‘What’s the use? I don’t even know who my wife is anymore. I don’t know how long she’s been with the other side.’
‘I don’t believe in this idea of a plot against you. Let’s come back to your near-death experience for a moment, shall we?’
‘You don’t believe in those, either.’
‘We were at the hospital. If I didn’t show some skepticism, they would have slashed my departmental budget a long time ago.’
He gets up to replace the log that has rolled under the andirons. He sets down his tongs and turns around. His back against the fireplace, he ponders me for a moment while lighting a cigarette, holds out the pack. I tell him I don’t smoke anymore.
‘Since when?’
‘It was Liz who quit.’
I see us sharing a cigar, early in our love, passing it to each other every two or three puffs, at a table, isolated in a cloud of smoke, glad to shock the other diners and create a void around us …
He sits back down.
‘Last June, a patient emerged from a Glasgow 4 coma, like you, but completely amnesiac. Every time I asked her a question, she answered, ‘There’s a torn sneaker on the cornice.’ And she pointed to the ceiling. To the point where I finally asked someone to go check. They found the shoe, two floors up, just as she had described it, but placed in such a way that it wasn’t visible from any window in the hospital, nor from the ground, nor from the roof – only if you climbed a ladder leaning against the building. Or if you were floating above the street.’
I hold my breath. A weight in my chest has lifted with every one of his sentences. A wave of lightness glides along the back of my neck.
‘When you thought you were leaving your body, what was your emotional state?’
I close my eyes, trying to recapture the feelings.
‘I wasn’t afraid. More like surprised and confident. But it all seemed to go by so fast …’
‘What were you thinking of?’
‘Liz. I wanted to tell her what had happened to me.’
‘Your accident or your death?’
‘The accident. I never felt like I was dead.’
‘Were you back with her?’
‘I think so. After that came the tunnel of light, and my father telling me …’
‘Never mind the tunnel. I’m interested in Liz. Were you at home, in your room?’
‘I’m not sure. When I try to recreate the surroundings, I see another image instead. A different day. We’re on a street in Manhattan and we’re kissing. I see us from above, as if I were hovering over us.’
‘Dissociated? You see your living body, in a moment from the past …’
‘Possibly. But I don’t remember ever having kissed Liz in that place.’
‘Where is it, exactly?’
‘At the corner of Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, beneath the ticker-tape that displays the national debt, with the portion per American family.’
‘Which was how much?’
‘Sixty-six thousand two hundred nine dollars,’ I say automatically.
‘Your memory is incredibly precise.’
I open my eyes.
‘For that kind of asinine detail, yes. But I have no recollection of that kiss in real life.’
‘It’s a symbolic image.’
‘It’s always in my head.’
‘And the number is always the same?’
‘Always. And always from the same perspective.’
‘So it’s a recurrent dream, but it’s identical every time.’
‘No, not every time. When I fell asleep just now, I found myself back at the same scene. Except that Liz pulled away … and I saw my face. It wasn’t me.’
‘That’s logical: your dream is incorporating your current situation.’
‘But it wasn’t the other man either! I don’t know who this one was, I’ve never seen him before.’
He sighs and falls backward, crosses his legs.
‘The root of your problem really seems to be jealousy.’
‘I’ve never been jealous! Before my accident, I never suspected Liz of seeing other men. And I wouldn’t have minded if she had – quite the opposite!’
He raises his hand so that I’ll let him finish.
‘You’re in a deep coma, with electrical activity in the cortex independent of any surrounding stimulus, agreed? Your disconnected consciousness – let’s call it your ‘astral body’ – transfers itself into Liz’s bedroom, and let’s say for argument’s sake that you find her making love to the other man. You can’t bear the sight, despite what you say, so in your dream you replace it with the screen-image of a simple kiss shared with a stranger in the street. But at that moment, in the room, the double effect of jealousy and your refusal to die results in your astral body taking over the personality of her lover. With the same determination that we witnessed in Rosita Lopez. Except that, after this, a life instinct, perhaps triggered by your refusal to give up your place, brings you out of the coma, in full possession of your faculties. But the impregnation remains in the lover’s memory on which you’ve trespassed. And so we have a kind of mental ubiquity, the fact that now two Martin Harrises coexist – one just as sincere as the other, from what you tell me.’
He pauses to let me absorb all this.
‘What I can’t explain is why your wife chose the infested one and erased you from her memory.’
I put my glass down. That last part I can understand.
‘This is all just speculation, of course,’ he says, stifling a yawn. ‘Let it sink in, we’ll talk about it more tomorrow.’
I stand up. He takes me to my room, wishes me goodnight, then turns around at the door. And he murmurs in a completely different voice, with disarming gentleness, ‘That was the first time I’ve heard the piano since …’
He walks away down the hall, head low.
I close the door, get undressed, slip beneath the embroidered sheets that smell of mint and cinnamon. Two initials are intertwined: J and V.
I, too, had loved Liz, passionately. So why do I feel so removed from her, not even angry with her anymore? Why, when I turn off the light, does her face blend with Muriel’s, her body with the image of the salesgirl at the Forum? Why do unknown women come into my head with every passing airplane? And why do I feel so comfortable tonight, all alone, my limbs spread out in this double bed?
8
She opens the shutters and leans out toward the street. She stretches out her hand to see if it’s raining. She is wearing one of my shirts, as she always does when she gets up. She disappears, leaving the window open.
I pull back into the doorway where I’ve been freezing for the past hour. She always slept naked, and put on my shirt from the day before to go make breakfast. The only ritual from our early days to withstand the passage of time. My stomach tightens at the memory of the coffee aroma that rose every morning to infiltrate my dreams. I would go join her in the kitchen and we’d make love one day out of two, depending on what was on the talk show she was watching distractedly, from room to room, on the three television sets that were permanently left running. Unless the interest of the topic or the celebrity of that day’s guest kept her on the living-room couch in front of the giant screen, tray on her knees, in which case I took my coffee into the bathroom.
This morning, I had only decaffeinated green tea and soy crackers. The neuropsychiatrist’s breakfast. He was still asleep; the housekeeper was ironing underpants next to my bowl. She told me I looked better than last night. I answered that her stew was delicious.
‘Why, did the dog tell you?’
I blushed in the heat of the iron. She shrugged her shoulders, grumbled that with the doctor she was used to cooking for nothing: he ate like a bird. She was heading to the market in Rambouillet and asked what I’d like for breakfast. I asked her to drop me at the station instead. The doctor had helped me, less with his theories about my coma than with his own situation, his confidences, his resigned distress and active impotence
. I left him a thank-you note on the table. In the garden that was dripping in the sunlight, Bernadette called to the dog, in vain.
‘The Doberman next door’s in heat again,’ she groused, pulling down the roadster’s convertible top.
She drove like a real myopic, constantly adjusting her steering, crossing over the white line and speeding up on turns, provoking honks and headlight signals from the cars we met. She yelled above the roar of the engine, in the howling wind: ‘My old man and I used to do road rallies when we were young. I was the one who taught the doctor how to drive.’
A blue station wagon had been following us since we entered the forest. Suddenly it passed us in the middle of a bend, cutting us off. Bernadette’s sudden yank of the wheel almost sent us into the ditch. She railed for a good five minutes against the village cops, who according to her were blotto by dawn. I didn’t say anything, but that wasn’t a police car.
Paranoia took hold of me again in the train to Paris. I felt watched from behind the newspapers, changed carriages at every station. Again I saw the yellow truck bearing down on Muriel Caradet’s taxi, the motorbike rushing toward me at the Forum des Halles …
Liz reappears in the window, shakes out a tablecloth. The crumbs slide along the tiled slope and fall into the gutter. She pauses a moment to take in the view. She seems much more relaxed than in Greenwich. I don’t know what she did with her time back then. She told me golf, classes, bridge at the country club, charity work at the church, but in the evening, coming home from the university, I would find her in the same place on the couch, with a glass of scotch and the news on CNN. Judging by the mileage on her car, if she went out at all, it was on foot.
She shuts the window. I try to recall the apartment, to visualize the rooms that I know only through photos that Kermeur emailed me. The living room with its sloped ceiling overlooking Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, the large kitchen looking out on the courtyard, and the bedroom in front of which I’m keeping watch, on Rue de Duras … An old-money, bijou kind of place, with dolls everywhere: the interior of an old woman’s house. I wonder how much Liz has transformed it in a week, she who turned my wood-shingled house into a model of New England chic.
I remember our last Monday in Greenwich, in the silence of the woods already reddening with autumn, those woods that oppress her in winter and give her allergies in the spring. Another one of those mornings when I went to work, leaving her to rot her brain with a fistful of health bars and Jenny Jones. The ecstatic hostess was promenading her microphone among a bunch of clairvoyants so they could give the audience news of their dear departed, between two commercials in which lawyers vaunted their success against malpracticing doctors. The star that day was an over-inflated bimbo who communicated with animals, acting as interpreter between a Labrador and its master. Liz loved it. She believes in all this. She jotted down the addresses of the mediums, including the dog translator, even though we don’t have any pets. I reproached her for her gullibility. She retorted that I should talk, with my trees. I got annoyed, said that had nothing to do with it, that what bothered me wasn’t the phenomenon itself but the exploitation of suffering nincompoops, and we yelled at each other against a background of soliciting lawyers. She called me a schizo, I slapped her, and she fell back, smacking her forehead against the base of the lamp.
I raise my eyes. My replacement is leaning against the window guardrail, with the face of someone who has slept in. He’s smoking, detached, calm, in my Hermès pajamas from Kennedy Airport. She hands him a cup, which he takes without a look, automatically. As if he has known this life as long as I have.
A mother and two little girls dressed for tennis turn the corner. The two girls tell each other secrets behind their rackets, throw a glance my way, and go back to their confidences, their hidden laughs. Their mother hurries them on, opens the back door of the car, shoves them inside by pushing their heads, like the police when they’re arresting someone. Liz wanted a child. As for me, I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. I suffered too much from my father’s shipwreck to want to be called Daddy. I would have liked to teach a little boy about trees, that’s all. But I couldn’t have stood it if he didn’t care, listened distractedly while chewing gum before turning back to his video game.
It’s amazing how much I continue to have thoughts from before, pathetic moments of nostalgia, remorse over my behavior that outweighs my grievances as a victim. The harm I did to Liz is minor compared to what she’s putting me through now, but it doesn’t change what I feel. Even if there’s nothing left between us, everything I once felt for her remains intact, incredibly new. It’s strange how the fact of being excluded from the present can reinvigorate the past.
They’ve gone back inside, shut the window, and from far away I hear the muffled sound of a piano. It might be him. If he knows as much as I do about botany, then logically he’s also a pianist. But why would that aspect of his personality have leached into me, and only that one? Why, if our memories have fused, don’t I have any other recollections that come from him?
I jump. An orchestra has just joined in with the piano. It’s a recording. That doesn’t prove or resolve anything, but I smile all the same, as if I’ve scored a point against the absurdity I’m battling. In my position, how can I define what is realistic and what isn’t? No matter how much I keep turning over Dr Farge’s hypothesis about my ‘mental ubiquity’, the way my consciousness at the point of death grafted itself onto the brain of my rival, the infestation that made him my duplicate, I still don’t believe it. But I have no arguments to support my doubts. Other than the very personal feeling that, if you took away my memories, there would be nothing of me left in him.
The smell of burnt fat wafts from the exhaust vent above my head. It’s eleven o’clock and the restaurant kitchens are firing up. The bittersweet odor brings back my years of fast food on Coney Island, under my Nathan’s hat. Again I see myself getting out of school, the ten elevated subway stops between John Dewey High School and Surf Avenue, the white building with its terrace roof parading golden letters under a smiling sausage, in the shadow of the abandoned Figure 8: More than just the best hot-dog. And that odor that permeated my hair and resisted every shampoo, the odor of my nights at the grill that made the girls in high school wrinkle their noses, that odor that would one day pay my college tuition and that, at the time, prevented me from going out.
I know why the other man is a fake. You can see it in his face, his ease, his detachment. He has never known shame, has never sought out the contempt in a girl’s eyes. He never stank of French fries. I know full well that this argument is no match for the proofs I’m expecting about my identity, but it’s the one that resonates most deeply in me. The lack of shame. And I believe I feel more hatred for him at the thought of this shame than in imagining him making love to Liz behind those shutters. As if my anger at him had less to do with being false than with not being sufficiently true.
She has just come out. She crosses diagonally, turns the corner, and heads toward the Champs-Elysées, taking the sunny side of the street. I emerge from my doorway recess, follow her at a distance in the crowd of tourists. She’s wearing a sexy tailored suit that I’ve never seen before, her raincoat over her shoulders. She seems carefree, peers into shop windows, fixes her hair in the reflection, discreetly verifying if men are turning back to look at her. I’ve never seen her like this. She, so rigid, so inhibited outside of bed … She cuts over to Avenue de Marigny, quickens her step when she notices the time.
A man bumps into me, a high-strung body-building type. He stops and asks for an apology. I push him away and step over the papers he dropped. I start to walk faster, my eyes fixed on the silhouette cutting a channel under the chestnut trees, when he grabs my arm and demands in a louder voice that I apologize. The next moment I see him bent in two on the ground. I can’t get over my strength, the precision of that karate chop that escaped me like a reflex. Apart from pull-ups when I climb trees, I never have time to exercise. The same w
ay I never learned to play the piano.
I slip away as a small group forms around the hulk writhing on the sidewalk. I slalom between groups of people and cars, run across the street toward the Marigny theater. The line at the ticket window makes me step off the curb. Camera-trucks linked by cables hide the intersection. I widen my stride, stop short at the flow of cars rushing toward the Arc de Triomphe, search in every direction. I’ve lost her.
Suddenly I see her hair disappearing into the subway. I run after her, hurtle down the steps, find her just as she heads toward the La Défense platform. She takes the corridor where violinists are playing and suddenly breaks into a run. I think that she’s spotted me, but maybe it’s only because the departure signal has sounded. She jumps into the packed train. I rush in just as the doors close, catch my breath as I look over my fellow passengers. She is standing not twenty yards from me. I don’t know if she’s seen me, if she’s trying to lose me, or if she’s simply running late.
At every stop, I elbow through people to make sure she hasn’t gotten off. The third stop is the one. I see her walk quickly toward the Avenue de la Grande-Armée exit, cut over to the side marked ‘Even numbers’. Not once has she stopped to check her path. Either she has already come this way, or she’s leading me around.
She hurries to street level, buttons up her raincoat against the risen wind, heads down the avenue, and turns into a one-way street. She stops in front of a hotel and suddenly turns around. I sensed it one second earlier and hid behind a trunk. Her eyes sweep over the sidewalk, but don’t come as far as my tree. She goes in.
I run up to the building facade, which I skirt closely, my forehead pressed against the windows, trying to make out the interior through the curtains. It’s a bar. I see her hesitate at the entrance, then walk toward the tables near the counter. I immediately pull back, head toward the doorman spinning the revolving door. I cross the lobby like a guest of the hotel, go up to the bar entrance and pretend to study the menu. Liz is sitting at a corner table, next to a young guy of about twenty with an evil smile and a sleeveless leather jacket. A huge camera is resting on the small table next to his glass. He shows it to her proudly, puts his arm around her neck. Suffocating, I see her offer him her lips, give him a passionate kiss, a kiss of reunion. Just like the one she shares with the stranger in my dream about Sixth Avenue, beneath the figure of the national debt.
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