The porcelain-like white distorted face of the Second Builder! It was he who struck me with all his strength; I hurt my head on something; and through the approaching darkness while falling I heard:
“Full speed—aft!”
A brusque jolt upward....
RECORD THIRTY-FIVE
In a Ring
A Carrot
A Murder
I did not sleep all night. The whole night but one thought.... As a result of yesterday’s mishap my head is tightly bandaged,—it seems to me not a bandage but a ring, a pitiless ring of glass-iron, riveted about my head. And I am busy with the same thought, always the same thought in my riveted circle: to kill U-. To kill U- and then go to her and say: “Now do you believe?” What is most disquieting is that to kill is dirty, primitive. To break her head with something—the thought of it gives me a peculiar sensation of something disgustingly sweet in my mouth, and I am unable to swallow my saliva; I am always spitting into my handkerchief, yet my mouth feels dry.
I had in my closet a heavy piston-rod which cracked during the casting and which I brought home in order to find out the cause of the cracking with a microscope. I made my manuscript into a tube (let her read me to the last letter!), pushed the broken piston into that tube and went downstairs. The stairway seemed endless, the steps
disgustingly slippery, liquid. I had to wipe off moisture from my mouth very frequently. Downstairs ... my heart dropped. I took out the piston and went to the controller’s table, but she was not there; instead an empty, icy desk with ink-blots. I remembered that today all work was stopped; everybody was to go to be operated upon. Hence there was no need for her to stay here. There was nobody to be registered....
The street. It was windy. The sky seemed to be composed of soaring panels of cast-iron. And exactly as it seemed for one moment yesterday, the whole world was broken up into separate, sharp, independent fragments, and each of these fragments was falling at full speed; each would stop for a second, hang before me in the air and disappear without trace. It was as if the black, precise letters on this page should suddenly move apart and begin to jump hither and thither in fright, so that there was not a word on the page, only nonsensical “ap,” “jum,” “wor.” The crowd seemed just as nonsensical, dispersed (not in rows), going forward, backward, diagonally, transversely....
Then nobody. For a second while I was dashing at full speed, suddenly stopping, I saw on the second floor in the glass cage hanging in the air,—a man and a woman—a kiss; she standing with her whole body bent backward brokenly: “This is for the last time, forever....”