positive fictional IEIs

[Joy]

The three slam dunk fictional IEIs I can think of off the top of my head are all really terrible people (Meredith Grey in Grey's Anatomy, Betty Draper from Mad Men, and Piper Whatsherface from OTNB). Does anyone have any positive examples? Or a subtype/ennetype explanation for why these women are particularly awful? I like most of the IEIs here, but getting a feel for someone is different online than it is irl. I'm questioning some typings of people I know irl and would be happy to have some better fictional benchmarks. (And yes I know that they are indeed fictional and not a true representation of any type.)

[role]

Remus Lupin and Albus Dumbledore from Harry Potter

[Radio]

Remus Lupin and Albus Dumbledore from Harry Potter

no no no no no. noooooo.

[role]

no no no no no. noooooo.

Tell me why not?

[Radio]

Tell me why not?

dumbledore is strict, law-abiding, scholarly with a touch of Ne/Si "whimsy". he plans extensively (already rules out IEI). he has very little "ethical" leanings, instead preferring to be cold and methodological (as in the 7th book). Ne-LII.

Lupin could be IEI, but Lupin could also be EII. the movie Lupin is EII, the book Lupin is more IEI. so idk.

[HERO]

Esther Greenwood from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Many (North) Americans don't like this novel, though.... usually they've never read it. I think J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is more popular. The female friend I had (whom I made a thread on) still thought The Bell Jar is a beautiful novel. I like it more than the The Catcher in the Rye. I have a female feminist east Indian friend (from facebook), and her favorite novel is The Bell Jar.

It's not a perfect novel and it has some flaws, yet it's not all bad. If Sylvia Plath had lived longer she could've probably written novels that were even better.

[Amber]

Is the guy in A Beautiful Mind IEI or ILI?

[Amber]

Sonia in Crime and Punishment

[Whoobie77]

Jesus?

[Pookie]

i See IEIs alot, but i don't know what show's you watch so im not sure you'd know who the people are i bring up.

[Pookie]

Jesus EIE, he was all bout that party life.

[Joy]

I haven't seen most of those shows (or haven't seen them recently).

Bones, Castle, Supernatural, Perception, Arrow, The Big Bang Theory, Elementary, Doctor Who, Merlin, Defiance, OTNB, Hemlock Grove, Stargate (all of them), Star Trek: TNG, Game of Thrones, Grey's Anatomy, Chuck, True Blood, Firefly, House, Criminal Minds, Raising Hope, and various anime.

[miss BabyDoll]

Dave Lizewski/kick ass from kick- ass was quite an amusing and positive IEI

[Joy]

What about Scott Pilgrim?

[miss BabyDoll]

What about Scott Pilgrim?

hmmm, not sure about him - would have to rewatch some bits of him to see! tho as i recall he doesn't strike me as an IEI - but i could be totally wrong

[Joy]

I only saw a few minutes of that movie. My son loved it, but I had no interest (in spite of the fact that I generally love comic book/super hero movies).

[miss BabyDoll]

I only saw a few minutes of that movie. My son loved it, but I had no interest (in spite of the fact that I generally love comic book/super hero movies).

if you're ever curious to see an uplifting version of an IEI you have to watch it i'm not a particular fan of the movie but he was rather brilliant

[Joy]

What about Stahma Tarr from defiance? She's classy in a way I associate with IEIs, but I could also see her as LSI or even EIE. Her behavior is so controlled and her demeanor so polished that it's hard to tell. Although she's technically a villain, I sympathize with, like, and respect her more than any of the characters I mentioned in my initial post.

[Joy]

What about Stahma Tarr from defiance? She's classy in a way I associate with IEIs, but I could also see her as LSI or even EIE. Her behavior is so controlled and her demeanor so polished that it's hard to tell. Although she's technically a villain, I sympathize with, like, and respect her more than any of the characters I mentioned in my initial post.

After finishing S02E04 I like her even more. She occasionally gets heavy-handed, much like the characters in my initial post, but she has very good reason and appropriate timing to do so. Also, the punishment seems to fit the crime. The main thing I dislike about other characters I mentioned is that they are randomly harsh/heavy handed. They often unfair about who/how/to what extend and occasionally mess with people for seemingly no reason at all.

[HERO]

The three slam dunk fictional IEIs I can think of off the top of my head are all really terrible people (Meredith Grey in Grey's Anatomy, Betty Draper from Mad Men, and Piper Whatsherface from OTNB). Does anyone have any positive examples? Or a subtype/ennetype explanation for why these women are particularly awful? I like most of the IEIs here, but getting a feel for someone is different online than it is irl. I'm questioning some typings of people I know irl and would be happy to have some better fictional benchmarks. (And yes I know that they are indeed fictional and not a true representation of any type.)

Mad Men is another retarded and boring American show posing as art. It gets kudos for 'objectivity' regarding one of the dumbest and most heterosexualized decades of American history (in reaction to the more masculine and homosocial World War II era in American history and in comparison to the 19th century). The only decades that are worse in my estimation are the 1970's, 1980's, and this one, I guess. At least anal wasn't as common in the 1950's and 1960's.

[HERO]

And then there's this somewhat stupid movie my Mom and I watched on youtube (Dark House/Haunted or whatever):

Nick Di Santo/Luke Kleintank [I don't like the actor or his character that much (and of course it turns out that he's not that 'positive', unfortunately)]



His best friend in the movie is an SLE (portrayed by Anthony Rey Perez):







And I kind of used to like this show before it became terrible in mid-2012 (The Young and the Restless)



Victoria Newman might be IEI-Ni? or EII or ILI or something. I kind of hate her character though.

[HERO]

Minoru from Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima. Then again I'm not sure if people would really consider Minoru a positive character or not, and he's not really important in the novel.


pp. 326-328: One could not compare young Yuichi’s body with that of Fukujiro, who was nearly forty. Not only that, Yuichi was to Minoru a vision of the hero out of so many action movies and the daring youth of adventure stories. Everything that Minoru wished to be he saw embodied in Yuichi. Shunsuke had used Yuichi as the material of a work he dreamed of; but Minoru used countless old tales as the material of a dream of Yuichi.

Yuichi would turn his head sharply—in the boy’s eyes he had turned his head in order to defend himself against the terrible onslaughts of young villains. Minoru fancied himself to be the boy companion sure to be accompanying such a hero. He was confident in the very depths of him in the courage of his master. He was a pure servant who felt that when he died it would be with his master. As a result, it was not love he manifested so much as sexual loyalty, the joy of imaginary renunciation and self-sacrifice. What he exhibited was a perfectly natural boyish propensity to dream. In his dreams one night, Minoru saw Yuichi and himself on the battlefield. Yuichi was the beautiful young officer; Minoru was his beautiful boy orderly. The two were simultaneously struck in the chest by rifle bullets and died embracing, their lips locked in a kiss.

Another time Yuichi was a young seaman; Minoru was a boy sailor. The two landed on an island in the torrid zone, and while they were there the ship, at the order of the crafty captain, set sail. There on the island the two castaways were attacked by savages. They warded off countless poison arrows fired from the bushes, using a great scallop shell for a shield.

Thus a night the two spend together was a fabulous night. Around them swirled the night of a gigantic, hostile world. Villains and bitter enemies and savages and assassins prayed for their misfortune. The eyes of adversaries who would shout for joy if they died were outside, peering through the dark window panes. Minoru was sad that he could not sleep with a pistol under his pillow. What would he do if some scoundrel had hidden himself in the wardrobe and was opening the door a crack and taking dead aim at the sleeping forms of the two with a revolver? He could not help feeling that Yuichi, sleeping undisturbed by these fancies, had courage beyond that of other men.

The unreasoning fear from which Minoru had longed to escape suddenly was transformed into a sweet, fabulous fear that made him feel only the joy of living under its influence. When he came upon articles in newspapers about opium smuggling and secret societies, he would read them avidly, thinking that each was an incident involving themselves.

Yuichi had been slightly infected by these proclivities in the boy. The stubborn bias against society that Yuichi once held—and still held—was in this dreamer something to encourage fantasies, romantic enmities, romanesque perils, plebeian defenses against justice and nobility, the unyielding, reasonless prejudice of the rabble. When he saw this, Yuichi felt better. When he realized, moreover, the source of these inspirations—that it was he, Yuichi, nothing else—he was amazed at his own intangible power.


- and then there's this novel The Cuttlefish by Maryline Desbiolles that seems like it could be about a female IEI protagonist, but it's probably not. I don't think I'm going to read it.

[HERO]

I want the protagonist and narrator from Mircea Cărtărescu's novella THE TWINS (which is actually part of his novel Nostalgia) to be IEI, even if he isn't. THE TWINS is the best part of the novel.



- from Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu; pp. 95-114 (“The Twins”):

I was in my last year of high school and about to turn eighteen. I was progressively worried about my future. Only a year before I had decided to renounce, categorically and without regrets, everything pertaining to life, the “joy of being alive.” People who seemed content with their small lives disgusted me. I saw myself as universal, ready to become the cosmos itself. But soon, it became physically impossible to endure this mode of life. Little by little, I began feeling like a failure rather than a genius. This change took place under the weight of loneliness. Before, I was content to be left alone, to lock myself in the house for weeks, to read till I couldn’t see anymore. I cursed if I had to answer the phone. During the first two years of high school, my fellow students would invite me to parties or birthdays, or to the discotheque in the school’s auditorium, but since I never went they stopped inviting me. They viewed me with the horror mixed with the reluctant admiration reserved for the chrysalis that might someday become a butterfly but also God knows what sort of horrific vermin. Even those who took my side—because despite it all, I was being talked about—couldn’t imagine themselves having a personal relationship with me. When I turned seventeen they prepared a gift for me, elegantly wrapped in paper and tied with a ribbon, but which no one had the courage to hand me: Instead, they placed it on my desk. They were flustered and a little frightened of their own gesture, as though they were presenting an offering to an unearthly being. Even today, I have no idea what the contents of the box were, because I left it on the desk without touching it. I had lost all traces of humanity—I realized this—but I believed it was the only way to progress along the path to becoming superhuman. During the break between my eleventh and twelfth years, I had attained such a degree of solitude that I was frightened for my sanity. For the period of three months, I constantly sensed that my heart was heavy with an abstract love, a love for no one. I couldn’t stand being home for a moment. I would go out and roam the streets of Bucharest, translucently golden from the sun, incessantly expecting to meet someone unknown. I stared with envy at the strolling couples with their arms around each other, the girls tricked out in the latest fashions, the boys my age with their LPs constantly under their arms, always trading in front of the Muzica record store: Sticky Fingers and 50 lei for Deep Purple in Rock; Caravanserai plus the single of “My Generation” by The Who for Ummagumma. I would return home dead tired, but in the afternoon I would begin all over again.

I could hardly wait for school to begin again, something that had never happened to me before. Because I felt very alone, like a fallen angel, or at least one in grave danger of falling. But I knew that in order to remain an angel, I had to ignore what I was fighting inside me, which was perhaps malignant and had progressively gained more power over me. Many times, I would wake up weeping from loneliness. Finally, I began twelfth grade, and seeing the familiar faces made me happy for the first time.



- pp. 104-105: I had a sentiment of predestination, I knew even then that this woman-girl would demolish my entire internal edifice. I walked her home again during the days that followed, and gradually it became our custom. I strove not to take her seriously, constantly spoke to her harshly, answered her ironically. Despite all this, I quickly noticed that her allusions to various friends, with whom she said she was spending her Sundays over a game of canasta or Saturdays over tea, began to hurt me. I had to tolerate—albeit with a condescending and ironic smile—all sorts of confessions. I was current with the great love between her and Silviu; in this matter Gina displayed an unbelievable cruelty. During classes she scrawled SILVIU in large letters on the margins of all her notebooks. Once, she took up designing the interior of a room. But then, with a few thick lines, she disfigured the framed photograph she had planned to place above the bed. Sometimes, she came to school in tears, and one day she left after the first two classes. Gina suffered, her love was not going well, and I was the one who was there to deal with her unhappiness. One evening (I think it was in the middle of November, because a trace of snow had already begun to fall and it was dark outside), she took me by the hand. We stopped in the middle of the street. She was transfigured by unhappiness. However, she converted all her despair, as she would later continue so many times, into an exalted and breathy discourse in which she nearly shouted how much she adored me. She begged me to help her, to stay with her always. She embraced me passionately, and I too put my arm around her shoulders, and we walked into her apartment holding each other. We paused in the hallway, filled with a coffee-hued air, and we kissed, uncomfortably, more on the cheeks and eyes than the mouth. Her face was wet with tears, while I, speaking her name over and over again, holding her tight in my arms, caressing her neck, caressing her breasts through her overcoat, forced myself with all my might to avoid, to postpone the words that formed themselves of their own will in my mind. For about a week, she continued being full of tenderness, but that dark melancholy on her face, her obstinate silence brought me more pain than the happiness of our moments in the hallway. I wasn’t even capable of writing verses anymore, I could hardly wait for the bustle at home to end, for me to get under the blankets and go to sleep. In my dreams, I had a rending sentiment of loneliness.





- pp. 105-114: Snow had already begun to fall, and it was dark when we went home now. We walked hand in hand, and sometimes she put her hand in the pocket of my overcoat, without letting go. She was terribly moody, sometimes happy, sometimes absent-minded, sometimes filled with an unbearable sadness. We walked slowly through the thin layer of snow illuminated by the light of the windows, happy and hopeless at the same time. As our relationship progressed, I realized that we were from different worlds, that our only tie was the irrational footbridge of unilateral sentiment, a footbridge no one would cross. I was filled with despair each time she told me about her trip to Leningrad, where she had gone the previous year, the strolls on the shores and bridges of the river Neva, the dawns white as milk. I imagined her alone, dreamy, roaming with her hair ruffled by the river’s current, under the forged-iron streetlamps, by the stone lions, or sitting on a bench in a park devastated by twilight and autumn. She told me how, at the sea, she swam in the sunbeam reflected in the water. And she recounted endless scenes from her childhood as a little girl from a good family, and showed me a large courtyard with a fence made of lances on a street not far from hers, where a few children in blue overcoats and green felt jackets were playing in the snow, and told me she had played there many times when she was in kindergarten. She would freeze for a long time, staring through the fence bars with an expression from which I had to turn away. She didn’t speak about Silviu any longer, but in everything she said, in the tone of her words, in her disposition, even in her kisses—because she would abruptly stop at times in the solitude of the snow-covered streets and, leaning against a pole, would say: “Kiss me”—in all her whims, I sensed his presence. I knew that Gina used me to protect herself, to let her unhappiness take a breath, to avoid being alone, to have someone hold her hand when she was forced to stare at her love’s agony in the face. Who was I to be her boyfriend? An ugly and bizarre boy, on the threshold of schizophrenia, who knew nothing outside of a smattering of literature, who had no experience of life. I dressed randomly, I had never traveled, I had no friends. All I could give her was my blind fear of losing her. For me, Gina was much more than a girlfriend, she was a being impossible to endure, a drug far too strong but which I couldn’t live without. I knew sooner or later that everything would fall apart, that Gina would leave me. But in her hallway, in the darkness where we could barely make out the contours of our faces, our love gestures were becoming more and more daring, uninhibited. Her tiny and thin body was learning not to contract any more when my caresses became more rash. I was learning to hold a woman in my arms, I was learning to enjoy caressing, to become dizzy from contact with her soft mouth, the dull taste of her lips and teeth and tongue, the shampoo smell of her hair, her eyebrows’ aroma. I was learning, underneath her blouse, the shape of her breasts. After I left her at home, I walked alone the distance of a few streetcar stops, through the frozen snowflakes. The winter air agreed with me. My palms preserved the smell of her skin till late into the night, when I fell asleep.



Many odd things occurred to us during our walk to her house. One night, clear as a crystal, we crossed Galati Plaza while staring up at the full moon, which rose above the station where the Number 40 bus stopped and turned the tram tracks to gold. We were speaking about the moon. She was telling me that during a trip to the mountains with a few friends, she had felt so alone that she wanted to eat the moon, literally. “But do you know what I mean? Literally!” Of course, I felt a shiver of jealousy and attempted to parry with something of my own, but my mouth remained wide open because, staring at the moon, I saw clearly that its sphere was not perfect anymore, that one side had changed shape and that a shadow which could only be the earth’s shadow was slowly taking over most of its surface. Amazed, we dropped our bags and, holding each other tight, we gazed at this spectacle above the roofs. Soon, the amber globe was half its size, while the shadow grew, leaving only a thinning scintillating sliver. All the while, buses and taxis drove by, pedestrians rushed along their way through the Galati Plaza but no one joined us to watch the moon, which soon began to grow back until, a quarter of an hour later, it regained its former perfect global shape. Later, both of us thought of it as an inexplicable dream.

Gina didn’t want us to meet on Sundays. I would telephone her, but she wasn’t home. As usual, her grandmother answered the phone, told me that Gina was out. What was she doing Sunday night? What was she doing during the evenings when she didn’t let me walk her home? I imagined the most unlikely scenes. For a while now, there had been a certain arrogance in her tone, that vulgar nuance that she used each time she felt herself superior to someone or the master of a situation. Her face then took on a look that drove me insane, simultaneously cynical, affected with guilt, and mysterious. Her language was spiced with erotic terms and allusions, which she smuggled compulsively into our conversation, indifferent to subject matter. I felt that she wished to brag or perhaps communicate something, and that wish was stronger than her concern to spare my feelings. “What a great place to make love!” she said once when we passed by a house with a small tower. Then, it may have been the same evening, she implied that she knew what a naked man looked like. Of course, I would mock her or make an absurd remark, but each time I felt the full strength of the blow. Still, it helped me dominate (however illusorily) those desperate situations, because then, when I was under pressure, I became unusually eloquent. I cajoled her and then captivated her with a terrific burst of imagination. But she wanted me to feel her joy and her triumph and, eventually, after a few days, she told me she had gone back to Silviu, that she went home with him, that she let him take her clothes off but, of course, “nothing happened.” She told me all that in the shadow of the hallway on the marble steps, painting everything in typically female fairy-tale hues: First, he took her to the restaurant Berlin, where they drank Cinzano, then he bought her a red rose and they went to his place by taxi. He had a motorcycle, and the following Sunday they would . . . I shouted at her then to stop and rushed out into the street. I began crying convulsively; I was fortunate it was dark outside. I walked by the windows displaying ski-wear, by the TV repair shops, through the viridian light of shoe stores. I knew I had lost her and couldn’t understand why. It was as though someone had told me that I had died, or that Gina had died. I couldn’t imagine what school would be like if she was going to be around all the time, the Gina who wasn’t my Gina anymore. What would it be like from then on without our walks home, what would it be like without putting up with all her whims and affectations and cynicisms . . . I left long tracks on the snow. It was the end.


That evening, I decided to have nothing to do with her anymore. I wrote in my journal: “Gina doesn’t want to, DOESN’T WANT TO be with me. I can’t understand how this monstrosity can exist, the ignorance of this perverse child. I watch the dissolution, column by column, step by step, wall by wall, like sugar in water, of our edifice. In any case, there is nothing to be done, you can’t fight against her animal irrationality. I have to recall who I am, to take back my previous life, whatever it might have been. I am a man who writes, I can’t lose myself for the sake of a subhuman, obnubilated, unfortunate being.” And I continued on like this for about three pages, in a state of delirium in which I saw Gina as the embodiment of human vileness and depravity. Perhaps what tortured me more than the incessant obsession with her face, her voice, were the purely physiological aspects of my passion: the accelerated heartbeat to the point of palpitation, the weighty and warm pain in my chest and bones, the insomnia in which I constructed endlessly bitter monologues. The next day at school, her silhouette jumped at me right away: As usual, she chattered with her girlfriends, without worrying that anyone was listening, without paying any attention to anyone’s replies. How affected seemed her rhetorical flourishes, the French and German expressions with which she carelessly spiced her conversation! It was the language of an old coquette, affected to the point of being ridiculous, peculiar, and for me, very attractive, despite my disdain for histrionics and affectation. Sometimes, I was amused to think about how well the word “pearl” fit every expression Gina used, how well it expressed the mixture of magic and superficiality that characterized her. That day, I tried my best not to look at her at all. I found other things to do with the boys. I told jokes during breaks, talked about soccer, about the differences in the singing of Mick Jagger and Robert Plant. But it was as though I was fitted with an interior radar that detected Gina wherever she was. I saw her even when I sat with my back to her, even when I went out in the schoolyard, in the snow. I could hear her talking, indifferent to the distance. I knew what she was talking about, I knew she couldn’t prevent herself from trumpeting her love affair everywhere. Her girlfriends already knew that her boyfriend from the College of Mathematics would take her out next Sunday on his motorcycle. What hurt most was that she wasn’t even avoiding me, that she showed up a few times at my desk, where I was reading during a break, and drew quickly on my notebook a little flower, next to which she wrote, GINA. The vivacity of her motions was uncanny: The rhythm of her stops, the movement of her arms, the speed of her writing constantly amazed me. The fact that she thought of me merely as a friend, that I saw no change in her behavior toward me, humiliated me, filled me with waves of hatred. Many times, she tried to start a conversation with me, but I rejected her brutally. She smiled then, with that mocking tone, that air of indifference that makes me furious even now. I had developed a kind of erotopathy, a mixture of love, hatred, disdain, admiration, idolatry, and disgust. In the evenings, I returned home all by myself through that gentle flurry of snowflakes illuminated by the headlights of the passing cars, through that odd solitary turmoil of late winter twilights, the time of day when it seemed that the impending night would rule forever.

She became large while I dwindled. From a bizarre and affected little girl, a child raised by old folks, she grew little by little into an immense, hieratical being. Gina became the All. Sunday, I couldn’t stay home. I wrapped myself in my scarf and winter coat and walked to the center of the city. The morning was blinding. The snow on the boulevards’ sidewalks, on the rubber banisters of the escalators, on the towers of the University and of the Institute of Architecture, put me in a state of exaltation. The frozen and glimmering air, clear as glass, dulled my interior sensors, wiped away the image that tried to cling tenaciously to the walls of my cranium: she and he, on the motorcycle, with orange helmets, Gina’s trickling with a tress of chestnut hair. I went into the Danube restaurant and ordered a pastry, which I ate slowly, with long pauses. I stared outside through the yellowish glass. There were beautiful women in winter jackets or stylish overcoats; there were foreigners, Africans and Arabs, huddled in their parks with large fur collars. I attempted uselessly to view myself objectively, from above, to struggle with this psychic illness which was my love. The inner images overwhelmed the outer ones.


Monday, Gina didn’t come to school. The next day, she showed up during the first hour, but after the class began. She remained quiet and isolated till the end of the school day. I couldn’t discern whether it was fatigue or sadness on her face, which I stared at constantly from the corner of my eye. After the first break, when I returned to my desk, I noticed on the corner of a notebook the four-petal flower I knew so well and next to it in capitals, GINA. I stared at her, but she wasn’t paying attention to me: She was copying down in her notebook a list of irregular English verbs. It was strange the way she could change my disposition with the smallest of gestures. Abruptly, the same way a toothache disappears under the impact of a powerful painkiller, this tiny flower sketched quickly with red ink infused my entire body with a sense of calm I had not hoped to ever achieve again. This relaxation was so powerful that within seconds I felt myself immaterial. That evening, she called me on the phone. She said she was alone at home and it was dark in her room. I imagined her, tiny and made of mother-of-pearl, inside that house with heavy furniture that must have looked frightening in the dark. She asked me to forgive her, she told me that everything was over between her and him (but the fact itself that she avoided saying his name and used instead him in such a significant manner proved the contrary; the same way there existed for me only one her). Then, she resumed her usual, exasperating emotional discourses, in which she expressed her suffering and nostalgia in an impersonal manner, so that, though they were nothing but the censored eruptions of her unhappiness, you could almost see them as lightly veiled declarations of love. She told me that she felt more alone than ever, that she regretted our parting; she projected on me, as in a state of inebriation, her amorous phantasms which otherwise would have suffocated her. Quickly, between tears, she confessed that she liked me and didn’t want us to part again. After I hung up, I paused to think for a moment. The fact that there was a minimal chance that what she said was true blinded me, made me want to believe that Gina could be mine, made me forget all about our differences, which I had ruminated about hundreds of times till then and each time seemed to me insurmountable. I had no choice. I had to believe, with my whole being, every one of her words. But somewhere in the wellsprings of my mind remained the certitude of disaster, the conviction that Gina would never love me. That feeling alternated with irrational hope, in a manner that toppled my interior equilibrium. My psyche was on its way to ruin on account of that permanent oscillation between love and hate, hope and despair, admiration and disdain. But for now I was happy, disposed to believe in the end of the story between Gina and Silviu, and felt myself liberated, as though this was the only hindrance between her and me. The next day, we walked home in a snowstorm. Winter break was near, and I was thinking with horror about the New Year celebration. Would I spend it with her? It seemed unlikely. We angled forward as we walked through the snowfall that shot ice needles at our cheeks and penetrated behind our necks. The tangled streets, pallidly illumined here and there in dull orange, were swept by the snowstorm until the black of the pavement came into sight, while in other, more protected places, the snow undulated the blue shadows. She took off her glove and stuck her hand in my pocket, lined with fur. I held tight her inert little fingers, which only responded from time to time with slightly perceptible quivers. Many times, we paused to kiss, nearly falling over from the force of the wind. We pushed our fur hats against each other, tried to embrace while fighting our heavy coats, stared in each other’s eyes in that frozen gloom that latched icy stars to our eyelashes. Gina was arrayed now in snow, glimmering in the light of the window displays of the self-service shop, decorated with tinsel-and-cloth children on little cardboard sleds, multicolored globes and bulbs. Her hair and face, under the delicate peak of the fox-fur hat, turned abruptly crimson from the purple tinfoil of the vestment of some Santa Claus ruling on his throne between bottles and canned goods. In the hallway, when I took her in my arms, she asked me if I wanted to come up to her room. We walked in together. The television was on in the living room, a Temp 6, one of the first sets to be sold around here, and her grandparents and aunt were watching it, wrapped in blankets and the magic light of the palpitating screen. I bade them good evening and, led by Gina, we went into her room. It was so familiar! Many times I dreamed about this room, so tall, with its upright piano and its dresser painted vaguely in the Renaissance style, the glass icons on the walls, the terracotta stove painted with beautiful blue pictures, the scarlet satin drapes faded by the passage of time. Free of our heavy coats, we sat on the narrow, quilted sofa mantled with fanciful pillows. She disappeared for a few minutes and returned in jeans and a thin yellow blouse that brought into relief her beautiful breasts, not large but round, with the nipples visible through the cotton. She brought me green walnut jam and fig wine in an oddly shaped crystal glass. The light fell over us, pallid and flushed and slightly dulled by the candelabra’s icicles. We talked about all sorts of trifles until the wine was gone, and then we sat quietly, staring at each other and swallowing the void. A sense of tension grew between us and became unbearable. She gave up first, falling backward on the plush pillows. Drunkenly, I embraced her, I lifted her blouse and glued my cheeks against the bare breasts with their tiny copper coins. We clutched each other close for a long time, until I unfastened the jeans’ metal button and pulled the zipper. The clamor awoke us. We had gone too far: The grandparents were only meters away and the door was made of frosted glass. Gina zipped up her jeans, and abruptly her face darkened. Her eyes burst with tears, and soon she started to sob convulsively. I held her in my arms, I squeezed her in order to stifle her sobs: I knew why she was crying. Gina wiped her eyes and took my cheeks between her palms. With a tortured expression, she looked into my eyes and said, nearly screaming at me: “I don’t love Silviu anymore. Do you understand? I don’t love him at all anymore, he disgusts me. Let’s laugh at him, do you want to?” And abruptly, she tore off her blouse and unzipped her pants again, until a few sparkling curls sprung out over the top of her tiny panties. We embraced again, but this time she convulsed with an urge for profanation that made her forget everything. I pulled away despite her grip and put on my jacket. I looked in the mirror and put myself together. My hair was wet and disheveled. I combed it with a few quick strokes. Gina stood up as well, put on her blouse, and leaned on my shoulder with her disheveled ringlets. We stared in the glimmering mirror. My eyes shone violet above the sharp cheekbones, while hers, amber, mirrored lighter than the coffee-toned reddish light. I remember our contracted and inexpressive faces, like masks of ecstasy, and the way they shone next to each other out of the mirror’s crystal. We gazed at them for a time in motionless silence, and then she smiled—that bitter, phantasmal smile of hers—and pointed her index finger at the mirror. But the image inside the mirror’s frame did not repeat this gesture. The hand in the mirror leaned on my shoulder, while the real one ferried its finger with its nail, polished in a transparent and sparkling glaze, brushed my forehead directly on the cold glass, coasting down along the line of the nose, insisting on a short rest along the lips, then tracing with deliberate leisure the path of the neck, to pause finally on the chest. A streak of light steam sectioned my face now, the tiny drops quivering a crimson hue. The phantom hand, simultaneously real, headed now for Gina’s mirror brow, paused with finger pointed at the eyebrows, then descended toward the lips that went on smiling strangely, all-knowingly. The finger took a rest between Gina’s breasts, then departed from the glass, stained now with a line of steam. The hand then rose and pressed with open palm in between our heads in the mirror. The dissolved seal of a palm of reddish steam persisted on the glass. Then, Gina’s hand alighted on my shoulder, identifying again with its reflected image. There was no longer any difference between us, the mirrored and the real. With faltering steps, she returned to the sofa, installed a silk tasseled pillow under her head, and in a few minutes was asleep. She is the only being I know who sleeps with open eyes. The fixed stare, contrasting with the motions of her breathing chest, gives her the aspect of being in coma, of a soul that sees, hears, senses its death. I leaned over Gina and stared in her eyes, their pupils enormously dilated, framed only by a thin honey ring. But, instead of seeing my face in her obscured pupils, I saw hers!



- pp. 72-77: I know the sensation of fainting that assaulted Max Blecher on abandoned lots; I experienced the entire network of Kafkaesque symptoms: false perceptions, jamais vu, and all the rest. And I also have sensations which are truly unique, not encountered anywhere in literature, but I won’t get into that now. I want to remember—though I know that the road to remembering will lead directly to catastrophe. I feel I will not be able to write about anything incidental, not compromised by obsession, by chimeras.


Since I began writing, the little old lady poked her head two or three times through the door, peering at me with concern. Each time I waved my hand in anger to make her understand I wished to be left alone. I am afraid they will send for the doctor and I will be forced to play the farce of normality. I stare now at the hand that holds the pen. The nail polish has nearly peeled off. My handwriting is slightly different than before; still, I am in control of it.

First, a few lightninglike memories awaken, perhaps from the age of two or three. I see at the corner of an alley three men in white shirts, their profiles against flame-red sky, smoking and chatting peacefully. In the distance, the giant red-brick walls of repair shops with windows black from soot, abandoned even then. It was somewhere near the Obor train station, because that’s where we lived then, and I see railroad tracks reflecting the red sky. Not a sound, not a smell that I can associate with this enigmatic movie. I approach the three men and stare at them, leaning my head back. They seem gigantic to me, my head barely above their knees. They lean forward over me. They have monstrous faces, made only of flesh and blood. They laugh noiselessly, while one of them lifts me by the armpits and tosses me up in the air, catching me an instant later. I begin to scream, also soundlessly, and he puts me down. I turn around and run to our gate, where my mother, tall as a tower and wearing a navy blouse, is waiting. In an instant I soak her chest and her blouse’s collar with tears and saliva.

Another time, all three of us are returning from the movies. We’d gone to a summer outdoor movie theater and saw Venice, the Moon, and You. I remember perfectly that title, which for me was magical. I forgot hundreds of movie titles but I will never forget that one. Certainly, I don’t remember the film itself, the same way I don’t recall the book Blue Evenings, which I read in my first years of school and which I can’t find anywhere, but whose title awakens in me a pervasive nostalgia. We walk the dim alleys, I am in the middle, my mother and father are holding my little hands. I see a street with tiny houses, with street-level shops, with minuscule balconies, whose pavement resounded sonorously under our footsteps. Before us walked the moon, full and larger than I had ever seen it before, yellow with brown-orange spots but still excessively bright. I say “walked” because it seemed to move forward in rhythm with my steps, oscillating up and down to the beat of my little shoes on the violet cobblestones. My parents, terribly tall, whispered over my head, while I gazed at the moon with fascination, mystified that we couldn’t pass it, that it continued to walk ahead of us. Suddenly, I found myself inside a passage guarded by frightening cement creatures. We walked underneath the vault of the passage till we reached a room, large and very bright. We were in the home of people whom I had never met, who were happy to see my parents. I was kissed by a hefty woman with lots of make-up, green eyes, and a string of green beads hanging around her neck; the beads were the size of Ping-Pong balls. On the walls, I saw hideous masks made of rags, and perhaps a musical instrument, a saber . . . A dirty glass chandelier burned above us with buzzing bulbs. The table was full of dishes and sweets, but after I munched on the corner of a piece of pie, I found myself pushed into another room, where a girl who must have been six years old and a little boy of about eight began to show me all sorts of toys. There were carousels that spun by themselves, with wires from which little tin airplanes were suspended, a kind of train running along tiny rails surrounding a tray, a yellow motorcyclist, and two birds, all made of nothing but tin, spinning and hopping on the waxed wooden floor. There was even a toy car that turned around by itself once it reached the edge of the table. We played together for a while. One by one, they spread out a series of toys I never dreamed I would ever possess. And then they showed me a toy that took my breath away: a Chinese puppet, the figure of a mandarin with his hands crossed over his belly. The toy was made of plastic and composed of a large sphere representing the stomach and a smaller one placed on top, with Chinese facial features painted on it, fierce and at the same time benign. The object was very heavy, its bottom filled with lead, and rocked endlessly from one side to the other like a Weeble Wobble. The astonishing thing for me, however, was that while it wobbled, the mandarin also sang, emitting a high-pitched and delicate melody that appeared to be generated by a multitude of minuscule copper gongs, a clockwork music arising from the mechanical spinning of the cammed axis inside. The wobbling and the minaret music were hypnotic, and I don’t recall when my parents finally took me home. Later, even though I asked them numerous times, they never knew whose house we had visited that night and did not remember Venice, the Moon, and You, even though the film did actually run in Bucharest. Who was the hefty woman? Who were the two children, the boy with the swollen face, leisurely gestures, and a horrible fixed gaze, and the sweet girl with lightly red hair so full of grace? Who was the spectral man who led us to the door and filled my pockets with Christmas candy, even though it was summer, and golden chocolate coins? But twenty years later, I saw the same puppet in her house. It is now next to me while I write. I shake it, and wobbling sleepily on the bureau (she always said “bewro”), the mandarin hums his metallic, iridescent melody.


About two years ago, I was rummaging through the cupboard looking for a document. My folks kept all their receipts, ledgers, and loose papers in a deteriorating old scarlet purse that belonged to my mother before she was married, when she worked as a seamstress at Donca Simo Weavers. In a partition next to the electrical fuses and a series of tiny springs for God knows what sort of contraption, I came across something wrapped in newspaper, whose pliancy piqued my curiosity. I opened it and found two blond tresses, about fifteen centimeters long, tied with a rubber band at the severed end and with a blue ribbon at the other, where the hair strands thinned. Next to the tresses was a yellowed photograph, with a folded corner, still very clear. It portrayed a little boy, about two or three, standing buck-naked in a garden, a curl above his forehead and hair braided in two ashen-yellow pigtails falling on both sides of his head all the way down to the shoulders. He held a fist in front of his eyes, while on his face you could read a sentiment of apprehension. His lips were pursed, and he looked like he was ready to burst into tears, and like lightning, my mind suddenly filled with memories, unusually alive, colorful images seeming to spring out of the beginning of the world: gigantic beds of tulips, the sun gushing forth apocalyptically between the leaves of the bitter cherry, the black earth with unusually large clods, as though observed through a looking glass, rotted wooden boards and a woman approaching, with her skirt in flames from the sun. Then, a stranger, dark, heading directly toward me with a gleaming piece of machinery. Yes, I recall the photographer whom I confused with the doctor who gave me shots. It follows, therefore, that those were my pigtails. Mother told me many times she dressed me like a little girl, with little white aprons, until all the neighbors in the slums where we lived called me Andriusa or Andrea and kissed and fondled me till I nearly suffocated. My consolation is that I was a beautiful child. After three years, I began to lose weight and rather than a color portrait I became a charcoal sketch. And, irony of ironies, I will write here that for the last two weeks I recaptured my former beauty—in fact, I actually surpassed it. Such an overflow of beauty could only mean disaster or death for someone. It is not mirrors and copulation which are abominable, it is beauty.

One night, I dreamed of Marcela. I remembered that dream long after, in one of my afternoon reveries. I dreamed of her the way she was when she became my playmate, the year we moved into the apartment building with four floors, when I was a little older than three—in fact I was about to turn four that summer. Marcela—the way I saw her in the dream and the way I suspect she actually looked—was a tomboyish girl, a little older than I, with broken teeth that looked frightful. Her clothes were always dirty, most of the time her yellow shorts and flowery T-shirts were stained with peach juice. She had a constantly demonic grin, but she was very charming in her incessant carelessness, her jailhouse hairdo, and her golden earrings with a crimson rock that shined too crassly to compete with a ruby. I loved roaming about all day with Marcela. Mornings, she knocked on our door, her lips already stained and, when Mother opened it, she never failed to ask: “M’am, how is your little baby?” (This because my baby brother was only a few months old. A few months later, he would die of double pneumonia.) We would go out together and visit the solarium, a place filled with sand. Once, scooping out the sand that got progressively wetter, we dug out some enormous scabby frogs. We dragged them through the sand till they looked like quivering cakes, but with large, limpid, human eyes. We played the wheel, catching each other by the feet and rolling across the sand, first on her back, then on mine, until we dug furrows in the sand basin and the sand got into our mouths, our nostrils, our ears. In the evening, we went exploring. Near our apartment building in Floreasca, there was a kind of a storage warehouse, a melancholy watchtower. Along its facade, the rusty remains of a fire escape hung like rags. Large clamps cast long shadows on the red bricks reddened all the more by the setting sun. She was the first to go in, through a slit in a side door missing a board. We crept in easily through that crack, so narrow that only cats could go through. Marcela, defter than I, with her twig-thin limbs, could get through in one move. Inside was a warm, amber-brown darkness where the sparkling rays of coppery light, penetrating through the cracks and nail leaks, gushed in forcefully toward the interior. We strolled through the nameless machinery, heavy metal carcasses immobilized in the black oil, cogged wheels taller than we were, leaning against workbenches shrouded by sheet metal. Marcela wanted to touch and feel everything, she wouldn’t stop till she was completely smeared with fuel and discarded oil, till she hung around her neck the rusty metal necklaces, till she scaled the top of the complicated metal gearing. The ground was scattered with large nails the size of my forearm, ball bearings crusty with compacted rust, wooden boxes filled with hacksaw blades, screwdrivers, files, spokes, wires of all thicknesses. When it got completely dark, we would get frightened. One evening, Marcela took off her T-shirt and wiped the dust off one of the windows until we could stare at the dark blue sky, sprinkled with stars. After those expeditions, we would always get a spanking. At least Marcela would, who showed up the next day filled with bruises, but just as happy and ready to begin anew.

She taught me to play doctor. There was a storage area a few steps below our apartment building’s first floor. Just before turning toward the door that led to the storage area, there was a niche in the wall with a bench. That’s where we played. No one was allowed to know about our game. Because of this game, we found out the disturbing fact that Marcela and I were not the same, that there were odd differences on the other side of our clothes, that these differences existed between all girls and boys. I remember how difficult it was to accept the evidence. Many times we withdrew in the semidarkness of that bench and contemplated each other with sadness.




- pp. 91-94: I was a difficult adolescent, with bizarre idiosyncrasies and absurd ideas. I am convinced that without her appearance in my life in the eighth grade, I would have definitely lost any contact with the real world. I read all day and most of the night, discovering—one thing leading to the next—entire families of poets (because poetry is what I read most) whom I then explored individually, borrowing books from four libraries. I easily retained all the poetry I liked, and during breaks, while my fellow students played Ping-Pong on the teacher’s desk, I was filling the blackboard with verses by Verlaine and Eluard. In my French and Latin classes, I concocted sentences with bizarre examples. If I had to conjugate a verb in a sentence, I would write, for example “The black flower spied on the transparent fox” or “I strike the green with an apricot cow,” making sure that the exercise was grammatically correct. Of course, the poor teachers were aghast. But I was an excellent student and won a few prizes in creative writing competitions, and so everyone left me alone. I saw myself as damned and felt profound contempt for my fellow students. And of course I, too, began writing verses and kept a journal which I read and reread so often that I knew its contents by heart. With each new reading, I acquired a new life. I was by turns, with my entire being, Camus, Sartre, Celine, Bacovia, Voronca, Rimbaud, and Valery. I barely noticed what went on around me. The other students always came to school bringing records, usually in very bad shape, with the sleeves Scotch-taped together both vertically and horizontally. The sleeves’ luster projected dour and grotesque figures of bearded men, eccentrically tricked out, or landscapes of melancholy factories with gigantic smokestacks and a little winged pig on top. Mysterious vocables crossed the course of our conversations in which I participated absent-mindedly: Inagada Davida, Led Zeppelin, Samba Pa Ti, Imagine. The kids murmured hypnotic refrains and recited rough-hewn verses: “I don’t believe in H*tler / I don’t believe in Zimmerman / I don’t believe in the Beatles / I only believe in me / In Yoko and me / And that’s reality / The dream is over.” They brought their reel-to-reel tape recorders to class, they connected them to the school speakers, which emitted such shrill guitar licks that I couldn’t listen for more than five minutes. I was indifferent to everything the kids my age loved. During the two years that my crises lasted, I got so close to madness that even now I feel its gelid breath girdling my cranium. The same way that the snake’s scaly skin gradually separates itself from the snake during molting, my world separated itself from the real world, became a parallel world with the consistency of dreams. Since it was impossible to spend the entire day reading and, since I had nightmares and difficulties in breathing if I didn’t go out in the fresh air, I took regular walks each day before sunset. I would walk down Galati and Princess Ruxandra Streets, cross Galati Plaza, and roam the golden and silent alleys on the other side of Toamnei Street, toward Calea Mosilor. I stared at the old houses, with alveolar-shaped balconies dangerously suspended above the street, with stucco walls, cornices, grotesque figures, and humid plaster Atlases under the arcades. As the sun dropped toward the horizon, the gold of the walls turned amber, then purple, the cheeks and noses of the gorgons on the pediments cast pointed shadows along the walls, the windows filled up with blood, and a little girl in a blue dress, standing in a gate of forged iron decorated with lances, unsettled old memories—so old it seemed they existed before the world. Many times I walked along Venera Street, without suspecting that in one of those large houses with storefronts, with white and pink friezes, lived the girl who would end up being the most monstrously beautiful thing in my whole life. I was fascinated by the leprous aspect of some of the shops and small factories lined up along this street. Their fronts had been painted with acrylic paint, which after a few years began to peel, revealing large spaces underneath the yellow plaster that covered them before. Large strips of strident blue paint still hung in dried-up layers. Down the street, there were cottages with horses in the courtyard or tiny, charming country houses with arching vines, in whose porches retired folk, using dyes, painted on pieces of discarded cardboard marine landscapes or still lifes with lilacs. As twilight fell on Venera Street, carcasses of refrigerators, abandoned on the road next to Silvestru Elementary School, rusted in the rain and drizzle, turned an unreal pale pink, and the whole landscape became artificial. I would return home filled with sadness.

My eroticism entered a phase of aggressive inhibition. Everything was paradoxical, unsolvable. I searched through art books or catalogues for erotic passages or nudes while on the other hand something in me was against these impulses. I felt that I was inherently different from the others, that love and everything related to it was not for me, that I traveled a road which took me way beyond the banal human condition. In fact, through this tendency toward absolutism, which I experienced so intently at the time, I came to believe that it was eroticism itself which prevented man from realizing himself, that love—and thus woman—was the cause leading to trivialization, to failure. For two years, in that state of alienation which I have been attempting to explain, I created for myself a monstrous system of ideas. I had determined that I didn’t have the right to get to know a girl because I had a higher mission to fulfill. I was convinced that immortality depends upon chastity and the moment you love or make love you taint yourself past all hope. This wasn’t because of any sort of lucid realization but impulses which I could not deny. Of course, I agonized by myself but couldn’t do it any other way.


- pp. 126-130: The chemistry teacher interrupted our discussion, to which I listened with much envy and renewed conviction that I was good for nothing, that I would never understand life. Light as a mouse and with a huge smile on her face, Gina snuck in, almost at the same time as the teacher. She was so amused that one of her misshapen teeth showed between her lips, giving her a malicious air, like that of a charming little witch. In her ultramarine halter top, with a tiny gold chain showing through the collar of her blue blouse, she seemed even smaller, almost like a sparrow. She plunged to my desk, flung a “bonjour” at me, and began to take out books from her book bag. I didn’t say anything back, but neither was I able to pay attention to the teacher. She sat up straight, affecting an air of femininity and grinning like a spoiled child who knew she had done something wrong. It drove me crazy that she behaved normally, as though we were merely two desk partners, as though nothing had happened between us. During breaks she asked me what subject we were studying the following class time, then blended in with the rest of the girls huddled about the heater and bantered cheerfully. Soon, you could hear her loud and crackly voice, which sounded like she was talking to deaf old people, chattering about lace and ruffs and fashions.

Since his parents weren’t home, Mera asked a few of us over after school. Besides me, he invited Manea—a coarse, unrefined boy, who was the son of a waiter and nicknamed Little Tiger by the English teacher, because of his red-orange hair and feline aspect—Radu G., and Mera’s girlfriend, Molina—about whom everyone sang Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Molina, where are you going to?”—The Dead and his girlfriend, Sanda—nicknamed Calceola Sandalina after the foraminifer. But Sanda (Sanda was her last name) was good friends with Gina; thus, while actually not invited, Gina came along with us. In any case, the gang was thrilled, because they sensed that something was not all right between Gina and me and hoped to witness a scene. I stayed as far away as I could from her and forced myself to engage in a discussion with the boys, especially since they were speaking about films, which I knew a lot about. I had seen Antonioni’s The Eclipse, and I was excited about the scene where Monica Vitti and Alain Delon kissed through a glass window. We had just stepped out on the boulevard and picked up a couple of bottles of vodka from the supermarket. The girls, laughing and screaming out loud, had managed to rattle the saleslady. They were delightful and flirtatious, they loved to exhibit their teeth and gums, to act silly, and flash their tongues. We turned on a side alley with cars parked on the sidewalks and eventually arrived at Mera’s home. He lived in a stylish apartment, with wood and aluminum furniture and chandeliers of ground, yellowish glass. The library occupied an entire wall and, on an especially designed shelf, there was a superb Japanese record player with tiny metal disks at the edge of the turntable and a multitude of shiny dials and lights. We sat wherever we could, trying not to disturb the delicately wrought vases and other odd objects on the coffee table and the trays: a daguerreotype, a pince-nez with folding lenses, a Russian doll . . . The boys headed for the disk section of the library, containing at least two hundred pieces: classical—in large elegant boxes—and rock—torn and pieced back together with yellowish Scotch tape. Mera brought some crackers, put on some unbearably violent music, and turned the volume to maximum. We hit the vodka. It was almost necessary to scream in order to hear each other. Despite this, I caught from time to time fragments of Gina’s stories from the other corner of the room. She and Sandalina had nestled together, and Gina was telling her about her New Year’s celebration. She was laughing, and despite the excitement, she was constantly affecting the air of a vamp. She had gone with him to two different places that night; they had kissed on the way; and danced madly, until they fell on the floor . . . I was trying with all my might to hear what she was saying, though everything I heard was making me sick; I felt that I could no longer stand up, that I could no longer bear it. I was constantly pouring vodka into my glass. Suddenly, I lost control, and while others started to dance, I fixed my glare on Gina—who was pretending to ignore me—with ever increasing insistence. I think I must have been staring at her like a madman, because I noticed Sanda’s frightened face just before I lost my lucidity. All I have now of the rest of the party are sensations rather than memories. They told me later that I was staggering and spilling my vodka, complaining to the boys about how Gina was treating me, and calling her all sorts of names; then, they said, I walked up to her, took her hands, and rattled deliriously for fifteen minutes about how much I loved her. “You repeated continually like a madman: ‘You are my everything, you are my everything!’ You were paler than The Dead. We couldn’t get through to you. You attacked poor Gina, I don’t mean ‘poor,’ the damn bitch, but she was trying to calm you down, except you weren’t listening, it seemed that all that mattered was to humiliate yourself before her, at some point you were rubbing your face against her knees . . .” “Man, you were a mess, there was nothing I could do, if I wasn’t drunk I would have tried to knock some sense into you, but there was no way, man.” “After Gina left ( you didn’t even know when she left, you were staring after her with a dumbfounded look on your face, you actually looked kind of cool), and after everyone left, we were together in the kitchen and you brought me a cup of coffee on a tray, your eyes were nearly closed, I’m surprised you didn’t trip. I helped you put your coat on. You looked like you were sobering up a bit, otherwise I wouldn’t have let you go.” I recall now how I went out into the frozen January air, how I waited at the trolley station, and how, when it arrived, I fell in the snow trying to grab the trolley’s safety rail. Happily, there was no one home. I threw myself on the bed, still in my school uniform, and fell asleep. I woke up in the dark, and at first I was scared. Then, I remembered Gina. In a reverie that lasted an hour, listening absent-mindedly to the streetcars on Stefan cel Mare, I imagined in great detail Gina’s New Year’s Eve till I felt I would suffocate. I washed my face and then, looking out the window, promised myself that under no circumstance would I behave like that again. Why should I destroy myself like that, for whom? . . . I found my journal and wrote with crooked letters and many corrections: “Disappointed by Gina, by the impossibility of our being together. She doesn’t want it, she freezes all affection and replaces it with affectation. She is an inferior being, you can’t demand that she surpass this vapid and egotistical condition of hers, of an irresponsible demimondaine. I suspect that the disdain and the hatred are reciprocal. This is a jungle.” I was expecting her phone call—after all, she left me in a pitiful state—but no one called me that evening. The next morning, I wondered how I would ever go to school again, how would I ever confront Mera’s sarcasm, Little Tiger’s ironic comments, Sanda’s allusive looks. I didn’t even want to think of her. But everyone behaved absolutely fine, despite the fact that everyone already knew about the embarrassing events at Mera’s. Still, no one mocked me; on the contrary, they treated me with extra courtesy and consideration. The girls especially lavished more compassion on me than ever; all of them had their issues with Gina. My friend Loretta Bedighian, the most intelligent girl in our class, talked to me every single day for a few days in the hallway, when we happened to be on duty together, monitoring the entrance. She told me that everything Gina did was for the sake of spectacle, that she liked everyone to focus on her, that wherever she was, she just had to be the center of attention. It was strange that everyone could see her frivolous aspect. Even then, when I was against her, I felt I couldn’t be in agreement with what was in fact a defamation of Gina. I knew how charming, how kind, and even how intelligent she could be at times; I knew that despite the perennial vacuous remarks, she could sometimes come up with a stunning reply; I knew how obsessed by death she was, and by old age. Certainly, I suffered and hated her because she belonged to someone else (I wondered if she was still with Silviu or had met someone new), but that made her seem even more complex in my eyes. Even though I changed desks, even though I was determined to have nothing to do with her anymore, our connection was never broken. After a few days, Gina telephoned me. I couldn’t believe it when I heard her voice (in which I suspected the guilty snicker). I hung up on her, but the next day she tried to approach me during each and every break. She smiled, the slut, with her little flat nose and bat snout, uncannily beautiful, with the lightly curled hair the color of oak. She would nestle next to me without saying a word, just staring at me, and then, with feigned shyness or fear, would grasp a finger or hair strand. I would instantly go somewhere else, but couldn’t help smiling when I saw her approaching. “What a scorpion I am!” she would whisper.

[HERO]

Lindsay Donner from PSI FACTOR: Chronicles of the Paranormal



I've considered IEI-Fe for her, although other types might be more likely.


Xander Harris from Buffy the Vampire Slayer



I used to think he was IEI-Fe, but he probably wasn't since I sometimes hated him.

[Joy]

Did you transcribe all of that? 0_o

I've never seen any of those shows (except maybe one full episode of Buffy, but I HATED the main character at the time so I didn't keep watching it).

[Amber]

Alice in Wonderland

Holly Golightly ....? (she could also be an Infantile type, maybe ILE)

Mina Harker in Dracula.

[Persephone]

I wonder for Beverly from "Winter's Tale"...

[ashlesha]

[Joy]

Sally, from the Nightmare Before Christmas

I've only seen it once and it was very long ago, but I remember her and Jack being typed as SEI and ILE? I do have a hard time seeing that movie as Alpha though!