I locked the window and lowered the shades. I also locked the door to the study. Then I went to the bathroom and turned on the hot water. I did everything per instructions. The radio went on the soap shelf, I threw several Devon tablets in the water, together with some salt crystals, and was about to swallow the tablet when I remembered that it was propitious to “loosen up.” I didn’t want to disturb the boys, but it wasn’t necessary — an open bottle of brandy stood in the medicine chest. I took a few swallows right out of the bottle, stripped down to the skin, climbed into the bath, and turned on the radio.
Chapter ELEVEN
I intentionally did not set the thermo-regulator, so that when the water cooled off, I returned to consciousness. The radio was still shrieking and the sparkle of white light on the walls hurt my eyes. I was thoroughly chilled and covered with goose bumps. Switching off the radio, I turned on the hot water and remained in the bath, basking in the flooding warmth and a very strange, very novel sensation of total, cosmically enormous emptiness. I expected a hangover, but there wasn’t any. I simply felt good. And there were very many memories. Also my thoughts flowed inordinately well, as though after a long rest in the mountains.
In the middle of the last century, Olds and Miller had conducted experiments on brain stimulation. They inserted electrodes into the brains of white rats. They employed a primitive technology and a barbarous methodology, but having located pleasure centers in the rats’ brains, they succeeded in having the animals press the lever which closed the contacts to the electrodes, hour after hour, producing up to eight thousand auto-excitations per hour. These rats did not need anything in the real world. They weren’t in the slightest interested in anything but the lever. They ignored food, water, danger, females; they were indifferent to everything except the stimulation lever. Later, these experiments were tried on monkeys and produced the same results. Rumors were about that someone carried out similar experiments on criminals condemned to death….
That was a difficult time for mankind: a time of struggle against atomic destruction, a time of increasing limited wars over the entire face of the planet, a time when the majority of mankind was starving, but even so, the contemporary English writer and critic Kingsley Amis, having learned of the experiments with rats, wrote: “I cannot be sure that this frightens me more than a Berlin or a Taiwan crisis, but it should, I believe, frighten me more.” He feared much about the future, this brilliant and venomous author of New Maps of Hell, and: in particular, he foresaw the possibilities of brain stimulation for the creation of an illusory existence, just as intense as the actual, or more intense.
By the end of the century, when the first triumphs of wave psychotechnology were realized, and when psychiatric wards began to empty, amid the chorus of exulting cries of science commentators, the little brochure by Krinitsky and Milanovitch had sounded like an irritating dissonance. In its concluding section the Soviet educators wrote approximately as follows: In the overwhelming majority of countries, the education of the young exists on the level of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This ancient system of education always did and continues to posit as its objective, first of all and above all, the preparation for society of qualified but stupefied contributors to the production process. This system is not interested in all the other potentialities of the human mind, and for this reason, outside of the production process, man, en masse, remains psychologically a cave dweller, Man the Uneducated. The disuse of these potentialities causes the individuals’ inability to comprehend our complex world in all its contradictions, to correlate psychologically incompatible concepts and phenomena, to obtain pleasure from the examination of connections and laws when these do not pertain directly to the satisfaction of the most primitive social instincts. In other words, this system of education for all practical purposes does not develop in man pure imagination, untrammeled vision, and as an immediate consequence, the sense of humor. The Uneducated Man perceives the world as some sort of essentially trivial, routine, and traditionally simple process, a world from which it is possible only by dint of great effort to extract pleasures which are, in the end, also compulsively routine and traditional. But even the unutilized potentialities remain, apparently, a hidden reality of the human brain. The problem for scientific education consists precisely in initiating the action of these possibilities, in teaching man to dream, in bringing the multiordinality and variety of psychic associations into quantitative and qualitative coordination with the multiordinality and variety of interrelationships in the world of reality. This problem is the one which, as is well known, must become the fundamental one for mankind in the coming proximate epoch. But until this problem is resolved, there remains some basis to fear that the successes of psychotechnics will lead to such methods of electrical stimulation as will endow man with an illusory existence which can exceed the real existence in intensity and variety by a considerable margin. And if one remembers that imagination allows man to be both a rational being and a sensual animal, and if one adds to that the fact that the psychic subject matter evoked by the Uneducated Man for his illusory life of splendor derives from the darkest, most primitive reflexes, then it is not hard to perceive the awful temptation hidden in such possibilities.
And therefore — slug.
It is now understandable, I thought, why they write the word “slug” on fences.
Everything is now understandable. It’s odious, that I understand…. Better if I understood nothing, better if, upon regaining consciousness, I shrugged my shoulders and climbed out of the bath. Would it have been understandable to Strogoff and Einstein and Petrarch? Imagination is a priceless gift, but it must not be given an inward direction. Only outward, only outward… What a tasty worm some corrupter has dropped from his rod into this stagnant pool! And how accurately timed! Yes indeed, if I were commander of Wells’ Martians, I would not have bothered with fighter tripods, heat rays, and other such nonsense. Illusory existence … no, this is not a narcotic, a narcotic has a long way to go to approach it. In a. way this is exactly appropriate. Here. Now. To each time its own. Poppy seeds and hemp, the kingdom of sweet blurred shadows and peace — for the beggar, the worn-out, the downtrodden… But here no one wants peace, here no one is dying of hunger, here is simply a bore. A well-fed, well-heated, drunken bore. It’s not that the world is bad, it’s just plain dreary. World without prospects, world without promise. But in the end man is not a carp, he still remains a man. Yes, it is no kingdom of shades, it is indeed the real existence, without detraction, without dreary confusion. Slug is moving on the world and the world will not mind subjecting itself to it.
Suddenly, for a fraction of a moment, I felt that I was lost. And it was cozy to be destroyed. Fortunately I grew angry. Splashing out water, I climbed out of the bath, cursing and stoking my ire, pulled my shorts and shirt over my wet body, and grabbed my watch. It was three o’clock, and it could have been three in the afternoon or three the following morning or three o’clock after a hundred years. Idiot, I thought, pulling on my trousers. Softened up and let Buba go when he was ready to give me the address of the gangsters’ den. The operatives could have been there by now and we could have nabbed the whole accursed nest, the vile nest. The vermin nest. The repulsive cloaca… And at this instant against the very depth of my consciousness, like a dancing spot of light, flicked a very calm thought. But I could not fasten upon it.
I located some Potomac in the medicine cabinet, the strongest stimulant which I could find in it. I started into the living room, but the youngsters were snoring away there, so I climbed out the window. The city was resting, of course. Guffawing louts hung around under the street lamp on Waterway, bawling crowds surged on the brightly lit avenues. Somewhere songs were shouted, somewhere they were yelling “Shivers!” Somewhere glass was being broken. I picked out a chauffeurless taxi, found the index for Sunshine Street, and dialed it on the control console. The car took off across town. The cab smelled sour and bottles rolled underfoot. At one intersection it almost plowed into a daisy chain of howling humanity, and at another there was the rhythmic flashing of colored lights — apparently it was possible to set up the shivers elsewhere than the plaza. They were resting, resting with all their might, these benevolent patrons from the Happy Mood Salons, these polite customs inspectors, clever barbers, tender mothers and manly fathers, innocent youths and maidens — they all exchanged their diurnal aspects for the nocturnal, they all worked hard to have fun and so that it wouldn’t be necessary to think about a thing….