‘Do you really want me to verify all these details? I would think that a statement from your university would be ample proof.’
The bald guy has come back in, and sets a photocopy of my life in front of me.
‘Yes, every detail. I insist on having them all verified, so that I can prove it’s my childhood, my career, my wife! That man has made away with my entire existence. I want us to be able to confound him point for point!’
He agrees zealously. It’s crazy how quickly authority returns when you represent the promise of profit.
‘I have to make a call. It’s local.’
‘Go ahead. Should I step out?’
‘No need.’
He hands me the receiver and goes to open a file drawer. I call Muriel, tell her everything’s fine and that Dr Farge has invited us to Rambouillet this evening. After three seconds of silence, she replies that she’s delighted for me but that she can’t make it: she has to help her son with his homework. But I can come for dinner at their place some other time. Her voice is toneless, impersonal. Without transition, she asks if I’m sure I’m feeling better. Overcoming my annoyance, I reply that she’ll soon have definitive proof of my identity.
‘Tomorrow at noon,’ the detective specifies.
I glance up at him, impressed. He explains that time is money, and that we both lose by wasting it.
‘As soon as he got my email, my correspondent answered that an operative was leaving for Yale and another one for Greenwich. If you wish, I’ll order two more for Orlando and Brooklyn. Don’t move.’
He presses the button on a digital camera, shows me the photo on the screen. At the other end of the line, I hear a man’s voice giving Muriel an itinerary. I say goodbye and hang up, then ask the detective how long he was out of the room.
‘Four or five minutes, I think … I worked as quickly as I could.’
Again that bizarre discontinuity in space and time the moment I search my memory; the impression that I’ve moved to the background for only ten seconds, and minutes have gone by without me.
‘I’m transmitting your photo. Where can I reach you?’
‘I’ll call you. While we’re at it, I also want to know the exact date when the gross national debt in America was at seventy-two billion, four hundred seventy million, seven hundred thirty-two thousand, eight hundred fifteen dollars.’
He jots it on a notepad. The good thing about a private eye is that nothing surprises him.
‘Anything else, Mr Harris?’
‘No.’
‘Then I have one more thing: your mother. You didn’t put down her address.’
‘The last time I saw her I was thirteen. I’ve never forgiven her for what she did to my father.’
He marks a polite silence, halfway between discretion and indifference.
‘But find her, if you can: it’s the perfect opportunity. Ask at Disney World. She worked for room service at the Polynesian until 15 August 1975, when she ran off with a German banker. Günther Krossmann, room 3124.’
He notes it on his pad, smiling to himself.
‘You’ve got some memory.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, standing up. ‘See you tomorrow.’
Between the two mirrors in the elevator, I try to forget that cold anger, the rage that has gone undiminished since my first day without her, the dispassionate rancor I felt every time she called me to justify her actions, to accuse my father for the sudden passion she’d conceived for number 3124, and render me ultimately responsible for the abandonment that followed. She repeated over and over that the Bundesbank widower was the chance of a lifetime – and between the lines, that it made up for the rotten luck I incarnated: a one-night stand with a shabby nobody who hadn’t pulled out in time. I had resisted the roller-coaster rides and purgative teas. I had clung on, and now that was my problem. She had put up with me and Dad for thirteen years. Now I was grown up and she was free. Being renounced by my wife today, as casually as I had been by my mother, is more than I can bear.
On the sidewalk, I find myself prey to an underlying violence that I don’t know how to channel, a strength that I squeeze in my fists as the passers-by skirt around me. No matter how often I repeat to myself that the truth is on the march, that the investigators will confirm my identity within hours, I can’t quite become myself again. Feel like before. Without my realizing it, another personality has sprouted since this morning, that of the impostor they accuse me of being, and the paradoxical freedom that comes with it leaves me feeling less and less comfortable in my skin, unable to control what’s happening to me. Like puberty that shocks the body, an energy that paralyzes you for as long as you don’t dare use it, accept it, satisfy it.
I walk down Boulevard Sébastopol between trees made fragile by the parking interdiction. I stop next to a condemned plane tree marked with a yellow cross. The salting of the roadsides every winter. Without the protection of parked cars along the curb, the traffic spews an acidic mix onto the tree trunks that will eat them away much more surely than dog urine. I hug the plane tree, to give it strength while absorbing some of its own – the exchange that punctuates my days. Nothing. I feel nothing. Not the vibrations of its sap in my veins, nor the dilation of the plexus, nor that kind of electric arc that courses through my body from hand to hand. I try again with its neighbor, then head into a small park to hug a younger, healthier linden, a centennial chestnut … Not the smallest echo, the slightest return signal. Even the trees don’t recognize me anymore. Or else my nervous state perturbs them, acts as a screen, prevents me from receiving their signals. I absolutely must evacuate this tension.
I cross the boulevard and take a narrow street that leads me to the Forum des Halles. Earlier, when I came out of the subway, children were playing on the paving slabs, parents were frozen in place, and teenagers were breakdancing among the dead leaves. It is now six o’clock and night has just fallen. The families have returned home, the teens have taken their music and gone. In the rows of street lamps, between the shrubs and the bushes, dealers calmly greet their clients, take out samples, give tastes, negotiate, pocket the cash.
I choose a quiet spot between two troughs of forsythias, lean against a signpost, and wait.
7
A tiny convertible is double-parked in front of the Rambouillet train station. Perched on the fender, arms folded, Dr Farge sits in the rain. He watches me walk up and tells me I’m looking very dapper. I should: my suit cost six of his prescriptions. He shakes my hand, says he’ll lend me some country clothes. I bend low to climb into his car. I feel no shame in his presence, no remorse. As if the fact that my identity is being denied has liberated me from every scruple, every value, every role society imposes on individuals to make them play their assigned part. I have no more limits, no more reference points, no more sanctions. Since no one recognizes me anymore. Since no one wants to know me anymore.
For a brief moment, as I was dealing in the Forum gardens, I told myself that I had to stop existing in order to start living. It wasn’t me talking, but the voice wasn’t unfamiliar to me, either.
‘Do you find me different from before?’
He finishes backing up, puts the car in neutral, and looks me in the eye.
‘Why? Should I?’
I’d forgotten that shrinks always answer a question with a question. I elude it with a motion toward the windshield: drive on. The acceleration throws me against the seat.
‘It’s the Honda roadster,’ he comments. ‘The only real extravagance I allow myself.’
The bumps in the road send my head banging against the roof. He hugs the bends, cruises over potholes at seventy miles an hour. Crushed against him, feeling like my ass is scraping the asphalt, I tell myself that you really shouldn’t judge on appearances. I pictured him in a Volvo station wagon, with dual airbags and soft music. For his part, he surely takes me for a poor, honest slob.
‘What are you thinking about?’ he asks after a moment, as we’re leaving town.
&
nbsp; I repress a smile. I was thinking about my last customer, the standard black-kid-on-rollerblades, who had the nerve to lecture me about what I was doing. I retorted that, in any case, with or without my prescriptions, he’d have found a way to get his fix. As it was, I might even have saved the life of an innocent pharmacist. He chuckled on his rollers, gave me a slap on the shoulder, and told me I was cool. I’m especially good at handling myself in the jungle. Otherwise I never would have returned alive from my missions in the Amazon.
‘If my questions bother you, just say so.’
‘No, they’re fine.’
We can barely make out the trees in the dim glow of the headlights. He turns on the AC, which freezes my face and thickens the fog on the windshield.
‘Did you hurt yourself?’
‘Just a bump.’
I fold down the vanity mirror to check the damage. Just a scratch on my cheekbone and the start of a bruise. A scooter ran me down as I was leaving the Forum, after shopping. I rolled on the ground. The helmeted passenger rushed at me, and then a whistle blast stopped him in his tracks. The two men vanished on their scooter. I thanked the cops, who had come out of nowhere and who warned me against walking around this neighborhood at this time of evening carrying Tendance D shopping bags.
‘So what’s new since this afternoon?’ the neuropsychiatrist asks in a jolly tone, wiping off the fog with his hand.
I keep mum about my transactions in the gardens of Les Halles, as well as about my shopping trip to sub-level 3 of the mall. I was scouting out the shops for a suit of the type I usually wear, an all-purpose outfit that doesn’t wrinkle, when I stopped dead in front of Tendance D. The salesgirl was rearranging the display window. A brunette with long hair, petite, arched, breasts taut against raw silk, she was putting a shirt on a mannequin. The way she was dressing it was sexier than a striptease. She caught my gaze and smiled. The corridor was empty, apart from the cleaning crew dragging dry mops, the noise of metal shutters clanging down one by one. I went in.
‘Are you closed?’
‘That depends.’
She finished buttoning the shirt on the plastic man, tucked it into his pants, and straddled over the edge of the window. Her nipples stood out between two bats on the gore shirt knotted above her navel.
‘Would you like to see something?’
She looked at my old blue herringbone jacket shrunken by the Seine. I nodded.
‘You must be a good size 46.’
It sounded like a compliment. She added, riffling through her hangers, that this place didn’t really seem my style. I answered that I no longer had a style: up to her to find me one. She immediately handed me an orange T-shirt and a vampire’s frock coat, breathing in a warm voice, ‘Try this on for me.’
She pulled aside the curtain of the changing room and I undressed without closing it. Desire was tying my throat in knots. The need to attract a stranger, to be looked at for my body, without the problem of who was occupying it. Hospital smells, that sour, chemical cleanliness, still permeated my skin – I wanted to bury them in the smells of fucking, to drown Liz’s betrayal in the body of another. And this desire was enough for me. It wasn’t a fantasy, but a rehabilitation – as you might say about an abandoned building that you’re trying to restore.
Bare-chested in the changing-room mirror, I looked like what I am: a man of the forests disguised as a product of civilization, shaved, combed, creamed, pasteurized: a woodsman from the city. The equivalent of a ski instructor away from the slopes – no charm, no interest, no color once out of his element. Still, the girl stole glances at me as I flexed my muscles while slipping on the T-shirt. I could tell she liked me. Even if her only goal was a sale.
‘Maybe something like this instead,’ she concluded, showing me the outfit I’m wearing now.
Standing in front of her, I put on the hip-huggers, the collarless shirt, the jacket with its eight buttons. I looked like a clergyman in bellbottoms. With her arms folded, she watched me get a hard-on under the snug-fitting trousers and confirmed that they were the right size.
‘Can you do the hems while I wait?’
She knelt down to stick her pins in me.
‘It’s just a two-liter, but it has great pick-up.’
I imagine he’s talking about his engine. I nod, erase the salesgirl’s mouth from my eyes.
‘And what about you – what do you drive back in the States?’
‘I’ve got a Ford.’
‘How many cylinders?’
‘I don’t really know. It’s got a big trunk.’
Silence. He slows down, stops in front of a rusty gate. His fingers resting on the door handle, he probes for more information. ‘Do you play chess?’
‘No.’
He gets out to open the creaky gates, gets back in to tell me that the weatherman promises it’ll clear by tomorrow, and asks me what I think. I answer that it’s possible, if that’s what they said. He points out that, after an experience of imminent death, people often have premonitions. I answer that it’s not the case with me.
He continues on to the end of a long driveway, parks on a gravel surface. The house is an old cottage squeezed between a cluster of rhododendrons and a huge magnolia lying on its side. I get out and approach the tree.
‘The Christmas ’99 storm,’ he comments sadly. ‘I didn’t want to cut it down. And now more than ever … The landscaper didn’t give it much hope, but see for yourself: it’s surviving. Aside from my patients, I don’t listen to anyone.’
I tell him I agree, so as not to put a damper on his evening. Trees always flower more before dying, to ensure their lineage.
‘You have an enviable profession, Martin. Tell me, honestly, can you really communicate with trees? Do they talk to you?’
‘Very clearly.’
‘How so?’
‘It depends on the species.’
‘I envy you. Humans can be so repetitive.’
‘I can keep quiet.’
‘I didn’t mean you. Go on in, it’s open. My housekeeper’s here. I’m going to fetch some wood and I’ll be right back.’
I open the door with its little glass panes, and am immediately enveloped by the smell of beef stew and fresh wax. A brutal sadness grips me in the gut. The interior of this single man’s home is a hundred times warmer than our home in Greenwich, which never smelled of food or basic household activities, but gave off only the artificial aroma of potpourri in bowls. The kitchen is tidy, decorated with useful objects, polished, alive. A vacuum cleaner shuts off; an old woman comes in to say hello and tells me there are slippers in the basket. I follow her into the living room with its low exposed beams. She makes me sit in a sunken couch, between a piano covered with a tablecloth and the fireplace in which kindling is stacked over balls of newspaper.
‘Mineral water or fruit juice?’
I smile in spite of myself. Here, apparently, guests don’t mix alcohol and antidepressants.
‘There’s champagne in the icebox,’ the doctor calls out, walking in with a basket full of logs. ‘Thank you, Bernadette.’
Bernadette turns with a grunt and heads back into the kitchen.
‘It’s nothing against you, it’s for my ulcer. Would you like to see your room?’
I tell him I hadn’t planned to spend the night.
‘Is someone expecting you?’
I let him light the fire without answering. He coughs from the smoke and opens the window a crack.
‘Make yourself at home, Martin.’
I watch him distrustfully, in his woolen shirt and canvas pants. I don’t believe in pure generosity: you only help those who can help you. I read through his Who Must I Be? on the train. If he’s trying to understand my case, it’s to get inspiration, draw conclusions, support his thesis. He brought me here to get raw material for a book in progress, in which I’ll be designated by a single initial. Another way of negating my identity.
‘Well, I’ll be going,’ says Bernadette at the kitchen do
or, removing her apron. ‘Careful not to burn the stew. I put it on low. And don’t forget to take the ice-cream sandwiches out of the freezer before you toss the salad.’
Two minutes later, backfire from a motorbike mixes with the crackling of the burning twigs. Dr Farge delicately lays an oak log across the andirons, replaces the fire screen, then goes into the kitchen. I hear the refrigerator being opened, glasses clinking, peanuts falling into a dish. A large black dog comes up silently to place a paw on my foot and look me over. I say hello; he doesn’t move. I stretch out a hand to pet him but he backs away and goes to lie down in front of the piano, watching me the whole time.
‘His name is Troy. He’s a Beauceron,’ the doctor says, coming back in with a tray.
‘He seems nice.’
‘He never barks. He attacks and kills. He’s not my type, but he was a gift from Bernadette. The last of the litter. I couldn’t refuse. Since then, we don’t see any burglars around here. Nor the mailman, for that matter.’
He tips the bottle and opens it by turning it around the cork. With meticulous precision he pours our drinks, carefully dosing the foam, aligning the levels of both glasses. Then he sits facing me on the couch, lets himself be absorbed by the velvet cushions, empties his glass, and leans forward, elbows resting on his knees.
‘So. Now that we’re away from the hospital, I can tell you privately what I couldn’t say earlier. If you want me to, that is.’
I invite him to continue with a vague gesture.
‘Have you made any progress since this morning? What I mean is, do you still believe you really are Martin Harris?’
‘Yes. And it has nothing to do with glutamate.’
‘Do you have any further proof to back you up?’
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