I watch my hands like a child at a puppet show, who doesn’t understand what is happening on the miniscule stage, but is fascinated by the agitation of wooden beings with yarn for hair and crepe dresses. I should be scared out of my mind, because someone else, within my own mind, directs these movements, skilled motions desperate to be decrypted, and yet I am seldom ever so happy. My fingers move precisely and unmistakably, making a series of unintelligible signs the right hand asks, the left responds, the ring finger and thumb close in a circle, the little fingers page through some text, the wrists pivot with the supple energy of an orchestra conductor. Before my enchanted eyes, they begin to make elegant and bizarre gestures on their own, to tell stories that perhaps the deaf can understand. I smile, I look at them as though for the first time: long, delicate, thin-boned, some black hair on the fingers. They rise on their own, pulling my shoulders up, levitating happily through the dense, glittering, dark air of my room. I’ll be writing something, correcting papers, or drinking a coffee, or cutting my nails with a Chinese nail trimmer, and suddenly my hands feel very light, as though they were filled with volatile gas. It happens unexpectedly, and luckily, only when I’m alone.

It doesn’t scare me, I might even say I liked it.

Sometimes I lose control of my hands, from the elbows down. “The Fall” Excerpt from the novel Solenoid - Mircea Cărtărescu (translated by Sean Cotter)

Solenoid mircea cartarescu