Aphelia

by Nicol Mikella

  “That one?” he’d asked me.

  I didn’t know how that girl had gotten him. Everything looked so natural for her. I would learn later that her name was Lara. Her apparent perfection was unbearable to me, even violent.

  “Yes, maybe,” I had replied to Louis.

  It was almost one in the morning. Marion was laughing a lot with her friends. Louis and I were amusing ourselves by ordering cocktails to see which fruit or umbrellas they’d be served with, and I was no longer thinking about my credit card. The sensible girl had disappeared, but Julien was still there with two or three other guys. His eyes met mine. I had faith in what was playing out between us, though he hadn’t given me any inviting signals, and it had become clear he wasn’t going to get up to come talk to me. When Marion, tipsy, approached us to suggest walking home, I accepted with relief.

  I straggled behind Louis and Marion, who were holding hands. If only I could have drunk the summer sky. Made it disappear through me, along with the memories of B., who I no longer heard from and who I’d never hear from again. In the spring, some people had filmed a fireball that entered the atmosphere and split in two, in full descent. My eyes fixed in the air, I wished I too could spot my meteorite to make a wish, like you did with shooting stars. Then I felt a presence. I turned around; Julien was walking a few metres behind me. I wasn’t scared. Nothing about him scared me. I knew I already partly possessed him. And yet, I hadn’t done anything special and I was nobody. I was hoping he was examining my legs, while fearing he would do so. I slowed my pace to signal I was waiting for him. We understood each other. We introduced ourselves. My two friends turned around toward us, and Louis smiled with satisfaction.

  We crossed paths with Florence. She too was going home, alone. Louis hadn’t noticed her, too concentrated on not losing his balance. She immediately understood what was going on between Julien and me. Impossible as it seemed, I felt her small face, symmetrical with mine, was reflecting my mistake. She was judging me. It was obvious she didn’t want to look like me anymore, because I would always disappoint her. We didn’t slow down to say hello to each other. Maybe if we had, she would have slipped me a word about what had happened to me at the bar earlier that summer. But no. Like everyone else, she was trying to forget that night, then she would forget it completely. A second later, she vanished around the bend in the street.

  I assured Louis they could go home without me. I would stay with my stranger for a bit. Too drunk to worry, too anxious to find himself in bed with Marion, Louis left me there.

  Our steps took Julien and me to the railway that cut the city in two. There weren’t any streetlights. Without saying anything, we contemplated the sprawling black brushwood. The air was pleasant—there was something country-like about it, and we took the time to savour it. A few weeks before, Marion told me she’d once made love in this spot. Next to Julien, who was no longer speaking, I became nostalgic. The first time I made love. My first time: Louis leaning over and taking one of my breasts between his lips in the darkness of the park where we hung out after school. The moment he entered me and, disconcerted, excited at the mere idea of the gesture, I came, despite the pain and the grating of the swing beneath our weight. I burst out laughing. Julien turned toward me, amused.

  “This is what I love most in the world,” I said. “Being in the dark, quiet.”

  Julien agreed. I asked him if he should get home, thinking again of the beauty who’d accompanied him earlier.

  “I think I settled down too quickly in life,” he replied.

  “Me, I need my life to be settled.”

  I told him I was recently separated and was living like a vagabond at Louis’s place. But I hadn’t told Julien how that story had ended. I would never tell him.

  We became sad, I wasn’t quite sure at which moment. It happened, like those things happen at that hour of the night. I brushed my hand against his, sitting in the grass. I clutched his pinky with my index for one second, then moved away, down the railway tracks. Some pebbles were wedged into my sandals.

  Julien caught up with me.

  “Do you want to have a last drink?”

  He took me to his new condo. I was flabbergasted. And yet he didn’t brag. For him, these things were natural: the stereo, the king-size bed, the glossy hardwood floors. I thought I would be happy with someone like that, someone who would protect me. Julien. I could wake up each morning without having to ask myself if I should leave. We drank a beer between the two of us, before he told me he couldn’t do that. But as soon as I left, I knew he wouldn’t wait long to do it. He’d written down my number.

  I listened to the wind rise. It made the windows groan and the trees bend over. This had been going on for several hours now. Those who ventured outside ran the risk of flying away. And finally, it happened: the next day, people on social media shared a video of a private party where an inflatable castle took off in the wind, with two little ones inside it. The kids had been rescued, but the incident left behind the fascinating image of a castle lost between earth and sky.

  A sudden squall made the walls tremble. This terrible season was keeping us constantly on alert. The gusts were making me grind my teeth. I wandered in the dark rooms without turning on the light. My nightshirt and panties were drenched in sweat. I opened the curtains of the living room window to see which trees had been uprooted, which house had lost its roof. At 11:45, I drank a double espresso to render my insomnia inevitable. I wondered if Mia was still awake. While the wind was surging all around, making it seem like the end of the world, I imagined goose bumps rising on her skin. Eagerly waiting for a text message from her, I hounded Louis instead. I sent him long messages describing the early signs of wrinkles on my forehead, or Florence’s tight-lipped expression at the store. I was writing in all caps so he’d wake up. Julien was sleeping too. His back, glistening with sweat, was swelling with the rhythm of his breathing. At night, men always sleep like rocks, but during the day they never shut up.

  With B. I hadn’t needed to talk. When Louis had introduced us, we shook hands, but it was a hollow gesture. Useless, I thought, as I recalled the moment for the umpteenth time. Like being introduced to your own brother or child. Already, we knew. We had always understood one another. What Louis and I didn’t know, however, was the violence of B.’s departure from our lives. How we would have to keep him at a distance, tear ourselves away from him.

  Until that fateful evening, B.’s aggression had been limited to pretending he still loved me, all while ignoring the immense gulf being dug between us. His strategy had been coldness. I’d come to believe he didn’t see me anymore. But that time, he had proved he saw me more than ever. My black eye was constantly full of tears that would accumulate and overflow. The other one stayed empty and dry. I was torn between terror and relief at not being completely invisible. At first, Louis tried to preserve their friendship, despite everything. Like me, he was dependent on B., who aroused in both of us all the nostalgia in the world, all the tenderness too. He was enhanced by his friend’s aura. Back when they walked through bar doors together, people would turn their heads to watch. Louis benefitted from the effect B. had on girls. I had acted like all this left me indifferent, saying it would be a shame to waste a friendship over a drunken night. I was lying. Then the two friends grew apart without anything being said, as the extent of his actions finally sunk into our heads.

  Louis wasn’t responding to my messages, and I was lethargic and hopeless. I took a pixelated photo of myself in the darkness. My hair pulled up carelessly and coming undone over my neck, my expression neutral, worn out, lit up by the cold blue light of the television. I sent it to Mia with the caption “insomnia.” Then I cried. I had just realized that in the upheaval of running into Florence that afternoon, I had pressured Julien to leave. We hadn’t bought anything for the house.

  A few minutes later, I received a photo of Mia in return. It was taken upside down, her curly hair spilling out onto the bedspread. “Insomnia too.”
Then: “The wind is making me crazy.”

  I slipped into bed beside Julien, struggling to resist the temptation to reply. After an hour of agitation, I finally dozed off. I dreamt of the girl from the parking lot, who was swimming in pursuit of silver fish. As she was moving away from the shore, I cried after her to come back before she got her feet caught in the algae and disappeared into the deep water. But she didn’t hear me.

  The next day, after my second night of insomnia in a row, I told Louis I wasn’t going to meet him at the bar.

  *

  She lived on the third floor of a triplex. I rang. Footsteps reverberated at the far end of the apartment, and a head appeared through the frosted, diamond-shaped glass of the door. I felt burnt out after a weekend when I hadn’t actually left the house.

  Mia kissed me on the cheeks and we attempted a brief embrace. The inside of her apartment had her smell, that smell I couldn’t quite identify. I thought of pine and reddish skin. She guided me through the rooms of a big, well-lit one-bedroom apartment. The door to her bedroom was closed. In the kitchen, she stopped.

  “And so, this is where I live.”

  “It’s nice.”

  “You think? I do what I can.”

  “I like it a lot,” I said sincerely.

  I asked to go to the bathroom and Mia indicated a door hidden in the corner. I pulled down my shorts. The metallic odour of blood spread throughout the room. To my great surprise, the fabric of my panties was stained. I wiped myself. I was in the middle of my cycle and told myself my guilt must have fuelled the wound.

  I opened the medicine cabinet on top of the sink, taking care to do it as quietly as possible. There was nothing to discover there, just the usual products. I inhaled the soaps and shampoos tucked into a shower caddy attached to the ceramic. They didn’t smell like Mia and I put them back, disappointed. I remembered to flush, and the red thread flattened on the surface of the water before flowing to the bottom like the grenadine in a Shirley Temple.

  For a moment, the only sound was a spoon hitting glass to dissolve the sugar in tumblers of homemade iced tea. I watched Mia’s fingers, deformed through the pitcher of yellowish liquid with slices of lemon and mint leaves. She’d made the tea for me. I lowered my eyes to give her the time to observe the curve of my eyelashes and the freckles on my nose. They came out with the sun and would disappear again come winter. Hers, much more numerous, were there to stay. It had never occurred to me to wonder if Mia was prettier than me. And yet it was normally the first reflex I had with women. The answer could be yes or no, and I had to learn to live with that answer. To live according to it. At that time I still believed it was like that for everyone.

  The kitchen walls were painted the blue-grey of the sea in January. The shelves on the walls were decorated with figurines and unusual rocks. I remembered that Mia really liked to travel. Some of the objects would have seemed ridiculous if they hadn’t been hers. From where I was, I could see that the living room was decorated with paintings and framed sketches, which I supposed were the work of her clients.

  Mia smiled. I knew that if I opened my mouth, she would understand all my words. Suffocation. The condo. She’d make little necklaces out of the blood clots burning in my belly.

  “Would you rather drink wine?” she asked after a few minutes.

  I thanked her.

  “I didn’t dare ask.”

  We went outside with a bottle of white and sat on the balcony overlooking the street. The sun softened me. It was snowing June pollen that was taken by the wind before accumulating on the ground and transforming the flowerbeds into old women’s hair. I watched the white heaps roll onto the sidewalk below. We drank the wine to quench our thirst as hastily as if it were water. I finished a second glass, and, taken by a sudden urge to open up, told her about how I’d seen the girl walking from far away, at the end of an industrial street where no one ever went. Mia was silent, listening to me talk. There was a pause.

  “Did you see what she looked like?” she asked.

  My throat tightened. She’d guessed exactly what I was thinking. By now everyone had heard the story of the woman who’d disappeared. It was impossible to escape it—her image was on the first page of the newspapers that inked the hands of readers before amassing on the floor and benches of the metro. The news showed continually on the televised screens that reflected on windows in public places. I nodded.

  “Yes, but not clearly. It was dark.”

  Deep down, I was certain it was the same person. It hit me: while most girls I knew would be caught up in their own worlds or orbiting around some dangerous centre of attraction, the walker had pursued her path without deviation. We served ourselves more wine. I thought out loud.

  “In this kind of investigation, the first forty-eight hours are crucial,” I said.

  But this period had already passed by now. It had been more than a week since she was supposed to show up at her partner’s. More than a week since I’d witnessed her walk. The hair, the pieces of fabric torn from clothing, the bus tickets fallen to the ground: everything is lost after the first days. Animals would move the evidence, thinking they were playing. Now the media blamed her boyfriend for not having alerted the authorities until the day after her disappearance.

  “Why did he take all that time?” insisted Mia, without waiting for an answer from me.

  We were silent for a moment. The leaves from the top of an ash tree were falling against the bars of the railing. They turned around in all directions, green then grey. What type of guy doesn’t worry about the absence of the one he loves?

  “I liked men a lot, before,” Mia said, as though she had read my thoughts.

  “And what happened?”

  “I like them less.”

  She threw me a knowing look, then burst out laughing. I laughed too.

  The balcony abounded with cactus and dazzling green plants. I admitted to Mia that I systematically let mine wilt. The withered leaves would amass on the floor of our living room, the only imperfection in the impeccable interior. Julien would vacuum with composure. Mia smiled, and we sipped our drinks to dispel the uneasiness created by the reminder of Julien. I told Mia that deep down, men hated me. It was an intuition that had come to me a long time ago. They confused their contempt for me with desire. They treated me like meat, I’d told Louis more than once. He’d responded immediately that it was because I presented myself that way.

  “I’m sure you’re very popular with them,” Mia said.

  She considered me, half-amused, half-serious. I was going to tell her I’d had enough to drink. But instead I leaned toward her and we kissed. Her mouth tasted like wine. She placed her hand on my hip. My vagina woke up, painfully, like it did during my period. I detached myself from her. She replaced a strand of hair behind my ear. Did I have to go further, and truly reveal myself? With Julien, I had omitted to do so. Neglected to say that most of the time I wasn’t happy, and that I no longer knew how to return the love of those who loved me.

  I left Mia’s as night fell. The next day, the bleeding stopped.

  Five

  There was always someone in the metro who looked like her. I often thought I saw her in another car, through the dirty plastic windows where people had used a key to carve messages. She would enter the train car as I was leaving it, passing through bodies and muddled murmurs. I would see a redheaded woman pass through the crowd in a flash. Time was distorted—it flowed differently. Out of fear of what could happen, I pushed away the possibility of another encounter, but we kept corresponding. The desire to see her again was unbearable. I wanted to talk about her, but I felt like I was lying if I said my friend. I didn’t have the right words. But the feelings, yes. I would content myself by innocently saying her name, Mia.

  I went outside into the open air. The people passing were bathed in sunlight, but the heat was less all-encompassing that day, a welcome respite. I wasn’t wearing any makeup and I offered myself up to everyone in the hopes someone would
take me. On the street, I met the eyes of men. They watched me watching them. I needed a lot of concentration to find Mia everywhere she was hiding, in the trees, at the ends of alleys, in the middle of the park, in the pond. I sat down facing the water.

  Julien came up behind me with our picnic. I often used to come here with B. What a weird idea, to go to the same places as before, but with someone else. To keep going as if there’d never been a breakup. Julien sat down and pulled me to him. I closed my eyes. For a second, I believed it would be the thin, brown arms of B. that would catch me. I curled my entire body against Julien’s. He rested his chin on my head. I caressed his arms, my hands catching on the fabric of his shirt. We started eating and drinking wine, using utensils and disposable cups. He’d come directly from the office, and he apologized for having left me alone for another Sunday. Sitting on the grass in his ironed clothes, he had a strange effect on me. After dinner, he started collecting the leftover food. He got up so we could go, but I asked him to stay a little longer. It had been an eternity since we’d contemplated the calmness of the night together.

  “You don’t go out with Louis anymore?” he asked suddenly, like he’d finally just noticed what had changed in my life.

  “I’m tired these days.”

  Julien agreed, happy. Without ever opposing them, he’d never loved those Friday nights when I didn’t reply to his text messages, and when I would come home at dawn making too much noise. He came near me to kiss me, but I avoided his mouth. Instead I slipped my face along his his neck and kissed his collarbone. I looked at the ground over his shoulder, then everything became blurred by tears. I cleared my throat.

  I had always loved the way the water in this pond moved. It was good for the mind. B. had explained that the pumps were directing the water so it converged near the fountain at the center. The mechanism was camouflaged by tall cattails. The water disgusted him. He wouldn’t let me dip my feet in it, saying it was dirty. But it didn’t stop me from wanting to swim in it. I could picture my body mixing with the stems of the water lilies. The autumn after our separation, I returned to the park alone. The pond was empty and the basin was littered with trash. The park stank of dog breath. B. was right.