A Perfect Vacuum

by Stanisław Lem

  He speaks these words, we see, with a solemnity to match that of the Maker: “Let there be...” For in fact Robinson prepares to create himself a world from zero. It is not now merely through his liberation from people due to a fortuitous calamity that he embarks upon creation whole hog, but by design. And thus the logically perfect hero of Marcel Coscat outlines a plan that later will destroy and mock him—can it be, as the human world has done to its Creator?

  Robinson does not know where to begin. Ought he to surround himself with ideal beings? Angels? Winged horses? (For a moment he has a yen for a centaur.) But, stripped of illusions, he understands that the presence of beings in any respect perfect will be difficult to stomach. Therefore, for a start, he supplies himself with one about whom before, till now, he could only dream: a loyal servant, a butler, valet, and footman in one person—the fat (no lean and hungry look!) Snibbins. In the course of this first Robinsonad our apprentice Demiurge reflects upon democracy, which, like any man (of this he is certain), he had put up with only out of necessity. When yet a boy, before dropping off to sleep, he imagined how lovely it would be to be born a mighty lord in some medieval time. Now at last that fantasy can be realized. Snibbins is properly stupid, for thereby he automatically elevates his master; nothing original ever enters his head, hence he will never give notice; he performs everything in a twinkling, even that which his master has not yet had time to ask.

  The author does not at all explain whether—and how—Robinson does the work for Snibbins, because the story is told in the first (Robinson’s) person; but even if Robinson (and how can it be otherwise?) does do everything himself on the sly and afterward attributes it to the servant’s offices, he acts at that time totally without awareness, and thus only the results of those exertions are visible. Hardly has Robinson rubbed the sleep from his eyes in the morning when there at his bedside lie the carefully prepared little oysters of which he is so fond—salted lightly with sea water, seasoned to taste with the sour tang of sorrel herbs—and, for an appetizer, soft grubs, white as butter, on dainty saucer-stones; and behold, nearby are his shoes polished to a high shine with coconut fiber, and his clothes all laid out, pressed by a rock hot from the sun, and the trousers creased, and a fresh flower in the lapel of the jacket. But even so the master usually grumbles a little as he eats and dresses. For lunch he will have roast tern, for supper coconut milk, but well chilled. Snibbins, as befits a good butler, receives his orders—of course—in submissive silence.

  The Master grumbles, the Servant listens; the Master orders, the Servant does as bid. It is a pleasant life, quiet, a little like a vacation in the country. Robinson goes for walks, pockets interesting pebbles, even builds up a collection of them; Snibbins, in the meantime, prepares the meals—but eats nothing at all himself: how easy on the budget and how convenient! But by and by in the relations of Master and Servant there appear the first sands of discord. The existence of Snibbins is beyond question: to doubt it is to doubt that the trees stand and the clouds float when no one is watching them. But the stiff formality of the footman, his meticulousness, obedience, submission, grow downright wearisome. The shoes are always waiting for Robinson polished, the oysters give off their smell each morning by his hard bed; Snibbins holds his tongue—and a good thing, too, the Master can’t abide servants’ ifs, ands, and buts—but from this it is evident that Snibbins as a person is not in any way present on the island. Robinson decides to add something that will make the situation—too simple, primitive really—more refined. To give Snibbins slothfulness, contrariness, an inclination to mischief, cannot be done: the way he is, is the way he is; he has by now too solidly established himself in existence. Robinson therefore engages, as a scullery boy and helper, the little Boomer. This is a filthy but good-looking urchin, foot-loose, you might say, somewhat of a loafer, but sharp-witted, full of shenanigans, and now it is not the Master but the Servant who begins to have more and more work—not in attendance on the Master, but to conceal from the Master’s eye all the things that that young whippersnapper thinks up. The result is that Snibbins, because he is constantly occupied with thrashing Boomer, is absent to an even higher degree than before; from time to time Robinson can hear, inadvertently, the sounds of Snibbins’s dressing-downs, carried in his direction by the ocean wind (the shrill voice of Snibbins is amazingly like the voice of the big gulls), but he is not about to involve himself in the bickering of servants! What, Boomer is pulling Snibbins away from the Master? Boomer will be dismissed—has already been sent packing, scattered to the winds. Had even helped himself to the oysters! The Master is willing to forget this little episode, but then Snibbins cannot, try as he might; he falls down on the job; scolding does not help; the servant maintains his silence, still waters run deep, and it’s clear now that he’s started thinking. The Master disdains to interrogate a servant or demand frankness—to whom is he to be confessor? ! Nothing goes smoothly, a sharp word has no effect—very well then, you too, old fool, out of my sight! Here’s three months’ wages—and to hell with you!

  Robinson, haughty as any master, wastes an entire day in the throwing together of a raft, with it reaches the deck of the Patricia, which lies wrecked upon a reef: the money, fortunately, has not been carried off by the waves. Accounts squared, Snibbins vanishes—except that he has left behind the counted-out money. Robinson, insulted thus by the servant, does not know what to do. He feels that he has committed an error, though as yet feels this by intuition only. What has gone wrong?!

  I am Master here, I can do anything!—he says to himself immediately, for courage, and takes on Wendy Mae. She is, we conjecture, an allusion to the paradigm of Man Friday. But this young, really rather simple girl might lead the Master into temptation. He might easily perish in her marvelous—since unattainable—embraces, he might lose himself in a fever of rut and lusting, go mad on the point of her pale, mysterious smile, her fleeting profile, her bare little feet bitter from the ashes of the campfire and reeking with the grease of barbecued mutton. Therefore, from the very first, in a moment of true inspiration, he makes Wendy Mae ... three-legged. In a more ordinary, that is, a tritely objective reality, he would not have been able to do this! But here he is Lord of Creation. He acts as one who, having a cask of methyl alcohol, poisonous yet inviting him to drink and be merry, plugs it up himself, against himself, for he will be living with a temptation he must never indulge; at the same time he will be kept on his toes, for his appetite will constantly be removing from the cask, lewdly, its hermetic bung. And thus Robinson will live, from now on, cheek by jowl with a three-legged maid, always able—of course—to imagine her without the middle leg, but that is all. He becomes wealthy in emotions unspent, in endearments unsquandered (for what point would there be in wasting them on such a person?). Little Wendy Mae, associated in his mind with both Wednesday and Wedding Day (note: Wednesday, Mitt-woch, the middle of the week—an obvious symbolization of sex; perhaps, too, Wendy—Wench—Window), and also with a poor orphan (“Wednesday’s child is full of woe”), becomes his Beatrice. Did that silly little chit of a fourteen-year-old know anything whatever about Dante’s infernal spasms of desire? Robinson is indeed pleased with himself. He created her and by that very act—her three-leggedness—barricaded her from himself. Nevertheless, before long the whole thing begins to come apart at the seams. While concentrating on a problem important in some respects, Robinson neglected so many other important facets of Wendy Mae!

  It begins innocently enough. He would like, now and then, to take a peek at the little one but has pride enough to resist this urge. Later, however, various thoughts run through his brain. The girl does what formerly was Snibbins’s job. Gathering the oysters—no problem there; but taking care of the Master’s wardrobe, even his personal linen? Here already one can detect an element of ambiguity—no!—it is all too unambiguous! So he gets up surreptitiously, in the dead of night, when she is sure to be still sleeping, and washes his unmentionables in the bay. But since he has begun to rise
so early, why couldn’t he—just once—you know—for fun (but only his own, Master’s, solitary fun)—wash her things? Didn’t he give them to her? By himself, in spite of the sharks, he went out several times to penetrate the hull of the Patricia and found some ladies’ frippery, shifts, pinafores, petticoats, panties. Yes, but when he washes them, won’t he have to hang everything up on a line, between the trunks of two palms? A dangerous game! Particularly dangerous in that, though Snibbins is no longer on the island as a servant, he has not dropped completely out of the picture. Robinson can almost hear his heavy breathing, can guess what he is thinking: Your Lordship, begging your pardon, never washed anything for me. While he existed, Snibbins never would have dared utter words so audaciously insinuating, but, missing, he turns out to be devilishly loose of tongue! Snibbins is gone, that is true; but he has left his absence. He is not to be seen in any concrete place, but even when he served he modestly lay low, kept out of the Master’s way and dared not show himself. Now, Snibbins haunts: his pathologically obsequious, goggle-eyed stare, his screechy voice, it all returns; the distant quarrels with Boomer shrill through the screams of the least gull; and now Snibbins bares his hairy chest among the ripe coconuts (to what leads the shamelessness of such hints?!), he bends to the curve of the scaled palm trunks and with fisheyes (the goggle!) looks at Robinson like a drowned man from beneath the waves. Where? There, over there, where that rock is, on the point—for he had his own little hobby, did Snibbins: he loved to sit on the promontory and hurl croaking curses at the aged and infirm whales, who loose their spouts sedately, within the confines of their families, on the bounding main.

  If only it were possible to come to an understanding with Wendy Mae and thereby make the relationship, already very unbusinesslike, more settled, more restricted, more decorous as regards obedience and command, with the sternness and the maturity of the masculine Master! Ah, but it’s really such a simple-minded girl; she’s never heard of Snibbins; to speak to her is like talking to a wall. Even if she actually thinks some thought of her own, it’s certain that she’ll never say a word. This, it would seem, out of simplicity, timidity (she’s a servant, after all!), but in fact such little-girlishness is instinctively crafty: she knows perfectly well for what—no, against what—the Master is dry, calm, controlled, and high-flown! Moreover she vanishes for hours on end, nowhere to be seen till nightfall. Could it be Boomer? Because it couldn’t be Snibbins—no, that’s out of the question! Snibbins definitely isn’t on the island!

  The naïve reader (alas, there are many such) will by now probably have concluded that Robinson is suffering hallucinations, that he is slipping into insanity. Nothing of the sort! If he is a prisoner, it is only of his own creation. For he may not say to himself the one thing that would act upon him, in a radical way, therapeutically—namely, that Snibbins never existed at all, and likewise Boomer. In the first place, should he say it, she who now is—Wendy Mae—would succumb, a helpless victim, to the destructive flood of such manifest negation. And furthermore, this explanation, once made, would completely and permanently paralyze Robinson as Creator. Therefore, regardless of what may yet happen, he can no more admit to himself the nothingness of his handiwork than the real Creator can ever admit to the creation—in His handiwork—of spite. Such an admission would mean, in both cases, total defeat. God has not created evil; nor does Robinson, by analogy, work in any kind of void. Each being, as it were, a captive of his own myth.

  So Robinson is delivered up, defenseless, to Snibbins. Snibbins exists, but always beyond the reach of a stone or a club, and it does not help to set out Wendy Mae, tied in the dark to a stake, for him as bait (already Robinson has resorted to this! ). The dismissed servant is nowhere, and therefore everywhere. Poor Robinson, who wanted so to avoid shoddiness, who intended to surround himself with chosen ones, has befouled his nest, for he has ensnibbined the entire island.

  Our hero suffers the torments of the damned. Particularly good are the descriptions of the quarrels at night with Wendy Mae, those dialogues, conversations rhythmically punctuated by her sullen, female, seductively swollen silences, in which Robinson throws all moderation, restraint, to the winds. His lordliness falls from him; he has become simply her chattel—dependent on her least nod, wink, smile. And through the darkness he feels that small, faint smile of the girl; however, when, fatigued and covered with sweat, he turns over on his hard bed to face the dawn, dissolute and mad thoughts come to him; he begins to imagine what else he might do with Wendy Mae ... something paradisiacal, perhaps? From this we get—in his threshing out of the matter—allusions, through feather stoles and boas, to the Biblical serpent (note, too: servant—serpent), and we have the attempted anagrammatic mutilation of birds to obtain Adam’s rib, which is Eve (note, too: Aves—Eva). Robinson, naturally, would be her Adam. But he well knows that if he cannot rid himself of Snibbins, in whom he took no personal interest whatever during the latter’s tenure as lackey, then surely a scheme to put Wendy Mae out of the way must spell disaster. Her presence in any form is preferable to parting with her: that much is clear.

  What follows is a tale of degeneration. The nightly washing of the fluffs and frills becomes a sort of sacramental rite. Awakened in the middle of the night, he listens intensely for her breathing. At the same time he knows that now he can at least struggle with himself not to leave his place, not to stretch his hand forth in that direction—but if he were to drive away the little tormentor, ah, that would be the end! In the first rays of the sun her underthings, scrubbed so, bleached by the sun, full of holes (oh, the locality of those holes!), flap frivolously in the wind; Robinson comes to know all the possibilities of those most hackneyed agonies which are the privilege of the lovelorn. And her chipped hand mirror, and her little comb ... Robinson begins to flee his cave-home, no more does he spurn the reef from which Snibbins abused the old, phlegmatic whales. But things cannot go on like this much longer, and so: let them not. There he is now, hastening to the beach to wait for the great white hulk of the Caryatid, a transatlantic steamer which a storm (very likely also conveniently invented) will be casting up on the leaden, foot-scorching sand covered with the gleam of dying chambered nautili. But what does it mean, that some of the chambered nautili contain within them bobby pins, while others in a soft-slimy slurp spit out—at Robinson’s feet—soaked butts of Camels? Do not such signs clearly indicate that even the beach, the sand, the trembling water, and its sheets of foam sliding back into the deep, are likewise no longer part of the material world? But whether this is the case or not, surely the drama that begins upon the beach, where the wreck of the Caryatid, ripped open on the reef with a monstrous rumble, spills its unbelievable contents before the dancing Robinson—that drama is entirely real, it is the wail of feelings unrequited....

  From this point on, we must confess, the book grows more and more difficult to understand and demands no little effort on the part of the reader. The line of development, precise till now, becomes entangled and doubles back upon itself. Can it be that the author deliberately sought to disturb the eloquence of the romance with dissonances? What purpose is served by the pair of barstools to which Wendy Mae has given birth? We assume that their three-leggedness is a simple family trait—that’s clear, fine; but who was the father of those stools? Can it be that we are faced with the immaculate conception of furniture?? Why does Snibbins, who previously only spat at the whales, turn out to be their ardent admirer, even to the point of requesting metamorphosis (Robinson says of him, to Wendy Mae, “He wants whaling”)? And further: at the beginning of the second volume Robinson has from three to five children. The uncertainty of the number we can understand. It is one of the characteristics of a hallucinated world that has grown too complicated: the Creator is no longer able to keep straight in his memory all the details of the creation simultaneously. Well and good. But with whom did Robinson have these children? Did he create them by a pure act of will, as previously he did Snibbins, Wendy Mae, Boomer, or—instead—did
he beget them in an act imagined indirectly, i.e., with a woman? There is not one word in the second volume that refers to Wendy Mae’s third leg. Might this amount to a kind of anticreational deletion? In Chapter Eight our suspicions would appear to be confirmed by a fragment of conversation with the tomcat of the Caryatid, in which the latter says to Robinson, “You’re a great one for pulling legs.” But since Robinson neither found the tomcat on the ship nor in any other way created it, the animal having been thought up by that aunt of Snibbins’s whom Snibbins’s wife refers to as the “accoucheuse of the Hyperboreans,” it is not known, unfortunately, whether Wendy Mae had any children in addition to the stools or not. Wendy Mae does not admit to children, or at least she does not answer any of Robinson’s questions during the great jealousy scene, in which the poor devil goes so far as to weave himself a noose out of coconut fibers.

  “Cock Robinson” is what the hero calls himself in this scene, ironically, and then, “Mock Robinson.” How are we to understand this? That Wendy Mae is “killing” him? And that he holds all that he has done (created) to be counterfeit? Why, too, does Robinson say that although he is not nearly so threelegged as Wendy Mae, still in this regard he is, to some extent, similar to her? This may more or less allow of an explanation, but the remark, closing the first volume, has no continuation in the second, neither anatomically nor artistically. Furthermore, the story of the aunt from the Hyperboreans seems rather tasteless, as does the children’s chorus which accompanies her metamorphosis: “There are three of us here, there are four and a half, Old Fried Eggs.” Fried Eggs, incidentally, is Wendy Mae’s uncle (Friday?); the fish gurgle about him in Chapter Three, and again we have some allusions to a leg (via fillet of sole), but it is not known whose.

  The deeper we get into the second volume, the more perplexing it becomes. In the second half of it, Robinson no longer speaks to Wendy Mae directly: the last act of communication is a letter, at night, in the cave, written by her in the ashes of the fireplace, by feel, a letter to Robinson, who will read it at the crack of dawn—but he trembles in advance, able to guess its message in the darkness when he passes his fingers over the cold cinders.... “Do leave me be!” she wrote, and he, not daring to reply, fled with his tail between his legs. To do what? To organize a Miss Chambered Nautilus Pageant, to belabor the palm trees with a cudgel, reviling them in the most opprobrious terms, to shout out, on the promenade of the beach, his program for harnessing the island to the tails of the whales! And then, in the course of one morning, arise those throngs which Robinson calls into existence off the cuff, carelessly, writing names, first and last, and nicknames, on whatever comes to hand. After this, complete chaos, it seems, is ushered in: e.g., the scenes of the putting together of the raft and the tearing asunder of the raft, of the raising up of the house for Wendy Mae and the pulling of it down, of the arms that fatten as the legs grow thin, of the impossible orgy without beets, where the hero cannot tell black eyes from peas or blood from borscht!