"Who is detaining you? What are you standing here for?"
I was silent, absurdly hanging upside down.
I followed obediently, waving my unnecessary, foreign arms. I could not raise my eyes. I walked through a strange world turned upside down, where people had their feet pasted to the ceilings, and where engines stood with their bases upward, and where, still lower, the sky merged in the heavy glass of the pavement. I remember what pained me most was the fact that looking at the world for the last time in my life, I should see it upside down rather than in its natural state; but I could not raise my eyes.
We stopped. Steps. One step ... and I should see the figures of the doctors in their white aprons and the enormous dumb Bell.
With force, with some sort of an inner screw, at length I succeeded in tearing my eyes away from the glass beneath my feet, and I noticed the golden letters, "Medical Bureau." Why did he bring me here rather than to the Operation Department? Why did he spare me?--about this I did not even think at that moment. I made one jump over all the steps, firmly closed the door behind me and took a very deep breath, as if I had not breathed since morning and as if my heart had not beaten for the same length of time, as if only now I started to breathe and only now there opened a sluice in my chest....
Inside there were two of them, one a short specimen with heavy legs, his eyes like the horns of a bull tossing the patients up, the other extremely thin with lips like sparkling scissors, a nose like a blade--it was the same man who ... I ran to him as to a dear friend, straight over close to the blade, and muttered something about insomnia, dreams, shadows, yellow sand. The scissors-lips sparkled and smiled.
"Yes, it _is_ too bad. Apparently a soul has formed in you."
A soul?--that strange ancient word that was forgotten long ago....
"Is it ... v-very dangerous?" I stuttered.
"Incurable," was the cut of the scissors.
"But more specifically, what is it? Somehow I cannot imagine--"
"You see ... how shall I put it? Are you a mathematician?"
"Then you see ... imagine a plane, let us say this mirror. You and I are on its surface. You see? there we are, squinting our eyes to protect ourselves from the sunlight, or here is the bluish electric spark in that tube, there the shadow of that aero that just passed. All this is on the surface, is momentary only. Now imagine this very same surface softened by a flame so that nothing can any longer glide over it, so everything instead will penetrate into that mirror world which excites such curiosity in children. I assure you, children are not so foolish as we think they are! The surface becomes a volume, a body, a world; and inside the mirror,--within you, there is the sunshine, and the whirlwind caused by the aero propeller, and your trembling lips and someone else's lips also. You see, the cold mirror reflects, throws out, while this one absorbs; it keeps forever a trace of everything that touches it. Once you saw an imperceptible wrinkle on some one's face, and this wrinkle is forever preserved within you; you may happen to hear in the silence a drop of water falling,--and you will hear it forever!"