Stanislaw Lem: The Chain of Chance

“Annabella, what’re you doing here?” I wanted to say, being as shocked as I was glad to see her, but all I could muster was a faint “Aa—” before she went inside the room, with such an inviting toss of the head and with such an unequivocal glance of the eyes that I stopped dead in my tracks. She left the inner door open, and in my momentary panic I thought maybe she wanted to confide in me, but before I was even in the room I distinctly heard both her shoes fall to the floor and the bed squeak. With these sounds still fresh in my ears, feeling morally indignant, I went in and gasped: the room was empty.

“Annabella!” I yelled. The bed was untouched. “Annabella!” Silence. In the bathroom, maybe? I opened the door, but it was dark inside; I waited in the doorway till the light blinked on. Bathtub, bidet, towel rack, washbasin, my own reflection in the mirror… I went back into the room, not daring to call out any more. Though it was unlikely she would have had time to hide in the wardrobe cabinet, I opened it anyway. Empty. My knees began to buckle, so I slumped into an armchair. Even now I could describe exactly the way she walked, the kind of clothes she wore… Then I realized why she’d seemed taller: she was wearing high heels instead of sandals. I could still see that expression in her eyes as she passed through the doorway, the way her hair spilled over her shoulder when she motioned with her head. I could still hear her naughtily kicking off her shoes and the sound made by the creaking bedsprings, and I remembered my jabbing, stinging sensation at hearing those sounds… Was it all just a fantasy? A hallucination?

I touched my knees, my chest, and my face, as if this were the sequence in which I had to examine them, ran my hands over the chair’s rough upholstery, walked across the room and banged my fist against the wardrobe’s half-open door; everything felt solid, stationary, immutable, well defined, and yet somehow ambiguous. I paused in front of the television set and saw a reduced reflection of the bed and a pair of girls’ shoes carelessly flung down on the carpet. I spun around in horror.

There was nothing on the floor, nothing anywhere. Next to the television set was a telephone. I picked up the receiver, heard the dial tone, but stopped short of dialing. What was I to tell Barth—that I was in a hotel fantasizing about some girl and was afraid to be left alone? I hung up the receiver, took my toilet kit out of my suitcase, went into the bathroom; as I leaned over the basin, I suddenly froze. Everything I was doing had its immediate and familiar precedent. Like Proque I splashed my face with cold water. Like Osborn I rubbed my temples with cologne. Then I went back into the room, not knowing what to do next. Nothing happened to me. The most sensible thing would have been to climb into bed and go to sleep. On the other hand, I was afraid of undressing, as if my clothes were somehow a protection. Moving quietly in order not to rouse the evil spirit, I took off my pants, shoes, and shirt, and after switching off the overhead light, pressed my head against the pillow. Now the threat seemed to come from outside—from the hazy ambiguity of the objects standing in the penumbra of the night light. I switched off the lamp. A feeling of inertia came over me; I forced myself to take long and even breaths. There was a knock at the door; I didn’t move a muscle. There was another knock, and someone—a man—opened the door and stepped into the passageway. The figure, silhouetted against the corridor’s brightness, started advancing toward my bed.

“Monsieur…”

I didn’t make a sound. Now so close that he stood over me, he laid something down on the table and quietly withdrew. The lock on the door clicked; I was alone again. I dragged myself out of bed—more beat than dazed—and switched on the wall light. Lying on the table was a telegram. With a pounding heart and wobbly legs I picked it up. It was addressed to me, care of the Hotel Air France. I glanced down at the sender’s name, and my blood ran cold. I pressed my eyelids together, opened the telegram, and again read the name of the man who had been buried long enough to be a rotting corpse.

WAITING ROME HILTON RM 303

ADAMS

I must have read and reread the message ten times, examining the telegram up close and from every angle. It had left Rome at 10:40, thus well over an hour ago. It was probably just a slip of the pen. Randy might have moved into the Hilton—he had settled for the little hotel near the Spanish Steps for lack of anything better—and this was his way of letting me know. Or he might have received my message, given up waiting for me, then heard about the flight cancellations and decided to wire me. But why the switch in names? And of all names, why that one? I sat down by the wall and considered whether the whole thing wasn’t just a dream. The wall light was burning right over my head. Everything around me was taking on a new appearance. The window curtain, the television set, and the outline of the shadows had all become portents of something inscrutable. Everything was becoming dependent on me, subject to my will. I decided to eliminate the wardrobe cabinet. Its lacquer finish suddenly turned dull, the outline of the door became blurred, the rear wall burst open, and an unshapely black hole was soon crawling with writhing, slithering shapes. I tried to restore the cabinet but couldn’t. The center of the room was gradually being enveloped by the shadows in the corners. I could only rescue those objects that still remained in the light. I reached for the phone; the receiver, which had taken on a perverse and mocking shape, slipped out of my hand. The telephone became a gray rock with a rough surface, the dial a hole. My fingers penetrated the surface and touched something cold. There was a ball-point pen lying on the table. Exerting all my powers of concentration to keep the pen from disappearing, I scrawled a message across the telegram in large letters:

11:00 NAUSEA

11:50 ILLUSIONS AND DELUSIONS

But while I was writing I lost all control over my surroundings and at any moment I expected the room to collapse. Then the unexpected happened: I noticed something was going on in my immediate vicinity. I realized that the immediate vicinity was my own body. It was stretching; my hands and feet were moving farther away from me. Afraid that I might bang my head against the ceiling, I made a dive for the bed. I lay on my back but had trouble breathing; my chest swelled like the dome of Saint Peter’s; my hands became big enough to scoop up several pieces of furniture, if not the whole room. A nightmare, I told myself. Just ignore it! By then I had stretched so far my extremities were dissolving into darkness. They were so distant from me that I’d lost all sensation in them. Only my interior was left. A vast and labyrinthine region, a gulf lying between my mind and the world, which in fact had ceased to exist. I leaned out breathlessly over my own abyss. Where I once had had a pair of lungs, intestines, and veins, I now saw only thoughts—gigantic thoughts; and in those thoughts, my life, my tangled and splintered life, as it glowed, turned to charcoal and finally into ashes. I watched it disintegrate into a fiery dust, a black Sahara. The black Sahara was my life. The room in which I was lying like a fish on the ocean floor had shrunk to the size of a grain of sand; it, too, was a part of me. The more I kept expanding beyond the limits of my body, the more terrified I became. Little by little I was being consumed by an awesome power, by the power of my expanding mass, which was devouring everything in a greedy surge. I groaned in despair as I found myself sucked into the depths; I tried raising myself up by supporting my elbows on the mattress, now located somewhere in the middle of the earth. I was afraid that with one jerk of my hand I might cave in the walls. It can’t be, I kept telling myself, but I could feel it in every nerve and fiber of my body. In a senseless attempt to escape, I crawled out of bed, got down on my knees, and groped along the wall for the light switch. The room was inundated by a razor-sharp whiteness. I saw the table oozing with an iridescent film; the telephone bleached bone-white; and in the mirror my own face glistening with sweat. I recognized the face, but nothing else had changed. I tried to understand what was happening to me, to get at the force that was bursting to get out. Was I that force? I was and I wasn’t. My swollen hand was still mine. But what if it turned into a mountain of flesh and tried to crush me with its seething, bubbling mass? Could I then still claim it as my own and not the force expanding it? Whenever I tried to resist the metamorphosis, I was too late; by then the change had already taken place. With a mere glance I could remove the ceiling; under my gaze everything buckled, caved in, collapsed—melted like a house of wax on fire. You’re hallucinating! I kept telling myself, and the words would bounce back like an echo from a well. I shoved myself away from the wall, spread out my feet, watched as they kept sinking into the mushy parquet flooring, turned my head like the dome of some lofty cathedral, and spotted my watch lying on the night stand. The dial was the bottom of a luminous crater; the second hand was ticking off the seconds in eerie slow motion, leaving behind it a trail more white than the dial’s enamel finish, while the dial expanded to become a battlefield traversed by military columns. The chalky ground between the marching ranks was ripped apart by explosions, the smoke assumed the shape of faces—malleable masks of mute agony. Swarms of antlike soldiers congealed into a vitreous mass; their blood ran out to form round pools of red mud, but they marched on, dust-covered and bloodied, to the steady accompaniment of a drum roll. The battle gradually diminished in scale as I put down the watch, but never ceased. Suddenly the room became tilted, began rotating in slow motion, and hurled me toward the ceiling. Something broke my fall. I dropped down on my hands and knees and lay by the bed as the room gradually came to a stop and everything settled back into place. Stretched out with my head on the floor like a dog, I glanced up at the watch leaning against the lamp on the night stand; it was a quarter to one.