Sun Alley. Cecilia Ştefănescu

on the floor, more than Superman. On the white sheet, on one of the six beds in the desolate ward of the emergency hospital, Sal contemplated the gauze bandage under which his warm hand pulsated. For the first time, he encountered that dull pain, getting sharp now and again, that suddenly separated his body from his mind. A new body was being born on his inside, growing under his skin, different from all he had felt so far. It felt different from the bike spills and from the blows received from the gang of bullies on Toma’s street, the fifteen- or sixteen-year-old tough guys who had put their bikes away in the attic long before and were now shamelessly touching and poking girls.

      The pain had seeped into his blood and was now forcefully pushed through his arteries, making his blood cells rush chaotically through all his organs – this unprecedented pain that had thrown him into the seclusion of the white hospital ward, made him stay with his eyes riveted to the ceiling for several hours in which not a thought, not even the most trifling and insignificant of thoughts, crossed his mind. His senses were petrified in a barren dream; his mind was stuck on his own inverted image into which, little by little, he descended.

      If you wish, you can do anything. You can jump with the soles of your feet right on the ceiling; you can hop around the neon lamps placed in the middle of the room like cracks in the walls of an open box through which sunshine seeps in. You can brush away the cobwebs in the corner and you can write your name in the dust. You can stay there, hanging unseen. But at the slightest relaxation of the mind, the image would turn back over, and the dizziness would make Sal close his eyes and jump off the bed with his feet on the floor. And, one Sunday before lunch, while he was heading to Toma’s to get a new game, the truth suddenly hit him, with the force of a boomerang returning to the present after a circuit of his personal history and jolting him out of his dream.

      That evening on the ward – with his ears whizzing, feeling dizzy from the iodine smell after an unsuccessful attempt to sleep – he felt an obscure urge to climb down from his bed and leave his room. Now that he was alone, he wanted to take a few aimless steps on the neon-lit hall of the hospital. He advanced on the circular aisle without encountering anybody, without hearing any sound apart from the jerky whoosh of a machine that was pumping air. When he thought he had gone all the way round and was about to return to his room, he opened the door of ward number 23 and saw before him a woman with black, curly shoulder-length hair held in place by a plastic hair band. She must have been around thirty, with a very pale complexion and round eyes like two black buttons. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, dressed in a T-shirt that only just covered her briefs. Sal drew back a step, but the woman reached an arm toward him.

      ‘Wait!’

      He stood still with his hand on the doorknob, daring neither to enter nor to cut and run out the door. He realised now that he had felt like leaving the room and running away from that pale and long-suffering lady. But she beckoned him to come in. And, as Sal advanced, her eyes became increasingly vivid and bright, as if two gems had grown inside them and taken the shape of the cheap buttons on his mother’s two-piece suit.

      ‘What’s your name?’

      ‘Mary Jane,’ a smooth voice murmured in his ear, and he almost felt Emi’s lips tickling his nape. The woman reached her arms out to him, and Sal advanced until he found his hands grasped by the woman’s translucent hands, which had bluish veins protruding through the skin.

      ‘Are you lost?’

      Sal relaxed. Instead of chilling him, the cold touch gave him a feeling of comfort and bliss. The gems had become eyes, the wiry hair had become silky and the skin on her cheekbones was glowing with colour.

      ‘I’m looking for my ward.’

      ‘What’s the matter with you?’

      ‘I cut my wrists and I lost a lot of blood.’

      The woman touched the tips of his fingers sticking out from under the bandage. ‘If you need anything, just tell me. What did you say your name was?’

      ‘Sal.’