I'm Gone

by Jean Echenoz

  Ferrer motioned them toward their chairs before unpacking the objects come in from the cold. Having managed to sit, Jean-Philippe Raymond began to examine these antiques poutingly, without emitting any comments, only delivering now and again esoteric coded indications, series of figures and letters. Standing behind him, Sonia whispered these indications into the Ericsson toward who knows what destination, then whispered in return the equally abstract replies provided by her interlocutor, then lit another Benson. After which, the expert and his other assistant deliberated obscurely while Ferrer, having given up trying to understand anything at all, exchanged more than one look with Sonia.

  We all know these exchanges, these intrigued glances addressed at first sight but with insistence by two strangers who immediately please each other in a group. These glances are instantaneous but serious and vaguely disquieted, brief though prolonged; their duration seems much greater than it really is. They slip quietly into group conversations, while the group in question doesn’t notice anything, or pretends not to. They provoke some upset in any case, since the assistant Sonia appeared once to confuse the functions of her accessories, talking for two seconds into her Bensons.

  The appraisal took nearly an hour, without either man turning even once toward Ferrer, but at its end Jean-Philippe Raymond’s mouth twisted into a worrisome grimace. The corners of his lips inflected toward the floor as he added up several columns of signs in a thin notebook bound in purple lizard, peevishly shaking his head all the while, and Ferrer, seeing the man’s expression, thought it was a total loss: the entire lot isn’t worth shit; all that traveling for nothing. But then the expert delivered his estimation. This sum, although stated after taxes and in a sour tone, easily rivaled the sale price of one or two small castles in the Loire Valley. Now, I’m not saying the great chateaux, like your Chambord or Chenonceaux; I’m talking about the small-to-medium-sized ones in the Montcontour or Talcy vein, which are already not bad.

  “You have a safe, of course,” the expert assumed.

  “Goodness, no,” answered Ferrer. “A safe. No. Or actually, yes, yes I do, an old one in back, but it’s a bit small.”

  “You will have to lock all this up in a safe,” Jean-Philippe Raymond pronounced gravely. “In a large safe. You can’t keep it here. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea to meet with your insurance agent as soon as possible. You don’t have a safe, but you do have insurance, don’t you?”

  “Well,” said Ferrer, “I’ll look into all of that tomorrow.”

  “If I were you,” Raymond said, standing up, “I wouldn’t wait until tomorrow, but as you wish. I’m off now. Sonia will stay here to go over the appraisal fees. You can handle everything with her.”

  Handle everything with her, thought Ferrer. Of course.

  “And how’s business, otherwise?” asked Raymond in an indifferent voice while pulling on his coat. “The gallery?”

  “It’s going well,” Ferrer assured him. “I have a few stars,” he ventured, hoping to impress Sonia. “But stars I can’t exhibit every two years, right? They’re too much in demand. I also have a few up-and-comers, but that’s another problem, you know? With up-and-comers you can’t start showing them too often too soon, people get tired of them too fast, so I show a piece or two of theirs now and then, no more. What would be good,” he went on, “would be to mount a little exhibit for them sometimes, on the upper floor, that is if I had an upper floor, anyway you see what I mean, but it’s going fine, it’s going just fine.” He interrupted himself there, aware that he was talking into the void and that everyone had begun to look elsewhere.

  Still, once the matter of appraisal fees was handled, it would not be too difficult to invite Sonia to dinner—Sonia who, while letting nothing show, was actually pretty impressed. It was warm out; it would be good to dine outside, where the story of Ferrer’s journey would hardly fail to interest the young woman to the highest degree—so high a degree, that she would turn off her Ericsson and light more and more Bensons—then he would accompany her back to her place, a little duplex not far from Quai Branly. And after they had agreed to have one last drink, when Ferrer followed her inside, the lower floor of her duplex turned out to be occupied by a young woman with dead eyes behind large bifocals, immersed in mimeographs of constitutional law supporting three empty containers of citrus-flavored yogurt, as well as a small receiving device in bright pink plastic that looked like a toy. A harmonious and nonviolent atmosphere reigned in that apartment. Red and pink cushions floated on a sofa upholstered in glazed flowered percale. On a tray, under soft lamplight, oranges cast shadows fuzzy as peaches.

  The young woman and Sonia exchanged news of Bruno, whom Ferrer gathered was sleeping, age one and three-quarters, on the upper floor: the function of the bright pink monitor called Babyphone was to receive and transmit his possible cries. The babysitter took a ridiculous amount of time gathering up her documents, throwing her yogurt containers in the trash, and unplugging the Babyphone before finally leaving, and they could fall into each other and move around as if doing a clumsy lopsided dance like two enlaced crabs toward Sonia’s room, where her unhooked black bra landed gently on the rug like a giant pair of sunglasses.

  After a moment, reinstalled tautly on the bedside table, the Babyphone started to emit a shrill series of sighs and moans, at first light and in counterpart to Sonia’s more or less soprano ones, but soon covering them over in a crescendo of wails, cries, and strident screeches. Immediately they disentangled themselves, not entirely willingly, before Sonia clambered upstairs to pacify young Bruno.

  Left on his own and tempted to fall asleep, Ferrer deemed it practical and discreet before anything else to turn down the sound on the Babyphone. But not being familiar with this type of device, he no doubt pushed the wrong button, for instead of lowering the volume of cries and consolations, he changed the frequency, which abruptly intersected with that of the local guardians of the peace, whose nocturnal efforts of prevention, surveillance, and repression he could then follow perfectly clearly. No chance now of disabling the mechanism. Ferrer started frantically pressing every button he could find, looking for an antenna to twist off or a wire to cut, attempting to muffle the thing under a pillow, but in vain: on the contrary, each maneuver only amplified its vociferations, which were swelling by the second. Ferrer finally threw up his hands, threw on his clothes, and ran out, doing up his last buttons in the stairwell, not even needing to flee quietly, so completely did the clamors from the Babyphone invade the area, progressively spreading throughout the building—he would not be calling Sonia the next day.

  On the other hand, Martine Delahaye, his former assistant’s widow, whom Ferrer had met at the funeral, did call him the very next day. It had seemed to him that despite her mourning she had not found him entirely uninteresting, but at the time he figured it was only as a potential shoulder to cry on. Now, here she was phoning in late afternoon, on some indifferent pretext, some story about social security papers that Delahaye might have left at the gallery, can’t find them for the life of her, and did he perhaps . . .

  “Alas, I’m pretty sure he didn’t,” said Ferrer. “He never left his personal effects here.”

  “Oh, that’s very distressing,” said Martine Delahaye. Could she come by and see him anyway, something about having a drink together, it would make her happy to share some memories.

  “It’s a bit difficult right now,” lied Ferrer, who especially did not want to envision any kind of scene with the widow Delahaye. “I’ve just gotten back from a trip and I have to leave again very soon, you see, I don’t really expect to have much time.”

  “Too bad, that’s a shame,” said Martine Delahaye. “Did you go far?”

  And Ferrer, to atone in his own mind for his fib, gave her a cursory recap of his trip to the Great North.

  “Magnificent,” enthused the widow, “I’ve always dreamed of seeing those places.”

  “It sure is beautiful,” Ferrer said inanely. “No doubt about it,
it sure is beautiful.”

  “How lucky you are,” the widow exclaimed, “to be able to take your vacation in such a place.”

  “You know,” replied Ferrer, a bit ruffled, “it wasn’t really a vacation. Business trip, you know? I was after some things for the gallery.”

  “Magnificent!” she reiterated with ardor. “And did you find any?”

  “I think I came back with a few small items,” Ferrer said cautiously, “but we’ll have to see. I don’t have any exact appraisals yet.”

  “I would love to see them,” said Martine Delahaye. “When will they be on view?”

  “I couldn’t really say for now,” said Ferrer. “I haven’t set any dates, but I can send you an invitation.”

  “Please do,” said the widow. “Send me an invitation. You promise?”

  “Sure,” said Ferrer. “I promise.”

  18

  For the entire period in question, Baumgartner had thus lived only in comfortable inns, residences, and other hosteleries copiously starred in the guidebooks. In July, for example, he had spent forty-eight hours at the Hotel Albizzia, where he had arrived toward the end of the afternoon. Four hundred twenty francs a night with continental breakfast. The room wasn’t too bad at first glance: a bit large but nicely proportioned, and a velvety light slid in through a 16 x 9 bay window laced with climbing roses. Anatolia carpet, multifunctional shower head, erotic videos for rent, fawn-colored coverlet, and a view of a small park populated with starlings, wooded with hostage eucalyptus and imported mimosas.

  If the mind-numbing starlings, having built their nests under the shingles of the Albizzia, in a hole in the wall, or in a eucalyptus, expressed themselves, as always, in whistles, creaks, clicks, and parodies of their feathered colleagues, they also seemed to have enriched their song: adapting to the present-day sonorous environment, not content with integrating into their repertoire the sounds of electronic games, musical car horns, and jingles from private radios, they had now added the cry of the mobile telephone by which Baumgartner, as he did every three days, called The Flounder before going to bed early with a book.

  Then it was with a newspaper that he went downstairs, fairly early the next morning, to have breakfast in the empty restaurant. No one was there at that hour. The sounds of clinking utensils and muffled voices reached him from the kitchen, rustlings, and dull footsteps of no interest: he pushed his glasses back up his nose without raising his head from the paper.

  But now, for example, a few weeks later, Baumgartner has checked into another hotel farther north, the Résidence des Meulières, near Anglet. Here there is no garden but rather a paved courtyard lined with ancient sycamores, between which gurgles a small fountain, or rather a large water spout that lollops from side to side while producing an irregular frothy noise. Most of the time, it seems that this noise is trying to mimic moderate salvos of applause, sparse, unenthusiastic, or purely out of politeness. But occasionally it enters into synchrony with itself and for a few instants produces that binary, somewhat ridiculous rhythm of regular hand-clapping—more, more—that breaks out when the public demands the artist’s return onstage.

  As every day, Baumgartner calls his wife, but this time the telephone interview lasts longer than usual. Baumgartner asks a fair number of questions, jots down the answers in the margins of his newspaper, then ends the call. Reflects. Reestablishes the dial tone and calls The Flounder’s number. The Flounder answers immediately.

  “All right,” Baumgartner tells him, “I think we can get started. The first thing you do is rent a small refrigerated van. Not a truck, mind you, just a van.”

  “No problem,” says The Flounder. “Why refrigerated?”

  “Never mind about that,” says Baumgartner. “Let’s just say it’s to avoid breaking the cold chain. Here’s a number in Paris for you to take down. I’m coming back tomorrow for a few days. Call me as soon as it’s done.”

  “Gotcha,” says The Flounder, “understood. I’ll take care of it tomorrow and call you right away.”

  19

  Isn’t it about time Ferrer settled down? Will he forever accumulate these sorry affairs, whose outcome he knows in advance, about which he no longer even imagines, as he once did, that this time it’s for real? Now he seems to give up at the first obstacle: after that business with Extatics Elixir, he didn’t even think of looking up Bérangère’s new address, and after the Babyphone episode he never tried to see Sonia again. Can he really have grown so blasé?

  Meanwhile, since he had some time to spare, he went back to see the cardiologist about his latest results. “We’re going to do that little ECG I told you about,” Feldman said. “Come with me.” The room was plunged in a light shadow pierced by three computer screens, though you could still see three awful reproductions on the walls, two angiology diplomas awarded to Feldman by foreign institutions, and a frame containing, under glass, photographs of his loved ones, including a dog. Ferrer undressed and lay down, naked except for his undershorts, on the examination bed covered with absorbent blue paper. He shivered a little despite the heat. “Relax your muscles, lie back,” Feldman said after programming his machines.

  Then the cardiologist began applying the tip of a black oblong, a sort of electronic pencil coated in conductive gel, to various parts of Ferrer’s body, different places on his neck, underarms, thighs, ankles, and the corners of his eyes. Each time the pencil touched one of these areas, the noise of amplified arterial pounding sounded loudly in the computer’s baffles, frightening sounds that were at once part sonar murmur, part brief gust of violent wind, the barking of a stuttering bulldog, or the panting of a Martian. So Ferrer listened to his arteries while, synchronically, wave flashes delivering their image appeared as peaks parading across the screen.

  The whole thing lasted for a good while, then: “Not so great,” Feldman observed, pulling Ferrer from the bed where he was reclining and tossing him another sheet of absorbent blue paper that he wiped over his body to mop up the smears of sticky gel. “Really not so great,” Feldman repeated. “Goes without saying you’ll have to be careful from now on. You’re going to pay a little more attention to that diet I put you on. And forgive me for being blunt, but you’re going to have to stop fucking around so much for a while.”

  “Well, that shouldn’t be a problem,” said Ferrer.

  “One more thing,” said Feldman. “Avoid exposure to extreme temperatures, not too cold or too hot. It can be disastrous for someone in your condition. Anyway,” he snickered, “I don’t suppose you get much opportunity for that in your line of work.”

  “Right you are,” said Ferrer, not uttering a word about his trip to the extreme North.

  Right now it’s a July morning. The city is relatively quiet; a climate of unexpressed mourning reigns over everything, and Ferrer is sitting alone at a sidewalk café in Place Saint-Sulpice with a beer. All things considered, it’s a good distance from Port Radium to Saint-Sulpice, a healthy half-dozen hours of jet lag from which Ferrer still hasn’t recovered. Despite Jean-Philippe Raymond’s admonitions, he has put off finding a safe and insurance; he’ll make those appointments later, at the end of the afternoon. In the meantime, he’s stored all the antiques in a locked closet, at the far end of the back room that also has a lock. For the moment he’s resting, though no one ever really rests. People sometimes say, they imagine that they are resting or are going to rest, but it’s really just a vain hope. They know perfectly well that it won’t work, that true rest doesn’t even really exist; it’s just something to say when you’re tired.

  Although run down, a bit weary of it all, Ferrer does not forgo watching women pass by, so scantily clad in this season, so immediately desirable that sometimes it almost hurts, like a ghost of pain in the solar plexus. One is, at times, so tempted by the spectacle of the world that one could even forget about one’s best interests. The very beautiful and the not-so-beautiful alike: Ferrer watches them all. He savors the absent, slightly haughty, dominating look the very
beautiful ones assume. But he also likes the absent, slightly haggard, wincing, downward-plunging gaze the not-so-pretty ones adopt when they know perfectly well that someone is scrutinizing them from the sidewalk of a bar because he’s found nothing better to do and that, moreover, he’s judging them not so bad to look at as they think. All the more so in that they, too, must make love, like everyone else, and no doubt their faces become quite different, that’s a fact; and perhaps then the hierarchy of very beautiful and not-so-pretty is no longer the same at all. But Ferrer’s thoughts must not take such a turn: Feldman has forbidden it.

  At that same moment, The Flounder is walking toward a huge private parking lot, guarded by massive watchmen flanked by huge dogs, out past the peripheral boulevard behind Porte de Champerret. While walking, The Flounder breathes more easily than before. When his skin itches, he scratches himself distractedly, but it’s not an unpleasant sensation. And so he can walk for a long time in the sun; he moves forward. He passes by a small, basic garage—workbenches, a drainage trough, three cars inelegantly deboned, a winch: nothing special. Then comes the parking lot, which apparently specializes in utilitarian vehicles: eighteen-wheelers, trailers, semi-trailers. In his transparent cage, where he reigns over six video-surveillance screens and two full ashtrays, the parking lot attendant is small, compact as a battery, and friendly as a toothache. The Flounder announces that he’s come for the refrigerated van someone should have reserved by phone the day before. The man nods, apparently in the know; he leads The Flounder to the object in question.