‘You talked to Jacqueline Pontaut?’
‘I went to the head office, thinking you might be there …’
Kermeur blanches. In two seconds, he’s lost his advantage, his control, his impartiality. He listens without a peep to the bastard suggest he call security: I’m a lunatic who has been following him, claiming to be him. The police already picked me up, but this time he’s going to press charges. Kermeur spins toward me. All that’s left in his eyes is fury at having attracted the attention of the administrative services for nothing.
‘Are you happy now?’ he shouts at me with a kind of hatred.
‘Ask him what degrees he holds.’
Then, for the first time, I see the impostor lose some of his self-assurance. He appeals to Kermeur, on the verge of losing it: ‘I’ve had it up to here having to show my passport every time I run into this nutcase! Where’s it going to be the next time – the supermarket? The tennis club? At the dentist’s?
‘Answer him, Martin,’ Kermeur advises him, and I have no further illusions about his choice.
‘Master of Forestry from Yale University,’ he recites. ‘Laboratory director since 1990 at the Environmental Science Center, 21 Sachem Street, again at Yale. Ph.D. thesis on plant mutations in the pollination process. Botanical explorations in Australia, Malaysia, the Amazon, and South Africa. Fifteen publications, including a study on electrochemical transmission during herbivore predation … Will that do?’
‘Why do antelopes die of hunger in nature reserves?’ Kermeur shoots at him, picking up the relay.
‘Because the vegetation they graze on emits a gaseous message that renders the flora toxic over a radius of six meters.’
‘What gas?’
‘Ethylene. If the antelopes don’t have a large enough territory to get around this chain reaction, they’ll let themselves die of starvation rather than poison themselves!’
‘Well?’ spits Kermeur, spinning toward me with a referee’s arrogance.
I shrug my shoulders. I’ve proved it in five countries, just as I demonstrated the way that certain predators anticipate the response, like the Mexican squash beetle that every day eats a leaf six and a half meters from its last meal – you only have to read my articles to know this. I add that he’d do better to test us about a discovery that hasn’t been published yet. Without batting an eyelash, he asks me what change in amino acids causes modifications in the functional sequence of a gene. I have no idea. He turns toward the other, who doesn’t know either and points out that that’s his specialty.
‘That’s true, my apologies. What’s my nephew’s name?’
‘Aurelien.’
Doing away with the middleman, I ask the impostor which wasp pollinates the hammer orchid.
‘Gorytini. More specifically, male Gorytini.’
I correct his mistake, throw the references of my publications in his face. Without losing a beat, he remarks to Kermeur that Gorytini and Thynnidae are two varieties of the same wasp. Floored by his nerve, I deny that ridiculous claim, but he replies by accusing me of deflecting the subject onto insects to hide my gaps in botany.
‘Fine, then what is the special characteristic of the Acacia cornigera?’
‘It hosts colonies of ants and secretes a special pulp for their babies at the tips of its leaves, made up of proteins and fats. Because of this, the ants protect it against aggressors and nourish it in return with insect larvae. How did I prove it?’ he shoots back.
‘I made the larvae radioactive so I could trace their absorption by the acacia’s tissues. When was that?’
‘June ’96. How do climbing plants manage to orient themselves toward a support?’
‘That’s something you can’t possibly know: I haven’t said anything about it, I’m still in the observation stage …’
‘Which proves that you don’t know about my ongoing experiments,’ he snickers.
‘On the Chilean bignonia? Its tendrils possess papillae that emit …’
‘… that might emit gaseous hormones …’
‘… with a reflux that is supposed to bring information about the location of the support back to the papillae.’
‘What are the last wooded regions in Malaysia that haven’t yet been deforested?’
‘Sungai Ureu, Sungai Batu, and Ulu Magoh. I’ve been campaigning on behalf of the nomad inhabitants of those areas to try to save their living space. What was the government’s answer?’
‘That they’ll have to change their way of life and not be so dependent on the forest; that it was doing them a favor.’
We catch our breath, looking each other over. The other two have followed the confrontation like a tennis match. They glance at each other in silence. It breaks my heart, but if this weren’t about me, I’d have to admit that we’re equally matched. Liz would never have been able to brief her lover this thoroughly. She doesn’t know a thing about botany and cares less: the hypothesis that she’s made me an alter ego out of revenge crumbles to dust. This guy is as authentic as I am. He’s had the same training and knows all there is to know about the same subjects that I’ve studied. It’s taken me dozens of years to learn all this. How could he come out of nowhere with all that baggage in six days? Unless it’s possible that my replacement was already planned, that an agricultural corporation as powerful as Monsanto devised this means of blocking my partnership with Paul de Kermeur to neutralize our campaign against GMOs.
‘How did you become so passionate about plants?’ Kermeur asks, addressing both of us.
We answer, constantly interrupting each other, that we were born in Orlando and that Dad was a gardener at Disney World. We grew up in a huge playing field where nature was the greatest attraction of all. I shout out suddenly:
‘What’s the first thing he taught us?’
I can’t get over what I’ve just said: here I am talking to him as if we were twins. He remains silent, staring at me, seeking the answer in my eyes.
‘To love snakes,’ he finally murmurs. ‘To keep plants from being asphyxiated.’
‘Why?’ Muriel asks him.
I have a knot in my throat. He explains, using the same words I would have used, that snakes eat mosquito larvae, which means fewer treatments with insecticides that prevent the leaves from breathing. I can still see Dad making me handle my first serpent, in the clumps of hibiscus and giant bamboo around the Polynesian Hotel. I remember him cutting endless Mickey Mouses in the shrubbery, Snow Whites out of hawthorn, Donald Ducks in privet. I remember him in front of his personal creation, the enchanted brooms from Fantasia, the ends of their ivy arms spilling pails full of forget-me-nots that flooded the lawns of the Magic Kingdom – a composition that earned him the title Employee of the Month. And then I remember him losing weight, letting himself go after Mom left him, starting to drink and not shaving, until Disney had to fire him. I see us moving to Brooklyn, to live near the ocean with an elderly cousin who agreed to take us in. I recall him sinking further and further as the years went by, ending up as watchman for the big Figure-8 roller coaster at Coney Island. I see the shame in his eyes across the table, me behind my schoolbooks and him behind his beers. Double shame: shame for the spectacle he’s offering me and the shame he thinks he causes me in front of others. Tell him as I might that I loved him, and that I was proud of him when he won the Nathan’s Hot-Dog Eating Contest every year, he couldn’t let go of it. Up to the day when he dropped dead while finishing his fourteenth sausage on the hundredth second, posthumously beating his own record – three days before I received the letter from Yale accepting me on scholarship, his last dream on earth … All those moments that rise in my throat while the other relates them, without a pause, like so many proofs to his credit. It’s horrible. Hearing my life coming out of this guy’s mouth. The feeling that everything I know, everything I experience, has been projected out of my head, poured into someone smarter, more open, newer, the way you decant wine into a carafe, and at the bottom of the bottle there’s only a murky
deposit.
A woman comes in holding a file, asks for some clarifications. They tell her. They no longer care about me. I feel emptied out. My childhood, my work, my memories … He knows as much about them as I do. Except that he has a passport to back up his claims. And Liz chose him. What good is it to resist, try to convince them? My arm hurts, and so does my head. I no longer have the strength to fight.
‘Help me, quick!’ cries Muriel.
In a spinning fog, I feel myself being lifted, carried.
‘Should I call a doctor?’
‘Thanks, no need … Just help me get him into the taxi. I’m taking him to the hospital.’
‘The hospital.’
‘I told you he was a psychopath, Paul! The kind that clings to you, copies everything you do, wants the same car, the same job, the same wife …’
‘But still, Martin, there were things he said …’
‘Personally, I can’t understand why hospitals ever let people like that out!’
‘Ms Pontaut is absolutely right: they can turn violent.’
‘Be careful, Mr Harris! It’s already happened, I saw it in the newspaper: people who were so envious of others that one day they killed them to take their place …’
The rest is lost in the bustle of being carried away. To forget. Go back into a coma. That’s all I want. To be alone. To be real. To be me.
5
The hospital is quiet, drowsy around its bare garden, just like when I left it this morning. Most of the wards are closed, having been relocated to a more modern, less human structure. Muriel adds that she spent the summer of ’98 in this garden, under the window where they were treating her daughter. Her voice carries the same nostalgia as if she were talking about a vacation home she was forced to sell. I listen and say nothing. I act as if I were normal, as if I were docile, as if I were going to heal.
The neuropsychiatrist is expecting us, having been alerted by phone. I insist on going first to the billing office to prove that I’m solvent, give my Amex number and explain my situation. The employee kindly answers that there’s no urgency. They’re all convinced I’ll be here a long time. It’s the only solution to the problem I incarnate. Martin Harris cannot live in duplicate. He exists without me; all that’s left for me to do is go back to sleep.
‘Remember what I told you in the car, Martin.’
I nod. She told me so many things. She’s sure I’m the real one. The other guy gave her an uneasy feeling, the impression of being some kind of manufactured product, of soullessly repeating facts learned by heart, while I moved her every time I spoke, and even more when I didn’t, while he was reciting his part. She’s certain that I’m still having a reaction to the tetanus vaccine. My fainting spell from before was nothing serious, the doctor could reassure me about that, and, if I felt like it, I had her address; she’d set an extra place for dinner, and would like me to meet her children. She spoke slowly, repeated the same words as the streets went by. She sounded sincere, but it was so that I’d go along without a fuss and let them shut me in. She kisses me on the cheeks.
‘This evening, then?’
‘If all goes well. Thanks.’
‘Everything will be fine. I have complete faith: he’s a terrific guy. He saved my daughter’s life.’
She leaves very quickly. I remain standing in the waiting room, eyes fixed on the taxi as it maneuvers its way out. I’ll never see her again. I’ll never leave this place.
‘Mr Harris?’
I wait a beat, then turn around and say yes. The secretary leads me to the office of the old gentleman with a lamb’s head who was smiling serenely when I awoke from my coma. I’ll never forget his welcoming sentence, the first words of my new life: ‘So, what’s new?’
‘Delighted to see you looking so well, Mr Harris.’
I drop his hand. He’s either near-sighted, joking, or a practiced liar.
‘I wouldn’t worry about the little dizzy spell Ms Caradet mentioned on the phone. It’s a classic reaction in your condition. Did you drink any alcohol?’
I say no.
‘Try not to until tonight, and by tomorrow it should be gone.’
He studies me in silence, smile fixed, like an artist admiring his work.
‘So … what did you want to see me about?’
I lower my gaze, stare at an inkstain in the carpet.
‘Is something bothering you? I’m here to listen to anything you might want to tell me, Mr Harris.’
His warm, mournful voice must push people to confide in him. He looks like he gets so bored all alone. After listening to my silence for about ten seconds, he continues, as if he were answering me, ‘On the other hand, it was good to try confronting external reality, even if it was a bit premature. We have you down as discharged but, while your brain is eliminating the excess of glutamate, I’d advise staying quietly at home for two or three days.’
‘I no longer have a home.’
Barely a reaction. His nose dips toward the green leather blotter on which my chart is resting, the medical file of Martin Harris.
‘What do you mean? When you got to your apartment, didn’t you … find yourself at home?’
‘That’s just the problem. Can you help me?’ I say in a burst of rancor.
‘Some memory loss?’
‘On the contrary, memory excess. Too much memory for two people.’
The friendlier he is, the more aggressive he makes me feel. He moves a paperweight and leans back.
‘I’m listening.’
And so I describe my situation, once again. But this time, I tell it as if I really were a mythomaniac who’s not fooled by any of it. And I add a few details, as if I resented him for bringing me back to life in someone else’s skin.
He’s stopped smiling. He stands up, skirts around his desk, and sits in the armchair next to mine. He lessens the distance between us: let’s forget about doctor–patient and talk man to man. My fists are squeezed into a violence that I don’t recognize.
‘It does exist, Mr Harris.’
‘What exists?’
‘This kind of transfer. Let me be blunt,’ he adds, even more serene than before. ‘May I?’
He joins his fingertips in front of his nose, leaning on the left armrest, twisted around to face me.
‘Perhaps you believe you’re not an amnesiac. Amnesia doesn’t always mean loss of memory. It’s more complicated than that. It can also mean a refusal to pick up the thread.’
‘What thread?’
He swallows, rubs the steel of his watchband.
‘Comas are a fascinating terra incognita, about which we have only theoretical data, evaluations, scales. If I told you that you scored four out of eleven on the Glasgow Test, or I gave you the levels of your evoked potential, it wouldn’t get you anywhere – or me either, now that you’re awake. We feel our way around, we note, we classify, but we actually know almost nothing about it. Only what we hear from our patients. You’re more or less the two hundredth that I’ve brought back to the surface – that I’ve welcomed, let’s say. And I think I’ve encountered every kind of symptom you can imagine: confusion, prostration, exuberance, stories of being at death’s door with the tunnel of light and angels, details of everything said around the bed, which the patient has heard perfectly, Korsakov’s Syndrome, which erases painful memories, irreversible and reparable lesions, complete or partial loss of identity, immediate recoveries and others that take years …’
His eyes, now vague, look through me.
‘One of my most interesting cases, only about six weeks ago, involved a young man who had perfectly recovered all his faculties, except one: social skills. When a visitor started to bore him, he said so. When someone smelled of sweat, he pointed it out. If someone was ugly, he remarked on it. He told his sincere feelings to each member of his family, which caused huge dramas. And it was impossible to make him understand that, socially, we’re obliged to lie all the time. He found that absurd, unacceptable, even comical, as if som
eone were trying to make him recognize the moral necessity of urinating on people when you meet them. Not only had the imprint been erased, but a logic had filled the space.’
‘But what’s that got to do with me?’
‘Before his coma, this young man had suffered greatly from self-censorship. Bullied in childhood, religious boarding school, introverted character, repressed homosexuality, training to be a diplomat …’
‘But again …’
‘I’m trying to help you gauge the hidden and, as I said, logical work that can take place during the deep coma phase. We are coming to believe more and more that, in this phase, the brain is functioning at peak efficiency; it’s just disconnected from its normal relations with the surrounding world. In your case, let’s suppose for example that you’re madly in love with a woman named Liz. You try to woo her, you follow her, you’re obsessed with her and know nearly everything about her. But she’s happily married and she tells you so with utter certainty and sincerity: she rejects you, leaving you no hope. On the contrary, she belittles you, devalues you by constantly invoking the castrating image of her husband. A husband who, moreover, is a brilliant man, socially desirable, physically superior … So at that point, what becomes the impossible dream of your life? To be him, in his place, married to this loving, emotionally fulfilled woman. Now comas can sometimes act as a kind of dream laboratory; they make possible, authentic, and attainable things that, under normal conditions, would be simple phantoms. Are you following me? Everything you’ve learned about this man, everything you’ve suspected, intuited, deduced, extrapolated, becomes true, becomes you. And when you wake up, you’re convinced that you’re him. And the undesirable one, your former self, is pushed back into your unconscious, incarcerated, destroyed.’
I’ve listened to him with arms folded, paralyzed.
‘Yeah, but just hold on there … We’re not talking about three or four bits of information I have in my head – it’s an entire memory!’
He smiles, lowering his eyelids.
‘That’s normal: it’s because of the glutamate. When the brain is deprived of oxygen, it releases massive quantities of this neuromediator, which plays a key role in memory generation: it’s what favors synaptic transmission. Hence your illusion today of possessing the “entire memory” of the man onto whom you’ve transferred.’
Unknown Page 5
