The Living (19 page)

Letter to Self

I died and rose again in accordance with a precise plan. In accordance with my friend Cracker’s plan.

He worked a miracle for me – and that miracle cost him dearly. But he managed it. He made them all see fire. The correctees, the officers, even Ef – the entire household.

Everyone except me. I was the only one who could not see my own staged death.

At the set hour I went down to the Available Terrace, leaving my ‘suicide diary’ on my bed open at the last page. I still thought that it was dangerous and stupid, that nothing would work for Cracker, and that they would find this diary of mine while I was not in the dormitory, and then there was no way I would be able to avoid solitary in the Special Unit…

…It worked. He blocked off first layer for all of them, replacing it with a phantom, a realistic hallucination from second.

While they were standing there, staring blindly at the floor, their mouths gaping open, choking and groaning slightly, as if they were trying to cry out in a dream, while they watched a ten-minute clip of me being swallowed up by hellish flame on the Available Terrace, I followed Cracker’s instructions, not trying to make sense of anything or over-thinking anything, but precisely, like a robot. I hit him in the front of the skull, right in the centre, with one of the trowels for loosening the sand which hung alongside every terrarium with desert pets. I pulled off Ef’s mask. I opened up his chatterbox. Inside I found a cerebron – it was different from the skewed doodle which Fox had drawn in the diagram, but still recognisable – and took out two cerebral lenses. They were small, warm and slippery like pieces of a jellyfish that has died in the sun.
I put one in the left eye, and the other in the right, like in the diagram… They blinded and deafened me – and I collapsed. Into the buzzing, hundred-voiced, flickering depths, which bubbled like butter boiling in a pan.

There, in the depths, like a spider lurking in his web, sat my friend Cracker. He had four arms and four legs, and he grabbed me with his four slender, jointed hands as I wheezed and drowned and he pulled me to his chest and shouted:

When I learned to breathe again, he let me go, squatted down, bending the knees on all his four legs, and said:

He showed me Ef’s cell – my cell. He explained how to hold first layer, which became quiet and ghostly, like the world as seen by a man drowning in murky water.

He taught me how to talk in the depths and I said:

He was with me, as much as he could. Nearly ten minutes. It’s terrifying to imagine how much effort he must have expended, keeping up the illusion that they were present at my death and still constantly staying with me, or, to be precise, in me. Helping
me, supporting me, leading me through everything, protecting me, like a brainlesss, cumbersome queen who has to be saved from a termite mound besieged by enemies.

…Once I had pulled that mirrored mask on, with its sharp stench of blood, once I had
actually
set fire to the termite room and the reflection of the flame flickered in the eyes of the bewitched household, once Samson, the driver of the food truck, reeling and pale, with glassy eyes (
my guy
, Cracker explained in a business-like way when he appeared) had started dragging the impassive Ef from the terrace, Cracker said:

I took the cage with my worker termite and followed Samson, barely making out the contours of first layer, which were murky even without the smoke. Ef’s friends were
scrabbling
around in my head, Ef’s memory flared up in my mind as a ripe bunch of files and folders. In first layer I saw myself as if from the outside: a man in a planetman’s mask, an officer in the Service for Order. That must have been when I started playing this game: thinking about myself in the third person. I liked calling myself Ef.

…The termite huddled against the wall of the cage, like it was a window. Almost the whole way to the old zoo, after every turn in the road he crawled along the wall of the cage to the point closest to his former home. To our former home. Then he suddenly lost interest in the turns, as if his invisible in-built compass had broken, and slowly crawled down to the floor and stopped moving. I thought: his castle has probably just burned down to the ground… I shook the cage with the tiny curled up body inside – it obeyed unwittingly, rolling back and forth.

I said to Cracker and at that moment discovered that I could no longer see Cracker.

He left
socio
without saying ‘no death’. He slipped off without a sound, like a thief.

We didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t even say thank you for the miracle. I never saw him again: not in first layer, not in
socio
. I will never see him again. My friend Cracker had abandoned me forever, but there, in the van carrying me off to a new life, I did not know that yet. My friend was dying, and I was crying for my termite, not my friend…

Because I could have guessed. By the way that the behaviour of ‘his guy’, the truck driver, changed. Samson was obviously trying to shake off his control. He drove nervily, jerkily, wobbling from side to side, accelerating and braking without reason, as if some invisible man was taking his leg off the pedals and turning the wheel. In the zoo he helped me unload Ef, who was groaning, but it was somehow grudging, as if he doubted whether he should really be helping. Before he left, Samson took a long look at the empty cages, then stared at me. Beads of white gunk had accumulated in the corners of his eyes, and suspicion blossomed murkily at the bottom of his boggy pupils.

‘What…is…this…place?’ Samson asked gruffly, although he was not supposed to ask.

Cracker had obviously lost control over him, he couldn’t cope – though in comparison with the miracle which he had worked for me, managing a medium was nothing…! At that moment my friend Cracker was probably in agony. ‘Lost ability to breathe and swallow independently,’ I read in his medical
records later. ‘Cause of deterioration of condition unknown. Connection to artificial breathing apparatus does not seem expedient.’ The cause is clear enough. He used up too much strength and energy dragging me to freedom.

He took everything through to the very end. There in the zoo he still managed to ‘sit’ Samson back in the van and make him leave without any unnecessary questions.

I can’t even imagine how much effort this must have taken. Most likely, as he was driving Samson away, Cracker was no longer breathing.

…As I was dragging the planetman into the orang-utans’ cage, he woke up for a little bit. Perhaps that was the last time Ef was fully conscious. He said my name and then punched me hard on the cheek. The mirror mask softened the blow slightly, but I tasted blood in my mouth…

…I dream that I am back in Samson’s van. And that Samson is driving me back to the House of Correction. He is obeying Cracker, but Cracker has ordered him to take me to the Special Unit. Because now, as Cracker is no longer breathing, he is no longer my friend and is giving bad orders… I dream that I was asleep on the witch’s blanket in the roboslums, and that Samson found me there, tied me up, flayed the skin from my face and poked out one of my eyes. And that then he loaded me into the van and drove me back to the House of Correction…

I often dream that I am going back there. I often have
nightmares
. To avoid nightmares you have to move in your sleep.

I touch my cheeks with my hands: they are hot and sticky and have no skin. The nightmare doesn’t go away. Then I order myself to wake up entirely. I slowly and heavily slip out of
sleep mode
and into my cell and I bang up against bare walls. The settings have been wiped.

Something’s wrong in first layer too. My nightmare is
continuing
: I hear the sound of a motor and feel it juddering.

‘He’s just not waking up,’ someone’s chatterbox states dispassionately. ‘Gonna have to liven him up a bit.’

Someone hits me on the cheek. Hard, with the back of their hand.

I automatically try to protect my cheek with my hand, and I realise that I am in handcuffs. I feel my face with my
fingertips
– I’m not wearing the mirror mask, and my skin really sticky and sore. With some difficulty I unstick my eyes – the right one itches and stings – and I am looking at first layer. I am in the back seat of an SPO patrol car. Outside the window the golden lights of the empty streets and the enormous silhouettes of concretions flash by. A giant iron fork, a giant bronze table, a giant apple, a giant index finger…

…The fingers which I touched my face with are covered in blood. Cerberus is sitting to the right of me; his unblinking eyes seem angry even beneath his mask.

‘Doesn’t that hurt?’ his chatterbox snarls, but Cerberus hits my face again, this time with his fist.

Ef is sitting on the left of me. He does not slouch in the seat only because he is tightly strapped in. His head is thrown back, his swollen face is covered in streams of sweat. He breathes hoarsely, unevenly – you would think he was snoring but his eyes are wide open. Beneath the old bandage his wound smells terrible.

‘Look at him, look at him, don’t you take your eyes off him,’ Cerberus buzzes dourly. ‘Look what you did to my partner.’ He hits me in the face again. ‘Killing’s too good for you. Piece of shit. Bastard.’

‘Quiet back there,’ orders someone vaguely familiar from the front seat without turning round. ‘We have to deliver him without any damage.’

The vaguely familiar man is driving. He’s just sitting there – the vehicle is on automatic – his hands not touching the wheel while he examines the pet clasped in his swarthy hand. Then he
breaks off from studying the pet and looks at me in the
rear-view
mirror. I recognise those eyes – a couple of festering olives. But last time his face was all painted, and now I can see his unhealthy dark skin. My friend Clown. From the Pause Zone…

He opens his palm and I see that what he has in his hand is not a pet. It’s a cerebral lens – the one they poked out of my eye, all dried out, with a couple of little crimson veins inside.

‘I didn’t even know that the capillaries grew into it.’ Clown contemplates the lens as he holds it up to the light. ‘Looks like it broke. The techservice can get the other one out, I’m no good with these ancient devices… Correctee Zero,’ he addresses me in a boring voice, ‘you are accused of
committing
a series of serious and grievous crimes…’

The planned route and final destination flashes up on the instrument panel. The House of Correction. A waking
nightmare
. A silvery dot – our vehicle – is crawling up a curved orange line, sure and steady, like an ant marching along the path trodden by its kinsmen…

I close my eyes so that I don’t see the way the silver ant is dragging me back to its nest. Now I only see the structure. The womb. It turns out that even one cerebral lens is enough to play about in it a bit. With one lens the womb looks slightly skewiff, but it’s entirely suitable for a bit of playing about.

I don’t want to play about. I’m tired of the flashing and the voices, of the music and films, of the spam and the useful advice, of the jokes and the sales.

I want to
leave socio
.

You are right, womb. It was a failure. But the failures will end soon enough. In about half an hour they are going to poke out the remaining cerebral lens, and you will disappear, womb,
you will crumble into nothing. And then I myself will
disappear
– the Council of Eight will hardly allow me to live after everything I’ve done.

I would like to leave the womb right now, but…

…it won’t let me go.

I try to imagine Hanna’s face on the evening when she went off to the festival, but a sort of sad shadow thickens in front of my eyes, then nods and immediately loses its shape. I try to imagine Cracker, the way he was in the Special Unit, but instead of him his eight-limbed userpic crawls out of the cracks in my memory and scurries off into the depths like a thief. Then, unbidden and surprisingly distinct, the face of the madman Matthew floats up, the face of my ‘apostle’, whom I denied. Whom I caught, bound and sent off on his final journey on a wonder-trolley, so that he wouldn’t make anyone suspicious…