I'm Gone

by Jean Echenoz

  “It’s just that with this heat . . . ,” The Flounder reminds him.

  “Carry,” Baumgartner repeats.

  Behind the wheel, without leaving his seat and constantly assuring himself that no one is watching, Baumgartner slips on a pair of tanned gloves, supple and light to wear, sewn with linen thread, all the while supervising the transfer of the containers into the storage cubicle. It really is hot, not a breath of wind; The Flounder is swimming. His muscles decimated by toxins still roll a little under his T-shirt and Baumgartner does not like that, does not like looking at that, does not like the fact that he likes looking at that. Then, his labors finished, The Flounder walks back to the Fiat.

  “All set,” he says. “You want to see? Hey, you’re wearing gloves.”

  “It’s the weather,” says Baumgartner, “it’s me, it’s this heat. It’s dermatological. Don’t worry about it. Are you sure you got everything?”

  “Everything,” says The Flounder.

  “Wait while I make sure,” says Baumgartner, who steps out of his car and inspects the contents of the cubicle. Then he raises his head, brows knit. “There’s one missing,” he says.

  “One what?” says The Flounder.

  “A container,” says Baumgartner. “There’s one that isn’t there.”

  “You’re joking,” the addict exclaims. “There were seven to begin with and there are seven now. It’s all set.”

  “I don’t think so,” says Baumgartner. “Go check inside the truck, you must have forgotten one.”

  The Flounder shrugs his shoulders doubtfully, then, as he climbs back into the refrigerator compartment, Baumgartner slams the van doors on him. Muffled voice of The Flounder, at first jocular, then distorted, then worried. Baumgartner locks the doors, walks around the refrigerated van, opens the driver’s-side door, and sits behind the wheel.

  From the cab, you no longer hear the young man’s voice at all. Baumgartner opens a small shutter located behind the driver’s seat, releases a catch, then slides open the rectangular peephole that allows communication with the isothermic compartment. This opening is half the size of a pack of cigarettes: while it allows you to look in back, it’s too small to pass your hand through.

  “There,” says Baumgartner, “it’s over now.”

  “Wait up,” says The Flounder, “what are you doing? Stop screwing around, will you? Please?”

  “It’s over,” Baumgartner repeats. “You are finally going to leave me in peace.”

  “I’ve never bothered you,” The Flounder inanely observes. “Let me out now.”

  “I can’t,” says Baumgartner. “You do bother me. You are liable to bother me, therefore you bother me.”

  “Let me out,” The Flounder says again, “or else people will find out and you’ll be in trouble.”

  “I don’t think so,” says Baumgartner. “You have no legal existence, you understand. No one will notice anything. Even the cops won’t care. Nobody knows you’re alive except your pusher, who wouldn’t be doing himself any favors by calling them. How do you expect anyone to notice you have no more existence at all? Who’ll miss you? Come on, now, settle down. It’ll all be over soon, just a little heat and cold.”

  “No!” says The Flounder. “No, and stop the monologue, if you don’t mind.” He tries again to convince Baumgartner before running short of arguments. “And besides,” he ventures as a last resort, “your whole deal is so cliché. They kill people like this in every TV movie in the world, there’s nothing original about it at all.”

  “I don’t disagree,” Baumgartner allows, “but I admit to being influenced by TV movies. TV movies are an art form like any other. And anyway, that’s enough now.”

  Then he hermetically seals the peephole and, after switching on the engine, activates the compressor. We all know the thermodynamic principle that governs an isothermic vehicle, and refrigerators in general: gas circulates in the walls, absorbing the heat contained inside. Thanks to a small motor located above the cab and the compressor that causes this gas to circulate, the heat is transformed into cold. Moreover, there exist two temperature options for vehicles of this type: 40° or 0°. It’s the latter type that Baumgartner, by telephone, has made sure to reserve two days earlier.

  23

  The disappearance of Ferrer’s antiques obviously represented a heavy loss. Financing for the expedition to the Great North, in which he had invested a fair amount of capital, was gone, pure deficit. And as the time had come when nothing was selling at the gallery—mediocre offerings combined with the slow season—it was of course also the moment his creditors chose to remind him of their existence, artists to demand their fees, and bankers to voice their concern. Then, when summer’s end appeared on the horizon, as in each year at that time there would be no delay in the arrival of all kinds of taxes, threats of fiscal reform, various fees and dues, the renewal of his lease accompanied by registered letters from the building manager. Ferrer began to feel at bay.

  Before anything else he had to file a complaint, of course. As soon as he’d noticed the theft, Ferrer had called the main police station of the 9th arrondissement and a weary officer from Criminal Investigations had shown up within the hour. The man had noted the damage, registered the complaint, and asked the name of his insurance company.

  “Well, that is,” Ferrer said, “it so happens that these objects weren’t insured quite yet. I was about to see to it, but—”

  “You’re a prize imbecile,” the policeman had crudely interrupted, making him feel ashamed of his negligence and pointing out that the fate of vanished objects was as uncertain as could be, the chances of finding them microscopic. This kind of case, he expounded, was rarely solved, given the highly organized nature of art smuggling: in the best of circumstances, the matter would drag on for a long time. They’d see what they could do, but they weren’t off to a very good start. “Anyway, I’ll send somebody from Criminal Identification,” the detective concluded, “see if he can come up with anything. Meanwhile, of course, you’re to touch nothing.”

  The technician arrived a few hours later. He didn’t introduce himself immediately, first spending a moment in the gallery to examine the art. He was a small, thin myope with overly fine blond hair, smiling continuously and not appearing all that eager to get to work. Ferrer had at first taken him for a potential client—“Are you interested in modern art?”—before the man identified himself, showing the insignia of his profession. Detective Paul Supin, Bureau of Criminal Identification.

  “That must be fascinating,” said Ferrer. “Your job.”

  “You know,” the other said, “I’m just a lab technician. Take me away from my electron microscope and I don’t really see much. But yes, it’s true, I am interested in all this.”

  In Ferrer’s studio he had unpacked his little kit, a tool box containing the classic accessories: camera, vials of transparent liquids, powder and tweezers, gloves. Ferrer watched him work until the other took his leave. He was demoralized, would have to recoup his losses quickly; it began to feel inordinately hot.

  The summer progressed slowly, as if the heat had made time itself viscous, its passage seemingly impeded by the friction of its molecules raised to a high temperature. With most of the movers and shakers on vacation, Paris was more supple and sparse but no more breathable in the still air rich in toxic gases like a smoky bar before closing time. Here and there the city took advantage of the reduced traffic to dig up the streets and put them back together: rumblings of jackhammers, rotations of steam drills, gyrations of cement mixers, flows of fresh tar in the sun veiled by various exhalations. To all this Ferrer paid scant attention: too many other things to think about as he crossed Paris in a taxi from one bank branch to another, trying without much success to borrow money, beginning to envision mortgaging the gallery. So it is that we find him at eleven in the morning, under the crushing heat, on Rue du 4-Septembre.

  This Rue du 4-Septembre is very wide and very short and money is what makes it
tick. All more or less the same, its Napoleon III–style buildings contain international and other kinds of banks, headquarters of insurance agencies, brokerage firms, temporary employment services, editorial offices of financial publications, currency exchange and appraisal offices, estate administrators, managing agents for co-ops, real estate storefronts, lawyers’ offices, rare-stamp dealerships, and the charred debris of the Crédit Lyonnais. The only brasserie in the neighborhood is called L’Agio. But you can also find the head offices of a Polish airline, photocopying services, travel agencies and beauty parlors, a world-champion hairstylist, and a commemorative plaque to a Resistance fighter who gave his life for France at the age of nineteen (In Memoriam).

  And there are also, on Rue du 4-Septembre, thousands of square feet of renovated office space for rent and uncompleted spaces under strict electronic surveillance: they gut the old buildings, preserving the facades, columns, and caryatids, the sculpted crowned heads overhanging the street entrances. They restructure the floors, adapting them to the laws of bureaucracy, and create spacious suites, scenic and double-paned, the better to accumulate more and still more capital. As everywhere in Paris in summer, hard-hatted workmen scurry around, unfold blueprints, bite into sandwiches, and express their views into walkie-talkies.

  It was the sixth bank in two days that Ferrer had approached to solicit a loan; once again he walked out without success, his damp fingers leaving their imprints on the documents with which he had armed himself. After the aforesaid had let him down once again, the elevator doors opened at the ground floor onto a wide entrance foyer, containing no people but many sofas and low tables. As he walked across this space, Ferrer had neither the will nor the energy to go home right away; he preferred to sit for a moment on one of the sofas. What tells us, physically, that he was weary, pessimistic, or discouraged? The fact, for instance, that he kept his jacket on despite the heat; that he stared fixedly at a mote of dust on his sleeve without thinking to brush it off; that he did not even push back a lock of hair that had fallen into his eyes; but perhaps most of all, that he sat without reacting when a woman passed through the foyer.

  Given this woman’s appearance, this is the most surprising part. By all logic, as we slightly know him, Ferrer should have been interested. She was a tall, slender young woman with statuesque contours, well defined lips, long, light-green eyes, and wavy copper-colored hair. She was wearing high heels and a loose black ensemble, cut low in the back, decorated with small light-colored chevrons on her hips and shoulders.

  As she passed near him, anyone else, or he himself in his normal frame of mind, would have judged that these clothes were there only to be taken off her, even ripped off her. The blue folder, moreover, that she was carrying under her arm, the pen that thoughtfully brushed against her lips seemed purely formal accessories, she herself looking like an actress in a hard-core porn film during the preliminary scenes, when people say anything at all while waiting for the situation to heat up. That said, she wore not a drop of makeup. Ferrer had just enough time to notice this detail, though without according it any more interest than to the decor of the foyer, when a pervasive weakness engulfed him, as if all the parts of his body were suddenly deprived of air.

  A thousand-pound weight then seemed to crash down on his shoulders, skull, and chest all at once. A taste of sour metal and dry dust invaded his mouth, his forehead, filled his neck and throat, creating a stifling mixture: swelling of a sneeze, violent hiccup, profound nausea. It was impossible to react in any way whatsoever; his wrists seemed bound by handcuffs and his mind saturated by a feeling of suffocation, acute anxiety, and imminent death. Pain ripped through his chest, spiraling from his throat to his pelvis, from his navel to his shoulders, irradiating his left arm and leg, and he saw himself fall off the sofa, saw the floor rush up toward him at top speed, though at the same time in slow motion. Once he was lying on the ground, at first it was impossible to move; then, having lost his balance, he lost consciousness—for how long is impossible to know, but it was just after recalling for an instant what Feldman had warned him about regarding the effects of extreme temperatures on coronary cases.

  He came to almost instantly, even though it was now impossible to utter a word: it was not blackness that engulfed the screen like a turned-off television, no, his field of vision continued to function the way a video camera fallen to the ground still goes on filming after the sudden death of its operator, and records in static shot whatever falls into its lens: a corner of wall and wooden flooring, a badly framed plinth, a piece of tiling, some excess glue at the edge of the rug. He wanted to stand but fell back more heavily still when he tried. Persons other than the young woman in black must have come running, for he felt them leaning over him, removing his jacket and laying him on his back, looking around for a telephone, then the firemen came quickly in their truck.

  The firemen were handsome, strapping young fellows, calm and reassuring, equipped with navy blue uniforms, leather accessories, and snap hooks on their belts. Gently they settled Ferrer on a stretcher and precisely slid the stretcher into their truck. Ferrer felt protected now. Without thinking that this episode had more than a little in common with the one from February, albeit much less pleasant, he tried to recover the rudimentary use of speech in the fire truck, but he was kindly told to keep quiet until they reached the hospital. Which he did. Then he fainted again.

  24

  When Ferrer opened his eyes, at first he saw around him only white, like in the good old days of the ice floe. He was resting in an adjustable single bed with a firm mattress and tightly made up, alone in a small room, with no other color but the distant emerald of a tree standing out against the sky in the square frame of a window. The sheets, the bedcover, the walls of the room, and the sky itself were equally white. The faraway tree, the single green note, could have been one of the thirty-five thousand sycamores, the seven thousand lindens, or the thirteen thousand five hundred chestnut trees planted around Paris. Unless it was one of the ones you might come across in the last remaining deserted lots whose name no one ever remembered, which perhaps didn’t even have a name, and which were no more than giant weeds, a clandestine flora monstrously gone to seed. Although it was too far away, Ferrer still tried to identify it, but this minor effort was enough to exhaust him and he shut his eyes again.

  The next time he opened them, five minutes later or the next morning, the decor remained unchanged but this time Ferrer abstained from revisiting the question of the tree. It’s hard to tell whether he forced himself to think of nothing or whether he was in no condition to ponder anything at all. As he felt and confusedly distinguished a small foreign body stuck to his nose that made him squint a bit, he tried bringing up his hand to identify it, but his right forearm did not respond. Further investigation revealed that this forearm was supine, attached to the head of the bed with a strap and pierced by a fat intravenous needle held in place by a wide translucent bandage. Ferrer began to understand what was going on; it was only for form’s sake that he verified, with his left hand, that the external object attached under his nostrils was a breathing tube. It was then that the door opened and a young woman, also dressed in white but with black skin, stuck her head through the doorway, turned back toward what must have been a nurse’s aide, and asked that person to notify Doctor Sarradon that number 43 was awake.

  Alone once more, Ferrer timidly renewed his attempts to identify that tree in the distance, but, if he still couldn’t manage, at least he didn’t fall asleep this time: we were making progress. Nonetheless, it was cautiously that he inspected his surroundings in greater detail, turning his head to distinguish various machines at his bedside, screens and meters that must have been keeping track of his heart’s condition: numbers in liquid crystal constantly trembling and changing, sine curves moving from left to right, always renewed, similar and different like ocean waves. A telephone sat on his nightstand and an oxygen mask hung from a hook. Ferrer made the best of the situation. Outside, dayli
ght was waning, transforming all the white in his room into tannish gray and darkening the color of the faraway tree to bronze green, then forest green. Finally, the door opened again and this time it was Dr. Sarradon himself, who wore a dense black beard and a bottle-green smock, with a paltry little skullcap of the same color: we’re sticking with green.

  While examining his patient, Sarradon explained that after his emergency admission to the hospital they’d had to perform a multiple bypass while he was still unconscious; everything seemed to have gone pretty smoothly. And in fact, once the sheets were turned down, as they were changing his bandages, Ferrer found that he was entirely resewn the length of his left arm and leg as well as from the meridian of the thorax. It was pretty like master craftsmanship, consisting in long, fine, regular sutures reminiscent of Renaissance English lace or the back of a high-fashion stocking, or a line of writing.

  “Good,” pronounced the doctor at the end of his exam. “It’s coming along fine,” he added, scanning the charts that hung from the foot of the bed, while the nurse dressed Ferrer in highly bleached pajamas. At this point, according to Sarradon, the patient should spend another three or four days in the intensive care ward before moving to a normal room. Then he should be able to leave just two weeks after that. Visits allowed. Night was falling.

  The next morning, in fact, Ferrer felt a little more himself. He spent a moment wondering who, among his acquaintances, he could tell of his situation. It was better not to notify Suzanne, who hadn’t heard from him in over six months and who might not respond too well to his call. He also preferred not to risk alarming his family, who in any case seemed to have become a sparse and distant archipelago, gradually submerged by the rising waters. To tell the truth, that didn’t leave too many people, and Ferrer promised himself to at least call the gallery that afternoon. Even though Elisabeth, quickly accustomed to his brief impromptu absences, must have opened the shop as usual and handled the day’s business, it would be better if she knew where he was. But there was no rush. Besides, he was better off closing the gallery altogether during his convalescence, which wouldn’t be such a bad idea in this off-season. He’d call her about it tomorrow. For now, he was going to try to get some sleep, when the nurse, contrary to expectation, announced that he had a visitor. Unthinkingly, Ferrer tried to sit up against the headboard, but no, still too weak, no can do.