During the visiting hour, Mr. Ionescu again found it meet to cause a fuss. He went after the nurses who, it seemed, purposely neglected him. It was funny that it didn’t bother him at all, the sadism with which the two old mares stuck syringe needles into his wrinkled buttocks, like into an old horse, squirting a few cubic centimeters of serum abruptly into his flesh with a kind of hatred that roused our indignation; nor was he bothered that he had to struggle and writhe and foam at the mouth for half a day, with his bladder about to burst, until one of them would take it upon herself to slide the catheter into his urethra; nor that they had given him, as a joke, a robe with buttons missing and put it on him backwards, with the big hole between his shoulder blades and the fabric unraveling everywhere. What he found intolerable was that the girls dressed indecently. “Harlots! I can see your underwear through the robe! Look at you, not even a bra, I can see you half a league away! No woman in my time would have walked around men like that! Not even in Crucea de Piatră they didn’t, I say, because the police would pick them up immediately! Moral corruption, the world is rotting like an apple, I tell you! The apocalypse is coming! Were there women like this in my time? Did whores like this walk the streets? There were whores, of course, but what women they were! The rich ones would put on extra petticoats, and when you took the last one off, I say, however coquettish and brazen she seemed, she’d turn red like a dove and bury her face in the sheets. They didn’t wag around, they didn’t, with their tits under a man’s nose, especially rickety, sick men like us. Shame! Shame on you!” While the old man’s eyes bulged out of his head in indignation, the girls fell over laughing, sorting medications in the compartments of their table. They stopped at each bed and left a few pills or brightly colored capsules on the nightstand, in a special tray, which, when shaken, made a happy, gentle clatter. One day, from one of these long orange and green capsules, forgotten on the nightstand of an old man with nocturnal bruxism, who always woke us with atrocious grindings, a kind of transparent larva emerged, slightly violet, with a complicated interior structure and four black, jointed legs. It pulled itself along the table and then disappeared somewhere underneath. From then on we all opened our capsules gently and carefully, and we only swallowed the bitter powder inside. We would all take the opportunity, when one of the nurses was at our bed with her back to us, to pretend to take her into our arms, to stroke her imperial buttocks, with the line of her underpants, indeed visible like under glass, in the back of the gown pressed to her ass, and to stick our middle finger into the shadowy wetness between her thighs. Then we would settle down, take our medications with a glass of water, and wait for breakfast: bread with butter (no salt) and tea in iron cups.
At eleven, as usual for that day of the week, I went off again through the hospital corridors to the office where I did “the rays.” This time it seemed like I made it there extremely easily, in a second. The vast labyrinth of green corridors was reduced (at least in my memory) to a single corridor, with a door at the end that seemed to me, maybe from the semi-shadow, scarlet and mysterious. When I went in, though, I found the banal and pitiful electrotherapy office, with mounds of devices dating from the time of Volta, exhibits from a technological museum. In the seventh grade I had tried to build a voltameter from cardboard, wire, and an empty marmalade jar: all of the instruments here seemed made by students in a workshop, from the same materials. Miraculously, they still worked, although the only proof was the movement of the stamped metal needles in the graded windows of thick, green glass. There was no sign of the doctor except a copy of Sport, forgotten on the chair, with pages turned down. But why did I need a doctor? I sat where I always did facing the galvanized metal monster, and I greased my temples with a little Vaseline from a yogurt jar. Then I put the electrodes on my temples, glued them with leucoplast, and stuck the prong at the end of the wire into its ebony plug. I turned the potentiometer gently toward the right, watching the needle come to life and move slowly over the screen. At the same time, I started to hear the somehow reassuring little sparks of heated Vaseline. Then I sat still, with my eyes closed, swimming again in my imagination, in the fabulous trajectory of rays through the empire of my mind. There were ghost towns there, villas with crystal columns, and torture chambers with instruments of gold. There were crematoria with violet smoke coming from their chimneys. There were Flemish houses lining canals where cephalorachidian fluid flowed lazily. There were chameleons with iridium jaws. While I watched the mysterious cavernous flux, I was blinded now and again by the multicolored shine of cave flowers. I was moved emotionally by a naked girl wrapped in cobwebs, by a pregnant woman whose stomach curved as much as possible and broke like a pomegranate and scattered into the holy night of light and blood, and by an old woman in a shell of sugar. In my mind, the words of the “saint” suddenly rang out, clearer than any real sounds that her vocal chords and cartilage could have made, echoing like in a frozen halclass="underline" “Go all the way! All the way!” Then, another voice, indescribably terrifying, annihilating, so intense and closed within itself that it could not have been composed of sounds, but phonemes, whispered quietly and powerfully in my brain: “Mircea.” For a moment, the enormous universe had this name. “Here I am, Lord,” I whispered, opening my eyes. I already knew what was being asked of me. And it was as though everything had already happened long ago. As I stood shaking in front of the tangle of wires and screens, with Vaseline licking my cheek and throat, for a long time I didn’t move at all. Finally, I put out my hand and took the potentiometer knob between my fingers. I can still feel its hard ebony ridges. I was not inside my body. Everything seemed like a sculpture from a block of yellow matter, a forgotten legend, an incomprehensible allegory. “All the way!” ordered the quiet, impenetrable nurse, who had no glottis, hyoid bone, tongue, tonsils, or palate. In the emotional sculpture one detail began to move. My fingers turned an ebony knob toward the right. A metal needle also glided to the right in a graded window, watched by two brown, inexpressive eyes. Hermetically sealed, like a syllable, in the glass vial of my body, I watched helplessly as I made the most insane gesture of my life, the one that unleashed, perhaps, everything. After I had turned the knob very slowly, after my lunatic internal structures began to shake, and chimeras and stone gargoyles fell off and smashed to bits on the pavement, and the quartz architraves of my temples cracked in zigzags, and a population of giant myriapods and termites swarmed in the dusk, I quickly turned the button all the way!
Back from the bathroom, the doctor found me on the floor, convulsing with clonic spasms, with red foam on my lips (I had broken a molar and bitten the inside of my cheek) and my pajama bottoms drenched. My temples smelled like something burnt. They took me to the basement, to intensive care, where I stayed in a coma for more than a week. They fed me glucose intravenously, and then through a tube down my nose. My epileptic seizures continued daily. When I opened my eyes again, it was evening, and a dry sadness floated over the intensive care ward full of people in agony, thousands of kilometers under the earth, with all history and all shapes and all ages. The patients lay on their tables wrapped in plaster sheets. A nurse in white, with a waxy face, stood still beside a podium. Nickel cases with boxes of syringes vibrated gently in the light-brown air. I stayed another week in that cargo hold. I saw outlines without being there myself. I made out sounds — moans, footsteps, a clink — without ears or hearing. Someone defecated, at times. Someone urinated. I was a duplicate, a copy, a picture, a mannequin. I saw, I felt, what a movie character sees, feels, and thinks, a character who moves and talks but is, in the end, only a spot of emulsion on a filmstrip. What despair and horror hides beneath the arrogant attitude and turned-up mustache of a grandfather, long dead, of whom only a picture is left? I was also long dead. They kept just my simulacrum. Glazed surfaces, eternal evening, plaster statues on sarcophagi … Falling back into sleep, wrapped to the neck in my liver and bile and nerves and guts … Curled up in my own stomach, feeding like a parasitic worm on the striated muscles of my homunculus … Blowing a living mist on my own mirror …