“There were several times that the teacher knocked on our door, because I was supposed to be in the sixth grade and I hadn’t come to school in the fall. By September, my hair was already bushy and covered up the tattoos. I didn’t go to school all year. The doctors found something in my bones or my heart, I don’t know what, that let me put school off for a year. But I read a lot, because anything was better than lying in bed or wandering around the table. And I dreamed a lot, more than ever, the way I heard once on the radio that embryos dream in the womb, that they are dreaming (but of what?) almost all the time. And locked in my room, curled up under the sheets, I was nothing but a fruit of flesh ripening in the shadows. I dreamed that you would come, I dreamed of what you would look like, in every detail, which is why I was not upset when you knocked, and I invited you into the house like an old friend, as I would Herman himself, if he ever came. In my dream, you were wandering the streets of a quiet and sunny neighborhood, you were like a blind man’s hand, plunged into what might be called reality, if it wasn’t unseen, the way something can exist even when there’s nobody there to perceive its existence. I watched from the little window as you approached, as you crossed the lot full of strange wheels, prismatic windows, fresh red and yellow paint, steps that lower automatically, the number clear on the side, and a small platform at the back. I watched as you reached the cypress — chopped down years ago — to the right of the tower, as you read the silly thing that Dănuţ, the carpenter’s son next door, had written in the wall in chalk, and as you sensed that you had to come in. I called you then, in the dream, by your name: ‘Mircea,’ and I knew that, years later, you would hear.”
10
THE rose jam gave me a dizzying pain at the bridge of my nose. I finished the jam, and now I distractedly scratched the spoon against the thick glass plate, dotted with syrup. Herman. How strangely everything was starting to connect! I had always hoped my life would go differently than anyone else’s, that it would have a meaning, a meaning that perhaps I couldn’t grasp, but that was visible from somewhere high up, like a pattern in an immense field. Nothing ought to be accidental. Every person I ever met and every toothache and every grain of dust seen in a ray of light (or unseen, but there with its unsteady geometry to plug a corner of my life’s endless fractal) and even the vaguest feeling of hunger or anxiety were only colored dots in a carpet rolling and unrolling within itself, wrapping me like a silk cocoon or like the mottled strips that wrap mummies. And even I, a mummified butterfly, was just another figure, dotting the canvas with the wool of my blood. Anca kept watch over the entrance to the labyrinth, in her lonely dungeon, with her tattooed scalp covered by hair, the way that Mayan temples full of rattlesnakes lie in the jungle and in Ernst’s paintings. An immense full moon might turn the steps yellow. Anca’s blue eyes would remain the only constant of her life, from when she was a little girl to her old age, as though the fluctuating volume of her life was only a series of photos passing before two blue bars. But an old Anca, hanging flaccidly from her own eyes, was inconceivable to me, because she could not have her own destiny, separate from mine. She was as dense and homogenous as a statue. Anca only made a brief appearance in my life. She was a robot built to deliver her lines, just like every person I ever met, and every object. The glass of juice I sipped sometime as a child appeared so I could drink it. There had been nothing before and there would be nothing after it left my hand or my sight. A woman on the street, who looked at me for a moment and then, with the same expression, at the window of a home store, existed only for that moment, slopped together with some plaster and a bit of color, and then dissolved on the spot in the scorching traffic. What could Anca do in old age? Raise her grandchildren? But the chair I sat on, sipping my cup of cold water and watching her, had never been made by a carpenter from timber brought from the mountains, and the timber was not cut from a tree that lived for thirty years in the piney solitude of the forest, and the fir had not sprouted from a seed fallen to the earth, among decaying pine needles and ferns. A year from now it will not be sold, other people will not sit on it, and in ten years it will not be taken apart, not used to patch a hole in a wood fence … it will not grow mold and lichen there, in a grove of cherry trees, until all its nails rust and its wood passes through the intestines of termites, to mingle with the earth. The chair had no history, but was conceived there only for an hour, in a house built for an hour, inhabited by a girl with breasts already large and round, but without qualities, without softness and warmth and internal structure. If I had touched Anca’s breasts, they would have become instantly pliable and scented, and then just as instantly not. I move slowly along a predestined path, while around me someone creates my existence.
Yes, I was sure: my life was constructed. Second by second, a metaphysical artist invented billions of details and made captivating and exuberant scenery, iridescent surfaces beyond which was perhaps a uniform radiance, or the indescribable. Naturally, this immense façade could at any moment take on the appearance of depth. You could put a sample of anything (a drop of blood from your finger, say) under the microscope and gaze at the snowflakes of hemoglobin, the iron atom in the center and the surrounding lace of oxygen and hydrogen, but this structure is created by the investigation itself, and only locally, no other drop of the cubic kilometers of blood of all living creatures had that pattern. Its depth was only produced by surfaces …
I stood. Anca did too, smoothing her blue dress with her fingers. Each fold housed in its depths a silken, ultramarine reflection, darker than the azure dress and flowing like water, as though she were dressed in a gelatinous liquid. She called me into another, smaller room, where a chipped mirror hung on the wall. Under the mirror was a pine table with a drawer, covered with a naïve cross-stitch. We looked into the mirror of olive-brown waters: a young man with hollow cheeks, sensual lips, fixed and fanatical eyes, and a modest girl from the edge of town. Anca pulled open the drawer, and I saw that it was filled with fantastical instruments: a glittering toolkit. I could recognize a razor, clippers, pliers, needles and bottles, and more complex devices utterly foreign to me, things that looked like sewing machine shuttles, electric torture clamps, wishbones … All were French-fitted into trays of white latex foam. Joints with delicate rivets, fine tips arching like insect mandibles, heavy, truncated handles — they all produced as much pleasure as repulsion, they were perfect, but perfect for wounding, tearing, puncturing, cutting, and maybe also for strangling and trepanning (a small saw, a beauty of silver metal, might serve to take slices from the skull). I lifted the kit carefully and placed it on the table. The girl took an old, dirty chair and sat on it in front of the mirror. She unfastened the straps on her shoulders and was naked to her waist, her breasts large and firm, with gooseflesh from the cold. Standing behind her, I passed my hand through her hair, and through the disorder of brown strands, for the first time, I glimpsed the wonder: a multicolored universe etched into the white, pearly skin of her head. My fingers opened scented paths, bordered by thousands of threads extending their white shoots. Every path seemed paved with blue tiles, and violet and pink and yellow, so many disparate letters in a convex puzzle … a quiet forest, empty and lonely, that covered ancient foundations. For a moment I imagined I was a louse exploring the barren woods, stepping on pliable soil, grabbing onto thick, semitransparent trunks made of horn, trying to trace the inextricable mandala beneath my footsteps on a map.