In spring, late in April, at night, I had the first “dream” with that terrible, terrible sound, amplified into a flame. In the golden, transparent air of my waking mind, or my ultra-waking mind, open like a triumphant crown in my sleeping body, a spiral appeared in my head. A long and fine arc, made up of smaller spirals, each twisting in turn, rotated spiral after spiral, making another one, hundreds of times larger, which rotated in turn around another axis, making close, flexible circles. From the new tube another formed, and from this one another, endlessly upwards and downwards, so that you could climb up and down from spiral to spiral, from one existential level to another, without limits, you could encompass the entire spiral simultaneously in each of its spirals, you could simultaneously become the master of the universe and the nothing of nothingness … The grandeur of the embossed tubes that began at the third and fourth level up could barely be imagined, and the others grew exponentially, so much that they broke the crystal safe of any mind, escaping into obliteration and insanity. And still I followed them, while the sound of gold and the void grew with each new level, until the spirals and the sound were one, and my face shattered like a handful of dust in the breath of God. Then I screamed, carbonized by beatitude and torture, in phrases I no longer knew, although I could touch them like the hard blades of knives. After a time without succession, my being acquired an asymmetry, the volume of a non-spatial void and the absence of light. Just as abyssal caves swab the dark and cold with their bioelectric train, I felt a Being approach — a Being made of cosmoses. Every cosmos had inhabited worlds, and every one of those worlds had a multitude of inhabitants. Their material was fire, and their thoughts sparked like supernovas. I shouted toward that Being, and it responded.
The center of the dream, the gate, the vulva, can no longer be described. I woke up in another dream, in a foggy levitation, wandering through the well-known rooms of our apartment. At five in the morning, when the sun was a scarlet ball over the Dâmboviţa Mill and my sweaty parents were sleeping under disordered sheets, I felt a wave of love for my mother, for the closeness of her shape completely wrapped in a sheet, like a mummy. Then I went back to my own bed in the room above the street, a mechanical movement, without thought … I woke up disoriented. I remember the trip to the bathroom, my small pointless actions, and shaking all over, like a cornered animal … It would all repeat dozens of times, almost identically, up to today (yes, almost up to today), for fourteen years. And each time after that, sometimes for a week, I dropped everything, sinking completely into my piercing sense of predestination. I was called toward something, there were signs, coincidences multiplied, and in my mind there were imperious and strange images, but I was to be held a bit longer in the antechamber of understanding. I would have preferred eternal torture, if torture was predestined. My past was the key, the disturbing signs seemed to be legible, I had to begin the great reading, but no shining star offered me any epiphany of understanding. I didn’t know whether the lines of my life (voices and caresses, clouds and cities, laughter and the earth full of worms) should be read vertically or horizontally, from the left or the right, of if I should go back and forth in the boustrophedon of my childhood. I didn’t know if the writing was pictographic, phonetic or if it was a writing at all. Illustrations and illuminations, vignettes and friezes with labyrinths of reeds decorated the old book of hours, its pages made of skin. In the filigree of every page, I could see a braid of blue and red veins, beating with a single pulse, irrigating the paragraphs. Arborescent nerves made every letter as sensitive as a tooth. Mistakes were attacked with antibodies of lymph. The parchment was alive, like skin just flayed from a martyr, and it smelled of ink and blood. What precisely was written on my skin, or what was tattooed there, between my nipples, was completely obscure to me. Thinking and fretting didn’t help, just as good eyesight doesn’t help an illiterate. After weeks of helpless reverie, I abandoned the search and returned to my sorry everyday life.
25
“ ‘QUILIBREX!’ shouted Fra Armando down the underground corridor, through walls of pale-shining quartz flowers, and the guardian, completely covered in a rubber hazmat suit with a gas mask on his face, let us pass, after he pressed into each of our palms a glass cylinder, thick and warm, pointed at the tip, which he pulled like expensive candies, from a white cardboard box. I put my vial into my pants pocket and forgot about it for a long time. While we were walking, always in descent, along the more and more irregular path, crossing pitch-black lakes, staying away from the wheeling depigmented bats, whose ramifying veins were visible through their skin, pinched on the shoulders by crustaceans on the ceiling with comically long antennae, leaving behind formations of karst so beautiful your heart would stop, we watched the hierophants of the abyss out of the corners of our eyes. The priest was always ahead of us, lighting our way with a magnesium torch. I could not see his albino ally, unless I craned my neck and looked far behind us, which seemed to be somehow unfitting or prohibited, since Monsieur Monsú, whenever I turned my gaze, gestured angrily for me to look forward. Or maybe he only wanted me to pay attention to the ever more frequent fissures in the swampy floor: sinkholes whose bottoms you could not see, emanating a green tumescence. The Albino, with his now-dead raspberry bead floating over his face like a miniscule satellite shadowing a milky planet, was the last in the group. On his head and shoulders, the transparent crustaceans teemed in thousands, surrounding him, like a speleological god, with millions of rays of continuously moving antennae. His eyes, in daylight as pale as a snake’s, were now only two slightly bellied ovals, a statue’s eyes, with no trace of irises or pupils. We walked between these two as black people, more enslaved, humiliated, powerless and fascinated than any one of our people ever was. Hamites, Cushites, Ethiopians, and Zombies. Chained, tortured, and whipped by white hands like the sails of a windmill, leaving the Ivory Coast on reeking galleons. Filling the mines, bordellos, and common graves in fifty kingdoms. And we were still ourselves kings, suzerains of our teeth, whiter than the white man’s bones, masters of the confederacy of our pigment, masters of the totems between our legs … In the strange mine of our souls, however, we were not masters of anything. Melanie’s sweat smelled like a fox’s underarms, coming from the entire volume of her hippo-like rump, which chafed against the walls, breaking the mine-flowers’ fragile towers. She pulled Cecilia by the hand. Cecilia’s fantastical make up came even more to life in the aquarium-light of the torches. The constellations of gold on her eyelids reflected on the walls and ceilings like in a planetarium. ‘Look, the cosmos surrounds us!’ whispered Fra Armando, smiling. I followed him closely, watching how two tiny lines of blood spouted from the places where the thin tubes of his miter broke into his skull, behind his ears, to penetrate his brain with stereotactic precision. His blood had already soaked the collar of his vestments, and like an embroidery thread, it braided itself into the threads of gold, making angels and chrysanthemums.
“The path descended, and it couldn’t do otherwise, because the fibers of space themselves went down, as though deformed by a revolting, difficult suffering. The transparent insects, with thousands of glassy anatomical details under the shells of their teguments, became larger and more aggressive. With a strange movement of their legs, the spiders spat jets of saliva at us, trying to pull us into the spools of their sparkling webs, where you could see the dried skeletons of bats, axolotls, and children. The mineral mosaics on the walls seemed to continuously change their colors, and bizarre icons appeared in unexpected combinations of marble, pyrite, porphyry, and quartz. Vasilica, I saw Saint George across an entire wall, wearing a purple mantle, as we know him, but thrown from his horse, with a yellow fear in his eyes and holding up his right hand in defense, pierced by the lance of the bile-green dragon, which triumphantly, with fire pouring from his nostrils, spread his wings over the world. I saw a woman nailed to a cross with spikes of zirconium nails, and three men in black garments crying at the foot of the cross and kissing her last curls of hair, red as copper wire. And I saw a man with wonderful brown eyes, holding a girl on his lap who was only a few years old, naked and plump, giving a blessing with two fingers. All of these ghosts merged one into the other like the waters of a cotton vestment …