It changed all right. Man, did it change. It was as if a chasm had suddenly opened up, splitting time into two distinct ages: systemic on the one side, presystemic on the other. Far more than simply enabling him to sleep, the system transformed and colored every aspect of his life. Before long, the distinction between the two ages became second nature to Homer, and he found he could instantly slot things into one or the other category. As time passed, his life became more and more systemized, and the traces of the presystemic age grew correspondingly weaker. Yet they didn’t entirely fade away: they were constantly popping up at the most unexpected moments and in the remotest corners of his days. They’d suddenly appear in front of him, alarming links between his present state as a Homer systemicus and his former one as a Homer insomnis. They were like fossils of some creature that was now extinct or unidentifiable, so deeply buried in his consciousness that he couldn’t be sure it had ever existed.
There came a point where he could scarcely believe that he, a magnificent specimen of Homer systemicus of the family Alienson, had ever been a Homer insomnis. That earlier incarnation seemed like a remote ancestor, a kind of prosimian that had managed to survive in a state of continuous wakefulness, as the eutherian mammals in prehistoric times had adapted to life in the trees.
But Homer was not aware of the metabolic changes that the system wrought in him. If he had been, he might have realized that it was his present, not his former self, that was more ape-like. For by this time he was totally and utterly systemized.
It wasn’t like that at first, however. The beginning was bland, impalpable and diffuse. A blissful, heavenly calm. A beginning so gentle and evanescent that it was almost imperceptible. He often recalled, in later times, the hazy moments of the dawn, those dilated instants when everything, beginning with the coffee table in front of the couch, took on the consistency of foam rubber. He would sit on the summit of the world, watching, and between the foam-rubber world and his vantage point the air seemed to condense into a protective film that cushioned or muffled the offensive solidity of objects and the menacing hostility of the human race. If ever he had been destined to experience moments of happiness, those moments must have been the early days of the system. They were his golden age, his paradise lost, his nirvana before death.
Unfortunately, the era of happiness in which he thought he was living receded, slowly but remorselessly, into the past. Eventually it vanished completely, except for occasional flashes, sadistic manifestations that only served to intensify his regret, to heighten his oppressive nostalgia for those halcyon days. Reluctantly, Homer was forced to conclude that one of the strengths of the system was precisely this: the elusiveness of its beginnings. And that was what made it so desperately desirable; so intimately indispensable.
He realized, in other words, that his unconditional subjection was explained by his anxiety to rediscover that indescribable glow that he thought he’d glimpsed in the early times. Beginning to see the light, he’d heard someone sing once on the radio. That was exactly how he had felt. He had begun to see the light - a light connected, in his memory, with the dawn glow of that day when he had returned home with the little pouch of system in the right pocket of his sweatpants. Then everything had gone blank.
With the passing of time he discovered that the more use he made of the system, the more his need to relive the feelings of the early days increased, while still remaining unsatisfied; the more he systemized his life, the weaker the feelings he was seeking became. He began to form the conviction that the whole complex of his sensory capacities had undergone a radical and irreversible change. He began to suspect that he no longer experienced things in the same way; that he no longer had feelings - at least not in the sense that he thought he should attribute to the concept of feeling. If he’d been obliged to explain the phenomenon, he would probably have said that feelings had been replaced by states, ranging from the transitory state of wellbeing he’d felt in the early days to a perpetual state of discomfort (the prevailing state from a certain moment onward), with, in between, a wide range of other states, all of them tending toward the negative.
After a while he understood that the fundamental state, the one that determined the nuances and gradations of all the others, was his addiction to the system. It occurred to him that it might be a good idea to change his system of life. And he tried to do so, at least initially. He tried to give up the system and return to the heroic Spartan sleeplessness of the presystemic age. He discovered, however, that it wasn’t so easy to escape; he felt the overwhelming strength of the system and discovered how much he had come to depend on it; he discovered that the perpetual state of discomfort was nothing compared to the pain that awaited him beyond the protective cushion; he discovered that if you live even for a short time in a world of foam rubber, contact with the hard material of things and the rough minds of people hurts too much; he dis-covered that when you return to feelings after living in states, the only feeling open to you is that of pain; he discovered pain in all its forms, a species of pain unknown to those who had never entered the system; he came to know pain as a form of life and discovered that pain itself could become a system, a far more invasive and unbearable system than the one that enabled him to sleep. For this and other reasons he never really tried to leave the system. Never even contemplated it. When you’re inside it, the thought of leaving is only a dream, a way of deluding yourself and killing time. And when, in the early Nineties, the question of love was put to him, he couldn’t remember ever having had a thought that had even the remotest connection with the possibility of leaving it. The system had gradually and definitively gained the upper hand, so that now it was no longer appropriate to speak of Homer being totally systemized, but rather of the system being homerized. Totally.
The day when the dawn light had been the color of steel and he’d returned home to gaze at his thoughts mirrored in the little bag of system that Kurt had given him, was a day of eager expectation. After cracking his knuckles and sighing, Homer had made up his mind not to try the system until the evening. He wanted to perform the act with due ceremony. It must have all the solemnity of an official occasion, so he would have to devise an appropriate ritual. He had wandered aimlessly round the house, cracking his knuckles at regular intervals, trying to think what might be suitable, but hadn’t been able to think of anything except that he found this new trick of cracking his knuckles really rather agreeable. Then he had gone out and walked toward the bus station without any precise intention. He lined up for tickets, though he had no destination in mind. Only when he found himself at the counter did he return to his senses and realize that he had come all this way for nothing. But he couldn’t tell the ticket clerk that he’d made a mistake. He knew himself only too well and was aware that whatever excuse he might have mumbled out would have sounded suspicious to the ticket clerk, who bore all the hallmarks of the classic different. He couldn’t risk being caught out after years of sleeplessness and only one step away from the system, so he bought a ticket to Olympia, doing his best to seem decisive. During the journey, with his head resting against the icy glass of the window, not really knowing what he was going to do when he got there, he thought about the beauty of being able to close your eyes and go to sleep, gently rocked by the movement of the bus as it devoured miles of wet asphalt. He peered out of the corner of his eye at the little boy sleeping in the row in front, till the mother noticed and glared back at him. Homer responded with an indignant leer. He meant to communicate to that woman and to the whole company of differents his profound sense of triumph. No longer will you hold me in the palm of your hand, that leer meant. Her only response was to take the child in her arms and move nearer the front, to the seat behind the driver. In the old days such behavior would have made him feel trapped, but now everything was different. He felt secure, and rested his head on the window again, enjoying the vibrations of the icy glass pane. The sight of the sleeping child had reminded him of the evening many years ago when he’d seen the famous piece of film footage that had changed his life. He had never again had occasion to see that recording of the dramatic testimony of Dr Miles Bennell of Santa Mira. The pictures had imprinted themselves on his memory, and every time he thought about them he seemed to relive distinctly the feelings he’d had, but if he tried to reconstruct the events narrated in the film he realized that only scattered fragments remained. He could only recall isolated scenes, like that of the