A red line in the milky whiteness of the fog—like blood, like a wound made by a sharp knife—her lips.
“I made you wait, I think? And now you are late for your work anyway?”
“How … ? Well, yes, it is too late now.”
I glanced at her lips in silence. All women are lips, lips only. Some are rosy lips, tense and round, a ring, a tender fence separating one from the world. But these! A second ago they were not here, and suddenly … the slash of a knife! I seemed to see even the dripping sweet blood. …
She came nearer. She leaned gently against my shoulder; we became one. Something streamed from her into me. I felt, I knew, it should be so. Every fibre of my nervous system told me this, every hair on my head, every painfully sweet heartbeat. And what a joy it was to submit to what should be. A fragment of iron-ore probably feels the same joy of submission to precise, inevitable law, when it clings to a loadstone. The same joy is in a stone which thrown aloft, hesitates a little at the height of its flight and then rushes down to the ground. It is the same with a man when in his final convulsion he takes a last deep breath and dies.
I remember I smiled vaguely and said for no reason at all, “Fog … very.”
“Thou lovest fog, dost thou?”
This ancient, long-forgotten thou—the thou of a master to his slave—penetrated me slowly, sharply. … Yes, I was a slave. … This too was inevitable, was good.
“Yes, good …” I said aloud to myself, and then to her, “I hate fog. I am afraid of fog.”
“Then you love it. For if you fear it because it is stronger than you, hate it because you fear it, you love it. For you cannot subject it to yourself. One loves only the things one cannot conquer.”
“Yes, that is so. That is why … that is precisely why I. …”
We were walking—as one. Somewhere beyond the fog the sun was singing in a faint tone, gradually swelling, filling the air with tension and with pearl and gold and rose and red. … The whole world seemed to be one unembraceable woman, and we who were in her body were not yet born; we were ripening in joy. It was clear to me, absolutely clear, that everything existed only for me: the sun, the fog, the gold—for me. I did not ask where we were going; what did it matter? It was pleasure to walk, to ripen, to become stronger and more tense. …
“Here …” I-330 stopped at a door. “It so happens that today there is someone on duty who … I told you about him in the Ancient House.”
Carefully guarding the forces ripening within me, I read the sign: “Medical Bureau.” Automatically only I understood.
… A glass room, filled with golden fog; shelves of glass, colored bottles, jars, electric wires, bluish sparks in tubes; and a male Number—a very thinly flattened man. He might have been cut out of a sheet of paper. Wherever he was, whichever way he turned, he showed only a profile, a sharply pointed, glittering blade of a nose and lips like scissors.
I could not hear what I-330 told him; I merely saw her lips when she was talking; and I felt that I was smiling, irrepressibly, blissfully. The scissors-like lips glittered and the doctor said, “Yes, yes, I see. A most dangerous disease. I know of nothing more dangerous.” And he laughed. With his thin, flat, papery hand he wrote something on a piece of paper and gave it to I-330; he wrote on another piece of paper and handed it over to me. He had given us certificates, testifying that we were ill, that we were unable to go to work. Thus I stole my work from the United State; I was a thief; I deserved to be put beneath the Machine of the Well-Doer. Yet I was indifferent to this thought; it was as distant from me as though it were written in a novel. I took the certificate without an instant’s hesitation. I, all my being, my eyes, my lips, my hands … knew it was as it should be.
At the corner, from a half empty garage we took an aero. I-330 took the wheel as she had done before, pressed the starter and we tore away from the earth. We soared. Behind us the golden haze; the Sun. The thin, blade-like profile of the doctor seemed to me suddenly so dear, so beloved. Formerly I knew everything was revolving around the Sun. Now I knew everything was revolving around me. Slowly, blissfully, with half-closed eyes. …
At the gate of the Ancient House we found the same old woman. What a dear mouth, with lips grown together and ray-like wrinkles around it! Probably those lips have remained grown together all these days; but now they parted and smiled:
“Ah! you mischievous girl, you! Work is too much for you? Well, all right, all right. If anything happens I’ll run up and warn you.”
A heavy, squeaky, opaque door. It closed behind us, and at once my heart opened painfully, widely, still wider. … My lips … hers. … I drank and drank from them. I tore myself away; in silence I looked into her widely open eyes, and then again. …
The room in half dusk. … Blue and saffron-yellow lights, dark green morocco leather, the golden smile of Buddha, a wide mahogany bed, a glimmer of mirrors. … And my dream of a few days before became so comprehensible, so clear to me; everything seemed saturated with the golden prime-juice of life, and it seemed that I was overflowing with it—one second more and it would splash out. … Like iron-ore to a loadstone, in sweet submission to the precise and unchangeable law, inevitably, I clung to her. … There was no pink check, no counting, no United State; I myself was no more.
