It was a story, with a moral, a crude parable as it was popular to use. On one side of the Earth there was a button. On the other side, a Mandarin. For some obscure reason, the two were linked. Whoever pushed it would have power, a lion’s share of riches, the whole kit and caboodle. Whoever pushed the button would kill the Mandarin. Just as Mrs. Courcelles had cleverly pointed out, it went without saying that the identity of the Mandarin was and would remain completely unknown to the button pusher. Nothing but a body on his or her conscience, a distant body. No one would ever know, she’d added. Only the button pusher would have any idea that someone else had lost their head for him or her. I can really still feel the slight tingle going up and down my spine until it terminated in my unwilling body. I can feel like I did then in Lagarigue’s office, I can feel it just like that very moment in high school in Sartrouville. Memories are tapes you watch over and over again, as long as you know how to get your hands on them. A slightly raucous silence almost inadvertently washes up at the edge of the teacher’s desk. Mrs. Courcelles lets enough seconds tick by to make her point, then, looking at us with disdain, she states: well, I’m not sure—silence—that there isn’t someone—who would still push that awful button—silence. With full force I experience that brief moment again, yesterday just as right now even less than tomorrow. Shame sprouting before it blooms, the insolent pleasure of a dirty little secret. I told Dr. Lagarigue not to mix everything together. The more we move forward, the more I’d like to run away without ever stopping, without even looking back. The more I investigate, the more I can’t stand myself, the more I’d like to flee far from this body of mine, the more I want to throw myself up, empty my insides out, anorexise my memory, blank-slate the slightest foundation. You’d have to be incredibly stupid not to push that button.
Round 6
(6 + 1, Total on the Dice = 7)
You shouldn’t linger in the cafeteria like this, it’s not sensible and you can see you’re keeping the workers on duty from doing their job. We have to close up, come on, you know we can’t leave it open in between meals, you have to go back to your room Miss Maupin, or next door to the TV room, or to the smoking lounge, you usually like to go to the smoking lounge. Margot, go get Boris for me. Aline, be nice, what’s going on. Yes he is, I saw him five minutes ago, he’s doing treatments in the hallway. Calm down, breathe, there, there you go, breathe. Boris is coming with the meds, you’ll feel a lot better, you’ll see. But what do you mean, you haven’t finished sitting down to your meal yet?
Notebook 1
(Overboard Maybe)
Charles comes every Thursday. He brings me daffodils because he says I like them and it’s daffodil season. Charles constantly wants me to like what I used to like. As if it would make any difference to him. Charles is a little naive and very fleshy. I’ve made a secret vow to never remember Charles’s body naked. I’ve made a secret vow to never remember what they call a man’s desire when the man in question is Charles. That makes two vows. If they come true, I’ll have to go to mass twice as often.
Round 7
(4 + 3, Total on the Dice = 7)
I like coming here. It’s too bad it’s not open very much. In the morning it’s only from eleven o’clock till noon because we eat at twelve thirty. They don’t have enough staff to come get us on the floors. And sometimes it stays closed ’cause there aren’t enough nurses. Yeah, I think she’s a nurse. She works at the reception desk too. Well, maybe she’s not a nurse strictly speaking, she doesn’t give out any medication. She’s part of the care team anyway. Like the man behind the bar. He wears a uniform too, but I think he just serves drinks. They must have some special training, here you’d have to. There are some special cases, you know, it’s normal. My roommate’s okay. She’s just manic-depressive, we can talk, I like her. Nothing, she was a sales assistant but now she just looks after her kids. In other words there aren’t a lot of single rooms, they keep them for the most disturbed ones, like the old lady with the green bag. They’re not hospital slippers, they’re washcloths. Yes they are, look, they’re made out of terry cloth and they’re not the same color. You’re blowing it out of proportion, it doesn’t matter she’s got socks on anyway, and besides it’s not that dirty. If they let her do it, they must have their reasons, at the very least it’s a bit of local color. I don’t know anything about that. You don’t always have to figure it out, you know. You imagine it’s connected, that everything always means something, that each and every thing is kind of internal code and once you find the right key you can decipher anything. Lagarigue even told me that sometimes she doesn’t understand anything about it. I think that’s kind of reassuring. Shit, you’re slow. It doesn’t matter what the illness is, there’s room for chaos, that’s what it means. Or free will, why not. Yes we do. No one is completely predetermined, not even a textbook case. Take the guy in the jogging suit back there, for example. No not him those are pajamas, the one on the left, there, next to the girl talking to her Twix. Yes. Well you can see he’s psychotic. Mm-hmm. There are tons of them here what do you think. What gets under his skin is that the system is out to get him, everything is based on that. Mitterand had the Grande Arche built on purpose just to show him how powerful he was after he’d graffitied Anarchy all along the rer tracks. Yes he did I’m telling you. And they’ve injected him with cameras too. He’s really into nanotechnology, and he knows Foucault by heart too. I already knew Foucault before, you’re full of crap. I’ve been hanging around the guy for quite a while. I’ve actually gotten used to him. At first it’s scary, then it makes you laugh, next you communicate with it, and you end up deciding there’s no smoke without fire. I’m kidding. Although. I talked to some former patients who only come during the day now. Some of them have been running into him for ten years. When I look at him, it’s like I’m seeing all his circuits laid bare, the connections, the switches, sometimes I can guess when they’re going to have to give him a shot. You could almost think that a psychotic is a cool, very precise clock. It starts, and tick tock it’s off on another spin around the dial. And then all of a sudden it gets stuck and goes offtrack. As if sometimes the mechanism was off. Not like it was out of order, no it’s not that. More like the subject was tired of its own gentrification. Not that psychosis is comfortable. But once you’ve settled into it, it must really purr, even if it’s really violent. So sometimes things rebel inside. He hasn’t mentioned geopolitics in a week. He just wants to marry a cheerleader and is trying to find out how to meet one. Don’t you think it’d be nice not to be under a yoke like that or to constantly rebel against your own subconscious? Yeah I suppose. A coffee. It looks like I’m boring you. No nothing. They have a real espresso machine have you seen it. When you say how awful do you mean in general or just when it’s not espressos in particular, because that’s really all I drink. Of course they do. Otherwise there’d just be a vending machine. The cafeteria’s not just for acting relaxed and friendly, like come on guys make yourself some friends being sociable is great to fight emotional problems. You’re not too sharp are you, Charlotte? In here they can watch our progress and keep us from going too far. Pretty sneaky eh. If something happens in here you can be sure it gets recorded. We’re all under control twenty-four hours a day, no need for cameras. My laugh freaks me out too. But I can’t compare, maybe I’d think the one I used to have is worse. After six coffees they won’t serve me anymore. Then they say it’s decaf. But the decaf is disgusting, so they give me some crappy soda or fruit juice that’s so heavy I feel like I’ve just eaten a full meal. See, it’s not expensive. With two sugars please. The day before yesterday or maybe Tuesday, I forget, I blew a gasket, see, because there’s a girl they let drink up the whole stock of Diet Coke, and they let her, they give her six cans at a time with a smile on top of it, and with all the caffeine it has in it I’m telling you she’s taking advantage. I don’t really feel like getting any air, but we can turn down the music if you want. Can’t stand Lara Fabian. No way. I have all her records
? No there’s no need, I’ll see when I get there, at some point I’m going to have to go home and have a look at everything. Will you get me another coffee? What was I just saying. You’re kidding. That’s why the cafeteria on the third floor and the Relais h on the grounds are so important. Without the cafeteria and the Relais H we’d all go crazy, I’m telling you the truth. And on top of that we’re lucky, our wing is just opposite, for the buildings on the other side it must be a real pain in the ass. Not everyone no. You have to get signed authorization from your psychiatrist, even if you don’t do anything with your two hours or your four hours, if all you do is the round-trip. A lot of times we organize it among ourselves. Since they leave me alone I can get my sheet almost immediately, and then I let them know, sometimes I forget but since Lagarigue remembers I get my pass every day. I let them know before I go, that way I come back with cigarettes and magazines. The number of magazines you can read in here is ridiculous. My bedside table is worse than the hair salon. Yesterday or the day before I bought Cat Fancy. Frankly neither do I. Not exactly. It’s either that or women’s magazines. Not trendy no, don’t go overboard, but still there’s a shopping page and a column with personal stories, this time it was about Kristo, an overweight Burmese on a diet. The picture’d give you the creeps, I swear, it looks like a bag filled with who-knows-what, it’s not even that it was spilling over, its ass was in the shape of a rectangle. I don’t like your laugh either to tell the truth. I don’t know what got into me, I’d already read the rest and there was a Siamese on the cover, Siamese are really cute. When I get out I’d like to get one, a Siamese I mean. Really? Two? God, how you can be best friends with some girl who named her two Siamese Dolce and Gabbana is beyond me.
Notebook 1
(Overboard Maybe)
I didn’t just have my first cigarette two months ago. I started when I was about fifteen, on vacation in Brittany. It had to have been at night, I felt the smoke warming my lungs, which were retracted from the cold, salty sea spray. Or maybe it was around noon, and I’d chosen a menthol to be like my mother. She laughed when she saw me cough, told me to brush my teeth and that it was time for school. Not necessarily finding witnesses. The first cigarette must not have been as good as the first one I had myself. Charlotte brought me a carton of Philip Morris Blues. I thought they had less taste than the Luckies I bought myself. Too light, they burned too quickly, too hard to inhale enough, one frustration after another and then an awful migraine.
I liked that my body already knew how to smoke. In here it’s easy to feel the serenity. Pleasure is a different story. I get up a lot at night to go to the smoking lounge. I sit in one of the armchairs, the noise of the lighter always echoes a little, so do the movements of my lungs. I can feel the word solitude. I know it’s not the first time, but it’s the most complete, the fullest, I’m full to the top with this word: solitude. It’s nice. The building is empty like I am inside, a little desert set at the edge of a much larger, three-story one. I don’t know the exact number of square feet. I feel reassured although I’m never really afraid. I haven’t been afraid for a long time now. I blocked up the damn process as much as I could. I dammed it up out of love, just out of love and nothing else, almost, out of love for the word solitude. I love the word solitude, I want to be this word, to be one with it. To do this only emptiness, real inside emptiness, devoid of memories and the already rancid past might be able to help me. Memories are the reason the insides of skulls smell so musty. Solitude smells like plains, apples strewn across the fall and the splashing of mountain streams unleashed across rocks that are still warm in a dying August. Dr. Lagarigue always finds a way to mention progress to me, but I know there’s no progress. My memory is dead. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the one who killed it. This question is normally underlined by a snarky little laugh.
I lit my first cigarette in the middle of the night, in this slightly cold room known as the smoking lounge. But in my head I was leaning on a railing facing the wind and I blew the smoke in the face of a Provençal sun. I tell Dr. Lagarigue that I’m building myself memories. They’re so perfect that the old ones don’t feel at home anymore. I know it and I don’t care. Anyway, a memory is nothing but a little bit of a lie that we hang onto in order to laugh or to cry a little harder. Might as well make them up. It’s working pretty well, at least for the time being. Maybe I’m losing something. It’s possible but I don’t care. In fact, no, I do care because I can tell I haven’t lost anything. I think I got rid of it.
I don’t dare mention it to Dr. Lagarigue, first of all because she’s a smart cookie and second because she wants what’s good for me. There’s nothing worse than smart people who want what’s good for you. I don’t know why I’m saying that. It sounds like something my father would say. I trust myself. Maybe I shouldn’t: the more I learn about myself the more I am. Disgusted isn’t the word. I feel contempt for myself, that’s more like it. That’s why I trust myself. I’m showing that I’m lucid. I’m showing a sense of distance too, distance and critical sense. Given the data it’s a sign of something. Something different. I’m different and that’s the only reason I’m lucid. It’s hard for me to be one with myself, it’s easier with the word solitude. If I wasn’t lucid, I could do it.
I would have preferred waking up somewhere else. Sometimes I hide my Tranxene tablet under my tongue and make my glottis bob under the noses of the nurses who are possibly completely aware of what I’m up to. The nurses are very clever because they want what’s good for me too. I do always take my sleeping pill in the end, it’s just that I spit it out for later. I like to have at least a little control over the time I spend asleep or awake, I don’t have control over much so I want to keep that at least. When I pull my Tranxene trick, I go think in the smoking lounge. I’m not the first one to think of it and sometime it bugs me, you have to talk for a while, play board games, or get rid of everybody else. For some that’s easy enough but for others it’s more complicated. I don’t really like to have to do that because it annoys the nurses and I really do like them. And plus it makes a lot of noise, and the alcoholics come to see what’s going on, the smoking lounge fills up, and everything goes to hell.
I really have a hard time with the alcoholics in here. First of all they pretend they’re here for some other reason, sprained neurons, cracked cerebellum, a nasty case of the blues, a seismic depression. Their speech patterns are consistent, so we trust them. We’re the B&L’s, the Bipolars and the Like. It’s just chance that we’re together, little clusters of overripe pain, all of our hearts were twisted with juicy, purulent secrets. Our stories twine together with every confidence and each stifled sigh, it seems we cry less if we use the buddy system. The alcoholics are really sly, they try to link up with the vine without understanding that even impaired, the sap owes it to itself to be loyal if it doesn’t want to end up covered in scabs. I understand the weight of shame, but after all, the nymphomaniac accepts the truth, the same goes for the addicts and the ones with eating disorders, and for the manic-depressives and the suicidal ones too. Some of the psychotics say they’re doing fine, and that’s how you can tell who they are every time. What good does it do to pretend, to talk about your every move and crisis, to compare your symptoms to anyone who will listen if it’s just to hide the cause, no really, it’s really annoying for us. And on top of that they depress me. I’m not saying I’m having fun all the time, but still. When I do my disappearing tablet trick, it’s so I can have some peace at night, at least for an hour or two. To think about all the bodies I could’ve woken up in instead of my own, bodies with lives that are so much worse or with former choices that are so much better. Maybe I could’ve been a man or a child, after all, why not, a man or a child why not, why not say so to Dr. Lagarigue, that honestly I really don’t accept this particular body, this particular life, because maybe it’s not mine, no not mine at all maybe it’s a punishment a damn idiotic metaphysical punishment, I screwed up bad in a former life and bang they sent me back to a
fucking grown-up body to a damn whore’s body, because that’s what it really is, a middle-class whore’s body, twenty-seven years old and the ass of a whore, the tits of a whore, a stomach that’s already had liposuction. When I think about all that I need to be alone at the railing so that I can look down and admit that that’s exactly what happened to me.
I need to be alone, bundled up in silence so my eyes can let go, free-fall from their sockets into the distance, and the more I look at myself the more my irises drop away, and the more I look at myself the more I know: I can only get away from myself if it’s full speed ahead. The B&L’s have a tacit agreement. We all know how precious solitude is, our survival instinct may have been laid to ruin we shelter the others as much as we can. We can’t do much but we try hard. Sometimes it’s hard to give up the room, to hold back the torrent of distress, to hold back the lock as the tidal wave of words bashes into the back of our teeth. We force ourselves to do just that despite it all by, I don’t know. Maybe just to be polite. The B&L’s have good manners. At three in the morning when the wind sweeps into my dull blonde highlights, I hear a creak crumbs I feel a damp gaze then a sugary bang. Sometimes we play duck-duck-goose, the goose a strange pedigree. I’m alone leaning on my elbows overlooking my peel pock-marked by this self, a distinct little spot in the field of lavender. A door cracked open a soggy handkerchief this old man he played one pulled-back snout the gong apologizes in the oil this old man he played two. A lot of times I’m the one who comes in just as the Kleenex package is started and on my heels the opening closes handing me over to the hallway and its twin sisters. It’s much more than a need, more than a necessity, it’s communion with solitude. Only the alcoholics like to talk. Well I say the alcoholics, I should be specific, the alcoholics in the post-withdrawal phase who live in the 14th arrondissement of Paris and who’ve been in my presence in the smoking lounge of the Piera Aulagnier Wing at Sainte-Anne’s for the last eight and a half months. In other words Jacques, Viviane, Jean-Claude, and occasionally Cyril. But even if it’s not a very large sample group, please note that I can’t look after them. Maybe it’s because they’re worn-out. Or maybe because they’re ugly. Or maybe just because they’re unbearably unhappy. I think that’s what it is. They ooze suffering, but it’s a diffuse suffering, throbbing old jazz music, I hate jazz, I’m sure that even before I hated jazz, that’s what the alcoholics in here are, jazz music, swaying pain, a rusty old tune sputtered out by the glottis of an antique saxophone that turns the atmosphere to lead on you with the first two notes. The post-withdrawal alcoholics living in the 14th arrondissement of Paris who’ve been in my presence in the smoking lounge of the Piera Aulagnier Wing at Sainte-Anne’s for the last eight and a half months spin fiberglass as soon as they open their mouths, their breath is so rough, the room becomes the hostage of their asbestos-laden comments, they make the air so thick it condemns our bronchia, the idea of contagion spreads terrifying in a clawed crescendo, everyone curls up tight oh so tight as tight as can be, a compact ball of self, crouching inside to try to avoid the oxidizing assaults of this deceitful lethargy. They have the bitterness of cider, their blood has turned bad, their souls are lead poisoned.
Not a Clue Page 7
