His ex-girlfriends were indulgent. He was the sort of guy girls fall for—he made them feel special. He never kept his promises, but it was obvious that while they were together he made them happier than they had ever been before. Having been princesses for a few scant weeks, they were intensely grateful to him and did not hate him for hurting them. Every one of them had been dumped without warning—after being idolized adored placed on a pedestal—he would vanish overnight. The only one who seemed to hold it against him was Sylvie, the online star. All his other ex-girlfriends talked about Alex Bleach wistfully, as though they believed that, if he had not died suddenly, he would have come back sooner or later and been happy with them. Alex did not have a “type”—he was magnanimous, he worshipped them all. From the young fashion model from eastern Europe to the jaded duchess, he convinced each of them that he was happiest with her. He had a gift for grand gestures. They were more grateful that he had swept them off their feet than they were bitter that he had lied to them.
Bleach’s relationship with Subutex was atypical. Though he regularly reconnected with people from his past, it was always to disappoint them at the last moment. He had never walked away from Subutex. He had even bequeathed him the videotapes. Even if the singer must have suspected—or known—that they were important.
The Hyena arranged to visit Dopalet in his office as often as possible. When she ran into Anaïs, she would come on strong, feel the girl get flustered, and this would put her in a good mood. She did not think about her much during the day. This reassured her. In fact, it made it possible for her to gradually move through the stages that transform a casual fuck into a question of intimacy almost without a second thought. The Hyena thought: she doesn’t obsess my every thought, so everything’s fine. No, Anaïs clearly does not pose a problem. It’s girls who are a pain in the ass that she obsesses over. The girls who go with the flow, who are always there when you need them, who get wet the moment you touch them, who tremble like a leaf when they come, who don’t say, “When am I seeing you again?” as they put on their jacket, girls like that don’t preoccupy your thoughts. They are content to shut up and do good. In her mind, Anaïs is light as a feather, a sporadic, comforting pleasure. There are tons like her. Except Anaïs attracts her like a magnet. Pretty quickly, they settled into a routine. But this did little to calm things; on the contrary, Anaïs would wait for her in the evenings after everyone else had left the office wearing nothing under her bomber jacket except her fluorescent centerfold lingerie. She liked to fuck on her desk, standing in the office supplies closet, lounging in the producer’s office chair, bent over the photocopier in Accounts … It was at this point that the Hyena had to set up across the road from Pamela Kant’s place, and it was when she gave the girl the address of the hotel that she realized—she doesn’t preoccupy my every thought, but I can’t go two days without seeing her. It is a metamorphosis. One morning, you get up, and silently, discreetly, you realize—you have become someone else. She views this new situation with deep suspicion. But there is nothing she can do about it. She has to admit it, she’s crazy about Anaïs. She snuggles between her scissored legs after sex, grabbing her buttocks with both hands, so their bodies are as tightly interlocked as possible, and feels a steady heartbeat thrum in her belly, stronger than the pulse in the throat, as Anaïs’s pussy sends tremors all down her thighs. She cannot remember ever knowing a woman who genuinely throbs the way she does.
Where Anaïs is concerned, the Hyena refuses to send or receive text messages, she has forbidden her to call or send emails. She insists that, if anyone should look at their phones or their computers, they would find nothing overt. It is safer this way. They arrange to meet when they run into each other at the office, pretending to talk shop. She likes this. And it’s mutual. Other girls always start out by saying, “Yeah, I prefer to keep my distance too, I’m really independent, I think it’s best only to see each other when we decide to.” Later—it takes about a week—they’re asking, “When can we have dinner, what were you doing last night, why don’t you sleep over.” But Anaïs is a dark landscape, she is scorched earth. She asks no questions. She rarely talks about herself. She is resilient and fragile, and there is something about the tension between these things that makes her overwhelming. There is a story behind it, one that ended recently, it is obvious the moment you visit her place. An apartment that someone left too recently for there to have been time to fill all the empty spaces he left behind.
One day, Anaïs said, “I never thought I’d end up doing a job like this. I never thought I’d spend my time doing something I don’t believe in. I assumed I’d end up doing social work and make a difference in my own small way. But I took the opportunities as they came. And here I am. Surrounded by people who had the power to do amazing things, but have completely given up. And I don’t know how to get out.” It was the first time she had talked about herself and the Hyena sensed that things had changed when she felt the urge to say, “Don’t go in tomorrow, where do you want to go? Come on, let’s take off together.” She discovered that this was what she wanted—to take off with Anaïs. Jesus fuck … this was a surprising turn. Relationships are always like this: they feed on events that seem trivial, but each one is a screw that turns and opens the way to unexpected levels of understanding.
Y siento tus cadenas arrastrar en mi noche callada. The young couple who bought the apartment next door and subjected everyone in the building to three months of noisy renovation work have finally moved in: they have a little boy a few months old who is constantly crying. The other tenants are furious—everyone wants young people to move into the neighborhood, but no one wants the racket that comes with them—but it hardly seems appropriate to suggest cutting the baby’s vocal cords just because he’s disturbing people. She cranks up the volume until Chavela’s voice drowns out the noise they are making.
The Hyena picks up her mobile and reads the messages in the WhatsApp group. They are at the parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Lydia Bazooka has just arrived with Xavier. They are waiting for Pamela Kant and Daniel. Everyone will be there. She phones Aïcha. “Hey, dimwit, Satan’s daughter calling, how’s things with you?” Aïcha does not often laugh. You really have to make an effort. The Hyena asks whether she’s free, says it’s important, asks if they can meet up at the Buttes-Chaumont right now, and cancel any plans she had for tonight. Then she picks out a jacket and a perfume. She takes her time. She will let them know when she’s on her way. When they know that she’s bringing the tapes, they’re not likely to scatter.
THE SKY IS OVERCAST with gray clouds like a lid over the city. Vernon studies the thin streak of blue on the horizon, as straight a line as if someone had unfurled a roll of paper above the rooftops. A last, stubborn ray of sunlight slinks from beneath the dark layer of cloud to bring a radiant shimmer to the gray tiles of Paris.
The girl showed up in midafternoon, she didn’t give her name. She is probably younger than Vernon, but she’s in a bad way. Her hair is cropped short—well, more hacked—and she’s cross-eyed, it’s hard to know which one you’re supposed to look at when you’re talking to her. She’s clean, she doesn’t smell, she has decent threads. She threw herself at him while he was chilling on his bench, enjoying the cigarette given to him by Stéphane, the site foreman. “’Scuse me monsieur I’ve got AIDS it’s terrible I saw my social worker but she said can’t get me into a shelter before Friday I have to find a hotel please help monsieur please this woman was gonna get cash from an ATM she was gonna give me eighty euros but she’d left her card at home so she couldn’t monsieur please for a hotel please.”
He had faked a smile and shrugged. “I would have, though it’s pretty obvious that I’m homeless … If someone gives you eighty euros for a hotel room, let me know, I wouldn’t mind sleeping in a warm bed myself…” She had looked him up and down: “You’re sleeping in the streets? You don’t look homeless.” As though she suspected him of usurping the title. She had sat down next to him and taken off
her shoes—she wasn’t wearing socks. “Look, it’s terrible.” If the filthy nails on her hands—red and swollen from the cold and the meds—were not impressive enough, her toenails were positively spectacular: thick orange claws so long they’d curled inward and meshed with the others. Vernon could not tear his eyes away. Thinking about his own swollen finger, he wondered: How long before you end up like that? How long before he was no longer like that person he had once been? Though he felt no nostalgia for his social identity, whose contours and pressures now seemed perfectly absurd, he still feared the idea of his body decaying. He still had some way to go before capitulation.
“See? I have to have it treated, it’s really painful, my feet are killing me. But it costs twenty-five euros. I haven’t fucking got that kind of money! I need treatment…” Vernon mentally calculated, eighty euros for a hotel plus twenty-five for a pedicure, you had to admit, the girl certainly set her standards high. He tried to reason with her: “If you don’t want to sleep on the streets tonight, you’d be better off heading down that way … Back toward Belleville, there are a lot more people, it’s easier to beg. You’re not likely to run into anyone here. And Belleville is full of poor people, and they’re much more generous than the rich fucks who live up here, they’re more likely to relate…” Here he was giving tips on urban survival, as though he knew anything about it. All he wanted was for her to go away, because he could tell that she would bring him trouble here.
“But I can’t go begging people are scared of me just look at me I’ve got AIDS they’re completely freaked.” Vernon nodded sagely. “Maybe best not to mention that straight off, you can tell them you need somewhere to stay without telling them you’re sick.” It was true that, when trying to start a conversation, AIDS was probably not the best icebreaker.
She was frantic, anxious, and convinced that Vernon had money and that if she busted his balls a bit more, he would eventually give it up. Or take her somewhere where she could get help. But he had no idea where he could take the girl, even if only to be rid of her. She clutched his arm, fell silent for a minute or two, then launched back into the same spiel. She had probably been through some bad shit, the thought of sleeping on the streets panicked her to the point of convulsions, and it was obvious that what most terrified her was not the cold. She clung to him relentlessly and he quickly abandoned the idea of asking her questions: her name, where she was from, whether she usually bummed around this area … The standard small talk of the homeless that he’d picked up over the past few days did not work on her. She was too far gone. Every time he tried to ask her something, she showed him some revolting wound. He didn’t know how to shake her off.
Darkness had fallen and still she was glued to the bench. Vernon knew that, if there were two of them, they would not be allowed to hang around for long. The very people who had been sympathetic to him—the laborers from the building site, Jeanine, and the two young guys who had given him a blanket—would quickly lose their patience and call the police as soon as it started to look like a gathering of pox-ridden warthogs.
In the distance, the Sacré-Coeur glimmered with a ghostly whiteness beneath the full moon. That night, he had shown her how to step over the low wire fence to reach the courtyard of the house, and the young woman set up camp, occupying a whole corner, and marking out the boundaries with pebbles she brought into the house. By the light of the moon, she had tossed out everything that former occupants had left strewn across the floor: two used condoms, a rusty cigarette lighter, an empty plastic container … While she settled in, she was watching him with wary hostility as if to say, lay a finger on me and I’ll kill you, and he wondered whether this was why she started conversations by talking about having AIDS—to cool the passions of guys like him. Vernon watched out of the corner of his eye as she futzed about, sorting out her sleeping area, taking pathetic pains over it, her deft, precise movements at odds with her apparent mental illness. How long before you end up like that was the question that haunted him. This was probably the night that he realized he could not carry on the way he had been doing. He had to tear himself away from the butte Bergeyre.
Unable to sleep, the girl had talked in the darkness, responding to someone who occasionally made her laugh but most of the time terrorized her, someone she had to reassure—“No no I swear I’ll go see her Friday morning she said she’d find a shelter for me.” Vernon let her ramble on. In the middle of the night, she had let out a series of harrowing screams. There was not much chance that the neighbors would put up with that for long.
The following morning when he got up, she did likewise and he did not even make an attempt to talk to her, to tell her that if she stayed much longer she’d get them both evicted and he had a good thing going here … He always left the house unobtrusively, through the courtyard, checking to make sure there was no one in the communal yards or on the balconies opposite. But the girl just settled herself in the small backyard, everyone could see this homeless skank lounging in the shade of the oak tree and talking to herself. And Vernon had left her there, thinking—oh well, it was a good gig while it lasted …
* * *
Euphoria is a fragile thing. One wrong word and you’re back down to earth with a thud—he is expecting to go back to the way he was, the cramps, the panic, all that stuff. The calamity, the distress, the fear, the denial, the whole shitstorm of overpowering emotions. And then, nothing. He needs to move on, and he tells himself there’s no hurry. He thinks back to Marcia. It happens to him sometimes. He feels her beside him more often than he misses her. He has no fight left. This must be what they mean by depression. Watching things from a distance without thinking of taking part. No one ever said that it can be quite bearable. He assumed it was accompanied by hopelessness, tenseness, a host of unpleasant feelings. Not at all. The clouds fascinate him as much as ever. He could stare at them for hours, he feels nothing but the emptiness inside him—a calmness that should be chilling but is as white as those fucking clouds.
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