Mircea Cărtărescu: Orbitor (excerpt in English)

Orbitor

Nevertheless I at last sunk deeply in sleep, wrapped in a cocoon of fuzzy
dreams. I dissolved into sleep like sugar in water, glided like a slider on
a rack of forgetfulness. I sometimes started so violently, that everything
inside me seemed to shake. At other times I dove straight down like an old
elevator crashing into a bottomless shaft. Horrible faces and masks, with
ripped cheeks, with eyes popping out of their sockets, with brains exposed
for a second then melting away in the roar of a dying animal. I could hear
my name whispered by a shy voice very close to my ear. Gradually, a lather
of words-images flooding the screen of my retinas and someone compos-
ing stories and landscapes out of aleatory stains, like those I had seen on
the studio wallpaper and in the mosaic of the bathroom floor. The finger
of a palmist, with a vulgar gold ring at its root, glided over the palm of my
dream, interpreted and prophesied, stuck in chaotic wrinkles and suddenly
let its nail encircle a hillock of clear skin, through the glass of which you
could see little trees of veins and arteries.

Translated by Ioana Ieronim with Martin Woodside
(source: Vilenica Almanac 2011)