It’s painful, but it has to be done. Get some help if you don’t have the nerve to do it. I didn’t have anyone I could count on—my mother was dead, as well as Romero, and the old woman upstairs… I scarcely knew the nice neighbours, apart from when we’d all helped the old woman. You never know who will denounce you. You never know who will shoot the wretched in the dungeons. I think it’s possible to find out a bit about someone from looking into their eyes, or from the very first words they say—you can find out on first meeting them, or, on the contrary, after a very long time. But back then I didn’t even know how to trust myself. I believed everything I was told.
I put on a scarf to hide the wound under my ear. The sleeves of the raincoat covered the cuts on my arms. I hopped on a train without a ticket and slid my device into the pocket of a cleaning robot, who would make a few round trips before anyone became worried about someone as deficient as me going missing, about my minuscule dot on the radar systems. So off I went. Into the forest.
The dog from the bottom of the building followed close at my heels, and stayed with me. He jumped in the train I’d caught at random. Not exactly at random, because that train followed the tram route, then went on further and entered the section of the forest where the Rest Centre was located. I got off among the trees, in a field that seemed promisingly empty. The dog followed me. And then he no longer followed me, but went ahead. And we walked together for a long time. It was spring and I hadn’t even noticed. One of those rare days of true spring in a once temperate area, a day that was neither freezing nor stifling hot, a cool, sunny day with a light and gentle wind that touches your face like—I can’t think of a comparison—like a caress. I took off my scarf. The wind caressed the wound under my ear. I could feel the cells working hard to heal over. It was good.
The forest was astonishing. Tiny little bright-green leaves, a green so natural that it looked artificial, the green you think of when you think of green: tiny little leaves growing at the ends of absolutely every single branch. I wanted to touch them, to be touched by this foliage that was soft and velvety and so green. And I couldn’t hear anything apart from the sound of the wind in the trees, and occasionally, yes, a bird. Astonishing. I was trembling, breathing, no tension, nothing. Just the call of the wind, the trees and the birds, and the sun. And of the dog, whom I was following, and who had the tact to act as if he was following me.
Standing under a tree was the clicker.
We set off walking like beasts of burden. Despite the fresh air, the effort made me short of breath. We had to keep stopping. We’d run out of water and the next spring was a long way off. ‘Get a grip,’ said the clicker. We burst out laughing. Yes, he managed to make me laugh. We were laughing because that’s what I used to say to him all the time, when he was my patient. It’s what I used to say to all my patients. He squinted and I was overcome by the sight of his face in the sun, and our three eyes continued to look at each other.
‘They didn’t go easy on you,’ he said.
We set off again.
Dog and I were together for a long time. He was the first dog I’d had who was called Dog. He belonged to the clicker and me, in the sense that he was happy enough to stay with us.
The first days in the encampment I was intoxicated. Sure, my reduced vision unbalanced me, but mostly it was being out in the open. Getting up in the morning and stepping out of the tent, and, hey presto, there was the forest, the clearing. The earth. Just a few steps and I was out in the sunshine. Back under the trees, barefoot, to wash in the river. The wide-open spaces. When I arrived, there were a number of people—for security reasons I can’t say how many—including a few halves. It was the halves’ job to dig the dry toilets. It’s fair to say that those toilets made a big improvement in the general hygiene of the group.
We fugitives were going to retrieve our halves as soon as we could. At first I thought everyone was similarly motivated: the same nostalgia that I felt, being away from Marie for so long. So long without being able to touch her, speak to her, so long dealing with her just sleeping. I thought we all wanted to find our halves because we missed them. Things are actually more complicated. I’m coming around to thinking that we each have a different story with our halves.
Anyhow, when I arrived, an attack had been staged against a small provincial centre: a blackout was triggered, during which ten or so halves had been retrieved and transported in a truck. They’re still only one-off operations, said the clicker. Amateurism like that annoyed him. A much grander plan was being hatched: to empty the Rest Centre completely. They were camping in the forest to prepare their attack.
I couldn’t take my eye off the few halves who had recently been reanimated. Their gestures were clumsy, not like children’s, more like adult-children, horses who had sprung in one go from being foals to being fully grown mares, without learning anything in between. They limped but they were lively. They ran around as fast as their legs could carry them, but got themselves in a muddle. They fell down laughing. They tussled with each other, they got told off, they set out again with their buckets to do the chores.
The clicker and I had a lot of serious conversations. The therapy framework had prevented us from talking to each other. We were catching up. He spoke to me about the Sioux. (The Sioux were Native Americans, many of whom were killed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.) The teepees in the forest were inspired by their dwellings, especially the ventilation system with rotating deflectors. The clicker could talk about them for hours. You had to be able to dismantle a teepee in less than half a day. Otherwise, you abandon everything. They had already done that a few times. Which was precisely why many members of the group were lobbying for another means of escape: by living in underground tunnels.
My clicker was disgusted by the idea. ‘We are not moles,’ he said. But this way of thinking was gaining traction and the halves were corralled into digging holes, tunnels, a whole complicated system of underground dwellings, less movable but more permanent, where we could stay hidden for longer. Our leader drew up the plans (the clicker wasn’t the leader). He delivered us lectures of sorts, on marmots. When you study the burrows of marmots from earlier times, there is a main hibernation room, adjoining storage rooms, and a little room at quite a distance, at the end of a long tunnel: the toilet. On the sand at the edge of the river, he drew cross-section plans of a semi-permanent encampment.
The halves chopped wood and buttressed the tunnels until they collapsed with exhaustion. In the clicker’s opinion, too much energy was expended on the tunnels; he wanted us back on the road. But how could we set off again inconspicuously if we were forever animating new halves? We had to get them on their feet and train them, et cetera. Some among us actually thought that, with this workforce, we could build an alternative, underground city, in competition with the connected city, et cetera. That we could establish ourselves there. For the future. There were a lot of arguments.
For now, we wrapped ourselves in camouflage material whenever we were out in the open. The leaders’ teepees were made of all-weather fabric, when we could find it; the clicker even had a little bottle of plasma spray that would, if necessary, conceal his escape. He was going to get me one too.
The hundred-odd halves at the Centre was nothing, he told me, when you consider that one to two per cent of human beings have at least one clone. Those who are less rich have jars with a simple heart–lungs operating system, and the vast majority of other human beings are superfluous, without purpose, and therefore, needless to say, without doubles or any sort of jar. It’s a very easy population pie chart to draw. According to the clicker, there was a huge market in organs that had been snatched from random bodies, kidnapped, and the compatibility tests on the transplant were carried out haphazardly; the organ lasted only as long as it lasted, and the cycle began again. Obviously it cost a lot less than a clone. I was expensive. That made him laugh. Ha! But what cost the most was Marie. I was already a second-hand model. That made him laugh and l
augh! A few birds were singing and we were walking under our camouflage capes, making our way slowly back to the encampment. He lifted up the canvas of his teepee for me. All we needed was a dry bed, a warm blanket, drinking water and grains and vegetables. So the clicker told me. Look where progress got us. And we talked and talked and kissed and hugged each other. We caught up on lost time.
Where was I?
I have to hurry.
The clicker loved me right down to my scars. He persuaded me to live without the dressing, to take off this thing that came from them. But I was too ugly without the dressing. I looked like I’d died by a thousand cuts. I didn’t recognise myself. So I just tied a scarf around my eye. No problem at all: they nicknamed me the Pirate. The Clicker and the Pirate. The new Bonnie and Clyde. (Bonnie and Clyde were a couple of famous outlaws in the twentieth century.)
His own half had disappeared. He didn’t say much about it. He hadn’t coped well discovering he had a double. It’s quite an unusual experience all the same, he’d say to me. Even if it happens to a lot of us. Right? He coped very badly with it.
Well, there you go.
He wanted to set the halves free. It was his big thing, his big idea.* Then, he imagined, we’d have an army of sleeping soldiers. He told me about an army of terracotta soldiers, buried somewhere in China in antiquity, and that a breath of wind could wake them, reanimate the rows and rows of them to walk on the ground…Our halves are like that, he said. We need to train them. Arm them.
I’ll spare you the discussions all this provoked in the group. My clicker quoted Russian writers and the others told him to go to hell. We were few in number, and what’s more, we were not united.* There was only a handful of us, and when I say a handful I have an image of a closed fist, between whose pitiless fingers skeletal bodies are contorting, trying to escape.
That’s the image I have in my mind.
I’m cold. I had to stop writing because I had trouble breathing. Water is dripping into the tunnels. The deepest ones have become uninhabitable; there’s been too much rain lately.
And yet it is possible, I assure you, to live like nomads.
We were all in agreement about setting the halves free, but we disagreed about what to do with them, about the long-term plan, about whether to flee or to stay and fight. We had no idea. In the end, was it up to us? Is one free in a forest? It’s early days, some said. We battled it out and we drank.
The halves crouched in a circle around us and pinched our grog and bits of rat. They laughed. They watched us arguing. Then, in the glow of the embers, they had sex. We didn’t manage to sterilise everyone—too many halves and not enough equipment. There was the issue of babies. The last thing we wanted in the forest was to lug around babies, especially the babies of halves. I don’t know why it was the women who had to sort this out. I was disgusted by the whole baby thing. So I was criticised. And then you had to do self-criticism, otherwise you got into big trouble. It was interminable. It’s easy to disappear in the forest too.
Anyway.
I can’t really enlarge upon our life in the forest. It’s a matter of security.
I wasn’t directly involved in the escape plan for the halves, so I can only recount what I know, cautiously, according to what my clicker was willing to tell me about it. (I say ‘my’ clicker: you’ll understand that it’s a mark of affection, not of appropriation.) I was in a bad way, and too short of breath to take part in an operation like that.* My only task was to keep a close eye on the halves who had already been rescued and gathered into various small units. I’ve never really liked children, and halves are worse. As it was night, they were supposed to sleep, each one attached to the stake alongside their straw mattress, underground. But they made an infernal racket and there were only a few of us acting as guards until the expedition returned. I was frightened a traitor would turn up, that someone would take this opportunity to attack us or whatever. I get claustrophobic in the tunnels. We listened out for noises in the night. We hit the halves to make them shut up. What would be the upshot of all that, I wondered. In the short term, it was a long night.
On this particular night, our group had organised a sort of train. Not exactly a train, but one of those vehicles you see on railway tracks, a handcar, used in the past for maintenance, I think, a draisine. There was one there on the disused track. They brought it back and tinkered with it. They attached a trailer that we nicknamed the Raft because it was made out of logs of wood that had been only roughly squared off, on which we had mounted side boards and attached vines in anticipation of a load. They selected two halves, two strapping fellows built like removalists, whom they trained for two days on this carriage. They all sprayed themselves with plasma and wrapped themselves in strips of camouflage material. Our two armed robots were going off with them. It was impossible to trigger an electrical blackout in such a major Rest Centre: there were generators and powerful batteries. So our group kept it simple. They set off in search of gas masks, and even cobbled them together from lichen and scraps of electrically resistant material. I witnessed all the preparations.
Am I talking too much? Am I writing too much? Let’s just say that when they came back, the Raft was full of piled-up bodies. Our halves. My clicker had the genius idea of severing the gas lines that were keeping the halves asleep. The gas spread everywhere. Hilarious. Ha! The robots were the only ones not to get knocked out. So I immediately had to know who was a robot and who wasn’t; I wanted to know if the doctor who had operated on me was one, if the guy who had chatted me up about my eye was one. But my clicker hadn’t had time to identify them. We weren’t there for that, he said. We were there to set the halves free. Our pirated robots shot at the nurse robots—I liked the idea of frying their brain cells. But the hardest thing was carrying the halves to the Raft. We had planned for two humans per half, one at the shoulders, the other with the legs. It was slow going. They had only managed to free about fifty per cent of the halves. All piled up on the Raft. An epic saga in the forest. They woke up, eyes staring wide, distraught, incapable of the slightest action, unable to get themselves moving. Sometimes I wonder if robots, in the end…know themselves. The most sophisticated robots. The clones who’ve just been woken up are the only ones left who don’t know themselves at all. Unless they dream. Perhaps. Perhaps they’ve lived something in their sleep, after all.
I’ve added this detail because I know it has raised a lot of questions: on this expedition we rescued two halves without owners. I mean two solitary halves. The one belonging to Mathias Matéo, my classmate who disappeared (and there he was, all of a sudden: unchanged, juvenile, semi-idiotic), and José, the half belonging to the husband of my suicide patient, you know, the miracle sole survivor of the crash. José never integrated well. He always remained alone, without the husband. We never really succeeded in getting José up and walking, adapting him to camp life, to work, to digging—well, to his life as a half. He spent his time whistling, stupidly staying out in the open to watch drones and—I’m not kidding—making little planes out of balsa wood, which he flew in the wind on strings.
I have to hurry.
At first, I wanted to tame Marie, keep her for myself. I knew her, she didn’t know me. Or perhaps she did have a vague, intuitive knowledge of me? I wanted to live with her in the same teepee, and, later, in the same hole. No one else did that. But I thought it was discriminatory to herd our halves together in what amounted to a dormitory. One evening I even called our group a pack of bastards. I slept with Marie. But in the morning, as soon as she woke up, she went running off to join the other halves. I’d taught her to speak: ‘Marie, Viviane, you, me, eat, drink, sleep…’ (Halves never want to sleep at the right time.) But she never told me anything. She went off to prattle with the other halves—I was going to say with halves like her. It had taken me two months to teach her to walk, and she still fell flat on her face all the time. And two months to teach her to talk. In the beginning, she sat still obediently and imitated me, repeating
my words. All in one go, all of a sudden, they can start speaking fully formed sentences. Their brain is that of an adult and they’ve been immersed in language, even when they were asleep. But their muscles, lips, tongue, et cetera, are stiff. The nurses worked on engaging the legs and arms but not the face—I have no idea why. I’ve always suspected that, if the need arose, they wouldn’t rule out the idea of waking up this whole mute army. Anyway. Once Marie managed to pronounce words, she had nothing to say. All she wanted to do was go and see Pépette and Mathias Mark 2 and the others. And when I insisted that she come back ‘before midnight’, she sulked and didn’t tell me anything. Did you have a good time? Nothing. Do you want some blackberries? Nothing. Well, anyway. We put her to work.
Still, you could say that I saved her. You could say that she even owes me her life. They would have chopped her up like all the rest, so the only thing left of me would have been a carcass, which they would have recycled as dog food.
One of the first things I did—I mean, as soon as I was able to—was to undress her. Remove her isolation bubble of hypoallergenic material. When you’re taking off their clothes they’re passive, relaxed. It even excites them sometimes. Marie is still intact. Intact all over. José has some scars. That’s probably why he has a screw loose. He’s also missing a testicle, as the clicker pointed out to me. We might have intervened just in time, before they removed everything from him. Before they terminated him even. In the end it’s turned out well, that the husband of my suicide patient was pulverised in the sky. He avoided any organ removal. Crash! A form of release, freedom! I don’t know if Mathias Mark 2 is missing a few bits, but he tends to run away as soon as you go near him. The solitary halves, like him and José, are in the firing line. Like us. We are the disposable bodies, the first bodies to jettison.
Our Life in the Forest Page 8
