Gaurav Sagar’s Reviews > Blinding > Status Update

Quilbrex! shouted Fra Armando down the underground corridor, through walls of pale-shining quartz flowers, and the guardian, completely covered in a rubber hazmat suit with a gas mask on his face, let us pass, after he pressed into each of our palms a glass cylinder, thick and warm, pointed at the tip, which he pulled liked expensive candies, from a shite cardboard box.

What if transferred myself into his martyred body? i would lay there, forever, a paralyzed jyphotic, dirty with excrement , half rotted, looking at the ceilinh with frightened eyes, while he, in my adolescent body, would run toward the autumnal world, in golden sunlight beyond the windows.

A few months after the tanks of Warsaw Pact entered Czechoslovakia, Romanian Securitate Department V receieved a series of the new assignments, some of which contradicted best practice protocols and had never before been proposed, and were set at the highest levels of state secrecy.

The final component of my treatment was massage. Long after I left the hospital, I continued to do it myself, in the mirror, like a woman worried she's getting old. I'd put a little talcum powder on my fingers, and start with my forehead, pushing my skin toward me temples and noting, day by day, how, if I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise, the folds in the left part of my brow took a clearer shape.

Maybe, in the heart of this book, there is nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling.... Last night, with all of my strength sucked dry, I fell asleep between my flaccid sheets and lay like a corpse frozen on a field, in an utter lack of existence that made death seem like a pointless, agitation, until I reacquired, for the first time in three of four years, my state of notural "revelation"

I recall the first and only hard-on of my childhood with the perplexity I have always had for the old paintings warehoused in the ponderous gallery of my memory, heaps upon heaps of paintings, with supple lichen flowering in layera thicker than collted paint, and the blind scorpions gnawing the pads of their frames.

I sit in my chair for a little while longer, in my attic with the oval window, on the edge of a galaxy. A quiet grows rosier as evening falls, interwoven with volatile and benign noises: the continuous song of the doves ()they often stop on the ledge and peer a round eye into the cave behind my window), toilets flushing in other apartments, the limpid cries of the boys playing soccer between cars parked in front.....

Lord, how she loved it! She had completely forgotten where she was; she'd stopped Costel's hand in hers long ago, her whole body and the world around her had disappeared, like hallucinations, like universes where no one had ever been born, where no one would ever understand, ever.... She was inside the movie.

In her imagination, the hideous U-shaped object, made of a waxy substance as pik as vomit, spaced by inhuman wires and teeth, was Leon's secret lover, with whom the virile crystal engaged in monstrous copulations. In the morning, Melanine drank the water from the glass, so the srystal seed would pass into her and live as long as he had waited in the bottom of the earth, among the mine-flower pearls,....

How strange, how bright that chep lipstick was, candy-flavored, on her young lips, below her chestnut eyes! Under the sky racing overhead like unraveling black smoke, she was the only thing with any color or life.