‘I’m expecting some.’
A jet flies over the house at low altitude, with a sharp whine of engines. With pursed lips, he lets the silence fall again, then looks at his watch.
‘It’s 3.30 p.m. back home. If you’d like to call someone, please feel free.’
‘I’ve hired a detective to contact my acquaintances.’
He ratifies my choice by spreading his hands. I thought he would insist. Faces, names, numbers parade through my brain. My assistant Rodney; the dean of my department; Mrs Fowlett, who’s watching our house; the Browns, who kept inviting us to dinner … I have no desire to call anyone I know, without being able to tell if this is from embarrassment or apprehension. I refuse to demean myself by seeking corroboration from the upstart who’s eyeing my salary, or the old pedant who’s trying to dissuade me from implicating the university in my attacks on GMOs, or Ms Temperamental, who thinks she runs the place because she’s the only one who can work the alarm, or the neighbors, who I have to beg not to keep pruning their hundred-year-old catalpa. But there’s something else to my reticence: the fear of getting a reaction like the one I got from Liz. It’s impossible, and I know it, but it’s stronger than I am. And in any case, over the phone they could easily mistake my voice for the impostor’s. Even if they authenticated me, it wouldn’t prove a thing. Better to let the investigators show them my photo.
Another jet flies overhead, louder than the first. Jérôme Farge abruptly reaches for a remote control, points it at the stairway. An operatic voice fills the room, vocalizes over a percussive background. He shuts it off after a minute.
‘My apologies,’ he says. ‘They opened a flight path in July, just above us. Since then I’ve spent my evenings counting Airbuses and blaring Wagner and Pavarotti to try to drown them out. No more Chopin – he’s no match for the jets.’
This is the second time I’ve glimpsed the human being piercing through the man of science. His boyish pleasure at driving a young man’s sports car, and this stubborn nostalgia that sentences his piano to silence.
‘Do you play?’ he asks.
He has followed my gaze toward the Pleyel. I answer with a pout that could express incompetence just as easily as modesty. I don’t remember myself sitting at a keyboard, and yet a prickling in my veins, a slight impatience in my fingertips, is drawing me toward the instrument.
‘Go ahead,’ he encourages. ‘My wife was the one who played, but I keep it in tune.’
I sit on the bench, intrigued by this internal call that corresponds to neither a memory nor a feeling of lack. I fold back the tablecloth, rest my good hand in the middle of the keyboard. I wait. I’m searching for a reflex, an autonomous movement, and end up clearing my brain by letting my fingers wander. At the first chords of the melody, I shut the fallboard.
‘You haven’t forgotten,’ he declares in admiration.
‘Yes, I have.’
I return to my chair near the fire. He asks if it’s Gershwin. I have no idea. I answer that I’ve gotten rusty, so he’ll leave it alone. He doesn’t insist. My gaze lost in the flames, I vainly scan the house in Greenwich, the one where I was born, the cousin’s apartment in Brooklyn, my dorm at Yale … No trace of a piano anywhere, no image of me learning music or practicing scales. It’s not in my history. It’s not a memory of mine. And yet, I know how to play.
He refills our glasses, offers me the dish of peanuts, sets it back on his knees. I can’t tell if he’s noticed my confusion or not.
‘Do you believe in reincarnation, doctor?’
‘What, like the notion of previous lives? The idea that all the infants born into the world are recycled corpses? The theory that if you’ve behaved badly, you’ll pay for it in the next life by being born unlucky, unhealthy, and poor? No. That’s just auto-suggestion and it doesn’t get you anywhere.’
‘Two-thirds of the planet believes in it.’
‘Two-thirds of the planet is also starving, but that doesn’t justify famine. That said, if you’re asking me specifically in relation to your coma, my answer wouldn’t be so unequivocal.’
A shiver runs up my spine.
‘Why?’
He leans forward, raises a cushion behind him, and falls back again.
‘I’m going to tell you about a case I was consulted on which was even stranger than yours. One evening last year, a young woman in Deux-Sèvres held a séance with some friends, just for fun. Sitting around a table, they made a glass spin, with the illusion that the deceased was answering their questions. Yes, no, banalities, contradictions … At the end of the seance, they turned the lights back on and blew out the candle. The young woman looked odd. They asked if she was okay, and she answered in Spanish. Her husband was surprised – he never knew she spoke that language. But the more they asked her, the more she answered in Spanish. No one else there spoke it, and they begged her to stop kidding around, but to no avail. It was as if she no longer understood French. The joke wasn’t funny anymore, tempers rose, their friends went home, and her husband went to bed in a huff. The next morning at breakfast, he found her speaking Spanish to their children and holding them tight. He began to get seriously worried and went to fetch the concierge, who translated what his wife was saying: that her name was Rosita Lopez, that she had died the week before in Barcelona, that she had no intention of leaving earth and was perfectly comfortable in this family. They called the town doctor, who diagnosed a split personality. And they checked out her story. It turned out that a certain Rosita Lopez had in fact passed away eight days earlier in Barcelona.’
He downs a handful of peanuts and I watch him chew. He pours us more champagne before continuing.
‘They took her to see a dozen specialists, including me. We noted the change of language, but medically we couldn’t detect any schizophrenic symptoms, any ambivalence, none of the syndromes you normally see in cases of multiple personality. The patient was perfectly coherent, perfectly settled; her mood was stable, her obsessions permanent: she adored her children and desired her husband, who did his best to resist the passions of this stranger who was sharing his life. And then one day, unable to stand it anymore, he went to see an exorcist, who through prayers and imprecations finally managed to expel the intruding spirit. With that, the young woman recovered her identity and went back to being what she was before, with one difference: she still spoke Spanish. The infestation was so strong that it had contaminated the language area, in the left side of her brain. The poor thing had to learn her native tongue all over again.’
I stare at the bubbles rising in my glass. If he’s drawing a parallel with my story, I’ll ask him which side he puts me on: infested or infester.
‘Do you know,’ he resumes, ‘that laboratory mice continue to find their way in a maze even after 90 per cent of their brain has been removed?’
‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘And that Dr McDougall at Harvard proved that other mice, bearing no biological relationship to the ones that had memorized the path, managed, years later, to find the exit just as quickly? As if the maze itself contained the memory of past experiences … The question I’m trying to lead you to, Mr Harris, is, where is memory stored? In our brains, or outside of us? Why, when we electrically stimulate a precise spot of the hippocampus several times over in a single patient, does it immediately revive an important memory, but never the same one? Could our brains be not so much a warehouse as a receiver? I’ll go even further. How can a brain deprived of oxygen, fully dysfunctional, in a comatose state, store and process long-term memories, as is the case in near-death experiences? Because on the point of death, as probably during a mediumistic trance, the right temporal lobe is abruptly activated, connected in spite of itself to a database located outside the body. Your database … or that of a wandering soul, or of the man whose wife you covet.’
I set my glass down, push away the dish he holds out to me.
‘Why do you always tell the story from that side? Why couldn’t it be the o
ther guy who bootlegged my database?’
‘Because his wife recognizes him.’
An old-fashioned telephone jingles on a side table. Farge pries himself from the cushions and answers it in a doleful voice. His face immediately brightens.
‘Yes, everything’s fine. I’ll put him on. My best to your family.’
He sets the antique appliance with its spiraling cord on my knees. Muriel apologizes for earlier: she had just taken on a fare and couldn’t talk. She’s sorry not to be joining us for dinner. She asks how it’s coming along. I explain that Monsanto and cohorts have set up the entire thing, I’m certain of it and I’ll have the proof tomorrow.
‘Enough Nintendo!’ she shouts. ‘I said go to bed, do you see what time it is? Go tell your sister to turn down that music, I’m on the phone! Are you still there, Martin?’
The tenderness in her voice constricts my throat. It’s not tenderness, moreover, but disarray. The honesty of letting me hear that she feels alone in the middle of her brood and that, perhaps, she misses me.
‘So, everything’s okay otherwise? Stew and ice-cream sandwiches?’
‘All fine.’
‘A word of advice: watch out for the burgundy. Well, have a good rest of the evening.’
‘Muriel … The next time we see each other, my problem will be solved. But I’m happy about one thing: it gave me a chance to know you.’
It rings false, and yet I meant it sincerely. She answers that it’s nice of me to say so. Modesty or politeness. The doctor stirs the embers, tactfully ignoring us. Muriel cuts the conversation short, asks me to let her know when I find anything out, adds lots of love. Once more her voice sounds hollow, like those translators on television who neutrally say ‘I’ in place of someone else. I hang up with a strange feeling, a mix of regret and spite. My head is heavy with all the things I should have said.
‘She’s a courageous woman,’ the doctor states, believing he’s echoing my thoughts.
I wrinkle my nose, tell him something’s burning. He lets go of his poker, runs to the kitchen, lets out a curse, and drops the pot. I go in to help him mop up the stew.
‘No matter, I’ll make us an omelet. Don’t worry about it, go back and relax.’
I open the door and walk out into the garden. The rain has stopped. I take a few steps into the acrid smell of wet lawn. Lights go on all around me. The setting is marvelous, ghostly, peaceful. Boulders, tiered gardens that bloom in sequence, the last roses of the season surrounded by Japanese chrysanthemums and winter jasmine.
I go from one tree to another, put my arms around them. They welcome me. These trees I can feel – not like the ones on Boulevard Sébastopol. Or else it’s I who have changed since before. It’s I who have again become receptive, identifiable. What restored the communication? That worried confidence and supplication I sensed in Muriel’s voice, or the fact of having taken control of the situation at the Forum des Halles? Once again I feel in harmony with my immobile brothers. I feel united with their frequencies; my blood pulses to the rhythm of their sap. The energy we exchange dissipates anxieties, doubts, the unease of the city. Even as a child, I never really felt settled unless I was touching tree bark. A week away from the forest and already I became a different person. I rest my plexus against a willow, my back against a purple beech; I fondle the oaks and talk to the surviving plum trees in the tangle of the orchard. But the reunion is spoiled by a question that nags at my brain: why did the piano seem as familiar to me as these trees?
Jérôme Farge joins me, hands in his pockets among the dead apple trees, and says that he can’t quite make up his mind to dig them up – they’re such a part of the landscape. I tell him he’s right: the pleurotus that grows on rotting wood eats nematode worms and prevents them from attacking living roots. With its sticky filaments, the mushroom forms a kind of lasso that smothers its prey by making its cells swell up. Without the parasites on their dead neighbors, his plum trees wouldn’t be doing nearly so well.
He nods his head and murmurs, ‘You really are a botanist.’
‘Of course I’m a botanist!’
‘What I mean is … You’re definitely a colleague of Martin Harris, there’s no doubt about it.’
I grab him by the shoulders and spin him around to face me.
‘Listen, doctor. That man has false papers, my wife’s complicity, and a mission to discredit me with the INRA in my battle against GMOs. Got it? I’m even starting to think that my accident was really an attempted murder. My replacement couldn’t have been improvised in six days. Everything was planned before I even arrived in France, they followed me from the airport, and when they saw their chance …’
‘I don’t mean to discourage you, but paranoia is also a side effect of glutamate.’
‘You can go to hell with your glutamate!’
The dog rushes up, stops one yard away from me, and stares at me with teeth bared.
‘Smile,’ says Jérôme Farge, tapping my shoulder. ‘Look relaxed, like me. Everything’s fine, Troy, he’s a friend, we’re just playing. Sit.’
The Beauceron slowly stretches out on the ground, not taking his eyes off me.
‘If I needle you, Martin, you know it’s only to test you. To gauge your degree of certainty. See if you really believe all the things you’re telling me.’
‘And what about you? What do you believe?’
Looking me squarely in the eye, he answers, ‘I believe in your humanity. You’re a good person, I’m certain of that.’
‘Yeah, and what do you know about it? I stole some of your prescription slips and I sold them to buy this get-up!’
I’ve blurted out the confession without understanding this burst of aggression, this need to kick him for his kindness. But he keeps smiling. And not only for the dog’s sake. He says it’s funny, but Muriel’s daughter pulled the same trick on him two years ago, when he was treating her after her suicide attempt. She had prescribed herself amphetamines, which she came to show him as a provocation, to prove she wasn’t as ‘out of the woods’ as he claimed, that she was free to start up again whenever she felt like it. He told her to keep them as a gauge of trust, a risk for which he would accept the consequences. She mailed them to him the following summer, along with a photocopy of her hairdressing certificate and a snapshot of her boyfriend.
‘Just out of curiosity, how much does one of those things go for?’
‘One hundred fifty euros.’
He remarks, with some bitterness, that it’s more than an office visit.
The dull noise of an airliner envelops us; the lights on its wings blink among the willow branches, disappear behind the thatched roof.
‘Once,’ he sighs, ‘you couldn’t hear a sound here. A real sanctuary. I savored the absence of noise the way you savor a cognac, the glass cupped in your hands. It’s gone forever.’
His sadness mollifies me. For the first time, I don’t feel under scrutiny. The dog gets up and lopes away, goes to lie down in its kennel. I look for something comforting to say.
‘In any case, your garden is very well maintained.’
‘For who? And for how long? My son teaches in Tahiti. He’ll sell the house when I die. I’ll end up haunting the idiotic couple who’ve had their eye on it for ages,’ he adds, indicating the huge villa behind the oak trees. ‘The kind that expands from year to year, the model family who keep hatching kids one after another and get together on the weekends. In the winter, they use a motorized leaf-blower as if it were a rake, and the rest of the time they shave their thousand square yards with a mulching mower. If they got their hands on this place, they’d rip out all the trees and dynamite the rocks so they could mow it flatter. Their idea of a garden is a golf course.’
He turns back toward his house, head lowered. I follow him inside.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asks, heading once more into the kitchen, with a distraught look at the empty frying pan on the stove.
‘No. The peanuts are fine.’
�
�I’ve got pretzels, too. And some black olives.’
He takes a bottle of burgundy and a corkscrew from the buffet and we go back to collapse into the soft cushions near the fire.
‘When my wife was alive, it was heaven here. At least, I never noticed the nuisances. How is it?’ he asks, seeing me taste the wine.
‘Perfect,’ I say, so as not to make him even sadder.
‘For the past five years, I’ve been living with cancer in remission. I’m tired of dealing with it on my own, but I believe I’m still useful to too many patients to give up. I’ve had some successes, I’ve published the books I wanted, lived for thirty years with a happy woman. I’ve got no complaints. I’m finishing off my burgundy and my firewood. I’ve still got thirty-six bottles of Nuits Saint Georges 1970 and two-thirds of the oak tree that died the same year as my wife. It’s already dry enough for the fireplace, but the wine is starting to turn, don’t you think?’
I admit it.
‘I thought so, from the color. I’ve lost my sense of taste since I’ve been alone. Psychosomatic ageusia – the only case I’ve ever encountered, and it’s me. But I still get pleasure from seeing – colors and memories …’
The crackling of the logs melts into the fading sound of jet engines, covered over by a nearer rumbling.
‘Martin.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Go on up to bed if you’re tired.’
I sit up, head in a fog, the taste of smoke in my mouth.
‘Have I been asleep? How long?’
‘Three Airbuses. Long enough for me to add a log and pour myself another glass.’
‘I’m sorry …’
‘Please, no need. Boring people when I talk probably helped me decide to become a psychiatrist.’
The wine swirls before his eyes in the glow of the flames. He resumes after a moment.
‘Your sleep is instructive.’
‘Did I say something?’
‘You called out. Three times.’
‘Liz?’
‘Would you like to talk about her?’
I stretch, empty my glass, swallow a handful of olives.
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