Free Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else by Daniela Fischerova, Neil Bermel

science fiction and will offer no new resolutions.

    When I was twenty-two, a serious young man appeared in my life.He was probably thirty — I don’t know, I didn’t ask. At the time, he was a columnist for one of the cultural reviews and had read my stories somewhere. We met in a café.
    From the very first moment, I was struck by a certain contradiction. He was reserved and abstract like no man I had ever known. He seemed absolutely unapproachable. And yet he sat closer to me than even the liveliest of them. He did not touch me. Not once that evening did he even try for a single accidental contact as he explained things in a slow, earnest manner with his face right up next to mine.
    I listened with only half an ear, because he made me feel strangely insecure. I cannot remember anything from that first meeting besides the awkward feeling that he was making a detailed, mirthless examination of my wrinkles and pores, of my irregular blotch of rouge, speaking all the while with languid fervor about sentence structure in the postwar short story.
    Through the windows Prague swam in a murky twilight. A dark pink band hung over the horizon like a scarf carried skyward.
    â€œThe short stories I like best are those I understand least,” he said. “And of those, I prefer the ones I don’t get till years after I read them.”
    He didn’t mention any by name, but he was not talking about mine, which tried to be enigmatic, but were as transparent as an aquarium and nearly as deep.

    The duality of his signals perplexed me. This man, as psychotherapy would say, entered other people’s bubbles. He did not respect that invisible membrane —
noli me tangere,
the circle drawn round us with consecrated chalk. The space freezes. Only a whirling tremble divides us, one that knows full well what it is doing. It admits only love and aggression. When lovers and brawlers embrace, it opens wide like a door on a sensor, letting the intruder inside. Everyone’s bubble is a different size. Mine is just big enough. I can’t stand clapson the shoulder, indiscriminate familiarity, or confidences. I sit in my bubble — rather satisfied, a little hostile, and self-possessed.

    Dr. M., as I called him, also seemed rather satisfied, a little hostile, and most of all self-possessed. His self-possession was as rigid as an inflated plastic bag. It was remarkably rare to see him smile. He never confided anything. I remember well his personal scent: he smelled like toothpaste. Dr. M. was always meticulously clean; the only thing disturbing the impression that he had just rolled out of a car wash was the dark pink band across his forehead, some sort of birthmark.
    For one brief moment we reached the threshold of love, but it brought us no closer. We never dropped the formalities. He did not have the key to my garden.

    After that first time, we began to meet sporadically and — as I would call it today — exchange brain outputs. We were two reviewers conversing. No one reading a stenographic record of our meetings would see in them a young man and woman. His indifference would have suited me perfectly (at a time when I was strangely deaf to the world of emotions, when my immature and unengaged heart felt as tough as a turnip), were it not for that violent familiarity perpetrated on my bubble.
    Boundaries create plotlines. Border skirmishes and balk plowing provide the fuel of history. Limits in space and time are literary stimuli.
    â€œToday’s prose is nothing but monologue,” he was saying. “Its growing incomprehensibility springs not from any formal characteristics, but rather from a fundamental resignation to its failure to be understood. The author does not want to be understood, because he does not even understand himself. He is showingus that comprehension is impossible. The omniscient author is passé. This century has realized that knowledge always comes too late. It resolves