I thought my guts had been emptied out already but I didn’t get into an argument.
Episode
I went back by crossing through Sainte-Anne. It’s a shortcut, and a peaceful walk. You’d think it was a big convent with its tennis courts, archways, statues of men on horseback (or not), a romantic garden, and a decent cafeteria with reasonable prices. My daughter is a performer there sometimes. It took her a long time to find her way. When she was thirteen she became introverted and anorexic and I really thought she would become a nun, but that’s when she came back to us with bright red hair and a black mouth, fishnet tights and parachute boots. She was inseparable from her girlfriend Fred who had the same deadly pale gargoyle face tattooed with aggressive devils and pierced from eyebrows to lips with square-headed nails. Which is why, when Fred jumped out of the fourteenth floor across from our apartment, first I thought I saw the two of them together, but I was seeing double at that time anyway. Now I see clearly, I see simply, I see things the way they are. I think my daughter was the one who pushed Fred, the way you push away your evil genius. So my daughter wasn’t so crazy, but she was crazy enough to be locked up in an asylum with a room kept for her here for the last five years.
“No such thing as crazy,” she said to me last time. “I’m paranoid because of you. I was unable to sublimate my homosexual desire, which you never recognized, into a social drive. You never accepted Frederique as my sister because then your attraction to her would have been incestuous.”
“I wasn’t her father.”
So we sort of had an interesting discussion, I mean it went way beyond the disgusted faces and monosyllabic yells our father-daughter dialogue had been reduced to. At the time she was part of a theater group in her psychiatric hospital. If there had been an audience she would have turned her back on it, and if she’d had a script to recite she would have watched out for spying ears. But there was no script, no audience, just a director, who in fact didn’t have a stage. Nonetheless, my daughter had found her way and if some might say it was a dead-end street, what could they say about their own way? I really felt like consoling my daughter and telling her that her little dead-end was finer than the widest highways. I knew where I could find her, she usually hid behind big trees to throw stones at the birds. I don’t look anything like a bird and yet when she saw me she screamed and threw a handful of big pebbles. I think she recognized me. At least she recognized a man. A potential rapist: She hates that. That’s the way she’s been, especially since her nonpsychiatric episode a year ago. She was doing better, she’d gone back to school and even found a temp job as a cashier to pay for it since I was unemployed at the time, but the boss kept telling her she was a dumb jerk and a fat bitch and a fat jerk, all day, behind his mustache, so she quit that job to become a temp prostitute and that disgusted her, that masculine promiscuity, the disrespect for the human person and the assault on feminine dignity.
As for me, I wasn’t so brave. I retreated, and when I turned around I couldn’t see her anymore, but the tree was shaken and trembling. The tree was going into convulsions and howling dickhead, asshole, get the fuck out of here, go roll in your shit. A psychiatrist took me by the arm, dislocating my shoulder, and I asked him if there were any rooms free. That cracked him up, because they were emptying the mental hospitals to fill the prisons. I thought of the policy of family entry and settlement and I felt like going back home.
I left the walls of the hospital thinking about my father, the general-in-chief of the middle class, who never knew his grandchildren, but always had faith in social progress and the great chain of being. He also used to say you had to get a good education, be equipped for life without killing yourself, and find a nice cushy job in the public sector.
Others
I hadn’t done anything to improve my anemia. I didn’t even know if I’d had a biopsy in Cochin or a bio-psych in Sainte-Anne. This kind of word problem could torment me, unsettle me to the max. I never should have walked on my head. A bunch of young hoods saw my weakness right away: “You sick, or you dead already? What were you doing with the crazies? Why’re you hanging out in front of the prison? Why don’t you go home?” They called me a dirty Frenchman; they must have been Arabs or blacks, I have a problem with colors. I said I had indeed passed by the hospital, the convent, the asylum, and the prison, and I’d heard the walls crying, but I hadn’t seen anything. There’s nothing to see on rue de la Santé. Nowhere. I could have walked by shop windows, brasseries, and cafés, I still wouldn’t have seen anything. There might’ve been bright lights, they might’ve been laughing in there, oh yes, but I would’ve walked on. I’m broke, nothing to sell nothing to give. I’m tired. When I go out I get claustrophobic. Outside not at home. At home’s bigger than outside. This city is a dead city the way a language is a dead language. Obsolete. Nothing is alive. People are thinner and thinner. They have the thickness of a light jacket, of spandex tights, jeans with holes in them, or a DVD. I tell these young assholes I can’t hear them, I can’t see them, I don’t even know if they’re there every day, dealing, hassling people, waiting while waiting for life to wait for them. Life doesn’t wait for anyone. They don’t exist. They’re sub-shits.
I tell them that because Hassan, the gardner, is behind me with a big pitchfork and he’s strict about the rules. He doesn’t like to see pre-delinquents smoking in his garden, sleeping on his lawns, or challenging honest passersby.
“You okay?” he asks me.
I don’t tell him I’m just out of the hospital, he doesn’t give a shit. I tell him I’m okay. He tells me about the garden. I don’t give a shit. I wonder what the teenagers are thinking. They’re not thinking, they’re waiting, they push things out of their way. I don’t know what Arabs think either, you never know what they’re thinking, they don’t think, they pray. Hassan gardens while he prays, maybe he prays while he’s gardening. Who knows. I don’t know what women think either—they talk, but do they think what they’re saying or say what they’re thinking? And when they think they don’t think about me but about Brad Pitt or George Clooney, I can tell. I don’t call that thinking. Anyway, my aggressors aren’t black or Arab or young, just morons. You have no idea what morons are thinking. A wild boar, a tiger or a snake, even a mosquito, you can imagine, but a moron? He thinks about himself. He doesn’t think of others. I don’t think of others either, but at least I try to think for others. I hear the walls crying. I don’t piss on prison walls, I don’t tag the walls of hospitals. Suddenly I realize I’m in Hassan’s arms, like an old fag crying his eyes out. It’s the anemia. Seems it dilates the tear ducts. Hassan is extremely embarrassed because he’s a modest, reserved man.
“You should go home.”
I tell him the kids are blocking my way. He drives them away with the back of his hand, like flies. You’d think he’d done that all his life, driving young assholes away like flies. I know them, he says, they’re not really bad. I blurt out that’s exactly what I tell my children about wild boars, snakes, and tigers, they’re not bad, but that being said, it is not unpleasant to see a fence, a wall, an ocean, and a few virgin forests between them and you.
The teenagers are threatening me behind Hassan’s back, they’re cursing me out, they’re cursing my mother and my children to the seventh generation, they’re saying they’re going to whip my ass. In their pants they have either fat dicks or huge knives, but it’s the same humiliation of my human person.
“Leave him alone, he’s crazy in the head,” one of them says. “Go finish yourself off,” he says to me. “We don’t play with dead people.”
“Don’t listen to them,” says Hassan. “They’ll play with anything.”
Elevator
In the elevator a neighbor, blocked breathing, impenetrable face. He looks at me while looking somewhere else. It’s almost like we’re turning our backs on each other while forcing ourselves into a merciless face-to-face confrontation. He looks around thirty, with a fresh, pink complexion. Each new generation is an invasion, a recent wave of immigration trying not so much to integrate into society as to disintegrate me. We have nothing to say to each other and we don’t say it. Well well, he has a little pimple on his lip, that’s normal. One, two, three, four, the floors go by without saying what they’re hiding like the walls on rue de la Santé. The neighbor doesn’t bat an eyelash. Me neither. I look at the pimple on his lip. Our bodies are close. There is nothing between us. As I say that, I don’t know if I mean that nothing separates us or that we have nothing in common between us. I can see his face as if he were an enormous sphinx, or the
Mona Lisa
, every detail, but a huge mystery. I don’t particularly believe in the existence of God but the existence of man remains to be proven. A lot of absence in all that. I have an urge to poke his pimple to verify its material existence. The elevator stops at the sixth floor and the neighbor gets out, says goodbye. No smile. Fuck him, that asshole.
Waiting for What?
Home. It’s on the last floor; above that, there’s the sky. I feel like I’m on vacation here, in transit—away from the world and life. I’m closer to the sky than to the street. The world is locked out. I see the world on TV, it has the consistency of a plasma screen, nice colors, and often there’s background music to muddle up the commentary.
I was wrong to go out. Without the French medical-social system that provides access to free care, I never would have left home, given the price of the scan, the fibro test, the colon test, the ultrasound, and a friendly word of advice.
“You sure took your time,” says Sarah. “What’d you do?”
“When? Nothing.”
(It’s true almost nothing you might as well say little and badly done but after all far away means almost and in a bad way but after all hidden elsewhere or else hidden here crouching inside but disaffected like totally devitalized so this evening nothing more, no thanks, I’m full, a few more steps yes preferably in town without the seasons coming down with the noise and the back of the crowd and the back of the walls and already come back to sleep no doubt or eat to talk a little alone or not watch television and then turn it off and say something always the same thing about finally going to sleep before getting a cold from a window that’s not closed well or shade from a tree there outside night pain and fear of giants first then dwarfs and all kinds of flying and crawling insects in great numbers and a foreign language but not more than a hasty translation than the idea you have of it now furtive with cloud and whirlwind so to be grabbed with a certain precaution before making honey from it on the contrary from your surroundings shapes and noise in the house maybe joyfully but still sort of always the same thing joyful toothless that is pretty little might as well say almost nothing next to two bumblebees in the left ear and the right ear and a sty on your eye first and then deafness and glaucoma the next day and stiffness of the hands and feet and the mouth and lights out of love to the disgust with moving and saying the essential minimum not to mention vain naïve pain and fatigue because well all that why again what can you say if not to warn once again about what whoever didn’t already happen every day and before days of a necessary or optional absence or presence for the proper functioning of the troops or the end of hostilities how to know without foreseeing the ability to worry or despair generating reactions of joy explosions of hatred but I should be asleep already gone to or remained asleep here or there in the same state of a dead or ignorant ignored thing.)
“Nothing? No news is good news. Did you buy some wine at the Nicolas store?”
“Meursault.”
“What’s that package wrapped up with tape?”
“It was in my mailbox this morning. It must be the iPod you ordered on eBay for Chloe’s birthday.”
“Cool! Did you see my leopardskin tights?”
“You dyed your hair again?”
“Yes, to relax a little. I went to the bank because of that business of unpaid rent, it’s a crazy story.”
“It’s always a crazy story.”
“
We’ve never been so alone, fused together in the same madness,lost in a world that has the consistency of a fantasy, it worriesus to death.
I read that in a book by Dardenne, I’m going to write something about it.”
“You’re lucky you can still write.”
(As for me, all I’m good at is waiting for the results of the biopsy. It’s like waiting for a verdict. Ten years, twenty years? A few weeks? And at the same time I don’t give a damn. Nothing I can do about it. The die is cast.)
“Where are the kids?”
“Julien’s at his PlayStation and Chloe’s sleeping over at her girlfriend’s.”
(I have no power over their lives. Here or not here, same thing. I floundered around all day whereas the street was straight. I screwed around, I nearly, I don’t know what I nearly did, I nearly did something I didn’t do I didn’t smile enough, I looked pissed off all day, not what you call an honorable exit.)
“When do you get the results?”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“Talk louder, I’m in the shower.”
Nobody pays attention to me with my dickhead and my asshole. The world turns. Women blossom. China is catching up with the rest of the world. I go out without waiting. Waiting for what?
Closing Time
It’s cold, night. Rue d’Alésia, deserted. Shutters closed. Bar-tabac shop lit up. I’m in the café at the very bottom of rue Gla-cière and rue de la Santé, the light in the jailhouse is diffuse at night, it isn’t lit. Walls eat up the blackness of the sky. Anemic streetlights shining very weakly on the barbed wire. The street is full of murders, fits of madness, creeping illnesses, and a whole planned contagion. The threat of an epidemic, gangrene. Dirty tricks. Everything is maintained there, a shadow zone, like a nuclear power plant. You have the feeling something’s going to happen, finally.
I’m reading a crime book by Albert Camus. Reading and writing for oneself and not counting on other people is a way of being French, being a zero from A to Z. So I’m reading
TheStranger
. I am that stranger. It’s a way of being out of it, being here by chance, in transit.