The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Page B

worlds,” and so could find no others. One of Moov’s novellas—“The Disconnected Man,” I believe it was called—described a supposedly brilliant thinker who, at the time of the coup carried out by the invisible enclave, had been completing his system for discovering new great meanings. Abruptly inserted into the ranks of automatons, he did the same simple work they did, five or six motions, day in, day out, and was powerless to throw humanity his saving idea: in a world where action and thought, conception and substantiation had been separated, he, you see, was a disconnected man.
    Another sketch was about a beautiful lady, beautiful from the depths of her soul to the tips of her fingers (biography often goes where it’s not wanted)—a lady to whom the machine had given the very man to whom she had lost her heart, but “he” did not know this and never could. This story contained many crossed-out lines and ink blots, so I can’t tell you any more about it.
    Finally, our “promising” young author decided to consider a life that meets with existence and exification at the same time: this was the story of a boy growing slowly into adolescence—by the time his consciousness wakes he has been activated by an ex. For this being, no world exists beyond the ex: the ex to him is transcendental, he sees his own actions as external things, just as we see the objects and bodies around us. He sees his own body as removed from his consciousness and in no way connected to it. In short, he sees the operation of the machine, which conditions all objective phenomena, as a third Kantian form of sensibility, * on a par with time and space. The ex-like thinking of this boy—who knows nothing of the possibility of passing from will to action, from conception to realization—naturally comes to recognize the existence of a world of conceptions and volitions in themselves, comes, that is, to an extreme spiritualism. And yet, move by move, Moov leads his hero out of this closed circle, compelling him to seek and find an exemplum that has escaped ex logic: Moov achieves this, as in the previous story, by means of happy coincidences (however rare) where the heart’s prayers happen to be answered by the action of an ex. These accidental moments of harmony set the exon to dreaming about another world where such exceptions are the rule and— But I won’t finish because neither did Moov: a radiogram from Zes requested his immediate presence.
    Moov found his patron with company—although “company” is scarcely the right word—he found Zes standing in front of two exons that had been maneuvered into armchairs.
    â€œIf I understood you right at the last meeting, you would like to step into the other world. Close the door. Good. Now I’ll open the souls of these two for you. Sit down and watch closely.”
    â€œBut I don’t understand …” Moov mumbled.
    â€œYou will shortly. Two hours and forty minutes ago I injected them each with almost a gram of init. This phial contains enough for two or three more such experiments. Init takes effect at the end of the third hour. Now pay attention.”
    â€œBut that means that Nototti … his death,” Moov’s lost eyes dashed from the mannequins to Zes to the tiny phial on the table.
    â€œStop talking nonsense. Look: that one is beginning to stir. A few minutes ago I had them both deactivated. That means, you realize …”
    One of the mannequins twitched in an odd way, thrust out his chest, and clenched his fists. His eyes remained closed. Then foam began to bubble from his lips, he opened his unblinking eyes, and stared dully at Zes and Moov. His brain, parted for long years from his muscles, seemed to be feeling its way back to them—then suddenly there was contact: leaping out of his seat with an animal cry, the exon hurled himself at Zes. In an instant they were rolling