… Hairy bunches of rays around the lips and eyes. … I grasped his hands:
“Tell me. Where is she? Where is I-330 ? There? Beyond the Wall or … ? I must. … Do you hear me? At once. … I cannot. …”
“Here!” he shouted in a happy, drunken voice, showing strong yellow teeth, “here in town, and she is acting! Oh, we are doing great work!”
Who are those “we”? Who am I?
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.