22.
The Luxembourg Garden in the spring, when the stained-glass light moves through the trees, allows one to daydream about one’s most vivid memories. For a few days Cédric felt himself coming alive again through his earliest recollections. The purest sensations from his childhood, which continually returned to him intact between ordeals, revitalized everything with an air of novelty. He’d spent the past weeks taking multiple psycho-technical exams, undergoing neuropsychological assessments and other biological tests amid an army of leading medical experts from France, Italy, and elsewhere. In his case, there were countless risk factors. He owed entirely to Lorna the fact that he’d managed to escape compulsory quarantine after several months of functional rehabilitation and convalescence. An excellent investigative journalist, she’d used the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to force his affable jailers to give him back his freedom. Because he was not insane, a drug addict, an alcoholic, or homeless, nor was he likely to spread a contagious disease, there were no grounds for hospitalization without consent, and Lorna, despite warnings and intimidations, did not have to go to court.
Cédric had returned with a sort of sorrowful pleasure to his apartment on rue du Regard, to his books, and to his old habits, as if they were a precious part of him. When he opened his closets, he was truly dismayed to discover that his shoes no longer fit. His former ways, however, gradually brought him back some peace of mind. Still, the bathroom mirror never failed to reveal to him what a medical monster he’d become. He was alive through some miracle. In this hallowed hour of late morning in the Luxembourg Garden, with his relative autonomy, it seemed to him that his survival was like a new dawn at the mouth of a river. Whatever happened now could never be worse than the tragedy he’d already experienced. Why shouldn’t he forsake ordinary illusions, starting with the need to be seductive, and his superfluous desires, his opinions, his hope? The lovely light of the moment, the sunlight dappling the leaves and the faces of students who laughed as they strolled about should be fully sufficient for his relative well-being. Though he had lost everything when he’d lost his body—his emotional bearings and the conventional methods of relating to others—he still had the ability to go about freely or to end it all. He remembered having accepted when he was in a semi-conscious state the idea of the transplant, thinking that if he didn’t die right away, at least the operation would offer him sufficient mobility to commit suicide. But the taste for life is as tenacious as a tick. Although, fiber after fiber, his spinal cord recovery was still imperfect, after a few months it had allowed him to regain his mobility in space, so that now he could wander equipment-free among the statues and chestnut trees of the Garden. Of course he still hobbled slightly, and stiffness and tics made him resemble a disjointed marionette, while mortal panic at the slightest cold prevented him from mixing with crowds or taking public transportation; nonetheless, he had a sense of rebirth once he was out in the fresh air. He needed to forget his private impotence and the cruelty of both being and not being himself; more than anything, he needed to forget the faceless question that had obsessed him night and day since his abetted breakout from Dr. Schoeler’s hospital. The body he inhabited had once had a genetic and social identity. Anonymous voices sometimes whispered to him through the abyss of his brain. They murmured from deep within his organs. It was a siren song at the edges of unknown reefs, as if he should let himself be carried off by this transplanted body and abandon himself to the outrageous question that this body, impossible to subjugate, was repeatedly asking as it beat on its intestinal walls to the rhythm of his heart: Who am I? Once he was outside, however, walking unsteadily among the statues and trees, he forgot his bodily prison and all the impediments of his implausible handicap.
His solitude, regained after all the media hounding and the requirements of his rehab, paradoxically opened new horizons for him: once again he could fantasize freely in the May sun, beneath the flowers of a handkerchief tree or a red buckeye tree, even though he was followed everywhere he went. None of the movements around him escaped his sight, whether the wake of a child’s sailboat in the octagonal basin or the figure of a bodyguard assigned to watch over him behind the rows of lindens. He had developed rare brain activity, a hypersensitivity not far from hallucination. Indeed his neurologists had warned him about the probability of mental disturbances: not only was there the trauma of the transplant, but his brain stem had also been connected de facto with another organic and reflex memory, heterogeneous energies, a peripheral nervous system that was perhaps inassimilable, and that “second brain,” the gut, whose spectrum of influence we still do not know. What was happening to Cédric was a chance empowerment, a lasting synchronicity between two independent series, a relation of uncertainty.
Without his knowledge and without straining the spine, Cédric shrugged the phantom shoulders of his former body. A flock of pigeons came plunging down at his feet with the sound of whistling sabers. A woman exasperated by her children stared at him for some time. Beneath his disguise, did she recognize the man with the severed head from the tabloids? Cédric went to limp around the octagonal basin where the little sailboats with their colored hulls were bobbing. His nurse followed him from a distance, carrying a first-aid kit. All those people on his heels did not prevent him from imagining a life other than this solid-gold lab rat/witness, even if that life had no future. He’d had enough of the interview requests from all over the world, of the more or less delusional threats of kidnapping, enough of harassment by all sorts of maniacs and advances from innkeepers or publishers and, as a result, enough of the security people from the division of temporary missions of the Protection Service. For now he was living incognito in his Paris apartment and was informed of all this buzz around him by everyone in Turin, Geneva, and the rehabilitation center of the Rult-Milleur château, where he was supposedly still residing. He had taken back his assumed identity without whetting his neighbors’ curiosity. If Cédric Allyn-Weberson was almost as famous as Neil Armstrong or Yuri Gagarin, the journalist Cédric Erg had long been forgotten. Behind the mask with which he thought he’d been hiding from his father’s vigilance, at least now he could disappear from the world. He knew that if he were to flee, he would be hunted down wherever he went, like the thief who’d stolen the blue diamond from the Saudi palace. His goal was not to change his life. He could hardly imagine he would last another year. Yet Cédric would have liked to learn the provenance of the moods that affected him and of all those sensations on which he was now dependent. He was filled with unbearable discomfort, a kind of indignant lack of privacy that some psychiatrists attempted to explain with the words “phase of narcissistic appropriation with homosexual components.” Bullshit! He simply felt a pain in his emptiness and was terribly ashamed. “Who told you that you were naked?” his creator asks Adam. Before Cédric’s accident, when the question of his physical completeness never had reason to arise, his nakedness belonged to him alone, without his having to think about it, like the sense of self. “Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.” These words from an English novel came back to him. Today everything reminded him of this corrosive obscenity. For this reason among many others he wanted to know everything about his divided self, to decipher the true nature of this lack of privacy. Lorna was taking liberties he’d never seen her take before: a kind of animal, exclusive pleasure. With reckless abandon, she granted him only the role of voyeur. Why, incidentally, did he think about those society women dipping their handkerchiefs in Eugen Weidmann’s blood at the foot of the guillotine? Something overpowering was blacking out all his reasoning. Never had he felt those tetanic impulses that would have pushed him to commit suicide or murder had they been permanently embedded in him. But his fits of jealousy, self-destructive madness, and patricidal fury barely crossed the line of taboo shared by all normally constituted human beings before he defended himself against them with all his might. Nonetheless, he
was determined by whatever means necessary to understand the significance of the slow and uncontrollable anamorphosis—almost a mutation—of his slightest perceptions and desires, as well as his memory that, at certain times of day, took on the mysterious coloring of the ocean floor or an aquarium.
The clock on the Luxembourg Palace chimed six times. Cédric was heading toward the exit closest to the Orangerie. The nurse and the plainclothes agent from the secret service—his “bodyguards,” but what body were they guarding?—met near rue de Fleurus while a black sedan parked nearby. No one was waiting for him on rue du Regard. He had been careful not to say anything to the people closest to him, not even to Lorna. His telephone was probably tapped. Under a few items of clothing tossed hastily inside, his suitcase was filled with medicine: antibiotics, sleeping pills, and several small bottles of the immunosuppressive drugs cyclosporine and tacrolimus. A taxi was to pick him up late at night to take him to Charles de Gaulle Airport. He was still a free man with up-to-date identification papers and an autonomous brain. Weren’t his rights “natural, inalienable, and sacred”? The enemy was the intrusive matter, all those invasive dreams! Cédric pondered the slice of deep-blue sky above the rooftops. Was there any cure for a disinherited head?
23.
Airplane crash in Scotland on the night of Wednesday, October 12. A Boeing 727-200 departing from Paris and headed for Reykjavík crashed at about midnight a few hundred yards from Inchgrundle, a town in the north of Scotland, with 149 passengers and 7 crew members aboard. Delayed over an hour at Charles de Gaulle Airport following a minor incident, flight S-413 seems to have left its flight path in order to avoid a severe storm. The causes of the accident remain unclear. No news as yet if there are any survivors.
“Very unlikely!” thought Swen Geislar as he transmitted the night’s main dispatch over the agency network before releasing it to the clients: approximately two thousand media outlets throughout France and the Francophone world. He glanced at the zinc rooftops and the boulevard. The light from the streetlamps prolonged a chalky-white dusk. Once again he smiled with obstinate discretion at the thought that nothing until now had come to interfere with his projects: he took on his duties with the restraint of a clergyman, and none of his colleagues dared to laugh at his slight handicap. Rigid in front of his computer screen, he quietly recited a precept of Sun Tzu: “He who excels at war directs the movements of others and does not let anyone dictate his own.”
But world news flooded in, and Swen, in the crosshairs of the most violent current events, had the impression that he was a foot soldier holed up under a barrage of universal fire. He steadfastly carried out his drudgery as an intermediary with the fanciful idea of making an insignificant stylistic change, adding or subtracting a word or a slight hyperbole to each of his transmissions. All it took was a comma, an ambiguous synonym, or an uncommon literary allusion. Swen regurgitated the dispatches he received in basic French. His mind haunted by the stunning Lorna Leer, sometimes he would confess his torment aloud as if he were sleepwalking, all while typing on his keyboard.
The military skirmish between Turkey and Iran once again risks inflaming the situation in the Middle East. Behind this conflict involving Western geopolitics and interests, some commentators see an unavoidable confrontation between Russia and the United States on the horizon.
One hundred heavy transport vessels carrying tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian militants from all parts of the Western world left the port of Larnaca, in southern Cyprus, on Friday morning in an attempt to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza strip. Jerusalem has promised to “sink this anti-Semitic armada to the bottom of the sea.”
An American think tank working for the Pentagon has provided evidence that military action against most terrorist groups would be ineffective. In order to reach this conclusion, researchers analyzed hundreds of thousands of documents regarding 948 terrorist groups identified throughout the world over the past forty years.
The British Home Office admitted to having “mislaid” the personal data of some 60,000 dangerous prisoners. The encrypted file contained the names of the majority of repeat offenders known for their “prolific criminal behavior” who had to be “monitored as a matter of priority.”
Swen’s indrawn laughter was more like an asthmatic’s coughing fit. He wondered what “prolific criminal behavior” could mean to an Englishman. For a moment, Lorna Leer’s face blurred his vision or his screen. He bit his lips and moaned like a wounded puppy. A jumble of sentences filled his mind: “You will keep on forgetting me, whereas I will live in the hell of memory. It’s raining but not a drop reaches me. Could it be that I didn’t love you enough?”
Swen’s confusion lasted only a few seconds. He looked at his watch, then slid his rolling chair away from the metal desk, put on his duffle coat, and crossed the half-empty editorial office in his disjointed robot fashion. In the corridor, above the wide ashen leaves of a rubber tree, a mechanical pendulum clock from another era marked for eternity quarter to twelve. He instinctively checked the time on his watch once again. The weather forecaster, a small bald man with a wide scar that changed colors, called to him in a reedy voice in front of the elevators.
“So? You quitting?”
“Nothing but boring human-interest stories going on,” said the stringer. “I’m outta here.”
“Let’s grab a coffee across the street. I think we have a good fifteen minutes before it starts to pour.”
Swen couldn’t see how to get out of it. And then, the smell of the coffee at the Vermont was far different from that of the bitter tincture from the office’s vending machine. The meteorologist pressed the wrong button, and the upper floors flew by at the speed of a space vessel launcher. By association, Swen recalled the amazing adventure of a German paraglider who was caught in a raging storm and had been sucked up to a height of 32,000 feet. She survived lightning, pounding hailstones, temperatures as low as −60 degrees, and oxygen deprivation. She came down to earth covered in ice and gasping for air, but alive.
At the café counter, the waiter had just knotted his apron around his protruding belly. Sullen, he observed the bluish color of the scar on the man’s skull.
“Looks like it’s gonna rain!” he remarked in a slightly complicit way, before placing two cups under the coffee machine.
“As you can see,” said the meteorologist, “everyone knows my tricks. What was the point of studying the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere for five years? My accident has turned me into a walking barometer.”
Swen was fairly new in the office, and he didn’t like people confiding in him. He took one of the morning papers set out for customers from the display rack and climbed up on a stool. Nothing on the front page about the airplane crash, which apparently had slipped under the newspapers’ radar. He glanced at the obituary page, which began with notice of the death of Morice Allyn-Weberson: “A giant of the pharmaceutical industry dies,” it said, without a single allusion to his family ties to the first man to receive a full body transplant, or to his relation to the beautiful Lorna, whose every move, because he was a genius at doxing and hot reading, and even social engineering, Swen knew by heart.
“I’m going back to my anticyclones,” said the weatherman. “Your name is Swen Geislar, isn’t it? There was a famous German geographer with that name . . .”
“Must be a great-great uncle . . .”
“My name is Michelet, like the historian. But he wasn’t my nephew! You know this one: ‘Man is his own Prometheus’”?
As was her habit when she had to go to the news agency offices, Lorna stopped in the Vermont to grab a coffee at the counter and buy a pack of cigarettes and the morning papers. Still on his stool, the stringer counted himself blessed by the gods: only a few feet away, Lorna hadn’t noticed his presence. She was dreamily waiting to be served, her eyes flitting across the reflections of a line of bottles and glasses placed against the yellowed mirror at the back of the room. At the risk of being found out, the yo
ung man would finally be able to gain standing in her eyes.
“Miss Lorna!” he cried, with the broken smile of a very timid man. “You know, there’s important information that even the news agencies miss . . .”
“Oh! It’s you, Swen,” answered the young woman, whom he’d disturbed in her uneasy torpor.
“Read this,” he said, handing her the paper’s obituary page. “I think you’ll be interested.”
Disturbed too abruptly by the implications of the news, Lorna showed no sign of surprise or anger. The forced reserve in which she’d been confined ever since Cédric’s inexplicable disappearance, and her anguish, which increased day by day, prevented any reaction in her other than a sudden pallor.
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