3
AFTER evenings like this, which had become the atmosphere of my lonely and frustrated life, after my mole-like wanderings along the continuum of reality-hallucination-dream, an inextricable triple empire, I would fall onto my bed and take a book at random from the pile on the floor, beside the bedstead. I would read almost all night. Books came at the right moment, mysteriously, as though they were pieces of a puzzle, of an image that was clear yet incomprehensible, incomplete, a kind of superbook at the threshold of books and my mind. I read deep into the night, the silence ringing ever louder, and sometimes a bug would buzz into the lampshades, burning itself on the hot light bulb. A truck would shake the windows. I began to blink more and more, faster with the right eyelid, more reluctantly with the left. I remembered nights when I would have to press my eyelid closed with my fingers to fall asleep, and days when only half of my face would laugh, while the other half stayed sullen and sinister. Now, when I blinked quickly, the orbicularis muscle of my mouth twitched and bothered me, and when I was tired, a cold sweat spouted from the pores of my left cheek. I tried looking at the image of the room with a single eye. With my right eye, the room looked bright, and the colors shone obediently one beside the next. My left eye, however, saw a strange greenish cavern, where wet forms oscillated like the skin of an underwater animal. By the end of the night the books’ meanings would completely evaporate, and I would be in the embrace of their thin pages, their incomprehensible cabalistic signs, and the scent of their dusty paper, the most stimulating scent on the planet. My two cerebral hemispheres contracted with pleasure in their bone scrotum. Half asleep, I spied on the books with the passion of a voyeur. I would rip a page’s corner to see the threads of puffy texture, pick at the wound of a torn binding, or watch, for as long as half an hour, an insect crossing the enormous field, from its home in Dostoyevsky’s “The Double” or Everyman’s Physics.
From its miniscule black body, the insect projected six transparent legs, each with a dark spot at the end. If you concentrated, you could see that its antennae, also translucent, were constantly shaking. It patiently traversed the hills and valleys of cheap paper, buried itself in between the pages, and appeared in the yellow, glistening light again, without giving any thought to the complicated mental processes of Goliadkin or to the black letters, bigger than its own body, which encoded his insanities. Hard little barbs kept it anchored to the book, to the universe where it was born. You could blow as hard as you liked, but you wouldn’t knock it off. It would, though, stop for a moment to weather the hurricane, pressing its stomach to the thick mat of the paper, and then it would go on, with steady and satisfied steps. No one could take it from its homeland, where it appeared and where it would die, turning into a dry shell at the base of a page. It might bite, from time to time, into a black or white piece of woven fiber. It would stick its ovipositor into the dot on the “i” in Goliadkin and leave a cylindrical tube with a small embryo inside. It did not know that its world meant something, that it could be read — it experienced its world, and that was enough. Maybe Goliadkin, or I, whose eye like a billion suns approached, was this insect’s God, but its nervous ganglions barley managed to keep it alive. I was a God that had not created it and could not save it. I was eternally unknown and indescribable.
Then suddenly I would feel someone watching me. I would shiver all over, leap up and go to the window. I saw the stars scattered over the city. Someone, deep inside another night, of another kind, held my world and followed, with amusement, my progress over its twisting roads, blowing loneliness and evil from its mouth like tongues of black fire, and I hung on to my life, spreading sticky viscera over the page. What book might I be in? And what kind of mind would I need to understand it? And if I could, wouldn’t I be disappointed to find I was living inside a cheap, licentious little book, or a train schedule, or a coloring book for children, or an abject anonymous letter, or a roll of toilet paper?
I closed the book over this being, miniscule but just like me, a body full of organs like mine, cells whose protoplasm accomplished the same billion chemical maneuvers per second, and I turned out the light at exactly the moment dawn began to whiten the window. I curled up and pulled the blanket over my head, leaving just a narrow gap where I could breathe. That was how my mother slept, mummified in the fetal position, and that was how I had slept, too, for as long as I could remember. But I was always afraid to fall asleep. Where would my being be for so many hours? I might go somewhere I could not come back from, or I might return transformed into a horrible monster. The rupture of my self’s continuity made acid churn in my solar plexus. The idea seemed unbearable — that I dissolved, night after night, into a terrifying jungle, one that was inside me, but that was not me. What would I do, descending further and further into the catacombs of the imagination, if I penetrated its depths and found myself among horrific, blood- and sperm-splattered idols of archetypes, the instincts of hunger and thirst, the gag reflex? And what if I did penetrate this zone, what if I I sank into the somatic, what if I twisted around kidneys and vertebrae, suffocated by cells that were growing hair and nails, hugged by the peristalsis of my innards? Anything could happen: the mechanism that wakes you up could break, like on one spring morning, when I opened my eyes in a room flooded with light, fresh and full of life, and I realized I could not move. I was completely paralyzed. I tried to get up. I commanded my fingers to move. I didn’t know, I did not know how to do it anymore. The light dwindled to a few folds of the blanket, a piece of flowered fabric, a flash in the mirror. It lasted no more than a minute, and then my body returned to my possession, and the hypnologic rebellion was over.
4
IN THE end I would sink into sleep, wrapped in a cocoon of fraying dreams. I melted into sleep like sugar into water. I slid like a gear in the clutch of forgetting. I started awake, sometimes so violently that it seemed like everything inside me rattled. Other times, I fell in a nosedive like an old elevator plummeting down an endless well. Horrifying snouts and masks — torn cheeks, eyes hanging from their sockets, brains exposed — appeared for a second, then melted away with the howls of animals in agony. A timid voice whispered my name, very close to my ear. Slowly, a lather of word-images flooded my retinal screens, and someone composed stories and scenes from the aleatory marks, the way I would, from the stencils on the apartment wall or the tile on the bathroom floor. A chiromancer traced his finger, with a fat gold ring at its base, over the palm of my dream, interpreting and prophesying, slowly wading through the chaotic lines, then suddenly circling his nail around a mound of limpid skin, the glassy cover of thumping veins and arteries. Acrid delirium, a stew of colored threads, garbage swept into heaps — and unexpected, sweeping Altdorfer scenes, oceans and ships, blue mountains and amber beasts, battles where every button and lily on the banners and every freckle on the soldiers’ faces was visible, like under a blinding magnifying glass. Ivory castles, abstruse, with twisted columns and round windows like in Monsú Desiderio. Cells like Piranesi. Twilight collapsed over abandoned buildings, severe and singular — I circle around them in a slow flight, passing the mascarons below the roof, alternating with glowing windows, where “HARDMUTH” is written. In a night coagulated like blood, marble itself turns brown, its geometry emphasized by small, red stripes. These kinds of stripes and bands of evening light hem the acanthus leaves on immense capitals, stone snakes in gorgons’ hair, the nipples and pubic hair of living, rickety Atlases who hold up balconies. I pass, tiny as a flea, under immense porticos, into halls with beautiful mosaic floors, under cupolas high as the stars. I wander through sinuous labyrinths, leaving through crystal doors, to sink again into aphasia, misunderstanding, delirium, and dejection. Jungles with limpid springs, swamps with visions of eternal citadels: such was the cartography of my dreams. And in my dream life I remembered earlier dreams. I knew: I had been in that pink building before, the one that seemed made from a child’s blocks. I had already held a completely transparent spider, spread across my palm, heavy as a sphere of quartz, with only its emerald, pulsing sack of venom visible in its stomach. I had already squinted, blinded by the flame of sunrise, in one of the canals of this impossible Venice. Pipes ran between dreams, they were connected the way buildings in Bucharest were connected with each other, the way each of the days of my life, at a distance of years or months, or one night alone, was bound, by imperceptible threadlike tubes, to all of the others. But the catacombs, tubes, cables, wires, or passages were not all equally important. The dream highways would abruptly pour onto reality’s thoroughfares, making constellations and engrams that someone, from a great height, could read like a multicolored tattoo, and someone from a great depth could feel on his own skin, like the sadistic torture of tattooing. Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night with one hand completely numb, cold as a snake’s skin and strangely heavy, a soft object I could move only with my other hand. In my mind I saw it black and bruised, and I rubbed it, with the same incomprehension and terror I would have touching an anaconda on the mosaic of its back, in the absurd hope that somehow I would feel it become part of me. When I let it go, it fell back onto the pillow, and only when I pushed and pulled it did the cold skin find its power, the inert flesh begin to prickle, and I fill the numb glove again. Its lace of nerves, veins, lymph pathways and tubes of psychic energy came back to life, and soon my corporeal system was once more complete.