The Leap

It is the year 2075, and it is said that once every 25 years, people do not die, but collapse into the waters of Lake Plumbuita. There is no grand commotion in the hydrosphere, no jigging or celebrating, no farewell letters written—people try to immortalize themselves in the quietest way possible and leave almost nothing behind. Whoever has entered the water has never returned, yet no ill word has ever been heard about them either. I have circled the lake many times, though my throat stung from the smoke-shapes that have kept the sky unclean for nearly fifty years. Still, the fog kept luring me—drawing me in, yet never far enough to let me become trapped. Or it desired nothing of the sort. The old men at Obor, who use rusted car plates as chessboards, tell me it is a curse not to catch the twenty-fifth anniversary. The first time I asked, they shook their heads as if I had explained something they already knew. The second time, they only said: “Blondie, everyone wants to vanish on the occasion of the Leap.”

The Man in the Navy Overcoat

It is a burning smell my polluted lungs have grown used to, or perhaps a contingent familiarity piercing my ribs, when in the shattered, dust-covered windows on Doamna Ghica I see a man in a navy overcoat—even though I do not know him, and reunions can last only a minute, since he does not blink, but looks at me more intently ever since I no longer remember who I am, what I have done, or since the world itself no longer remembers anything at all.

The sellers of lanterns and ropes have brought in a new stock of adhesive tape, meant for those moments when the air becomes unbearable and we must seal the smoke away from the windows. A sharp scent of gasoline mingles with the sweetness of boiled corn. I look into the reflections of the containers advertising a black, sweet, fizzy liquid, but inside them are only cans of fish and vegetables.

The pigeons peck tiredly at the small yellow grains and fix their gaze on tram 21 as it drops off passengers at the stop and rattles on, gathering more people from elsewhere. From the rooftops, I hear only vague whispers of birds before they take flight, dissolving into the grey backdrop.

“Dear, I saw that ghoul again in the window today, it knocked,” one of the sellers said, to which the other replied: “I felt someone put a hand on my shoulder—no one was there, but I felt the fingers, just as I was coming back from the market. However, their touch was strikingly alive in my memory.”

They, too, see many human remnants in reflections. I turned back toward the streets where the mundane circuit runs slow and forced, where cars really ought not to exist given the level of pollution. The Colentina bridge is half-abandoned; pieces of concrete still break away from it and fall into the underground lot, flinging rubble all the way onto the highway.

protect me from nuclear power, and lend me some of the strength with which you dive into the Leap

The words sound pleasant the first time I hear them.
Playgrounds ooze a green phosphorescent liquid that brushes against the tips of my boots.
The swings sway on their own, rust dripping onto sand blackened with tar and littered with rotten debris.

I almost shudder—I feel chased, I hear footsteps—yet behind me there is no wind.
  The man in the navy overcoat appeared three more times that day:
  once in the puddle before Saint Anthony the Great Church,
  once in the hotdog ad at the abandoned Froo in the intersection,
  and once in the stitches that surfaced across the palm of my left hand.

“How often do you see holograms this vivid?” I asked a woman selling parsley in front of the Raiffeisen bank. Another tree had burned, and the smoke was so suffocating I had to cover my mouth with the torn sleeve of my jacket, while coughing out of control.

The fire lasted nearly two hours. No hose, no bucket could stop the branches from dismembering themselves like porcelain stubs. The tree collapsed, broken and defeated, while the smoke rose arrogantly toward the sky.

“Holograms come alive after the Leap”, the woman answered, pointing with her finger toward a line of ten people heading for the lake. They did not cry, they did not judge, they did not scream. They walked as though along a path of routine, one that happens only once every twenty-five years.

The Ordinary Scent of Endeavour

At times, events have not unfolded the way their striations would allow them to be recognizable. For a long while I believed there had been an earthquake in the neighborhood, that with every tremor and shake, the abandoned buildings rose in proportion to the slice of sky allotted to them, while the new residential blocks—built over parks and kindergartens—collapsed, forming a cemetery of evidence, proof of a life altered by the apocalypse, by the SMOKE.

The projectile marks on my building were covered with drywall to keep them from looking so dystopian.

But how can one ask a person to be good if their only point of reference is a bullet hole they never even lived through?

*

The clothing stalls, their stock drawn from garbage bins, are moments of survival, of conservation in this inflexible new ecosystem.

No one lived through an earthquake. There was no earthquake.

*

At other times, I carried a burning desire, a fuse ready to be lit by an inner plea, something that might have been fulfilled through my own will—an urge I could mistake for a gradual optimism or an erotic fatalism.

And yet, in the stories told in Obor Hall, at the stalls of fish and quince jam, no one ever agreed with me. No one felt, or would have ever felt, anything like that. No one remembered anyone else, and no one recalled their life before the new life.

Instead, Mrs Rodica, at the table where she sold honey made from technobionic bees, told me that the bad-luck-bringing cats were now the striped ones. When she once begged Lula to lead her toward Nada Florilor Street, it bit her on the leg and snatched the can of tuna.

For me, the cats—especially those hiding behind pipes and cracks in the heavy walls—never lead me astray the way they do with the other civilians. They purr in my arms and keep watch over me each day as I try to find an astral light in the sky, though the smoke is too suffocating, asking me whether I might be suffering from some incurable disease.

When those people walked toward the lake, I felt a mix of curiosity and revolt, though it burned secretly in me like smoldering embers. The fog around the water would rise, and the more it made you lose yourself along the untrodden paths and abandoned courtyards, the more it guided you among your new neighbors of the Leap.

For a long time, I believed my street was adjacent to one named after an architect, and on the local maps, it appeared so. But the more I repeated my address at the census localization stations, the more indignantly I was told that my street had never bordered the architect’s—that they were, in fact, a full kilometer apart.

How much of my own self—or of the one beside me—can I truly hold, if I awoke too early from the escape?

There are those strange, vague sensations when I walk in daylight and yet it looks as though it were night; when I notice more clearly the lint clinging to his/your coat, and the hair like a nest from which dragon hatchlings might emerge.

I memorize his steps perfectly—light, yet weighted. His voice is hoarse, almost imperceptible, and it triggers in me a softening, as if I had known, seen, or felt it all before.

Your power is in the Leap’s hands—the Leap is yours, kiddo.

I almost follow you, and where I once knew there was a secluded place, wrapped in thicker smoke and benches pierced by metal shards, now there is a crowd.

An exchange market, with covered noses and heavy coughs. You appear to me only on filthy, decomposed surfaces, but I got used to it.

*

No evil force, no nuclear power, no malevolent strength can touch the fog. Protect me from all that cannot save us—from the burned colentina and the energies we freeze inside containers.

I believe the water would keep me warm, and I would feel no need to resist. It could never be colder than the hottest day in my earthly neighborhood.

Perhaps the ones who leapt now live beneath the water. Perhaps there is smoke on the other side of the medium as well. They bear pastel gills and scales across polluted skin, where fragments of those who once walked the earth replay themselves in memories dulled by lethargy and non-effort.

Perhaps I have already been chosen. Perhaps it was you who chose me to leap—you who carry some knowledge of my historical self, an identity I have not yet had the chance to inhabit.

I feel I may be delirious, and that this is only a marginal form of rapture and extinction, of despair and the substitution of what was once familiar. So much vigor, so much misfortune, in a near-mocking excavation of the ego—at the very moment when identity loses the possibility of self-regulation.

You called me ‘bromski’ on a daily basis and it made me crush on you

Is anyone home? I asked, standing before a mustard-yellow door—glossy around the handle, but frayed and peeling at the edges.

I asked three cats for your directions, your signals. They guided me almost out of the neighborhood, to where the air scams and memory falters. I couldn’t bear to leave the trace—familiar, yet unsettlingly alien—left by a hologram that dreamed itself in the present.

It’s okay, kiddo. You did everything right. But there’s no one left here.

What is more perilous in a game

than the mystic pendulum of rules

that never falls evenly?

In every round,

I could have been a hologram too—

like the man in the navy overcoat—

wandering through what remains of Colentina,

playing upon the fogged windows

and the shaking skin of the water.

The rules of a game—like terms of confidentiality accepted just in time

I don’t remember the feeling of fervor, nor the moment I turned back to step down the worn, greasy stairs, as if someone had deliberately stained them with odorless gasoline.

I descended and left the building, looking at it one last time, knowing this was the hologram’s place
Something within me was binding, and I despised myself for the absence of connection

*

I like your dry tone, as if you’re afraid to raise it, as if anyone gives a shit

I don’t take the sidewalk anymore; I go straight onto the highway, through heavy concrete and small carcasses

The smoke needles my esophagus, but I keep walking through the void of the air.

Give me the nucleus of your apparition and I promise to share the lust gain of life with you

At the end of the road and the beginning of the intersection lies the park.

It’s a happy moment for me, almost nostalgic—I feel good

I walk around the branches that part from their embrace, yet they crawl slowly toward me.

No researcher or scientist has yet discovered why people stopped aging after the apocalypse

A new one is near—

and perhaps after that,

we’ll begin to grow old again

from the point where time once stopped turning,

I, however, discovered that you can see your exact age like a peeled orange, floating in the Plumbuita water.

I cling to the railing

and imagine gills unfolding

along the parts of me the body still accepts—

how I might be perceived,

as a faint reflection

on the greasy glass of a refrigerator door.

The wind no longer flows,

no longer stirs the unscarred slides.

The trees are either fallen,

or breathing their last—

watching me as they go.

*

It feels like the climax of all waiting—

the summit of imagined triumphs that dissolve upon touch.

Memory returns in fragments:

the thick smell,

the alleys strewn with remnants of objects

that once wrapped another’s skin.

Another apocalypse is approaching—

the next, sharper, more merciless.

Everything stiffens, rots,

breathes its stench in a single monochrome pulse.

And still, there’s a strange comfort

in being summoned as the last body standing

at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end.

No resentment.

No diversion.

No clumsy refusal of the chance

to reclaim a self,

to exhume the memory of a couple, or a crowd.

I cling to the image of your overcoat—

it holds the final resistance

against a sleep so deep

it might make the world so vivid.

embrace it or leave it

It is the year 2075.

And I remember—

as I swim downward,

unable to breathe,

yet needing no air.

I am stronger than you would think.

A former life surfaces before me,

a version of things unfolding

coherently, logically—

My hands turn into a menthol paste that glues my extremities together like a jet of superglue.
I no longer feel the disorientation in my mind, nor in the mind’s trajectory.

I float inside, inside the water, turning and pressing myself against myself, my own branches fusing back into me.

Like a stroke, I detach from Colentina—

which will be in flames in a few hours, days, weeks,

until the next apocalyptic attack.

The people’s words bear fruit:

the Leap is said to be good

for both mental quiet

and the recovery of the self in its body

I dive and breathe without gills,

without striations,

without the dramatic fog at the surface.

I remember you wearing the same frayed overcoat

as when, twenty-five years ago,

you were summoned to leap—

to have your own full, optimized experience,

to follow the conduct.

And since then you’ve never returned

except as a hologram

whose consciousness

I still dispute.

you have the power, now, kiddo, you are ready to haunt glasses

I feel tingling beneath what used to be my skin—the kind that comes when a favored, noble situationship fails. It’s more of an oversaturated memory now: two lives I must grow accustomed to, one of which I am obliged to forget. I twist with my eyes closed, already sensing the wrinkles forming, the fruitful creasing of skin that pulls me back into the present I need. I am the luckiest girl in Colentinian folklore—at last, I am growing old.

*

To be honest—because honesty has taken me far. Both as a goal, and far from the goal itself. What I sought, and what I kept colliding with, was never the lake, nor Plumbuita, nor Colentina. It was the need for completion, something I could reach only through unmooring.

The final moments release grey clouds swelling above me; distorted, and shapeshifting through the water’s blur. Yet the water holds me, shelters me, rethreads the torn strings of my fading mind. Down here, people grow old, while their younger holograms linger above—souvenirs from a life they no longer own, drifting like ghosts from an unforgettable holiday that never ended.

I know the one from the past is no longer the one in the present, just as I know the you of the present is already the you of the future. You’re like a magnet brought back from a holiday—something that always stirs a flicker of intrigue, an ah, this!—but you can’t quite remember what, because it happened so long ago.

And you stand far ahead of me, beyond the reach of time, and there is no time left to catch up. For us to be, at the same time, the same versions of our passing through ourselves.

*

You followed me like a magnet, the way I keep myself bound to the water. It’s scandalous—full of the vengeance through which you finally heal. A state of recognition and gratitude, a knowing of the self I could never afford to miss.

you got it, bromski, go, go, go!

I bend into myself completely, and one version of me drifts downward, to where age collects and the years multiply—the ones I should have already known, assumed, and reclaimed. While another stays at the surface, a living, magnetic shape of nerve cells, slipping, haunting, elastic and fluid. I am becoming a déjà vu.