Vernon Subutex Three

by Virginie Despentes

  *

  Kiko is no longer listening. He has launched into a solo about his favourite subject: Vernon has a gift. There are few words to describe it. And, as he sees it, the whole problem, because there is a problem, stems from the fact that Vernon refuses to assume his role.

  “You can’t be a leader if you don’t pull your weight. O.K., I get it, it works, this shit you’ve got going on. And the way you have of keeping people at a distance during the convergences makes you seem interesting and mysterious. That’s clever, I’ll give you that. It’s instinctive, it’s class. You leave a space for imagination. Kind of like storytelling by leaving gaps. Until the night gets going, no-one knows what’s so fucking special about Vernon Subutex. Fair enough, it adds to your charm.”

  But this, Kiko feels, is not enough. Vernon never does anything really attention-grabbing, like healing people with his hands, or communing with the dead so they can talk to the living as if he was some sort of cosmic answering machine. He doesn’t take himself seriously enough. Kiko sees the big picture. It’s in his nature. He nervously taps his fingernails on the table. He’s come up with a new idea:

  “You know Confucius? That story about the tree, I think we could use it . . . The Romans ripped out the tree which Confucius used to preach under. I heard it on the radio. I think this thing about the tree – what was it? An oak? I guess you don’t know either – anyway, I figure it would be a good backdrop for your origin story as a prophet.”

  “Have you been listening to France Culture again, Kiko? Knock it off. I’ve told you before, it really doesn’t mix well with your coke habit. I’m a D.J., not a fucking prophet.”

  “I’m educating myself, arsehole, I’m educating myself and here you are insulting me. They figured they’d cut down the tree Confucius used to preach under to force him to leave, they did it because he was too influential . . . O.K., right there, you’ve got a story. We could start out with that: the French authorities, alerted to your great power, cut down the tree you used to sit under . . .”

  “Kiko, you know me, I’m prepared to swallow any old shit, but I can tell you right now that Confucius and me . . . it won’t work – even if they did cut down his tree.”

  “So you’re telling me you know Confucius?”

  “No. But instinctively I can tell you there’s no fit.”

  “Instinctively . . . that’s typical of ignorance. You don’t understand how it works, but you’re convinced that it doesn’t. I’ve thought about this a lot, we need to tell the story. I think we should hire a ghostwriter, a novelist. I’m working on a shortlist.”

  “Quit listening to France Culture. You’re boring the rest of us rigid.”

  *

  Whenever he has a free evening, Kiko buys two grams of coke and spends the whole night making gibbering, lunatic podcasts. He fills a notepad with bizarre scrawls that, the following morning, seem perfectly reasonable – and this isn’t just the coke talking, it’s the social class to which he belongs: the class that believes it can do anything, that accepts no limitations. So, he persists:

  “I’m thinking about hiring a female novelist, someone talented enough to knock it into shape, but not too successful, otherwise she’ll do what the fuck she likes and three months down the road she’ll be busting our balls with ideas we don’t want to listen to.”

  Mariana interrupts, she is already on her third glass of champagne and beginning to loosen up.

  “Why are you thinking about a woman? Is it something to do with sensitivity?”

  “Let’s be honest rather than politically correct: talented guys have better things to do with their life . . . Besides, they’ll cost an arm and a leg, whereas with a girl, you offer her twice the minimum wage and she’ll give you three years of her life . . . That’s the way it goes: you’re designed to take care of others. It’s been that way for two thousand years; it’s not going to suddenly stop just because Simone said wake up. But let’s cut the shit, I mean, it’s just us here, so there’s no need to wank on: Vernon is a prophet who appeals to chicks.”

  He’s been working on it for months. He’s put his back out spending nights hunched over his laptop reading biographies of prophets on Wikipedia. He knows this is a sure thing: Vernon has a gift, they just need to sort out the comms and it will go viral. Mariana drains her glass, Kiko has already fetched a second bottle, he pops the cork as she asks:

  “The story of Confucius was written how many years after his death? Building a prophet’s reputation takes time, doesn’t it?”

  “Confucius is just an example, he’s like Moses, they’re old-school prophets. The closer you come to our era, the more you find prophets that appeared overnight.”

  “You mean the way cathedrals used to take decades to build, but a shopping centre can be thrown up in three or four months?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, who did you have in mind, in terms of a recent prophet?”

  “The one who most directly concerns us: L. Ron Hubbard.”

  *

  Kiko has been rambling on about the founder of Scientology for months now. This time, the source is not France Culture but a conversation he had with the person in the next seat on a flight from Paris to L.A.

  Kiko is working on the assumption that what stops Vernon from truly assuming his role as a guru is the fear that, to be a true prophet, you have to be a martyr.

  This is how you bind the early disciples: you need a great injustice. Ideally, a tragic death. If there’s a little visceral torture in the mix, that just adds to the effect. But, Kiko can understand why Vernon would want to skip the part where he’s spat on as he lugs an eighty-kilo cross on his back and ends up being stabbed in the side, and dying, on that same cross. You only have to see the guy with toothache to realise Vernon isn’t the kind to suffer with dignity. This is why Hubbard seems the perfect counterexample:

  “Huge yacht, chicks in white miniskirts, barely legal, awesome food . . . and when he started out, the guy was a bit like you: check him out at thirty and he’s just some fucking loser – and, all due respect, but when you were thirty you weren’t up to much. The real difference between you is that the guy was motivated. That’s the thing you’re lacking. Positive mental attitude. Just look at sports, and never forget mental attitude accounts for eighty per cent of the performance. If you can up your game mentally, we’re onto a winner: the convergences keep getting more and more amazing. Ever since the girls down in Bordeaux remixed Bleach’s subsonic bass loops so they can be played as a constant wave, we’ve turned a corner . . . Bleach, now, there was a guy who’d have made a great guru. Fit as fuck, there are hundreds of stunning portraits, and – best of all – he died alone and in pain, tweak the story a bit and you could call it ‘The Fall’. He’s perfect. When we settle on this novelist, maybe we tell her to include him, sort of a John the Baptist to your Jesus, you get the idea . . . but keep it a bit subtle, leave people to wonder who was the true prophet?”

  “More France Culture?”

  “No, I listen to Radio Courtoisie sometimes . . . Thing is, dude, you’ve got to pull your finger out. Potential, talent, the reality of the thing – that shit accounts for, like, ten per cent of the success of a business.”

  “Switch off the radio, stop reading books. Go clubbing. Buy yourself a motorbike. But no intellectual pursuits, you know that’s not your strong suit . . .”

  *

  Kiko is not the only one at the camp who feels that things are bubbling up, that they’re about to explode, that they need to do “something big”. Some say they should move to Detroit, some think they should be like a circus troupe, there are those who’ve visited a commune in Italy and those who’ve just come back from the “Zone to Defend” in Notre-Dame-des-Landes . . . Everyone has an idea. Everyone except Vernon, who wants things to carry on just as they are – chaotic, formless, without having to bust his balls.

  *

  Charles, the elderly wino, has plans to shoot a movie. The project occurred to hi
m when a number of Pamela’s former co-workers joined the group and turned his head. Bimbos with boob jobs and polished nails whom he initially found intimidating before discovering that they were more receptive to his humour and his philosophy than he might have expected. Punkettes trapped in the bodies of creatures of vice. He suggested a film project about a utopia: girls marooned on a desert island, surrounded by white rabbits and cute little puppies . . . a project that, in a single evening, they managed to transform into a zombie movie. And Charles listened, open-mouthed in admiration, as one of the girls described the scene where she’d fuck the head of a corpse with a huge purple strap-on.

  *

  But he did not come back, as expected, to hone this utopian project. When Mariana says she is going to hook up with some friends near Montmartre, and stumbles as she gets up because she’s had a lot to drink, Vernon gets to his feet to hold her up. He says he is going to try to see Charles. He’ll make the rounds of the neighbourhood bars, the old guy is bound to be somewhere.

  VÉRO SMOOTHS THE BROWN PAPER BAG WITH THE PALM OF HER hand until she can fold it neatly and stack it with the others. Never again will she have to listen to the old man kicking up a stink, seeing her spending so much time over piles of wrapping paper while the rest of the apartment is going to shit. It drove him mad that she was capable of forgetting that there was laundry in the washing machine until it was mouldering, while paper and plastic bags were carefully arranged by size, colour and material in the large living-room dresser, after she had thrown out the china because she had too many bags. We’ve all got our foibles. The mahogany dresser is stuffed with wrapping materials, and organising this space brings Véro inexplicable pleasure. On one side, there is the bubble wrap, then paper bags, then small plastic bags next to the big ones and, lastly, particularly beautiful bags that she finds in the street.

  They bought the dresser together one day when they were visiting a branch of Emmaüs in the suburbs, because a guy who was a regular at their bar worked there from time to time. It was a veritable expedition, going to Emmaüs, but they used to have an aperitif in the garden and afterwards they would be so tipsy that they didn’t remember how they got home. It was summer. They hadn’t gone on holiday. They never went anywhere. A little flash of greenery can only be good for the spirit, even if Véro is not particularly chlorophyll-inclined. The dresser cost ten euros, they bought it in a sufficiently advanced state of inebriation that they were surprised when, some days later, it was delivered. Charles has always loathed it. It’s true that it takes over the whole room. And they never found any real use for it. At first, they stacked plates and letters on it. And, eventually, Véro commandeered it for her bags. It has lots of shelves and drawers, perfect for her obsession. Charles used to say that she knew exactly what she was doing the day she bought it, that she engineered the whole thing. Maybe he was right: the brain of a person with irrational goals has greater depth of field than one that functions normally, it’s always several steps ahead, it anticipates everything. It’s the same thing with alcohol. Even when Véro wants to stop drinking, she knows that her brain will manage to get her into situations that leave her no option, and generally this happens unbeknownst to her own free will – in other words, she does not decide to drink, she remembers she needs to call an old friend going through a hard time, and once she is round at his place, she realises that what she really came for is a dozen shots of pastis. The brain is devious: it plays tricks on your consciousness, it does things on the sly, that way you get exactly what you wanted while pretending you were thinking about something else entirely.

  *

  Now she can do whatever she wants with the dresser, she can even extend her collection to the whole living room if she feels like it . . . He’s not here to kick up a stink anymore. The squabbling is over.

  The old man is dead. He did it elegantly, the old bastard, he slipped away without a sound. A warning twinge, just to alert her to the fact that something important was brewing, he collapsed over the bar late one afternoon, writhed on his side for a minute, coughing up blood, until the ambulance arrived. He enjoyed a spectacular recovery for about a week, which he used to put his affairs in order, as though he knew that he was taking his last bow. A devastating relapse, outside the grocer’s, a stroke, the real thing this time. Véro was with him. Just before he collapsed, they had been screaming at each other because she wanted to buy a tube of Nestlé sweetened condensed milk for her morning coffee and he was quibbling that she didn’t need it, that it was a waste of money, and besides, it played havoc with her stomach. Always ready with the right word to piss her off, the old bastard. At the hospital, the nurses were heartbroken at the thought of this elderly couple being separated by death. Alcoholics, obviously, it was written on their faces, but the sort of old people who held hands and didn’t let go until the last moment, because Charles was gripping her hand as he had never done before, he didn’t say anything but she could tell that he was afraid, and she could think of nothing better to say than, you’ll be fine, old man, you’ll get through this. And from the outside, that’s what they looked like: an elderly couple saying their goodbyes. And that’s what they were, when all is said and done. But living in harmony had never been their thing.

  After the first attack, the one that didn’t kill him, the old man’s family didn’t rush to be at his bedside. His sister did call to ask how he was doing, but, hearing that he was back on his feet, she didn’t bother to visit. Good thing too, she’s an old bitch. His friends at the bar were more worried. Old Michel dropped by twice – he’d sold the bar, but before he did he and Charles were thick as thieves. And fat François – practically a childhood friend, another northerner. Ahmed, who used to work with him at the Bar des Vosges when it was still a respectable bistro, came by to check on him. He’d changed a lot. Like so many others. He doesn’t drink alcohol anymore, and he didn’t dare tell them much about what he was up to, but they guessed – you have to move with the times, he was going to mosque and observing Ramadan. In this neighbourhood, with a name like Ahmed you couldn’t knock back a beer in peace anymore without someone coming up and lecturing you. There had been others, too, drinking companions who, having heard about his condition on the grapevine, had promised to stop by – given their age, they weren’t overly optimistic, they knew a stroke is usually followed by complications. Charles hadn’t hung around for long. She was lucky she had been there the day it happened. Shit. The old bastard died holding her hand. It was probably the most tender moment of their entire relationship. He’s not the first she’s seen kick the bucket. But it does something to you. That’s all there is to it, she had thought, that’s it. It’s no big deal, dying. People make a fuss about it, but when it finally comes, it’s just a slight release.

  Jesus, they were in a hell of a hurry at the hospital to free up the bed as soon as death was pronounced. It’s not compassion for those left behind that’s choking them up. Even when you know that to them it’s just a load of paperwork, that they see it every day, that they’re overworked, that there’s a crisis, that it would be criminal to take up a bed when you’re officially deceased – you still feel like slamming one of them against the wall when they start bustling about because they’ve got no time to waste on a stiff. They didn’t give her five minutes’ peace. At the time, she was so shocked she didn’t argue. But ever since, the images have haunted her – they pounced on the cold body like it was nothing, no more important than a clapped-out old fridge.

  Nearly fifteen years she’d spent with that fucker, listening to him snore every night, and that night she wouldn’t hear him rattling up the house, the least they could have done was give her a little time. It’s a question of decency. Even people like them need to say their goodbyes. If only so they can believe it’s true. It’s over. It’ll never move again, that lump of lard, never shout never pound its fist on the table never scream at her for changing the channel never piss beside the bowl never call her a stupid bitch when she says that Oba
ma is handsome, it’s over. He used to sing the “Internationale” every time he heard the word “debt”, so lately you couldn’t turn on the T.V. without him singing. But that’s over now. That, and everything else.

  Even if there was a lot of misery, their life together, she didn’t hate it. By the time she met him, she was already too old to tell herself that this was anything other than someone to cling to. She knew that she only put up with him because she was afraid of being alone. She was past the age – long past the age – of thinking love was anything other than a crock of shit, a scam to sell you microwaves and cars on credit.

  She was constantly carping at him about something. She knew they were stupid things. Not that this stopped her spending hours in front of the sink, reciting the litany of things she couldn’t stand about him. But she knew that, without him, she would get depressed. Because they had a good laugh, from time to time, all things considered. He wasn’t one for melancholy, her Charles. She’d told anyone who would listen, told them until she was blue in the face, that the two of them living together wasn’t just about saving on rent and heating. In their own way, they got along pretty well. He was a blowhard, a brawler. She could throw a six-pack at his head, he wasn’t the type to complain.

  She smooths the pink plastic bag, the plastic is so sheer you can see through it. First, she pulls on the handles so that it is the right shape, then folds it in two widthways, then in three lengthwise. She stores it with the others. Now that the shops don’t give out bags for free anymore, her collection is increasing in value.

  Charles loved reality T.V. The dumber the programme, the happier he was. When he stumbled on a show about compulsive hoarders, people who can’t bring themselves to throw out anything that might one day be useful, people suffering from what they call Diogenes syndrome, he had a coughing fit, so eager was he to bellow, “Come here, you old bat! Come and see how we’re going to end up if I let you carry on the way you’re going.” And for three days afterwards, he followed her around, keeping an eye on her hoarding, he called her Didine, a diminutive of Diogenes, and tried to get her to throw out the bags and other things that were potentially useful. But she’s not the one with the screw loose, as they call it. It’s the world around her that’s off its rocker. What’s with this obsession with tossing everything out? Just because everyone does it doesn’t make it rational.