Level 7

SEPTEMBER 14

P announced this morning that she wanted to divorce me and marry X-107. He had often been present when she visited me in my room, and that is how they had got to know each other.

I agreed and wished her better luck with her new mate. She had tears in her eyes.

X-107 was rather uneasy about it, but I told him I did not mind at all, and this seemed to reassure him.

The formalities were arranged for this afternoon without any difficulty. P and I were divorced in the marriage-cum-laundry room, where five minutes later she was married to X-107. I was told to leave the ‘m’ from my identity badge in the room. X-107 probably got it.

I think this development was inevitable and for the best. Perhaps a man of so-called ‘saintly’ disposition should not be married.

The general loudspeaker announced today that the PBX Operations Room was to be transformed into a maternity ward. Several births are expected, but not before January or February next year, so there is plenty of time and no real need to announce the conversion of the room so early.

Perhaps the news was given now with the intention of cheering people up. They even tried to suggest that the transformation is symbolical: from operations room, the centre of push-button war, into maternity ward, the place where new life starts.

“And you shall beat your push-buttons into perambulators,” occurred to me.

Rather late in the day, though!

I rarely go to the lounge now. There is nobody I want to talk to. People I meet there, my fellow-internees on Level 7, think differently, feel differently. I might have found a good companion in X-117. But he is gone. Not by blast or fire or radioactivity. By his own hand and a leather belt.

But I commune with myself. I almost converse with the artist and his wife who chose to die their radioactive death.

There are people living all round me, but I do not live with them. For me the dead are alive. The living are dead.