The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Page A

quitters, their muscles that is, had to be written off; the amortization coefficient for exes was on the high side. Then the Mating Ex began to malfunction: forecasts for the human harvest proved overblown—the birth rate was quite low. This mightn’t have mattered, but the situation became alarming when unforeseen technical errors and irregularities surfaced in the operation of the Central Ex in charge of all the exes in Exinia. Bombarded with questions, Tutus shook his head abstractedly—and finally declared: “The only way to check a machine is to stop it.”
    Following a lengthy conference the Exinians decided to stop Ex No. 1 as a test. They chose Ex No. 1 because (a) as the longest-running ex, it misfired the most often, and (b) it activated, you may remember, the madmen—to sacrifice them seemed the most humane.
    On the appointed day and hour, Ex No. 1 cut off innervation and all of a sudden several million people—like sails reft of wind—subsided, sank down, and, wherever they were, crumpled to the ground. Walking past written-off exons, some inits saw eyes moving in the motionless carcasses, fluttering eyelashes and breathing nostrils (certain minor muscles deemed harmless to the socium remained at the exons’ disposal); within three or four days one could not walk past those immobilized mounds of human flesh without holding one’s nose since they had begun to rot alive. The checks on the machine were still not finished, therefore—as a matter of public hygiene—all that lash-fluttering flesh had to be dumped into pits and smoothed over with earth.
    Meanwhile the long and painstaking inspection of No. 1, which had been taken entirely to pieces, produced entirely unexpected results.
    â€œThe innervator is in perfect working order,” Tutus, the designated expert in chief, announced with pride. “The charges against the machine are false. But if the cause of the excesses is not in the exes, then … it must be in the exons, in the isolation and neglect of their psyches. I recently observed a simple and instructive incident: an exon, stationed by the handle of a machine and innervated to turn it from right to left, was in fact turning it now to the right, now to the left, as if his muscles were affected by two warring innervations. Yes, when we cut off their brains’ access to the world, we also cut off our access to their psyches. You cannot cross a threshold—from the inside or the outside—if the door is locked. I, of course, don’t care about all those soul-like adjuncts known in the barbaric old days by such absurd names as ‘inner world’ and so on …”
    â€œYou don’t care either, Das.” Mov struck the story a resounding blow. Turning a burning face to Das despite the president’s warning gesture and speaking so fast he nearly swallowed his words, Mov charged the story’s flank: “Yes, you, like your Tutuses and Zeses, have no interest in the only interesting thing in this whole phantasmagoria—the problem of a demuscled psyche, a spirit robbed of its ability to act; you enter facts from the outside, not the inside; you’re worse than your bacteria: they eat the facts, you eat the facts’ meanings. Tell us the story not of the exes but of the exons, and then …”
    If you can believe it, Moov felt the same way. After Tutus’s speech at the meeting I mentioned, he—somewhat to his patron’s surprise—leapt up and, eyes flashing, began saying that … but Mov has spared me having to repeat that “that.” Thank you. I’ll go on. So then, you need to know that this Moov, about whose existence I have already told you, devoted his leisure hours to composing short stories. In secret, of course, and purely “for himself,” since finding “others” … In the age of exes, literature was completely cut off along with all those “inner