“Relax.” Audrey burst out laughing. “I was joking… fuck. You should’ve seen your face."

  She was laughing for real, completely unrestrained.

  So hard that tears welled up in her eyes, and she wiped them away with her index fingers, still shaken by the fit of laughter.

  The Mediator just stared at her, unable to react.

  After those words — I was joking — the sadness that had been crushing him began to give way.

  It didn’t disappear: it was eaten away from the inside, replaced by a dull, compact emptiness that was harder to endure.

  Naturally, there was another possibility:

  that she was joking about having joked.

  In that case, Anton might truly be dead.

  There was no way to tell where the joke ended and where everything else began — assuming such a boundary even existed.

  And that uncertainty, unhealthy as it was, felt paradoxically reassuring.

  Audrey wasn’t a reliable source.

  She never had been.

  And yet one question remained, stubbornly in place:

  why bring up Anton at all?

  “The truth is that Anton arrived in this world, just like you did in the past.

  And with him there’s also your old classmate, Mark.”

  Mark.

  Should he have reacted? Said something?

  The name stirred nothing inside him, as if he had heard it spoken about a stranger.

  The news that Anton was in the same reality should have shaken him.

  Instead, he remained still, impermeable, as though the information hadn’t yet found a surface to latch onto.

  He waited.

  With a taut restlessness, heavy with anxiety.

  Because by now a sensation had settled inside him with unpleasant clarity:

  the problem wasn’t where Anton was.

  The problem was that she knew his name.

  Whether Anton was alive in this world or another made little difference.

  Either way, it was a bad sign.

  “Does the name Mark mean nothing to you?” she asked, with cloying curiosity.

  “How do you know these things?” he asked, deliberately ignoring her question.

  She looked at him with an authoritative indifference.

  A gaze in which his fear immediately recognized itself.

  Audrey stood up.

  Statuesque.

  Only someone familiar with her worst side—assuming she even had a better one—could have inferred her intentions from the way she occupied the space.

  “Now I’m going to make you suffer a little,” she said, without any emotional inflection.

  How original, the Mediator thought.

  As she moved closer, he asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

  Audrey looked down at him with the same effortless, almost natural superiority with which a Japanese man would have looked at a Chinese man in early-1930s Manchuria.

  “You know,” she said.

  She struck his abdomen gently with the tip of her right foot.

  A light touch. Almost careless.

  Then the effect came.

  His abdomen compressed with an unnatural delay, as if, immediately after that harmless tap, the wheel of an invisible car had rolled over him.

  His eyes nearly bulged from their sockets. He spat a jet of blood that splashed onto Audrey’s legs as well.

  She jumped back, making a sound of disgust.

  With a sharp gesture, she shook the blood off using her powers.

  The coagulating blood reassembled into a red ribbon.

  The Mediator watched it writhe in midair.

  For an instant, it took the shape of a M?bius strip.

  He hoped with everything he had—gripped by a tightly controlled fear—that she wouldn’t make him swallow it.

  It didn’t happen.

  But not out of mercy.

  The ribbon tightened around his neck.

  It was choking him.

  Briefly.

  The plasmatic grip loosened, leaving him with something like a collar of blood around his throat—warm, pulsing.

  In the Mediator’s field of vision, Audrey’s finger looked like a conductor’s baton seen after spinning around drunk a dozen times.

  Sometimes she made his head slam against the furniture.

  Sometimes she sent it spinning in circles.

  Other times she moved it without any recognizable pattern.

  She laughed to herself, clearly enjoying it.

  All of a sudden, the right side of his body was violently dragged toward the ground—as if gravity had spent some time lifting weights and had become immensely stronger only within that tiny cone of the gravitational field.

  His head slammed hard, but the pain came dulled, muted.

  Now he had a noose of blood tight around his neck and his face crushed against the floor, lying on his right side.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “I was really in the mood to change seating arrangements for my ass, you know?” Audrey said.

  She stepped closer and sat down on his head.

  She rubbed her ass against the left side of his face.

  She got aroused. He too.

  “A bit uncomfortable,” she went on, “but it’s a kind of discomfort that has its reasons, I have to say.”

  She said it with the detached tone of someone reviewing a chair.

  Then the pressure her ass was exerting on his head increased.

  It felt like a watermelon being violently squeezed between the hands of a mountain gorilla.

  “Does it hurt, puppy?” Audrey asked, snickering.

  He clenched his teeth.

  Air was starting to run out.

  His heartbeat sped up even more.

  Then, suddenly, the pressure eased.

  “Come on, enough playing,” she said.

  He stayed there, panting, staring at the long legs in front of his eyes, in a state of total confusion.

  “You see,” Audrey went on, “I’d like to tell you a story.

  I’m not sure you’ll like it, but you’ll definitely find it interesting. No doubt about that.

  Would you like to hear it?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  She laughed gracefully, as if she had just heard a joke from her crush.

  “Then let’s begin,” she said. “It’s getting late, and I have a lot to say.”

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  The Mediator remained where he was, still half-pressed into the floor, waiting—almost expecting—the pain to resume. His body hadn’t yet received permission to believe it was over.

  His breathing was shallow, irregular. Each inhalation felt provisional, as if it might be revoked at any second.

  “I thought for a long time about how to begin this story.

  Or rather: where to begin it.

  I want you to truly identify with the character. And to do that, all those details I could easily discard—since they’re not strictly necessary for the purpose I’ve set for myself—become useful instead, because they help precondition your brain in the most appropriate way for our aims, in view of the final revelation.

  I think the correct technical term is peripeteia, though honestly I’m not entirely sure…”

  Our aims, the Mediator thought, uneasily.

  The Mediator swallowed. His throat still ached where the blood had tightened, as if the story were passing through there before reaching his brain.

  Audrey went on, her delivery unexpectedly narrative, almost innocent.

  “In any case, I eventually decided to start from a specific moment in the protagonist’s childhood.

  Imagine a child raised by two well-educated, well-off parents, but profoundly unaffectionate—almost as if he’d been born into an early-twentieth-century bourgeois family, when, as far as I know, hugging a child was considered a foolish thing.

  The house he lived in for the first eight years of his life was larger than average.

  Despite that, he spent most of his time shut away in his room, lost in fantasy.

  He had created a small group of imaginary friends, and together they had founded an organization that did a bit of everything.

  The recurring motif of his fantasies was clashes against a rival organization, led by a man presumably Italian, known in his mind only as Pedretti.

  He wasn’t a true villain.

  At most, the child wanted to defeat him—to prove he was stronger.”

  Something loosened behind his eyes, like an old seam.

  A degenerate subtype of flashbulb memory surfaced in the Mediator’s mind.

  A few features of Pedretti.

  The non-lethal “energy” weapons they fought with.

  He remembered—or perhaps constructed, in that very moment as Audrey spoke—a battle between his self-insert character and the Italian rival.

  Pedretti wielded an enormous greatsword, similar to Gatsu’s in Berserk, but made of indigo-colored energy.

  The protagonist held two katana-like blades, formed of pale, snowy-white energy.

  A faint, bittersweet sadness washed over him.

  Am I really the protagonist? he wondered.

  The memory of Pedretti surfaced in a hazy way, yet effortlessly, as if it truly belonged to him. It didn’t feel like he was trying to imagine what the words of that audio-tale were meant to evoke.

  “By around the age of eight, those fantasies were no longer able to satisfy his need for imaginative novelty.

  He hated physical activity with all his heart.

  He hated other children, whom he considered too foolish and boring to stimulate him in any way.

  School subjects were too easy and, for that very reason, unbearably dull.

  The cartoons he was allowed to watch—a limited selection due to parental control—were, in his opinion, absolute trash compared to what his imagination was capable of producing.

  In short, every road led to a childish form of blasé boredom, one that was slowly making him more and more apathetic.

  And yet, he felt an urgent need to refine the details of his mental drafts and to expand the boundaries within which his imagination could roam.

  There was still one option left.

  More than one, actually.

  There was drawing. Comics. But one, more than the others, had always tempted him.

  The house was overflowing with books. His mother was a voracious reader, especially of thrillers, but there were also poetry collections on the shelves. More than once, his search for material to feed his imagination had led him to stand in front of that bookcase, and every time he had stopped there, paralyzed by a kind of reverential fear. As if he were afraid of discovering that his imagination wasn’t equal to the evocative power hidden in words.

  He had always had a complicated relationship with words.

  At the time he wouldn’t have been able to describe it—certainly not in words—but one thing was clear: he wanted to learn as many as possible, and yet every new word left him with the feeling that something was slipping away. As if learning it were never enough. So he kept his distance. He didn’t know many.

  But now his imagination was stagnating. And words, arranged within a precise architecture, might have been the right means to explore new mental landscapes.

  One summer day, while his parents were on vacation—he had refused to go with them—and he was home with the nanny, who fortunately had understood that there was no need to hover over him, after several attempts he finally decided.

  He chose a novel.

  The Little Prince.

  A banal choice.

  It took him three days to read it all. During those three days, aside from eating and going to the bathroom a couple of times, he did almost nothing else. He wasn’t reading for entertainment. It was more like training.

  He had the computer beside him, and every time he encountered a word he didn’t know—or one he knew poorly, or one he found particularly euphonious—he looked it up, trying to connect more deeply with the text.

  It wasn’t a gratifying experience.

  He wondered why one should read thousands of words in exchange for so few moments that were truly beautiful. He came away disappointed. Maybe the problem was that specific novel. And yet he didn’t think the story itself was bad.

  The problem, he thought, was that it didn’t do what he wanted to be able to do with his own mind.

  He was convinced that the story was far better than the ones he created when he locked himself in his room, moved in strange ways, and made strange sounds. Later on he would understand that this made him “strange.” At the time, he didn’t concern himself with what others thought.

  It was simply a choice.

  A child who chooses solitude is a very sad thing, isn’t it?”

  The Mediator had been partially absorbed by the story, as if at any moment the tape of his own life might rewind before his eyes.

  The question caught him off guard.

  He answered honestly, in a dull, spectral, dry tone:

  “Yes. It’s very sad.”

  His eyes were closed.

  And yet he couldn’t summon any memory, nor form any mental image. He felt that he could—and wanted to—but he kept listening, detached.

  “Mmh,” he let out.

  “I was saying that he knew for certain there were many stories more beautiful than the ones he could imagine himself. And that The Little Prince was one of them. But stories no longer held his attention. He felt, with growing clarity, that imagination could do much more.

  There were moments, during his waking daydreams, when the mental images resonated with something mysterious, something not entirely graspable. He wanted, at all costs, to understand what that was.

  If not novels, then perhaps poetry was the right choice.

  He chose a poetry anthology: a mix of poems by different authors, names the child had, of course, never heard of. He understood almost none of the poems. And yet, nearly all of them captivated him.

  Some words struck him like a bolt from a clear sky.

  Above all, “I illuminate myself with immensity” by the Italian poet Ungaretti, and “I am nothing. I will never be anything. I cannot want to be anything. Apart from this, I have in me all the dreams of the world” by the Portuguese poet Pessoa-Or rather, his heteronym álvaro de Campos.

  As already mentioned, he had no clear idea of what the authors meant by those words.

  But that, to the child, didn’t matter in the slightest.

  That mysterious thing, moreover, remained just that.

  If anything, it had perhaps become even more mysterious.

  And yet he had understood something more.

  Not about it—but about the relationship between himself and that elusive element.

  The sensation the child experienced is, of course, ineffable.

  Let’s say that the interaction between his vivid yet still immature imagination and Italian hermeticism—or the Lusitanian’s magical nihilism—showed him, with sudden clarity, that the relationship between humankind and the infinite can at best be an asymptote.

  And that, somehow, he had managed to see that asymptote.

  But “asymptote” isn’t the right word.

  It isn’t even properly an image.

  And I’m not a poet, so it’s difficult for me to make others understand something I’ve never truly experienced myself.

  Whatever. Let’s drop it.”

  Frustration.

  The Mediator felt a sudden, violent urge to find the words himself—to describe that sensation.

  That sensation Audrey was talking about reminded him of something.

  He felt nostalgia for something he could no longer name. And melancholy, as if he were certain he had once felt it, long ago.

  He was identifying more and more with the child.

  If the narrator had been reliable, one might have concluded that the story described a crucial part of his childhood. More than once, he had felt chills run through his body.

  And then there was something else.

  It was the first time she had shown herself vulnerable in front of him. The thought that the protagonist of the story might truly be him as a child—and that something about him had been enough to make her seem fallible—sparked an unexpected surge of pride in him.

  “In any case, it was a spark.

  That spark ignited the child’s passion for poetry.

  At first, his interest was generic. He explored that world in what seemed like a random way, but with method. He fixated on every detail until he realized he had chosen the wrong one, and then shifted his focus elsewhere. The speed with which he identified the real problem to concentrate on was astonishing for someone his age. His stubbornness, too, was extraordinary.

  From that day on, he devoted almost all his free time to poetry. And he would have devoted all of his living time to it, if he could have.

  His idiolect expanded at an excessive pace: words, structures, techniques to be exploited in order to create—or understand—a node in the infinite informational network that poetry is. Soon his English teacher noticed he had an extra gear. He improved in his other subjects as well, because now everything intrigued him. Everything could prove useful in building poetically meaningful and unique formulas.

  So more and more teachers began to praise him.

  And his parents began to take a greater interest in him.

  He disdained the teachers’ compliments.

  He despised his parents’ interest.

  He believed those authorities had nothing of real value to teach him. He found it absurd that poetry could even be taught in school. And his parents’ love seemed so artificial to him that, at times, he felt like vomiting it back onto them.

  I’m closing the distance, he once said, but for now it seems nothing has changed.

  He said this to his English teacher, who had suggested that he take part in the Youth Poetry Contest in the city of Salt Lake.

  She asked him to clarify.

  “The distance between you and what?”

  “My first poem.”

  “But you’ve already written so many. Some of them truly beautiful, really. I think you have a good chance of winning. Still, if you don’t feel like participating, that’s fine too.”

  Imagine a woman who has taught English for twenty years, standing in front of this tall, skinny child, with a gaunt face, bowl-cut hair, pale skin, who looks at her with icy eyes and answers with absolute confidence—confidence no one would have expected from him:

  “If I participate, I win. I know it. It just bothers me that someone might think this trash can be called poetry.”

  He participated.

  And he won.

  He received a great deal of praise, which annoyed him. Deflecting compliments was essential so they wouldn’t interfere with his pursuit of authenticity. With so many poems already written in the world, being authentic had become almost impossible.

  So he stopped entering competitions.

  During middle school, a more serious problem emerged. At first he managed to contain it, but over time it opened an irreparable rift between him and his vocation.

  Puberty.

  Setting aside the rapid physical, hormonal, and psychological changes—which severely tested his rigid self-discipline by making him a noticeably different person from the one who had made that decision, changes he nonetheless managed to handle thanks to the self-control he had developed in the preceding years—the main problem was his peers.

  People he was forced to interact with, whether he liked it or not. At least indirectly."

  Toward the end of the story, while Audrey was still speaking, something began to stir in his brain—beyond the cringe brought on by the childish voice she used when giving the boy his lines.

  Something abnormal.

  Something painful.

  A pulsating pain.

  Unilateral.

  Intracranial.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Then opened them again.

  Audrey’s voice was still there, but now it reached him like an off-screen sound, slightly misaligned, as if it had lost its anchor point to the image. In front of him, everything was blurred and excessively bright: some objects seemed to emit their own light, others appeared washed out, as though he were suddenly looking at them through eyes lacking the proper diopters.

  His body began to go numb.

  Scotomas appeared.

  Darkness spread, devouring the light in patches.

  Sensory perception collapsed gradually, dissolving one sense after another, until—for an instant, as if he had been abruptly thrown into a sensory deprivation chamber—he felt nothing at all.

  He was floating.

  A sea reduced to just two tones: black and white.

  Like a Mooney image, but three-dimensional.

  And dynamic.

  Yes—dynamic. There was movement.

  Some white patches moved erratically, like cocaine-fueled spectral figures; others followed slower, more rhythmic trajectories.

  Then, gradually, the senses returned.

  First weight.

  Then gravity.

  Then contact.

  He felt himself anchored to the ground again.

  He looked down at himself.

  He too was an unstable jumble of black-and-white shapes. White dominated. The parts of his body were indistinguishable except in brief flashes, as if the body schema itself were incomplete. The same could be said of the surrounding environment.

  He touched something that felt like a bench.

  Behind him, he sensed the cold. A locker?

  He was sitting.

  But the height was wrong.

  That body was too short to be his.

  He had no agency.

  He was trapped inside a body that moved and reacted on its own, as if volition had been left behind.

  Then he heard a voice.

  “Oh, did you see how big Janette’s tits have gotten?” said a high-pitched male voice.

  A boy’s voice.