PART TWO — opening

There is one day longer than all the rest.

The steep slope Felix had drawn on the stone balustrade of the bridge at Cotroceni turned into a massive metal beam and collapsed all at once, crushing beneath its weight the boundless space of "Three Balloons." Suddenly the room turned small, suffocating, pressed down by the elegant villa above it, and I discovered to my surprise that it had horizontal bars across the little window through which one could see only the legs of passers-by, or rather their shadows. Only the chestnuts strung on a thread and the edelweiss picked on Cozia still seemed to keep a shred of strength to rise toward the clear, coherent sky where God dwells, in every one of us.

We had crossed Bucharest in a rickety tram that tore at our brains with its screeching. The buildings, the people, the rancid sky filed past its dirty windows. I didn't know exactly what was about to happen, and the last night had to be special. For that I chose the spacious room of a hotel on the edge of the city. Felix had wanted to see the plain. We tried to make a plan, to build something that resembled a hope, an assurance that the world would not end with the morning to come, but all our words had vanished. We made love and we wept. We wept those tears that slide down in silence, one after another, over a face turned to stone with pain. At dawn we boarded the same rickety tram and circled the city once more.

We decided to part without looking back. We thought it would be easier that way. Felix, a carton of "Carpați" cigarettes under his arm, stopped to flag a taxi into the unknown, while I set off stoutly to cross the street, determined not to glance behind me. I was halfway across when the signal he had so often used to call me down into the park full of red roses at Grozăvești lashed through the air. It struck the walls of the Palace Hall like a crystal globe, struck the tower block that broke the horizontal rhythm of the square, and shattered into a thousand shards, all at once with the window of the Royal Palace, in which Felix's hand had been mirrored, arched in a broken flight.

Georgiana came to Călimănești.

I didn't think she would come, but she stepped down from the elegant coach that carried her out of the din of Bucharest. She arrived in "Eden," flooding it with her radiant smile. It amused her that I called Călimănești "Eden," and I could see her settling with pleasure into the faintly retro atmosphere I savor every day, on the scrap of street where I live. I had promised her she would rest. I knew she was sad, but of that I didn't breathe a word. The story between Gosupisoi and Strumf had lately come apart. The intimate warmth of the home where they had welcomed me so generously one fine evening had scattered.

She sat across from me, on the other side of the table, and the night around us was a real one.

I remembered how one evening, while we were playing WoW and talking on Skype, she was amused at the thought that she had to cook. It was during the Christmas fast. Geo was just then "socializing" me, getting me acquainted with other players. After a long meditation on the fact that, in order to cook, one must first wash "a vessel" fit for cooking, Geo announced to us in a triumphant voice: "I have cooked a boiled potato."

I was very fond of her from the very first. She was exactly as I had pictured her. Blonde, delicate, and overwhelmed with worry for the fate of all the unhappy cats in this world.

From Strumf I had learned that things were no longer quite right between them. "You'll make up," I told him. "I hope so," was his reply.

"I don't think so. Several people have told me that. I have no idea why people believe it. Honestly, I expected to suffer far more. To my surprise, I find I'm calmer than I imagined," Geo said, settling a rose petal into the hollow of her palm.

She had barely arrived in "Eden" before Geo plunged, without a second thought, into the disorder of my garden. She wanted to eat cherries, but of my grandmother's garden only the memory remained. For a few years I fought on, in memory of my grandmother and my mother, trying to grow tomatoes, peppers, and cabbage in the shade of a Methuselah of a walnut tree. In the end my nerves gave way. I pitied the plants I set out so carefully, watching for them to push up from the earth, only for the weeds, in the end, to smother them with sheer obstinacy. There was no fighting them. I had to let them run riot. Now a horse grazed them. It belonged to the neighbors.

"Geo, I'm not going through! That horse scares me!"

"I'll get you past him," she said, sure of herself.

And that is exactly what she did. Being the mage she was, she got me past the horse, which insisted stubbornly on being scratched between the ears and patted lightly on the neck. I watched her pull the cherry branches toward her, delighting in it. It reminded me of Silverpine Forest. A forest of silver firs in the lands of the dead, south of Undercity. Gosupisoi had come to help me with a quest in Pyrewood Village.

"There are rather a lot of critters around here, if you ask me, and they patrol back and forth!" I whined.

"Don't worry, I'll kill them, no problem. Come over here next to me, I won't let them get close. Can't you see what level I am and what level they are!" Gosupisoi reassured me, perched on the rim of the fountain in the middle of the little village.

The garden was flooded with greenery and sunlight. Something in the sadness of the abandoned beds, over which the weeds had risen victorious, and the assurance with which Georgiana had helped me cope in my own garden, blended the two planes together in my perception: "Virtual... Real... all the same damn thing!" I said to myself, watching Geo.

She shook her head to feel against her cheek the light touch of her red cherry earrings.

"Will you describe a raid for me, the way you lived it?!"

"Of course. But I'll send you the description by e-mail, okay?"