There were about fifty around him. Like him, they seemed to have crawled out from under their foreheads. They were loud, cheerful, strong-toothed, swallowing the stormy wind. With their simple, not at all terrible-looking electrocutors (where did they get them?) they started to the west, towards the operated ones, encircling them, keeping parallel to forty-eighth avenue....
Stumbling against the tightly-drawn ropes woven by the wind, I was running to her. What for? I did not know. I was stumbling.... Empty streets.... The city seemed foreign, wild, filled with the ceaseless, triumphant, hubbub of birds. It seemed like the end of the world, Doomsday.
Through the glass of the walls in quite a few houses (this cut into my mind) I saw male and female Numbers in shameless embraces—without curtains lowered, without pink checks, in the middle of the day!...
The house—her house; the door ajar. The lobby, the control desk, all was empty. The elevator had stopped in the middle of its shaft. I ran panting up the endless stairs. The corridor. Like the spokes of a wheel figures on the doors dashed past my eyes; 320, 326, 330,—I-330! Through the glass wall everything in her room was seen to be upside down, confused, creased. The table overturned, its legs in the air like a
beast. The bed was absurdly placed away from the wall, obliquely. Strewn over the floor—fallen, trodden petals of the pink checks.
I bent over and picked up one, two, three of them; all bore the name D-503. I was on all of them, drops of myself, of my molten, poured-out self. And that was all—that was left....
Somehow I felt they should not lie there on the floor and be trodden upon. I gathered a handful of them, put them on the table and carefully smoothed them out, glanced at them and ... laughed aloud! I never knew it before but now I know, and you too, know, that laughter may be of different colors. It is but a distant echo of an explosion within us; it may be the echo of a holiday, red, blue and golden fireworks, or at times it may represent pieces of human flesh exploded into the air....
I noticed an unfamiliar name on some of the pink checks. I do not remember the figures but I do remember the letter—F. I brushed the stubs from the table to the floor, stepped on them, on myself, stamped on them with my heels,—and went out....
I sat in the corridor on the window-sill in front of her door and waited long and stupidly. An old man appeared. His face was like a pierced, empty bladder with folds; from beneath the puncture something transparent was still slowly dripping. Slowly, vaguely I realized—tears. And
only when the old man was quite far off I came to and exclaimed: