We

Thirty-eighth Entry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, it is.”

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

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

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

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

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

There was no need. I knew.

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

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

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