THE DAY THAT I DIED

a short story by Luca Dinulescu

e-mail: lucadinulescu@yahoo.com Phone: 0040/722935311 Work e-mail: lucadinulescu@gmail.com Work phone: 0040/722391308 Lahovary square, sc.B, app. 67, 1st district, Bucharest, Romania

Hello again. I'm standing in Saint Andrew's hall of the Great Palace of Kremlin, as the less known painter Oukhtomski captured me in a fresco. I'm not revealed in one of my best postures, as long as I was picking my nose, but, even so, I look like me, I can't complain. The artist, who was painting with the frequency of forty thousand miniaturized brushes per second, had long waited for this moment, he saw me and right that very moment, due to his unmistakable technique he instantly caught me on paint. That day Bogdan entered the thrown room, very preoccupied, as I had never seen him before, much more agitated than usual, when nothing, absolutely nothing, no matter how extraordinary could seem to surprise him. He was carrying a blue, magic carpet under his arm. He would wonder around the huge hall, restless, unable to stand still, while I waited for him patiently. Because I hardly understand anything. - Are you leaving, Luca? he asked me, worried. - No, I answered surprised, my eyes gleaming with the anticipation of some new adventures never seen before. Where would I leave? - Nowhere. It was a joke. But I see that you - I what? - You don't understand anything anymore! - Yes well I had turned rather sullen. And I had a good reason for it. I knew exactly what was the difference between us two, especially because I, once the pride and glory of the Russian nobility, had turned into a dull, tiresome vegetable, a sickly creature, incomprehensibly different, because, anyway, I wasn't the powerless or inactive type. On the contrary, I represented the strong kind, for whom the worries were a real absence. Now, here I am, though: I have been lying here for a few hours and I already caught myself several times thinking about nothing at

all. Incredible. I'm lying here like a cow. The malachite fireplace practically pains me ; its presence and color annoy me to death. Pinocchio's furniture, brought by Zappa himself, drives me crazy. I think I'll unstick the room, like an undesirable wallpaper and I'll throw it out on the window, with me inside of it, doing this way two admirable things: the first - finally do the world a big favor and spare it of my idiotic presence and the second one - creating the first vacuum which I would want to make sure I invented, although it would be nothing but a lie, and which would represent somehow the Kyzyl-Oj village, the place where I was born. Exactly. I am a kirghiz-er. On the other hand, him. Bogdan. The Russian court poet who managed to get in this thankless situation through God-knows what circumstances and on some talent, if I'm not mistaken, and with a few volumes published through the good-will of my famous and ancient grandfather Angestaitn, the craftsman of the historic victory of Pennemunde, if I'm not mistaken again. I'm annoyed by his superiority, never actually put on display but still obvious, his undeniable wisdom, on which the space fills with his every word, but about which he never brags. Brilliant, and he knows it. Why doesn't he say it, so I could grab one of his phrases' end? Why is he never wrong? Terribly annoying. But I love him. He inspires me. I wish we switched places, obviously if we could; only that my father's money are not enough for that. I'm a boundless idiot. Before rising from my Nubian armchair, I start humming in a low tone the classical Arabian mode, maybe hoping to impress Bogdan, or hoping this unforgettable moment could finally stop time, as I've been wishing for all my life, or hoping I don't know what anymore I'm standing up. We're facing each other. His big black eyes are endless, and I'm already lost. And still, this is where I have to start from, not elsewhere, because there's no other way. Carried away and aggrieved by their immense kindness, here I am, already accepted among them, and now I'm flying towards My Death, or The Ultimate Settlement. Soft, oblong chords, warm and pleasant stellar tunes, galactic endless harmonies caress my suffering spirit. The rhythmic unison of hundreds of darboukas leads me towards a blinding light. Just as I

suspected, it's Zappa's toilet's bulb. In Allah's name, what's happening to me? I've got to come to my senses. And I keep doing that, because something squeezes my hand really hard. It's Bogdan. He's transformed. He's looking right through me, somewhere behind me, far away and maybe if I didn't know that he came from other world, I would try to pursue his miracle working will somehow. My God, what a man! - We must go, Luca. I suddenly turned into stone. His decision gave me the chills. Where could we go? - Where? I heard myself saying, from a far away place, like an echo of my previous thought. Someone else was talking, not me. Bogdan is shocked by my lack of judgment, I can see that and I can feel his answer preparing to explode off his furious lips. - Where are we going ?! I must solve an extremely difiicult problem of most importance for the faculty, Luca, and if I lay this case on you, you are going to faint! There are only calculations, only crazy shit! Can you even imagine? Could you solve this for me? I'm telling you: no! A fan of white sheets of paper, ordered as the feathers of a bird spread on the floor. There were the thoughts of this poor man. Calculations. Scribblings. Good old God! - There you go! Bogdan's voice sounded like thunder. Now I'll lean over and I will tell him he's right. I know it. Strange thing, this thought of mine: "I know it"; it doesn't belong to me but I can hear it while I'm leaning over and it's obvious that I can't fight an impulse I got from God-knows-where. In another second I'll realize that I've fulfilled my task. I did what I suspected I would do indeed, what you all actually wanted me to, you, invisible puppeteers of the sky, you, false mimes of the moor of knowledge, you, character's awful frauds and you, terrible drunken men of order.

Are you happy now? Well, that's a good one, but till when are you going to continue to do only what you feel like? Then I hear myself talking and telling him he's right. The man is right. - Here, there it is, said he, showing me what looks like a sort of calculation, because I can't call it otherwise. Anything with numbers for me is a calculation or adding up. I'm an utter ass-hole, as I've said it before. - Which one is it? This one? - This one, yes, he says, caught with the grimace of the world's worry on his face, without wishing so, because he's very expressive, this Bogdan of mine. He crosses his arms and he waits for me to draw a conclusion. Though in vain. I'm looking at what his square finger is pointing me to and, being tormented, I'm trying to give a meaning to the following words or numbers. It says like this: take a convex polygon having the following sides . If Mr. Blinchevici Stroe, assumed Bulgarian guitarist and director, trained impostor, is an internal point of the polygon so that the sides could be seen from the town's tower under pointed angles and if are the distances from Mr. Blinchevici to the tops, then should equal 8. And that's about it. The rest are other scribblings, which I don't think have anything to do with Bogdan's problem. They seem more like unsuccessful attempts of solving this bloody thing that he showed me and even more: here's also a sketch of a naked chick! Aha, that's how it goes! As the refined psychologist and unbelievable detective that I am, I start to foresee other problems too, but not mathematic at all. Good. So, nothing extraordinary so far, because if I think better, even with my raw mind, this can't be a difficult problem. I'm watching him sympathetically and you won't believe it, but may be this is one of the moments when I wouldn't want to be in his place. - Bogdan, I say, with all due respectbut this is not a very difficult problem Even I think I can solve it.

In this moment I think Bogdan lit himself a cigarette, because he turned his back and I can't understand what he's doing. Look at him. Look, look the way he is looking at me, the palace's walls bend because of the look he's giving me, through them. He's turning. He's crying. - Luca, something is not right! I can feel it! The world is built up on wrong rules, and I want to change it, do you understand me?! Saying these last words he succeeds in making me almost def because of his shout. The huge room makes it so that the echo propagate during a few good moments, and its reverberation is at least strange, I'm telling you, good people. I'm hearing tens of mean, robotic Bogdans yelling through pipes. In Allah's name, this is not good! I take my heart and prepare myself to listen as calmly as I can the monologue of this infinite and loved warrior, who's looking through me now, far distant. He's breaking through me. He's calm now. Together we'll win, gentle people. - Luca, this is my geometric manifesto!, do you understand?! I'll rebuild the world from the ground, after mathematic rules that won't fail! The rules of nature, Luca, of the universe, universal available rules, not the sick human creations that we're used to and which installed themselves pretty damn good, so that if they suddenly stopped existing, we wouldn't manage without them! Our thoughts have been going on for thousands of years in this way of this thread of theft, of crime, Lucaof hideousness, and you know, because you used to feel like me, or may be you still do. Pfuaah! Ooh! I can't believe we've no control over our lives!! But it's ok! I've got my formula, that's why I want to complete it, so that once put into practice to a piece of land on which I would have previously released my doom and desolation, it could give life to imposing, zoidic shapes, Luca, mixt paraclefs that could generate perfect and unpredictable life, reprobable metal tubes coming out of one another, giving life to genius cleobs and radiating electro-gastro-necromant-obliveonaal hemispheres that are so necessary to life, Luca, and to the security of interracial understanding of what will be

after I will have released, in the first stage, my personal Pogrom!! Do you understand? God, this is not control! I think it's incredible! How couldn't you control your tiny moment in this Conscience's hall which we miraculously enjoy, this anamorpho-psychotic rippleness of the gelow that some call celestial space and who's life itself lasts a second of the Universe's Spirit? Luca, do you understand what I'm saying? I want to change everything!!! Luca?!? Are you with me or not? I'm watching him much too quietly. He's more than crazy. I'm even sure he has overstepped the boundary of paroxysm. He has passed over, to where only few got. What I mean is that, he is probably the Chosen one. It's already too much what is happening to him. He's even drooling now and it's not pleasant at all what's happening, my friends, believe me. I would stand up once again, to seem more imposing, but I can't because I'm already on my feet. The moment clearly favors me though, because this man is waiting for my answer, so I don't know what to do to seem as theatrical and pathetic as possible, to give value to one of the rare moments when I'm important to somebody. I'm picking my nose again without wanting so, as I've made a habit of doing. This is the only way I succeed in being interesting, and I still can't get used to this idea. The silence is too heavy though; the man is in an advanced state of dementia, so I'd better answer him little before he baths in my own viscera at which he seems to be looking with hunger right now. - I'm with you, Bogdan, I can hear myself talking again, without my realizing so, because I couldn't even have the power to open my mouth. These are more likely my thoughts which got, after minutes of waiting, to be understood easier than the crap I usually use as words. - I'm with you all the way, Bogdan, said the one who until a few moments ago could be me continued, because the poor judgment found in that place isn't sure even about this. And this is all he's waiting for. He takes my hand and we're flying.

Wait Bogdan, not like this. We're going to hit the ceiling and crash, Bogdan. The chandelier will go right into the water of my eyes and will take away the sight I care so much for, my dear sight, with which I was never able to grasp anything more than the edge of the vegetable garden. Bogdan, we're going to die! Bogdan, do something! Then, Prince Luca, will you be upset if I tell you that I'm not interested in your "old before his time fellow" babblings, I hear a curious and painfully new and unknown thought? Would you mind if we flew towards the infinite, to find the solution to the problem and build humanity again? If a few seconds ago, say, I could have lived the surprise of the situation's incredible overturn to which we were put under, now I can not but establish how trivial is the demonstration of the theorem, long known, saying that any person can be another person or any other object or phenomenon in any given space and time in any dimension. Nothing more simpler than that. Now, in this close second, anything that could mean the concept of "me, or "mine", or the strange feeling to which almost all people referred to through a personal pronoun, which would compose someone's individuality, I am Bogdan. Behind me is the pathetic prince Luca, frightened and shivering. Very low underneath us, plains. Houses. The old Kremlin stays quickly behind, with its gorgeous architecture and his sleepy rooftops looking like wings stoned long before or emptied. The city of old passions and love stories continues to move away more and more, until it remains a thread of ashes. And solving the problem and applying the formula still eludes me. The blue magic carpet flies as good as I imagined it would when I stole it from that tradesman's cellar. It runs as if oiled and it is extraordinary. It takes curves or spectacular leaps or crazy eights, to spin completely a few times after that. I'm afraid I can't grip him good enough through.

Now we're flying upside down and it is frustrating to realize after years of research, that this is really the position one should stay in all the time in order to be able to solve a geometry problem right. Thoughts flow like waves now, synapses recover from numbness, it's true, also maybe because of the very ugly smell that got to ruin my nostrils. Given the nature of the unpleasant aroma, prince Luca probably shit his pants of fear. Then I've gotten far in my thoughts. After an undefined period of time when I must have had a dream, blind and with my eyes open, I'm waking up frightened as if hit by a rock in my temple. I'm looking around disoriented, with the terrifying fear caused by the fact that I don't know who I am and why I am so high in the sky, but here it is: because of the rapid flight, of the incredible speed and cold, my senses come back to me. I am Bogdan; Prince Luca is in his place and has fainted but still holds my waste and the solution to the problem is closer than ever. - Bogdan, where are we going? I hear the thin prince's voice, vague because of the terrible wind. Now I can see what's happening to the world. It can't be. It is the scariest scenery someone could conceive: the mankind is under water. Completely. - We're going to Aquarelin's court, Luca. That's where it is the answer to the problem, I'm telling him, with eyes full of the heaviest tears. This is the cruelest fulfillment in the most absurd way of the dream I've been having for more than ten years. I keep dreaming hundreds-of-meters-long waves covering the whole life. Then everything seems to end in a planetary aquatic disaster after which amazingly I find myself still alive, much to my pain, into a pestilential smell of alga, sitting on a piece of land not bigger than a piece of bread and barely seeing between tears how the water, now calm and peaceful but flopping joyfully is swallowing everything. They all get to Aquarelin's court eventually. This is it. You can't help it. And I'm more and more aware of that. Now I'm turning the carpet back up stopping it with the steering pole as a wild horse. I'm preparing the fall

that is going to follow in a better way. Just for a moment we freeze in the air, the carpet neighs and prances, or may be I'm just imagining. And then the incredible fall that every person dreams about at least once in their lifetime would follow. We're plunging from a frightening height like we've never imagined it could ever happen, like we never thought possible of dreaming. The speed is amazing. It almost rips our faces off, but this seems to be nothing compared to the greatness and horror that exists beneath us which is the mean and huge entity the ocean has turned into. The billions of the mirrors' sides that it forms and that reflect the frozen sun, blind us instantly. You can't distinguish anything more during the fall that mixes your organs with fear bringing them up till the brain and back. Nothing more than an amorphous mass, stretched till the edge of the universe and strangely smelling which wants you inside it no matter what. It is a matter of moments till we'll have to start somehow the journey to which about some of us have been thinking for an entire lifetime, or, on the contrary, are not thinking about it at all, and It, the journey, catches us being stupid, ugly and unprepared. We'll see what happens. It's for sure that, through our nature, mine and prince's Luca, we will make such fun of the poor death itself, that she won't want to have anything to do with us anymore, and will go away swearing us terribly. Poor Death. We'll be an eternal laughing stock for her. She will ruin her reputation but that's life: we were born and we have to be taken away too. Or won't we? I can see now, the compact paste and the liquid lava which seem to have become the body of the green and black water that got stunningly closer. It is infinite and you can't realize that it has turned into everything in the last seconds and it has swollen even the sky. Useless to say that the waves are so big that we: me, prince Luca and the carpet are exactly like a grain of sand falling into the desert, like a drop angry with its insignificance, facing a waterfall. We're crazy. The carpet has turned into a red car, with motorcycle wheels and huge exhaust pipes, curved till the sky in the shape of Japanese swords that carelessly tickle the world's cover. The lights suddenly light the way and

frown. We're not us any more, but fragments of the gorgeous weaving of the carpet that is one with the though ally of the car, with its own chassis. The car is a carpet. My sudden mustache that I hadn't had before is enclosing everything and represents now the signature of someone big and invisible who laughs at us. This wicked scared thing is trying to keep us from touching the ocean and it is making heroic efforts not to let us be swollen. But how could someone avoid the inevitable like this? The useless and somewhat silly struggle of the vehicle, that developed some legs from somewhere inside it, especially for this sinister occasion, is much too little to save us from seeing the face of death, but enough to grab a smile out of me. The water is close; much too close. And all of a sudden it swallows us, slapping us terribly. I've never thought I would hit something so hard and badly like this thick liquid metal surface. I've never thought I'd die. Life, as I knew it, disappears, leaving place to an unspeakable despair followed by distorted chaotic and totally senseless struggle. I'm looking into the prince's eyes who, like me, has also realized it right this moment. We mustn't fight this anymore. We're still falling but much slower and we're sadly watching the green and transparent ceiling of this forever unknown world, while the evil hand of the water tightens round our necks. Here everything is calm, compared to the immensity and fury of what happens at the surface. We're lowering into an enormous and thick water column like an underwater elevator. It is strange how much our descendant route resembles to an object about which I would only think in the everyday life, going down in it to at football match eventually or may be going at the gathering of the flat's committee... What silly things can cross your mind before you die! No movie, not all your life, or other foolish that the semi-deep and the half-cultivated people babble about at different meetings upon six years since finishing university. The flat's administrative meeting is the only thing I can clearly visualize in these moments. And the air finishes. How is that possible? I'm writhing, trying with one last effort not to accept my death. I'm tossing. I want to climb up, for God's sake! I want to be born again. My eyes filled in blood

bursting, I still get to notice the prince. He's going down, being dead on his feet with his head hanging on his chest as if broken. You're a doll, prince, just like me. Now it's happening. It's going to happen. Now! The word now remains in my mind for infinity and it seems to be written in flamy blood, that's how much it burns. I can feel an immense happiness lighting me up inside. An incomparable joy and a colossal love towards everything that existed and will ever exist is wrecking my internal being. I love you prince! I love you, poor me! Death, as it came to me, is the most beautiful thing that anyone can experience. I'm proud I'm so conscious of it and I can seize it so well. I salute you, death and I love you especially you. How could I've lived without knowing you could be so beautiful? I'm detaching myself and I'm leaving towards the stars. I'm part of only One now. I'm scared, death. Where are you taking me? You're showing me everything that exists by taking me with your strong and endless hand. You're spinning my spirit towards the unknown, scattering the stars with it and the little lights from the imagination's land. They, the lights, are the beings of those who once lived. They're so many! My place is near one of them. It's little because I'm nothing more than a white little light. It's only. that not all are equal. Not even here but they each light up after how much each one has received from her Father, while they were alive. It's hot. It's cold. It's night and that's how Death looks like. But if someone had been there anymore, he would have seen the bodies of the two friends, dripping off the cruel and incredible melasse, dead. Falling slowly close to mirable hourglasses of white, smooth meat, who's titanic bases were placed right on the court's land of Aquarelin, the master of nuances and the servant of death, the prince of a territory the two friends would never see again. But what could they have possibly seen there? The Parfume Lake, the most amassing invention from the last decade of history, a stone and earth Volcano, in which Aquarelin himself gathered all the Universe's

colors. And under this liquid universe that had frozen, becoming a solid mirror, the most beautiful woman of mankind, a Chicago Illinois blonde was captured, struggling to get out and was hitting it with her small fists. Indifferent, as an answer to this state of things, Aquarelin was playing with his enormous socks in that part of the lake where Calvin Klein's essence had been dropped. But who would have cared. For sure, not the human rase who's unique preoccupation had been to destroy itself and which have disappeared I love you death, like I've said it, but only when you're mine. Don't come to others, because I won't like you anymore and you won't want that, would you? I salute you again and I'll be waiting for you, ha ha ha. (laughter from the throat, at first clear, sincere one and then grotesque, burping one, scary, turned off from the volume button).

Luca Dinulescu November - December 2002