The Elves

I entered the game. I was a night elf, priest, and I belonged to the Alliance. There are two factions: the Horde and the Alliance. The choice was simple. At first glance it seemed to come down to the ugly ones and the beautiful ones. My name was Lee, I had green hair and long ears. I was running through a forest like none I had seen since childhood. In high school, my classmates called me Lee. Those close to me still call me that.

Lee was a strange experience. A kind of chosen solitude that delighted and saddened me in equal measure. A retreat into the joy of the game, a world in which almost everything could be read in one key: carpe diem!

Lee crept into my soul. I merged with her. I had simple, amusing tasks to carry out. For instance, I had to restore the optimal number of animals in the forest by killing little tigers with fangs as long as swords. "These ones they brought over from Rahan's story," came to mind — the famous colour strips that ran in Pif. Ilthalain had assigned me this responsibility, once I had understood that his role was to train the young priests, myself among them, and to watch over the balance of nature.

Everything was fine until I ran into some greenish tarantulas that rushed at me and killed me. That was how I ended up at Spirit, a kind of undulating Valkyrie with wide-open wings of light. I begged her to revive me and she revived me. I went back to the spiders with warlike thoughts, entered their cave and held my ground fairly well, hurling my spell of light at them. But in the depths of the grotto I came upon a big green apparition called Githyiss the Vile. The creature mobilized all the spiders swarming around it, attacked me, and I died right beneath its fearsome feet. Then the story turned downright dramatic. I would come back in the shape of a little star of light, I would revive, but I never had time to rebuild my life before the insects killed me almost instantly. I won back my right to life after much striving. Annoyed, I set off down the main road, lit by plant-like lamp-posts — a sort of flower with a woody stem in whose cups little spheres of blue light pulsed. At the first crossroads, the signposts showed me the way to Dolanaar and Starbreeze Village. I took the road to Starbreeze Village, a hamlet full of little pink bears — demons, actually, as I would learn later. A poor choice, because the game's logic was to go first to Dolanaar, to train, to have it explained what I had to do, and only then to venture toward the heart of the forest. I told myself there was no point tramping the roads for nothing, so I lay in wait, devising all sorts of strategies, and in the end I attacked one of the little bears. In practice, I was supposed to manage to kill it, but with them, too, solidarity kicked in — far better than with the spiders — and I had no chance. They killed me.

When I came back, all the living breath that had animated the forest and the prettily drawn little houses a short while before had vanished. The corpses of the little pink bears lay everywhere. Their fangs, frozen in the fearsome grin of death, glinted among the tall blades of grass. Why had they all died, just like that, all at once?

I wanted to reach the elves' capital as soon as possible, but it was still far off and I had grown tired. Maybe tomorrow, I told myself, and I had fun running beneath the soles of Ancient Protector, a walking tree, enormous, its mane, beard, and shoulders overrun with violet maple leaves. He patrolled through Dolanaar, guarding it — though he let me die, torn apart by a black panther, right at his feet, shod in violet maple leaves and little pink flowers.

I delighted in every detail, half-convinced I was in a real world where I had once been before — for instance, when I had asked, in all seriousness, a goose at the edge of the brook to turn me into a dwarf and carry me across the brook on her back; for surely, once, I had travelled with Nils Holgersson's geese the length of Sweden. My good friend in Dolanaar was Keldamyr, the innkeeper. He had green hair like mine, only his was a bright, poisoned green, and his face was harsh, almost fierce. Time flowed on, wrapped in the endless night of Teldrassil, and I, once I had grown tired and drowsy, would settle at the edge of the terrace, with Keldamyr behind me, minding his innkeeper's business. I would watch the clearing of giant trees where Ancient Protector patrolled, sure of himself. I felt safe, too, with myself. It was a quiet nostalgia. Heavy, sweet, persistent. The stillness of the night elves, of Teldrassil. I would stay for an indefinite time, curled beside the bed I was about to fall asleep in, my gaze fixed on the violet distance, where Felix surely had to be, and I listened to the music of the elves.

"Hikikomori! It's wreaking havoc in Japan, you know. A million people lost in their own imagination, sometimes to the point of total annihilation," Alin told me. "It's a social phenomenon that has alarmed the Japanese government. This world is worth studying. It seems to have a future. Soon they'll invent the jack that transposes you, senses and all, into the character on the monitor, and — 'Ta-da, world!'"

I felt acutely, almost like a stitch between the ribs, that he was right.

I climb the hill to the cemetery.

For a long time, when I was at an impasse, Felix would come to me. He was very real, I could touch him, I could embrace him. He was so corporeal that I felt his physical presence. I would ask him what he was doing "over there," and he would tell me something about some "missions." I would stop him, because I felt he was pulling me somewhere between worlds, where I had no right to be. In the loveliest of these dreams he was robed in white. He had come to help me free myself from the net of a miserable daily life. I was running down corridors flanked on one side by toilets I had just hosed down with a jet of water, and I was in a panic. He waited for me at the end of the corridor in my high school in Călimănești. That was where my running ended. He stroked my hair, without words, wrapping me in the light of a smile from "beyond." He was no longer my guardian angel. He had risen toward the rank of the archangels, and I saw that clearly. He had caressed me, his light had gladdened me, but I knew that, from then on, I was on my own. He would not come again. Or...

Contrary to appearances, I feel that God loves me. With Him I have an intimate, natural relationship. My grandmother passed it on to me. Every evening, she would sit by my bed, above which, on the wall, the icons stood neatly arranged on a flowered woollen rug. She recited the Lord's Prayer aloud and invariably yawned with relish during the prayer, preparing to pass straight into a healthy, blessed sleep. Never again have I witnessed an act of faith greater in sincerity and depth. My grandmother fell asleep, every evening, straight into the arms of the Lord. Eighteen years have passed since she and Felix left me. He first. It was his birthday, and he went, clutching a wax candle so hard that the candle curved. Then she, also on a feast day. On the feast of Saint Parascheva.

A year later, I brought, with no small amount of trouble, a block of marble from the womb of the Apuseni Mountains. A beautiful stone, white with transparent, reddish veins of iron. We glided together along the road running parallel to the mountains: Alin, I, and Felix's gravestone. That journey is very clear in my mind.

On the block of marble I drew a cross, and at its foot a circle in which my name and Felix's embraced in the yin-and-yang symbol. Cristian, a gifted stonemason, carved the design deep into the stone, then raised it on a pedestal, also of marble, on which I wrote "CARPE DIEM." The base of the monument I clad with the Greek marble slab from the billiard table — the last toy Felix bought himself for his bar, perched on the dyke of the Olt, across the road from the Central Hotel in Călimănești. Dedal, the bar was called.

For a thousand days, I turned these two things over in my mind: the verse from the Gospel of Matthew — "O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done" — and the Latin maxim Carpe diem.

Felix had turned the famous maxim into a question. He would ask, rubbing his palms together: "Carpe diem?" He was a master of joy.

When I climb the hill in the evening to light candles, the white crosses greet me with their stillness. They have their faces turned toward the gentle huddle of houses at the foot of the hill. For a while, I put down roots beside them. The depth of the surrounding valley, seen from here, from the bank that has dissolved so many bodies, explains to me — almost deafening me — how touching our desire is to be confirmed by a mocking cosmos devoid of indulgence.

And yet, here, beside my own funerary monument at the top of the hill, I have, every time, the feeling that I need only reach out my hand to gather the whole planet into my palms. It is unspeakably beautiful, like this, filtered through the bodies of the white crosses descending in an amphitheatre toward the valley, and I feel the need to caress it. And even though I am in a cemetery, beside my own funerary monument — a thought that frightens many people, or perhaps for that very reason — my soul fills with love and with a warm light, at peace with itself. Felix is always beyond the horizon, and if I spread my wings I could fly there.

My most consistent talent was living inside the stories I read or invented myself. Throughout my childhood I had been a plain little girl and, in the opinion of those around me, doomed to be a nobody both now and in the future. A relentless swot, with a slight squint on top of it, I had no other choice but to dream all through childhood of pie in the sky and fairy-tale princes from illo tempore, seasoned with the great stars of the films I watched religiously at the "Cărbunele" cinema, at the end of the world called Lonea. The world had taken shape for me when I was five. I stood quietly in a queue to enter a palace with little chairs, little tables for dwarves, and a heap of toys. At the entrance, a nursery teacher gave each child a piece of gingerbread from a pot-bellied barrel. I had got close to it, to the barrel, I had seen the concentric rings of gingerbread laid out inside it, when another teacher spotted me and shouted at me:

"What are you doing here? Go home! Her mother has no job," she explained, somewhere up in the heavens, to the one handing out the gingerbread, while, pushing me from behind, she shoved me out the gate.

Lord, how the road curved before me then! It had become a hill — of mountains I knew nothing yet! Mothers always appear at crucial moments, exactly where they should. Tall, beautiful, like her black scissors with which she cut cloth to make dresses, my mother was coming down the hill toward me.

"She drove me out!" I stammered, and my voice broke off.

How I could have burst into tears! But I didn't. I thought I must have done something wrong, that it couldn't be otherwise, and that if I cried I would upset my mother too. She took me by the hand and helped me climb the hill. In my soul I was carrying a piece of gingerbread as big as a cartwheel. And so it came about that I stayed forever outside the pack, and never again did I want to stand in a queue to receive any gingerbread at all.

I had to write this book, and I was obsessed with the idea of getting it out of my head and setting it down on paper. But I couldn't find enough resources to begin writing.

"Ligia, books don't exist, they have to be invented. Get on with inventing it, stop wasting time!" the Archangel told me, my friend from World of Warcraft. The urging seemed to come straight from Felix. He had explained this to me again and again while he wrote his plays on "Erika," his famous typewriter, which became the main character of the novel, Domino.

Dusk was settling decorously over the park in Grozăvești. I was going out into the city. I no longer remember why. I was waiting for the tram. From Regie to Piața Unirii, the 13 and the 14 were our student trams.

That late-February evening the stop was deserted. Hunched against the cold, a few steps behind me, doing the same thing as I was — that is, waiting for the tram — was Felix. We didn't know each other.

I was just then musing on the impossibility of having, in a few weeks' time, when spring was sure to come, a decent pair of shoes on my feet — feet that were said, often enough, to be "cool." I was especially fond of dusk. People are tired enough not to notice that I have worn-out shoes on my feet, I would amuse myself at my own expense. But that wasn't why I loved the dusk. Its warm, transfigured light — that was what I loved.

"Do you know anyone at I.A.T.C.?"

The question came from behind me, where Felix was, along with the fearsome Grozăvești power plant that, now and then, menacingly discharged its valves gone under pressure, sending shivers down your spine.

"Yes, quite a few people," I answered, almost amiably.

My deskmate from high school, Raluca, was a theatre student; I had lived in the dormitory with the theatre girls, got into shows on their student cards even though I looked nothing like the photographs on them, and watched their exams, to which outsiders were admitted and invited. I.A.T.C. was the acronym for the Institute of Theatre and Cinematographic Art. At Theatre, at the Conservatory, and at Fine Arts there were, in those days, very few students, and they all thought of themselves and behaved like stars.

"From the first year — do you know anyone?… but it doesn't matter, I have no intention of picking up women tonight," he went on drily, more to himself, and reabsorbed himself into the scene against the backdrop of the fearsome Grozăvești plant.

True, my answer had been a few seconds late, but his reaction seemed to me unjustified, even excessive. I had sensed in it a shade of irritation for which I found no reason, not even after I was fully assured that he'd had no intention... of "picking me up." The tram came, we boarded through different doors — I through the middle one, he through the one at the back of the first car. "Well, I never! What did this fellow want?" Naturally I looked at him, to fix him in my memory. In passing, of course. He had, after all, been such a boor!

Anchored to the bar beside the ticket-collector, he stared blankly past the tram doors, convinced, of course, that he had shocked me and ignoring me for that very reason. Then I remembered. A brief, illuminating flash unlocked in my memory.

One evening, at the entrance of Block A, where I had managed to get a room only a few days earlier after the inevitable cavalcade through the dean's office and the rector's office and every university administration in the world, I passed by him. He was holding in his arms a beautiful girl I had noticed and taken a liking to. We lived on the same floor. She was a first-year psychology student, and her story was that she had transformed spectacularly after cosmetic surgery. She had corrected her nose and become "a swan." He looked at her tenderly, in ecstasy, curved like an open parenthesis. The expression on his face, and the parenthesis he traced in the evening air, amused me and imprinted themselves on my mind. "Oh, look — there's that one too!" I mused then, briefly and sadly, disappointed to have found the girl again on the path beneath the block, where every autumn the "silly geese," freshly escaped from home, lined up so neatly.

The tram rattled along the Dâmbovița. "God, so that was it!" it suddenly dawned on me. I had met Virgil two or three times. The second time, I had gone to the Architecture club with Marius, a good childhood friend of Felix's. Both were first-year acting students.

I lost Lee, and it was a real tragedy.

I could hardly wait to get home in the evening. I would almost rush at the computer. Until the game loaded, I lived through moments of profound unease. What was I really looking for? The stories of old? The ones from before I was nagged to "come down to earth"? Almost always, I was told: "Come down to earth, dear!" But reality was, most of the time, the other way round. If I "came down to earth," the others would have been left suspended in the air, by the law of the seesaw, and without the comfortable point of reference I provided, they wouldn't have liked it at all. And so the roles were clearly assigned and unchangeable.

So it couldn't be that. It was something else. I had been won over by the sensation that I could touch parallel worlds, that they existed, that I could travel from one to another without restriction. The idea was an old one in my mind, but the game made it tangible, changing the parameters of "reality." And besides, to me it was all clear: I was looking for Felix within myself and somewhere out there across Teldrassil.

The very first evening.

Things were going on as usual. Impassive, opaque. The canteen tables kept to their preordained symmetry. They were round, covered with stained tablecloths, holed here and there. Only the chairs scattered every which way spoiled this symmetry. A levelling, ill-willed symmetry, the kind to make you feel like just another ant in that austere hall. A great deal of bustle and oppression, heavy, choking smoke, and an infernal clatter of cutlery.

The conveyor belt, on which you neatly set your tray once you had finished eating, ran along the wall by the window with undisturbed precision. Alongside it moved, with calm and elegant gestures, the belt boys. They were the cream of Bucharest's student bohemia, feared and much-respected hooligans. As a rule, they had long hair and jeans worn thin by time or specially scrubbed to bleach them. "Individuals devoid of decency and of any sense of responsibility," "subversive agitators" who scorned the valuable "gifts" of socialist society. So it was said of them at the meetings held specially in the canteen, to bring them onto the right path — that is, to stop them eating the scraps off the belt. By way of riposte, every so often the belt boys would show up dressed in immaculate suits. In this way they thumbed their noses at everyone and made it clear that they were the true and only lords of those times. They were stars and behaved accordingly. One of them, nostalgic, would turn up in his Western fiancée's car, a Mercedes-Benz S-Class, to "ride the belt," though he had finished university years before. The "Grozăvești Belt" was an institution with a clear hierarchy and clear laws. Most certainly, not just anyone was allowed into this brotherhood.

Saturday evening. As at the end of every week, the faces of those gathered in the Grozăvești canteen looked somehow changed. They took on a kind of transfiguration. The exception was the well-behaved couples, highly visible — those who had already found their right and final match. From their tables wafted the perfume of future domestic gestures: calm, settled, dull. Otherwise, almost everyone was in a flutter.

It was spring, though not decided enough to make you fall in love.

I can almost see myself. I eat slowly — in fact I play at eating, spelling out my half-portion, drawing out each motion to keep the fork and knife moving through the air as long as possible. I split the meal card fifty-fifty with Mana, for the sake of my figure, but above all for the money. Yes, in fact I'm playing while studying her — for the umpteenth time! — Mana. Her nostrils are flared with appetite. What strange mechanism could trigger in her so great a hunger amid a landscape clogged with plates, cutlery, trays, and the heavy smell of canteen food?

To my surprise, from the belt boys' table Felix greeted me, sizing me up cheekily from head to toe — or, more precisely, the other way round. He had an exotic face, looked a great deal like the famous Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, and was dressed in a fine, light-blue suit. We knew each other vaguely, taking into account that botched conversation, witnessed one evening by the sinister Grozăvești plant.

Meanwhile, I witnessed a scene of delicate sadness. Its protagonist was a beautiful, intelligent, sensitive girl, born somewhere on the banks of the Danube, a naiad. Her name was Maria. Her mother had a negative Rh factor, and the maternal antibodies had attacked the foetus — that is, Maria — crippling her. From the knees down, the muscles of her legs, which should have been flawless, were atrophied. The physical defect she had been born with was major, but she fought it tooth and nail. Apparently she was winning. She presented a woman sure of herself, writing off her defect as a negligible quantity, and she was the best friend in the world. For two weeks I had moved into her room.

It was another Saturday evening. Maria was bustling about, getting ready for her date with "Felix, the guy from the theatre."

I attended her for an hour or so as she dressed one way, then another, until, at last, she was satisfied with her appearance. She made up her face with care and sat down meekly on a chair. I was perched at the top of the bed, chattering about anything and everything. I could feel her tension, though she let nothing show. Felix had invited her to go to a club together. I had some experience dealing with Theatre students. I had tested first-hand how individuals of this species catch you in their nets, playing credibility, depth, and sincerity with such ease. They fool you with the greatest of ease. I had learned that the only chance of escaping their hands was, at the right moment — when they were doing their number, studying you cynically as you fell into their trap — to applaud them and say: Bravo! You were really cool, you convinced me! But I didn't dare tell Maria what I thought. Eight o'clock passed, the academic quarter-hour passed. After two hours, Maria began to wipe off her make-up with frighteningly heavy gestures. That was when I hated Felix for the first time!

"What did you want from Maria?" I asked him later, across time.

"At first I was tempted by an experience with her. I was curious. I was carried away on my own wave of superficiality. But I thought about the consequences and didn't show up that evening. I didn't want to hurt her. I avoided a problem, believe me!"

"But you did hurt her."

"I chose the lesser evil," Felix specified.

That evening I had put on the shortest skirt I owned and given up the idea of staying in the dormitory, in my room on the fifth floor of Block A, staring at the ceiling. I responded promptly to the cheeky look with which Felix had approached me, asking him familiarly for a cigarette. It was an old pirouette by which I disarmed "adversaries" of this kind, making them do something for me, as if we had been friends since the dawn of time. By obliging them to make a few gestures — to fish out the cigarette pack, say, and light my cigarette — I bought time to prepare the tone and smile needed for: Merci, goodbye!

It didn't go that way. First he borrowed two cigarettes, then, chair and all, he settled at our table, where silence suddenly fell. Mana and her friends, who until then had been cooing almost without pause, went quiet as if by magic, erasing themselves from the scene. We lit our cigarettes and began the exchange of "pleasantries."

"You look good tonight," Felix began in a natural tone, and, with a mischievous glint in his eye, traced a line down my whole length, to make clear what he meant, then concluded: "But I think you look much better undressed."

"I don't doubt it," I answered, swallowing with difficulty his insolence — far too offensive — quickly searching for something to replace the "Oh, piss off!" that I stopped at the last second, plucking it almost out of the air. It was, after all, too harsh. In the end, I had provoked him.

"What are your plans tonight?" he asked, his tone completely changed.

"None."

The answer escaped me almost involuntarily, because I was still hunting for a possible curse.

"Me neither. And I haven't a single coin."

He kept his mischievous tone.

"That's your problem!"

I hadn't told him piss off!, but out of reflex I fell back on the femme-fatale tone. My answer, curt and tossed over my shoulder, resembled a curse quite closely.

"I wonder... what can two students do on a Saturday evening when they have neither plans nor money?!"

He drew out and shaded each word. He was "playing the kitten," to win my goodwill.

"I haven't the faintest! And anyway, why must they necessarily do something?" I asked curtly.

He paid no attention to my tone. He pursued his idea, all coy, and answered himself.

"They take a walk under the moonlight, or they go to a student club. By the way, do you want to go to a club?"

Had he sensed that I rejected "the recipes," or was it only an impression! I liked the natural tone of the question. It was as if we were old friends. I thought of the ceiling on the fifth floor of Block A. I accepted. I couldn't be more bored with an "I.A.T.C. boy" than I would be philosophically contemplating a ceiling I was rather sick of anyway. I knew the type, after all! They could be charming, if you knew how to listen to them, and they made a good addition to one's tally.

We set off. The tram, the requisite stops, and above all the lurches and sways of the contraption — an opportunity, naturally, for Felix to come to my aid.

"Lord, with what confidence this man puts his hands on me!" I said to myself.

The "Universitas" club was across from Cișmigiu. A big crowd — that is, lots of penniless students. It was hard to get in. For Felix it was very easy. Well! An artist! Just as easily he found an out-of-the-way spot where we could talk. He had known of it beforehand. Out of our pockets, with difficulty, spilled the five lei needed for a pack of "Carpați" cigarettes and two "lemon sodas."

He had a terrific verve. I was amazed that I didn't have to do the talking, as almost always happened, that there was no mention of theatre, that no one was groaning about the vicissitudes of our student life. He was inexhaustible! I felt wonderful. He was charming. He talked a great deal, built and tore down sumptuous pyramids, spun in an avalanche of pirouettes — some unexpectedly deep and serious, all of them submerged beneath cascades of laughter. I really don't know what Felix talked about for a whole evening. My memory kept only what was happening beyond appearances, beyond any context, and above all beyond words.

The very limit! We kissed, though I had resolved not to make, in any way, any commitment, however superficial. When I was left alone for a few minutes, a state of total hilarity suddenly seized me. I laughed out loud, I laughed with pure joy, and I congratulated myself on the inspiration of not having stayed that evening under my sad ceiling in Block A at Grozăvești.

"When shall we see each other again?"

"Wednesday at four," I answered.

It was a stereotype set many months before. Wednesday at four I met no one. I had learned that this is the easiest way to slip out without awkward explanations. Wednesday at four did not exist in my calendar.

I climbed the building's five floors with that same state of hilarity that refused to end. Nor could it. The stairwell was glazed and we could see each other. Felix danced among the rosebushes in the park, signalling to me with both hands, and I stopped on every floor doing the same.

We met not on Wednesday but on Sunday — that is, the next day. And again at the canteen. I arrived near closing time. Felix was there. Had he been waiting for me? Yes, he had been waiting for me. He had even come at twelve, when the canteen opened: "And you just wouldn't arrive!" he told me.

From that day on, we were never apart again.

We went to the Botanical Garden. The game began. A complex, fascinating game. We lay in wait, attacked each other by surprise, tried to throw each other off as much as we could. Charge after charge, nonchalance, indifference, and unconcern paraded for all to see. Lord, he's a dangerous individual, all the sensors I was equipped with told me, activated down to the last one.

In the Botanical Garden spring was insinuating itself, with some assurance, freshening the grass and rounding out the buds on the trees' branches. Intent on seeing through the most serious task ever undertaken in this world, thousands of ants marched in tight formation along a path that, to them, was as boundless as the Russian steppe. Now and then the clouds let slanting rays caress the grass, the tree trunks, the shyly aligned benches, and the two of us. It took us some time to study the ants' route. Where they came from was impossible to discover, but they were surely going to heaven, because they climbed up the trunk of a chestnut tree and were lost among its branches, still wet from the recent rain.

"Here's how it is," I explained, trying to warn him that I might seem atypical to him. "For as long as I can remember, I've been like a stray ant, taken out of the column and left somewhere off to the side of the flowing stream. I can't conform. I'm not part of this world, which lines us up only to send us wherever it takes into its head. It's nonsense, but I can love people only if I watch them from the edge. Only if I don't mingle among them."

I watched his profile, sculpted with classical precision, while he studied the squadron of ants in deep concentration. He was a handsome man, and handsome men put me on my guard. I had the feeling that something was not right with them, that they took up too much room on the stage where we all parade, great and small, that they monopolized too many spotlights, which drain them of content, and that for you they must remain only some gleaming, intangible shells. I believed, and I still believe, that a somewhat longer power cut would be enough to make them annihilate themselves, literally. Well — a whole philosophy. In short, I was convinced that a handsome man complicates things terribly. I knew you mustn't fall in love with him, and if you had let the reins slip from your hands, you should leave him there on his stage and pretend to ignore him. He'll come to you on his own. That's the moment you enter the battle with the cohorts of women who will be obsessed with dethroning you, if you should happen to come to occupy a privileged place in his dramatic existence as a fairy-tale prince. That's how it is! You have to keep him in check at all times, without his catching on, and fight all the women who will turn up along his path. For this reason, almost all the handsome men I have known became my friends, because they were drawn to me. But no more than that.

In high school I had lived through an enchanting story, but at bottom a very harsh one. Then, at sixteen, I discovered for the first time that love is a grave illness.

I fell in love with Tom, instantly and irrevocably. He was the star of the school, because he looked like Roger Moore and, on top of that, like Elvis Presley! Nothing more than that could be conceived. The first two weeks of the school year hadn't yet passed, and I was struggling hard to grow into the skin of a high-schooler. The teachers were new, the classmates were, for the most part, new as well, and I had come from a modest school where I had easily been the best. Emil, my brother two years older, held a good position at the school, and that helped me somewhat. He was in the eleventh grade, like Tom. The eleventh-graders were the oldest in the school, the absolute leaders in all things. Tom, however, was a staple subject in the conversation of the girls in my class. They all sighed after him.

Over the summer my general physical appearance had registered an improvement, but my "plain girl" psychology had not eased much. It had been fed constantly throughout childhood by the comparison with Emil, the family's successful child, handsome and clever. I had noticed Tom. It couldn't have been otherwise! I had studied him from a distance and exclaimed: "What a conceited fellow this one must be!"

Then came a day when things changed.

During a break, Tom turned his attention to me. I answered by looking at him long and intently, with that depth into which I had poured all my forests of Eden. It was a short circuit. A thunderbolt. My desk, the history teacher, everything, absolutely everything, vanished utterly. From within me, a tornado of light seized Tom and carried him off to a clearing on the mountaintop. A summer rain clothed, with diamond drops, the wild horses rearing through the tall gentian. The two of us, under the same rain, beside an enormous fire, had become ribbons of plasma stalking each other's touch, dissolving into the sky, together with the fluid dance of the horses in the clearing.

In other words, I fell gravely ill! So gravely that Tom — my classmate two years older, from the classroom of — could no longer be a concrete earthling, with hands to touch me, with legs to carry him toward me, and he had no voice with which to speak to me. Nothing that might mar our sacred dance, up there on the mountaintop, was conceivable. We looked at each other during every break, day after day, only that, and I had unilaterally taken on the eternity of the most unrequited of loves.

It was a long autumn. I hid in a nook of my soul where truly no one could find me. Between myself and those around me I drew curtain after curtain, each of them of heavy velvet the colour of night. At night the whole world grows gentle, because it falls asleep, and you can change the look of the place you are forced to live in. As long as you have imagination! I breathed in rhythm with the planet, with the forest climbing through the evening mist toward the mountaintop, and I waited patiently for the Evening Star to rise. I talked to him, to the Evening Star. I realized, rather confusedly, that I wanted to be the Evening Star myself, that I did not feel at home in my human skin, there, in the squalid hamlet at the end of the world, a labour camp where people had been brought to dig the black, glistening coal out of the womb of the mountain.

"Someone saw you... and said you're a fine girl," Nela told me, looking at me indirectly, in the mirror we all looked at, because it was set at the building's entrance. "He said he predicts a brilliant future for you," she added, adjusting a strand of hair that was, in any case, sitting obediently in place.

Then she smiled at me sweetly, looking at me directly and sizing me up briefly.

I knew it was about Tom, and I asked her nothing. The day before, I had caught them watching me, amused. They were talking about me. Nela was holding part of their classroom door in her arms, and Tom swung, from one knee to the other, a wide-meshed net with a ball in it. She was on all the school's lists of top girls. We knew each other well, because we had lived in the same stairwell in Lonea and slept many nights together. I was, in a way, her protégée.

Then came the reunion, the party their class organized in honour of the "freshers," that is, us. Our school building was dull on ordinary days. A rectangular block set at the roadside, between the clear, rebellious water of the Jiu and an enormous, almost vertical hill that I climb obsessively in my dreams, usually in flight. On the evening of the reunion it had become a sounding box.

I came in with Emil and crossed the room diagonally. Emil introduced me to Camil and vanished to play chess. I spent the whole evening with Camil. He was a year older, so he was "emancipated enough" to instruct a "fresher." We gossiped about all the teachers, laughed heartily for no reason, decided that we didn't want to dance, and talked about theatre. Camil wanted to become an actor.

For a while Tom was a drummer, then he danced with a heap of girls. The reunion stretched on toward midnight, the ranks of the "freshers" thinned out gradually, and the older ones, shielded by their form mistress — an emancipated gal — noticeably heightened the party's intimacy. Emil remembered me for a few seconds, just long enough to ask how I was and to inform me that we were staying until the end, because he had to beat someone at chess... I didn't even want to leave.

Under other circumstances, Camil would no doubt have won me over. That evening, though, I was watching Tom, to whom I seemingly didn't exist. The doubt, the futility of the whole evening — in which we had talked about the moon and the stars without Camil's efforts to please me touching me in the slightest — were coming to the surface. I was growing sad, gradually and quite visibly, when Tom came in through the door, looked at me, headed resolutely toward us, but halfway there stopped. He struck his forehead in annoyance with his right palm, turned back, and disappeared.

I no longer remember the way home. When I was left alone in the darkness of night, I collapsed to my knees, put my hands to my head, and screamed inside myself: Tom!

For a time, things slipped badly out of my control. I was overwhelmed. Spring is the Earth's most beautiful garment. It hides all the wounds with which people strive so hard to make it ugly. It has the special power to enamel the hills with green velvet and the trees with blossom. The clear mornings when I walked to school, beneath the trees in bloom, to meet Tom — for that, in the end, was what it was all about — were so beautiful that none of the mornings I have lived since could dim them. Every moment had the intensity and emotion of a revelation, flooded as it was by such a love as, rightly, would have been due to God alone. I translated it simply, in two words, and kept it forever: I love Love.

A single incident disturbed my constant reverie. We had a gym lesson. If you didn't feel like taking part, the rule was that you had to dress in your sports kit, line up in formation, in your place, and when the teacher — a shrew I hated — called your name from the register, you said: "absent." Then you could go wherever you liked. That day I said "absent" and set off toward my classroom upstairs. I went down the long ground-floor corridor. The sun filtered through the single window at the end of the hall. I was about to climb the stairs. By the door between the corridor and the stairwell, just as I went to round the corner, I came upon Tom and his best friend, with whom I flirted, practising, in principle, the effect of long looks — appraising or watchful, as the case required. Why did I flirt with him? Simple. Because he challenged me. Thrown off, I stopped for a few seconds. Politely, the boys drew back from the doorway to let me pass, then, the very next second, abruptly cut off my way. I could no longer avoid a touch with Tom — rather, a brief embrace — while his friend snickered alongside. "You ass!" — I said, certainly in my mind, but I think aloud as well, and I broke into a run up the spiralling stairs. When I was sure I could no longer be seen, my breath caught, I gripped the iron rail of the banister and slid slowly, with almost disjointed movements, into a half-faint. I was horrified to discover how much power he could have over me, how much I wanted Tom concretely, physically.

In the days that followed, I stayed away from the well-established meetings during every break, and if we crossed paths by chance, I looked ostentatiously past him. I wanted somehow to restore the balance we had both experienced for months, in a communion where gestures, touch, and words had no place.

Summer came, school ended, and I left the town for good. So I believed then. On the bus that took me to the station, I sat by the window so I could look out toward the roadside. I knew I would see Tom, and so it was. He was waiting for me at one of the stops. So I liked to believe. No other bus stopped at that stop. He didn't get on. Our eyes couldn't meet. They slid nervously past each other. Then I pressed my temple to the glass and heavy tears flooded my soul. I let him look at me freely, see how the infernal machine of our parting was gradually erasing me from the world.

We saw each other again three years later. Tom came to Călimănești for Raluca. He had been corresponding with her all that time. After a summer in which I died every day longing for Tom, school began again. I was in the blackest of all the sufferings on earth! The distance had produced no significant change. I loved Tom.

"Write to him!" Raluca advised me.

"That I cannot do, not for the life of me."

"Then I'll write to him," Raluca decided.

Tom replied promptly, but mockingly. He spoke of a person he called Zizica. I felt the dig was aimed at me. I wrote to him. I chose every word with great care, to make him understand the following: "Even though I love you, I am inaccessible to you, because I want nothing concrete from you. I cannot be an object of jokes or mockery, since the two of us don't know each other... etc. You want to apply to acting school, Raluca will surely apply to acting school too... that's why she wrote to you." Tom certainly understood that I loved him and that he had upset me. He apologized, insisting firmly that Zizica really was a flesh-and-blood person who had just been at Călimănești, at the resort, and he was convinced that I had deliberately concocted a joke. I didn't believe him. I withdrew into my muteness and watched the gradual romance being built, through correspondence, between Tom and Raluca. I read every letter that left from Raluca and every reply received from Tom, and I found nothing for myself in them, as I couldn't help but hope I would. Banal phrases, banal happenings, an exchange of photographs, for three years! Hope for what?! For Tom to tell me he loved me! That he missed me! Ridiculous!

Gradually I detached. Flirtations and sentimental little tales intervened, as happens when you move from one school to another, and in time I was forced to admit, with sadness, that I hadn't meant much to Tom at all. It was not only sadness but bitterness. I was disappointed in myself, in my naivety. At bottom, I had been a silly goose like any other, in love with the school star. Nothing more. Pathetic. For that very reason, when Tom came to Călimănești, I decided to be done with all my adolescent fantasizing, to close the chapter of platonic and futile love. I entered the scene by force, taking on the risk of being ridiculous. We met in the library.

"You two know each other," Raluca made the introduction, brief and conclusive.

Tom kissed my hand with a touch of gravity. Indeed, it was hard for us to behave naturally.

We walked together along the paths of Ostrov. It was the end of February. The bridge with white arches, like a line of swans strayed into the snow; black, sullen trees; dead leaves stuck to the gravel of the paths; a light mist with which the Olt caressed the island; and I, walking alongside Raluca and Tom. The two of them told each other all sorts of stories without pause, and Raluca flirted with the trees and with Tom at the same time. She pressed her head to a tree trunk, and Tom asked for passage to her by knocking on the opposite side of the tree; they measured each other's footprints in the snow... "What the hell am I doing here!" I felt awful. I couldn't simply leave. The gesture would have seemed dramatic, ridiculous. In a way it was good. Tom was being erased from my mind rapidly. That was what I had wanted, wasn't it? I spoke very little, neutrally, somewhat distantly, often falling behind them. Tom made the acquaintance of all the trees in the park, which, thanks to me and Raluca, bore names. Mephisto, Buddha, the Path to Nirvana. Of the last, Tom remarked: "It seems a bit short to me!"

We went back over the white bridge, passing in silence beneath its "swans," far more frozen-stiff this time. By the library, right at the end of the bridge, Raluca made the excuse that she needed a book, and Tom offered to walk me home.

Then Tom and I actually talked for the first time. True, mostly I did. I embodied myself as an end of February: melancholy, meditative, solitary, and eager to stay that way. I almost apologized for having been so in love with him, but it hadn't been my fault — it was the fault of that wretched Jiu Valley, where everything is black with coal and crushed by poverty. For me he had been a light, a haven... At the end of the road, Tom kissed my hand, bowing slightly and at length, and then we looked at each other directly, openly. For the first time we were close to one another. It seemed to me that I glimpsed all the weight of that year in which we had sought each other, had met... Yes, I still loved him, because I had loved him beyond measure. I was glad I had had the good fortune to do so. I never saw him again.

Two days later, Raluca received from Tom a long letter in which she had become the girl in his ivory tower, an ideal he had believed, until the walk through Ostrov, existed only in his own fiction. I read those pages, which Tom said he had written on the train, still in a state of ecstasy, and I felt each one of them like a blow to the solar plexus. I didn't want to read anything more of what followed. Raluca felt obliged to explain that she had stood up to him, holding him back for the sake of our friendship, but it really was no longer my problem. I was wounded, and I stroked my own head in comfort, admitting, with a sadness I owned, that I had sunk too far into my own illusions.

And yet, a few weeks later, things took a turn I no longer expected. "You're a good friend and I respect you for that," Tom wrote to Raluca. "We're grown-ups, and there's no sense in fooling ourselves any longer. We both know that the reason for our correspondence was always Ligia. She has something that we, of the opposite sex, cannot pass by with indifference."

And so Tom gave me a diamond as big as a fist, of a divine brilliance. Confidence in myself.

Something like a pressure, like an enchanted bond, was closing around me. Around me and around the whole Botanical Garden.

Dusk roughened the evening air. It was still cold, too cold for romantic walks. I didn't want the day to end so uncertainly. I was not at all clear about what I wanted. We went back to the dormitory. I had received 50 lei from home. I took them and we went to Athénée Palace. At first I balked. I was unsuitably dressed, not to say badly. Felix was amused by this, confirmed that it was so, that people would criticize me, but that he liked the way I looked and I had to have the courage to step onto the stage. To feel good in my own skin. Then he reviewed all the customers in the bar, characterizing each one and drawing droll portraits of them. Again I laughed a great deal, again I played it up a great deal.

We went back to Cotroceni. On the concrete parapet at the end of the bridge, Felix drew his destiny for me. From a point with a circle drawn around it, a vertical line descended, having at its base another point, in which he sketched a crossed-out zero.

"Here I am now, on a peak," he specified, while running his finger around the circumference of the circle in the imaginary drawing, "and at any moment, this can happen to me!" — and he sketched a vertical plunge, pointing to the point he had marked with the crossed-out zero.

"It can't be that serious!" I hurried my reply, treating the matter rather formally.

"Yes, it is."

"You haven't killed someone, surely!"

"No, but it's very possible that I will."

"Whom do you want to kill?"

"Myself."

"You want to kill yourself?"

"No, but I have the rope around my neck and the stool under my feet. It's enough for someone to come and nudge it gently, cynically, and I become an empty set."

"Then don't tell me anything. I don't want to know!"

"But you — I can and I want to tell you."

His confession came like a thunderbolt. It shocked me. After all, we had known each other only since the evening before. I thought it was a test, that he was playing. But he wasn't playing. He had got into the theatre institute by forging his sister's high-school diploma. It had been a lark. He hadn't believed he would be admitted. Now he lived with the sword of Damocles above his head and the rope tied around his neck. Every day was complete agony.

At the time I didn't fully understand what was happening to me. I didn't understand that Felix had already chosen me and was leaving me no way back.

I was playing World of Warcraft on a "private" server — that is, a pirated one. The inevitable happened. The server "broke." I could no longer get into the game, though I kept at it for hours on end. Despair had taken hold of me. The music of the elves had insinuated itself into my brain with tenacity and spun around there until it made me dizzy. At last I managed to get back into the game, but Lee I could no longer find. I had lost her. I made myself a new character, Oldlee.

Out of the blue, in my forest and the elves' forest, Tiberiu appeared. He asked me what I was doing. I was unpleasantly struck, even thrown off. The spell had dissipated. I had liked very much to turn into an elf and stay that way for part of the time. I had hoped that, sitting quietly in their forest, no one would see me.

"Hey, do you not want to talk, or do you not know how to talk on chat?"

"I do know. I'm playing WoW. What about you?"

"I'm dancing with you. Have you had another char?"

A fearsome apparition — a sort of centaur with horns, hooves, and a ridiculous tail — was hopping around me.

"Char?!"

"Character — meaning your figure in the game."

"Yes, Lee. For a while I couldn't get into the game, and when I managed to, I couldn't find her anymore."

"Yep! There was a problem with the server. It wasn't your fault. How much money do you have?"

"Money?"

"Yeah! Have you played WoW before?"

"No, I'm a beginner. I have no money."

"You're a girl?! Well, WoW is usually played by boys. How old are you?"

Now there's a question! I thought: "If I tell him I'm the same age as his mother, he'll think I'm crazy." Since lying didn't sit well with me either, I switched to coquetry.

"Don't you know it's not polite to ask women their age? Many."

"Come on, let's make you some money," he said, seeming uninterested in my answer.

He turned into a very agile feline and began to kill everything in his path.

"Why are you killing them? Don't you feel sorry for them?"

"These ones have money — loot them, that is, gather the money off them."

"How can you kill the elves?" I asked him, puzzled that he could kill the guards too.

"I'm with the Horde. Don't you see my name's written in red? You're with the Alliance. I can kill you too" — and, demonstratively, he killed me with a single blow. "Hit resurrect, your spirit isn't far!"

I hit resurrect, my spirit was teleported to the Valkyrie with wings of white light, and I came back to recover my beautiful body lying at Tiberiu's feet.

Felix enveloped me more each day than the day before. With his embrace, he was separating me from myself and from the world I believed was mine.

One April evening, he took me by the hand and decided, without looking at me.

"Tonight, the two of us make love."

I had dodged him using various strategies. I wanted no firmer commitment, but neither could I cut off his daily presence in my life. I believed that, as long as I stayed wrapped in a faintly mysterious mist and remained inaccessible, I could drift through time, in a prolonged and comfortable story. Nonsense! Felix absorbed me at once, mysterious mist and all. He told me, with an ironic smile and deliberate mischief: "There's no hurry. I'm not going anywhere."

We passed beneath arcades of blossoming trees. In the trolley's wake, they closed and melted continuously into multicoloured lights. We went in past an iron door, a massive, threatening door, and kept climbing a spiral staircase. Up, very high up. When I had finished climbing, I found myself in a cage. Felix hadn't been joking when he said he was locking me in a "cell." If I stretched out my arms, I touched the two side walls. By instinct I sought to reach the window, a square gap at the foot of the bed, because the room I was in was, in fact, a bed with four walls. In a nest under the eaves, my presence disturbed two collared doves. The sky, cut out by disorderly rooftops and drowned in the lake of the city's lights, had made the air in the "cell" more breathable.

He turned me toward him, intent, delaying each gesture, making it flow into a caress. He undid, one after another, the clothes from my body.

"Take this off too!" I held out to him my ring finger, on which I had a platinum ring with a diamond, a gift from my grandmother. "I want nothing to separate us."

I descended into myself, or I ascended... I really don't know.

I watched him with a timid curiosity, hiding, as much as I could, my interest in studying him detail by detail. He was amused. He paraded regally through my sensations, my thoughts, my virgin body, transfigured forever by the gleams of a unique precious stone — the one I had received from Tom. From him I knew that I leave a clear mark in a man's mind and sensations. I counted on that.

Replaying the film from the start, it wasn't true that Felix was in no hurry. He was in a hurry. Everything he did, even the most ordinary thing, was an avalanche that caught you in its whirl. I instinctively sensed its danger, its constant threat. He seemed to take no notice of my fear. He annihilated it by opening one gate after another for me. There were gates beyond which I knew what I would find, because that was what I had ceaselessly dreamed of. Beyond others, though, reality became new, surprising. He made the passage from one to the next without any effort, as if stepping from one tram into another. That was precisely what frightened me. He had become a river I swam in, carried by the force of the current, and it was alarming that it never crossed my mind to pull for shore. His waves were caress, floating, clarity. The nights above were deep, with all the stars wheeling toward the earth, so that the mornings might become concrete, with the dust and sweat of a journey in a crowded bus. Just as concrete was the glass of buttermilk, bought for fifty bani and drunk slowly, to win ourselves a little more time, to keep looking at each other, watching each other.

I had taken the city into my possession. I was conquering it, piece by piece, adding new memories to it every day and compelling it to record on its map the islands where our nights of love had alighted. These maps, most surely, are passed on for archiving in one of the "libraries" of the universe. It cannot be otherwise.

Years later, I had asked Felix:

"What's the difference between having sex and making love?"

"You make the difference," Felix answered, resting my cheek in his palm.

"What do you mean? Explain it to me!"

"There's nothing to explain. You know very well."

I became a WoW fan.

I logged in, as I had been doing every evening for some time, to carry hilarious missions through to the end. I exterminated the wolves in the forest and fought the bandits in the farms unlawfully occupied by the kobolds, a sort of humanoid degenerated into pigs, who walked on two legs and squealed. An obvious tension hung in the air — that is, on general chat. Tiberiu was chasing Zaros all over Azeroth; Zaros had broken the rules of the game and tried to undermine his authority. I was in Redridge Mountains, a beautiful place; I had found the flypass, a kind of air terminal for travel by flying gryphons, and I intended to take off for Stormwind. Tiberiu, before the bewildered eyes of my mage, was busily killing the nice flying creatures.

"Are you being violent again?"

"Yes," he answered, and demonstratively lunged at a peaceful cow, intent on grazing quietly by the lakeshore.

"Lol! you really are violent!"

"No! I have to catch the fellow and throw him in prison, to teach him a lesson! I killed the gryphons so he can't run from one place to another anymore."

"Catch whom?"

"Zaros. He's a cheater."

He teleported away with no further explanation, and I was left to mourn the sad fate of the wonderful flying creatures and to wait for them to come back to life. Meanwhile, with the help of the dictionary, I worked out that a cheater was a sort of charlatan.

Tiberiu announced the rules of the game sententiously. "Jail" and "ban" — that is, prison and exclusion from the server — after which an oppressive silence settled in for more than an hour. I missed the cheer and the daft chatter on chat. I imagined the other players, in front of their monitors, uneasy and fearful that the characters they had built with such toil could go up in smoke. Tiberiu was the absolute master of those characters' fate.

I let some time pass, enough for any flash of anger to die down, and wrote on general chat: "And we too were a sad little band, there in the empty café — a paraphrase after Bacovia, from Oldlee, for all the good people of these fantastical-strange lands!"

"Come with me!" Tiberiu wrote to me on whispers (the private chat), after about ten minutes.

I didn't answer right away. I waited to see whether he hadn't got the chat wrong.

"Me?"

"Yes, Ligia. Let me show you an instance," Tiberiu said, preening in his feline pose.

It sounded strange! I hadn't told him my name. He hadn't even asked. So, I had spoken with him before. I struggled to remember when and what exactly. Ah, yes! It was Silen I had told my name and where I was from. He had helped me with quests in Westfall. I had also told him I liked WoW, even though it was rather beyond me.

"How old are you?" came the natural question.

"Many!" I answered.

"You're surely not 30!" That was how old Alin had said he was when he entered the game.

"No!" I answered, relieved that I didn't have to lie. The dodge was obvious, and he called me on it with irony.

"I'm 16!"

Oldlee was creating problems for me. The comfort of anonymous play was unravelling. The simplest option would have been to close the game, delete it, and forget about it. I didn't do it!

I followed Tiberiu with real emotion. I didn't know what to do and, above all, what to say to him. And since, obviously, I couldn't tell him who I was in real life, I kept quiet and decided I had to remain the enigmatic Oldlee. Strange as it may seem, into the characters you create in WoW a good part of your real personality is transferred. It is an illusion that you become unrecognizable. Compared with the games I knew, WoW brought something new: the interpersonal relationship mediated by a character who, moving fairly freely, brought to the surface reactions, attitudes, behaviours that were mine. I couldn't cheat. And something else happened. Sooner than I imagined, through Oldlee I travelled back through time, as in a session of regression hypnosis. I watched with surprise as that young woman of long ago, whom I had forgotten, came to the surface. It was new, it was disorienting. I discovered a host of things I didn't know about myself, or had passed over far too lightly. For a good many years I have frequently thought that I wouldn't like to relive the cycle of my earlier experiences. If I were offered the chance to go back in time, I would be seized with horror, whatever scenario was proposed to me. Through Oldlee, though, the memories about myself came pouring one over another, and I returned to them with pleasure. The game was becoming exciting, profound, painful.

I followed Tiberiu along paths flanked by tall cliffs, swam in lakes; he showed me how he fought the monsters, and when I died he revived me! He took me into Blackrock Depths, among torrents of lava and dizzying chasms, to show me the boss of Molten Core, the fearsome Ragnaros the Firelord. I had to cross a river of lava that flowed dizzyingly beneath my feet, and I could barely keep my balance on the links of an enormous chain that joined the two banks. I have a very pronounced fear of heights, and I noted with astonishment that I was taking part, through my senses, in what was happening to my mage. That I was no longer only in front of a monitor, but beyond it as well. Where, dear God?!

I watched tensely the way the Tiberiu character moved in front of me. I tried to get past the filter the game imposed, accustomed as I was to deciphering people's gestures and reactions. (Well! Occupational hazard!)

He was showing me, with a kind of delight, showing off of course, that that complicated instance worked.

"I got it to work," he explained.

"Impressive, but it looks rather fierce," I tried to pay him a compliment. He received it with pleasure, because he did a few dance steps. I applauded him, then died instantly, because a "living" blaze of flames jumped on my back.

"Watch where you're going, will you. And stay behind me, you're drawing the critters onto yourself!"

"These are too big for me, and I don't even know how to manage this mage of mine," I said with chagrin.

"I've boosted your health, and I'll stay back with Achille. Come on, to the boss!"

The boss was an apparition of fire, as big as a mountain.

"Can you kill it?"

"Nope! It takes a 40-person raid. We're trying to put one together tomorrow. Come on, let me get you out of here!"

"I'd love to have a horse," I said, tired of forever searching the map for him — now Tiberiu, now Achille.

"Heh-heh! You need level 40."

"Then I'll never have a horse! I won't reach level 40, not in a hundred years!"

I was being honest. I couldn't manage the quests, my character's talents, the keyboard buttons, and I didn't have the courage to ask anything. I had noticed that the other players' helpfulness left something to be desired, and I really didn't know what to ask them. As for support from Alin, that was out of the question. I was struggling to learn, on my own, a very complicated game, without knowing English, and it was clear to me that I would never get to the bottom of it. Learning English overnight was out of the question, and "Google Translate" had only just appeared, and at that time, in 2006, besides the fact that I hadn't heard of it, it only allowed translation to and from English, Chinese, and Arabic.

We were still in "Vanilla"...

After the inferno of Blackrock Depths, Eastvale Logging Camp seemed to me a return to Eden. A clearing gently rolling beneath trees with rich crowns, probably oaks, alive with the flight of little birds and a band of running children. Flowers and tufts of tall grass, three little houses scattered beneath the trees, and lots of green, a thick flood of green. Pastoral calm and safety.

A stable of horses, with a wooden corral in front, and beside it the cottage of Drake Lindgren, a fine cottage of massive timber beams, with carefully considered finishes and a blue roof with a dormer. The furniture, also massive but elegant in line, the lit fireplace, bottles of wine set on the shelf above the fire — I didn't understand why, probably because it wasn't wine — and a large wreath of white flowers hung on the wall, all had a festive air. To make everything just so, in the centre of the settlement stood, enthroned, a well with a sweep, around which white hens scurried, while a few peasants busily loaded wood into a cart. Supervisor Raelen, annoyingly nagging, repeated to them like a broken record that they were obliged to meet their quota by the end of the day. I delighted childishly in every detail and commented on them with irony and enchantment.

Mounted on his horse with hooves of fire, which reared nervously now and then, the paladin Achille, in shining, sophisticated armour, let me carry on with my little act for about five minutes.

"Come and get your horse, I'm getting sleepy," he told me at last.

"I CAN?!"

"Now you can!"

On the monitor, in the medallion beside my portrait, I saw written: level 40. I sat frozen for a few seconds.

"Come over here, where I am." He was in the corral in front of the stable. "Hit trade!"

I hit "trade" and received a diamond. Achille had me sell it to Ralic Finn. I sold it and got a heap of money for it. Then he took me to Randal Hunter, whom I paid 85 "golds" to cast on me the spell by which I instantly learned to ride, and to Katie Hunter to buy myself a brown horse. Here I got a little muddled and, instead of one horse, I bought two.

"Throw one away!" Achille got me out of my dilemma.

He patiently taught me how to mount and dismount and how to jump the corral fence, pressing spacebar at the right moment.

Ah! my little chestnut kept getting stuck on the fence, while Achille floated elegantly above it, with his proud stallion clad in shining mail. There was no longer any doubt — I was living in a story. All through my adolescence I had dreamed of running through forests, crossing mountains and valleys, on a white horse. I instantly fell in love with both myself and Achille!

Once he had used up his reserve of patience, Achille left "to crash into bed," and I stayed on at Eastvale Logging Camp to do riding exercises and to examine in detail the sensations and feelings that overwhelmed me. When I shut down the computer, the night was almost over, the first light of dawn glimmering outside. I missed so much the Ravine of my childhood, and myself, and my white horses, with which I once galloped along the crests of the Parâng, forever searching for a certain clearing with a little house and its redeeming light in the fall of evening…

Summer was over.

The train glided over the plain and was carrying me inevitably to Bucharest. I had a hard exam to pass. The professor was renowned for his high specialization in victimizing girls. And, to be fair, at his exam the girls failed like flies.

A big crowd, heat, luggage, and not enough seats. I spent the whole journey in the corridor, at an open window I shared with Cleopatra, my classmate from high school.

I have always loved travelling by train. A piece of time is torn off, taking on an almost material consistency, between the two markers. Departure... arrival.

Cleopatra swayed her hair whenever the wind wasn't tangling it completely, and she talked without stopping. I tore myself with difficulty from my thoughts, in which Felix sought his outline, then lost it again among folds of unease.

I was afraid. I was afraid of the exam. I was on a knife's edge. If the "idiot" professor failed me, I'd lose my place at university. That would have wiped me out. I was afraid of Felix too. Him I feared even more. We had been apart only three weeks when he came, unexpectedly, to my home. First, he had bombarded me with letters in which the metaphors modulated, one after another, into a delirious architecture. He tried to convince me that I had become the voluptuousness with which the Danube, like a beautiful, triumphant woman, glides over the plain, while the plain was his soul, which received the Danube with emotion, with tension, because she had always been there. But my mind had retained from him only this: "Never lie to me, Lee!" It was a plea, a cry, a thunderclap over the plain through which my train was racing, in the plain and in the night.

I tried to cope with Cleopatra. All sorts of stupidities came out of my mouth. Not a single sentence found its meaning. I had nothing to say to her, but we had to talk, to make the time pass more easily. I wanted to tell her only this: "My love is waiting for me at the station," and have her fall silent. But I knew she wouldn't fall silent; on the contrary, she would start to probe me, would want details I wasn't willing to give her.

We arrived. I was so far from the end of the platform! People were getting off the train in waves, forming with each second an ever more compact mass. Why had I thought it would be enough to look through that moving mass and see him, with no trouble at all?! I didn't see him.

"What if he isn't waiting for me?"

The station unfolded all around with sounds, with its gleaming, arched metal vaults. I recognized them, just as I recognized that human torrent I absolutely had to keep pace with. Otherwise it would have shoved me from all sides. I felt my undulating gait thinning out, with every second that brought me closer to the end of the platform.

"What if he isn't there?"

Uncertainty. Layer upon layer. The station, its sounds of every kind, people bustling, embraces, luggage, and the massive body of the ever-emptier carriages receded progressively into the background. I was thin as a wisp of smoke when I collided with Felix's gaze. Heavy, tense. But alas! His hair was cut too short, and the black suit he had praised so highly was pitiful.

Cleopatra was lost in the crowd. I made my way toward him with a faltering step. He watched me at length, without coming to meet me. My gestures knotted up. I felt them tangling. I wasn't glad to see him. I really wasn't glad at all. A dull, stubborn hostility made his embrace slide off me. How I had waited for it! Now it didn't move me; on the contrary, it irritated me. We went into a patisserie near the station. I remembered its name. Café-frapé. He took a pack of "Select" cigarettes from his pocket and set it on the table. They were unfiltered. He watched me the way he had watched me at the station. A smile had been added, its sadness barely glimpsed. I fiercely refused to smoke his unfiltered cigarettes. He went off for filtered ones. I stared fixedly at the straw and the tall glass in front of me. I didn't understand what was wrong with me. Nor did I want to. A feeling of guilt, an ice cube like the one in my glass on the table, lingered in the centre of my brain. It hurt. All summer I had thought about this meeting. It should have been different. Not long before, he had told me: "I'm a great exuberant. I'd love for us to roll among the flowers in that flowerbed!" It was a bed of white flowers. I liked the idea, and yet — no.

He came back with the cigarettes. His expression was fluctuating. An uncertainty and a shadow of weariness alternated beneath his smile, this time not only sad but also vaguely ironic. Consistent in my stubbornness, I refused to see anything. I talked a great deal without saying anything. Later, that look hurt me with an ever-growing pain. There was suffering in it, there was longing, a murderous shyness. It was clear to me that I loved him, but all summer I had striven to destroy his image, to annihilate him, to tear him to pieces, so that this love of mine would be reduced to dust and ashes! Lord, how hard I strove to avoid the embraces with which he sought me. I dodged, I talked a great deal, without sense. I was terrified that I might humiliate him. I was terrified that I might somehow lose him. I had the exam the next day, I was anxious, I was afraid of the exam, but I clumsily hid the fact that the exam was only a smokescreen.

I went off to my eternal aunt's, not into the night of Felix's embrace, which I had dreamed of all summer.

After the exam, we walked the streets, sat on a bench, and again I talked a great deal to him. Inside, I felt parched and made ugly. I didn't want to renew the nights of love from the spring. But I smoked his unfiltered cigarettes with pleasure. I was gripped by the sensation that I didn't know the man beside me, on the bench in front of the Opera, didn't remember him, and yet at the same time was caught in a loop of time in which he and I had been together for an eternity. Then came that invitation for coffee, "at his place." I agreed to drop by, only to see where he lived, but I carried my luggage with me, determined to leave for the station that same evening.

He lived in a little house at the back of a courtyard, on Nuferilor Street, near the imposing building of Romanian Radio Broadcasting. We weren't alone. Some fellows were there, classmates of Felix's, who had come to visit from across the street, from "the Radio," where they had recorded something. In addition, the hosts typical of a Bucharest backstreet — that is, a "gentleman and a lady" — whom I disliked at first sight.

I didn't reach out to caress him. The coffee, the whipped cream, and the brandy in the glazed little glasses became trivial fripperies in a cramped, sordid little room.

He walked me to the station, I boarded the train.

As the distance between us greedily swallowed kilometre after kilometre, and the night turned the world into a senseless abyss, my citadel of pride and folly collapsed so threateningly that I had to step out quickly into the corridor and open the window. Tears the size of fists trickled into the night and the plain. My path had been decided there, on the bridge at Cotroceni. There was nothing more to be done. "Damn, it seems like a karmic bond," I confessed to the night and the plain. Cords of living matter were pulling me back, to the place I had tried to flee. Even Felix had asked me one day: "I wonder what sins you have to atone for?" I don't know what answer he had expected. To me, the chance of having met him grew ever clearer — the chance of not having been able to ignore him, the unequivocal miracle called love.

In all my cells I had the readiness to love him. And he had it too. It was an impact we could never again escape.

I was an absolute "noob," and everyone was terribly amused at my expense. For instance, no one explained to me how I could get from one continent to another.

One evening they set off to attack Orgrimmar, the orcs' capital. I kept after them, trying not to fall behind, but I didn't manage. Their horses and panthers ran much faster than mine. When they were all already in Kalimdor, I asked them how they had crossed the Ocean.

"It's a skill you have to learn!"

The answer was given mockingly. I felt I should keep quiet and mind my own business — that is, my solitary travels. Toward midnight, Tiberiu asked me:

"Have you been to Orgrimmar?"

"I was in a raid, with Riwest. After they'd "ribbed" me for not knowing how to cross the Ocean, the boys teleported me under the gates of Orgrimmar, but we didn't get a chance to enter the citadel before you came like a dragon and killed us all. You killed me so many times that I gave up coming back to the world of the living. I just stayed dead like that and watched the rest of you play."

"Well, you attacked like cowards, when not one of the Horde was online. Do you want to see the Horde capital?"

"Of course I do!" I said. And my mage shone with happiness.

"Come and see it!"

I had told him I liked the game, that I got annoyed when I couldn't wander wherever I pleased, because all sorts of critters with a higher level than mine kept killing me, and he was giving me a gift.

"You will be able to!" he encouraged me simply, with a confidence that passed to me entirely.

We teleported to Darnassus.

"This is where Lee was born, my priestess who vanished into the void," I told Tiberiu, and I really did feel a fine haze of nostalgia drifting among the majestic columns of the elves' Capital.

"I'll show you how to cross the sea."

"Ah! So I won't have to swim stupidly anymore!"

"Lol! No!"

It was simple. We just had to board a ship that periodically pulled in at the wooden pier extending out to sea, after we passed beneath the elegant elven arcades. I call them that because I can't find an architectural style to fit them into. The elves are northern deities, and their architecture is a subtle blend of Greek antiquity and Far Eastern exuberance. Ah, how much time I had lost waiting for that ship that came from the unknown and left for there as well! I had seen it from afar, but when I sat down at the end of the pier to wait for it, it didn't appear again.

"Well, there are problems sometimes. You have to do a logout, and usually that sorts it out."

We crossed the sea at Auberdine, an elven port.

"I'll go around the guards, I don't feel like drawing them all onto myself. You can take the road, and we'll meet at the exit on the other side of the settlement."

It wasn't hard at all to sink into a strange dream. I was running "for real" through a forest of firs, fairly fearsome in its way, like any true coniferous forest, mounted on a black panther. I had gone specially to Darnassus to buy her. Ahead of me, the druid, embodied as a black horned feline, opened the way for me.

"Here it's exactly like the elves' lands!" I exclaimed, genuinely surprised. "These places seem so familiar to me! It's as if I were home."

"We're in Ashenvale. There are many elf settlements here."

"The elves are so special! Look, they put carpets on the bridges…"

"Come on, we've got a way to go," Tiberiu cut me off, "run, or morning will catch us!"

I ran after the druid, and "Song of Elune" took my breath away. I had the feeling that that beautiful music welled up from the roots of the trees, caressing the road I ran along and the flowers at its edge. Tiberiu stopped to wait for me at a crossroads.

"This is the road to Orgrimmar. But we'll go another way. I want to show you an elite. Stay away from me, you'll pull the mobs onto yourself and die for nothing."

Is there such a thing as a death with meaning, I wanted to ask him, but he had already started the fight with a whole band of dragons that would otherwise have been strolling peacefully through the clearing. At the roots of a giant ash tree pulsed the green-blue light of a monumental portal, raised on an inclined plane of white marble.

"Come closer, until you see the dragons. The top one is called Dreamstalker. He guards the "Dream Emerald," a gate of dreams. I'll kill him; maybe you'll be lucky and something will drop for you from him."

Something dropped for me... a fistful of gold coins, and Tiberiu let me look, for a while, at the emerald dragon, its wings steeped in a warm, almost caressing yellow-orange. Then we went back to the road, and by a bridge we descended into a canyon carved by a river.

"Now, let's go for a swim!" Tiberiu said, and turned into a white seal. "Come on, what are you doing? Get down into the river, you won't catch cold!"

"How would I know — it's only March, after all!"

"Lol!" Tiberiu chuckled. "Come on, you can see the entrance to Orgrimmar. Are you bored?"

"No, on the contrary, I'm won over. Completely!"

"I have to bring Achille and kill the guards at the entrance. Otherwise I have no way to get you past them. Then I'll come back with the druid and take you to Thrall, but we'll avoid the guards. You stay close to me."

Finally we reached Thrall's palace.

"Look, this is the Horde boss."

An ugly orc, his teeth bared — actually they were full-blown boar's tusks — ignored me, standing stiffly in front of a regal throne and looking over my head.

"Why doesn't he kill me?" I asked, with, in my opinion, complete justification.

"Look what level you are!"

"Oooh! 70! How did you do that?" And suddenly I understood. Beside me stood Achille. I made an elegant bow before the paladin. "Thank you, My Lord!"

"There was no other way you could have got this far."

After a while, during which I wandered without being in the least bit bored, carefully avoiding all the apparitions of a higher level than mine, I read on general chat:

"Oldlee is a cheater! For two weeks she's been stuck at level 40!"

Someone made a point of pinning me to the wall in the public square.

"And what business is it of yours?!" Tiberiu said, cutting off any comment.

Another October.

I came back to Bucharest two weeks later.

"How are you? Shall I come to you or go to Auntie Lucica's?"

"Where are you?"

"At the Gara de Nord. I don't have a place at the dormitory yet."

"Why didn't you tell me when you were coming? I could have been off somewhere!"

Did something seem not quite right? Or was it just my impression?

"You know I don't have a phone at home. So?!"

"Do you still remember where I live, or shall I come get you?"

"I remember."

Our reunion was, without any doubt, electric. I had taken him by surprise. The little room he lived in was utterly without privacy. I politely explained to the landlady that I was going to stay at the dormitory once I had finished with the requisite formalities. She — that is, "the landlady" — seemed understanding and told me, decent lady that she was, that it was no problem, and that, in any case, another woman had been visiting Felix. A "former fiancée."

"Former fiancée in her own head!" Felix said, rather testily.

"But she knew where you live, didn't she?"

"My mother sent her. She's the daughter-in-law she wants!"

He explained the whole story to me in lavish detail. Two years earlier they had been together for a time in the Balta Brăilei. She was an engineer and ran a farm where his mother had found him work, to get him off the streets. But he had never loved her. She knew it and had accepted the situation with a kind of humility that stirred his pity but that, in a way, also flattered him.

"She followed me everywhere like a shadow and made sure my mother wanted for nothing. She made do with so little that I had no reason to drive her away. She was, in fact, a good girl. When I came to Bucharest last autumn, I told her to get on with her own life and stop wasting her time for nothing, that I didn't want her. My mother, though, had decided she was her daughter-in-law and would have no other. This summer, when I came to you, my mother finally understood it was time to ease off. She asked me maliciously: 'What's this, son — are you in love?'; 'Yes, Mother, and I love this girl,' I set her straight, but my dear mother never gives up."

The story quickly receded into the background, because, the second evening, things went completely off the rails. We came back late, toward midnight, from a show. Since communication between us was rather hampered — for the image of the former lover had muddied the waters quite seriously — we lay down in bed side by side, without speaking, each replaying his own personal film on the low ceiling. I was thinking that I had to move to the dormitory at once, that I had made a big mistake bursting in on him, and he — I have no idea about what. After a while I conceded that, in the end, nothing in this world is all that serious, and I let him take me in his arms, to put an end to the tension between us and let us fall asleep.

What followed was incredible!

The light came on and, in a slip, her face disfigured with hatred, a woman pulled off the blanket covering us, screaming:

"What are you doing here?! What's this one doing here?!"

The rest can't be told in detail, though perhaps it would be worth it. Felix, with only his jeans yanked on in haste, took hold of the girl and dragged her outside. He didn't manage to put on shoes. They both howled like lunatics. The police appeared, probably called by the neighbours, loaded them both into a van, and I was left with the landlady, who was talking incoherently. I put some clothes on, closed my suitcase, and rummaged through Bucharest in my mind to find a place to go. The only one possible, at that hour, was the Gara de Nord, and nothing else.

After a while that felt like a century, the local officer came back alone. He checked my ID and put me through a brief interview: who I was, what I did, what I was doing there, how long I had been there, and so on. Then he asked me for Felix's shoes, explaining that they couldn't bring him back in the van again and he couldn't walk barefoot through the streets. As he handed me back my student card, he informed me that he had also been called to this address that afternoon, because: "The young lady was sitting on this suitcase" (that is, mine!) "with a big kitchen knife in her hand, saying she was going to kill herself. Tonight we're keeping her at the station, so she doesn't do anything stupid again!"

Once he seemed clear about how things stood with me, he headed for the door. On the threshold he turned, studied me again for a few seconds, and asked:

"This Felix — is he really an artist?"

"Yes, he's a theatre student," I answered.

"Aha! And that girl — did she really burst in on you undressed?!"

"Yes. We were sleeping. She turned on the light and pulled the blanket off us, screaming like a madwoman..."

Experienced beat officer that he was, he finished his physical assessment of me, filed me away, and concluded:

"That's just how it is! What is it that artists have that's so special, that women chase after them?!"

I stayed curled up on the floor, beside the suitcase that had become, against its will, the hero of a story. I couldn't go anywhere. At that hour the city was an unfriendly abyss.

After Felix came back, the whole mystery was "unravelled": he had come to the aid of a colleague, a fellow from Brăila, whom the woman had taken to court for attempted rape; the guy had taken up with her for a laugh and got himself tangled up; the strategy was for Felix to shift the woman's centre of interest onto himself and make her drop the case; he knew the woman was very dangerous and had a fixation on actors, but he had believed himself master of the situation; he knew the girl followed him everywhere like a shadow, but, in the end, she wasn't the only one haunting the gates of the theatre institute. In short, he had underestimated her. He seemed quite frightened.

My soul was a tangle of frayed threads. "Another one!" a little bell tinkled in my brain. The next day I moved to the dormitory, using all the "connections" I had.

Autumn had grown stifling; the streets had a sticky slime with which they trapped the rust-coloured leaves fallen from the branches of the trees in Cișmigiu, and the Dâmbovița smelled foul.

I had become a target for C. I won't give the girl's name; it's not important. I tried to understand what was going on with her. Had her blazing passion for Felix brought her to a state of hysteria, or was she truly mad? She followed me to the dormitory, to the university. Everywhere she introduced herself as my friend. One evening, on the straight path beside the block where I lived at the dormitory near the Law Faculty, irritated beyond measure, I turned round abruptly. She was a few metres behind me.

"What do you want, girl? What do you want from me?"

"Leave Felix alone! Are you sleeping with him? Tell me, are you sleeping with him?"

She was screaming as if bitten by a snake.

"Yes. What business is it of yours?"

"Lovely! You've got the nerve to admit it, too. I'm a virgin! Leave him alone — he loves me, not you!"

The people around watched us as if we were a circus act.

"Is that why he took you to the police?"

"Shameless creature! You're sleeping with him! Leave him alone, do you hear?" she screamed in fury and lunged at me.

I caught the hand she meant to hit me with, twisted it behind her back, pinned her down hard, and threatened her:

"If you set foot here again, I'll call an ambulance to take you to Hospital Nine, in a straitjacket!"

I was taller and stronger than she was and, on top of that, very angry. She broke free of my grip and bolted.

From a bench in the little park between the blocks, a guy applauded me cynically. I tossed "Fuck off!" over my shoulder and went on my way. My mind really had emptied out entirely. The following nights I couldn't sleep. It kept replaying the nights of love with which I had given meaning to the whole city, through which we had walked together above the streets, above the buildings, above the parks, all the way somewhere far off, into the plain mirrored in a sky deep and dizzied by the wheeling of the most brilliant stars. They had been so real after all!

I said aloud: "After all, if everything had to end this way, very well!"

When you're a "ghost," everything turns into something transparent and misty. The trees, the stones, the grass, the mountains, you included. The living creatures vanish, and your solitude, in that transparent, ashen world, is absolute. You run through the void and you float above the waters. You absolutely must reach your own self, come back to life, or else the game is over. You die easily enough. Either out of carelessness, or because you tangle with monsters or with adversaries stronger than you, who kill you without the slightest scruple. Or, quite simply, because you plunge from too great a height. The Valkyrie can revive you, but, for a while, all your powers drop so sharply that you forgo her services and go to look for your body, to bring it back to life. My first hard contact with World of Warcraft was the "ghost" state. That was how I felt then, too, when Tiberiu's server broke down for good. The game became inaccessible to me. I stared, bewildered, at the monitor where I could no longer find even Oldlee. I was downright shocked to discover how much I was suffering. I drove the computer mad. I drove Alin mad.

After about two weeks, to be rid of my nagging, Alin decided to buy me the official game, and he actually did buy it for me. He told me: "This way you won't risk losing your characters anymore."

Two days of silence followed.

Felix wrote a little note and left it for me at the gate, at the dormitory. On the note was written: "I've found a place on 'Theodor Aman.' I miss you. Shall we put rows of chestnuts on the walls?"

I simply wanted to. We went back to the Botanical Garden.

We gathered chestnuts, bought big needles so we could thread the chestnuts onto string, and red balloons. The little room we were going to decorate was in the basement of an elegant villa. It was two metres wide, three and a half long. It held a brass bed — a very beautiful one, as it happened — a nightstand, and a little round table set at the foot of the bed, which forced the door to open only halfway. One wall we decorated with rows of chestnuts, which looked very good against the yellowish whitewash, and on the other, beneath a cluster of red balloons, we wrote — in red chalk, of course: "I love you, wild blond gypsy!"

Only three of the balloons held out for any length of time, and so the little room received its name: "Three Balloons." There I learned to truly love a man and to let him love me. Nonchalant, enigmatic, and insolent, Felix was a complex man, hard to fathom. Unless you were mentally deficient, or your reflex of self-defence was faulty, it was quite clear that in his presence you must never let your guard down, not even when you were only going as far as the bathroom.

It became thrilling to share with such a man just a few cubic metres of air. I was flattered that he wanted it too. It moved me. He would settle into the palms of my hands, stripped entirely of his armour of a hooligan raised in the port of Brăila, and he seemed so happy to do it. He became simply a beautiful man — delicate, sometimes even shy and fragile — and everything took on a profound meaning. For him and for me both.

One warm, velvety evening, when the trees in Herăstrău had dressed specially for us in robes of gold, we climbed into a boat, quite determined to wipe from the face of the earth anything that did not mean the two of us. We bought grapefruit for our supper and set off across the lake. The sun was slowly dissolving all around us, and we glided off toward nowhere, convinced that we would be able to carry our journey through to the end.

"Do you actually know how to row?" I asked him, delighted.

"The folk back in Brăila would crack me over the head with a steamer if I didn't!" he answered, and to prove it he began spinning the boat in place.

I was peeling the yellow, fragrant fruit. A light breeze caressed Felix's hair. I felt my palms turn into rays of sunlight and caress his forehead, his smile, his shoulders straining over the oars, together with the breeze that slipped from his hair off into the distance. The fine waves of the lake glittered like a tangible infinity.

"What are you doing!" I heard, there, inside me, Felix's resonant whisper.

He had sensed the depth of that caress without a gesture.

"Nothing! I'm going off into the sky," I said, and stretched out in the cradle of the boat.

"Ah! So that's what it means to bathe in someone's gaze!" he said, and the words floated out over the lake.

I really did go off into the sky, my eyes wide open to the blue deepening above me. I was floating straight up into the sky. Time dilated. In its own special way of going off the rails sometimes, simply forgetting to pass!

An unexpected shadow covered my sky. I came back abruptly to reality. A little steamer was floating beside us. Whistles and meaningless shouts. A group of men had been startled to discover me "floating in the sky," and, leaning over the steamer's railing, they had made their admiration known the only way they knew how. Felix saluted them with a cordial gesture. Something along the lines of: "She's mine! This one!"

I made my Ligia, on the Neptulon realm.

After he installed the official game for me, Alin quizzed his friends who played WoW. We didn't have much time for deliberations.

"What do you want — orc, undead, tauren, or troll?" Alin pressed me, in a hurry to see how the game "ran" on an official server.

"What the hell do I want! They're all ugly as hell! Make me an orc warrior."

I gave it my own name and was delighted that it was accepted on the very first try. Alin gave me a heap of technical explanations about the game, which were of no use to me and which I didn't even understand, while together we "raised" Ligia in the Valley of Trials. The next day, when I got home from work, he gave me a list of character names, recommending Gosupisoi to me.

"I talked to her. She said she'd help you. She took me into her guild. Mind you, this isn't like Tiberiu's server. You work for every level. Come on, take your warrior in hand. This game takes time, and I don't have any."

So began my wanderings through Orgrimmar. You enter the citadel through a tunnel broken at a right angle, dug straight into the rock and shored up with massive wooden posts, like a mine gallery. The view that opens toward the Valley of Strength is a deep hollow. The mountain's crest hides a few buildings with ferocious fangs, which seem to pierce the reddened air of a permanent dusk.

Full of gravity, the guards answered my greeting, striking their chests with a brief gesture: "For the Horde!"

Yes, Ligia is a warrior. I don't have a warlike nature — or so I believe about myself. Tiberiu, though, had told me to make a warrior, because I kept charging with my fragile mage at the monsters he was fighting, instead of keeping my distance and using spells.

My first impression was that the main square in Orgrimmar is bedlam. A great many very preoccupied people, running endlessly between the bank and the auction house.

"I'll pay Thrall a visit and then go see the Horde's other capitals too," I laid out my plan. If you play Alliance you have no access to the Horde capitals, and the other way around, except by way of genuine sieges. So, on Tiberiu's server I had not been able to see Undercity, the undead capital, or Thunder Bluff, the tauren capital.

I managed to reach Thrall. Seated on his throne, between two fires burning in vessels carved from stone, Thrall welcomed me cordially: "Welcome to Orgrimmar!" Then he gave me a speech from which I gathered that it was my duty to fight for the Horde and to be fearless.

While I was thinking about how I might find the zeppelin, a band of players swept past me like a gale. One of them was called Tibi. An absurd hope blossomed in my mind: "What if it's Tiberiu?" I knew he had an account in the official game. I didn't think twice. I set off after them, but they were riding mounted and I was on foot. I saw the zeppelin in the distance. "I'll never catch them!" I thought. I reached the tower, climbed in a spiral up an inclined plane, banging into the walls because I was in such a hurry, and came out onto the platform above just as a zeppelin — that is, a ship with a big balloon on top instead of sails — covered my whole screen, disorienting me. Then Tibi said to me, "Should, Ligia," and invited me into their group. Even though what I read on my monitor seemed to make no sense, I no longer doubted that it was Tiberiu, and I hurried to greet him.

"Hi, Tiberiu!" I said.

He answered me with a question mark and set me straight:

"English please!"

"Where are you from?" I made another utterly futile attempt, because it had become clear he wasn't going to say Romania.

"Sweden," came the prompt reply.

"I don't believe you!" I informed him, and climbed resolutely aboard that charming vessel.

He didn't answer me again. I had hoped in vain. I had come to Neptulon because this was where the Maat guild was — a well-known guild of Romanians in the WoW community.

I didn't end up in Undercity, but in Stranglethorn Vale. The zone was familiar to me and I liked it. It was an exotic jungle. The first raid Tiberiu had ever taken me along on had been in Stranglethorn Vale, of all places.

I kept after Tibi's group with unrivalled valour. It wasn't easy to reach, unharmed, the tents of Nesingwary's Expedition, where they finally halted. Even though the boys had killed everything that crossed their path, here and there a few had slipped through — the odd raptor, a sort of rather quarrelsome dinosaur, some ferocious crocodile strolling along the seashore, or tigers and panthers hidden in the tall grass. No sooner had I arrived than the Alliance lot fell upon us. And so I got my first "bloodbath" in official World of Warcraft — that is, a confrontation between Horde and Alliance. They are fights to the death, followed by jeering peals of laughter, spitting, and dancing on the corpses.

I had no business being in that place with my level (10!). The Alliance opponents shattered me with a single flick, delivered in mockery, and the character "Tibi" paid me no further attention. Only Adam, one of his friends, said, in a moment of respite:

"Ligia has got very far for her level."

Though Adam's remark could well have been a dig — meaning I had no business being there at my level — I remembered Adam, and for several years running I sent him New Year's greetings.

For a while I watched their battle in the posture of a ghost — that is, thoroughly dead — but I couldn't do that forever, and with regret I left "Tibi" in peace, giving up the idea that he might be the Tiberiu I knew.

My enthusiasm, in the lands of official World of Warcraft, cooled noticeably. I would have wished for a friend who knew the game and wanted to help me, too, to understand that world into which Alin had pushed me, with the task — half in jest, half in earnest — of studying it. I had imagined that I would manage to make a few friends, to draw them into my project of conducting together a piece of scientific research on one of the most renowned virtual worlds: World of Warcraft. I believed I would find these friends in the game. I was wrong. I realized very quickly that however good a sociologist you may be, without feeling on your own skin what the universe of World of Warcraft means, you miss the essence and remain somewhere "on the outside."

I switched tracks. I plunged into the game with no preconceived ideas, no learned methodologies and techniques. I let it overwhelm me and embarked on a battle in which all the balls were in "its" court. It drew me for some obscure reason that came from somewhere in the depths of my inner life. It worked on me like a magnet.

Gosupisoi had taken me into her guild. Actually, not me, but Alin, who had bawled at the top of his lungs through Crossroads, hunting for a guild.

"Hi Gosupisoi, how's it going?"

"Good."

"Hey, I'm new to this game and it kind of throws me."

"How old are you?"

"I'm a bit old — 25."

That was what Alin and I had settled my age had to be, so I wouldn't be sidelined for no reason.

"Relax! There are serious people around here too, with families, with kids."

"True, I did play on a private server before, but here it's a whole different thing from my native WoW."

"Lol! I like the idea of a native WoW. Don't worry, you'll manage just fine!"

"Can I pester you with questions if I hit a wall?"

"You can. Do you have Skype?"

"No."

"Install it off the net and we can talk." She gave me an id. "It's my friend's — I'm over at his place right now."

"What's your name, actually?" I asked her.

"Georgiana."

I installed Skype, and in the evening I came back into the game. Gosupisoi was online and invited me into the party.

"It's just us. The two of us and my friend, that is."

I had stage fright. Georgiana's velvety voice gave me courage. I was received with serenity. Patiently, Georgiana's friend explained how I could improve the game's interface, while Georgiana's running commentary, as she fought with her mage in an instance, was sparkling. At last, there were seconds, minutes, hours in which I slotted naturally into the time and space of a youth, remembering with clarity a similar time and space of my own. Something diffuse but pleasant was sliding toward me out of the trembling mist in which my past lay hidden. Age brings with it a sum of conventions, of prejudices and confusions, to which I found I was beholden. I was thinking seriously about the superiority with which I treated young people their age.

"It's an interesting world. I'm actually fascinated by the game," I told Georgiana, and she cut me off short.

"Not really. It's a game like any other. That's just how some people like to spend their free time."

"This kind of virtual reality intrigues me. I'm a sociologist."

"In real life?"

"Yes."

"Sounds very highbrow. People with books are pretty rare around here. Most are into maths, into IT. I did mathematics."

"Are you a teacher?"

"I was. Now I want to change my job. It's not working out. Too little money."

"I'm crossing my fingers for you to find a good job!"

"I've found one — let's see if I pass the trial tests."

"You'll pass them for sure... Do you have a cat?"

"Yes, did you hear her? I've actually got several. I like them."

That evening I stayed a long while "at Georgiana's friend's place." When we said "good night," it was clear to me: WoW is not a game, not some "that's just how some people like to spend their free time." Things were not that simple!

From time to time, a murk, like a curse, would come surging up out of the depths without warning.

At such moments Felix became impenetrable, even menacing. It lasted only a very short while and seldom spilled over onto me as well. More often it caught me in its shock wave. When he sensed that I was beginning to panic, he would embrace me tenderly, saying to the chasm before his eyes: "It's not your fault!"

I confess that, studying him at night while he slept, I sometimes grew frightened. I felt, in some way I couldn't quite grasp, the menacing presence of a demon hovering in the air of the little room, and I would wake him from his sleep, giving as my reason: "I thought you were having a bad dream."

I went through contradictory states. There were moments when I thought very seriously of taking to my heels. It frightened me that I couldn't tear myself away from him. I was afraid. One such night stays lodged in my mind.

Taking advantage of a quarrel, a fairly trivial one, I had decided to go back to the dormitory, at least for a while. My resolve held firm until around ten in the evening, after which an inner restlessness carried me down into the street and onto a trolleybus. I got off at the Gara de Nord, not exactly a good place to be wandering at night. I became aware that my skirt was far too short, that my white poncho with its black fringes was too conspicuous in the night, but there was nothing to be done about it now. I had reckoned I would catch tram 6, which dropped me right in front of the gate, "Three Balloons," but I had got it wrong. I ran after a tram that had flooded the intersection with the light pouring from its two cars, trying to make the driver stop, but he showed me the placard that read, in big red letters: "Returning to depot." I was left stranded in the middle of the street, in front of the Hotel Nord. The streets by which I could reach Theodor Aman were menacing. As for the ones by which I might go back to the dormitory, things stood even worse. On top of that, across the road from me, in front of the Polytechnic, a group of men was gathering. I set off at a quick walk to put as much distance between us as I could, before they had time to react in any way. One of them came after me. I had gone out into the jungle at the wrong hour. I was exactly that creature that is meant to be hunted. The guy ran after me, ordering me to stop. I didn't stop. I went on my way, searching for the gestures that were supposed to signify self-assurance.

"Hey, hold on, I'm not going to do anything to you! What are you doing out on the street at this hour?" the guy pulled me up short, catching up to me.

He was about my age and didn't look fierce.

"I missed the tram, what can I do! I'm going home."

"At this hour? Where are you coming from, at this hour?"

"Well, where are you coming from?"

"I just got off my shift, and I'm a man. Nobody bothers me. You're a bit crazy, walking alone at night on these streets!"

"Oh, it's just a fluke. I don't go roaming the streets at night like a madwoman."

I made up a story on the spot — that is, I "introduced myself," trying not to seem easily available, yet still leaving some small door cracked open, on the principle that you don't provoke an enemy. I was very annoyed, I was coming from a party, a boring name-day, but I'd had to go because the hostess was our group leader and her mother was one of our professors, I'd miscalculated the time and missed the last tram... I talked a great deal and camouflaged myself as best I could under my white poncho.

"Are you a student?"

"Yes, in philology."

"Relax. I'll see you home. That's why I ran after you. Anyone could tell from a mile off that you were scared."

The streets I had ventured into really were menacing at that hour. If by day their slum perfume, the passageways that separated the old houses one from the next, the narrow pavement and the blind windows spattered with mud from the roadway could seem interesting, at that hour they looked sinister. My mind locked into evasion strategies, beside an unknown man, I had the feeling I was walking along a frail little path, on the lip of an abyss. My companion, much taller than I, taking advantage of an unevenness made in the cobblestones by some manhole cover he had to jump over, would get a few steps ahead of me, then cover the next few walking backwards, so he could look at me from the front. Meanwhile, he was bringing me up to date on the story of his life. He was a taxi driver, just then had no steady relationship, and had witnessed "a whole heap of horrors" that took place at night in the city's hidden corners. When we turned onto Theodor Aman, the muscles in my legs, my arms, my stomach relaxed, and I think my whole face was flooded with relief. At the gate, he gave me a little scrap of paper with a telephone number.

"It's my home number, not work. If you like, look me up. Maybe we'll go for a coffee."

He wasn't too convinced that I would. The villa at whose gate I had stopped had intimidated him a little. He waited by the fence to make sure I went into the building. When he saw me take a key out of my bag and open the door, he gave me a friendly wave and warned me:

"Stop walking the streets at night! I might not have been a good guy!"

Felix was asleep. His face was flooded with an unfriendly scowl that marred his features. His hair was tousled and damp with sweat. I didn't wake him. I sat down gently on the edge of the bed. The walls of the room seemed to me unnaturally close to one another. "This really is a cell!" I thought, studying the sleeping man beside me coldly, with detachment. I despised myself for being in that place, after just coming through a critical situation. Leaning against the brass headboard of the bed, I watched, sullen, that sleeping, alien man. "God, but I don't love him!" flashed through my mind like a lightning bolt. I reached out my hand and touched him lightly on the forehead. In his sleep he gathered up my hand and pressed it to his chest. My soul cried out as if stabbed: "But I do love him — terribly, terribly much!" I slid gently down beside him, coiling myself around his body. He answered the embrace, carrying me off into his sleep.