Hellfire Peninsula.

A patch, a continuation of the game that you have to pay for, takes you into the Blasted Lands, an ugly, inhospitable territory where just about every last trace of romance had run out. The sky rumbled without pause, the ground was hostile across almost every square inch. Demons, beasts, mutants — and that was about it. No, wait — at the end of the road there was a portal guarded by two enormous demons, faceless, with golden eyes glinting mysteriously, each leaning on his sword. To make everything as neatly arranged as possible, getting in through this portal became a kind of Suez Canal over which fierce, frustrating battles are fought. But, well, you can manage to get through it if you arm yourself with patience and reason. And so you cross into The Burning Crusade.

"Did Blizzard set this up, or did the players, on their own authority, start a battlefield here?" I asked Andrada — the last friend I had left, it seems, on the official World of Warcraft server.

"Ahhh! The players made it, it's got nothing to do with Blizzard."

Hellfire Peninsula...

Obviously I'm being subjective when I say it was the hardest endurance test I could have been put through. A red, arid land, and the huge, beautiful planet up in the sky, the one I called Nibiru. Beautiful, threatening...

It seems the quiet had gone on too long.

It was morning and it was Sunday. Felix woke me from sleep, took me by the hand, settled me carefully into my armchair and said:

"Listen!"

On the radio, Max Bănuș and the director Val Mugur were talking about how "The Box of Monkeys" would be staged.

"Your Box of Monkeys?!"

"Yes, I sent it to them! They'd organized a literary writing competition."

"It's with them?"

"Yes, and it won a prize of five thousand marks," he thought it important to tell me, though my breath had caught in my throat.

States of terror have their own rule. Your brain goes white, all your muscles clench, and you want to climb out of your own skin, trying to run. But you can't.

"Is that why you wanted to cross the Danube?"

"Not only that. Well... that's how it is!"

Felix smoked, watching the cigarette smoke intently. His eyes narrowed a little. They cut through the air far into the distance. Just as they had that day in September. He had come to tell me he was leaving. He would swim across the Danube, near Orșova. That's all I still remember. The distances he was looking toward.

He didn't make it. He'd meant to swim underwater using a painter's pump that he had turned into an oxygen tank. But he had slipped and twisted his leg before he even got into the water.

"I swam, and by my reckoning I should have been past the middle of the Danube. I lost my bearings underwater, and in reality I was only about three hundred metres from the Romanian bank. I came up to the surface to get my bearings and the border guards saw me. I'd lost time and energy swimming parallel to the bank. There was nothing left to do. I dove down fast and went back to the Romanian side. I came out into a thicket, close to some pifan guarding the border. I watched him for a while and then I threw a stone in the opposite direction. The kid panicked, yelled — hold it, or I'll shoot! — and I managed to get past the strip in his moment of panic."

There was a stretch of time, then, that broke off. I have no memory at all of those three or four days. That's about how many it must have been until Felix came back home.

"Run!" the Archangel howled at me.

"Where the hell to?!"

An apparition as tall as the sky, a contraption that clattered and huffed from under its metal shell, was shaking the ground beneath my feet and cutting off every line of retreat.

"I'm dying and that's that, I thought."

"You'll grow, and you'll be able to blast it to bits, the Archangel consoled me, because the monster had crushed me under its iron soles. Come back and pay more attention!"

"I can't. I've fallen into the abyss."

"Ugh! Outland is actually an island floating in the abyss. I forgot to tell you. Go back to your Spirit."

A few "friends" paid us a visit from the very first day.

Maybe it was pure chance, maybe not.

"Their" silence, though, was very hard. It seemed to me the air around me was solid, petrified. I forced my way through it with difficulty, with a superhuman effort at every move. It was absurd. The Box of Monkeys was just about to be read at the Teatrul Mic. It had been sent to many theatres. Dinu Săraru had liked it and decided it would be presented at their reading studio. Why were they staying silent?

Two weeks passed. Then the telephone rang.

"And if I don't come?" Felix asked.

"Better that you come. Otherwise we'll come and get you."

It was very late before I understood why it took so long. Felix was under investigation in the "Ether" file by "big shots" from the centre, sponsored by the notorious General Pleșiță.

"If I'm not back by four o'clock, you come to the Militia and ask for me."

This was the only defensive measure that came to Felix's mind just then. Completely useless. But that's what I did.

I was walking down the street toward the Militia. I saw him from far off. I waited for him to reach me. He took me by the shoulders and we walked like that for a while. I asked nothing. I waited. We went into the small, grimy bar of the hotel that made up part of the same block as the grocery on the corner of the street that sloped gently down toward the Militia.

"So?" I asked.

I had my fists gathered in my lap, under the table. Not clenched — I had hardly any strength left.

"They worked me over psychologically. They put me in a room. They made a point of showing me it had bars on the window, gave me a coffee and left me there until around two o'clock, without another sign of life. Then they showed up with some guy from Bucharest and started questioning me. They wanted to know how the play got to Radio Free Europe. They knew the subject of the play and asked me which dictatorship I was talking about in it, how I would know what a dictator looks like. They had some kind of review signed by one of your sociologists, some guy from Deva. 'What do you mean, how would I know? From Somoza, from Duvalier,' I told them. They didn't seem to get the joke. They're hunting for a pretext, claiming I'd supposedly broken the Law on State Secrets and National Security by sending the play to Radio Free Europe."

It was then that a childhood friend came back into my life. She got straight to the point, without wasting time on preliminaries.

"The jolly boys called me in to give a statement about Felix! I told them flat out that I don't write what they want. Let them find somebody else, not me. What have I got to do with Felix? He's your husband and the two of us were friends as children. And that's that! I know them well. They're full of themselves, like puffed-up doughnuts, but they're off their rockers."

She smiled at some memory and went on.

"I was in the car with one of them and he started running his mouth like a fool about something I already knew anyway. 'I need to pee, pull over, please,' I told him, and I dragged him out of the car. I invited him to sit down next to me on the edge of the ditch, away from the car. 'There, now you can tell me all about it, if you're in the mood for confessions.' We stayed friends," she told me, with a winning look.

The self-assurance with which she had come to tell me something that, by the rule of the day, should have stayed strictly confidential had on me the effect of a very powerful sedative. I had loved her dearly as a child.

"Tell Felix to be careful who he talks to and what he says. All sorts of people are crawling around, both at your place and... at theirs. Oh, and tell him I'm asking him to drink his morning coffee at Georgică's, damn it, so the boys don't get themselves worked up for nothing."

"You're not a bad player. You're a player who plays this game differently, not the way it was meant to be played. Differently from how most of the others play it. To me you're an exceptional player," said the Archangel.

"Thanks!"

"Meaning an exception. Which is a good thing. If everybody in the game had been dead set on playing it only the way it was designed, it would've turned out a piece of shit."

Mm-hm. He was trying to patch up his harshness. In truth, I ought to have become a halfway-decent player. Only my enthusiasm would abandon me midway down the road, and I found that, in fact, quite often I had no desire to deal with the others, and only rarely did a conversation inside the game strike me as interesting. There was something else about this game, and I kept asking myself what.

"So?"

"What 'so'?!"

"Did I upset you?"

"Lol! you really do live up to your name... I was on the verge of quitting WOW again. Now I've dug my heels in and I'm staying."

"Which of them? 'Deces'?"

"Oh!!! Deces. It drives me up the wall. It sounds dreadful."

"Why? It's so ironic!"

"Ironic my ass! Death is the only truth we're sure of."

"I couldn't care less about truth. I prefer fictions."

"Yeah, it's all just pure fiction."

"Not all of it."

"What isn't fiction?"

"Tomorrow isn't fiction. And pain isn't fiction either. Physical pain is a pure truth."

"The toothache kind?"

"When your head hurts so bad you'll want to smash it against the walls and throw it in the trash, then we'll talk about fiction again..."

"You've got no idea how many times my head's ached!"

"I believe you. But there are degrees of pain and limits to what you can bear."

"The ones caused by wounded vanity are still the most unbearable. That's what I think."

"I don't think so. Those can be treated with words."

"Believe me — or, well, believe whatever you want. Words are just conventions, most often with nothing to back them. They don't heal gestures or deeds."

"Words can be the best medicine and you know it, and right then you couldn't give a damn that they're 'mere conventions.'"

"There's something else. Far more complex..."

"What?"

"You'll find out in thirty years or so."

"Ligia, we think alike, even if there's about twenty-five years between us. That's why we get along, and that's also why my warlock's name is ironic. And I've told you before that I'm not a believable character."

"Then you've got the advantage."

"Nobody has the advantage."

"You've more or less shut me up."

"Because it's late and we're sleepy, and tomorrow is as non-fiction a day as they come."

"Don't underestimate me!"

"Okay. I'm not a character. I talk too artificially. Like out of a book, as they say."

"A vice of the schoolroom."

"Hey! I was barely a teacher. I spent more time in Orgrimmar than at the lectern as a teacher, and as a student I sat at my mother's place and read."

"I walked the streets of Bucharest. I know it by heart, all its outskirts and all."

"Which have changed in the meantime!"

"What can I do about it? Their business!"

"Nothing. Just keep remembering them the way you have them in your head."

"Ha! So realities are strictly virtual?!"

"I'm going to bed, damn it, I'm talking too much."

"No, you're not talking too much, but I do think you should get to bed."

"Reality hurts and it isn't virtual. What hurts isn't virtual."

"Don't go playing the fool before your time!"

"Meaning I'm starting to show signs? I thought as much. Good night!"

"Reality doesn't exist, my dear, it's only an invention. Invent it however you think does you good. Good night!"

"Like hell! You'd love it to be just an invention."

Felix took up tailoring.

"We can't live on your salary alone. I can't stand the idea! Mircea promised he'd teach me to make quilted puffer jackets!" he told me as autumn came on.

Mircea, one of Felix's friends, was a well-known puffer-jacket maker. He was generous. He taught us the secret of puffer jackets made from a nylon shell filled with melana fibre. He could make one jacket a day and sell it for two thousand lei. Whoa! That was a lot of money!

"If we sell two a month, we're set!" said Felix, and he brought "Matilda" over from Brăila. She'd been lying in the attic of the house for ages, dusty and seized up. Mircea set "Matilda" down in a basin full of paraffin, and after ten minutes he tested her wheel, which managed a movement of about two centimetres. "She'll run," Mircea pronounced, and so she did.

Thanks to "Matilda," Felix struck up a friendship with the bulibașa of the Gypsies in Petroșani.

"Heads up, the bulibașa's coming to give 'Matilda' a consultation."

"Good Lord! What's gotten into you?"

"He's the best specialist in Singers there is."

Yes. "Matilda" was a "Singer" sewing machine that had been through the war. She had mended military broadcloth tunics in the last World War, until the shuttle mechanism wore out. The bulibașa fashioned her a metal ring that corrected the fault, and "Matilda" got back into her stride.

Felix perfected his stitching in a single day. He had talent! I never once managed to lay a decent seam. But I was good at cutting. Then we worked together, some ten hours, to get the double-entry pockets just right — one at the top, like any pocket, and the other on the side, so they'd be easy to reach for hands sheltering from the cold.

We started production. The first two models were called "Chess" and "The Snake." I was the designer and made the patterns. Felix sewed them. We put them on display in our dining room and stood looking at them. We were thrilled, admiring them in ecstasy and wondering whether anyone would want them. A priest from Baru Mare wanted both of them, for his children. I said: "God's on our side, not theirs!"

In truth those puffer jackets were in great demand — puffed-up, quilted, handsome, and above all warm and light. Socialist commerce offered nothing of the kind.

Then I took out a tailoring licence in my name, so we'd have a legal way of operating and could pay tax to the revenue office.

At regular intervals some "senior officer" or other would turn up around Petroșani and Felix would be summoned for an "interview," at the "Securitate." I assume he was under investigation in the file with the code name "Ether." I never had the curiosity to find out more, though Felix would very much have liked his CNSAS file published. In any case, back then, he had to drink his coffee every morning at "Georgică's." It was a kind of attendance register. They put "tails" on him, usually female ones, whenever he left the Jiu Valley.

They put tails on him in his tailoring "workshop" too. That's how Persida came into our lives. I had neither the physical nor the mental time to handle making puffer jackets on a "Stakhanovite" production line, to clear the melana out of our house, since it had become overwhelming, and as for cooking, that was out of the question. Persida had taken over everything. Including the gifts Felix used to give me, because I never even caught wind of the moment she became the household accountant too.

"You don't like money," Felix would reason with me, "and you'd never have left your job to make puffer jackets with me!"

He was changing. He was slipping out of my hands. But that wasn't the grave part — the grave part was that I knew he wouldn't hold out. He was earning a lot of money. He redid the house. Floor tiles, wall tiles, a water heater in the bathroom, new carpets, curtains, Guban shoes, which Persida would bring home for me from the shop on the ground floor so I could pick out the ones I liked. I couldn't fight this new game of his, which Persida ran with a treachery hidden under a great show of devotion, leaving me with no way to reproach her for anything. I couldn't stop him by saying: "My dear, that's enough! You haven't written a line in so long, you haven't opened a book..." If I tried to tell him so, all I did was give him the chance to dash to the ground every false value of the world he was sliding into, throwing his own helplessness and fury back in my face, turned into an accusing finger: "This is the show you're all forcing me to play! If I don't like the play, at least let me do the part well."

I had become one of his fundamental enemies. I could no longer correct him by saying: "Not me — them, the men, the women..." His brain, his soul, could bear no further incisions. The people at Radio Free Europe had made a fuss for two or three days, and the promise to stage "The Box of Monkeys" had remained a mere taunt for Pleșiță's pack of Securitate men. The black abyss came pouring in waves from every side, and Felix was suffocating. People were hostile to him, even the ones who assured him to his face of their friendship.

In the meantime, he had become a famous puffer-jacket maker. Around town I kept recognizing more and more "Felix"-brand jackets. With the Theatre in the Jiu Valley, all ties were cut off. The only ones who still came by were Clara and Adrian, our old friends.

One day a guy from the economic militia rang the doorbell. He rummaged through every nook, checked the receipts for materials, the stocks of nylon shell, the sacks of melana, and above all the manuscripts. Felix told me about it:

"I told him, look, these are some film scripts, this is a novel I sent to 'Scrisul Românesc,' this is another script, for television, about the struggle between good and better — because that's the gimmick. Surely you'll agree that we live in the most beautiful world on earth — these are stage plays. I've sent them everywhere. If you like, I'll give them to you to read."

I got a summons too. Naturally, only the tailoring licence was in my name. The militiaman wasn't alone. There was another man who sat in on our conversation. I answered the questions meekly. Yes, I know tailoring from my mother, my friends want puffer jackets, we design the models together, they're delighted, I earn a little extra in my free time and I pay my taxes to the revenue office. He asked whether I'd make him a jacket too. Of course — we'll go and buy the materials, choose a model, and I'll make you a fine jacket. The strange thing was that he asked me how durable they were and what happens to them after the first wash. I explained that they're sewn with care, meaning they're well quilted, and that my sewing machine, which is called "Matilda," can lay down stitching even on broadcloth far thicker than what's needed to finish a puffer jacket, since in her day she'd sewn military tunics. As for washing, they wash easily, in the tub, you rinse them well and first let the water drain out of them, then hang them to dry. That was about all. I wrote out a formal statement, which he dictated to me. The man didn't seem hostile — quite the opposite. Felix even made him a jacket afterwards, and on the 22nd of December he saved him from the fury of the crowd taking part in the revolt in front of the Petroșani Town Hall.

The mob stays a mob, whatever the motive driving it. It has only enemies and it is always blind. How else would the scaffolding of manipulation hold up. True, the energy that feeds it comes in different strengths. That time it was of the highest level.

There the man stood, I don't know whether out of some inner impulse or on some mission, among the demonstrators at the Town Hall clamouring for Ceaușescu's fall. Felix was on the balcony, talking to them about the fall of communism. The militiaman was spotted by some people who had probably had dealings with him, and that was enough for a lynching to get going. The shoving and the blows had started to rain down.

"Leave him alone, I know him! He's from the economic militia, not the Securitate! He went after the thieves who were stealing. Have you got something against the economic militia? Show them your badge, man!" said Felix, from the balcony.

"They were lynching him. Simply lynching him. They'd hauled him up off his feet. He was done for. And when it comes down to it, he'd been just some little cog in a mechanism that took its orders from an entirely different place," he explained to me.

"You protected him because he was a decent guy?"

"Maybe. Though... physical violence repels me, whatever reason it might have."

The method of reduction to the absurd.

"So, this is at least the tenth time I'm telling you how to make a profit of 80% minimum, and you do nothing. As if all you like is watching me break my fingers on the keyboard."

The Archangel was set on scolding me, but he seemed to be gentle about it.

"I level up priests, 'cause they're cool"... I parried.

"I know, I do know you," he cut me off.

— "...and I love this continent to death!" I went on with my thought.

We were in Northrend, where the aurora borealis is right at home.

"Anyway, if you need money I'll give you some, so you don't even have to rack your brains over it, but in the meantime I've turned seriously twisted."

"Meaning?"

"Well, do the math yourself. I take in at least 10 wips a day, worth 16 gold each. Over a week, that comes to about 100 gold. Interesting game, this one! If I didn't make money, I'd go bankrupt in no time. And since I've only got time for raids..."

"Big deal, these raids!"

"They're interesting. For me the game has come down to raids."

"I've noticed."

"It's probably time I dropped it."

"That means you've reached the end of the game."

"Not at all. I mean, where the hell does this game end? Nowhere. You should've realized that long ago. It's like the life of a mediocre man."

"There's something sad in it."

"You're under the impression you never die, until you find out you've got cancer."

"There — we're thinking in sync again."

"When you find out, who's going to sit there counting how many packs of cigarettes you smoked or how many double cheeseburgers you ate. Or how much you drank. But it's beautiful. It's as if you'd never die."

"If you don't throw out the cigarette packs for a month, you scare yourself."

"Well, who's making you collect them!"

With the money from the puffer jackets, Felix built himself a kind of cable television that was called HERMES SAT.

Improbable as it may seem, in 1987–1988, in Petroșani there were several cable video networks — in fact a kind of video library where each subscriber sat at home and watched the films that the owner of such a network broadcast from a video player. The coaxial cables ran from one apartment to another, from one block to the next, and webbed across the neighbourhoods. When the cable run was too long and the signal weakened, homemade network amplifiers were used. The craftsmen were the electronics men, who had come to be highly prized. The network was "upgraded" by a "satellite installation," made up of an LNC (a converter for the signals from the ASTRA satellite), a parabolic dish made of fibreglass — homemade, of course, the best of them being made at the time somewhere in Alba County — and a receiver, also homemade. Felix's had been made by the electronics man from the television relay station up on the Parâng, and it became the star of a report broadcast by TV5 right after the 22nd of December 1989. The "fashion" for the "satellite" had been brought over from Deva, where it had been installed clandestinely as far back as 1985. Historically speaking, it followed on from the aerials pointed toward the Bulgarians and the Serbs.

The programming, broadcast around the clock, consisted of two films every evening, rounded out with satellite shows from the sports channels and MTV. Alongside it there was also a cassette-exchange network, judiciously organized, and the films, it was said, were brought in by airline pilots, almost all of them subtitled by Irina Margareta Nistor.

And this in the Jiu Valley. Incredible, isn't it?

Legend has it that the Ceaușescu woman noticed the satellite dishes and asked what the deal was with them "washbasins" on the rooftops and that cobweb of cables — "you can't even land a helicopter in Deva" — and was told they had something to do with the telephones. She demanded immediate measures, but since it was already March 1989, there wasn't much time left to put them into practice. Very widespread in the Jiu Valley and in other parts of Transylvania, the phenomenon had grown too large, and it would have created a mood of discontent that the regime feared — especially in light of the 1977 miners' strike and the 1987 Brașov revolt. It was far better for everyone to stay home.

And yet, people had access to satellite broadcasts, which raises certain suspicions about the subversive character of allowing these networks. Gorbachev's perestroika was spreading our way too.

"These people are letting you set up a cable network?!"

"They didn't stop me from doing it! I've got a couple of Securitate men on the network. Obviously I'm not the one who hooked them up..."

On the morning of the 22nd of December, in 1989, I went to work. I was scheduled to sign the attendance register for everyone and to write next to each name that they were out "in the field."

There had been a savage frost for days on end, and the building of the Ambulance Station, which also housed our office at the time, was frozen solid. You couldn't stay still for more than five minutes without going stiff. The miraculous, sudden spring of the morning of 22 December 1989 turned the whole building into a sea of water. All the pipes burst and water streamed down the walls. I was there, just me and the director of the Ambulance Station. Together we searched the basement for the valves to shut off the water. I got my feet wet and went home.

I turned on the television to watch the rally in Bucharest. Ceaușescu's last rally. Felix was busy with some network amplifiers, the telephone rang without stop. I watched that rally with dread, but also with a kind of hope born of despair. On the evening of 17 December, the one when they fired on people in Timișoara, after the two films of the evening and the never-missing final scene from Antonioni's film, "Zabriskie Point," with which Felix would close the "programming," he put on one more cassette, onto which he had recorded machine-gun fire, and left it on the television screens for about an hour. He got a single phone call in solidarity with his pointed message. Otherwise, silence.

Fury and helplessness overwhelmed me as I watched Ceaușescu's ungrammatical speech. When the square began to roar, I screamed:

"He's falling! This time, he's falling!"

Felix grew agitated. He put the speakers out on the balcony so the whole neighbourhood could hear what was happening in Bucharest, then he went down into the street, together with Dan Tăbăcaru, who had stopped by in the meantime on some errand I no longer recall. They got hold of two flags and made their way to the Jiul store, waving them and shouting that Ceaușescu had fallen, and by the time they got back to the Town Hall — there are only about two hundred metres between them, maybe three — the Petroșani revolution had been set off. On their march, they had already gathered a few hundred people, which very quickly became a few thousand.

He stayed in the thick of events for two weeks. He gave speeches from the Town Hall balcony to keep people out in the street. It seemed essential to him. The threatening phone calls came one after another. I sent my mother and Alin up the hill, to the Tuhuț family. At night, so we could sleep at least a few hours with the illusion of safety, we would block the door with an armchair.

After two weeks, Felix figured out what it was all about — he understood the game that many are still struggling to explain even now, a quarter of a century later. He calmed down and decided to leave for Bucharest. But first, he tinkered for a whole day and managed to turn his network into an ad-hoc radio station. He explained "on air" to the subscribers of the HERMES SAT network everything that had happened at the Town Hall in the two weeks that had launched the Petroșani "revolution."