The Snail on the Slope Read online

  “Wind-up tanks,” said Peretz, and wiped the sweat off his brow. “And armored vehicles.”

  “Aha! This you remember! And this was back when you were in preschool, in far more distant times, as it were. But less crucial times, eh, Peretz? All right. So, tanks and armored vehicles. Next question. At what age did you first feel attracted to a woman—in parentheses, toward a man? The sentence in parentheses is usually addressed to a woman. You may answer now.”

  “A long time ago,” said Peretz. “It was a very long time ago.”

  “Be more precise.”

  “How about you?” asked Peretz. “You tell me first, then I’ll answer.”

  The chairman shrugged. “I have nothing to hide. This first happened to me when I was nine years old, when I was being bathed with my cousin . . . And now answer me, please.”

  “I can’t,” said Peretz. “I refuse to answer questions like that.”

  “You idiot,” someone whispered in his ear. “Just tell a lie with a straight face, and that’ll be the end of it. What are you torturing yourself for? You think someone will check?”

  “All right,” Peretz said meekly. “When I was ten years old. When I was being washed with our dog Daisy.”

  “Very good!” the chairman exclaimed. “So you can do it if you want to! And now list all the foot diseases you’ve ever suffered from.”

  “Rheumatism.”

  “Any others?”

  “Intermittent claudication.”

  “Very good. Any others?”

  “Colds,” said Peretz.

  “That’s not a foot disease.”

  “I don’t know about that. Maybe for you it isn’t. It certainly is for me. My feet get wet, and presto, a cold.”

  “Weeell, all right. Any others?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Do as you please. But you should know—the more, the better.”

  “Spontaneous gangrene,” said Peretz. “Followed by amputation. That was my very last foot disease.”

  “That will probably suffice. One last question. Briefly state your worldview.”

  “I’m a materialist,” said Peretz.

  “What kind of materialist?”

  “An emotional one.”

  “I don’t have any more questions. How about you, gentlemen?”

  There were no more questions. Some of the employees were dozing and some were chatting, their backs turned to the chairman. The truck was now going slowly. It was getting hot, and humid air with a whiff of forest was starting to waft toward them—an unpleasant, pungent odor that didn’t usually reach the Administration. The truck’s engine had been turned off, and in the distance, in the most distant of distances, they could hear the faint rumbling of thunder.

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” the deputy chairman was saying, his back also turned to the chairman. “This must be some kind of unhealthy pessimism. First of all, man is by nature an optimist. And second—and most important—do you really think that the Director spends less time thinking about these things than you do? That’s almost funny. During his last speech, while speaking to me, the Director revealed majestic prospects. It took my breath away, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’ve always been an optimist, but this vision . . . If you care to know, everything here will be knocked down, all these walls, these villas . . . In their place, we will have dazzlingly beautiful structures made out of transparent and translucent materials—swimming pools, air parks, crystalline bars and diners! Stairs into the sky! Slender, lithe women with supple, tanned skin! Libraries! Muscles! Laboratories! Soaked through with sunshine and light! Flexible schedules! Cars, gliders, airships . . . Public debates, sleep-learning, stereoscopic cinema . . . After work, employees will spend hours in the library, reflecting, composing music, playing guitars and other musical instruments, carving wood, reciting poetry to each other!”

  “And what will you do?”

  “I’ll carve wood.”

  “And what else?”

  “I’ll write poetry, too. They’ll teach me to write poetry, I have good handwriting.”

  “And what will I do?”

  “Whatever you like!” the deputy chairman said magnanimously. “You could carve wood, you could write poetry . . . Whatever you like.”

  “I don’t want to carve wood. I’m a mathematician.”

  “And that’s great! Do mathematics to your heart’s content!”

  “I do mathematics to my heart’s content as it is.”

  “Now you get paid for it. It’s silly. You’ll take up diving off a high board.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why? Aren’t you curious?”

  “I’m not curious.”

  “What exactly are you trying to say? That you aren’t interested in anything but mathematics?”

  “You know, I’m probably not . . . After a day’s work, I’m too tired to be interested in much of anything.”

  “You’re just limited. That’s all right, they’ll develop you. They’ll find your hidden talents—you’ll compose music, carve things . . .”

  “Composing music—that’s no problem. Finding an audience, on the other hand . . .”

  “I’d be happy to listen to you . . . Peretz here . . .”

  “You just think you would. You wouldn’t listen to me. And you wouldn’t write poetry. You’d hack a bit at your wood, then go chase skirt. Or you’d go on a bender. I know you. And I know everyone else here. You’d slouch between the crystalline bar and the diamond diner. Especially if you had a flexible schedule. I shudder to think what would happen if everyone here had a flexible schedule.”

  “Everyone is a genius in one way or another,” the deputy chairman countered. “We just need to bring this genius to light. We don’t even suspect it, but maybe I’m a culinary genius, and you’re, say, a pharmaceutical genius, and we spend our time on all the wrong things and never discover our true natures. The Director said that in the future this will be handled by experts, who will search for our secret potentialities.”

  “Well, you know, potentialities are a funny thing. I’m not arguing with you, exactly—it’s possible that everyone really does have some hidden genius, but what are we going to do if it turns out that someone’s genius is only of use in either the distant past or the distant future? And in the present, no one would think of it as genius, whether it’s been exhibited or not. Of course it’d be wonderful if it turns that you’re a culinary genius. But we might instead learn that you’re a brilliant coachman, and Peretz is a magnificent arrowhead polisher, and my unique talent lies in detecting a certain Z-field that hasn’t been discovered yet and won’t be discovered for another two centuries . . . And that’s when, as the poet said, leisure will turn its grim visage toward us . . .”

  “Guys,” someone said, “you know, we didn’t bring any food. By the time we get there, then get our salaries . . .”

  “Stoyan will feed us.”

  “Yeah, right, Stoyan will feed us. They have a ration system.”

  “Damn it, my wife even packed me sandwiches!”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll manage—look, there’s the barrier.”

  Peretz craned his neck. There was a yellow-green wall of forest in front of them, and the road disappeared into it, like a thread disappears into a multicolored rug. The truck drove past a plywood sign that exclaimed, ATTENTION! SLOW DOWN! GET YOUR DOCUMENTS READY! They could already see the guard’s booth with the lowered black-and-white-striped barrier next to it, and the barbed wire, white pinecones of insulators, and latticework searchlight towers to the right of the booth. The truck stopped. Everyone began staring at the guard, who was dozing standing up, his legs crossed and his carbine under his arm. An extinguished cigarette was stuck to his lower lip, and the ground beneath him was littered with cigarette butts. Warning signs were nailed to a post next to the barrier: ATTENTION! FOREST! . . . UNFOLD YOUR PASS BEFORE PRESENTING IT! . . . DON’T BRING DISEASE IN! The driver honked tactfully. The gu
ard opened his eyes, stared in front of him blearily, then detached himself from the booth and went around the vehicle.

  “Why are there so many of you?” he said hoarsely. “Coming to get paid?”

  “Precisely,” the former chairman said ingratiatingly.

  “A fine mission,” said the guard. He walked around the truck, stepped onto the running board, and peered into the back. “My goodness, what a lot of you there are,” he said reproachfully. “And your hands? Are your hands clean?”

  “They’re clean!” the employees said in unison. Some showed their palms.

  “Everyone’s hands are clean?”

  “Everyone’s!”

  “Okeydokey,” said the guard, leaning so far into the cab that his whole upper body disappeared. Peretz heard voices coming from within. “Who’s boss here? You are? How many have you brought? Uh-huh . . . You aren’t lying to me, are you? Your last name? Kim? You’d better watch it, Kim, I’m writing that down . . . Hey, Waldemar! Still driving? . . . And I’m still guarding. Let me see your driver’s license. Now, now, don’t bite my head off, let me see . . . Your license is in order or I’d bust your ass . . . Why in the world are you writing phone numbers on your license? Wait a minute . . . Who’s this Charlotte chick? Ah, I remember. Let me copy that down real quick . . . Thanks a lot. Off you go. You may go now.”

  He jumped off the running board, raising dust with his boots, walked up to the barrier, and leaned hard on the counterweight. The barrier went up slowly; the long johns that had been hanging on it slid into the dust. The truck began to move.

  There was a hubbub in the cargo area, but Peretz didn’t hear a thing. He was entering the forest. It was coming closer, towering over him, looming higher and higher, like an ocean wave, then it suddenly swallowed him. The sun and the sky were gone, space and time were gone—the forest had taken their place. Nothing existed but the somber colors flashing by, the dense humid air, the strange smoky smells, and the tart taste in his mouth. The forest touched all of his senses but one: the sounds of the forest were drowned out by the roar of the engine and the chatter of the other employees. This is the forest, Peretz repeated. I’m in the forest, he repeated inanely. Not above it but inside it; not an observer but a participant. I’m in the forest. Something cool and damp touched his face, tickled him, then broke off and slowly sank onto his knees. He looked at it: it was a long, thin fiber from some plant, or possibly some animal, or perhaps this was simply the forest making contact—either greeting him amicably or examining him suspiciously. He didn’t touch the fiber.

  Meanwhile, the truck sped along, following the path of the glorious human incursion—yellow, green, brown splotches disappeared obediently behind them, while columns of the long-forgotten, deserted veterans of the advancing army stretched alongside the road: the bucking bulldozers with their fiercely lifted rusty shields; the tractors buried in the ground up to their cabs, their torn-off treads snaking behind them; the trucks without wheels or windows—they were all dead, forever abandoned, yet they still looked fearlessly forward with their mangled radiators and broken headlights. And the forest rippled around them, trembling and writhing, changing color, blazing up and shimmering, deceiving the eye, approaching and retreating; the forest mocked you, scared you, teased you, and it was utterly unusual, and it was impossible to describe, and it made you dizzy.

  6.

  PERETZ

  Peretz had opened the door of the ATV and was looking into the thicket. He didn’t know what he was supposed to see. Something that looked like nauseating jelly. Something extraordinary that couldn’t be described. But the most extraordinary, most unimaginable, most impossible objects in this thicket were people, and that was why Peretz saw only them. They were walking toward the ATV, slim and graceful, confident and elegant; they walked with ease, never stumbling, instantly finding where to step, and they pretended not to notice the forest, to be at home in the forest—and they probably weren’t even pretending; they really did feel that way. Meanwhile, the forest loomed over them, shaking with silent laughter, pointing at them with myriad mocking fingers, cleverly pretending to be familiar, obedient, and simple—completely tame. For now. For the time being . . .

  “That Rita sure is a looker,” said the erstwhile truck driver Randy to Peretz. He was standing next to the ATV, his slightly crooked legs spread wide, holding the grunting and vibrating motorcycle with his thighs. “I definitely would have had a go at her, but that Quentin . . . He’s one observant man.”

  Quentin and Rita came right up to them, and Stoyan climbed out from behind the wheel to meet them. “How’s it doing?”

  “It’s breathing,” Quentin said, studying Peretz closely. “What, have they brought the money or something?”

  “This is Peretz,” said Stoyan. “I’ve told you about him.”

  Rita and Quentin smiled at Peretz. He didn’t have the chance to get a good look, and merely thought in passing that Rita was the strangest woman and Quentin the most profoundly unhappy man he had ever met.

  “Hello, Peretz,” said Quentin, continuing to smile pitifully. “Did you come to have a look? Have you never seen it before?”

  “I still don’t see it,” said Peretz. It was obvious that the strangeness and the unhappiness were elusively but inextricably linked.

  Rita turned her back to him and lit a cigarette.

  “You are just looking the wrong direction,” said Quentin. “Look over there, right in front of you! Don’t you see it?”

  And then Peretz saw it and immediately forgot about the people. It appeared, like a picture emerges on photographic paper, like the main character appears in a child’s “Where’s the bunny?” puzzle—and once you saw it, it was impossible to unsee. It was very close, about ten yards away from the trail and from the wheels of the ATV. Peretz swallowed hard.

  A living pillar rose toward the tree crowns, a sheaf of extremely thin transparent threads, sticky and shiny, taut and writhing; this sheaf pierced the dense foliage and continued still higher, into the sky. And it originated in a cloaca, a greasy, seething cloaca filled with protoplasm—a living, active cloaca swelling with bubbles of primitive flesh, busily organizing and then instantly decomposing itself, spilling the products of decomposition onto its flat banks, spitting out sticky foam . . . And at the same time, the cloaca’s voice became distinct from the grunting of the motorcycle, as if someone had turned on invisible audio filters; he heard gurgling and burbling, splashing, sobbing, and prolonged swampy moans. A wall of oppressive smells bore down on them: odors of oozing raw meat, lymph, fresh bile, serum, hot, starchy paste—and only then did Peretz notice that there were oxygen masks dangling at Rita’s and Quentin’s chests, and that Stoyan, grimacing squeamishly, was lifting a respirator toward his face. But Peretz didn’t put on a respirator himself, as if hoping that the smells would tell him the story that his eyes and ears were failing to tell him . . .

  “It stinks here,” Randy was saying with disgust. “Like in a morgue . . .”

  And Quentin was saying to Stoyan, “You should talk to Kim, have him do something about the rations. We have a dangerous work environment, after all. We deserve milk, chocolate . . .”

  Rita was smoking pensively, blowing smoke out of her thin, flexible nostrils.

  The trees surrounding the cloaca were quivering, bending over it solicitously, all their branches pointing the same direction, hanging over the bubbling mass, and there were thick, fuzzy vines streaming along the branches and falling into the cloaca, and the cloaca accepted them into itself, and the protoplasm gnawed at them and turned them into yet more protoplasm, in the same way that it could dissolve everything surrounding it and turn it into its own flesh . . .

  “Perry,” said Stoyan. “If you goggle like that, your eyes will pop out.” Peretz smiled, but he knew the smile looked fake.

  “Why did you bring the motorcycle?” asked Quentin.

  “In case we get stuck. They’ll crawl along the path, I’ll drive with two wheels on t
he path and the other two on the grass, and the motorcycle will take up the rear. If we get stuck, Randy will go fetch a tow truck on the motorcycle.”

  “You’re bound to get stuck,” said Quentin.

  “Of course we are,” said Randy. “This is a stupid idea—I told you so from the first.”

  “Be quiet,” Stoyan told him. “Did anyone ask for your opinion? . . . Are they coming out soon?” he asked Quentin.

  Quentin looked at his watch. “Well . . .” he said. “It’s currently having a litter every eighty-seven minutes. Therefore, it’s going to be another . . . another . . . Hold on, we don’t have to wait at all—look, it started already.”

  The cloaca was having a litter. Blobs of rippling, quivering white dough were being extruded onto its flat banks with impatient jerks; they rolled blindly and helplessly along the ground, then they paused, flattened out, extended a number of cautious pseudopods, and began to move in a deliberate manner—they continued to wiggle and root, but they were now all heading the same direction, one particular direction, wandering off then bumping into one another, but continuing to go the same way, following the same ray away from the womb, streaming into the thickets in a single white column, looking like giant, pouchy, slug-like ants . . .

  “We’re surrounded by quicksand,” Randy was saying. “We’ll get stuck so fast that no tow truck will do—we’ll just snap its cables.”

  “Maybe you’d like to come with us?” Stoyan asked Quentin.

  “Rita is tired.”

  “Well, maybe Rita could go home and we’ll go for a ride.”

  Quentin was hesitating. “How are you feeling, darling?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’ll go home,” said Rita.

  “Oh, good,” said Quentin. “And we’ll go take a look, all right? We’ll probably be back soon. We won’t be gone long, right, Stoyan?”

  Rita threw her cigarette butt on the ground and left without saying good-bye, setting out along the path leading to the biological research station. Quentin lingered indecisively for a bit, then said to Peretz softly, “Excuse me . . . May I get by?”