State). Our priest had a very powerful voice; a real hurricane would come out of the loud-speaker. And we children would yell the prescribed texts after him with all our lung power. We recalled how our scapegrace, R­13, used to stuff the priest with chewed paper; every word was thus accompanied by a paper wad shot out. Naturally, R- was punished, for what he did was undoubtedly wrong, but now we laughed heartily—by we I mean our triangle, R-, O-, and I. I must confess, I, too.

      “And what if he had been a living one? Like the ancient ones, eh? We’d have b … b …” a fountain running from the fat bubbling lips. The sun was shining through the ceiling, the sun above, the sun from the sides, its reflection from below. O- on R-13’s lap and minute drops of sunlight in O-’s blue eyes. Somehow my heart warmed up. The square root of minus one became silent and motionless…

      “Well, how is your Integral? Will you soon hop off to enlighten the inhabitants of the planets? You’d better hurry up, my boy, or we poets will have produced such a devilish lot that even your Integral will be unable to lift the cargo. ‘Every day from eight to eleven’ …” R- wagged his head and scratched the back of it. The back of his head is square; it looks like a little valise (I recalled for some reason an ancient painting “In the Cab”). I felt more lively.

      “You, too, are writing for the Integral? Tell me about it. What are you writing about? What did you write today, for instance?”

      “Today I did not write; today I was busy with something else.” (“B-b-busy” sprinkled straight into my face.)

      “What else?”

      R- frowned. “What? What? Well, if you insist I’ll tell you. I was busy with the Death Sentence. I was putting the Death Sentence into verse. An idiot—and to be frank, one of our poets… For two years we all lived side by side with him and nothing seemed wrong. Suddenly he went crazy. ‘I,’ said he, ‘am a genius! and I am above the law.’ All that sort of nonsense.—But it is not a thing to talk about.”

      The fat lips hung down. The varnish disappeared from the eyes. He jumped up, turned around, and stared through the wall. I looked at his tightly closed little “valise” and thought, “What is he handling in his little valise now?”

      A moment of awkward, asymmetric silence. I could not see clearly what was the. matter, but I was certain there was something…

      “Fortunately the antediluvian time of those Shakespeares and Dostoevskys (or what were their names?) is past,” I said in a voice deliberately loud.

      R- turned his face to me. Words sprinkled and bubbled out of him as before, but I thought I noticed there was no more joyful varnish to his eyes.

      “Yes, dear mathematician, fortunately, fortunately. We are the happy arithmetical mean. As you would put it, the integration from zero to infinity, from imbeciles to Shakespeare. Do I put it right?”

      I do not know why (it seemed to me absolutely uncalled for) I recalled suddenly the other one, her tone. A thin, invisible thread stretched between her and R- (what thread?). The square root of minus one began to bother me again. I glanced at my badge; sixteen-twenty-five o’clock! They had only thirty-five minutes for the use of the pink check.

      “Well, I must go” I kissed O-, shook hands with R-, and went to the elevator.

      As I crossed the avenue I turned around. Here and there in the huge mass of glass penetrated by sunshine there were grayish-blue squares, the opaque squares of lowered curtains, the squares of rhythmic, Taylorized happiness. On the seventh floor I found R-13’s square. The curtains were already lowered.

      Dear O- .… Dear R- …. He also has (I do not know why I write this “also,” but I write as it comes from my pen), he, too, has something which is not entirely clear in him. Yet I, he, and O-, we are a triangle; I confess, not an isosceles triangle, but a triangle nevertheless. We, to speak in the language of our ancestors (perhaps to you, my planetary readers, this is the more comprehensible language), we are a family. And one feels so good at times, when one is able for a short while, at least, to close oneself within a firm triangle, to close oneself away from anything that…

      Record Nine

      Liturgy

      Iambus

      The Cast-iron Hand

      A solemn, bright day. On such days one forgets one’s weaknesses, inexactitudes, illnesses, and everything is crystalline and imperturbable like our new glass….

      The Plaza of the Cube. Sixty-six imposing concentric circles—stands. Sixty-six rows of quiet, serene faces. Eyes reflecting the shining of the sky, or perhaps it is the shining of the United State. Red like blood are the flowers—the lips of the women. Like soft garlands the faces of the children in the first rows, nearest the place of action. Profound, austere, Gothic silence.

      To judge by the descriptions that reach us from the ancients, they felt somewhat like this during their “church services.” But they served their nonsensical, unknown god; we serve our rational god, whom we know most thoroughly. Their god gave them nothing but eternal, torturing seeking; our god gives us absolute truth—that is, he has rid us of any kind of doubt. Their god did not invent anything cleverer than sacrificing oneself, nobody knows what for; we bring to our god, die United State, a quiet, rational, carefully thought-out sacrifice.

      Yes, it was a solemn liturgy for the United State, a reminiscence of the great days, years, of the Two Hundred Years’ War—a magnificent celebration of the victory of all over one, of the sum over the individual!

      That one stood on the steps of the Cube which was filled with sunlight. A white, no not even white but already colorless, glass face, lips of glass. And only the eyes—thirsty, swallowing black holes leading into that dreadful world from which he was only a few minutes away. The golden badge with the number already had been taken off. His hands were tied with a red ribbon. (A symbol of ancient custom. The explanation of it is that in the old days, when this sort of thing was not done in the name of the United State, the convicted naturally considered that they had the right to resist, hence their hands were usually bound with chains.)

      On the top of the Cube, next to the Machine, the motionless, metallic figure of him whom we call the Well-Doer. One could not see his face from below. All one could see was that it was bounded by austere, magnificent, square lines. And his hands…. Did you ever notice how sometimes in a photograph the hands, if they were too near the camera, appear to be enormous? They then compel your attention, overshadow everything else. Those hands of his, heavy hands, quiet for the time being, were stony hands—it seemed the knees on which they rested must have ached in bearing their weight.

      Suddenly

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