The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (9 page)

Alone in the apartment, David brooded endlessly on his memories. They rose from the depths of his skull like a distant buzzing, a drift of bees converging on a target. They’d start out fuzzy, blurry, then sharpen and suddenly there they were, swarming him, refusing to go back into their box. It was, in large part, to flee his memories that David lingered at Antonine’s, but the baker always wound up gently kicking him out for fear of harmful gossip at the shop. Then he would go home, a great floury loaf under each arm, like a sleepwalker careful to maintain his balance, and there he was, back with his memories. Oh, he tried to read, but snatches of the past would lie in ambush, waiting
between the pages of old novels. Here was a ticket to a movie theater long since demolished, there a wrapper from a vanished brand of candy. These improvised bookmarks were like so many traps. They would each suddenly reveal themselves to be fraught with incredibly clear images of almost hallucinatory precision. He’d be leafing through No. 9 in the adventures of Special Agent XBY-00, and suddenly everything would come back to him: smells, colors … He saw Hugo again, his friend when he was twelve, the one they called Hugo Thundercalves at school because his calves were like a cyclist’s. Hugo, a little centaur of the suburbs, joined at the hip to his bike, pant legs rolled up so as not to “catch a spot of grease.” Yes, first came Hugo, his fat face gleaming with effort, and then the pampered, doctored bicycle he spent all this time fixing up and oiling. David had long harbored the conviction that Hugo slept with his bike, fists clenched around the handlebars, pedaling in the space under the covers. Hugo was training to become a pro. With astounding masochism for one so young, he crammed rocks in his schoolbag and launched himself at the steepest hills. People said he was the “son of a lush,” a bit off his rocker. It was in large part thanks to Hugo that David could devote himself to the louche delights of theft. The idea had come to him just like that, without malice aforethought. One day he’d walked past the cluttered courtyard of Merlin, the bric-a-brac trader, and thought: “I have to steal something.” A bedazzling, Pascalian revelation. From then on, his every thought was for the twisted, dented, unmatched objects that littered the tinker’s lair. He started talking to Hugo about
it, laying out the basis of what would become their Wednesday raids.

“You’ll stay out front, on your two-wheeler, feet on the pedals,” David whispered, “ready to go as soon as I come out running.”

“Uh, feet?” Hugo objected. “I can’t do both feet. I’ll fall right over.”

“I didn’t mean literally.” David was getting impatient. “I’ll jump on in back and you take off downhill. No one’ll be able to catch us.”

Their eyes shone. In their imaginations, the bicycle suddenly took on the aspect of a curious mount, half-horse, half–scrap metal, carrying them in a cloud of dust toward the painted backdrop of the horizon. “Sure, hunky-dory,” Hugo approved, “but in order to pedal like a champ I need to get my strength up. Can’t you go buy me some nuclear suppositories?”

Suppositories that gave off nuclear energy were his other hobbyhorse. They came from obsessively reading an American comic during a bad throat infection that had kept him bedridden for more than a week. In the delirium of fever, Hugo had strangely lumped together superheroes, whose powers came straight from accidental exposure to radiation, and the antibiotic suppositories the family doctor had prescribed. Hugo was a nice kid, but a bit off his rocker, a fact of which David was occasionally reminded … especially when he had to walk into a pharmacy and ask for nuclear suppositories. He would’ve liked to sneak away, but Hugo would be standing right there at the window, trying to read his friend’s lips. No chance now of lying to Hugo, or tricking
him; David had no choice but to go through with it all—stammer his request while trying not to go poppy-red and look too much like a moron. Invariably, he would come out of the drugstore empty-handed.

“Well?” Hugo panted, quivering with impatience.

“Prescription only,” David would lie. “They wouldn’t give me any.”

“Aw, darn!” the cyclist grumbled. “Don’t worry, we’ll try somewhere else. It’s bound to work someday.” And he would cross the name of the pharmacy off the endless list of dispensaries copied from the phone book.

Since the grown-ups were clearly against them, they had to resign themselves to undertaking their first raid without the help of nuclear suppositories, trusting themselves to Hugo’s calves alone. David had come tearing into Merlin’s courtyard just as the old man was nursing his second daily liter of wine, seized an old clock with a broken face, and turned on his heels to exit enemy territory before the junk dealer came out of his trance. No sooner was David over the doorsill than he leapt onto Hugo’s bike rack as if onto a horse, fresh from robbing a bank … which is to say, horribly bruising his balls. The speed the bike picked up going down Commerce Street had seemed miraculous, and sent actual shivers of holy terror racing up their spines. Just before he went home, David had tossed the clock in a trash can. He didn’t know what made him do it. A fit of extravagance? Maybe Hugo’s craziness was catching? Would he go off his rocker too and start hitting up every pharmacy in town for nuclear suppositories?

The next week, they’d carried out another raid, and the week
after that too, and … It was like a curse, a vicious cycle whose workings David didn’t understand. He would pass by old Merlin’s secondhand shop and
click
, something would go off, a sudden gluttony for that heap of shapeless old things all jumbled up together, those mountains of used tires, cast-iron skillets gray with ash, pipes that looked like mortar casings after a battle. Over all this hovered some undefinable smell, the smell of the past, of things so old they’d seen it all: the world and its secrets. David beelined for these marvels, hands outstretched like claws. He sneaked into enemy territory, dashing low to the cobblestones, hair on end with terror, his mind intent only on the loot and a quick U-turn. Hugo was no longer satisfied with covering their getaway; he grew more demanding, raising the bar a notch with each new incursion.

“Gotta go a bit farther each time,” he decreed. “That pile of clocks is too easy. There’s nothing but trash outside, the good stuff’s hiding back there in the shed. No two ways about it, buddy, you’ve got to dive deeper.” Dive deeper? David had risen to the challenge, filling his lungs with air like a pearl diver as he entered the secondhand shop. But Hugo was right: old Merlin kept his best finds all the way at the back of the hangar, the aged items he sold to antique dealers. But they always tossed the haul no matter what. As soon as they got their hands on it, it lost all value, stopped glittering—like gold gone suddenly to lead. They’d ditch it in a garbage can or by the side of the road. Hugo took a liking to the forays. They were just too much fun; old Merlin’d never corner them! Now David was stealing candlesticks, bronzes, statuettes of chipped marble. But these objects, carefully scoped out with his father’s binoculars, so feverishly coveted, seemed ugly and soiled
as soon as they were past the doors of the junk shop. It was as if some magic charm governed fat old Merlin’s territory.

“Don’t you get it?” David muttered one day. “That’s why he doesn’t even bother to stop us. He knows everything we steal becomes worthless the minute it falls into our hands. He’s a wizard.”

“You’re getting as crazy as I am,” Hugo snickered. Then he added, “True, it looks a lot nicer inside. Maybe you’re not going deep enough, is all.”

Two weeks after that conversation, David became aware that his mother was also a shoplifter. The discovery astounded him. They didn’t want for anything back home; David’s father, a salesman, worked for a company that specialized in installing wall safes. His clientele consisted almost entirely of small business owners he called on from one end of the country to the other, hardly ever setting foot back at home more than twice a month. Mama was tall and thin, but pretty, with a face like a ferret lost in a thicket of blonde hair she never managed to tame. She didn’t talk much, and spent whole afternoons deep in an armchair, wearing nothing but a lace slip, smoking cigarette after cigarette. The room became blue around her, filling with a suffocating fog. When she spoke, bitter scrolls of smoke escaped her lips, as if from the jaws of a dragon slumbering in a fairy tale. Bored, she would cast about for a quarter of an hour, chewing on her nails with their flaking polish, then dive back into the movie magazines that were all she read. Whenever David tried to speak to her, she would muss his hair and murmur gently, “Poor darling boy, I’ve got a migraine. You picked a bad day. Let’s talk about it some other time.”

She was never mean, or sullen, never yelled or scolded. But each time he tried to make contact, she withdrew with a sad, impish grin as if just being near other people chafed her skin. “Poor darling boy …” she’d begin, and drift off.

She always had a migraine. Later, she went so far as to use the word “period,” because it was surer to send a terrified David running. Her hands, clothes, and hair smelled of smoke. She drifted barefoot from one room to the next in a pink silk slip, her pack of cigarettes and lighter in hand. It was a big soldier’s lighter, nickel-plated, on which had been engraved a somewhat terrifying inscription David never tired of trying to fathom.

Madame Zara. Clairvoyant. Psychic readings, summoning of the deceased, speaking with the dead
. He’d questioned Mama more than once about the origins of this phrase without ever getting an answer. “She’s just a lady,” she said one day, evasively. “A lady I used to work for before I met your father.” That was all he ever found out.

Mama stole from department stores. She probably always had, but David—too young then, and too distracted by the spectacle of toys—had never noticed before. Mama stole nonchalantly, as if in a trance, without even trying to look around and make sure there were no guards. She stole as if sleepwalking, vanishing objects up her sleeves like a music hall prestidigitator. David was convinced she got rid of the fruit of her larceny just like he did. This discovery persuaded him they both suffered from the same hereditary disease … perhaps even a curse. He spoke to no one about it, not even Hugo. Watching his mother, he realized she had no fear of being caught red-handed. She probably had some
magic charm that made her legerdemain invisible to the eyes of salesclerks and plainclothes cops. He took great pride in this, and considered himself a fool for having trembled even a moment for her sake. She was good, real good. She could’ve whisked an entire store into her pockets without anyone being any the wiser.
She had a gift
. Besides, she moved as if possessed; you could tell from the glassy look in her eyes when she tucked an item up her sleeve.

Whenever Mama operated, salesclerks and customers became blind. Morillard, head of the plainclothes division, took to wheeling around the various departments like a bat deranged by the light. He was a sight to see, eyes wild, the few hairs he had left pasted down with brilliantine, and his little mustache perched precariously above his spindly upper lip, circling like a hound flustered by the wind, a hound that had lost the scent of its prey. His instincts told him something was going on
right under his nose
, but he didn’t know where. David would hear the detective whistling behind his back; he could even smell the vegetable soup under the man’s cheap aftershave. Morillard kept circling, circling, a myopic matador looking vainly about for the bull … and Mama would fill her pockets with rings, bracelets that she never wound up wearing. David was proud of her. When he thought about it, he always wound up wondering if he and Mama weren’t one of those doomed couples in noir novels. He was drunk with impunity. There was nothing he enjoyed watching so much as her sauntering unhurried from a department store, pockets full of glittering costume junk torn from the display case. The cherry on top, the thumb to the nose, was when she’d stop right in front of the cops ready to ambush her at the exit and take her sweet time
knotting a scarf around her neck like an honest citizen beyond reproach. He had the feeling shoplifting was just the beginning, that soon he and Mama would really go wild and take this town to the cleaners. They’d become kingpins. There’d be no crime too low: blackmail, murder … No one would know what they looked like. By day they’d stroll down the avenues, hand in amiable hand, but by night—ah, by night! Faces hidden under scarlet cowls, they’d sow terror, eviscerating the safes of the leisured class, and the leisured classes themselves if those old buggers made so much as a move to call for help.

They’d scour the town, making it cough up all its ill-gotten gains, and no one would be any the wiser. It’d be their secret. In the meantime, they shoplifted: Mama in department stores, David at the junk shop. They were in fact very close to each other, even if they never talked about it. Their connivance simply lay on another level, deeper, more mysterious, where words were no use. Sometimes David wondered where Mama had learned to steal so skillfully. Had she been part of a ring of pilfering youths trained in secret schools by masters lighter-fingered than magicians? He’d read a novel about it and, for a few days, had felt an actual vocational call for pickpocketing. In reality, he knew nothing about Mama’s past. She never brought it up, never said, “When I was your age …” What ties bound her to the strange Madame Zara whose name was engraved on her lighter, a lady who specialized in summoning the dead?

During one raid on the junk shop, things took a sudden turn. Just as David leapt onto Hugo’s bike rack, old man Merlin burst from his shack and hurled a jankety alarm clock at David’s head.
The chunk of metal struck the boy in the temple, throwing him from the seat. Half-unconscious, David rolled across the cobblestones while his buddy took off, shrieking with terror, nose pressed to the handlebars to duck the wind on the way down Commerce Street. The junkman seized David by the scruff of his neck like a cat he was about to drown, demanded his address, and, without another word, dragged him home. Bad timing: Dad had just come back from his rounds and was getting ready to enjoy a long weekend with his feet up in slippers. The confrontation was a horrible one. The scrap collector laid out in great detail every single incursion the “little rapscallion” had made. He’d established a daunting (and highly exaggerated) list of objects plundered. He demanded compensation on the spot, or he’d go and press charges. Dad paid; his face was livid as candle wax. When old Merlin was gone, he advanced on David, slowly unbuckling his belt with the clear intent of using it as a whip, but Mama intervened.