At the same time it was clear that someone else, not he, needed to ready himself. The sound was the sound of a trumpet . . .
The Judean leaned over and kissed Skinhead awkwardly and ran down to the arena, and it became clear that the voice of the trumpet had been calling precisely him . . . Suddenly he stopped, returned, and rummaged hastily in his pockets. He pulled out something that looked either like a small box or a large bug and stuck it in Skinhead’s hand.
“I almost forgot. It’s a lighter. That sticks to the palm of your hand. Take it easy! Everything will be okay! Very okay!”
He ran back down, skipping slightly, rather quickly, and the light locks of his poor hair flew behind him. An instant later he was alongside the platform, and two radiant indeterminate beings that could barely be made out piled into his outstretched arms a stack of books, papers, packages, and bags—the usual travel gear for a scholarly business trip . . .
The sphere split into two hemispheres. The Judean with his baggage stepped inside, and the sphere shut with a metallic click.
The sound of the trumpet—piercing, and resembling reveille at a Pioneer camp amplified multiple times over—mounted until the moment the metallic click was heard. Then the trumpet abated, and a weak electric-tinted buzz could be heard as the base of the sphere lit up slightly. The illumination increased, and the entire sphere filled with a cold bluish-white light that, despite its brilliance, did not light the arena; rather, it seemed, all its powerful incandescence was concentrated deep inside the sphere.
“He’ll burn up . . . It’s the end.” Skinhead was horrified.
The buzzing ceased, the light inside the sphere was extinguished, and the sphere became cloudy and translucent. As if it were cooling down . . . It opened.
Out of the sphere emerged the Judean. His arms were stretched out in front of him, as they had been, as if they still held the pile of books. But there were no books. It seemed as if there was nothing at all.
“It burned up. It all burned up.” Skinhead deduced what exactly it had been that his best, idiotic friend had been holding in his arms: all his thoughts, his work, his plans, his books, his reports, and all his silly accomplishments, his prison work, as well as all his noble deeds, which had always caused those around him so much suffering . . .
The Judean raised the palm of his right hand so that Skinhead could see perfectly clearly the thin light metallic plate on it. The plate bore a word that Skinhead was able to make out despite the distance between them.
INTENTIONS read the word on the plate.
“Lord, God,” Skinhead implored, “but what about hell being paved with them? . . . Can our intentions really acquit us?”
The arena swayed, and the cooling sphere, and the edge of the brightening sky—all of it shifted to the side, like the shadow of a cloud . . . Once again they were walking single file through the gray sandy desert, and their legs sank into the sand, and the weak breeze carried bits of sand that it cast in their faces . . . Up ahead marched Skinhead, while Limper brought up the rear, no longer limping . . .
7
AFTER THEIR NIGHT IN THE SHED EVERYONE HAD CHANGED slightly. Most appreciably—Manikin. It was no longer stiff as oak, had become more flexible, and had acquired certain details: even its ear helixes had come to life and formed a primitive pattern, and while its eyes still looked out blankly, they no longer seemed blind.
“Likely our nighttime visitors worked him over particularly thoroughly,” Skinhead noted to himself. “They’re good at plastic surgery, no denying it . . . And they made a leg for Limper: what’s not clear only is whether it’s a prosthesis or a transplant. It looks like they formed new bone tissue and fashioned the fibula and the tibia, then grafted the nerves and muscle tissue . . . Fat Lady has become even fatter. Sister has become transparent; the light shines through her fingers . . . Actually, everybody has changed except the Newling . . .”
He watched surreptitiously from afar as she sat down on a hump, removed her shoes, poured the sand from them, then ran her marvelous hands (with a slight scar on the left one, between the middle and ring finger where a fishhook had lodged itself in her childhood) along her narrow long feet (she’d always been embarrassed by her large shoe size), and brushed off the grains of sand. Then she pulled off the black lace headscarf and loosened her thick chestnut hair, and it fell in three separate, springy locks—like hair accustomed to long years of tight braiding; she shook out the sand . . .
Manikin, despite its improvement, worried Skinhead, while at the same time Skinhead was angry with himself: How had it happened that all of a sudden he had been put in charge of them? . . . Who was he, anyway? Just like them, brought there from who knew where or why, confused and lonely . . .
Skinhead had noticed Manikin’s strange behavior even before its first seizure: it started to display signs of alarm, which was out of character for it. It would look over its shoulder, or squat down and cover its head with haphazardly fashioned paws. At one point Manikin stopped dead in its tracks and listened: from somewhere far away in the distance it was struck by a subtle terrifying sound aimed like a thin, sharp needle at its face.
The first time the wait was quite short: the needle pierced Manikin’s forehead, and it fell to the ground with a loud scream. The seizure resembled epilepsy, and Skinhead immediately stuck the bowl of a spoon—where had it come from?—in its mouth, elevating its head on his knees so that its stone-hard skull did not beat against the ground. They had no medicine. If only he had about five tablets of phenobarbital . . .
Following this first seizure Manikin’s life changed, becoming horrible and considerably more conscious. It was now constantly in one of two states—before “that” and after “that.” But it knew that there was yet a third state—“that,” which was horrid. “That” was followed by “after that.” Manikin would get up, light as an empty sack, having completely forgotten what it had just undergone. Usually at that moment it saw Skinhead alongside it. If he was not there, Manikin would catch up with the rest, who sometimes had managed to go quite far. It experienced intense hunger and approach Skinhead, who without uttering a word stuck a small square cookie in its hand. Manikin ate the funny cookie and within a few minutes forgot about its hunger. It walked on and on once again, then suddenly recall how once when it had been walking just that way it had heard a subtle, terrifying sound. It anxiously attuned its hearing, and soon the sound arose: “before that” was approaching. The malicious needles, or bees, or bullets, that flew at it from some unknown distance multiplied. It seemed as if each of them was aimed at some particularly tender and painful part of Manikin’s body: at its eyes, throat, stomach, gut . . . Each target would turn into a kind of independent organ and experience a woeful expectation, an ever-intensifying horror, and all these independent sensations of individual organs multiplied geometrically and expanded cosmically and uncontrollably so that Manikin’s terror by far came to exceed its own dimensions, and in order to contain this uncontrollably expanding fear within itself it became enormous, much larger than itself, much larger than any largeness a human being could imagine. And all of this went on and on and on . . . At that moment Manikin would get the desperate urge to shrink, to become little, tiny, the most insignificant grain of sand.
It attempted to shrink into nothingness, but instead only grew more enormous, becoming an open target for all the arrows rushing toward it. The greater this insane expansion, this ballooning of its body, the more urgent was its desire to shrink into a grain of sand, into nothingness . . . And then the blows struck. The first, to the head, was crushing and burned its way through. The blow was sharp, sabrelike, and gleaming black in color. Then another, and another. They came one after the next, striking the ever-diminishing bounds of Manikin’s body, whipping, like lightning, the already charred but still shuddering tree of its body . . .