August 18, 1998
Tuesday
7:00 p.m.
We went up to the seventh floor. She opened the door and let me into a cavernous, enormous apartment – half a dozen rooms. Among the sparse furniture, a double bed in the middle of the largest room caught my eye. I ran a finger over the coverlet. The silk answered with a memory of a body, her body.
Where was she?
I looked around.
The girl had vanished, only the cold scent of «Eternity» circling, driving me out of my mind. I walked through the empty rooms and found her nowhere... then I guessed. The splash of water and the steady rumble of the shower told me.
I went back to the bedroom and touched the blanket again. It seemed to hold onto her warmth. It gave off some kind of aura, tickling and intoxicating both body and mind. My God! I’d give anything to be under it.
– You can take a shower, – a voice more familiar than family shut off my mind, turned me around, and made me follow, past her, naked, fresh, and damp, into the bathroom. There, without ever really coming to, caught in a kind of sleepwalking trance, I stripped off my clothes and climbed under the hot spray. Switched to cold, then to lukewarm. Unable to shake the somnambulism that had taken hold of me, I stepped out at the sound of her voice calling.
My brain melted, spread out, slid like porridge down my throat into my chest, and, touching my heart, came to rest. A haze enveloped me.
I saw mountains with hoary peaks lit by the sunset, and a lake with water as blue as the sky hanging overhead. I saw a white horse galloping down from the mountains. The red light of the setting sun called it, demanded it. And the horse, reaching the shore, soared over the surface of the water and continued its gallop in my direction, in the direction of the setting sun. Two horses raced toward me: one white, the second pale, barely made out in the gathering dusk, inverted, a reflection galloping beneath the water. And both horses called and pulled me to them, one upward, the other down.
The vision, tender and unsteady, vanished.
I saw her – naked, beautiful. She lay on the bed. I stood before her. A thousand-volt arc, piercing the space between us, released the tension. I threw myself at her, she wrapped her arms around me and pressed her lips into mine.
It happened!
It happened! It happened!
It happened! It happened! It happened!
