I removed the clippers from their bay. I snapped them a few times in the air, watching the two toothed blades mounted on the end work together, well oiled, and then I placed the cold metal on Anca’s brow and cleared a first stripe, up to her crown. Her locks fell gracefully, art nouveau, into her lap, and just a few hairs clung to her eyelashes, which she shook off with a wink. I continued, carefully following the undulations of her scalp, scattering spiral locks on the ground, until her forehead stretched up to the fontanel. I cleared the area around her left ear (now I noticed her earrings, a little girl’s, three grains as ruby as a raspberry held in a bit of gold), and then her neck, trying hard not to look at the increasingly bizarre lithography I uncovered. There were some tufts between the two neck muscles that I found impossible to cut away. I continued toward her right ear, and everything was complete when an aery spiral fell in a delicate coil to the floor. Her scalp was ashen, as though along with her hair, she had also lost the frame that, like a motorcycle helmet, protected her brain. In that ashen desert there were drawings. The tattoos were clearly visible now. But I hadn’t wanted to understand the tattoos from the start, so, gently bringing my eyelids together to hide the dazzling embellishments, I kept working, repeating Herman’s technological maneuvers in reverse. I lathered her scalp, and with the razor, I removed the last traces of the ancient forest. I wiped her skull with a napkin until it began to shine dully, like an ivory ball. In comparison, Anca’s face seemed fleshy and vulgar, like a sexual organ hanging toward the floor. Her breasts, her slim teenager’s belly, her hips and legs now wrapped in electric blue cashmere were hanging, like the fringes of a multicolored jellyfish, from the convexity of her scalp. I stared, stunned by the thousands of lines intersecting like the threads of a bizarre embroidery, curves of endless grace traced over the floral design, tiny figurines flowing one into the next, knotted in an inextricable diorama. There was nothing to understand, yet everything cried out to be understood … the mystical conduction of the lines, the manic patience of the connections, and the refinement of the colors made you feel there was a message encoded there, that Herman had left a generous invitation or a terrible warning, or both at once, fixed on the hemisphere of that planet that had once been inhabited and flowering.
I circled around Anca, trying to make connections mentally, to join this spot in the shape of a wing with that line like a polyarticulate spider leg, this figure I thought I knew with that graffiti from a public toilet, this letter so clearly depicted (an M, in antic capital, colored in a beautiful violet), with that man as naked and beautiful as an archangel … But I didn’t have the key, and without it, everything was chaos and despair. Like in a coffee cup, a tortoise shell, the whole and broken lines of the I Ching, a palm whose sprawling fingers would hold the world, an inextricable dream, an obscure prophecy, I tried, in the catoptromant of memory, to divine, through the fog of too many colors, through the obscenity of excessive chastity, the message from another world. With my eyes closed, I circled my fingers over the pearly shell of Anca’s brain, like a phrenologist exploring the hump of stubbornness and gratitude. I opened my eyes and continued around her, trying dozens of angles, each of which revealed still more degrees of the design (the left parietal area seemed to house the watermark of a strange transparent egg, in which throbbed the fetus of a scaly chimera; toward the occiput I made out clearly the word DAN woven in royal cobras; above the forehead at one point I saw a naked girl sitting on her heels, urinating a flood of blue, and then I lost her; in Broca’s area my parents were smiling like in their wedding photo). Anca tried from time to time, helplessly, to meet my gaze, showing me a detail in the mirror and then shrugging her shoulders.
Only when I looked from exactly overhead, and just with my right eye — the one that lets me see clearly — did I have the revelation of the whole. There, on Anca’s skull, Herman (the same one I had talked to for hours on the cement steps of the block on Ştefan cel Mare, listening to his husky whispers about Felicia and the cosmos and his need to drink two bottles of vodka per day) had tattooed Everything, and everything had my face. Looking directly at the middle of the fontanel, I saw my face in a convex reflection. Moving my eyes just a centimeter to one side or the other changed the perspective and destroyed the overall picture, as if the drawing was not flat, but in relief, containing all of Anca’s intracranial space, biting into her jugular, and rooted in filaments of her entire body. It was my face, but every feature of it was formed in many miniscule designs, tightly intertwined, and their details, drawn in even thinner lines, were in turn composed of other designs, on another scale. The process had no end, because the twisting shroud of the abyssal fish that was a hair in my right eyebrow, was in turn composed of a nocturnal scene where Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus sat by a fire the night before the flight to Egypt. If you looked carefully at one of the stars frothing in the sky above the Holy Family, you could just see an immense cluster of faces screaming among tongues of fire (one of these faces was Felicia’s). The mole on her chin clearly held the smoking remains of a railway accident, and in an atom of the smoke were the planets and suns of another universe, with their own flora, fauna and ethology, and so on, and so on, without end. Exploring any detail meant you had to chose one branch, ignore the rest of the design, and concentrate on just one detail of the original detail, and then a detail of the detail of the detail. This plunge into the heart of the design could be deadly for one’s mind to even attempt. From the thousandth level, you would have to come back, to reverse course to find, in the billions of details of your level of detail, a single detail from the next higher level, to combine it with a billion more to move higher up, in maddening continuity.
Hours must have passed before I surfaced, before I recomposed my face from a myriad of particulars in the silky mirror of Anca’s scalp. But did I come out onto the same surface? Might the image of me in the tower, looking at the shaved skull of a girl naked to the waist, seated in front of a mirror, repeat somewhere in the depths of the billions of layers? Perhaps, following a new thrust of my mind, I might have risen so high that the scene in Anca’s room, and the tower and houses nearby, and the clouds above, and the fantastical view of Bucharest, and the vast curvature of the earth, and the golden pocket watch of the galaxy, and the foam of the supergalaxy, curved within itself and throbbing like an embryo, all of this would make up just one atom of carbon in a thread of chitin in the back of a fly from another universe, and this universe would constitute one atom of a potato peel in the garbage of a higher universe, and this whole process of my mind would continue indefinitely too, just like diving into the details and details of details …
Again I looked at my thin and sad face, that seemed drawn in charcoal, as it was reflected in the shining, living ball in front of my sternum. I looked around us, and the world was concrete again, reassuring, with impenetrable gray walls, where lights and shadows were sharply drawn, with a window where summer clouds rolled by, and a bald girl seated in front of a mirror — and me. The wet floor was strewn with brown hair, and looked somehow dirty. Anca stood, reattached the straps at her shoulders and took my hand, leading me back to the living room. We were quiet for a few minutes. She was ashen and exhausted, as if she knew her life was over (I saw her again a few years ago: a housewife holding a baby boy and a misshapen bag from which arose a hemisphere of cabbage. She was about to cross somewhere on Ziduri Moşi. She had a fatigued expression, and her right cheekbone was bruised. I rapped on the tram window taking me to Pantelimon, but I couldn’t get her to look) and that from that moment on, she would grope blindly through the dark, as spent as a discharged weapon, as ignored as a valuable incunabulum mixed in with rags and scraps by a clueless antiques dealer. I was distractedly looking at the wall, where there was a painting of a girl in a red dress jumping a crooked hopscotch, each square a different color. The tower was solemn and awkward, like a hut of planks raised higher than high, its crown in the clouds, and above it, like an ashen blade, slanted, hung the shadow of the cypress. We embraced in the hallway, like brother and sister, and touched our lips to each other’s cheeks. I went down the spiral staircase, opened the front door, and was struck suddenly by the gale, ready to knock me down, of the light and heat of the day. I didn’t take even a dozen steps before my shirt was sopping. I waded into the flames squinting, wounded, trying to orient myself, almost sure I was going the wrong direction. And I was, because after a while, turning onto a street with an algae-filled gutter along the edge, I recognized a ruined house, where I had seen the gypsy working a strip of brass. The boy was a few houses further on, eating sunflower seeds with some other kids wearing only underwear: black, dirty shorts and torn tank tops. Among the weeds that jetted up from the rank and the gaping holes in the windows, where plaster had been worn down to the brick, I saw something glittering gold. I walked through the garbage and thistles up to the wall of the house, staining my pants on the rusty cans and greasy pipes. Human feces, dry and full of flies, were scattered everywhere, in the corners of empty rooms, on the grass, and in the weeds … I lifted the brass band, a crooked crescent baked so long in the sun I could barely hold it. It looked like a filmstrip, with every frame sliced by the jaws of a guillotine press. My heart jumped when I saw that, near the middle, the series of rectangles broke off and were replaced by etched letters. A word. Perhaps it was the word Anca saw in her dream (or in her true reality): PÎNCOTA.