Free Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else by Daniela Fischerova, Neil Bermel Page A

nothing and does not protect mankind from anything.”
    As he spoke, he leaned over so close that my bubble, in a panicky defense, shot off an electrostatic charge, arced across and clung to his face like a death mask made of freezer wrap.
    â€œWe’re wrong,” he said with unusual gravity. “We’re not ourselves, we’re not in ourselves, and we’re never where we ought to be.”

    I’d already ruled out the possibility that he was hard of hearing. On the contrary, he had sensitive hi-fi ears, and more than once we exchanged a noisy pub for a cocoon of quiet, for the empty corners of exceedingly vile bistros, and there conducted our lethargic, wobbly, pointless conversations, at a safe distance from anything that could touch us. What did we talk about? About “archetypal natural settings.” About “mythical elements of reality.” About “the profanization of the leitmotif of coincidence and of any defining moment.” About things that exist and do not exist, and whose pale veins teem with paper blood.
    It was — it should have, would have, could have been — a happy sexless nothing. Two hermaphroditic brains floated in a solution of irresponsibility: ageless, outside reality, without a future. If only we had not been so tinglingly close to each other that our auras’ furs bristled with crackling violet sparks.

    He had the unmistakable imago of a bachelor: a narrow-gauge intellectual sense of humor, his screws sunk tight. He was married but never spoke of his wife, except in passing (“I’ll be away, but my wife will send it to me.”). I learned somewhere that she was an anesthesiologist, substantially older than him, and apparently verybeautiful. I didn’t think about her, beautiful or not.

    We met more and more often, practically every day. He began to walk me home (garden, site, shed, steps), but otherwise our meetings were no different from before, except maybe for a certain facility. We skipped a step in our development. In half a year we were an aging married couple, with his indifferent faithfulness and weary sensuality. He would wait for me at the university. We would go to movies or exhibits. Everyone believed we were lovers, but we only listened to each other with half an ear and were no closer than two stuffed lizards.
    Sometimes it seemed to me that everything was already behind us: sobs of passion, rampages, dragging each other by the hair. That it had happened long ago, in some other time that we had already forgotten. We were an old couple on a look-out tower. The world lay far below us; the bare, distant trees stuck up from the horizon like spikelets on a blade of wheat.
    Twice in my life there have been times when the whole world of feelings, with its demonic dankness, has seemed incomprehensibly foreign to me, artificial to its very core, affected and cloying. The first time, I was ten: romance novels enticed me into an exuberant arrogance and a know-it-all cheerfulness. The second was now: without knowing why, I had escaped the force field of love for a year or two, and its vibrations did not pass through me. Maybe a third will soon be upon me, and this time it will last. Certainly our friendship, if you can call it that, was the best thing I could have wished for. It freed me from the opprobrious stigma of solitude. Concepts and phrases formed a haze around us. Thanks to them, I was at peace, and I did not have to dance the tortuous courtship dances of my age. Only I never did see how Dr. M. profited from this strange relationship.

    Before Christmas we casually said our good-byes, exchanged presents (books for books, of course), and set a meeting for January. We were such strangers to each other that neither thought to ask how the other was spending the holidays. I stayed at home with my parents and then set off to Budapest for a New Year’s Eve concert.
    The train chugged across a flat, charmless landscape; heaps of