Translated from Romanian.

There are people who see only objects around them.
For them, a window is a piece of glass. A bed is nothing more than the place where sleep closes its eyelids over tired bodies. And a chair is just a chair – nothing more.
Quinn, however, was not one of them. For as long as he could remember, he had held the almost painful conviction that things keep something of the souls of those who have touched them. Wood, the palms of the carpenter who carved it. Iron, the echo of the fire in which it was made red-hot. And stone, the mountain from which it was torn hundreds or thousands of years ago.
To others these were mere fantasies, but to him they were the way the world worked.
He had turned twenty-seven and had the kind of face people quickly forgot. He was tall and slender, his shoulders slightly hunched forward, as if he were always trying to make himself smaller than he was. His brown hair, too long to be considered tidy and too short to look neglected, fell over his forehead in unruly strands that he instinctively pushed back with the back of his hand whenever he was absorbed in some thought.
His eyes, however, were unusual. Not because of their colour – a shifting grey-green, like the water of a lake before a storm – but because of the way they looked. They seemed so deep that those who met them had the strange feeling that they were not being looked at, but inspected.
Quinn spoke little. He had learned that silence often says more than all the words spoken.
He lived alone in an old apartment on the top floor of a building put up many decades ago. The walls kept the faint smell of old whitewash, while the floors creaked like old men murmuring in their sleep. The windows looked out over the rooftops of the city, where pigeons drew lazy circles in the sky.
The home was not furnished according to the fashion of the day.
Every piece had a history.
A Victorian bookcase bought from the house of a professor who had died without heirs. A wall clock that ran exactly three minutes slow every day, no matter how many times it was set. A leather armchair worn at the arms, which he was convinced still kept the shape of the man who had read in it for a whole lifetime. In fact, Quinn collected the past. His trade helped him feed this passion. He restored old objects, and his hands had the rare patience of those who understand that beauty cannot be rushed. He could read the age of wood from its grain, recognise a tree's species just from the smell of its sawdust, and uncover, beneath dozens of layers of varnish and paint, the original design of a carving.
That Saturday morning, the air had the cold freshness of an early autumn day. The sky was covered with thin clouds, and the light fell over the city like bluish ash. Quinn set off for the auction held in a former industrial warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Half an hour later he arrived in front of the building with huge windows, dirty with dust and old rain. Inside, beyond the gate with its rust-eaten panels, the air smelled of wax, yellowed paper, linseed oil and old wood. Every step raised a fine dust that floated slowly, as if gravity had forgotten for a moment to do its duty. He reached the middle of the hall, carefully skirting the collections of furniture, passing bored customers and dealers of every kind.
That was when he saw it. Behind a row of mannequins stored on a solid wood sideboard. A bed built from a wood so dark that its surface absorbed light instead of reflecting it. It was not very large, nor the most richly ornamented. And yet the other objects seemed to withdraw into its shadow. It had the colour of the depths of water that the sun never reaches. Its edges were carved with great care. Thin lines coiled into one another, forming patterns that resembled now the roots of a tree, now swarms of galaxies, now beings whose bodies seemed made of smoke and stars.
Quinn approached the bed and looked around. No one seemed interested in the object. The moment his fingers touched the headboard, he had the strange feeling that the bed recognised him. It was a certainty that came from nowhere, silent and inexplicable, like a memory from before his own birth.
- Nobody wants this one, a low voice said. Every time we manage to sell it... it comes back.
Quinn felt a trembling hand on his shoulder. The old man who ran the auction had appeared from behind the curtain and stopped beside the piece of furniture. Quinn had seen him at other events too. That was why he smiled at him politely. He was convinced the man was only trying to add a little mystery. For a few moments they looked each other in the eye, then they parted before Quinn could answer him. The young man watched his rolling gait until the silhouette disappeared behind the black velvet screen.
The auction began a few dozen minutes later. The objects were sold one after another, to the dry sound of the gavel and the murmur of the bidders. When it was the bed's turn, a strange silence fell over the hall, as if the room itself were holding its breath.
No one raised a paddle except Quinn. At a surprisingly low price, the object was knocked down to him at the very first call.
The organiser's faint smile sent an inexplicable shiver through Quinn. He took his documents and left the warehouse, heading for the trucks parked at the back, where he arranged with two removal men to carry the piece to his apartment.
The bed arrived at his home towards evening.
The two porters struggled for almost half an hour to carry it up. Although it did not look very big, it was unusually heavy. On every floor they stopped to catch their breath, swearing under their breath and wondering what wood it could be made of.
Quinn's bedroom was small but welcoming. One wall was covered with books, and by the window stood an old desk full of sketches, chisels, brushes and pieces of wood that he used in his restoration workshop. On the windowsill there were a few flowerpots and odds and ends of every kind. In one corner, a single sofa bed that had been left open for a long time seemed to have forgotten what it was like to be folded up again. The sheet fell in soft folds, like deep wrinkles, and every crease seemed to hide the memory of an unfinished dream.
Once the bed he had won at auction was placed against the empty wall, Quinn saw the removal men to the door, where he handed them a fifty and thanked them politely. Just before leaving, one of them stopped on the threshold and turned towards the bedroom. He hesitated for a few moments, as if struggling with his own thoughts.
- Don't laugh at me, Mr Quinn, he said awkwardly. But while we were carrying the bed up the stairs, I had the impression there was a sound coming from underneath it. A kind of muffled knocking. As if someone were knocking from inside.
The other man burst into a short laugh and clapped his colleague on the shoulder.
- You're too tired. Come on, let's go. Stop scaring the gentleman.
A few minutes later, alone in the apartment, Quinn stopped in the bedroom doorway and looked at the bed for a long time. Now, at last, he could examine it in peace. He approached slowly and ran his palm over the headboard, following every notch and carved ornament with his fingers.
The wood was very fine, though it was without doubt of a respectable age. He found no deep scratches and no trace of woodworm. The carvings caught his attention again. If he shifted his gaze a little, he had the impression that they changed shape. At first he made out the same floral patterns. Looking at them more closely, he noticed that they resembled no known plant. Hundreds of thin lines coiled around one another, forming circles, spirals and strange branchings. He studied them from another angle without blinking and discovered the root of a huge tree, then a river seen from a great height. The headboard came alive, and Quinn made out two humanoid beings holding hands. He told himself it was just a trick of the light, as in the warehouse when he had first seen it. Curiosity, however, won. He took a few steps, picked up a cloth from the windowsill and began carefully cleaning the wood. The dust rose in thin wisps through the light of the sunset. The whole surface took on a discreet sheen, and the wood became even darker, while the patterns melted into deep lines that crossed the headboard.
Then his gaze slid to the space under the bed. It was high enough for the floor to be visible without any effort.
But it was not.
Beneath it there was nothing to be seen but compact darkness. The gloom began abruptly, right below the bed frame, like a black velvet curtain drawn over something that was not meant to be seen. He slowly went down on his knees and brought his face close to the floor. He should have been able to make out the parquet, but the darkness remained just as dense, whatever angle he looked at it from. His heart began to beat faster. He stood up and went to the desk, where he took the professional torch he used in the workshop in the living room. He came back to the bed, took a deep breath and knelt. The beam pierced the darkness and revealed walls of grey stone, tall and damp, disappearing into the distance.
Quinn stayed motionless, his knees resting on the cold floor and the torch frozen in his right hand. The space resembled a huge chamber.
The powerful light could not make out the far end of the chamber. The darkness in the distance remained just as compact and impenetrable, as if light lost its power to exist there.
He noticed movement. Discreet at first, then the gloom changed its shape for a moment, like a curtain stirred by a draught.
Someone was there.
He strained his eyes and moved the beam of light.
A tall, thin silhouette stood motionless beside one of the walls of the chamber. He had the impression that the creature wanted to hide, pressing itself against the stone, the way a wild animal blends into the landscape when it senses a predator approaching.
Quinn felt his mouth go dry, and his heart began to beat so hard that he had the feeling its sound echoed all the way into that impossible chamber.
- Is someone there? he asked in a voice lower than he had intended.
The dark shape moved slightly. Unusually slowly, cautiously, as if the creature had not seen light for a long time and was trying to understand whether it represented a threat.
- I don't want to hurt you, Quinn went on. If you understand me, answer me!
Two greenish lights kindled in the darkness. They did not resemble the reflection a torch produces in an animal's eyes. The glow came from within them – faint, cold and constant, like precious stones in the depths of a cave. The eyes watched Quinn without blinking.
The creature took a step, then another. It approached slowly, stopping after every movement. As it advanced, the beam of light slowly revealed its body.
It was tall, but unusually thin. Its limbs were elongated and out of proportion. Its arms hung down to its knees, and its long, thin fingers each had an extra joint. Its skin had the colour of dead ashes and was furrowed with fine cracks. They resembled earth dried out after years of drought. Through some of them a faint, bluish light could be seen, pulsing slowly.
But it was the creature's face that made Quinn forget to breathe.
The forehead was higher, the cheeks more hollow, and the jaw seemed deformed by a different gravity. The nose was narrow and flat against the face, and the lips so thin they could barely be seen.
Beyond all these deformations, the features seemed disturbingly familiar. The shape of the chin, the line of the eyebrows and the way it tilted its head slightly when it looked. All of it together made Quinn feel the blood freeze in his veins. Those eyes, in which the light seemed to die and be reborn at the same time, were identical to his own. In an instinctive gesture, the creature raised its right hand and pushed an imaginary strand of hair from its forehead.
Quinn froze. That was his gesture. He had done it since he was a child, without realising it. He lowered his gaze to the creature's hand. On its left wrist he could make out a whitish, crescent-shaped scar. The same one he had carried since childhood.
- Who... are you?
The creature slowly opened its mouth, and Quinn felt the whole world sway. The voice was his. It had the same inflection and restrained warmth.
- You are asking the wrong question, Quinn... Not who am I? But which of us belongs to this world.
The creature remained motionless. The white light of the torch caressed its deformed face without softening its features. Up close, the resemblance became even more disturbing. Every detail seemed an imperfect copy of the other.
- If you are what I think you are, then tell me, who brought you here?
The creature smiled for the first time. A strange gesture, weary and almost without hope.
- No one brought me.
It turned its gaze towards the bedpost.
- You could sit more comfortably, it whispered. If you raise the bed, we can talk face to face.
Quinn realised that the position he was looking from was hurting his back and neck. He stood up and brought a few books from the bookcase, which he used to prop up one side of the bed. Then he did the same on the opposite side. Finally he sat down cross-legged, amazed that the chamber in which the creature had appeared had not changed its dimensions. He picked up the torch he had left on the parquet and pointed the beam into the darkness.
- I have been here for a long time, the creature went on.
Quinn followed the direction of its gaze. It seemed absorbed by the door separating the bedroom from the living room.
- You've been under the bed?
The creature raised a hand and touched the wood beyond the border between the worlds.
- This bed exists in the other reality too, it continued in a grave tone. When our universes separated, almost everything changed. The continents, the sky, time... but not the bed. It all began in childhood, when I was seven and fell from my grandparents' attic. Surely you remember. That was when I woke up in another universe, dazed, with a nasty wound on my left hand.
Quinn felt that every word opened a door he would never have wished to find.
- Your world... What happened to it?
The creature raised its eyes to the dark vault of the chamber, as if beyond that stone it could see the sky it had lost.
- The sun was no longer yellow. It was so big that it filled half the horizon. Sunrise lasted whole days, and the shadows of the houses moved slowly, like a silent threat. Time had already begun to warp. Our star had aged billions of years before its time, because of a neutron star that came level with the Oort Cloud. It became a red giant, and as it swelled it deformed space, time, reality, matter. Sometimes a single day lasted a year. At other times a year vanished in an instant. Mountains changed places, rivers flowed backwards, and cities woke up in other lands. Children were born old, and some people woke up as children again, without remembering who they had been.
Quinn felt a shiver run through him.
- And you?
The creature looked at its long, deformed hands.
- I was not born like this. At first I looked like you. Then the world changed me little by little. My bones grew longer, my skin split open and my blood learned to carry light. My universe was trying with all its might to save its last people.
As it spoke, the creature twirled one of its fingers. A strange ripple formed around it. The torch in Quinn's hand bent slightly, as if seen through still water.
Quinn blinked in amazement.
- How did you do that?
- I did nothing, the creature answered. That is how light travels in my universe. Here it looks like magic, but there it is the way you can move. You should know that I would like to stay here, it said in the most serious tone possible. Now that you have found me, I can fulfil my wish.
Quinn felt his throat go dry.
- Universes do not accept two identical existences.
The creature gave him a long look. In its eyes there was no hatred or cruelty. Only an infinite weariness.
For the first time since he had looked under the bed, Quinn understood that the rift between the two worlds was not a discovery, but a choice. And someone had to pay its price. He no longer felt the floor, nor the weight of his own body. He had the impression that the apartment had disappeared and the whole world had shrunk to the edge of that rift, where two identical gazes sought each other beyond the impossible borders of existence.
- What if I choose to stay? he said at last.
The creature slowly lowered its gaze.
- Then the reality I come from will die with me.
- And if I leave?
- Then this world will go on existing, but it will not remember you.
Quinn closed his eyes. In his mind appeared the image of a morning from his childhood. His mother was smiling at him from the doorway of the house, and the rain was pattering softly on the windows. He remembered the smell of coffee, the sound of leaves carried by the wind. He opened his eyes and whispered:
- I can't.
The creature smiled. It was the smile of someone who, after an endless search, had found the answer they had always suspected. At that same moment, the chamber under the bed began to come apart. The stone was covered with luminous cracks, and through them poured a reddish, trembling light, like blood bursting from a deep wound. The walls slowly bent, and the darkness began to recede. Beyond the creature, the sky of the other world opened up. It resembled nothing a human being could dream of. A huge star, red and torn apart by its own fire, covered almost the entire horizon. Beneath it the mountains flowed slowly, like molten metal, and whole cities sank into plains of ash.
Then, without any warning, Quinn began to remember. He saw his mother covering his eyes when the star grew too big in the sky. He remembered the hunger, the dust, the fear. But above all he remembered the bed. The only place where the air was cool and time flowed quietly.
- It can't be! he said, horrified.
The creature took a step forward. Now their faces were separated only by the edge of the rift.
- It can! it said. And it is the only truth.
Quinn raised his hands to his temples. He felt the memories he had called "his" all his life beginning to come apart one by one, like mirrors struck by stones. His parents' faces became blurred. His childhood home lost its colours. The street where he had learned to ride a bicycle slowly disappeared, swallowed by a nameless fog. In their place appeared another world, another sky.
There had been no exchange of bodies. The rift had not moved people. It had only changed the memory of the universe. The moment the child from the dying world was saved, reality had done the only thing it was capable of. It had given him a new past. A new family and a different childhood. A whole life, woven from memories that had never belonged to anyone. The universe had not saved him; it had rewritten him.
The creature watched him in silence.
- I am not your copy.
The voice was calm, almost tender.
- I am what you left behind when you were saved. The wound the universe could not close.
Quinn slowly raised his hand. The creature made the same gesture. When their fingers met, the rift closed with the delicacy of an eyelid.
*
The next day, the residents of the building saw Quinn come out of the stairwell at the usual time. He went down the steps unhurriedly and disappeared along the path between the lime trees. No one noticed that the shadows around him lingered for a moment before following his steps. The man who walked calmly towards the city carried within him the memory of two universes and the pain of a dying star.
In his apartment, the bed was still there. Old, silent and ordinary. Beneath it, only the floor could be seen.
But if someone had pressed an ear to the wood of the headboard, they might have heard, almost beyond all imagining, the quiet beating of a heart that belonged neither to this world nor to the other. But to the rift between them.