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Q: Did you see his face?

Berton: Yes.

Q: Who was it?

Berton: It was a child.

Q: What child? Had you ever seen it before in your life?

Berton: No. Never. In any case, not that I can recall. Besides, as soon as I drew closer—I was forty-odd yards away, maybe a little more—I realized there was something wrong with it.

Q: What do you mean?

Berton: Let me explain. At first I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was only a moment later that I realized: it was extraordinarily big. Gigantic would be more like it. It was maybe thirteen feet in length. I remember distinctly that when the undercarriage hit the wave, its face was a little higher than mine, and though I was sitting in the cockpit, I must have been a good ten feet above the surface of the ocean.

Q: If it was so big, how do you know it was a child?

Berton: Because it was a very small child.

Q: Does that answer not strike you as illogical?

Berton: No. Not at all. Because I saw its face. Besides, its body was proportioned like that of a child. It looked to me like. . . almost like a baby. No, that’s going too far. It was perhaps two or three years old. It had black hair and blue eyes. They were huge! And it was naked. Completely naked, like a new-born infant. It was wet, or rather slimy; its skin sort of shimmered.

This sight had a terrible effect on me. I no longer believed it could be a mirage. I’d seen it too close up. It was rising and falling with the waves, but it was also moving independently of them. It was disgusting!

Q: Why? What was it doing?

Berton: It looked, well, like something in a museum, like a doll, but a living doll. It was opening and closing its mouth and making different movements. Disgusting. Because they weren’t its own movements.

Q: Can you say what you mean by that?

Berton: I didn’t get closer than fifteen or so yards, maybe twenty would be more accurate. But I already mentioned how huge it was, and because of this I could see it extremely distinctly. Its eyes were shining and in general it gave the impression of a living child; it was just those movements, as if someone were attempting. . . as if someone were trying them out.

Q: Can you explain that further?

Berton: I’m not sure I can. That was the impression I had. It was intuitive. I didn’t think about it. The movements were unnatural.

Q: Are you trying to say that the arms, for example, were moving in a way that isn’t possible for human arms because of the limitations of mobility in the joints?

Berton: No. That’s not it at all. It was just. . . the movements made no sense. Normally any movement has some meaning, it serves some purpose. . .

Q: You think so? The movements of an infant don’t have to mean anything.

Berton: I’m aware of that. But an infant’s movements are chaotic, uncoordinated. They’re not specific. Whereas these movements, they were. . . Oh, I know! They were methodical. They took place in sequence, in groups and series. As if someone were trying to find out what the child was capable of doing with its arms, what it could do with its torso and its mouth. The worst was the face, I guess because the face is the most expressive part of the body. That face was like a face. . . No, I don’t know how to describe it. It was alive, yes, yet it wasn’t human. I mean, the features very much were, the eyes, the complexion, everything. But the look, the expressions, not at all.

Q: Were these grimaces? Do you know what a person’s face looks like during an epileptic seizure?

Berton: Yes, I’ve seen such a seizure. I understand. No, it was something else. In epilepsy there are contractions and twitches, while these movements were entirely smooth and continuous, graceful, you might say melodious. I can’t think of another word. And the face, with the face it was the same. A face can’t look as if one half of it is happy and the other half sad, as if one part is threatening or afraid and the other half exultant, or something like that. But with this child that’s how it was. Plus, all these movements and facial expressions took place at an amazing speed. I was only there for a short time. Ten seconds perhaps. I don’t know if it was even that long.

— Solaris by Stanisław Lem

But Fitzgerald says that there is another type of cracking, with an entirely different segmentarity. Instead of great breaks, these are microcracks, as in a dish; they are much more subtle and supple, and occur when things are going well on the other side.

— A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari