Precinct 5.

Every day I had circled the building in whose cellar Felix was supposedly locked up. I tried to whistle the signal we had agreed on, but I couldn't manage it for the life of me.

His mother and grandfather had come rushing to Bucharest. Together we went to Precinct 5.

I saw Felix again. We were incoherent, we held back our tears — I, for certain, made superhuman efforts — until we convinced ourselves that we were optimistic. Extremely optimistic. Only, when he left, his steps were unsteady, and he gauged with difficulty the distance between himself and the corridor walls. I went on talking, the smile frozen at the corners of my mouth. He went down into the building's cellar, into a room whose window was covered by a sheet of metal punched with holes here and there. The captain, across from me, was exceptionally kind and eager to talk. In fact, he was visibly struck by the absurdity of the case he was investigating. Though I had seen Felix only moments before, I couldn't get out of my head the intersection where we had parted the day before, after cutting Bucharest in two, sitting side by side and rocked by a tram that should never have reached its destination.

There was nothing I could do but howl inside myself like a wounded beast, and write. Write to Felix. Out of the hundreds of pages I wrote then, Felix chose a few, numbered them carefully, and underlined, with a vertical bar, two sentences in which I was trying to make sense of him to myself.

"Your great adventure in this life is a strange one. There are great, complete circles in it. I don't know exactly where we are now. I don't know where we are to be. What I do know is that we will be together."

In those pages of pain, I beat my head against every wall, the physical absence of my beloved suffocated me, and the fangs of vanity and fear came out without my willing it. I loved him with a love that exceeded my power to understand things. I was, like Pinocchio, a puppet he pulled by the strings, with delicate care that she should not feel it, should not take fright, while, furious and implacable, the World unfolded chaotically all around me. But I too was furious. I was not capable of living in a palpable "truth," nor could I get past "the Felix entity," even though my instinct for self-preservation commanded me to take shelter.

I wrote:

"God, how many traces of your gestures strike me from every side! Each one comes back to my memory with a diabolical cruelty. What am I to do with my brain so full of you?"

I felt shut out; I was jealous of his mother and of his seventy-year-old grandfather, who had come to help him in concrete ways. They knew it was a matter of a trial, that there was need of a lawyer, of food parcels... while I wrote with utter conviction:

"Tonight I'm feeling sorry for myself. (Five days had passed since our parting at the intersection in Palace Square.) I would like to say that I love you, but a dry vanity stops me. The vanity of a character caught in a scene of high drama in which he is utterly useless."

A hidden spring, like a wisdom come from a glimpsed future, kept bringing me back to the heart of the matter:

"It is hard without you. People are so lonely and so wretched, irremediably wretched, that only we are still happy on this earth. It is impossible for me to conceive of a man more complete than you, who would come and make me a part of his whole."

The last entry Felix chose, from April 26 — by which time an eternity and one more day had passed since our physical parting, that is, exactly eleven days — runs more or less like this:

"My love, I have an ugly thought. It seems to me that something has changed in you after all. A detachment, an indifference... I have the feeling that, in a way, there is a kind of contentment that you no longer have to bear my constant presence. It's true there are many reasons that would justify this behavior of yours. What saddens me is that I suspect you are barely aware of it. That means I have very serious problems. But what if you are pulling away from me consciously?

It's dreadful. It doesn't seem real, yet I feel you are forgetting me and denying me. It may be that I stir up such feelings in myself. And yet you know as well as I do that in matters like these I am rarely wrong. An absurd jealousy, sprung up all at once at a moment when it isn't warranted, rises from the depths of me where fear now reigns.

I carry the image of you, there, in a disgusting cellar. You dream, you rebel, and I, naturally, am nowhere to be found. The thought clings to my mind with fierce stubbornness that the way you are now — overwhelmed by your own self, by the filthy walls scrawled with desperate or stupidly primitive scribbles — you can no longer love.

I am a woman with the gift of fascination. I would dare to say it is something greater than is proper. But I feel that for you this concreteness of mine falls away, the way some chance object might fall from your hand.

Oh, Felix, if you only knew how like a stranger you looked at me that Sunday when I came to you with your mother and grandfather. You measured me with your eyes and told me, detached: You look well! I smothered a stab of pain when I answered in my Pinocchio voice: 'I scrubbed myself specially for a good two hours!'"

"Raids in World of Warcraft... were far more than a way to pass your free time.

They were a player's most important objective. In life you study, you grow, you prepare yourself physically and intellectually to get the greatest possible professional satisfaction and to be important. Or not?... Anyway, that's what I did; that's what I'm still doing. In WoW you built up skills, you gathered potions, gear, artifacts, you farmed for them — every day the same 10 quests, then 15, and so on, just to collect gear, even though you hated doing it, because you were forever getting beaten... All of it for the great event that took place 2–3 times a week: setting out on a raid. Ten people would gather, then 25. Once, long ago, in the glory days, there were raids that drew 40 people. My level was still too low back then. And these people had a duty to be as well prepared as possible and to keep their attention strained to the maximum, so the guild could tick off the slaying of yet another dragon. It was a moment in the game, seemingly a team one. The participants had to be very attentive and to synchronize to within tenths of a second. Everything had to unfold according to a perfect script. In reality, it didn't really involve much team spirit. If you knew what you had to do, if you read up on tactics, if you had experience with the scenarios in question, if you invested time in your skills and your gear, it was all fine. The team... I don't know how much of a team... It wasn't about helping one another, it was only about tactics. You healed, because that was your job; you shielded the rest of the group from the monster, because that was your job. If someone slipped up, if one healer out of two didn't heal in time, or if a tank didn't protect the rest of the group, we all died. Actually, I think the dps had the smallest responsibilities toward the team, and the simplest. You did nothing but deal damage, watch the damage meter, make sure you were "strong," and know the script of the battle. Run to a corner at moment X, hold your breath at moment Y, and so on, each battle with its own quirks. At one boss you weren't allowed to move at a certain instant, at another you weren't allowed to stand in the lava patch, at another you had to throw yourself into the water. It was much like in instances, only that in raids the battles were longer, involved more responsibility and attention. It was more dramatic if someone didn't do their job. Why raids? For many reasons... To gain experience, to raise your character's value, to collect items and make yourself sought-after in parties. For me, I think the most important thing was a happy ending. The joy of the party dancing on the dragon we'd finally brought down, after whole evenings of attempts; the little video posted on the guild's website, which we were all so proud of. I remember my inventory packed to the brim with potions and food, my screen full of buffs, add-ons. 48% critical chance :D — that was my pride and joy... And that's how we'd set out on raids. They were good times, good enough that, three years after I quit, I went to visit my WoW friends in Sweden.

It was a feeling full of adrenaline, so concentrated, the kind you rarely find in real life. You'd be drenched in sweat after a 10–15 minute fight — that's about how long the battles with the bosses lasted, around 10–15 minutes."

Things had slipped completely out of control.

The world around me, Felix included, covered me over with a vague haze. It was as if I were playing a hand of whist in which everyone else had the trump up their sleeve, except me.

Exasperated by his prolonged imprisonment in the cellar of a police precinct, Felix had reacted. The springs of his inner freedom, which accepted no constraint, the dignity of playing on a knife's edge — by whose rules you may be torn apart but not insulted — had burst out violently. The prosecutor, the police captain, the lawyer, my triumphant pregnancy by which I secured the perpetuation of an uncertain world — all of it had crowded together within the walls of the vault in the basement of a building that, from the outside, looked calm, even beautiful.

Felix could bear it no longer. Three weeks had passed since they had been holding him and Marius in a lightless cellar, through which various offenders were paraded on their way to the penitentiaries. The investigation dragged on, the food was more theoretical than real, the parcels his mama brought from Brăila could not be enough for two young men, and his teeth ached something dreadful from the excessive damp seeping out of the old house's foundations. For no logical reason, they had not been moved to a penitentiary, where they could at least have had the use of a medical office. The revolt that was choking him erupted like a volcano. For several weeks they had been waiting for a prosecutor to send the case to trial. Forgery and the use of forged documents had been pardoned by a recent presidential decree of Ceaușescu's, and so the arrest of the two offenders — blinded in their wrongdoing by the longing to take a shortcut onto a theater stage — could only be sustained by establishing material damages. Accordingly, the forensic accountants were working away to calculate, down to the last penny, all the harm done to public property in the 15 months Felix and Marius had been students at the Theater, and the figures were terrifying. The first assessment of the damage had been set at a hundred thousand lei, and for that the communist Penal Code condemned them to over 7 years in prison, in the best of cases.

Felix slashed open the bed's mattress, sat down in the middle of it, and threatened, with complete credibility, to set himself on fire. The whole affair turned, in an instant, from an interesting story, just right for telling at the café across the street, into a problem that had to be punished firmly. The result matched the deed. Felix, crowned with the label "dangerous," was shipped off to "Arcuda," a real prison, with real bolts and full of repeat offenders. With Marius they were gentler. They sent him to "Policolor," a "health spa" compared with "Arcuda."

"Felix is dangerous. And he's dragging this other boy down with him, a well-behaved one. I didn't expect anything like this!" the captain investigating the case explained to me.

"They panicked. They promised me the moon itself, anything to calm me down!" Felix told me later.

I didn't ask him whether he really would have set himself on fire. Of that, neither the guards, nor the police captain, nor the prosecutor had any doubt — all of them roused from their beds in the dead of night.

The next day, just as I had rounded the corner of the building, Felix was being loaded into a police van. He was only a few steps from me, no more than ten, but the space between us fractured, multiplying to infinity into a menacing abyss. With a brief gesture, he showed me the handcuffs binding his hands behind his back.

"Tell me, Geo, what part did WoW play in your breakup?" Geo pushed aside the cherry branches, the ones that came between us, as if drawing back a curtain, and began to tell me her story. She smiled all the while.

"It's a longish story. It was a warm summer afternoon, I felt full of life, eager to do something. My boyfriend lived one metro stop away from me; we were university classmates and had already been together a year. I walked over to his place, to make the most of the summer day. Once I got there, no surprise. He was playing on the computer and ignoring me. Nothing new. He was a really decent guy and a good partner to match — as long as he was away from the computer... After a while I got annoyed and left, slamming the door. I expected him to come after me. But he didn't. I decided it was over. I cried for a day, and then, toward evening, I changed my mind and decided it couldn't end like that. I went back to him. In the meantime he too had been looking for a solution and had found the cure for our quarrels. He kindly sat me down in his chair at the computer and opened Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction, telling me to make myself a character while he tidied up the place a bit. About six months earlier, he had shown me another game. I'd played that little game for about a week, barely getting up from the computer. I finished it and beat him at it, too. That was how my experience with the first little game had gone. But Diablo was something else, it was a class-A drug, the kind the people at Blizzard know how to make. I made my first character.

I played Diablo intensively for two and a half years. My boyfriend gave it up after a while, tried various other games, and settled on WoW. I, however, kept diligently perfecting the three Sorceress-class characters I had. When I quit, my sorceresses were brilliantly geared and skilled. I had one specced for Lightning (the main one), one for Fire, and one for Frost. After a while, my boyfriend said to me: 'Why don't you make a character on my WoW account too.' He insisted, but I didn't want to. I knew what an addiction Diablo had bred in me. I didn't want another Blizzard specialty. In the end I made a mage in the image and likeness of the ones from Diablo — that is, an Undead specced into Arcane. At level five I decided I wanted my own account, and I got one. I rebuilt the character I'd taken up to level five. She started out Arcane and stayed that way all three or four years I played. I made myself a guild."

"I know the guild. I was part of it."

"Lol! I remember the warrior Ligia yelling at the top of her lungs through Crossroads, in the Barrens, looking for a guild with Romanians in it."

"Ha! Ha! It wasn't me yelling. Alin was hunting up friends for me around Azeroth."

Geo took up her story again.

"I loved my character more and more, I took screenshots of her at every level, and little by little she stopped being a copy of the one from Diablo. She was taking on a personality. She took on from me passion, perfectionism, perseverance. She was no longer a character from a game, she was what I wanted to be and, perhaps, couldn't find the strength to be in the real world. Clearly, she was something she could never have been in Diablo."

"I know Gosu! She was a famous mage in Orgrimmar."

"Not quite that famous... But she was beautiful, strong, clever."

We left the garden and the cherry tree. Geo went on with her story without my having to ask. She was speaking more to herself.

"Naturally, my boyfriend got rather bored with WoW too after a while. He wanted to quit, to talk me into doing the same, but he no longer had anyone to talk to. I was far too anchored in the game. So anchored that he, as a real character in my life, barely existed anymore. He was my WoW partner. We looked after each other in real life and in WoW, like two good friends, and that was about it. The passion between us, if any trace of it was left, was in the game. Often, with our computers side by side and headphones on, we'd talk over chat. He — and everything else in real life — went on because that was how it had to be. Going to work, eating — that's what they came down to. He wanted to be with me, and I didn't mind. It was fine. And that was about it. I think he even quit WoW for a while, but I only vaguely remember. I was too busy to notice what he was doing."

"He haunted Azeroth like me. Well, maybe that was only my impression. But I remember one moment. I was standing at the edge of that frozen lake, Shimmering Flats, wondering what to do, when he flew over me, toward Tanaris. We had a downright metaphysical conversation about meaning, nonsense, illusion."

"Anyway, if he did quit, he took it up again," Geo went on, paying me no mind, "because when we broke up he was still playing, I think... He was trying to bring me back to life, or our relationship back to life, but he simply had nothing to do it with. He had already reached the point where he was in my life because he didn't bother me, not because I wanted him there. I no longer talked with my friends. I no longer wanted to leave the house. All I wanted was one more raid, one more enchant, one more quest... Sometimes anything that kept me away from the computer irritated me. But that happened rarely enough for real life to stay bearable. If I wasn't at work, I was in WoW."

Geo, carried off by her thoughts, fell into a longer pause.

"Then I met D. in WoW as well," Geo continued. "We became friends and I liked talking with him on messenger. It was fun... until he wrote me that he loved me and it upset me terribly. Then, about another year later, we even had a brief affair..."