T Zero, Page 3

  "Or! I understand! You! How beautiful! Hurrah!" I exclaimed and I sat up in the bed.

  My bride let out a cry.

  "Now I'll explain it to you!" I said, exultant. "Now I'll explain everything to everyone!"

  "Be quiet!" Or shouted. "You must be quiet!"

  "The world is single and what exists can't be explained without..." I proclaimed. Now she was over me, she was trying to suffocate me (in the drawing: a breast crushing me): "Be quiet! Be quiet!"

  Hundreds of beaks and claws were tearing the canopy of the nuptial bed. The birds fell upon me, but beyond their wings I could recognize my native landscape, which was becoming fused with the alien continent.

  ‘There's no difference. Monsters and nonmonsters have always been close to one another! What hasn't been continues to be..."—I was speaking not only to the birds and the monsters but also to those I had always known, who were rushing in on every side.

  "Qfwfq! You've lost mel Birds! He's yours!" and the Queen pushed me away.

  Too late, I realized how the birds' beaks were intent on separating the two worlds that my revelation had united. "No, wait, don't move away, the two of us together, Or ... where are you?" I was rolling in the void among scraps of paper and feathers.

  (The birds, with beaks and claws, tear up the page of strips. Each flies off with a scrap of printed paper in his beak. The page below is also covered with strip drawings; it depicts the world as it was before the birds' appearance and its successive, predictable developments. I'm among the others, with a bewildered look. In the sky there are still birds, but nobody pays attention to them any more.)

  Of what I understood then, I've now forgotten everything. What I've told you is all I can reconstruct, with the help of conjectures in the episodes with the most gaps. I have never stopped hoping that the birds might one day take me back to Queen Or. But are they real birds, these ones that have remained in our midst? The more I observe them, the less they suggest what I would like to remember. (The last strip is all photographs: a bird, the same bird in close-up, the head of the bird enlarged, a detail of the head, the eye...)

  Crystals

  If the substances that made up the terrestrial globe in its incandescent state had had at their disposal a period of time long enough to allow them to grow cold and also sufficient freedom of movement, each of them would have become separated from the others in a single, enormous crystal.

  It could have been different, I know,—Qfwfq remarked, —you're telling me: I believed so firmly in that world of crystal that was supposed to come forth that I can't resign myself to living still in this world, amorphous and crumbling and gummy, which has been our lot, instead. I run all the time like everybody else, I take the train each morning (I live in New Jersey) to slip into the cluster of prisms I see emerging beyond the Hudson, with its sharp cusps; I spend my days there, going up and down the horizontal and vertical axes that crisscross that compact solid, or along the obligatory routes that graze its sides and its edges. But I don't fall into the trap: I know they're making me run among smooth transparent walls and between symmetrical angles so I'll believe I'm inside a crystal, so I'll recognize a regular form there, a rotation axis, a constant in the dihedrons, whereas none of all this exists. The contrary exists: glass, those are glass solids that flank the streets, not crystal, it's a paste of haphazard molecules which has invaded and cemented the world, a layer of suddenly chilled lava, stiffened into forms imposed from the outside, whereas inside it's magma just as in the Earth's incandescent days.

  I don't pine for them surely, those days: I feel discontented with things as they are, but if, for that reason, you expect me to remember the past with nostalgia, you're mistaken. It was horrible, the Earth without any crust, an eternal incandescent winter, a mineral bog, with black swirls of iron and nickel that dripped down from every crack toward the center of the globe, and jets of mercury that gushed up in high spurts. We made our way through a boiling haze, Vug and I, and we could never manage to touch a solid point. A barrier of liquid rocks that we found before us would suddenly evaporate in our path, disintegrating into an acid cloud; we would rush to pass it, but already we could feel it condensing and striking us like a storm of metallic rain, swelling the thick waves of an aluminum ocean. The substance of things changed around us every minute; the atoms, that is, passed from one state of disorder to another state of disorder and then another still: or rather, practically speaking, everything remained always the same. The only real change would have been the atoms' arranging themselves in some sort of order: this is what Vug and I were looking for, moving in the mixture of the elements without any points of reference, without a before or an after.

  Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wrist watch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a checkbook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold my newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpenetration of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.

  Before it was worse, of course. The world was a solution of substances where everything was dissolved into everything and the solvent of everything. Vug and I kept on getting lost in its midst, losing our lost places, where we had been lost always, without any idea of what we could have found (or of what could have found us) so as to be lost no more.

  We realized it all of a sudden. Vug said: "There!"

  She was pointing, in the midst of a lava flow, at something that was taking form. It was a solid with regular, smooth facets and sharp comers; and these facets and corners were slowly expanding, as if at the expense of the surrounding matter, and also the form of the solid was changing, while still maintaining symmetrical proportions ... And it wasn't only the form that was distinct from all the rest: it was also the way the light entered inside, passing through it and refracted by it. Vug said: "They shinel Lots of them!"

  It wasn't the only one, in fact. On the incandescent expanse where once only ephemeral gas bubbles had risen, expelled from the Earth's bowels, cubes now were coming to the surface and octahedrons, prisms, figures so transparent they seemed airy, empty inside, but instead, as we soon saw, they concentrated in themselves an incredible compactness and hardness. The sparkle of this angled blossoming was invading the Earth, and Vug said: "It's spring!" I kissed her.

  Now you can understand me: if I love order, it's not—as with so many others—the mark of a character subjected to an inner discipline, a repression of the instincts. In me the idea of an absolutely regular world, symmetrical and methodical, is associated with that first impulse and burgeoning of nature, that amorous tension—what you call eros—while all the rest of your images, those that according to you associate passion with disorder, love with intemperate overflow—river fire whirlpool volcano—for me are memories of nothingness and listlessness and boredom.

  It was a mistake on my part, it didn't take me long to understand that. Here we are at the point of arrival: Vug is lost; of the diamond eros only dust remains; the simulated crystal that imprisons me now is base glass. I follow the arrows on the asphalt, I line up at the traffic light, and I start again (today I came into New York by car) when the green comes on (as I do every Wednesday because I take) shifting into first (Dorothy to her psychoanalyst), I try to maintain a steady speed which allows me to pass all the green lights on Second Avenue. This, which you call order, is a threadbare patch over disintegration; I found a parking space but in two hours I'll have to go down again to put another coin in the meter; if I forget they'll tow my car away.

  I dreamed of a world of c
rystal, in those days: I didn't dream it, I saw it, an indestructible frozen springtime of quartz. Polyhedrons grew up, tall as mountains, diaphanous: the shadow of the person beyond pierced through their thickness. "Vug, it's you!" To reach her I flung myself against walls smooth as mirrors; I slipped back; I clutched the edges, wounding myself; I ran along treacherous perimeters, and at every turn there was a different light—diffused, milky, opaque—that the mountain contained.

  "Where are you?"

  "In the woods!"

  The silver crystals were filiform trees, with branches at every right angle. Skeletal fronds of tin and of lead thickened the forest in a geometric vegetation.

  In the middle there was Vug, running. "Qfwfq! It's different over there!" she cried. "Gold, green, blue!"

  A valley of beryllium opened out, surrounded by ridges of every color, from aquamarine to emerald. I followed Vug with my spirit torn between happiness and fear: happiness at seeing how every substance that made up the world was finding its definitive and solid form, and a still vague fear that this triumph of order in such various fashions might reproduce on another scale the disorder we had barely left behind us. A total crystal I dreamed, a topaz world that would leave out nothing: I was impatient for our Earth to detach itself from the wheel of gas and dust in which all the celestial bodies were whirling, ours should be the first to escape that useless dispersal which is the universe.

  Of course, if he chooses, a person can also take it into his head to find an order in the stars, the galaxies, an order in the lighted windows of the empty skyscrapers where between nine and midnight the cleaning women wax the floors of the offices. Rationalize, that's the big task: rationalize if you don't want everything to come apart. Tonight we're dining in town, in a restaurant on the terrace of a twenty-fourth floor. It's a business dinner: there are six of us; there is also Dorothy, and the wife of Dick Bemberg. I eat some oysters, I look at a star that's called (if I have the right one) Betelgeuse. We make conversation: we husbands talk about production; the ladies, about consumption. Anyway, seeing the firmament is difficult: the lights of Manhattan spread out a halo that becomes mixed with the luminosity of the sky.

  The wonder of crystals is the network of atoms that is constantly repeated: this is what Vug wouldn't understand. What she liked—I quickly realized—was to discover in crystals some differences, even minimal ones, irregularities, flaws.

  "But what does one atom out of place matter to you, an exfoliation that's a bit crooked," I said, "in a solid that's destined to be enlarged infinitely according to a regular pattern? It's the single crystal we're working toward, the gigantic crystal..."

  "I like them when there're lots of little ones," she said. To contradict me, surely; but also because it was true that crystals were popping up by the thousands at the same time and were interpenetrating one another, arresting their growth where they came in contact, and they never succeeded in taking over entirely the liquid rock from which they received their form: the world wasn't tending to be composed into an ever-simpler figure but was clotting in a vitreous mass from which prisms and octahedrons and cubes seemed to be struggling to be free, to draw all the matter to themselves...

  A crater exploded: a cascade of diamonds spread out.

  "Look! Aren't they big?" Vug exclaimed.

  On every side there were erupting volcanoes: a continent of diamond refracted the sun's light in a mosaic of rainbow chips.

  "Didn't you say the smaller they are the more you like them?" I reminded her.

  "No! Those enormous ones—I want them!" and she darted off.

  "There are still bigger ones," I said, pointing above us. The sparkle was blinding: I could already see a mountain-diamond, a faceted and iridescent chain, a gem-plateau, a Koh-i-noor-Himalaya.

  "What can I do with them? I like the ones that can be picked up. I want to have them!" and in Vug there was already the frenzy of possession.

  "The diamond will have us, instead. It's the stronger," I said.

  I was mistaken, as usual: the diamond was had, not by us. When I walk past Tiffany's, I stop to look at the windows, I contemplate the diamond prisoners, shards of our lost kingdom. They lie in velvet coffins, chained with silver and platinum; with my imagination and my memory I enlarge them, I give them again the gigantic dimensions of fortress, garden, lake, I imagine Vug's pale blue shadow mirrored there. I'm not imagining it: it really is Vug who now advances among the diamonds. I turn: it's the girl looking into the window over my shoulder, from beneath the hair falling across her forehead.

  "Vug!'' I say. "Our diamonds!"

  She laughs.

  "Is it really you?" I ask. "What's your name?"

  She gives me her telephone number.

  We are among slabs of glass: I live in simulated order, I would like to say to her, I have an office on the East Side, I live in New Jersey, for the weekend Dorothy has invited the Bembergs, against simulated order simulated disorder is impotent, diamond would be necessary, not for us to possess it but for it to possess us, the free diamond in which Vug and I were free...

  "I'll call you," I say to her. only out of the desire to resume my arguing with her.

  In an aluminum crystal, where chance scatters some chrome atoms, the transparency is colored a dark red: so the rubies flowered beneath our footsteps.

  "You see?" Vug said. "Aren't they beautiful?"

  We couldn't walk through a valley of rubies without Starting to quarrel again.

  "Yes," I said, "because the regularity of the hexagon..."

  "Uff!" she said. "Would they be rubies without the intrusion of extraneous atoms? Answer me that!"

  I became angry. More beautiful? Or less beautiful? We could go on arguing to infinity, but the only sure fact was that the Earth was moving in the direction of Vug's preferences. Vug's world was in the fissures, the cracks where lava rises, dissolving the rock and mixing the minerals in unpredictable concretions. Seeing her caress walls of granite, I regretted what had been lost in that rock, the exactness of the feldspars, the micas, the quartzes. Vug seemed to take pleasure only in noting how minutely variegated the face of the world appeared. How could we understand each other? For me all that mattered was homogeneous growth, indiscerptibility, achieved serenity; for her, everything had to be separation and mixture, one or the other, or both at once. Even the two of us had to take on an aspect (we still possessed neither form nor future): I imagined a slow uniform expansion, following the crystals' example, until the me-crystal would have interpenetrated and fused with the her-crystal and perhaps together we would have become a unity within the world-crystal; she already seemed to know that the law of living matter would be infinite separating and rejoining. Was it Vug, then, who was right?

  It's Monday; I telephone her. It's almost summer already. We spend a day together, on Staten Island, lying on the beach. Vug watches the grains of sand trickle through her fingers.

  "All these tiny crystals...'' she says.

  The shattered world that surrounds us is, for her, still the world of the past, the one we expected to be born from the incandescent world. To be sure, the crystals still give the world form, breaking up, being reduced to almost imperceptible fragments rolled by the waves, encrusted with all the elements dissolved in the sea which kneads them together again in steep cliffs, in sandstone reefs, a hundred times dissolved and recomposed, in schists, slates, marbles of glabrous whiteness, simulacra of what they once could have been and now can never be.

  And again I am gripped by my stubbornness as I was when it began to be clear that the game was lost, that the Earth's crust was becoming a congeries of disparate forms, and I didn't want to resign myself, and at every irregularity in the porphyry that Vug happily pointed out to me, at every vitrescence that emerged from the basalt, I wanted to persuade myself that these were only apparent flaws, that they were all part of a much vaster regular structure, in which every asymmetry we thought we observed really corresponded to a network of symmetries so complicated we cou
ldn't comprehend it, and I tried to calculate how many billions of sides and dihedral comers this labyrinthine crystal must have, this hypercrystal that included within itself crystals and noncrystals.

  Vug has brought a little transistor radio along to the beach with her.

  "Everything comes from crystal," I say, "even the music we're hearing." But I know full well that the transistor's crystal is imperfect, flawed, veined with impurities, with rents in the warp of the atoms.

  She says: "It's an obsession with you." And it is our old quarrel, continuing. She wants to make me admit that real order carries impurity within itself, destruction.

  The boat lands at the Battery, it is evening; in the illuminated network of the skyscraper-prisms I now look only at the dark rips, the gaps. I see Vug home; I go up with her. She lives downtown, she has a photography studio. As I look around I see nothing but perturbations of the order of the atoms: luminescent tubes, TV, the condensing of tiny silver crystals on the photographic plates. I open the icebox, I take out the ice for our whisky. From the transistor comes the sound of a saxophone. The crystal which has succeeded in becoming the world, in making the world transparent to itself, in refracting it into infinite spectral images, is not mine: it is a corroded crystal, stained, mixed. The victory of the crystals (and of Vug) has been the same thing as their defeat (and mine). I'll wait now till the Thelonius Monk record ends, then I'll tell her.

  Blood, Sea

  The conditions that obtained when life had not yet emerged from the oceans have not subsequently changed a great deal for the cells of the human body, bathed by the primordial wave which continues to flow in the arteries. Our blood in fact has a chemical composition analogous to that of the sea of our origins, from which the first living cells and the first multicellular beings derived the oxygen and the other elements necessary to life. With the evolution of more complex organisms, the problem of maintaining a maximum number of cells in contact with the liquid environment could not be solved simply by the expansion of the exterior surface: those organisms endowed with hollow structures, into which the sea water could flow, found themselves at an advantage. But it was only with the ramification of these cavities into a system of blood circulation that distribution of oxygen was guaranteed to the complex of cells, thus making terrestrial life possible. The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.