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Thirty-third Entry

Quick, the newspaper. Perhaps it… I read it with my eyes (precisely—my eyes are now like a pen, a calculator, which you hold in your hands and feel—it is apart from you, an instrument).

In bold type, across the front page:

The enemies of happiness are not sleeping. Hold on to your happiness with both hands! Tomorrow all work will halt—all numbers shall report for the Operation. Those who fail to do so will be subject to the Benefactor’s Machine.

Tomorrow! Can there be—will there be a tomorrow?

By daily habit, I stretch my hand (an instrument) to the bookshelf to add today’s Gazette to the others, in the binding stamped with the gold design. And on the way: What for? What does it matter? I shall never return to this room.

The newspaper drops to the floor. And I stand up and look around the room, the whole room; I hastily take with me, gather up into an invisible valise, all that I’m sorry to leave behind. The table. The books. The chair. I-330 sat in it that day, and I—below, on the floor… The bed…

Then, for a minute or two—absurdly waiting for some miracle. Perhaps the telephone will ring, perhaps she’ll say that…

No. There is no miracle.

I am leaving—into the unknown. These are my last lines. Good-by, beloved readers, with whom I’ve lived through so many pages, to whom, having contracted the soul sickness, I have exposed all of myself, to the last crushed little screw, the last broken spring…

I am leaving.