There’s a pantomime artist wandering through my gallery, in the tender solitude of night. Not quite a Fitzgerald scene, but not far from it. Nirvana’s Nevermind album is playing in the background – such a cliché. The lights hum faintly, like echoes of forgotten applause, while I sit alone on a marble bench, half-shadow, half-thought, gazing at the paintings – my paintings – each one bleeding a different version of me. As I exhale, I feel like my lungs are made of sharp glass that shatters fast inside my chest.
Breathe in – it’s just a storm.
A thousand jagged splinters are now slicing through my breath; a hymn of revolt against my own irregular heartbeat.
Breathe out – A thousand thoughts keep flooding my mind, trapping me in their web.
and I just drown within.
And I choke. And I choke… I cannot breathe.
The heavy air turns solid in my throat, my lungs collapse, and my whole little world narrows to the sound of my breath.
It fills my skull, a brutal rhythm I cannot stop.
It beats like a mad thunder: so so so bound to drop.
While touching my chest and wondering if this is my last moment alive, I see he is now gliding through my paintings.
He is the artist of all time, a Kafkaesque silhouette painting his loneliness in silent screams.
In the meanwhile – the lights, again, like nervous saints, begin to tremble: They buzz They bruise They won’t die clean.
He’s dancing faster – my Fred Astaire on fractured dawn while that cold glass sighs beneath my skin.
At midnight, we finally face each other: two hollow phantoms mid-spin And now The agony is over The thick air folds The floor thrums like a held breath.
He spins in the limelight – like a tragedy dressed in grace. and our hearts slowly collide, unmindful of their fragility. and life keeps drumming quiet…
Creating a new “heart-shaped box” carved from silence and sin Making me feel complete before tomorrow’s grand opening.
I guess I should have always asked sooner… Where have you been?
Note: “Tender solitude of night” is used as an allusion to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night (1934). “Heart-shaped box” is used as an allusion to Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box,” the first single from In Utero (1993).
HB was a novel of 6 books, written on a blog, between 2011 – 2015 by two co-authors, with more than 28 000 views and fans all around the world. This is the continuation of the story that never ended.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, events, organizations, and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, or events is purely coincidental. The views and actions of the characters in this book do not reflect those of the authors. References to violence, crime, or other harmful or illegal behavior are included solely for narrative purposes and are not intended to encourage, condone, or promote such conduct. This work is intended for entertainment purposes only. The authors disclaim any liability for any misuse or misinterpretation of the material contained herein. This book contains themes related to mental health, including references to suicide and psychological distress, which some readers may find sensitive or triggering. These topics are portrayed as part of a fictional narrative and are not intended to encourage or romanticize self-harm or suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please consider reaching out to a qualified professional, trusted individual, or a local support service. This work does not intend to promote, endorse, or include discriminatory or harmful content related to race, ethnicity, or identity. Any such elements, if present, exist solely within the context of the fictional narrative. Reader discretion is advised.
Portions of this chapter were translated from Romanian into English or Spanish with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI). The AI was used solely as a translation and language refinement tool. The story, characters, plot, and all creative content are entirely my own.
Don’t let go of my hand (don’t let go of my hand)’
(Michael Jackson – Whatever happens)
‘Humanity’s not all it’s cracked up to be.’
(quote from Damon Salvatore, played by Ian Somerholder –
in the TV Series ‘The Vampire Diaries’)
‘ Vincent Hanna: So, you never wanted to have a normal life?
Neil McCauley: What the hell is this? Barbecues and baseball games?’
(dialogue between Vincent Hanna, played by Al Pacino
and Neil McCauley, played by Robert de Niro,
in the movie ‘Heat’)
D.’s part:
I walked into a restaurant at midday…I stepped onto a thick light-brown carpet and walked across a brown carpet before going down two or three steps into the main dining area. On the restaurant, each wooden table is covered with white tablecloths, giving the room a cozy feel. I sat down at a table, near a large aquarium, filled with snakes instead of fish. Max was waiting for me at the table.
We are both dressed casually. He has a black T-shirt and jeans, while I’m wearing my usual black suit jacket and black skirt.
Behind him, more tables extend into the background. Beyond them, an open doorway leads outside, where people walk in and out, and the view opens onto trees and flowers.
Max looks at me and takes my hand into his. I smile and I know I am happy.
Max: D. you know what I have just realized…we never had a proper date.
And then all of a sudden, the fish tank bursts. Snakes get out and they go everywhere, some crossing below our legs. I know they are non venomous, however I am so damn scared.
People start screaming and there is general chaos…waiters run around, trying to catch the snakes and tell everyone to stay calm. And we don’t move. He looks at me in a way that he’s telling me he is protecting me. While everyone is running around, we remain at the table, while he keeps holding my hand.
And I woke up. Another messed up dream.
5.15 AM. Monday. Getting ready for the ER.
I live in Brooklyn, in a flat that is modern and spacious, with large windows, which are covered in long dark blinds. I have photophobia, so I don’t like natural lights as much. The apartment isn’t anything extravagant, but it serves the need, and it is in a good neighborhood. It has wooden floors, white walls, and an open living room that connects to a small kitchen. And it is also a storage place for all the guns & forbidden things that shouldn’t exist in such an apartment.
I have a Range Rover and a Lexus GX parked in the parking space of the building but cannot go to work with these. Need to keep the appearances.
I came to America at 15 after graduating high school early in London as an academic prodigy. I was accepted to MIT, where I earned my B.S. in Chemistry by the age of 20. During my second year, I was recruited into a highly classified U.S. government talent program for exceptional students, a commitment that lasted until I was 23. After MIT, I went to Harvard, where I earned both my J.D. and my M.D. while continuing my work with the program by 26. I completed my first two years of Emergency Medicine residency before putting my medical training on hold to continue my government assignments – and that’s when I met the Evil. At 28. Happy Birthday, D.
Now, after years away, I’m finally back as a PGY-3.
I get dressed and get out of the apartment at 6 AM, after a shower and my 10 minutes morning workout. Need to get to NYU Langone Hospital Brooklyn.
I always carry a bag with me – a medium-sized travel bag. Inside are the clothes for my other job, my makeup, a pair of heels, guns, knives, a pepper spray, smoking grenades, a tactical flashlight and a handful of other things that aren’t necessarily legal.
I can’t exactly show up at the hospital dressed the way I do for my other life. I just dress casually: a black T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a vintage leather jacket.
I step onto the subway knowing I’ve got about 20 minutes before I arrive.
The New York subway is nothing like London’s. London has a certain elegance to it. New York is something else entirely. It feels like the entire world is squeezed into one moving box. Some people are heading to six-figure jobs in Manhattan; others are just trying to make it through another day. You can’t ride it for long without your perspective shifting. But it keeps you humble. It makes me feel like I just live like other people – normal people.
When I arrive at the hospital, I know I have to talk to Mila, Theo, and Damian before I go in. They are my interns. I always try to get there by 6:30, change, and have a 10 -15 minute huddle with them before the shift. It’s important to organize yourself for the day, and it’s even more important to be able to connect with the people around you. A habit I picked up when I was at Colombia…
All three of them are still at the beginning of their journey and want to learn from me. They are all studying at Columbia. Ivy League. Theo and Damian are on scholarships, as they are originally from Croatia and New Zealand, while Mila was born and raised in the UK to American parents, who decided to move back a few years ago.
Theo is white, with curly brown hair and green eyes. He’s feisty. Damian is more calculated. He has black hair, dark eyes, and African heritage. Both Theo and Damian are tall and you can see they are the kind of guys who go often to the gym.
Mila has light brown hair, brown eyes and she’s moderately tall. She’s very direct and can get you into trouble sometimes, but she’s very eager to learn, and when needed, she slips into that polished, posh British attitude.
I walk into the hospital, take the elevator, greet the reception staff, head to the locker room, change, and then go to my colleague Mark, so he can tell me what I’ve got today before my little huddle.
I always liked taking over the shift from Mark. He’s born and raised in New York, knows the system and he’s the calculated type, straight to the point. He knows what to do, when to do it, and how to balance the treatment for the patients. It’s very important to know how to dose properly and not give a patient more than they need, but also to know how fast to act when it’s an emergency or when they’re dealing with life-threatening issues.
So, Mark, what do we have on the list today?
I stop in front of reception and notice there are more people than usual – visitors and doctors rushing around.
D., we have a problem… Camilo Hernandez has been admitted. They caught him at the port with a shipment of cocaine. They want to extradite him to Colombia, but the mayor and the authorities are keeping him here. He was shot twice. We operated on him – they just brought him out of surgery. The wounds were on his left arm, and they were superficial.
I stare into space, and I know exactly who he’s talking about. An old “friend” from Colombia…I know far better who Camilo is; how I took his streets from him and how much he hated it. Even so, I let him survive and continue running his business. And that’s why we have this mess now.
Oh, if I tell the Evil…but let’s not go that way.
What Mark doesn’t know is that I used to work with the intelligence services, and I could make one phone call right now, have him handed over to the people he’s supposed to be with, and leave the local police out of it.
Mark continues.
Other than that, the ambulance called. They said they’re bringing in a few overdose patients – the usual. Fentanyl. Apparently, it’s pretty bad.
Mark closes the chart and hands it to me.
And for the rest… you know the drill. Same day, different story.
I take the chart and look at it.
Any plans with Jessica?
Oh, D., I just want to go home and sleep. I need that vacation really badly.
I smile.
Soon, Mark, soon. Keep the faith.
He laughs and walks away.
I take the chart and head to the locker room to meet Mila, Damian, and Theo for the huddle and briefing.
Camilo…Damn.
The last thing I needed. I think about calling Dean – my internal contact at the secret service agency – and telling him that maybe it’s time for them to take him directly…As I know, if I call the Evil, it’s game over. Actually, the one I should call is Michael, but after Colombia, all ended between us. Well, I guess it’s normal, since I chose to be loyal to his brother and rescue him from the sanatory I put him in.
I walk through the door and see Mila, Theo, and Damian standing in the locker room, changing into their hospital clothes. As usual, we form a circle and I talk to them.
This morning, knowing what’s going on with this whole Camilo situation, I think I need to be careful how I deliver the message. I don’t have to show any hard feelings. At the same time, we need to prepare for the fentanyl emergencies.
So, for the fentanyl cases, can we give them the standard protocol? Theo asks me.
Yes, you can do that. We need to stabilize them first.
Theo is always calculated and always wants to do his job quickly.
Then Mila and Damian have other questions about what else we might have on the shift, how we’ll divide the cases between us, the standard things we usually go over.
And what are we doing tonight? Are we still going to dinner? Damian asks.
Yes, we’re still on for dinner at the Plaza. I think we’ve earned one.
They all laugh. I need that dinner myself.
I’ll call later and reconfirm, Mila says.
I nod in approval.
We get ready to walk out of the locker room and start the shift.
And I think… if they only knew who I really am, what I do… if they knew even a part of who I am. It’s interesting to see how some people see you like this – as a mentor, as a leader, as their boss…yeah.
We head into the emergency department.
The doors swing open. The paramedics rush in with three young adults suffering from fentanyl overdoses.
I turn to Theo, Damian, and Mila.
Okay, you can put them in these beds over here. Start administering the protocol, then draw blood for labs and order CT scans of their lungs.
They nod in understanding. Each of them takes charge of one patient and settles them into their assigned beds.
Nothing else critical comes in from the ambulances, apart from an elderly woman with what looks like a burn on her arm, probably from cooking. One of the other doctors on shift takes her case. Those patients wouldn’t have come to me anyway – that’s why we divide responsibilities among the staff according to our assigned roles.
I walk over to the beds where Theo, Damian, and Mila are working.
Then, without warning, the power cuts out.
Screams echo through the emergency department as the lights die.
I don’t know if the outage has affected the entire hospital. Through the doors, which are still open from when the ambulance came in, I can see that the neighboring buildings still have electricity.
Just not our hospital.
Immediately, I think I know what this is about. My dear friend, Camilo.
Nothing like this has ever happened before, and it’s too much of a coincidence for Camilo to be here at the exact moment the power fails. I cannot take the chance. I have to move.
At the same time, I remember that earlier that morning, when I took over the shift from Mark, on my way from reception to the locker room for the huddle, in that 1 minute and 53 seconds, I examined how many several critically ill patients there were. The advantage of having a high IQ with LLI. Three of them were dependent on electrically powered ventilators. Now, with the power out, they would only have minutes before their condition became life-threatening.
I shout across the department, giving Mila, Theo and Damian orders. I know they’ve already administered the necessary medication to the fentanyl patients.
Go now to beds 22, 23 and 37! Stay with the critical patients and keep them stable.
I yell and I leave. I switch on my phone’s flashlight and hurry down the corridor.
I reach the locker room and immediately change back into my jeans, T-shirt, jacket, and sneakers. Over my clothes, I pull on my surgical gear, along with a mask and surgical cap. I need to stay undercover.
I grab my bag.
I know I have to reach the 2nd floor, where Camilo is.
I can’t risk anyone seeing me. If the cartel has infiltrated the hospital, I can’t afford to walk openly through the stairwells by myself.
I take a different route. Not the public emergency stairwell shown on the hospital’s evacuation maps – the ones anyone can find on the hospital’s website – but a restricted staff emergency stairwell reserved for exceptional situations, such as major security incidents or terrorist attacks.
I make my way through it until I reach the second floor.
Carefully, I ease the door open. I’m standing at one end of the hallway. Camilo’s private room is all the way at the opposite end. That’s when I see them.
Several armed men are entering the floor from the other side, moving with purpose towards Camilo’s room.
I take my phone and text Dean a code, only known by us at the agency. Then, I pull a smoke grenade from my bag and throw it down the hallway in order to temporarily make everyone fall asleep for a few minutes.
Smoke rapidly fills the corridor.
Keeping my face covered with a special mask I take from my bag, I move through the haze to the end of the hall.
I manage to get into Camilo’s room. He’s asleep.
I look around, close the blinds on the windows. I act quickly.
I take a syringe out of my bag and inject him with a substance, enough to paralyze him, so I know I have control over his body. I am the only one with the antidote for that substance, so that will give me some leverage.
I inject him directly because I don’t want to risk waiting for an IV drip.
I finish the injection, take the syringe, and the very next second at 3 cartel agents come through the door carrying Kalashnikov rifles. I raise my hands, since I’m still wearing my hospital gear.
I pretend to be his doctor. Let the fun begin.
Please don’t shoot. Please don’t shoot. I am his doctor. My name is Dr. Jenny Smith, and I am the surgeon who operated on him. He is not stable. He needs treatment, and he is currently under a substance from which he will not wake up. Only if I inject him every few hours with another substance will he wake up.
I have a slightly shaky, nervous voice… just getting into character.
I see them looking at me.
There are a few moments of silence, and one of them says in broken English.
Can you take him off the machines?
I nod.
Then I start doing it.
And I hear them talking to each other in Spanish.
Tenemos que llevárnosla. Si de verdad es la doctora, todavía nos sirve.
¿Y después?
Cuando lleguemos al cuartel, se acabó. Nos deshacemos de ella. No puede quedar ningún testigo.
Entendido. Que mantenga con vida a Camilo hasta entonces. Después… ya no la necesitaremos. (1)
I act as if I don’t understand anything. I look at them, trying to keep my voice steady.
If you want him alive, we need to move him in a wheelchair first. Then we’ll transfer him into an ambulance. There’s one parked behind the hospital. I’ll show you where it is.
One of the agents narrows his eyes.
Why the back?
The front entrance is crowded. And the police might be here soon.
The three of them exchange a quick look. Finally, the one in charge nods.
Fine. You lead the way. But don’t try anything.
I won’t.
‘cause if I will… you will be gone very soon. But not yet.
We put Camilo into a wheelchair, we go downstairs, we load him into the ambulance, and I get into the back with him and my bag. The agents are with us. One gets into the front to drive the ambulance, and two stay with us in the back.
I’m sitting beside him, and the two agents are sitting across from us with their weapons pointed in our direction.
One of the agents – the same one who spoke to me before – looks at me and says:
Don’t do anything stupid.
The ambulance starts moving. I’ve already given the guy who’s driving the directions for where to drive, where to exit, and the exit codes, so no one can suspect that anything is wrong.
I wait until we reach the main boulevard in Brooklyn.
I know I have to act quickly. I know I have to do what I was trained to do. I know Camilo won’t stay unconscious for very long, and that isn’t to my advantage.
I keep my eyes on the road ahead through the rear door window, waiting.
The moment the ambulance reaches the main boulevard, I know this is the moment.
I lunge forward, catching one of the guys off guard. His rifle slips from his hands as I drive him backward into the side of the ambulance. The second man reacts immediately, throwing himself towards me. We crash into the cabinets lining the wall. The metal doors open as equipment scatters across the floor. I pick up the oxygen tank and hit him. I pick up as well the surgical scissors.
I manage to wrench one of the rifles away and throw it across the ambulance, out of everyone’s reach. The guy I initially hit now grabs me by the shoulder, but I drive him into the wall with enough force to send him collapsing to the floor and I take out the scissors and cut his throat.
The remaining man lunges again.
I twist away, forcing him off balance, and he crashes into the rear doors. Before he can recover, I take the rifle and shoot him 4 times.
The driver keeps speeds up. I climb into the front.
He turns towards me. I take off the doctor’s coat and put it around his neck. The ambulance lurches forward at high speed. I am strangling him, while I turn and look towards the back. Camilo’s wheelchair is rocking from side to side, sliding dangerously with every sharp turn.
I just hope he doesn’t crash into any of the medical equipment left unsecured in the rear compartment. The driver becomes unconscious within seconds and I take control of the ambulance.
I slide into the driver’s seat, grip the wheel, and hit the accelerator. He’s not dead. I know I have to keep one alive for the investigation.
I speed up and minutes later I pull the ambulance the secured entrance of the agency headquarters. I jump out, open the rear doors, and lower Camilo’s wheelchair onto the pavement and push him through the entrance.
The moment I cross the threshold, I slam my hand against the large red emergency button mounted on the wall.
The alarm echoes through the building. I shout.
Code Black!
Within seconds, agents flood the corridor from every direction. I point them to the ambulance, to make sure they take care of the one who’s still alive and the other 2 potential dead bodies. I go back and pick up my bag and walk inside.
Dean is already coming down the staircase, his expression shifting from confusion to disbelief the moment he recognizes me.
Dean, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.
Yeah, D., it’s been a long time, indeed.
2 agents start searching me, while staying in front of Dean.
You know there’s protocol. You have to come in and explain everything. Especially for an inactive agent.
I look at him.
Yes, I know the protocol. I know I have to come and do that, but I don’t have time right now. And this… is gonna be news soon.
The agents are still surrounding me.
Let her go, I will deal with it, Dean says.
The agents let me go. I look at the clock on the wall. It’s 12.30.
I know I already have to be at my new job. I ask for the restroom. I need to take off all my hospital gear.
I enter and first thing is to wipe the blood from my hands, and change into a suit and heels. I do my makeup, put on perfume, place the rest of my clothes in my bag, throw the hospital gear into the trash. I look at myself in the mirror for a few seconds and take a deep breath.
What a day.
I really didn’t expect to kill anyone today. But I had to do what needed to be done.
I walk out of the building and stop a taxi.
I know I have to go to the bank and start trading.
I check my phone and see the hospital’s WhatsApp group flooded with messages. I text Mila, Damian and Theo on our group to let them know I had to go to the other job and that I see them tonight. I read their texts and they seem to have everything in order.
I also hear at the radio in the cab the news: Camilo Hernandez has been handed to the secret services this morning, in an escape from NYU Langone Hospital Brooklyn, organized by the notorious cartel…
I put in my Airpods and turn on my Spotify playlist as I cannot listen to that. This is going to be a long day. It is also one of those days where I would badly need to drink.
Then I remind myself that I can’t drink.
I mean, I can, but I’m an ex-addict.
So, I really need to take care of myself.
I can’t do that to myself.
When those overdose patients came in this morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the shelves of drugs we have in the hospital. How many combinations could be made to cause an overdose… and how I could access them in a second.
It’s a battle with addiction every single day. A hard battle.
It hurts to see it in other people because I know how deeply it can affect you.
And no matter how many support groups there are, or how many places are supposed to help you talk about it and recover, it’s a lonely journey, where it’s just you with yourself.
However, I don’t have time to think about that.
I need to go and make some money on Wall Street.
The Evil’s part:
What a mess… I can’t even begin to describe how disastrous all of this is. I’ve never been in a situation like this before – not since the very beginning of beginnings. And I’ve lived through more of human history than anyone could imagine.
But after being locked away in that asylum with Hans and the rest of the lunatics, I lost my powers.
Michael and I always had one rule throughout history: whenever we created something or made someone dangerous, especially brilliant minds capable of changing the course of the world, we made sure they didn’t stay alive long enough to become a threat. This time, I let one slip through. That was my mistake. One I have no intention of repeating. What can I say… when I left the sanatorium, let’s say that this message was very well understood and communicated at a global scale.
Now I have to leave and travel the world, to really understand the damage. Which, once again, is far from ideal. Sure, my brother and I have supernatural abilities, but every time we use them, we disturb the balance of the world. Whatever I do has to be a quick in and out. Otherwise, we start tearing at the fabric of time itself.
It’s fascinating, really. Humanity’s greatest engineers are still trying to figure out teleportation… while I can do it in an instant, whenever I choose. I know they recently were able to do the successful teleportation of a photon’s quantum state, between two separate quantum dots over a 270-meter free-space link in Rome. Amateurs… they should really look at the concept of complete quantum state transfer.
Basically, every particle in an object has to be linked with a corresponding set of particles at the destination. To create a perfect ‘match’. Then, the wavefunction would be able to transfer all the quantum information to the destination: all the atomic positions, the molecular bonds… all that matters is to reconfigure piece by piece the matter into an identical quantum state. Once the match is done, the initial object will be destroyed and the new one will ‘created’…
Ahh, I should teach. I tell myself that all the time. But I know there are secrets that can never be told – secrets that Michael and I have to keep to ourselves.
And with D., another mess. And now, there are souls like Max’s, trying to break the veil of death. How did we end up here? In the same kind of situation… repeating the same patterns. It’s utterly humiliating and deeply disturbing.
And the pandemic… damn, that wasn’t in the books. At all. That shouldn’t have happened. There is something that humans know as the theory of chaos… It’s the closest theory I can use to explain what happened with the pandemic. There is a lot that should not have happened. Lives lost. Lives saved. Michael and I in no control.
We are like yin and yang, my brother and I…if we do not balance each other, we cannot succeed.
D. and I had been through a lot…since the moment I entered her life. Humans like her don’t repeat as much through the history of time and they are born with a certain mission. In her case, she has to work with me…
My brother was smart enough and took advantage of this. However, I never expected that we would be so close to the Apocalypse. This has never happened. And we’ve been through two World Wars. And prevented the Third one… but that’s a story for another time.
And Max… that imbecile. Only when I think that he might be back and trigger her so much trauma. It took me agrees to make her realize how toxic he was and how she wasn’t doing everything she needed to maximize her potential because of him. Now imagine the risk of having all this work being undone.
But today is not the day to worry about that. I have to go in all the 4 corners of the world: Longyearbyen (Svalbard) in Norway, Sinabang in Indonesia, Ushuaia in Argentina and Puerto Villamil (Galápagos) in Ecuador…to see the damage. But one at a time. I start with Svalbard.
D.’s part:
I arrive at the bank for the afternoon shift. I only trade on European markets, that’s my specialty. I sit on my desk, and hear my colleagues talking about Camilo…that idiot.
Hey, D., did you see what happened this morning?
They know I have a part-time job at the hospital, but they don’t know what I am doing and where.
I nod, while looking at the handover Word document and check the latest news and stock exchanges. I don’t have much time to talk while I work there. When you trade, you have to be quick. Markets are ruthless.
I trade both listed and OTC. The markets open and I can see a lot of panic on the listed stock exchanges, due to the events in New York this morning and the news coming from Colombia. Most stocks plunge with 8% on panic selling. After the first 30 minutes, I see prices moving up and down with gains and losses of approx. 5%.
The OTC market is even more chaotic. Fewer centralized quotes, thinner liquidity. Bid-ask spreads widen. Dealers constantly adjusting their quotes.
I know I don’t need to try to predict the markets’ direction. I need to wait for exaggerated moves, enter after panic-driven selloffs, and sell once prices recover.
This is how I will accumulate gains and avoid holding positions for long.
And I am right…as always.
It’s 4 PM and my strategy seems to work.
I have exactly twenty minutes for a break. Before I quit smoking, this used to be my two-cigarette break. Now it’s my tea break.
I need to stay focused because I’m trading across multiple portfolios, and I have to make sure I’m maximizing the NAV.
I told Salah to meet me at the café across from the building.
We’ve been seeing each other for a while. We’ve had sex a few times, but I’ve always been emotionally distant with him. I know he wants something more from me. I know he’s trying. I just can’t bring myself to think about that.
One morning, I woke up beside him after dreaming about Max, and ever since then I’ve told him not to sleep over at my apartment or stay there overnight anymore.
I enter the coffee shop, say hello to him and order my mint tea, while he gets himself a protein smoothie.
Classic – such a professional basketball player thing to do.
While we are waiting for our order, he stands behind me. I knew he is watching me.
I know Salah’s looking me up and down, taking in my skirt, my silk stockings, my stiletto heels. I know he’s wondering what I’d be like in bed… and I also know that he sees me as the kind of girl that’s unavailable. That’s too busy with her trading job. That she might be lonely at night or that she had a few bad experiences with guys and that she lost her faith in guys.
What Salah doesn’t know is that, to be honest, I haven’t met men who are fundamentally different from Max. Sure, I’ve met better versions – men who weren’t as low or as toxic – but the point is that Max set the standard for just how bad someone can be. And sometimes that improved version that I see of a man isn’t necessarily what a woman truly wants – it’s just someone who fills the emptiness when we’re alone. That doesn’t necessarily mean sex. It simply means attention.
And when all of them start to act like shining heroes, who show up, care, and even love… that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re what a woman truly needs. It just means they’re an improved version of the benchmark Max set.
As in the end, men are mostly the same. It’s incredibly rare to find the kind of man you see in movies or certain romance novels – the kind who respects his woman with the same reverence he has for God, or whatever higher power he believes in.
And apparently, if we’re going by what Michael said – and what the Evil confirmed – that Max and I had that real, true love. Can you imagine what that says about humanity these days if we were considered true love? And then people wonder why the world is falling apart.
I mean, if those are the standards we’re starting with, how is anyone supposed to survive, let alone be genuinely happy?
I pick up my tea and watch him while he’s still waiting for his smoothie.
He’s tall, of African descent, born and raised in America, and he plays in the professional basketball league. He’s younger than me with a few years, he’s 28.
He’s always dressed in the latest Adidas gear because he’s one of their ambassadors. He also likes to wear a bandana on his head from time to time and he has this tendency to keep his jeans or sweatpants hanging low; he is built with tons of muscle and a six-pack…And he’s tattooed.
I have a soft spot for tattoos. Max actually got one just for me that said “La Rubia”. Of course, it said “La Rubia”… but I don’t tell this to Salah. And Max also used to dress like that and look similar to him. No wonder I am attracted to him.
He’s also an overachiever, just like me, addicted to adrenaline. He’s very successful.
And yet, he keeps chasing someone like me.
He always picks me up in his Bentley, and we listen to rap because he knows it’s my favorite kind of music.
But at the same time… well, like I said, he’s nowhere near special. There’s nothing about him that makes me see him any differently.
He’s just another man in my life.
Do you want to have dinner tonight?
He asks, while looking at me.
I look at my watch. Exactly twelve minutes left.
I can’t. I’m going out with my coworkers.
The barista calls his name for the smoothie. He walks over to the counter and picks it up.
You’re always busy when it comes to me.
He seems to be annoyed, but he doesn’t show it to me.
I play the innocent card.
Are you accusing me of something?
He takes a sip of the smoothie without looking at me.
No. I just think you’re avoiding me.
I don’t react. My face doesn’t give anything away…but his confidence amuses me.
You’ll have to make me a better offer if you actually want me to have dinner with you.
I pick up my tea.
You know I have standards.
I start walking towards the door, while he follows behind me.
So you have standards, D?
He says it like he’s making fun of me.
We step outside, and he walks me to the entrance of the bank.
As we’re walking, I turn around and keep moving backwards, till I’m facing him, leaving a comfortable distance between us.
Yes Salah, I have standards. Meaning that if you really want to take me out to dinner, you do it in a way that makes it impossible for me to say no.
I laugh.
He just watches me, without saying anything and follows me all the way to the bank’s entrance.
It’s not like he’s some desperate guy who doesn’t have other options. But I think he’s got a thing for me. He wouldn’t be the first, and he certainly won’t be the last.
I look at him and say flatly.
You can’t kiss me here.
I know it annoys him. I also know he won’t react.
His eyes travel slowly from my head to my toes before he finally says.
See you later.
Then he turns and walks away.
I head back inside the building.
What a waste of time.
The Evil’s part:
I arrive in Svalbard as my first destination. It’s been many years since I was here. I know I have to visit Magnus. Magnus has always been loyal to me. He never asked too many questions; he just did his job. And over the years, he answered the questions I needed to be answered.
There aren’t many houses here, but I know his house very well because it is the only red house in town, and I wanted it to be red. To make sure it stands out and it is very reachable.
I head towards it, and I see Magnus outside, drinking a mug of coffee or tea. I think it’s tea because I remember he really liked herbal tea. Magnus is bundled up against the Arctic cold, wearing a thick insulated parka zipped all the way to his chin, wool-lined trousers, heavy winter boots, and thick blue gloves. A knitted beanie covers most of his head, leaving only his weathered face exposed to the freezing air.
I walk up to Magnus. I realize I’m wearing nothing but a jacket and a T-shirt, but, well, I don’t feel the cold. One of the few advantages of being what I am is that temperatures mean nothing to me. And I know Magnus won’t ask any questions.
I walk up to him, and he is very straightforward. We don’t need much dialogue, so I ask him if he’s noticed anything strange over the past few months or lately.
I don’t know what to say… the polar bears. They’ve kind of changed their hunting grounds. There was some kind of friction. All the animals around here left, came back, left again. Nothing out of the ordinary, but it was something I noticed. But during the last northern lights, there was something different.
Different how?
I don’t know. I noticed there was some kind of grey. It wasn’t the usual colors. There was a gray streak running through the aurora. It wasn’t bright or glowing. Just gray.
This is not good. This doesn’t look good. These are signs, and they are not good signs.
Anything else? I ask him.
Yeah, there is something. Something happened recently, about a month ago, with the glaciers. And I know that we have the most important glaciers in the world here, the major ones. Two of them had pieces break off and fall, but I don’t know how to explain it. It didn’t look like they were just pieces breaking off. It looked like they had moved. It didn’t look like a normal ice collapse. The pieces broke off, but something about their motion had changed. They didn’t move the way ice usually does.
Magnus pauses for a second. Then, he continues.
Maybe that’s just in my mind. I’ve been here a long time, so, you know… you know how it is when you see these things.
Unfortunately, this time I think Marcus is right…
I leave and go straight to Austfonna. I know what lays beneath its vast sheet of ice, and unlike any human, I could reach it. One of the few advantages of being what I am.
The glacier, one of the largest in the Arctic, stretches across the island. Beneath it lays a world no human had ever truly seen, nor it will ever see. To mankind, Austfonna is a glacier. To Michael and I, it is something else entirely – a place that had always been watched, guarded, and safeguarded.
I stepped directly into the water and descended into the depths. I don’t feel the cold and I have no need to breathe. Ah, it’s good to be back in shape.
What can I say, the darkness is more familiar to me than the light. I have to feel whether cracks had formed, so I go straight to the depth.
When I reached the base of glacier, I begin to move and touch the glacier. I start to feel deep cracks, wide enough for me to slip through, and that is not good… Not only I can slip through them. They are large enough for everything to break apart.
This is the First Seal from the Bible… the classic rider on the white horse. I mean, you can see why it is white.
I continue to touch the glacier and feel the cracks growing larger and larger. The Seal is breaking, and if the glacier collapsed, people would die and the climate would change completely.
It is bad. Very bad.
I decided I cannot stay any longer. I shut to the surface at the speed of light and land back on the snow. I am soaked, but I feel nothing.
F**k… how did we get here?
I scream, but I know no one will answer this. This is outrageous.
This isn’t supposed to happen. D. Was actually right. The Apocalypse is coming… and that’s the worst news in human history.
I have to check the other locations, but one day at a time.
Now that I have broken the barrier of time and space by teleporting, I have to return to New York. I might have spent only two hours here, but in reality, much more time had passed…
D.’s part:
It’s 8 PM when I arrived at the Palm Court. I know Mila, Theo and Damian are already in. I could really use a drink tonight.
As I walk in, I see Dean waiting for me at the bar. Of course, he found me here.
I walk over to the bar, and Dean looks at me.
Hi, D. Happy to see you again. You know the protocol. You know how it is. I need to fill out a report and send it to my boss this evening.
There are tall bar stools lined up along the counter. I sit down on the chair beside him.
Yes, Dean, I say. I know. I know the protocol.
The bartender walks over behind the bar and approaches us.
Do you want something to drink? Dean asks.
He’s having whisky on ice. I hesitate. I know I could really, really use a drink. But I can’t do that to myself. Not now. I can’t. I have to stay strong.
I look at the bartender.
Just water with ice and a lemon.
Dean laughs and looks at me again.
So, tell me what happened.
You know what happened, Dean. The guy was admitted into the hospital. I had to check on him on my shift. They cut the power at the hospital, so I knew something was going to happen. And I had to act. There was nothing to think about. You know very well we were trained to know exactly what to do in situations like these. There wasn’t a second thought. I think you needed him in your custody.
The bartender brings my glass of water with ice and lemon. I take a sip.
That’s right. D. I know that. Anything else you want to tell me?
I look at him.
No, Dean. Nothing, to be honest. There’s nothing else I can really think of. But I know where to find you if that’s the case.
Dean laughs.
Do you ever think of rejoining us?
If he would only know what I do for a living…
No, Dean, I am happy with my normal jobs.
Then, I notice Mila looking over from the table. She spots me and waves.
Ok, Dean. I have to go.
See you, D.
I pick up the glass from the bar and walk towards the table.
As I leave the bar and head towards them, I notice an aquarium. It’s exactly like the aquarium from my dream this morning. Exactly the same.
I’ve never seen it here before.
I think it’s new.
I’ve been to this restaurant before. We come here at least once a month, and it was never here.
I begin to shake.
I tighten my grip around my glass, terrified that I might drop it, because this is exactly like my dream this morning. There aren’t any snakes in it as it is just an ordinary aquarium fish, but I don’t know. I don’t know how this is possible.
I need to text the Evil.
I need to tell him I need him to come here.
This isn’t how this is supposed to happen.
And I can’t… it would be too much for one day if I saw Max walk through that door, just like in the dream.
This can’t happen.
Not now.
Not tonight.
As I reach the table, everyone stands up and we hug. They are all very happy to see me.
D., we ordered some starters. I hope you don’t mind. Go ahead and try some, Damian says.
I sit down with my face towards the entrance, exactly like in the dream, thinking that if it’s Max… at least, well, I guess I’ll be the first one to see him the moment he walks through the door. And then I text the Evil.
It is 9 PM when he walks through the restaurant door.
I see him walking past Dean at the bar, who is now there with another man, probably a client or a coworker, and he comes towards our table.
He sits down across from me. Mila is sitting to my right, and across from Mila are Damian and Teo.
He kisses my hand. Ah, I hate when he does that.
Damian, Teo, and Mila look at him in surprise.
Oh, I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Joseph. I’m D.’s boss from a previous job she had at an investment bank.
Where did he even come up with Joseph, the most Biblical name possible…
Oh, Joseph, it’s so nice to meet you, Mila says. D., you never told us about your other jobs. It’s so great to have someone come and join us.
The Evil sits across from me. I look at him. I don’t react. I try to keep a smile on my face.
And he smiles.
What a pleasure to meet you, Mila. You have such a beautiful accent. Are you British?
I see she giggles.
No. My parents lived in England, but I lived there for many years, in London.
Oh, London. What a city. Amazing. D. lived there as well.
I try to pretend and hold myself back from saying anything, because it’s going to be a long evening.
Now I regret that I only ordered a glass of water with ice and lemon at the bar.
I see the Evil looking around, analyzing everything, and he notices the aquarium.
Then he looks at me.
I look at him.
And we try to continue the evening as normally as possible, because I can already see that he’s getting annoyed. So, I ask him.
Joseph, how was your day? What have you done today?
He knows that’s not exactly an appropriate question, because there’s no way he can tell me what he really did today, since I know very well that he told me he was going to investigate what had happened around the world.
And I’m very curious to see how he’ll answer that question.
Theo also adds to my question.
Yes, Joseph, what do you do for a living? Are you like the head of the trading desk?
Head of product delivery actually. And yes, I do I travel a lot. I travel very often. Even today I was away, and I just got back.
Oh, Damian says. Really? So early? That fast?
Yes. I went to New Jersey and back.
I look at the Evil as I know the truth. He didn’t go to New Jersey.
I have four clients that I have to meet, and I met the first one in New Jersey. But it was a very good meeting because we found out that we have a problem in the system.
Oh, no way, Damian says. How bad is it? Did you know anything about this?
Yes, we have a problem with our biggest product, and if we continue with this problem, we’re going to lose the product. And if we lose the product, we could even go bankrupt.
I look at the Evil and cannot believe that he’s making the analogy that the apocalypse would be a bankruptcy.
We’ve identified a major glitch that’s happening in one specific location, and we’re hoping to mitigate the risk, so hopefully it doesn’t happen in other locations.
Oh, this must be awful, Mila says. I suppose you were really stressed. No wonder you wanted to come for dinner tonight.
The Evil looks at me and smiles.
D. invited me here because she knew it hadn’t been easy, and I know she also had difficulties at the hospital today.
Yes, we all did, Theo says. We lost power for about half an hour. We were afraid the patients were going to die. We had to put them on battery-powered backup ventilators. We had to monitor them nonstop. Then we also had people come in with fentanyl overdoses.
Yeah, and after you left, D., Damian says, things got even worse. We got new patients – some people come in stabbed in a gang fight.
Oh, it was terrible, Mila says.
Joseph looks at them.
Terrible day, guys. Isn’t that right, D.?
I look at him.
I don’t react.
And he knows what I mean from the way I’m looking at him.
We look at each other, and I see him smile, and I know how ironic is what he’s doing right now is. The waiter comes and he is asking for the main course.
And as if that wasn’t enough, I see Salah across the room as he walks into the restaurant with his friends. He doesn’t see me at first, but after he heads towards his table, he sees me.
He looks at me, I look at him. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s having dinner here – I think it’s the most popular place in town at the moment. Besides, he’s here with his basketball teammates.
I know it’s only a matter of time until something will blow.
The waiter leaves and we start talking about other subjects.
Then, he comes back bringing more alcohol, more bottles of wine. I see Mila, Damian, and Teo starting to feel good.
The Evil keeps ordering himself a whiskey.
I stick to water because I can’t afford to switch to anything else. It has been a long day. I’m starting to feel exhausted.
I glance at the aquarium from time to time, but I’m somehow relieved that the Evil is here, because I know that if Max’s capable of walking through that door, then I’ll be able to… I’ll be safe because he’s here.
The Evil starts telling the three of them stories about his travels – obviously fake stories, but he likes telling them. They all start laughing. They like his attention and everything.
But what happened? Why didn’t D. travel with you anymore in the last few years? I thought she only recently changed the job at the bank, Mila asks.
The Evil and I look at each other at that question.
I decide to answer, so the situation doesn’t become more awkward.
Yeah, I had an incident. My ex-boyfriend died.
Damian, Theo, and Mila look at me in shock. Mila hugs me.
Oh my God, that’s terrible. How? Oh my God, so sorry to hear.
I look at the three of them.
It happened a long time ago. I moved over.
Yeah, what a tragedy.
The Evil makes sure to point that out.
If I may ask, what happened? I mean, was he sick or something? Damian continues.
I stare into space for a few seconds before I talk.
No. He was shot.
They are horrified.
What?1 I can’t believe it, Theo says. No, that can’t be.
If they would only know…
The Evil continues because he sees it’s affecting me.
Yeah, it was a feud between gangs. He got caught in the middle.
I look at him. He sees the reaction I have, but I don’t say anything.
I continue.
Yeah, indeed. It was something that happened the way it happened, and there was nothing anyone could do.
And that’s it. I have to change the subject from this topic. It’s the last thing I wanted to talk about.
If I may ask, what was his name? Damian adds.
I look at the Evil as I know how much his name annoyed him.
Max. Maximiliano.
Mila pours more wine into the guys’ glasses, and meanwhile I see Salah on the other side of the restaurant approaching our table.
I’ve just noticed he is wearing my favorite black suit, the one that let the tattoo on his neck show.
I look at the Evil and try to whisper something, but I see he is already reading my thoughts.
Salah’s getting closer to the table, so I slam the glass of water down on the table. Damian, Theo and Mila turn towards us, unsure of what’s happening.
I continue to look at the Evil when Salah gets to the table.
Are you ok, D.? Salah asks.
I am sure he saw my gesture.
Damian, Theo and Mila keep looking at me, surprised. The Evil stands up and speaks in the most English accent I have ever heard.
Do we have a problem, mate?
The Evil takes a step closer to him. Salah looks at me. The Evil continues while I see the bodyguards approaching Salah.
You are at my table, mate.
The three of them look again surprised.
The bodyguards get closer to Salah, but he doesn’t move.
Are you ok, D.? Salah asks again.
He looks worried.
Ah…playing this game. It never gets old.
Do I look like I have a problem, Salah? I say, on an angry tone, like his presence there annoys me.
He glances at me, then at the bodyguards. He seems surprised that I speak to him like this.
I continue – I need to put this one on him.
I thought I told you today that if you want me to go to dinner with you, you have to make it impossible for me to say no – not make me want to get rid of you as quickly as possible.
He seems annoyed with me before turning and walking away.
The Evil looks at me and we both start to laugh. Damian and Theo are still trying to figure out what just happened.
Who is this guy? says Theo.
D., do you know him? What was he doing here? asks Damian.
I laugh.
Joseph knows me well… that’s what happens when I don’t want to talk to guys. Salah is a guy who’s trying for a while to hook up with me. This is a game Joseph and I used to play…long time ago. When we were…
In college. At Harvard.
The Evil finishes my sentence, giving me a look that tells me not to say too much.
Indeed. In college. At Harvard.
I echo what he says, making it clear we’re in agreement.
Well, then, you got him! says Damian, laughing.
We all start to laugh, while the waiter comes with the main course.
I’m not hungry. I can’t eat. I managed to eat something back at the bank, at the office. I know it’s not ideal, but I really can’t eat anything else. I’m not hungry, but I’ll keep up appearances and try to eat.
I look around the restaurant and I see Salah at his table, talking to the guys and explaining to them what happened. I can tell he’s angry. I see him looking at me, and I realize I have to do something about it.
I stand up.
Excuse me, I’m just going to the toilet, I tell everyone.
I leave, making sure to walk past his table, so he’ll see me as I’m heading to the bathroom.
The restroom is huge, and there’s a hallway between the women’s and men’s restrooms. I wait there so we don’t cause any conflict. It doesn’t take long before he comes.
I notice there’s no one in the men’s restroom, so we step just inside the entrance area. The sinks line the wall to my right beneath a row of mirrors, while the stalls are on the left. He stays by the doorway, facing me, close enough to leave at any moment. I rest one hand on the sink to my right as I look back at him.
He’s angry. I can see it.
What the f**k, D., what the f**k was that?
I look at him.
I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to tell him. Because at the end of the day, what is there to say? I mean…
I can’t explain this. People imagine things. People imagine. People imagine. And that’s why there are so many books, so many ideas, so many movies even, that talk about these kinds of connections, these kinds of relationships where the guy looks good and the girl looks good and there’s chemistry and something begins to develop.
I mean, in real life, let’s think about what happened from this morning until now. Let’s think about what I was doing this morning. Let’s think about how I got from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and what happened. I mean, let’s not lie to each other. This whole thing that, oh, he’s this big basketball player and what’s happening… he’s living in an illusion. I live in real life.
These are fairy tales with princes. I mean, I went to Harvard and look what kind of guy I ended up dating. He wasn’t any Prince Charming. He was a thief and a drug dealer. And let’s remember that few months ago, I was running with Michael cartels in Colombia. Not even going to mention how I worked as an assassin for the Evil.
That’s why I can’t tell him that this doesn’t make any sense…but I know I have to say something.
Are we still okay?
He looks at me, surprised, because that’s all I could come up with.
Then he scoffs, rolling his eyes in frustration, and punches the wall beside the doorway.
F**k this day.
And he leaves.
Then I leave too and go back to the table. The Evil noticed what happened. I can tell Damian, Teo, and Mila didn’t.
So, we just continue the conversation.
Sometime around 11, the Evil pays the bill and leave together, knowing that the guys have to be at the hospital by 7 AM. I am off Tuesday.
The Evil and I grab a cab. As the driver weaves through the streets of Manhattan, the Evil turns to me and I can see irritation written all over his face.
Why did you want us to pull that stunt with Salah? What’s your plan with him? I really hope this isn’t turning into Max 2.0.
I shake my head.
No. Don’t worry. Just trust me.
He lets out a humorless laugh.
When has that ever worked out for us, D.?
I don’t answer.
Instead, I let the silence settle between us.
We have far bigger problems to worry about. After all, the apocalypse is coming.
I take a small notebook out of my bag, grab a pen, and start writing.
‘People imagine…’
It’s been a while since I’ve written, and I need to write. Technically, at my core, I’m a screenwriter, director, and film producer… I had a film that won the Palme d’Or, but it was released under someone else’s name, back in the days when I was in missions with the Evil, before we reached the Colombia point… that was my greatest achievement.
But those were different times.
In 20 minutes, the taxi stops in front of one of the 220 Central Park South.
I know he had his apartment there for ages, in one of NY’s most exclusive buildings. We go at floor 66. He knows how much I hate heights.
Once inside, I feel like I can relax. There is no more fake life, no pretending. This is just so normal for me.
The apartment is modern, but the main living room has changed. A large table dominates the space. On every wall there is an enormous map, crowded with photographs, newspaper clippings in half a dozen languages, handwritten notes, and colored marking locations across the world. It looks like the center of an investigation.
This is new. None of it had been here when I was there 1 month ago.
It’s linked to the ending of the world. I need to actually SEE what happens in front of my eyes.
I watch him walk over to the wall, where there is a picture. I think of Norway or somewhere in the Arctic. I see him draw a red X across it while he writes ‘First Seal’.
So, what happened? I ask.
He takes the picture off the wall and shows me the glacier.
It extends several miles beneath the surface, forming an immense body of ice that reaches all the way down to its base. I went there today. I felt the cracks. Everything is fractured. And this is connected to the First Seal. I think the First Seal is breaking. And we are in danger because there are seven seals, before the Apocalypse is coming.
Like in the Bible?
Yes. Exactly like in the Bible. Not everything in the Bible is false, you know.
Then we have a serious problem.
He looks at me like I’ve just reached the most obvious conclusion in the world.
I’ll have to check the others as well. But it won’t be that easy. For some, I’ll need you to come with me.
I look back at him, nodded, and said nothing.
I go near the walls, trying to absorb all the information. He is now near the bar and he is pouring a glass of whisky on ice for himself.
D., apart from that, I know there’s a lot of things that happened.
He keeps pouring without looking at me. I look at him, at the kitchen table, at the knives set.
Yeah…apart from the fact that 7 years ago I committed suicide when I reached my limit with our crazy missions and you did save me; apart from the fact that I had to lock you down in a sanatorium where you had previously locked me, to have you finally lose the power; apart from the fact that it triggered world chaos and a global pandemic; apart from the fact that you escaped and you did not…
Kill you. Remember, D.? I didn’t kill you.
He comes closer to me. I keep forgetting he can do that. Reading my mind.
I was here 1 month ago…He was just back… from the Sanatorium. And I was just back from Columbia. From the mission I had with Michael.
He invited me for a fancy dinner and had his private chefs cook the best food for us. And while we almost finished dinner, he looked at me and said:
It is time for dessert.
He knew I wasn’t eating anything sweet, so I knew there was a twist. Once the waiters cleared the table, he grabbed my hand and threw me on the table. He came and put his hand on my chest and I felt how I started to sink….and fall…and keep falling in the darkness. And then I felt the worst pain I have ever experienced, the darkest thoughts I have ever had. I felt darkness. I felt like my worst fears came true. I felt how I was burning. I heard the screams of thousands of souls…I couldn’t even describe it in words. I just felt torn apart in a million ways. I saw a million faces…one of them was Max’s, who was screaming…but I only saw him for a split second.
What lasted almost 5 minutes…for me it felt like 5 years.
And then all of a sudden, I was back on his kitchen table screaming. He took his hand from my chest and started to laugh. I kept screaming and couldn’t stop.
He then came back near the table and sat beside it. He placed both hands on the tabletop, one on either side of my head and leaned towards me just enough to meet my gaze.
He lowered his voice and whispered in my ear.
Just use your imagination, D. If these were 5 minutes…just imagine what else, I can do to you.
I knew he wanted to scare me. I knew this was payback for the sanatorium. I knew that was his way of telling me not to cross the line. Not that I will ever do it again. As I knew that I had thrown the whole world on fire when he lost his power.
He keeps looking at me.
I understand that you need to feel a bit ‘human’. As you are. But this….this is more important than any mission we had to do together. So, I need you to be available. At least 5 days a week. Keep your part-time jobs for Monday and Wednesday as nothing major started during these days in the world history.
Yeah, I knew what he meant by that. WW1 was on a Tuesday – same was 9/11. WW2 was on a Friday, Chernobyl was on a Saturday, Pearl Harbor was on a Sunday…OK, WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on a Wednesday, but that happened because all was upside down.
I look at him and nod.
I might need some extra help with that.
He nods in agreement.
He then goes and sits on the sofa with the glass of whisky.
There’s such a strange dynamic between us. Always has been.
Every time I look at him and that body… he always looks so impeccable. Defined abs, flawless skin – the kind of perfection that seems almost unreal. I know that body is nothing more than a cover, a carefully crafted shell, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it sometimes, from a purely human perspective. There has always been a certain chemistry between us, from the very first moment (or crime) and it is undeniable, no matter how hard I try to ignore it. But whatever exists between us is so twisted, tangled into something neither of us could ever call normal.
I go to the bar, take a glass, put ice in it, while he is watching me. Then I go to the fridge and pour sparking water on it.
It helps me deceive my own mind.
I sit down on the sofa opposite his.
A coffee table separates us. He crouches down, sets the glass on the table and looks up at me.
Columbia. Now.
I sigh as I know it is gonna be a long night.
To be continued…
Footnote (1) (translation from Spanish):
We have to take her with us. If she’s really the doctor, she’s still useful.
And after that?
Once we get back to headquarters, it’s over. We get rid of her. We can’t leave any witnesses.
Understood. Let her keep Camilo alive until then. After that… we won’t need her anymore.
Disclaimer:Artificial intelligence softwares (ChatGPT by OpenAI and Claude by Anthropic) were used as a writing support tool during the preparation of this essay. Specifically, it assisted with translating passages from French and Romanian into English, improving the clarity and coherence of academic writing, merging and restructuring ideas from the author’s own notes and source summaries, and refining the organisation of literature review sections. All interpretations, critical analysis, and final editorial decisions remain the author’s own responsibility, and all primary and secondary sources cited in the essay were independently verified.
I should begin with a confession. This essay was born from a simple curiosity that gradually became something more demanding: a desire to understand what some Romanian writers created after arriving in France in the aftermath of World War II, and how their works came to resonate not only within Romanian culture, but also within French and, ultimately, international literature. Yet the question that continues to haunt me is not merely what they wrote, but where the true imprint of their work lies. What place do they occupy in the literary legacy? Were they, in fact, writers of exceptional stature who irrevocably altered the course of literary history, or did history itself – with all its contingencies of exile, language, and political upheaval – help to create their reputations? Would they have become the writers we know had they never left Romania, or was France the necessary condition for their intellectual and artistic transformation? Do the works they produced in France contribute to the history of literature – and perhaps even to the history of human thought?
These questions remain strikingly relevant in 2026. How do we read these writers today? How have they endured the changing critical landscape of the twenty-first century? In what sense can they be understood not only as the culmination of an intellectual tradition, but as the forerunners of the literature that followed them?
From my perspective, three Romanian writers most profoundly shaped the postwar intellectual landscape as each one of them found in France the right place to pursue different trajectories.
Treating these writers together rather than as separate case studies reflects a broader methodological conviction. Their individual biographies have each generated extensive specialist literatures, yet comparison discloses what biography alone cannot: that a common historical condition yielded profoundly different forms of intellectual life, indicating that exile is better understood as a condition of possibility than as a sufficient explanation.
Eugène Ionesco reinvented modern theatre through the Theatre of the Absurd, transforming not simply dramatic form but the very conditions through which theatre could represent reality.
Mircea Eliade turned to the sacred and the profane, constructing an intellectual bridge – an axis mundi of his own – between Romanian and French culture, while revealing dimensions of myth and religious experience that seemed at once deeply familiar and curiously unarticulated; he bridged the gap between what we believed we already knew and what had always existed – but remained undefined in its essence.
Last but not least, there is Emil Cioran: perhaps the most unsettling of the three, a writer who demands to be rediscovered with every generation, the very embodiment of paradox. His work compels us to confront uncomfortable questions about the relationship between biography and philosophy, about the lingering shadow of his early fascist sympathies, and about the extent to which his French exile allowed – or encouraged – that past to be obscured, rewritten, or absorbed into a different intellectual identity.
The political and ideological trajectories of Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade, and Eugène Ionesco have been examined extensively in the existing literature, particularly in relation to the intellectual and political climate of interwar Romania and the lasting impact of these experiences on their postwar lives and reputations. While this study provides an indispensable historical account of their biographies, it does not address the question that animates the present essay. The aim here is not to revisit their political past, but to examine how their works came to acquire a significance that surpassed the historical conditions of their emergence, securing an enduring place within French culture and international literature.
This essay argues how, for Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade, and Eugène Ionesco, France did not create their genius; rather, exile constituted the historical condition through which that originality assumed an international literary and philosophical significance. This essay does not attempt to review or assess every contribution to the existing literature on these three authors. Rather, it engages selectively with those works that are most relevant to the questions guiding this analysis, using them to frame and support an examination of how exile in France enabled these three writers to transform a shared Romanian intellectual formation into distinct contributions to post-war Western thought.
Among the three writers considered in this essay, Emil Cioran perhaps best exemplifies the transformative power of exile. His intellectual journey reveals with particular clarity how displacement could become not just a geographical experience but a profound process of philosophical and literary reinvention. It is in Cioran’s transition from Romanian to French, from political engagement to philosophical skepticism, and from a national to an international environment that the central argument of this essay becomes most visible. His career serves as an appropriate point of departure in analysing how exile reshaped not only individual writers but also their place within international literature.
I will begin by examining the historical context, tracing Romania’s position and experience during the two World Wars before turning to the literary questions that emerge from this history.
Neagu Djuvara was among the first prominent Romanian historians to bring international attention to the importance of Romania’s Latin heritage as the defining element of its national identity. Romanian developed from the popular Latin spoken in the Roman province of Dacia and remained a Romance language despite centuries of contact with Slavic, Turkish, Greek, and Hungarian populations. While Romanian absorbed numerous words and expressions from neighboring cultures, its grammatical structure and core vocabulary remained fundamentally Latin, distinguishing it from the surrounding Slavic-speaking nations. This linguistic continuity reinforced Romania’s sense of belonging to the family of Romance cultures and later facilitated its close cultural relationship with France, whose language shares the same Latin roots (Djuvara, 2018).
Romania underwent a long profound process of Westernization under the dominant influence of France. As Djuvara (2018) explains, this transformation was facilitated by the linguistic affinity between Romanian and French, both Romance languages, which enabled French culture to become deeply embedded within Romanian society. Also, throughout history, the Romanian legal system was heavily influenced by the French one: The Criminal Code promulgated by Alexandru Ioan Cuza in 1864 was largely modelled on the French Criminal Code of 1810, illustrating the extent to which nineteenth-century Romania had France as the principal model for its institutional and legislative modernization (Agerpres, 2019).
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Romania was one of the most Francophile countries in Europe. French became the language of the educated elite who regarded France as the Latin sister of Romania and as a model for modernization, democracy, and Westernization (“Iron Guard”, n.d.). This firmly establishing France as Romania’s foremost cultural and intellectual model (Djuvara, 2018).
However, following World War I, Romania entered a period of profound political and social transformation (Ornea, 2015). During the 1930s, many Romanian intellectuals saw the liberal democracy as incapable of solving national problems, while authoritarian models from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany appeared increasingly attractive. This environment facilitated the growth of nationalist and anti-democratic movements (Ornea, 2015).
Among the most significant political forces was the Legion of the Archangel Michael (Legiunea Arhanghelului Mihail) or the Legionary Movement (Mișcarea Legionară), founded by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in 1927. As a far-right fascist movement, it was active during the period between the wars, as well as during World War II. In 1930, Codreanu founded its paramilitary wing, the Iron Guard (“Iron Guard,” n.d.). Clark (2015) explains that the Legion of the Archangel Michael and the Iron Guard were closely connected, but not identical. The Legion was founded in 1927 as a political and spiritual movement, while the Iron Guard was established in 1930 as its paramilitary organization.
Clark (2015) describes Corneliu Zelea Codreanu as a charismatic leader. He transformed earlier antisemitic student activism into a disciplined mass movement built around religious symbolism, nationalism, and a strict organizational hierarchy. Ornea (2015) described the Romanian Iron Guard as the country’s most important fascist movement. Codreanu emphasized the creation of a so-called new man through moral purification, discipline, and collective activism. Under his leadership, the Legion expanded rapidly during the 1930s before being outlawed, and Codreanu was arrested and murdered in 1938 (Clark, 2015).
Although officially banned in 1933, the name Iron Guard continued to be widely used to refer to the Legion itself. Its strength was kept not only in its ideology, but also in its own ability to reshape and disrupt the everyday lives and identities of its members (Clark, 2015).
The Iron Guard main purpose was to reject the long-standing Francophile orientation. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu argued that French universalism, liberal democracy, and the ideals of the Enlightenment weakened authentic Romanian identity. Instead, the movement promoted an exclusive Romanian nationalism rooted in Orthodox Christianity, peasant traditions, and indigenous culture, rejecting the aspiration to give Romania the chance to become what many hoped would be the new France of Eastern Europe. This ideological shift represented a conscious break with the French cultural model that had dominated Romanian political and intellectual life for decades (“Iron Guard”, n.d.).
According to Clark (2015), Nae Ionescu was an important intellectual mentor for Romania’s “Young Generation.”1 His philosophical influence encouraged many young intellectuals to view nationalism as a spiritual and cultural mission rather than simply a political program. Although he was not presented as an organizational leader of the Legion, his ideas significantly shaped the intellectual environment in which some legionary writers, including Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran and other young authors, developed their support for ultranationalism and Orthodox spiritual renewal. His newspaper Cuvântul2 promoted these ideas, while his public support for the Legionary Movement after 1933 gave intellectual legitimacy to Romanian fascism. His influence was decisive on students such as Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and Constantin Noica (Sandu, 2003).
Taken together, this background does more than set the scene: it explains why exile could not have been a clean break for any of the three. Each had already absorbed French language and culture well before 1940, and each carried into Paris an entanglement with Nae Ionescu’s circle that no relocation could simply dissolve. What exile in France offered, then, was not a refuge from a compromised political past but the linguistic, institutional, and intellectual conditions through which each transformed a shared Romanian formation – shaped under Nae Ionescu and the “Generation of 1927”- into a distinct contribution to postwar Western thought (Laignel-Lavastine, 2002). Cioran developed a philosophy of pessimism, Ionesco became a leading figure of the Theatre of the Absurd, and Eliade established himself as a major historian of religions. Their trajectories suggest that neither their common Romanian origins, nor their French exile alone explains their influence; rather, it was the interaction between these shared beginnings and the opportunities afforded by exile that shaped their place in Western intellectual life after 1945.
Although these authors have emerged from the same intellectual milieu, their responses to the political upheavals of interwar Romania diverged significantly. Eliade’s early sympathy for the Legionary Movement was followed by exile and a profound intellectual reinvention in France, where he established himself as one of the foremost historians of religion. Frank (2006) describes how Romanians exiled in Paris gathered around Eliade, whose hotel room became one of the principal meeting points of the exile, even though unresolved tensions over its members’ Legionary past continued to generate division.
Cioran was initially drawn to fascist ideas, but his move to France marked a definititve break with his earlier political convictions, allowing him to reshape both his philosophical outlook and literary identity. Ornea (2015) notes that Cioran left for Paris after the failure of the Legionary regime and remained there permanently, later distancing himself from his political past. In contrast, Ionesco rejected nationalism and fascism from the outset. As he watched many of his friends and fellow intellectuals embrace the Legionary Movement, he became increasingly preoccupied with the dangers of ideological conformity – an anxiety that would later find powerful expression in his dramatic works.
In 1937, Emil Cioran moved to Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life. Both Iordache (1999) and Gruzińska (2001) identify this relocation as a decisive turning point in his intellectual career. After collaborating with major Romanian literary journals and publishing several influential works in Romanian, Cioran gradually abandoned Romanian language in favour of French. Although he continued to write in Romanian during his early years in France, completing “A Breviary of the Vanquished” (Bréviaire des vaincus –translated from Romanian to French), he made his French literary debut with “A Short History of Decay” (Précis de décomposition), published by Gallimard in 1949, followed by “All gall is divided” (Syllogismes de l’amertume) in 1952.
The publication of “A Short History of Decay” is therefore widely regarded as the defining moment of Cioran’s intellectual rebirth in France, symbolizing both his linguistic conversion and his definitive break with the ideological commitments of his youth. Santa Cruz (2023) echoes that Cioran’s embrace of the French language and intellectual tradition allowed him to distance himself from his extremist past and reshape his philosophical identity; the transformation culminated with this book, which marked the emergence of the mature French-language Cioran, whose work focused on the limits of human existence rather than political activism.
In this regard, Gabriel Liiceanu presents France as the place where Cioran achieved his intellectual and literary maturity while remaining profoundly marked by his Romanian origins. According to Liiceanu (2021), although Cioran lived in an extremely modest attic room in Paris, it was there that he produced the works that established him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers. Liiceanu characterizes Cioran as “a contemporary Nietzsche who passed through the school of the French moralists” (un Nietzsche contemporan trecut pe la școala moraliștilor francezi) (Liiceanu, 2021); the author is emphasizing how French language and culture shaped the style and precision of his mature writing. At the same time, Liiceanu (2021) emphasizes that Cioran remained a foreigner who deliberately severed his roots in order “to speak impartially about the world, God, and himself” (să poată vorbi echitabil despre lume, Dumnezeu și despre sine însuși) (Liiceanu, 2021). Nevertheless, France did not erase Cioran’s Romanian identity; instead, Paris became the setting in which his philosophical voice developed, while the memories of Romania continued to provide the emotional and existential foundation of his thought.
According to Gruzińska (2001), this linguistic transition established Cioran as one of the leading French-language essayists of the postwar period. However, Minzetanu (2015) argues that, despite the apparent rupture marked by the publication of “A Short History of Decay” (Précis de décomposition), Cioran’s French writings retained a fundamental continuity with his Romanian work through the figure of the “organ thinker” (penseur organique). Rather than embracing academic philosophy, Cioran continued to privilege lived experience over abstract systems, a position illustrated by his critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, which he regarded as intellectually sophisticated but lacking genuine emotional authenticity.
Iordache (1999) also reinforced this view, by describing Cioran as a precursor of existentialism, emphasizing his conviction that authentic knowledge arises from lived experience rather than abstract philosophical systems. In her view, France became the setting in which Cioran refined his aphoristic style and achieved international recognition through his French-language works. She presents him as one of the most original Romanian thinkers of the twentieth century, whose philosophy is dominated by themes of despair, suffering, solitude, death, skepticism, and the absurdity of existence.
The continuity that different authors identified between Cioran’s Romanian and French writings inevitably invites a reconsideration of the political ideas that informed his early work and whether exile represented a genuine intellectual rupture or a more complex process of transformation. It is precisely this question that has dominated much of the current literature on Cioran since the rediscovery of his Romanian writings after the fall of communism.
Cioran’s radicalisation looks less like an isolated youthful error than like a symptom of his whole generation’s search for meaning. Sandu (2003) offers more clarity and situates Cioran’s political radicalisation within the broader intellectual context of the Romanian “Generation of 1927”. He claims that many young intellectuals associated with the philosopher Nae Ionescu, including Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade, and Constantin Noica, initially pursued projects of cultural and spiritual renewal before increasingly embracing the nationalist and revolutionary ideals of the Romanian Iron Guard. According to Sandu (2003), this evolution reflected a broader search for Romania’s historical and national destiny rather than a purely political commitment from the outset, with fascism emerging as part of a wider ideological response to the perceived crisis of Romanian society during the interwar period.
Gruzińska (2001) examines Cioran’s early fascist and antisemitic writings in Romanian alongside his later French essays, arguing that his work represents a philosophical transformation rather than an attempt to conceal his past. She notes that Cioran’s Romanian works remained largely inaccessible for decades because of Romania’s political isolation during the communist period. After 1989, these writings resurfaced, revealing his admiration for Nazism, sympathy for the Romanian Iron Guard, and explicit antisemitic views. Their findings have fuelled an ongoing debate over whether Cioran’s postwar writings represent indeed a genuine break with his fascist past. Moreover, Ornea (2015) presented Cioran as one of the first intellectuals of his generation to embrace authoritarian politics. In the 1930s he praised Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, condemned parliamentary democracy, and advocated a radical national transformation in “The transformation of Romania” (Schimbarea la față a României). During the National Legionary State, he publicly praised Codreanu, including a 1940 speech at the radio.
While these studies primarily document the extent and development of Cioran’s political engagement, Santa Cruz shifts the focus from what Cioran believed to why he became drawn to fascism in the first place, offering a psychological and existential interpretation of his radicalisation. Santa Cruz (2023) illustrates that Emil Cioran’s attraction to fascism cannot be explained simply as political conviction but must be understood through his psychological and existential crisis, that emerged from an obsessive search for intensity rather than from a coherent ideological commitment. The author describes how Cioran initially mocked the mystical nationalism of Romania’s Iron Guard but later became captivated by the emotional power of Nazi Germany after arriving there in 1933.
This interpretation also helps explain the ideological inconsistencies in Cioran’s political thought, which other writers have highlighted. Consequently, Boia (2011) notes that Cioran’s political thinking was complex: despite his nationalism, he acknowledged certain social aims of Bolshevism and argued that nationalism alone could not solve Romania’s social problems.
In this context, according to Ion’s (2004) review, Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine advances a continuity thesis, arguing that Cioran’s mature philosophy cannot be separated from his interwar fascist commitments. As summarized by Ion (2004), Laignel-Lavastine contends that, after 1945, Cioran adopted a “tactic of evasion” (tactique de l’esquive), avoiding direct confrontation with his political past through autobiographical silence and a transformed literary style. Rather than viewing his postwar pessimism as evidence of repentance, she interprets it as a “reversed rhetoric” (rhétorique renversée), arguing that explicit antisemitism gave way to subtler cultural and metaphysical forms of prejudice. More broadly, she maintains that Cioran’s critique of modernity, rejection of Enlightenment rationalism, distrust of democracy and progress, and pessimistic view of history formed an intellectual framework compatible with fascism. From this perspective, his political activism in the 1930s was not an isolated youthful error but an expression of philosophical assumptions that continued to shape his later French writings despite the disappearance of explicit political rhetoric.
Laignel-Lavastine’s (2002) interpretation differs from authors who view exile as a decisive moral conversion. She maintains that although France transformed Cioran’s literary style and philosophical expression, it did not erase the significance of his earlier fascist commitments, which remain essential for understanding both his intellectual development and the subsequent construction of his public image.
Petreu (2002) contends that Laignel-Lavastine’s work3 does not primarily present new archival discoveries but instead relies heavily on research that had already been published by Romanian researchers. According to Petreu, many of the book’s central arguments and interpretations concerning Cioran’s political evolution had previously appeared in her own work. She further claims that passages from her publications were translated into French, paraphrased, or closely reproduced without quotation marks or adequate citation. Beyond these allegations, Petreu also challenges Laignel-Lavastine’s interpretation of Cioran’s intellectual trajectory. While acknowledging the importance of confronting Cioran’s fascist commitments, she maintains that Laignel-Lavastine overstates the continuity of these ideological positions throughout his later life and writings. Petreu (2002) concludes that such interpretations rest on selective readings and methodological shortcomings rather than balanced historical analysis. For her, rigorous research on Romania’s interwar intellectual history requires accurate documentation, careful attribution, and nuanced interpretation.
Ornea (2015) adopts a similar position that differs from Laignel-Lavastine’s and is broadly consistent with Petreu’s interpretation. While acknowledging Cioran’s documented fascist commitments during the interwar period, Ornea notes that Cioran later reconsidered these political positions after settling in Paris. He observes that Cioran distanced himself from many of his youthful convictions, revised later editions of “The transformation of Romania” (Schimbarea la față a României), and acknowledged that the political enthusiasm expressed in the 1930s belonged to an earlier phase of his intellectual development. The author is naming specifically a 1972 interview where Cioran states that he was carried away by the atmosphere surrounding the Iron Guard and describes the movement as a “complex” phenomenon rather than a coherent ideology. He reflects that he had experienced “what it means to be swept away by the wave (“dus de val”) and claims that this experience made him permanently skeptical of political enthusiasm. Cioran affirmed then that: “The Iron Guard, to which, incidentally, I never formally belonged, was a very curious phenomenon. Its leader, Codreanu, was in fact Slavic, more like a Ukrainian hetman. Most of the dead Legionaries were uprooted Macedonians; in general, what emerged in this movement was Romania’s periphery. Just as people say that cancer is not one disease but a complex of diseases, the Iron Guard was likewise a complex of movements; more than that, it was both a fanatical sect and a political party. There was less talk there about national rebirth than about the grandeur of death. I learned firsthand what it means to be swept away by a wave without the slightest genuine conviction. It is a state of mind that I have often recognized ever since – not only among twenty-year-olds, as I was then, but unfortunately also among people in their sixties. Against that state of mind, I am now immune.”4
Read against one another, these interpretations do not resolve the fundamental question of this essay. Laignel-Laignel-Lavastine maintains that a change of language and genre is not, in itself, evidence of moral conversion; yet Petreu and Ornea are more persuasive in arguing that Cioran’s later silences cannot be disentangled from his earlier commitments, using solid arguments. Therefore, Cioran’s postwar pessimism should be understood not as a continuation of his fascist commitments, but as the philosophical form through which he confronted and ultimately repudiated the illusions that had once sustained them.
Gruzińska (2001) provides a compelling argument in support of this interpretation: Cioran’s 1956 essay “A people of solitaries” in “The temptation to Exist” (Un peuple de solitaires, published in La Tentation d’exister), functions as an implicit mea culpa. Drawing on Edgar Reichmann’s interpretation, she suggests that the Holocaust, together with Cioran’s friendships with Jewish intellectuals such as Benjamin Fondane and Paul Celan, prompted a profound reassessment of his earlier antisemitic beliefs and depicts Jews through the lens of hostility but instead presents them as symbols of endurance, exile, and spiritual resilience. Ornea (2015) reinforces the same view, saying that in later years Cioran distanced himself from many of his political writings and refused to reaffirm his youthful fascist sympathies. He mentions the same essay as Gruzińska, to illustrate the profound change in Cioran’s thinking after World War II. The author notes that this essay is one of the texts in which Cioran explicitly distances himself from the xenophobia of 1936, particularly toward Jews. Overall, these later writings demonstrate that Cioran’s mature philosophy abandoned the nationalist and exclusionary positions of his youth (Ornea, 2015).
As Cioran himself remarks in “Apocalipsa după Cioran”5: “Every writer has its own destiny”6 (Liiceanu & Ilieșiu, 1995), suggesting that a writer’s intellectual trajectory is inseparable from their lived experience. In Cioran’s case, exile profoundly reshaped both his life and his philosophical voice. These interpretations suggest that exile transformed not only the content of Cioran’s thought but also the manner in which it was articulated. Minzetanu (2015) suggests that Cioran’s French works in essence continue to privilege subjective experience and existential introspection over philosophical objectivity. Rejecting systematic philosophy, Cioran develops what he calls “interjective thought” (pensée interjective), in which ideas emerge from suffering, exclamations, and lived experience rather than rational argument. For Cioran, philosophy expressed existence rather than explained it, making experience the highest source of truth.
Cioran’s experience suggests that exile did not necessarily produce an immediate rupture with the interwar Legionary milieu. Instead, it provided the conditions under which earlier ideological commitments were progressively recast into a different philosophical vocabulary, leaving the extent of his break with fascism open to interpretation. Mircea Eliade shared a similar intellectual formation, making his trajectory a useful point of comparison. Like Cioran, he developed under the same influence of Nae Ionescu, and experienced exile in France after 1944. However, Eliade’s response took a different direction. Rather than turning inward toward philosophical pessimism, he devoted himself to constructing a comparative history of religions that would secure his place among the most influential authors of religion in the twentieth century.
After World War II, Mircea Eliade settled in Paris in 1945 after choosing not to return to communist Romania. His years in France (1945–1956) marked the most productive and influential period of his academic career. With the support of Georges Dumézil, Eliade began teaching at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he established himself as a leading historian of religion. During this period, he published several of his most significant works, including “Treatise on the History of Religions” (Traité d’histoire des religions, 1949), “The Myth of the Eternal Return” (Le Mythe de l’éternel retour, 1949), and “Yoga: Immortality and Freedom” (Techniques du yoga, 1948). Living in Paris also allowed him to engage with prominent European intellectuals such as Emil Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, Carl Jung, and Henry Corbin, helping to shape his comparative approach to the study of religion.
Mircea Eliade’s understanding of religion was significantly shaped during his formative years by his mentor Nae Ionescu, who emphasized that religious truth is accessible through direct existential experience rather than abstract theological systems, an idea that strongly influenced Eliade’s later emphasis on the sacred as a distinct mode of reality irreducible to purely rational analysis. (Rennie, 2010; Sato, 2011).
Under Ionescu’s intellectual guidance, Eliade developed an early interest in Romanian Orthodoxy and the idea that religious phenomena such as myths and rituals should be understood as expressions of a deeper, transhistorical sacred dimension. (“Mircea Eliade”, n.d.). Authors note that Ionescu’s interpretation of Orthodoxy and his “trăirist”7 philosophy provided one of the key channels through which Orthodox theological sensibilities entered Eliade’s thought, particularly in shaping his later distinction between the sacred and the profane and his view of religion as a universal structure of meaning (Rennie, 2010; Sato, 2011). Although Eliade later expanded his framework through comparative studies of Hinduism and other traditions, the existential and Orthodox-inflected foundations laid by Ionescu remained an important influence on his overall approach to the history of religions (Eliade, n.d.).
Eliade’s route into the Legionary Movement undercuts any simple story of a scholar merely drawn briefly into bad company. Ornea (2015) traces how Eliade gradually moved from cultural and religious concerns toward explicit support for the Legionary Movement between 1936 and 1937. He defended Legionary ideals in his journalism and was imprisoned in the Legionary detention camp in Romania at Miercurea Ciuc. Boia (2011) also explicitly identifies Eliade as one of the prominent intellectuals who adhered, for a time, to Legionary ideology.
What is most striking in Eliade’s case, compared with Cioran’s, is the absence of anything resembling a comparable moment of explicit self-questioning. Cioran, whatever the sincerity of his 1972 remarks, at least offered an account of his earlier political commitments; Eliade largely declined to provide any equivalent explanation, preferring silence to confession. The contrast is best understood not as evidence of greater or lesser honesty, but as revealing two distinct responses to a compromised past: one grounded in the attempt to render that past intelligible, the other in the refusal to make it an object of retrospective explanation.
Ornea (2015) emphasizes that Eliade condemned specific Legionary assassinations once left from Romania, such as those of Nicolae Iorga and Virgil Madgearu, but never fully repudiated his earlier political commitments. Rennie (1996) and Sato (2011) both trace important aspects of Eliade’s intellectual formation to the influence of Nae Ionescu, arguing that the comparative approach developed in his French scholarship retained methodological and philosophical continuities with ideas formed during his Romanian period. Volovici (1991) and Manea (2003) shar the same view: that Eliade’s intellectual prestige cannot be fully separated from the continuing debate surrounding his earlier support for the Iron Guard.
A related controversy emerged following the publication of Norman Manea’s essay Felix Culpa (1991), which criticized the uncritical celebration of Eliade without adequately addressing his involvement with the Legionary Movement. The essay generated intense debate in Romania and among Romanian intellectuals abroad, with many regarding it as an attack on a major cultural figure, while others viewed it as a necessary confrontation with an overlooked aspect of Eliade’s past (Manea, 1991; Petreu, 2002).
Beyond the debate over Eliade’s political commitments, other authors have also examined the theoretical foundations of his academic work. Allen (1978) articulates that Mircea Eliade’s methodology is fundamentally structured around three interconnected concepts: the dialectic of the sacred and the profane, symbolism, and structural hermeneutics. According to Allen, the distinction between the sacred and the profane provides the essential framework through which Eliade interprets religious phenomena, while symbolism functions as the primary means by which the sacred becomes manifest within the ordinary world. Rather than reducing religion to psychological, sociological, or historical explanations, Eliade insists that religious experience possesses an irreducible character that must be understood on its own terms (Allen, 1978).
Consequently, Eliade adopts a phenomenological approach, arguing that authors enter the experiential world of homo religiosus in order to understand how the sacred is perceived and lived. Religion, therefore, is defined not primarily by belief in supernatural beings but by the experience of the sacred as a distinct mode of existence. Eliade’s analysis remains descriptive rather than metaphysical: he does not seek to prove the objective reality of the sacred but instead examines how religious individuals experience and interpret the world through the sacred–profane distinction (Allen, 1978).
Meagher’s (1980) interpretation complements that of Allen (1978) in emphasizing Eliade’s phenomenological understanding of homo religiosus. Both authors argue that Eliade’s methodology requires the researcher to understand religion from within the perspective of those who experience the sacred. However, whereas Allen primarily defends Eliade’s phenomenological framework by arguing that the sacred constitutes an irreducible mode of human experience requiring its own method of interpretation, Meagher adopts a more critical stance. He accepts Eliade’s emphasis on religious consciousness but questions whether Eliade overstates the universality of homo religiosus by minimizing the role of historical agency, individuality, and human creativity.
Meagher (1980) examines Eliade’s concept of homo religiosus by questioning the universality of his phenomenological approach. While acknowledging Eliade’s claim that religious individuals experience reality through the distinction between the sacred and the profane, Meagher implies that Eliade often extends this principle too broadly. In particular, he criticizes “The Myth of the Eternal Return” for suggesting that meaningful human action derives almost exclusively from the repetition of sacred archetypes and mythical models. According to Meagher (1980), such an interpretation risks overlooking individual initiative, historical change, and the creative dimensions of human existence. Nevertheless, he recognizes that Eliade’s primary concern is not to reconstruct the historical origins of religion but to understand the experiential world of homo religiosus.
In this respect, Meagher notes that Eliade views religion as a distinctive mode of consciousness in which the sacred is experienced as a value rather than as an objective property of things. Sacred and profane, therefore, are not inherent qualities of objects but interpretative categories through which religious individuals give meaning to reality (Meagher, 1980). The disagreement between the two is less a refutation than a difference of emphasis, but it matters for the argument here: if the sacred-profane distinction is as universal as Allen allows, Eliade’s move from a nationalist theology of the sacred to a general science of religion looks like genuine intellectual expansion; if Meagher is right that the category smooths over historical particularity, that same move looks more like an earlier commitment restated in more abstract terms.
Building on these contrasting interpretations of Eliade’s concept of the sacred, Pleșu (1988) shifts the discussion from methodological questions to the broader philosophical orientation of Eliade’s thought. Drawing on Eliade’s reflections, he insists that modern individuals experience revelation primarily through cultural forms and symbols because direct access to the sacred has become increasingly difficult. For Pleșu, Eliade’s image of the “cave in the Himalayas”8 symbolizes the idea that authentic culture should always point beyond itself toward a deeper spiritual reality. Thus, culture for Eliade functions as a necessary mediation between human existence and transcendence rather than as a self-sufficient achievement (Pleșu, 1988).
While Pleșu focuses on the philosophical and spiritual content of Eliade’s work, other authors have examined the historical conditions that enabled these ideas to develop and reach an international audience. Lovinescu’s (1994) interpretation reinforces the broader consensus that exile was central to Eliade’s intellectual development. While Boia emphasizes the historical circumstances that shaped Eliade’s trajectory and Pleșu highlights the spiritual and cultural dimensions of his thought, Lovinescu demonstrates how France became the intellectual space in which these ideas gained international visibility. Together, these perspectives support the central argument of this essay that Eliade’s exile did not diminish his Romanian identity but rather enabled him to transform it into a universal cultural legacy (Lovinescu, 1994).
In 1956, Eliade left France to accept a professorship at the University of Chicago, where he continued to develop the ideas that would make him one of the most influential authors of religion in the twentieth century. His Paris-era publications supplied the comparative vocabulary, sacred and profane, hierophany, the eternal return, that shaped the academic study of religion for decades afterward, and his subsequent work at the University of Chicago is credited with helping establish paradigms still used in religious studies today (“Mircea Eliade”, n.d.).
Unlike Cioran, whose French years centered on philosophical introspection, Eliade transformed that common intellectual inheritance into a comparative study of myth, religion, and the sacred. Eugène Ionesco, although belonging to the same generation and sharing many of the same formative experiences, had a different position within this shared intellectual milieu. His experience of French exile followed a markedly different course and was less shaped by a compromised political past.
Eugène Ionesco’s connection to France began in childhood. Born in Romania in 1909, he moved with his family to Paris in 1911. Following his parents’ divorce, Ionesco returned to Romania after 1922, where he studied French literature at the University of Bucharest and became a French language teacher. In 1938, after marrying Rodica Burileanu, he moved back to France on a French government authorship to pursue doctoral research. Although the outbreak of World War II forced him to return temporarily to Romania, he soon secured travel documents and returned to France in 1942. After the liberation of France, Ionesco and his family settled permanently in Paris, where he began his literary career. The postwar intellectual climate of Paris, marked by existential uncertainty and the search for new artistic forms, profoundly influenced his work and provided the environment in which he developed the innovative dramatic style that made him one of the leading figures of the Theatre of the Absurd. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1964, together with Jean-Paul Sartre (Ionesco, n.d.).
Ionesco (2022) portrays France as the country in which Eugène Ionesco’s literary career developed and achieved international recognition, while also revealing his ambivalent relationship with French intellectual life. Throughout the interviews, he identifies with French culture but remains highly critical of the ideological climate of postwar France, particularly the dominance of Marxism, “political engagement” (littérature engagée), and the influence of left-wing intellectuals. He repeatedly argues that literature should remain independent of political ideology, rejecting both communist and fascist dogmatism in favour of artistic freedom, individual conscience, and skepticism.
Of the three, Ionesco alone can claim an opposition to fascism that was contemporaneous rather than retrospective. Quinney (2007) places considerable emphasis on Ionesco’s opposition to political extremism. She notes that, unlike many members of the Romanian intellectual elite associated with the “Generation of 1927,” Ionesco remained openly hostile to both fascism and communism. Because of a satirical article published in the Romanian journal Vremea9, criticizing the Romanian army, magistrates, and Orthodox clergy, he was sentenced in absentia to approximately six years’ imprisonment by the Romanian authorities.
Boia (2011) also distinguishes Ionesco from Eliade and Cioran. Although he belonged to the same generation and shared its iconoclastic rejection of established Romanian culture – as illustrated in Nu (1934)10 – he never embraced Legionary ideology. Ionesco was characterized as intellectually nonconformist and generally inclined toward left-wing democratic attitudes.
Of the three writers examined here, Ionesco alone stands outside the need to reconcile a compromised political past, a distinction that is crucial to the interpretation of his later work. His Theatre of the Absurd did not emerge from the necessity of reckoning with prior political commitments, but from a continuity of ethical and intellectual orientation unavailable to Cioran and Eliade. This does not establish Ionesco as the more important writer; rather, it suggests that his relation to exile is qualitatively different, reflecting a distinct mode of inhabiting historical displacement.
Quinney (2007) cites Ionesco’s recollection of the ideological radicalization that surrounded him during the 1930s: “University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, becoming Iron Guards, one after the other. We were some fifteen people who used to get together, to discuss, to try to find arguments opposing theirs. It was not easy… From time to time, one of the group would come out and say: ‘I don’t agree at all with them, to be sure, but on certain points, nevertheless, I must admit, for example the Jews…’ And that kind of comment was a symptom. Three weeks later, that person would become a Nazi. He was caught in the mechanism, he accepted everything, he became a Rhinoceros. Toward the end, it was only three or four of us who resisted.”11
According to Elsky (2018), Eugène Ionesco’s role in Vichy France extended beyond conventional diplomacy to include cultural diplomacy aimed at strengthening Romania’s image among the French literary and academic public. His activities included promoting Romanian literature through translation, encouraging the study of the Romanian language and supporting the appointment of Romanian-language instructors in French universities.
Shirazi and Vala (2012) argue that his theatre was profoundly shaped by the French theatrical tradition, particularly the influence of Antonin Artaud’s concept of the “total theatre” (théâtre total). He drew inspiration from the medieval French religious theatre discussed by Artaud, seeking to restore a metaphysical dimension to drama while adapting it to the modern experience of absurdity. Through this synthesis, Ionesco developed a new dramatic language capable of expressing both the tragic and the absurd dimensions of the human condition, helping to redefine twentieth-century theatre.
Weales argued, as cited in Brater (1974), that Samuel Beckett and Eugen Ionesco were “France’s angels in darkness.” However, Brater draws a careful distinction between the two writers. Beckett’s work is rooted in metaphysical concerns, with its central ideas existing before, during, and after the writing process. In contrast, Ionesco’s plays emerge more spontaneously, as he discovers their implications while writing. For Ionesco, the stage is a space where anxieties can be transcended and emotions intensified to the point of paroxysm, thereby revealing the true source of tragedy. Despite their different creative approaches, Beckett and Ionesco share a common use of comedy: audiences do not laugh at the characters themselves but at the irony and absurdity of the situations they face. For Ionesco, humour represents a form of freedom (Brater, 1974).
According to Steinhardt, as cited in Partenie (2018), Ionesco seeks to restore the proper moral order, reflecting a strong commitment to justice.
In 1959, Ionesco wrote “The Killer” (Tueur sans gages), introducing Bérenger as the play’s central character. Bérenger assumes the role of a vigilante after discovering that a serial killer is murdering people in an otherwise ideal city while the authorities remain passive and ineffective. Faced with a profound moral dilemma, he attempts to persuade the killer to acknowledge the immorality of his actions. However, the assassin remains silent and unresponsive, rejecting all rational and moral arguments. The ending is deliberately ambiguous. Bérenger lays down his weapons, falls to his knees, and appeals to God for an answer as the killer approaches him, at which point the play ends. Although the scene strongly suggests Bérenger’s death, it is never explicitly confirmed, and his reappearance in later plays leaves the conclusion open to interpretation. Reflecting on the play fifteen years after its publication, Ionesco (2022) regarded some earlier interpretations of the work as naive. He was self-critical about aspects of the play, yet ultimately accepted it as a product of its time, acknowledging that what had been written could not be changed.
Ionesco (2022) also reflects extensively on his dramatic works, explaining that his plays emerged from a rejection of conventional realism and ideological theatre. In particular, the “Rhinoceros” (Rhinocéros) play from 1959 is presented as a critique of ideological conformity and mass movements, inspired by the totalitarian experiences of the twentieth century rather than by any single political regime. Throughout the volume, Ionesco insists that authentic theatre should reveal the metaphysical dimensions of the human condition instead of serving ideological or propagandistic purposes.
According to Quinney (2007), this experience of what Ionesco later called ideological “contagion” became the historical and psychological foundation of “Rhinoceros”. The play represents not simply an abstract meditation on conformity, but a dramatization of the betrayal Ionesco experienced as friends, intellectuals, and political communities embraced fascism. Bérenger’s refusal to become a rhinoceros symbolizes the preservation of individual conscience against the collective pressure of ideological conformity.
Shirazi and Vala (2012) argue that Ionesco’s dramatic works, particularly “Rhinoceros” and “Exit the King” (Le Roi se meurt), express the existential unease of modern humanity through different manifestations of the absurd. They interpret “Rhinoceros” as a critique of ideological conformity and totalitarianism, demonstrating how individuals become complicit in the political systems that ultimately destroy them. In contrast, “Exit the King” examines the universal human confrontation with death, portraying mortality as the most fundamental expression of the absurd. Across both plays, the authors identify loneliness, the crisis of individuality, and the fragility of humanism as recurring themes, with the character of Bérenger representing the isolated individual who resists conformity and preserves his humanity despite overwhelming social and existential pressures (Shirazi & Vala, 2012).
In Quinney’s view (2007), Ionesco’s dramatic works should not be understood solely within the framework of the Theatre of the Absurd or as abstract philosophical allegories. Instead, she maintains that plays such as “Rhinoceros” are deeply rooted in both the historical realities of twentieth-century Europe and Ionesco’s own experience as a Romanian living between two cultures. While the play has frequently been interpreted as a satire of totalitarianism, fascism, and political conformity in general, Quinney suggests that it also reflects Ionesco’s personal confrontation with the rise of the Iron Guard in Romania and the ideological transformation of many of his friends and contemporaries. Rather than limiting “Rhinoceros” to a universal allegory, she suggests that the play should also be read through the lens of Ionesco’s Romanian origins and his hybrid Franco-Romanian identity.
Elsky (2018) reassures that “The Bald Soprano” (La Cantatrice chauve) is Ionesco most performed plays in the world. The author articulates that the play should be understood in light of its wartime origins rather than solely as a postwar absurdist play. She contends that Ionesco’s earlier Romanian version, Englezește fără profesor12 (1943), and his professional involvement with language education and cultural diplomacy demonstrate that the play emerged from his engagement with language learning and translation rather than from a belief that language is inherently meaningless. The author challenges the traditional interpretation, popularized by Martin Esslin, that the play satirizes the emptiness of language through its use of repetitive language-learning dialogues. Instead, she elaborates on Ionesco’s experience as a teacher, translator, and Romanian cultural official suggests an active interest in language acquisition and multilingual communication (Elsky, 2018).
Elsky (2018) also questions Esslin’s13 interpretation of Ionesco’s work as a purely postwar response to exile and the collapse of meaning following World War II. While Esslin viewed “The Bald Soprano” as expressing the alienation of exile and the failure of language in a conformist society, Elsky argues that this reading overlooks the play’s wartime development and its roots in the politics of language, translation, and cultural exchange. She suggests that Ionesco’s play is better understood as an exploration of how meaning is created through language learning and cross-cultural communication rather than simply as a commentary on linguistic emptiness or postwar absurdity (Elsky, 2018). The stakes of this disagreement extend beyond one play: if Elsky is right, Ionesco’s absurdism did not spring fully formed from the shock of exile, as the Esslin narrative implies, but grew out of a longer engagement with language and translation that predates 1945 – which would mean exile sharpened and gave an audience to a sensibility Ionesco already possessed, rather than manufacturing it from displacement alone.
Ionesco’s plays helped establish the Theatre of the Absurd as a recognized dramatic form; his innovations in dramatic technique and his treatment of language as an unreliable vehicle for meaning are credited with influencing later playwrights, including Harold Pinter and Jean Genet (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.-a). Brater (1974) places Ionesco alongside Samuel Beckett as one of the two writers most responsible for defining this mode of postwar theatre, even while distinguishing Ionesco’s more spontaneous, discovery-driven method of composition from Beckett’s more deliberate one.
Finally, Quinney (2007) identifies an intriguing connection between Ionesco and Emil Cioran. Discussing the figure of the Logician in “Rhinoceros”, she implies that the play exposes how apparently rational forms of argument can become instruments of ideological manipulation. In this context, she notes that Cioran’s “All gall is divided”, published in 1952, predates “Rhinoceros” by seven years. She suggests that this parallel may not be accidental. Ionesco ultimately restores an ethical dimension to reason by exposing the absurdity and dangers of logic employed in the service of ideology rather than humanity (Quienny, 2007).
Of the three writers examined here, Ionesco alone stands outside the need to reconcile a compromised political past, a distinction that is crucial to the interpretation of his later work. His Theatre of the Absurd did not emerge from the necessity of reckoning with prior political commitments, but from a continuity of ethical and intellectual orientation unavailable to Cioran and Eliade. This does not establish Ionesco as the more important writer; rather, it suggests that his relation to exile is qualitatively different, reflecting a distinct mode of inhabiting historical displacement.
Overall, France supplied each writer with more than physical safety. For Cioran, it meant a new language, French, in which, according to Iordache (1999) and Gruzińska (2001), he refined the aphoristic style that made him one of the leading essayists of the postwar period. For Ionesco, it meant a new audience and a new institutional home in French theatre, where freed from any single national tradition, he could develop the Theatre of the Absurd (Ionesco, 2022). For Eliade, France meant new colleagues and new institutions, above all the École Pratique des Hautes Études14 and the support of Georges Dumézil, which gave him the platform to build a comparative history of religions. (“Mircea Eliade”, n.d.). In each case, France supplied the intellectual distance needed to construct a public identity distinct from the one each had built in Romania during the 1930s.
Although they differ in genre and disciplinary focus, the three authors’ works consistently address the same core themes. Identity and exile are explicit subjects for Cioran, whose philosophy of pessimism repeatedly returns to displacement and rootlessness (Iordache, 1999). For Eliade, the writings were focused on religious meaning as something irreducible to any single national or historical setting (Rennie, 2010; Sato, 2011). For Ionesco’s plays repeatedly stage the distortion of language and memory under ideological pressure (Ionesco, 2022).
Read together, the three life trajectories show that the same condition of exile could yield philosophy, theatre, and the academic study of religion, depending on what institutional and linguistic opportunities France offered each writer. Their contribution to French culture is correspondingly broad: Cioran’s entry into the canon of French-language essayists, Ionesco’s election to the Académie Française, and Eliade’s role in French and later American university life together illustrate how thoroughly France came to shape them, even if questions about their earlier political commitments have continued to accompany their careers (Ornea, 2015; Ion, 2004).
Taken together, the Paris years of Cioran, Ionesco, and Eliade demonstrate that exile was a shared condition expressed through distinct intellectual paths: for each, France supplied a new language or institutional home, a public no longer bound by prewar Romanian debates, and the interpretive distance in which an earlier political commitment could be reconsidered, if not always fully resolved. Boia (2011) demonstrated that France became both a refuge from communism and the setting in which these Romanian intellectuals achieved the international recognition that would have been impossible had they remained in Romania.
This essay examined how exile in France shaped the intellectual trajectories of three Romanian émigrés who shared a common formation under Nae Ionescu and the “Generation of 1927.” The evidence assembled here suggests that exile operated on each of them differently, but always along the same two axes: it removed the possibility of return by 1947, and it supplied, in its place, a language, an institution, and a public through which a shared point of departure could be reworked into three distinct outcomes. Cioran arrived in Paris in 1937 already estranged from his own political enthusiasms, and used French to distance himself, incompletely and unevenly, from a body of youthful conviction he could no longer fully claim or fully disown (Iordache, 1999; Gruzińska, 2001; Ornea, 2015). Ionesco, who settled in France definitively after 1942 carrying a very different kind of past, one of complicity through circumstance rather than through conviction, used the same city to build a theatre indifferent to any political agenda (Ionesco, 2022). Eliade, arriving last, in 1945, and never renouncing his earlier commitments as explicitly as Cioran did, used Paris’s academic institutions to recast a nationalist theory of the sacred into an ostensibly universal science of religion (Ornea, 2015; Rennie, 2010; Sato, 2011).
Taken together, the evidence suggests that none of these intellectual trajectories were determined by exile alone. Rather, France became decisive because it offered a unique combination of conditions analyzed throughout the essay: proximity to a language and intellectual culture the three had already partly absorbed before 1940, a public no longer bound by the political debts of interwar Bucharest, and enough distance from Romania that each man’s earlier commitments became a matter of interpretation rather than an immediate liability. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates that: exile in France functioned not merely as a place of refuge or a field of opportunity, but also as a historical condition that enabled a compromised generation of Romanian intellectuals to become, in profoundly different ways, central figures within the literature and thought of their adopted West.
Footnotes
1 Săndulescu, A., “Revolutionizing Romania,” in Romania between East and West: Historical Essays in Memory of Constantin C. Giurescu, ed. Stephen Fischer-Galați, Radu R. Florescu, and George R. Ursul (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1982), 105–128, as cited in Clark, R. (2015). Holy legionary youth: Fascist activism in interwar Romania. Cornell University Press.
2 Cuvântul (“The Word”) was an influential Romanian daily newspaper published in Bucharest under the editorship of Nae Ionescu from 1926 to 1934, with a brief revival in 1938. Initially an important forum for philosophical, literary, and political debate, it became increasingly associated with the Romanian far right during the 1930s, ultimately supporting the Iron Guard. The newspaper also served as a major platform for young intellectuals such as Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and Mihail Sebastian, who contributed regularly to its pages. (“Cuvântul”, n.d.)
3 Laignel-Lavastine, A. (2002). Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L’oubli du fascisme: Trois intellectuels roumains dans la tourmente du siècle. Presses Universitaires de France.
4 “Garda de Fier, căreia de altfel nu i-am aparţinut, a fost un fenomen foarte curios. Conducătorul ei, Codreanu, era, de fapt, slav, mai mult tipul unui hatman ucrainean. Gardiştii morţi erau în majoritate macedoneni dezrădăcinaţi; în general, în această mişcare ieşea la suprafaţă mai ales periferia României. Aşa cum se spune despre cancer că nu e o boală, ci un complex de boli, aşa şi Garda de Fier era un complex de mişcări; mai mult decît atît, o sectă smintită şi un partid. Se vorbea acolo mai puţin de o redeşteptare naţională şi mai mult de măreţia morţii… Am aflat atunci pe propria-mi piele ce înseamnă să fii dus de val fără nici cea mai mică urmă de convingere. O stare de spirit pe care de atunci am observat-o deseori, şi nu numai la cei de 20 de ani, cîţi aveam eu atunci, ci, din păcate, şi la oameni de 60 de ani. La acest lucru sunt acum imun.” (Ornea, 2015).
5 Liiceanu, G., & Ilieșiu, S. (1995). Apocalipsa după Cioran [Film]. (No official English translation of the title is available.) [Apocalypse According to Cioran; author’s translation] [Film].
6 Emil Cioran in Liiceanu, G., & Ilieșiu, S. (1995). Apocalypse According to Cioran [Film]: “Fiecare scriitor are destinul lui”.
7 Ricketts (1988) explains that Trăirism (from trăire, “lived experience”) was the philosophical orientation associated with Nae Ionescu and his circle, emphasizing authentic, existential, and spiritual experience over abstract rationalism. He also discusses Eliade’s relationship to the movement in detail.
8 Eliade in Pleșu, A. (1988). Minima moralia: Elemente pentru o etică a intervalului. Cartea Românească.
9Vremea was one of the leading Romanian literary, cultural, and political weekly journals of the interwar period. Published in Bucharest from 1928 to 1947, it became an important forum for essays, literary criticism, philosophy, and public debate. Although politically eclectic, it attracted many of Romania’s foremost intellectuals, including Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, Mihail Sebastian, and Petru Comarnescu. During the 1930s it served as one of the principal venues in which the “Young Generation” debated questions of nationalism, modernity, religion, fascism, and Romanian identity (The Romania Journal, 2026)
10 Eugène Ionesco’s Nu (1934) is not a novel but a collection of literary essays, literary criticism, autobiographical reflections, and satirical sketches. Widely regarded as one of the most provocative works of Romanian literary criticism, it anticipates many of the anti-dogmatic, paradoxical, and self-reflexive themes that would later characterize Ionesco’s Theatre of the Absurd. The work was translated in full only into French as Non (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), translated and annotated by Marie-France Ionesco; no complete English translation has been published.
11 Tismăneanu, V. (1994). Romania’s mystical revolutionaries: The generation of angst and adventure revisited. East European Politics and Societies, 8(3), 402–438, as cited in Quinney, A. (2007). Excess and Identity: The Franco-Romanian Ionesco Combats Rhinoceritis. South Central Review, 24(3), 36–52.
12 Ionesco first wrote “English Without a Teacher” (Englezește fără profesor) in Romanian in 1943. The play was inspired in part by a Romanian-language English textbook and was later reworked into the French “The Bald Soprano” (La Cantatrice chauve). Rather than being a direct translation, the French version substantially transformed the original Romanian text in response to its new linguistic, political, and cultural context. (Elsky, 2018)
13 Esslin, Martin (from Introduction.Absurd Drama, edited by Martin Esslin, Penguin Books, 1965, pp. 7–23) as cited in Elsky, J. (2018). Rethinking lonesco’s Absurd: “The Bald Soprano” in the Interlingual Context of Vichy and Postwar France. PMLA, 133(2), 347–363. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45179386
14 Practical School of Higher Studies (École Pratique des Hautes Études, abbreviated EPHE).
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HB was a novel of 6 books, written on a blog, between 2011 – 2015 by two co-authors, with more than 28 000 views and fans all around the world. This is the continuation of the story that never ended.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, events, organizations, and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, or events is purely coincidental. The views and actions of the characters in this book do not reflect those of the authors. References to violence, crime, or other harmful or illegal behavior are included solely for narrative purposes and are not intended to encourage, condone, or promote such conduct. This work is intended for entertainment purposes only. The authors disclaim any liability for any misuse or misinterpretation of the material contained herein. This book contains themes related to mental health, including references to suicide and psychological distress, which some readers may find sensitive or triggering. These topics are portrayed as part of a fictional narrative and are not intended to encourage or romanticize self-harm or suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please consider reaching out to a qualified professional, trusted individual, or a local support service. This work does not intend to promote, endorse, or include discriminatory or harmful content related to race, ethnicity, or identity. Any such elements, if present, exist solely within the context of the fictional narrative. Reader discretion is advised.
Motto:
‘...a little slow, a little late.’
(quote by Avon Barksdale – from the TV show The Wire)
‘I wanna talk with the clown who has apologies down Pay him 300 pound to take a class in it I wanna bite the phone, I wanna bleed the tone I wanna see you alone, alone, alone, lone’
(Fontaines DC – Starbuster)
‘You’re the one I used to idolize I knew it wasn’t right Addicted to this high Addicted, so I…’
(Duke Dumont – Ocean Drive – extended version)
[in the psychiatrist’s office, New York, 6 PM, January 2026]
The psychiatrist: So, you’re back.
D. and the Evil are sitting on two black armchairs in front of him. They look exactly the same as 7 years ago, the last time they paid him a visit.
Maybe a few little things have changed, he thinks. Her hair is now black, but she’s still dressed in a full black body jumpsuit with black Armani trainers and a black leather jacket. He’s also dressed in a black suit, wearing a white shirt completely unbuttoned at the top, with his hair in a ponytail. As always, he’s too arrogant, and she’s too confident.
D.: We’re back.
The Evil looks at her.
The Evil: Yeah, we’re back.
Photo created with Deevid AI
D.’s part:
[11 hours before the visit]
I call it the return; you call it however you want…
I woke up this morning with the same dream that I’ve been having for the last few months.
Buried beneath the desert, there is a book. No ruins mark the place. No stone, no road, no memory. Only sand upon sand…stretching endlessly beneath a merciless sky. The wind moves, but it makes no sound. The sun passes overhead without witnessing anyone. Nothing lives there long enough to remember, and neither do I.
In the dream, I know the book is there before I ever see it. It lies deep beneath the dunes, wrapped in silence with its pages pressed shut by centuries of weight. It’s not hidden to be found, but to be forgotten. And yet, somehow, it waits for me. When I open it, the sand is gone. The desert vanishes. There is only one page. And on it, I see the prophecy:
On the last day, the earth will tremble in a way never known before. Souls will rise from it, though not for long. They will long follow the one who freed them, who gave them life once more… yet they will be chained to their bodies.
The day will seem ordinary, but the Sun will dim by half. Rain will fall from the sky, washing away blood – so much blood.
The Three shall meet, and the Three shall be divided anew. One among them will be chosen, and with his rise the world will descend into chaos, as he claims the greatest share of power and bends all things to his will. None shall defeat him while he stands alone.
Only at the Sunset of the Black Shore shall his dominion falter – through the spilling of one’s blood; his power will be undone. Yet this end will not be one of ruin, but of renewal. The chosen will no longer stand as rivals, but as keepers of peace.
[1 hour before the visit]
I open the door of the Range Rover Sentinel and step inside.
It’s 5 PM and in New York is already cold and dark. I guess that’s how January feels.
The Evil looks at me with the same skeptical expression as always. Some things never change.
It’s been years since we last saw each other. There’s so much we could say – and somehow, nothing at all.
He talks first.
Are you ready?
Yeah, we have around 4 hours.
I didn’t ask you how much time we have left; I already know that.
I pause. I have to admit I didn’t miss that arrogance.
Yeah, I’m ready.
The Evil starts driving. Silence settles between us, as always.
Do you know what you’re going to tell him?
Don’t worry, I will use the same story.
With Max?
He laughs.
Ah, D….that’s the difference between me and you. I’ve lived a thousand lives, and you barely lived one – and that’s the best story you have? I thought what we’ve done together would have meant more to you than that fool.
I don’t reply. I need to concentrate. Tonight is going to be a long one, and failure isn’t an option.
He looks at me.
And D. … don’t mention Colombia.
I turn up the radio, Starbuster by Fontaines D.C. blasting through the speakers as we ride through New York City. I roll down the window, craving the rush of cool air against my face.
After being in business for so long, I never imagined we’d end up like this.
[10 minutes before the visit]
We arrive at the destination at 5.50 PM and the Evil pulls into an underground car park in Brooklyn. We both step out and he takes a bag from the trunk. I feel the need to clarify.
Just for the record: that’s the not the best story I’ve got… it’s the best story that everyone else thinks I have.
He shuts the trunk with a dull thud, and we move from the subterranean parking lot toward the psychiatrist’s building. The night clings to us until the door swings shut behind us. Within five minutes of walking those corridors, we noticed that nothing had changed in this place.
The reception area is empty. The walls are stained and still poorly kept – same faded paint scratched and scarred.
The air is saturated with antiseptic, carrying that unmistakable hospital feel.
The hallways stretch out in silence.
We hear nothing… only our own footsteps echoing through the corridor.
We scan the building as we move, checking angles, doorways, and reflections.
Then, we walk in.
[back in the psychiatrist’s office, 6 PM]
Should I start?
Silence.
I slip off my black leather jacket and drape it over the chair. Then, slowly, I place the Sig Sauer P320 gun on the table in front of the psy. The metal makes a dull, deliberate sound against the wood.
I lean back slightly.
I like how sometimes people forget I was trained and worked with the secret services.
Silence. The psy doesn’t react, just watches.
I tilt my head.
Not trying to be arrogant here.
A smirk appears on the Evil’s face and he looks at the psy.
It’s been a while since I saw you… I don’t mean the last time we met. I mean before that. When was it? The ‘80s in Cuba or the ‘90s in Washington?
The psy looks at The Evil.
1986. Miami.
The Evil nods.
Hm.. yeah. I remember. I was there with my brother. Terrible heat that day.
The psy opens a drawer, takes out a pen and a notepad. As he sets them on the desk, I notice a few boxes of Valium.
He starts writing.
I start talking.
Oxycodone, heroine, alcohol, morphine, benzodiazepines – the worst addictions ever. And I’m not referencing Queens of the Stone Age1. But well, I’m not judging; everyone has their own drug.
I glance briefly at the psy’s hand as it moves across the page.
What can we do. Mines have just been different lately. Living on the edge with my treatment. Still surviving, but that’s not my biggest issue. At least I quit cocaine, cigarettes, mostly alcohol and Valium. Still craving, though.
I lift my eyes to meet the Evil’s eyes.
I guess that’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it?
The Evil looks at me and then shouts at the psy.
Don’t look at me! I was busy with other business while I was locked in the sanatorium. I don’t know how she deals with her addictions.
I exhale slowly. I know I have to give the psy a bit of context.
I sit back, crossing one leg over the other.
I’m back in New York, after 5 years spent in South America, between Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, running the biggest drug operation of the last 20 years. Yeah, I know, sounds utopian (for those who don’t remember what I used to do). Before that, just before the pandemic, I betrayed The Evil and left with his brother in Colombia, while I locked him in a sanatorium with one of the worsts psychopaths ever – a sanatorium where previously The Evil sent me himself.
Silence settles again.
I keep my eyes on the psy.
So yeah… basically, the whole COVID mess is partially because the Evil lost control and we kinda changed the world order.
The Evil intervenes.
Fun times. That’s what happens when you spend too much time with humans.
I see that the Evil is not that mad. Or at least he does not show it. He looks at the psy.
She forgot to add that she also had tried to commit suicide and that I saved her. F**king hell, D.… you did some damage back then. The Valium really messed you up.
I decided not to look at him and ignore what he has just said.
The truth is that… at the end of the day no one really cares, no one actually gives a damn about you, because life goes on. No one cares about my ex-addictions or his crimes.
I stand up and start walking around the room.
Do you think that people on this planet have a clue about my drug operation, about world order or about the fact that there’s a prophecy hanging over me, him and his brother, Michael?
I stop and then I answer myself.
No, the answer is no.
I walk back and sit down.
My eyes flick briefly at the gun. Then, to the clock on the wall.
6.15 PM.
No one cares. We’re all on our own. And we will always be.
The Evil laughs. He’s amused.
She likes drama. That’s her thing.
I tilt my head slightly.
I don’t, really. I just got stuck with it.
The Evil lets out another short laugh, shaking his head.
The psy finally speaks.
Let’s take a break here. Why did you come today?
I don’t look again at the clock, because I already know that we still have almost 2 hours to keep him here.
The Evil leans forward, resting his forearms on his knees, taking control of the conversation.
Well, she has some issues. You know, emotional issues. And I need her focused. For the missions.
The psy writes something in his notebook. He pauses, then glances up.
For the killings…you mean.
The Evil’s smile fades. Slowly, he stands.
The psy freezes. The fear in his eyes is immediate.
The Evil takes a step closer and asks a question on a sharp tone.
Tell me, are you questioning me?
The psy swallows. His hand is tightening around the pen.
No, of course not… I’m just trying to establish … why you’re here… today.
A long second passes.
Then the Evil exhales, almost bored and straightens his suit jacket.
Basically, I want you to tell me she’s ready for work. We’ve spent the last years apart, so I need to know if I can trust her.
The psy nods quickly.
So…you want me to evaluate her?
The Evil nods.
Indeed.
The psy looks at me.
The Evil keeps going. I know he’s entertained by this situation.
Go on, D. Tell him. Explain how you work.
The psy looks at me, paying attention to the movement of my hands.
I lean back slightly, then forward again, resting my elbows on my knees.
There’s only one way. Get the job done and shut up. Get the job done.. because if you don’t, I put a bullet in your head.
We both laugh. The psy remains silent. Feels like he’s just there to assist at our dialogue.
The Evil smiles, almost proudly.
I taught her that. She’s quite aggressive, like me. I like that about her. But she knows how to hide it. She preserves it well. Have I ever told you about her type? She prefers to end the agony, to put the misery out of her, rather than letting it consume her…
I let out a quiet breath.
Oh, he’s so right. The first crime… it was passional. But after that…that’s when I discovered the pleasure of killing.
The Evil smiles at that, almost nostalgic.
It took a while to get her ready. We were in Los Angeles back then. However, I have to admit, that’s one of my favorite memories.
The Evil stops moving and looks directly at me.
The passion you showed that night, D.
Then, he turns back to the psy.
I kissed her. But not because there was anything romantic – no. It was because she executed her first murder perfectly, after stealing a very expensive diamond. I remember, D. You were covered in blood, and you were so lost in translation… as I told you back then, blood…is undoubtedly the most beautiful makeup a woman can wear.
He laughs again.
I’ve always found something fascinating when I watch her sleep… to know that she passes through half of her life without feeling, without acting, living only in her small world defined by what she has heard and seen while she’s awake… sometimes I wish I had that kind of simplicity too. But today is not that day…
She wakes up in the morning and says nothing… I can feel her fear. It’s normal – she has something extraordinary to do in a very short time. Throughout history, many extraordinary things have happened, many of them… having an architect like me. The theft is like an excuse… what comes after is what interests me. If I were to make an analogy… the theft is the warm-up before the match; the real match – the one with the highest stakes – is what follows…
[…]
Hours after, we were in that penthouse when I called my people to clean the room and take care of the body, while we stepped out onto the terrace on the 42nd floor, overlooking the city from the edge of the building, our arms resting on the railing. I looked at her and said, “The higher you’re, the harder you fall.”
In the end, it was just another day in LA, in that terrible heat.
That was my D. That was my girl.
He pauses.
Ah, D., we shared such a special moment. These were different times.
He glances back at the psy.
You see, that’s why she and I get along so well. We like the same things. Sometimes I wonder how we didn’t end up in some kind of a love relationship or whatever you’d call it.
The psy continues to take notes, while we stay silent for a moment. I then speak again.
It’s so messed up. The only man I ever wanted… I couldn’t get him. I just couldn’t.
I was lying in bed, half-covered with that sheet – because you had stolen the other half… I could still taste that dry whisky lingering in my stomach, and I could feel your breath, tinged with Marlboro smoke. I couldn’t sleep. I felt the cold touch of your metal watch against my skin, mixed with the warmth of your arm wrapped around me. I could hear your uneven breathing, and I knew you weren’t asleep either.
It was almost 6 in the morning… New York felt like a dealer, handing us the finest substance of all: love.
I loved your YSL scent – it suited you so perfectly. I loved the flowers you brought me for no special reason at all. I loved your words – the way you said them, when you said them, the effortless charm behind them that made me tremble every time, like a curse I never wanted to escape. I loved your gaze, the way it stripped me instantly of every thought, yet carried every feeling in me to the edge of ecstasy. I loved the mornings when you woke me, whispering my name…
Suddenly, I snapped out of it. I had fallen asleep under New York’s starlit sky, in your bed. You were there, waiting for me with breakfast, smiling… I was wearing your shirt, wrapped in that scent of yours-that jewel thief’s scent… you, who had turned me into your diamond, the most coveted thing you’d ever stolen.
Your expression seemed calm, but I could see everything you couldn’t say:
that you’d be leaving again today… that you didn’t know when you’d return… that you were sorry… that one day all of this would end… that you’d stay with me and no longer need other precious stones… that for now you had to live your life, to do what you loved, what you felt, what was necessary… that I was the only woman who mattered, the only one you’d ever truly loved… that you felt guilty… that maybe one day I’d forgive you…
You always did the same thing. And yet, every time, it stirred a different thrill in me – and darker thoughts that stayed with me until you returned.
I lean forward, elbows pressing into my knees. I continue.
This man took out everything out of me. He stripped me of every emotion, everything I felt. He took my heart and never gave it back. And the worst part is that he was my only weakness. The only one. And all I ever wanted was him. That’s it. Just to be with him. And I never got that. It’s the only thing that I could never have. That’s what drove me insane.
The Evil lets out a dry laugh.
Women and their drama…who cares about love?
The psy intervenes.
I suppose it was about power. Between you and your man.
The Evil turns to him sharply as he didn’t expect him to comment, and the psy freezes. I feel the need to step in, while I look at the Evil.
You don’t understand. It wasn’t about love. Love was long gone between us before I killed him… It was indeed about power. It always was. His power over me, my vulnerability to him.
I pause, searching for the right words.
With him…life was bearable. When I was with him, nothing else mattered. Everything felt possible, everything was better. I wrote my best scripts because of him. And when he was gone, everything turned dark gain. Every day since, I wake up and manage the darkness… because life goes on.
The psy frowns slightly – he seems confused.
Would you call that love?
No, it was beyond that.
The Evil scoffs. I feel irritation creeping into his voice.
D., common…
He turns to the psy.
Let me tell you what happened. She shot him. Killed him. One bullet, straight through his head.
He looks back at me, eyes narrowing.
So, tell me, D., if life wasn’t bearable without him…why did you do it?
I hold his gaze, knowing he’ll never understand.
I guess…I liked the power more.
A faint, bitter smile crosses my lips.
He was the most narcissistic, toxic and manipulative man I’ve ever met.
The psy leans forward slightly, intrigues.
Tell me about that night. The night you shot him.
I exhale slowly, my fingers tightening together.
Oh… in 13 years with him, I had five minutes of clarity. Just five.
I look up, distant.
Long enough to understand that a life with him would always be a life of pain. My father used to say that love sparkles at the beginning… but what comes after is compromise. And I saw it clearly – me being second, third, fourth… always the one he comes back to, but never the one he truly chooses. A life of uncertainty, never knowing what tomorrow would bring. A life where I had no control, because he had my heart in a way no other man ever did. That’s when I knew I had to do something. But that decision… it would have never come if the Evil hadn’t entered my life. Before that, I wasn’t planning to become a hitwoman…
I pause.
The psy watches me closely.
But what made you pull the trigger?
I look at him then away.
It wasn’t what he did to me.
I shake my head slowly, eyes fixed somewhere past the floor.
It was what he did to the other girls. The stories I heard… how he strangled his girlfriend, how he threw her out of the apartment, how he even hit her pet. That’s when I knew – it was either a bullet in his head… or a bullet in his head.
I pause.
The bullet was for every woman who has ever been abused. Physically, verbally, or mentally. For every woman who has lost precious time in her life for toxic narcissists. For every woman who struggles and fights every day with the weight of a trauma.
The Evil cuts in.
So, you decided he was nothing more than a drug dealer. Someone who brought nothing of value into this world. Ah – and a professional thief as well. Stealing exquisite jewelry and selling it on the black market.
I glance at him, then look away.
I continue – my voice is steady but low.
Most of the time, that’s exactly who he was. And there were nights – nights when other girls had priority. He never had time to give me what he gave them. Even if I was “his everything.”
A bitter pause.
He chose to spend most of his time with anyone else but me. But if I spent time with someone else… then I was betraying him. He was so jealous. Zileve…2.
I lift my eyes toward the Evil.
Did you know he got jealous of us?
The Evil looks at me surprised.
You never told me that, D.
I let out a quiet breath.
There was this one time… some conference or some event. He called me just before it started – he completely lost it.
The Evil lets out a short laugh.
You’re joking, right, D.?
No. I swear. He was jealous of us.
The Evil turns to the psy, scoffing under his breath.
He was more deranged than I thought… f**king c**t.
I shrug slightly.
Of course, I never told you. I knew what the consequences would be.
I pull myself back into the memory.
And then… he’d switch to the other extreme. I hated his MO… always rejecting me, then coming back as the good guy.
I mimic his voice, flat, stripped of emotion.
‘I care about you too much to hurt you; You deserve better; You’re the best thing that ever came out of me.’ That’s what he’d say. But in reality… that was the method. The hook. He knew exactly what would pull me in – and he used it every time.
I pause again.
Still, in a strange way… I miss him. I mean, not him, I miss the fact that I cannot talk to him anymore, that I cannot ask him for advice. You’d be surprised how insightful guys like him can be.
I notice the psy writing more quicky now.
And sometimes… I just miss how he made me feel. From agony to ecstasy… he was playing with my dopamine like a debt he never intended to pay. Feeding my hope in installments, just enough to keep me there… trapped. Forever. And that… was the most powerful feeling I’ve ever experienced. I felt that time stopped when I was with him. I felt at peace, like I had everything I needed. But when he was gone – or even in the moments he simply wasn’t there – everything turned into a chase: for perfection, for the next thing, for more.
I shake my head slowly.
And nothing ever came close.
It was 2016 and we were in Bronx, at a playground, near some swings, smoking cigarettes. It was September and the air had just started to turn cold. I hadn’t seen him for a few months at that point, so I kinda missed him.
Where have you been recently? You were gone for a couple of months.
I knew I had to tell him.
I know. I’ve been everywhere…New York, Barcelona, Dubai, London, Paris and… yeah, well, everywhere.
You know how much I love staying in this jungle. But I also went back to Puerto Rico to visit my friend and some other friends…
I knew he was talking about one of the biggest gangs in the country. And that was just his way of saying it, like it was the most casual thing in the world.
I didn’t tell you, but I was seeing a girl; she wanted to marry me.
Ah, really?
That hurt, but I couldn’t show him how much it did.
Yeah, I was living in her apartment for the last months. She was quite rich too, so spent a lot of money. On the Upper East.
So, what happened?
Well… I kept thinking about someone else. That’s when I realized that she wasn’t the right one.
Someone else?
Aham…
I still don’t know if he meant me or not. I just kept going along with his nonsense.
Do you remember the guy I used to tell you about? The one who asked me to marry him when we were students – when I was back at my dad’s place in Switzerland for a semester? I met him for coffee in Paris and he showed up with his girlfriend. And the moment she said she had a 30-minute work call for work and left the table…
I let out a small laugh.
He invited me to spend the next weekend with him in Miami. You know… to have some fun.
I shook my head, still half-amused.
It was so ridiculous…such a fool…
He went quiet. He just stared at his cigarette, watching it burn between his fingers.
How can you even question that someone loves you, D.? Common, D. I mean, Jeez… I mean, common, D. … How can someone not love you?!
There was something different in his voice – something raw, almost regretful. And I felt it. I felt the pain when he had said that. It was one of the few times when he expressed, in his own strange way…something close to love.
I froze.
I looked at him, he looked at me.
And we both finished our cigarettes in silence.
The Evil laughs and looks first at the psychiatrist. He then looks at me and starts screaming, standing up from the chair. When he starts screaming, it’s like a shockwave moving through the room, rattling everything in its path.
For what would you need his advice for, D.? For what??
He takes a step forward, his voice rising.
Are you kidding me?? For what – how to open another drug lab, like the one you built with Michael in Colombia. Or to figure out how long it will take before you relapse again?
I don’t move. I don’t speak. I can feel the weight of it, but I stay still. He continues.
Or do you remember how many times he ghosted you? Left you hanging? When you needed him the most – where was he? You always remember the good parts, how he made you feel… but that was what – 5% of your relationship? Do you remember how many nights you suffered? How many times you fell asleep crying?
I know he’s pissed.
He sits back down, and can’t tell if he really meant it, or if It’s just another performance, to let time pass.
He shifts his attention to the psy.
Sometimes, she takes what I say too personally. And that’s when she’s weak. Vulnerable. That’s when she starts thinking about that fool.
He scoffs.
Believe it or not, I would have killed him myself if she hadn’t done it first.
He pauses. His jaw tightens.
That bullet in his head? Best thing that ever happened. For everyone.
I feel the pressure creeping in, so I need to say something, not to let him own the narrative.
This reminds me of the time when him and I fought.
The psy is confused.
What do you mean… you fought?
Of course, he wouldn’t understand. He couldn’t.
I pulled my shirt halfway off and then slipped it back on, just enough to show the scars near my left rib and also the one on the left arm. Big scars. It’s noticeable that they took a long time to heal.
We destroyed an entire apartment…it was 2 or 3 months before I killed him. We went mad. All that anger, all that fury, everything that was wrong between us. We just made one promise to each other: no glass and no guns. I remember I almost broke his right arm. I set that apartment on fire at the end.
It was terrible. The fire spreading…and he was sitting in front of the door looking at me through it. We were covered in blood, both of us. Still, so full of anger. So much love. So much hate. Like he once told me: to love and hate someone at the same time – that’s the most intense feeling there is.
The Evil scoffs.
And that’s the guy she wants to get advice from.
I turn to look at him. He makes me angry.
Yeah, because in moments like this, when I tell stories like this, all that I think about is vodka. Dry vodka with ice. Not 50, not 100, but 200 ml. And sometimes… calling him helped. It kept a chronic addiction in check. Something you will never be able to understand because you cannot comprehend human nature. People spend years in therapy and get nowhere. And he… he could fix me just by being there.
The psy takes notes while both the Evil and I remain silent. A few seconds pass.
Then the psy looks up and asks me another question.
What was his name?
The Evil speaks first.
Max.
I cut in, sharper.
Maximiliano… that’s what I used to call him. He was Max to everyone else. Born in the Bronx, NY, American dad, Puerto Rican mother. No siblings – if you really want to know the full family history. And when I was blonde, he used to call me La Rubia…
The Evil expression hardens.
I know he hates this part – when it shows how real it was.
An ordinary drug dealer and thief who got lucky and ended up being the most wanted guy at Ivy League parties.
I feel my patience slipping.
Not like you didn’t buy for him at least once.
His voice sharpens.
Not like you didn’t put a bullet in his head when you had the chance.
Silence falls between us again.
That’s the only time I’ve been weak. With Maximilliano. Never with anyone else. For everyone else…it’s exactly like Heat. Like when De Niro said and I quote… ‘don’t let yourself get attached to anything you’re not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner’3. I’m the one who walks away in 30 seconds.
The Evil cuts in.
Believe it or not, I confirm.
The psy keeps taking notes. I glance at the Evil, then gesture slightly towards him.
I know what he’s thinking right now. He’s looking at my family history, at the fact that my parents are divorced and that I grew up by myself with my aunt in London; that then I went to Harvard, MIT and followed the secret services training academy. And he wants to say that I’m traumatized and this is why I ended up with someone like Maximilliano. But he has not clue what it’s like to find the one person completely outside your world who made me feel something. He was the perfect escape… and I was his.
The Evil interrupts me.
And yet, you’re still here. Max isn’t. He’s been gone for a long time now.
I continue.
I miss how simple he was sometimes.
The Evil lets out a low laugh and turns towards the psy.
What she didn’t tell you… is that Max wasn’t poor. Not really. He came from money – old money, the kind that doesn’t disappear overnight. But circumstances have a way of bending people. His dad got involved with some debts with loan sharks, so that’s when things started to shift. Max stepped into the streets – not because he had to, but because he chose to. He was educated in some good public schools, so he learned how to control the streets.
The Evil smirks.
But let’s not forget, D., about his Ferrari, or how he drove down every single week from NY to Boston – just to see you. Common, D., let’s be honest with ourselves. We don’t romanticize poverty.
I say nothing. I glance at the psychiatrist.
One evening, I was at a reception in Boston, drinking a glass of whisky alone, when an investment banker came up to me and asked me what I studied and what I believed about quantitative easing. I talked with him about the subject, and he became fascinated. I was so cold. So serious… so bored. He asked for my number. I couldn’t give it.
And all I thought about while talking with him was one moment I had with Max today, in the park, on our bench…
We had our weekly meeting. It was spring. It was cold outside. Still, we smoked Marlboro Lights in silence, as usual. I wanted to tell him so many things, but I couldn’t. And I know he was thinking about someone else.
Then, all of a sudden, a guy came up-looked like he was in a rush. I glanced at him: he was a mid-40s, fairly normal-looking white guy, wearing a tracksuit, with dark hair and dark eyes. He greeted me, real casual, and then went and kissed my hand.
He said to Max:
Let’s go for a walk.
They went for a walk near a tree. I started to smoke another cigarette. I was wondering what they were talking about.
He returned after five minutes and we started talking. I knew him. He seemed to be so calm, but he was just trying to hide his fear. I started to argue with him. Who was that guy? What did he want from him? Bla bla… Max, you don’t need that kind of men in your life.
After five minutes, he became angry and strangled me softly. If people had seen us, it would have looked like we were so in love…
Max whispered in my ear.
D., that mob guy pointed a gun at me and asked me if I wanted to buy it. And then he asked me…
He paused.
He actually begged me to come with him to Detroit. He said I’m the best for the job he wanted to do there.
I froze. He took a cigarette from my pack and he smoked it in silence.
Then we both left.
He quietly opens a drawer, pulls out a file, and flips through several pages with clinical detachment. After a moment, he looks up at me.
You suffer from low latent inhibition (LLI), but it is combined with one of the highest IQs I’ve ever seen – between 160 and 200, with 200 being the maximum on this scale – which makes you a born genius. You also speak 7 languages. And you wrote scripts – you had quite a few short films that you wrote, directed, and produced yourself.
He makes me laugh as he finally checks that information. And it’s only 7 PM.
You know. It doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day… I was an addict. I’m still a murderer. There is no difference between me and a death row convict or a drug addict. Just the context. That’s the only difference.
The Evil feels the need to praise me to the psy.
You see, that’s why she’s a better human than many others… she’s so humble. Common D., maybe one day you’ll get the Oscar.
I have to reply.
I’m really not. I just manage my addictions better; that’s why I’m not dead yet and I’m not convicted because I work with him.
The psy continues to ask his questions.
Tell me, D., what didn’t you like while about studying at these universities?
The entitlement.
The Evil laughs.
Ohh, humans… going on their endless quest, wanting this and that and more, while the world is falling apart. If only they would stop for a second to reflect on their existence. To engage in some internal introspection when they wake up. Why is everything about wanting something? Why are they so, so selfish? Like the great Jim Morrison once said: ‘people are strange4’… great guy.
He pauses.
Take Max, for example…a narcissist who made no real contribution to this world apart from selling drugs, stealing diamonds and breaking hearts. How is that beneficial to anyone? Michael and I have been preventing wars for ages… for what? In the end, humans are just so selfish, so focused on who they’re, what they get. And they completely miss the essence of life. And when Michael and I lost control, even for a short period of time, chaos followed.
I look at him and start to hum Morrison’s tune.
‘People are strange when you’re a stranger…’5
He looks at me, and we both keep humming, staring into the distance.
‘When you’re strange, no one remembers your name…’6
I look at the Evil and return to our topic.
You know what my issue is… with anyone who’s kind of made it. Some feel they’re infallible. That it’s just them and God. Or whatever their God is. And no one else matters. They think they rule the world, that having money and power is everything. I call this ‘glory within 4 walls’…. and that’s why I hung around with Max. As he was like a modern Omar…7 stealing from those who believe they’re entitled to this and that.
The Evil interrupts.
So funny…. No one is entitled to anything. NOOOOO ONE!!!
He gets angry… and starts walking around the room.
And the more someone believes that, the emptier they become and the easier they’re to manipulate. Power is just a game that my brother and I have played for maaany centuries, and humans are just our pawns in it. They have no real power; they’re so fragile. With a few exceptions… we gave you some power, D.
He looks at me, suddenly serious.
We gave you some power, D.
I flinch. I need to explain this to the psy, who is now taking notes.
It’s true. The worst thing that I’ve experienced was real power. Through him and his brother. And It’s nothing…but terrifying.
I pause, trying to find the right words.
And the way I define power is not the privilege of being able to kill someone with no consequences. No… not at all. Power is many things; power is choosing not to say what could be said; choosing not to fix what you know you could fix; allowing history to unfold without interfering…
The Evil interrupts me again.
With one exception, D. When you killed Max. That wasn’t in the cards.
I pause, then continue.
What can I say… I knew the power he had over me. Now I dream about him sometimes and there are mornings when I wake up and feel him before I even feel myself. And the worst part is that no one knows, and no one can see it. It’s all happening in my mind. He was the only one who ever had that kind of power over me. So…when I killed him, I did it to protect myself, because I knew how weak I was.
I pause again, then continue.
It’s so hard to explain this in words. It’s so damn hard.
I start walking around the room. It’s true – it really is so hard to put into words.
There are days when I go into a kind of “freeze” and it feels like the day just passes by me, while I observe it from a distance. Deep down, I feel so damn empty and nothing that happens that day can make me feel better. That’s when I realize how empty my life is without him. There’s no excitement, no real thrill. And no, this isn’t soul searching. This is just how It’s, and that’s it.
One Saturday night, Max told me to go out. I was back in New York and had the weekend free, so I assumed he’d come by my place and we’d take a walk around Central Park – like we always did. But instead, he pulled up in his latest Bugatti.
That wasn’t our usual kind of night.
I have a surprise for you, Rubia.
He drove straight to LaGuardia, where his father’s private jet was already waiting. He didn’t say much after that, and I didn’t ask. I just followed.
On the plane, everything was there – food, champagne, all the things he knew I liked. He told me we had about six hours. Faster than flying commercial. He poured me a glass of rum over ice, handed it to me, and then said something I’ve never forgotten:
You’ve done so many things for me, D. This is one thing I need to do for you.
We spent the flight watching The Wire. Our favorite.
When we landed, one of his friends picked us up and drove us to a music studio. It was massive- one of those places where you just know the biggest names have recorded. He told me to stay quiet. We weren’t supposed to be there.
We slipped in behind the scenes, up above the main recording room. From where we stood, we could see everything – the studio below, dimly lit, with a single piano in the center. We waited in silence.
And then she walked in.
Alicia Keys sat down at the piano… and started playing Falling.
That’s when Max looked at me and said:
This one is for you, D.
That was one of the moments he truly got to me. He was a man of few words – but in that moment, it felt like all the love he had for me was poured into that one song.
I pause and I come back to sit on the armchair.
Ahh…now I have a part-time job in the ER and a part-time job as a trader in one of the biggest investment banks in the US. I needed something to stimulate my adrenaline – to make sure that I don’t think about him, that I don’t suddenly feel the urge to kill someone and join any of these two sick brothers in their missions… and go back to that hitwoman style.
The Evil looks at me, then at the psy.
So, are you having fun, D.?
He makes me laugh. Ha…
Oh… I need to tell you more about that.
The Evil seems amused.
Tell me, D. Tell me more. What do you do at your job. Your jobs.
I laughed. He actually made me laugh.
Well, it’s not about killing people & other crazy missions. Clearly not.
He looks at me.
So, what do you do in the ER?
Trauma. Heavy trauma – shootings, overdoses, people hanging between life and death.
I pause for a second.
And I see it there too… doctors who think they’re gods. Same messed-up attitude everywhere.
The Evil laughs.
Oh, and I have a boss.. Not in the hospital. At the other job. A funny guy. Ah… he’s so funny. And useless. Absolutely useless.
I actually laugh again.
He’s all for the family – very involved or something and he doesn’t want a headache. And he leads a few traders, so he’s very busy. Or at least he thinks he’s. He told me…ha. He told me… during our last meeting, he told me…
I laugh again.
Ohh… so funny.
I pause, trying not to laugh.
So, he told me that, you know… I need to focus on the job and that he really doesn’t want a headache on top of all the BAU issues. Apparently, I had raised quite a few concerns and tried to help some colleagues from other departments that were drowning there.
I pause. I laugh again.
And I was like…
I hesitate for a second, searching for the right words.
How should I put this… I don’t have time for something like this. I really don’t.
I get serious.
We were in a meeting room and that morning I had heart surgery on a patient – a really bad case. Barely saved him. When I left, he was still hanging in between life and death. It really drained me.
I take a breath.
All I could think about when I left the hospital and took a cab to the bank was a glass of vodka, some Diazepam… you know the drill. And then you have this guy…this person…. Talking about how confident he’s that I will adapt and then…
I feel the anger rising.
He dared to tell me about KPIs and targets – about how, yes, I’m good, but I shouldn’t become too comfortable, like the other colleagues… when last week he didn’t even know how to read the KPIs. Then he told me a whole theory about knowing and reading people and how some people exaggerate and don’t see the facts for what they’re, which is why stats are being messed up when it comes to P&L. Preaching leadership skills like he’s MLK Jr. on a comeback tour.
I clench my jaw slightly.
And I swear… I swear, all I could think about was how I could have … in just a few seconds…
I stop, staring at the floor.
I could have just killed him. Just like that.
I look at the psy.
Not even with a gun. Just with the power I refuse to use. And he kept talking…and I looked like I kept listening, however all I knew was that I could end it right there. No consequences. No trace. I just knew it. And all I could think was… please do not say anything that will make me snap. Please just don’t. Because that’s just the end. That’s it.
The room falls silent. The psy and the Evil just listen.
But I chose not to. I’ve learned that this is what real power looks like. And…
I let out a short laugh.
It’s funny, you realize that’s what power really is. When you don’t use it.
I pause.
There was this memory with Max that came back to me that day.
We both had terrible days. Somehow, we ended up on the rooftop of the DL in NY. I told him I was there, so he came.
I was still full of anger, barely able to speak. He didn’t try to fix it with words. Instead, he went to the bar, spoke to the bartender who knew him, and asked for something like Long Island. Then he talked to the guy in charge of bookings, asking him to give us some privacy. A few people moved away, and we stayed there, alone on a sofa in the corner.
We had no cigarettes left, and there were none around to buy. At some point, he picked up a half-smoked one from an ashtray, from the table near us, and we shared it.
We barely spoke. It was just silence, the city around us, the loud music. The two of us sitting there. But somehow, in that silence, we were putting each other back together.
He taught me over time how to contain my emotions – how to deal with them, how to filter them. But he never told me how to do it – he just showed me what my options were. I remember it was a really good night; once we got a bit better, he went to get more cigarettes while I ordered some rum for us, and we kept partying on our favorite rooftop in New York until morning.
The way we could make each other feel better – without words, without effort – was something that you rarely find with someone.
I get back to the present.
And because of what I learnt from Max, I think that’s how I manage my anger. Not by getting rid of it, but by keeping it from taking control.
I shrug, glancing around for a second.
And what I think is the most important…it’s why I didn’t use my power against my boss.
I pause.
I know why I reacted. It’s cause I’ve seen criminals. I’ve seen people who would have no shame to put a bullet in someone if they wanted to. I’ve seen people who would have tortured your entire family for not being loyal to them. However, he just stood there, at his desk, preaching the change, and getting from hero to zero…I know I could have done so much, but I chose not to. And there was only one reason. Just one.
I pause again.
Not his family, not his kids. I thought…. you know… today is just a day where I don’t want to kill anyone. Not today. Maybe it was because of that patient…Maybe. I don’t know. Or maybe it was just the fact that I cannot really use such power on useless people. At the end of the day, I’m not supposed to fix them, it’s not my job; regardless, even if I had killed him, another fool would have replaced him. That kind of energy and power has to be saved for other types of “projects”. Maybe indeed for him the harshest punishment is that guilt won’t let him sleep well at night.
The Evil listens without reacting, without even looking at me.
So, you carried on, D. Damage control.
I laugh.
Neah, I didn’t. But I did something that someone who spent much time with an experienced thief/drug dealer would have done and let him feel in control. Set the scene. Told him to present the new major committee together, how we could improve the KPIs with almost 5% and showed him that we were a team, but kept it factual. No emotions. I needed to make him feel like he was the hero, while the others would see him more and more as the zero.
I continue.
Like Emil Cioran once said: “fools build the world and the intelligent ones tear it down”8.
The Evil laughs, and I let the sound settle before continuing.
On the other hand, veryone at the hospital seems to see me as some kind of hero – some kind of leader. Maybe that’s what happens when you’ve run the biggest drug cartel in South America. You pick up a few things about leadership. At least I learned it in practice – not from some fake “return of MLK Jr.” trying to teach me how to lead.
An almost ironic smile crosses my face.
But still… this isn’t self-praise. Not at all. I’m no one’s leader. No one’s hero. Let me give you an example.
I turn slightly towards the Evil.
Do you remember our mission in Tijuana?
Yes.
Do you remember how that bastard got away, how we couldn’t get him in the end?
A slight pause. The Evil looks at me.
I mean, I could have. But we did it the human way.
I roll my eyes.
So, back to this idea of me being a ‘hero’. It’s 8 a.m., a Monday, in the ER. I’ve got 4 residents with me when a severe shooting case comes in – multiple shotgun wounds.
I pause, grounding myself in the memory.
And then I see who he is: Agim.
I smile. A faint, bitter smile.
A very lucky man. I have to stabilize him, remove the pellets. It’s a fight between life and death, so I move fast. But inside, it’s killing me that I have to save him.
I glance briefly at the psy.
My residents are amazed – you have no idea. And in the end, he lives.
The Evil laughs, entertained.
But he was lucky… because he was unconscious. I kept hoping he’d open his eyes and recognize me.
The Evil tilts his head slightly.
And what would you have done if he were awake, D.?
I don’t answer immediately.
As I was removing the pellets, all I could think about was how much I wanted him to wake up… to send my residents out… close the door…
A quiet pause.
…and kill him.
I look down for a moment, then back up.
So how can anyone call me a hero?
The Evil doesn’t seem bothered.
Well, D… technically, you’re one. After all, we’re trying to save the world.
I meet his gaze, almost skeptical.
Are we?
A smirk appears on his face.
Nice one, D. But I know there’s more. You know there’s more than that, D.
He gives a light smirk and then looks at the psy.
She thinks he’s gonna be back.
The psy seems confused.
What do you mean- you think he’s gonna be back?
I glance at the clock.
7.20 PM.
Finally…I can get to the point.
It’s the damn vision. That’s what bothers me.
The Evil nods, almost pleased that I said it out loud.
She’s really freaking out because she thinks Max will come back.
I shake my head slightly. I have to correct that.
No, that’s not the problem. The problem is that if he’s back, then we’re already too late with our plan. The prophecy will happen.
My tone hardens.
I couldn’t care less that he’s back. I would still put a bullet in his head if needed.
The Evil laughs.
Feels like we’re in Supernatural. Season 5, most specifically.
I look at the psy.
Have you ever watched it? It might actually help you with a lot of patients.
The Evil laughs again and adds.
Quite a lot, actually.
The psy ignores our little joke and brings the conversation back to the point.
Let’s focus on something positive. D., is there any happy memory you have with Max?
I laugh and I can feel the shift immediately.
The Evil is already getting irritated. He lets out a short laugh.
Dude…
I reply.
Yeah, I guess it’s the one where I put the bullet in his head.
The Evil laughs again, louder this time.
The psy quickly takes notes, unfazed.
I pause for a moment, then my tone shifts – less sarcastic, more reflective.
The thing with Max… I think it was the way he looked at me. The way he talked to me. The way he made me feel… completely exposed in front of him. So weak.
The Evil groans, visibly annoyed.
Here we go again…
I ignore him and continue.
I’ve never seen that kind of skill in anyone. Damn, and what a skill. Guys like him don’t say “I love you” very often.
But there was one time…
He called me, furious. A friend of mine was involved with this very rich guy – his father was vice mayor. Max was close to him back then; they were spending almost every afternoon together. So, I asked Max what he knew.
He told me, “I see him every day with a different girl… but your friend is never in the car.” Casinos, escorts, whatever you can imagine. She had no idea. When she found out, she was shattered.
He called me to ask what the situation was – what she knew, what she didn’t. We were talking about her, about what to do, what to tell her…
And then, in the middle of the conversation – like it was just another comment, nothing special – he said:
She thinks what we have… she has with him. But the difference between me and him is that I love you. He doesn’t love her.
I remember I didn’t say anything. We were still talking about her, about helping her.
But we both knew what had just been said… and how it had been said.
The Evil contradicts me.
She’s lying. She has exactly the same skills.
That’s not true.
I feel how the Evil’s irritation quickly turns into anger.
Did she tell you how many of her ex-es have died? Or how many she killed? Fascinating stories! And how many of her ex-es felt thought she was so damn special – one of a kind?
I don’t respond. Tonight is not about that.
He continues.
Alright, let’s recap – Aris, Dean, Benitto, Vitto, and now this new one … Salah? Common, D. Get a grip. The way Max behaved with you – this is exactly how you treat these guys. And you don’t even have to try D. It comes naturally to you.
I exhale slowly. I have to say something.
Tonight is not about that.
The psy flips through a few files, briefly reviewing his notes before looking back at me.
Maybe we should take a step back. Let me recap: you ran drug operations in Colombia and now you work in an office… you’re part-time ER surgeon and part-time trader in a bank.
The Evil lets out a short laugh.
Actually, I shouldn’t laugh.
He gets serious.
It’s not that funny.
He’s then silent for a few seconds.
When D. locked me in the sanatorium, pre-COVID, that’s when I lost my powers and took a while to get them back … and that’s when I lost control of the world. Before that, I used to split it with Michael. He had South America, Europe, Australia, Japan and China. I had the U.S., lost South America to my brother, Africa, Russia and I think overall Asia’s still split between us…
He pauses.
And the problem with losing control is that here we’re now, trying to stop the apocalypse. The real apocalypse, not stories in books or on whatever TikToks… All because a human got in between me and my brother.
He looks at the psy and continues.
And she’s doomed, really – her whole life is an exercise in living with something she can’t have… the only human that ever made her happy. So instead, she chases the dopamine – takes on different jobs, one after another – until the day she decides to walk away. But all of that… that’s behind us now. As there’s a bigger danger.
I have to say something.
You know…we’re talking a lot about Max , my ex- es, but we never address the dynamic between us; I mean, how I was meant to end up like this, how much this really affected me, how from Havard and MIT I ended up being a hitman… hitwoman in my case. I didn’t kind of subscribe for this, if you see what I mean.
The Evil’s pissed and he stands up walking around the office. I intervene.
Maybe we should talk about the dynamics between you and your brother. And how your main headquarter has always been in Cuba.
I see he keeps walking, not answering.
October 1962…
Morning in Cuba. I hate this hell. It burns too hot.
My brother is back, and I have to deal with him…
This time I took a precaution – ordered a bottle of rum in advance, so I could sit at the bar while waiting, let it settle my nerves before facing him.
It’s been a day since Michael and I left a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. Russia was too cold, and our resentment ran too deep for his stubbornness… so we turned our attention to John F. Kennedy.
Just another one of our “courtesy visits.”
If we left them too long without our control, they’d start going off the rails too …
Everything was chaos. Constant pressure.
The last saint in hell prays for the last evil in hell – some kind of equation.
Where I’m the saint… and the evil – well, that’s him. Michael, obviously.
Or maybe it just depends on how you look at it-like the dynamic between Nikita and John.
Somehow, Michael and I, for once, made peace between us and decided to take a long break… because we’d been at war nonstop since 1914.
So… we arranged that a secret arrangement has to take place and prevent World War III from happening.
And now he’s here.
He calls it a celebration. No war. No collapse. No fire swallowing everything whole.
But I’m not in the mood.
Our kind of peace never lasts. And whatever we’re – brothers, enemies, something in between – it’s never been simple. Never been what it should be.
The Evil turns around and starts shouting at me. I remain on the chair, looking at him.
Common D., you worked for me and then when you stopped… you joined my brother in the cartel business and the war between gangs, while taking control of South America, which was my main territory. So please, just please, do not play the victim, when you know better than me that you were fully aware of your actions and many things that you did were your choice.
I stay calm.
Did I really have a choice with Max?
I say that, looking at him and then at the psy
The desert air at Coachella felt like it belonged to us that year-dry, electric, humming with bass that never really stopped. LA had always been our city, but out there, everything just felt different. Under these neon nights, it felt like we owned something bigger than New York’s streets and memories.
I met Max in a tent that smelled like dust, cheap cologne, and pain.
He was carrying close to 56,000 dollars cash like it was just another accessory.
Crazy money. That kind that people ruin their lives over.
And still, we were dressed like we had nothing.
H&M. Head to toe. Like we were just two kids who scraped together enough to be there.
That’s what I loved about it. About him.
Out there, no one knew. No one mattered.
Not the girls orbiting him, not the noise, not the chaos of it all.
I remember that he barely said much that day. I knew Max never needed to fill silence – but at some point, without asking, without warning, he just took my hand.
And he pulled me into the crowd.
Thousands of people, lights flashing, music breaking through your ribs – and somehow, it felt like he was showing me off to every single one of them.
And I let him. Because in that moment, I was the one.
By the time night settled in, everything softened.
The heat faded, the music drifted further away, and we ended up sitting outside the tent, side by side, sharing a cigarette like always. Marlboro Lights like always.
Above us, there were stars scattered across the sky.
Neither of us said much.
We didn’t have to.
Then I saw a falling star and got excited.
I remember I sat up straight, grabbing his arm.
– Oh my God, make a wish!
I was half-laughing, half-serious, like a kid again.
He didn’t rush. He never rushed anything.
He just looked at me for a second and then he leaned in, pressed a slow kiss on my forehead, while whispering in my ear.
You make a wish for me instead, he said quietly. I leave that to you.
And just like that, it felt heavier than it should have – like he held something in me no one else could ever reach.
The Evil sits down. I continue. I look at the psy.
Actually, I know that we were doomed from the beginning. Max and I. Michael explained it to me. That what we had was true love. That Real True love. The kind that it’s so rare, it only happens once in a while on this Earth. And that… if we had made it work, the apocalypse would have come. And you see now… I have these visions; that he will be back; that Max will be back. And if he’s back, it means we’re closer to the apocalypse – that it’s coming.
The Evil wants to interrupt me, but I lean forward, closer to the psy’s desk – to the gun I had placed there at the beginning of the night.
You don’t understand. No one understands. I feel him. I feel him when I wake up, when I go to work. It’s like he’s there. Always, constant. And it’s not grief, it’s not me imagining things, it’s not the LLI. I can tell you, he will be back and if this happens, we’re all screwed.
The Evil comments.
He cannot be back. He’s dead. He’s in a very dark place right now and I can tell you – no one came back from there. Not even I can bring someone back.
He pauses, his tone shifting slightly.
Ok, maybe except for Lazarus and Jesus. But they weren’t where Max is. And that is a line I do not cross. I do not cross my Father.
I keep looking at the psy.
I know the day, the moment, when he comes back. I can see it. There are many things I can see.
The Evil cuts in again.
We keep talking nonsense about Max, about my brother, when the reality is that… there is NO time. There is NO time left. We’re already too late. We’re running a race against time here.
I glance at the clock. It’s almost 9 PM.
The psy looks at me.
What else can you see?
It’s 8.58. I need to time this right.
I take a deep breath.
I see…. that there is man that I need to kill with this gun before I’m getting killed. And I do not know why yet, I just know I need to do it.
8.59 PM.
And I know I need to be quick, otherwise someone else will get to me first.
The psy leans forward slightly.
Why go, then? Just don’t be there at that right place and at that time.
The Evil smiles.
You see..if she doesn’t, I can tell you that fool – Max – will indeed be back and then we’re really screwed.
And then he looks at me.
And D. …the only reason you’re not dead is because we have a bigger issue. Otherwise, you really crossed the line when you plotted against me and sent me to that bloody sanatorium. Trust me, you’re so lucky that you’re still alive. Otherwise, I would have tortured you for an eternity.
9 PM.
The psy presses a panic button below his desk.
In a split second, I take the gun and shot him straight in the head.
At the same time, the glass of the window shatters and the Evil pushes me to the floor not to be hit by the sniper.
We hear a lot of noise and more shots.
We hear a lot of people entering the building.
The Evil and I are still hiding below the desk.
I’m breathing heavily as it’s been a while since I’ve had to kill someone.
The Evil reaches into his bag, pulls out an AK-47, and hands me another gun, while giving me a clear order.
Let’s go.
We crawl under the floor and then split into the corridor.
We look at each other and we both know that we need to move slowly.
He then shoots first and we see how the first body hits the floor. Then we move again.
He takes the left side of the corridor. I take the right.
We keep just enough distance between us to split angles.
He starts shooting while I try to take cover.
They move too – I count around 8 from my side.
I raise the gun and fire. Another man drops.
The Evil keeps firing. Other bodies hit the wall.
One of the bodies is now close to me. I look at the Evil to cover for me while I grab the gun from the man I shot. I learned through the years that there is a certain way you need to look at these bodies… to see them like resources, not like obstacles in your path – nothing that should slow you down or make you stop. You just need to keep going.
We advance, and we hear them shouting that they need to regroup.
I count 5 or 6 more.
For a second, it feels like I’m back in Colombia. But with the right brother this time.
A smoke grenade rolls towards us. They’re trying to close the distance.
We split and run again, avoiding the smoke.
I had forgotten how good we were together on the field.
I look at him and then we shift angles and start to crossfire. Blind shooting.
I feel that they’re closer now. We try to take them one by one.
In less than 5 minutes, it’s over.
I guess that’s what good training does to you over time.
We drop the guns and get out.
He takes a grenade from his bag and throws it behind us.
Move, he says.
We start running and push outside and after a few seconds we hear the building going off behind us. Windows are now shattered and I see the whole place shaking and coming apart.
We run back to the parking lot.
No one’s around. At least that’s something.
He’s one step ahead, reaching the driver’s door first.
When he puts his hand on the handle, I shout at him.
I know you don’t care, but I have to tell you. I know this is not relevant for our relationship, but I want you to know that I’m sharp. I’m ready to deal with this. We need to save the world.
The Evil turns around, looking at me. We whisper, knowing the parking lot echoes every sound back at us.
D., all I care about is getting this mess done as the last thing we need is the damn end of the world. Trust me, I believed until the very last minute that this meeting with the psy was a charade, but you were right. It’s happening. And it’s gonna get ugly.
We both get into the car. He’s driving again and I’m on the passenger seat.
It’s the first time in years I’ve seen him worried. And annoyed.
I have to ask.
But do you know why him? Why did I have to be here and kill him?
I don’t know, D. I really don’t know. There’s a saying that I hate..but time will really tell this time.
He’s about to start the car when he looks at me again.
D., don’t think that in a million years…I would have taken you seriously. But…these dreams that you’re having… they’re not just dreams. It’s him breaking through the vail of death and reaching out to you.
He sighs.
This is indeed very worrying as it’s one of the signs that the Apocalypse is coming.
He starts the engine. Before turning on the radio, he looks at me one more time.
And I need you to tell me everything about Colombia.
I nod and tell him to drop me off at my apartment.
No more Fontaines D.C., just some ads playing in the background. We stay in silence.
I keep thinking this is really happening, that it’s just the beginning and that we’re the only ones who can actually stop it.
And I still cannot process yet that the dreams with Max are real; because it feels unreal that they’re actually so real.
To be continued
Footnotes:
1 Queens of the Stone Age – Feel good hit of the summer (lyrics mentioning “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy, and alcohol”)
2 ζηλεύε, Greek. Translation: ‘He’s gelous’. It refers to Georgios Mazonakis’s song – ζηλεύω (Zilevw), which emphasizes the jealousy of a man towards a woman.
3 Quote from the movie Heat, said by Robert DeNiro
4 Reference to The Doors’ song – ‘People are strange
5 Reference to The Doors’ song – ‘People are strange
6 Reference to The Doors ‘ song – ‘People are strange’
7 Reference to Omar’s character, from the TV series the Wire
8 Quote from the book “Îndreptar pătimaș” by Emil Cioran; Romanian original: “Proștii zidesc lumea și deștepții o dărâmă.”; different translation in English than the one used in the text: “Fools are building the world and smart ones are ruining it.”
HB was a novel of 6 books, written on a blog, between 2011 – 2015 by my co-author and I, with more than 28 000 views and fans all around the world. This is the continuation of the story that never ended.
Photo created with Gemini Copyright Delia Kelly 2026
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, events, organizations, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, or events is purely coincidental. The views and actions of the characters in this book do not reflect those of the author. References to violence, crime, or other harmful or illegal behavior are included solely for narrative purposes and are not intended to encourage, condone, or promote such conduct. This work is intended for entertainment purposes only. The author disclaims any liability for any misuse or misinterpretation of the material contained herein. This book contains themes related to mental health, including references to suicide and psychological distress, which some readers may find sensitive or triggering. These topics are portrayed as part of a fictional narrative and are not intended to encourage or romanticize self-harm or suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please consider reaching out to a qualified professional, trusted individual, or a local support service. This work does not intend to promote, endorse, or include discriminatory or harmful content related to race, ethnicity, or identity. Any such elements, if present, exist solely within the context of the fictional narrative. Reader discretion is advised.
HB was a novel of 6 books, written on a blog, between 2011 – 2015 by my co-author and I, with more than 28 000 views and fans all around the world. This is the continuation of the story that never ended.
Photo created with Gemini Copyright Delia Kelly 2026
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, events, organizations, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, or events is purely coincidental. The views and actions of the characters in this book do not reflect those of the author. References to violence, crime, or other harmful or illegal behavior are included solely for narrative purposes and are not intended to encourage, condone, or promote such conduct. This work is intended for entertainment purposes only. The author disclaims any liability for any misuse or misinterpretation of the material contained herein. This book contains themes related to mental health, including references to suicide and psychological distress, which some readers may find sensitive or triggering. These topics are portrayed as part of a fictional narrative and are not intended to encourage or romanticize self-harm or suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please consider reaching out to a qualified professional, trusted individual, or a local support service. This work does not intend to promote, endorse, or include discriminatory or harmful content related to race, ethnicity, or identity. Any such elements, if present, exist solely within the context of the fictional narrative.Reader discretion is advised.
HB was a novel of 6 books, written on a blog, between 2011 – 2015 by my co-author and I, with more than 28 000 views and fans all around the world. This is the continuation of the story that never ended.
Photo created with Gemini Copyright Delia Kelly 2026
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, events, organizations, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, or events is purely coincidental. The views and actions of the characters in this book do not reflect those of the author. References to violence, crime, or other harmful or illegal behavior are included solely for narrative purposes and are not intended to encourage, condone, or promote such conduct. This work is intended for entertainment purposes only. The author disclaims any liability for any misuse or misinterpretation of the material contained herein. This book contains themes related to mental health, including references to suicide and psychological distress, which some readers may find sensitive or triggering. These topics are portrayed as part of a fictional narrative and are not intended to encourage or romanticize self-harm or suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please consider reaching out to a qualified professional, trusted individual, or a local support service. This work does not intend to promote, endorse, or include discriminatory or harmful content related to race, ethnicity, or identity. Any such elements, if present, exist solely within the context of the fictional narrative.Reader discretion is advised.
HB was a novel of 6 books, written on a blog, between 2011 – 2015 by my co-author and I, with more than 28 000 views and fans all around the world. This is the continuation of the story that never ended.
Photo created with Gemini Copyright Delia Kelly 2026
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, events, organizations, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, or events is purely coincidental. The views and actions of the characters in this book do not reflect those of the author. References to violence, crime, or other harmful or illegal behavior are included solely for narrative purposes and are not intended to encourage, condone, or promote such conduct. This work is intended for entertainment purposes only. The author disclaims any liability for any misuse or misinterpretation of the material contained herein. This book contains themes related to mental health, including references to suicide and psychological distress, which some readers may find sensitive or triggering. These topics are portrayed as part of a fictional narrative and are not intended to encourage or romanticize self-harm or suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please consider reaching out to a qualified professional, trusted individual, or a local support service. This work does not intend to promote, endorse, or include discriminatory or harmful content related to race, ethnicity, or identity. Any such elements, if present, exist solely within the context of the fictional narrative.Reader discretion is advised.
HB was a novel of 6 books, written on a blog, between 2011 – 2015 by my co-author and I, with more than 28 000 views and fans all around the world. This is the continuation of the story that never ended.
Photo created with Gemini Copyright Delia Kelly 2026
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, events, organizations, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, or events is purely coincidental. The views and actions of the characters in this book do not reflect those of the author. References to violence, crime, or other harmful or illegal behavior are included solely for narrative purposes and are not intended to encourage, condone, or promote such conduct. This work is intended for entertainment purposes only. The author disclaims any liability for any misuse or misinterpretation of the material contained herein. This book contains themes related to mental health, including references to suicide and psychological distress, which some readers may find sensitive or triggering. These topics are portrayed as part of a fictional narrative and are not intended to encourage or romanticize self-harm or suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, please consider reaching out to a qualified professional, trusted individual, or a local support service. This work does not intend to promote, endorse, or include discriminatory or harmful content related to race, ethnicity, or identity. Any such elements, if present, exist solely within the context of the fictional narrative.Reader discretion is advised.
