“We lost years of our lives marching toward the center, and during that time we did not eat, drink, or sleep. Now and then we touched the warm glass of the floor, pressing our ear to it and listening to the chorus of a billion voices. Cupping our hands on either side of our eyes and looking deep into the mirror, we saw entire races of men and women, completely naked, holding their hands out to us and screaming in torture or ecstasy. Were we the angels of a sunken world? Sometimes we caught the eye of one of the young girls with hair falling in curls past her buttocks. She lay down on the pebbly earth of those islands, pressed her temple and breasts to the ground, and in a sweet lordosis raised her rump, in the middle of which her pomegranate sparked like a gemstone. Why, though, did she have those seeping crusts between her shoulder blades? All of these people were sick and deformed. Each had a different stigma. Hundreds of thousands of diseases exhibited their sequelae beneath us, upsetting but at the same time fascinating. For that young man, with a Greek face so upturned that the tendons of his throat crushed his Adam’s apple, would have filled out his form too well, would have melted into it, if a venomous anthrax, just under his left arm, hadn’t made him stand out, hadn’t given him true existence. All of them lived through plagues that served as their names, their habits, and maybe even their souls. They had cleft lips, flaking skin, paunches swollen with cirrhosis, umbilical hernias like watermelons, leprosy and scabies ennobling pink bodies that otherwise bore the imprimatur of tiresome perfection. I watched them for hours on end through the semiprecious floor, which cast a glassy green shadow over their faces as their eyes eternally searched for ours. And then our small procession set off again, always in the same order, squinting at the far-off liquid flame, which made prismatic flakes between our eyelashes. And what a giant landscape appeared under the floor of liquid agate! What a sunken continent! Blue mountains, with thousands of fog-wrapped peaks, rivers wider than the Amazon, fields with unknown flora, grazed by bats with human eyes … Legions of beasts snorting through the endless forests, where every leaf and every vein on every leaf was covered in calligraphy with a miniaturist’s akribia … Isthmuses of madrepore leading to eyes made of water with islands in the center … And we passed over gold and purple clouds with the steps of superfluous gods, incapable of dissolving the transparent hail between us and our creation, unable to intervene in the tragic course of the world …
“At great intervals (decades? years? hours? moments?), the column of fire flashed obliquely, touching a spot on the surface of the floor and then returning to the black center of the disk. From the circular moats, with diameters so large that their metal lines seemed straight, objects and creatures appeared, like sophisticated projections on a drawing table. Were they real beings? Were they simply phantoms? We would never find out, because we dared to look at them only with our sight. The nanosecond flash of a ray produced, suddenly, the city of Amsterdam, with each of its four thousand Dutch houses. It reflected their austere façades in its semicircular, inner ear-like canals. And Badislav Dumitru appeared in the doorway of the house destroyed by bombs, crying with his head in his hands, beside his bag of stinking garlic. And the priest from the village of Bârzava appeared, in his holiday vestments, with the quartz box holding the tooth of the martyr on his chest. And here was one of the sinister instruments that Herman used to tattoo Anca’s perfectly spherical skull. And now, the immense wall of Victor’s ilium bones, the enigmatic dark brother, the great and necessary and impossible Victor. And the dwarf hugging a white panther cub. And Dan Nebunul rising with the registries through the well of Stairway One’s interior courtyard, and the dusty-blue mushroom of the State Circus with its windows shining like diamonds. And the hansom of Efraim Scopitul, and the statue of C. A. Rosetti suddenly brought to life, declaiming in the center of five hundred statues in Bucharest, urging them to revolt, and the cloudy nimbus that Maria didn’t have time to see the day she went out with Costel in Govora, and Mircea (which Mircea?) writing a demented, endless book, in his little room on Uranus, and Fulcanelli howling at the bottom of the inferno, naked in the tongues of fire, and Voila, and Montevideo, and New Orleans, and the ice of Antarctica, and the pearls of universes strung on a metaphysical cord, and fractals, and national history with heroes and monuments, and Witold Czartoryski, the 18th-century Polish poet who saw through Costel’s eyes without his knowing or consent, and we ourselves, Monsieur Monsú, Fra Armando, me, Cecilia, and Melanie, and you Vasilica, and especially you, Maria (in hundreds of forms); and this nut, and this chair, and this glass lamp, and Tântava and everything, and all of it … So there was a time we didn’t feel alone at alclass="underline" we were there with everything, we were one with the universe, we were one with all that was given to us to perceive and experience. And we understood then that we all were Those Who Know, that in all space and time, in all being, there was no place for innocence … that we all knew we knew, without knowing, though, what we knew. That the only non-knower on the face of the earth was yet to be born, because a single wave of his hand would make a transparent universe opaque, changing the fluctuating and fairy-like aurora borealis of potential into truth and reality. With each step toward the center, the disk changed into earth.”
Soon, the small procession could barely squeeze itself between so many walls, barrels, cables, people of different countries and epochs, fair monsters, stinking lagoons (which they crossed in gondolas), statues at every step — Hitler and Kafka and Lombroso and Pushkin —, branching seas with trawlers and whales … They were not surprised when they passed along the shore of Beheading with three beings crucified on pitch-covered crosses, whom they recognized as Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, in their rich oriental costumes, nor when Marconi, in front of his ridiculous device, received the first message over the air-waves: from quiqui quinet to a michemiche chellet and from a jambebatist to a brulo brulo … Crossing countries and seas, eras and spheres, finally they reached the middle of the middle, the enigma of the enigma, the navel. They were on the sharp edge, beyond which the void began. The black hole in the center of the disk must have been hundreds of meters in diameter. The river of vertical fire, which you couldn’t think of or look at, fell directly through this orifice, forming a great and holy mandala forming together a — yin and yang, matter and spirit, horizontal and vertical, woman and man, vulva and penis, in eternal copulation, palpable, the fire without beginning or end … The roar of this liquid column, like melting pearls, sounded like enormous rushing waters. They stopped there, half illuminated, half burned by the light of that light. Humanity, all humanity, flowed behind them and surrounded them, like an amphitheater of bodies stretching for dozens of miles. And strangely, however far away a face might be, an old man’s face, a child’s face, the face of a beggar or an emperor or a cardinal, even if it blended into thousands of other faces in a stripe of ochre at the edge of sight, it was perfectly drawn, and recognizable even before you actually saw it. Everyone saw each other as though they were in the foreground, half a meter away. Cedric, for example, recognized his neighbors from the The Crest, every last one here in the catacombs of the swamp. Everyone talked to each other, and their voices wove together like bindweed at the root of a giant tree — the great voice of a golden waterfall and wind. Concentrating on one face alone, you heard its voice at that moment, however far away the prostitute or pastor speaking might be, as though that voice had been born right in your ear, or in the auditory zone of your mind, like the wheedling voices of madness.