Solenoid

by Mircea Cărtărescu

Our sex life has gained an incredible amount thanks to levitation; we make love in the air, without the awkwardness of people handicapped by a bed. We close the drapes, lie down naked across the bed, push the button, and we rise gently through the total, unblemished darkness, such that it doesn’t matter if we open our eyes or keep them closed. We embrace without knowing who is above and who is below; suddenly space has no point of orientation. We are only bodies, with dry parts and wet parts, with warm parts and rough parts, with hairinesses and smoothnesses, with acrid tastes and fatty tastes, with softnesses and tumescences. We devour each other, we cleave to each other, we enter and exit each other’s cavities, we lose ourselves in the dark and find ourselves, ever sweatier and more ardent, after our fingers claw through nothing and nevermore to find other fingers, or a foot, or a shoulder, or hair, or a mouth, or the eyelashes of the other person, so we can approach and touch and come close. We almost make a metallic click, like two curved magnets, but our click, which culminates in a physic aura and an unimaginable jet of light, is never the end of our encounters over the undisturbed bed. After our epileptic screams subside and our membranes calm down, we turn on the light, and the image, violently mirrored, of our bodies floating, surrounded by droplets of sperm and sweat, Irina’s soaked hair, our membranes, our starving sexes, fill the suddenly alien, unbearable real...