*
Léonard went back on the meds three weeks ago. He did his calculations as he took a quarter of a tablet this morning. He hides them at the bottom of his sponge bag. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s ashamed that he needs to take them. He no longer sees the shrink who gave him the prescription. He could put up with the constant gnawing at his solar plexus as anxiety begins to bite. He could put up with the obsessive thoughts that wake him up in the night. But he didn’t have the strength to come to terms with Antoine’s death without a crutch.
It was a wise decision: ten days later, the Orlando nightclub shooting happened. In a statement, the murderer’s father said, “This has nothing to do with religion . . . We were in Downtown Miami, Bayside, people were playing music. And he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry.” This has nothing to do with religion – the problem is that queers refuse to hide anymore. People like him are disgusting. This is something he learned as a little boy. Something he learned in his own home. Today, his parents have come to terms with the situation. But before they admitted defeat, they fought with all their might. They refused to let Léonard come home. They didn’t want the neighbours to see. He’s not the kind of faggot that mothers say would make a fine son-in-law. He’s a queen. People only have to see the way he walks to realise. His mother would say, “Don’t come home for Christmas, please. Whenever you come, I can’t go to the hairdresser’s for months, I’m the laughing stock of the neighbourhood.” After Orlando, there were the headlines. Newspapers avoided the word “gay”. No-one mentioned the identity of the victims, because they knew that if they did, their readers would feel no sympathy for them. Faggots. After the Bataclan massacre, the fundamentalist Catholics who dared to say that the attackers and the victims were equally sinful were excoriated by the press. But Orlando is different. After Orlando, they had the right to say “bravo”. No-one contradicted them.
On the night of the Bataclan massacre, Léonard had been in the thirteenth arrondissement, at a party on a houseboat. The taxi that brought him home had not charged him, even though he hadn’t been in the area affected. It was a night of humanity – everyone felt red raw and people were not ashamed to reassure each other. After Orlando, there was nothing of that. He has not encountered a single taxi driver who feels sorry.
With the massacre at Rennes-le-Château, the newspapers started out liking the victims. Even online trolls waited a few days before criticising them. Then, gradually, it became more acrimonious. People who didn’t have their mobile phones with them, people who used Linux on their home computers – who uses Linux if they’ve got nothing to hide? People with no fixed address. There were rumours that the group included a large number of political radicals. In fact, tracts containing extremist propaganda had been found at the site. There was talk of a Muslim. There was a lesbian, and a former prostitute, and others who, during the post-mortem, turned out to have different genitals from those expected. There was a former stock market trader turned drug dealer. There was even talk of a guru, because people did not know what to make up to sully the memory of the dead. Gradually, public opinion decided it was a settling of scores between political radicals, unless it had something to do with sordid sexual practices, some depraved ritual?
The pills help. He sleeps for seven hours straight. His thoughts are no longer obsessive. They glide. Physically, he is not as strong. He can feel it in his legs when he walks, a weakness. Minor irritations no longer cling to him. He thinks about Antoine, and tears well in his eyes. He rides on the métro and is surprised to find himself thinking about something else. He needed to start taking the pills again.
Léonard would like someone to explain how somebody like him, who has taken so much coke, champagne and Ecstasy, who smokes weed at every opportunity and never passes up a line of smack if it’s offered, is so reluctant to swallow a quarter of a tablet every morning. It’s not a question of legality – he enjoys a shot of vodka in a bar as much as he does swallowing a tab of Molly. He doesn’t enjoy the company of dealers, and would prefer to know what his coke has been cut with. The distinction is between recreational drugs and therapeutic drugs. One says you’re going to have fun, go on a psychedelic journey, modify reality, enhance your perception, experiment – the other says that you’re sick, you’re weak, you need to be cured.
Recently Léonard has been getting on his boyfriend’s nerves. Jean-Michel talks to him in an irritable tone he hasn’t heard before. He gets annoyed when he sees Léonard coming out of a hotel room with a coffee in one hand, checking his phone while trying to push his suitcase with his feet. He says tersely, “Fuck’s sake, can’t you concentrate on what you’re doing sometimes?” There is something about him that people, eventually, cannot bear. They withdraw the love they have invested. The way a stockholder might sell off his portfolio when he realises he has backed the wrong horse. Leonardo is not a good horse. No matter how much effort he makes, Jean-Michel will leave him. Like the others.
Léonard went back on the pills two days after the shooting. Nobody knows what Antoine was doing at this rave. He was curious about street culture. He had made a name for himself in the art world by ripping it a new arsehole – in other words, through graffiti, back in the day when it seemed unlikely that hip-hop would end up in galleries. He’d become a curator with a bright future, all the galleries fought over him. But he still spent time in the hood, it was important to him not to lose contact with the streets.
There were a hundred or so people at this rave, some wild private party. Not one of them survived. The girl who carried out the attack was well trained. And armed to the teeth. The newspapers talked about someone with mental health issues. A lone wolf. But it wasn’t out in the sticks that she managed to acquire the arsenal she used to massacre so many people.
Léonard would take any drug in the world if it meant he did not have to imagine the terror that Antoine must have felt when the first grenade exploded. Didn’t have to try to imagine his last thoughts. What do you think, when you’re utterly terrified?
The girl had stood around waiting for the wounded and the survivors to move so she could shoot them, one by one, using an assault rifle. She had stationed herself above the dancers, she had taken a high-power flashlight to light up the scene. Afterwards, she had killed herself – a bullet to the head in the middle of the woods, only a few metres from the scene of the crime. It was not a terrorist attack. It was not political. According to the media. Léonard is all too aware that any drug that makes it possible not to imagine the scene is useful.
*
After every terrorist attack since Charlie Hebdo, just the thought of the conversations he will have to have makes him feel physically sick. He has walked away from people he considered friends. He has lived in France for more than thirty years. There have always been conversations that he has had to avoid. He cannot bear the litany of excuses for Islam anymore. A lot of people feel the need to be wary when it comes to condemning massacres that have been committed by others. He grew up in Israel. The constant fear returned, intact, in January 2015. Fear is like riding a bicycle; you never forget. He was twelve when his parents moved to France. They came one summer, he assumed it was just a holiday, but he never saw Bat Yam again. Back then, no-one talked to their children. They simply took them. The first thing he found surprising, in Nice, where they settled, was the way people boarded a bus without troubling to keep an eye out, the way that, when they saw an unattended bag lying on a seat, they didn’t panic. They weren’t afraid. Back in Bat Yam, children were free, they did as they pleased. But being vigilant was part of everyday life. At every bomb scare, people went down into the shelters. At first, it was France that seemed strange. The only things he liked here were baguettes and Palmitos. It took him a long time to settle in.
*
Antoine’s father is inconsolable. Léonard waited a few days before calling to offer his condolences. Laurent Dopalet was incoherent. He was devastated by gr
ief. Léonard said, if you need anything at all, please, don’t hesitate and Antoine’s father said: come and see me, please, I’d like to talk to you about him.
*
Since then, Léonard has had lunch with Dopalet every Thursday. Instead of going to the stand-up paddle course he loved. But Antoine’s father needs support. He’s mixing whisky and sleeping pills, he’s often unintelligible. In his lucid moments, he wants to talk about Antoine, or listen to Léonard evoke old memories. Forgotten images of childhood and adolescence resurface.
When social media began to suspect that the victims of the massacre were not as innocent as they first assumed, Leonardo thought that Dopalet would go mad. Obviously, the campaign of harassment and insults was not the main tragedy. It was the straw that breaks the camel’s back – something so unfair, so repulsive, that you throw in the towel, you sink back into madness. As the producer himself says, “In the end, what is most horrifying is not the tragedy itself, it’s the reaction of the survivors.”
One Thursday, as they were having lunch in a Japanese restaurant in the thirteenth arrondissement, Dopalet, who had been half-comatose, suddenly recovered his self-control, and the look in his eyes was heart-wrenching, filled with boundless grief. He was a ruined man. In a flash of energy that was not quite lucid he said: “You’d make a good screenwriter. A great screenwriter.” Léonard is a graphic designer. He doesn’t even know how to start a new paragraph in Word. As he usually did with Dopalet’s non sequiturs, he said, “I don’t think so.” But the producer swayed in his seat, refusing to drop the subject. He had had an idea. The first in a long time. “I’ll teach you. You’ll be a brilliant writer. We’ll tell their story. You and me. A true story. I won’t allow them to sully the memory of my son. It’ll be a series. The story of these people, their tragic story . . . You’re the one I want to write it with, Léo.” And then he had smiled for the first time in months. A poor smile that chilled the heart. Léo made no attempt to contradict him. Antoine’s father had ordered wine, he was finally waking up, with difficulty, he had found something to cling to. This ludicrous idea made him sit up. Then he added, “Besides, you’re Jewish. That’s good. That will be useful. Always have a Jew on your team.” Léonard did not hold it against him. The man was drowning, he didn’t know what he was saying anymore.
The preposterous project refuses to die. Every Thursday, when Léonard has lunch with Antoine’s father, he brings the U.S.B. thumb drive with the screenplay they are co-writing. Often, he has doubts: what good is he doing by supporting Dopalet in this insane project? But there is no graceful way to recover from the most unbearable of all griefs – the death of a beloved son.
WHEN HE SEES HIMSELF IN A MIRROR, HE IS DISFIGURED. He can see non-existent scars. The face of a burns victim, the face of a casualty of war. He remembers his real face, it did not look like this. It has been obliterated by his screams.
Marcia is sitting at the white, circular, living-room table drinking jasmine tea. On her lap is the flea-ridden kitten she rescued the night before from the garbage room. It is tiny, she is sure it is only a baby. Its white fur is crawling with parasites. Its eyes are a deep blue, and it is not wild. The vet diagnosed severe dehydration, and then examined its teeth and declared the cat was about three years old. Once it had been fed and dewormed, it would probably be healthy.
Marcia called it Roger. She wanted to keep it. She was sure that having a cat for company would do Vernon good. She had not realised that the dogs, too, are dead. That he watched them crawl, wounded, and take a bullet. But Vernon did not say anything. There is no way she could know. Having checked online, Marcia found the cat’s owner. A woman who could precisely describe the dark patch on his belly, and the fact that he has one black paw when all the others are white. There is no doubt that it’s her cat. She will come by and pick him up after work. She says: I’ll bring champagne. She says: I’d almost given up hope, I’m so happy. Marcia is disappointed. She had wanted to adopt Roger. She says, even if you didn’t like him, you could have fed him when I wasn’t in Paris. Vernon forces himself to say: “It’s O.K. You’ve still got me.” And Marcia turns, startled to hear his voice.
*
She makes the most of her last moments with the cat, which allows itself to be stroked. She checks out Brazilian blogs, glasses perched on her forehead, as always when she is reading intently. She feels sad. She experiences the things that have been happening in her country in recent months with a particular intensity. Expatriates experience events after the fact, but this does not make them any less tragic, quite the reverse. Distance is like a sounding board. Not many people here can understand. She says, I need to make some new friends, people from back home, people like me.
*
Vernon washes the dishes in cold water. The boiler is broken, there is no hot water in the kitchen. But since Marcia is subletting, she doesn’t want to contact the landlord and risk getting into trouble. He rinses the dishes, his hands are red with cold. Feeling something – anything – is fascinating.
After the shooting, Vernon walked straight ahead. He collapsed in a village square where a woman called Stéphanie took him in. She translated books from Italian and lived alone with her dog. She looked after him. She lived on the top floor of a block of flats perched on a hill. She collected turtles – stuffed turtles, plastic turtles, postcards of turtles. There were turtles everywhere. And a Himalayan salt lamp that gave off electrical waves. Vernon doesn’t know how long he stayed there. He did not speak to her, she spent her days ignoring him, puffing on an e-cigarette, tapping on her keyboard. She probably guessed where he had come from. It was all anyone talked about in the days that followed. He had been the only one to get out alive. Stéphanie was black, with close-cropped hair. She listened constantly to C.D.s of rainstorms and forest murmurs. It was hideous. Vernon spent several days shivering with fever. He wanted to leave but could not summon the strength to cross the threshold and step out into the street. Every morning she performed funny stretches on a blue yoga mat. Vernon slept on the sofa and, from the first day, she covered him with a red wool blanket that never left his side all the time he was there.
*
One afternoon, while she was out shopping, he summoned the courage to walk out the door. He walked down nine floors. He could not bear the thought of taking the lift. He stole the red wool blanket. He ran away like a cat, like a thankless animal. Each step was agony, the descent was endless. He had to think about where to place his foot to bear his weight, he clung to the banister like a worn-out old man.
He startled a young couple, appearing soundlessly behind them, and they startled him, too, as they flinched, as though caught in flagrante delicto. The girl would have been about fifteen, Vernon was struck by her huge blue eyes, the paleness of her skin and her hair, which seemed dyed, being a blue-black too deep to seem natural. She was pretty, the boy was tall, he had strong legs, the thighs of a footballer. The boy got up to allow Vernon to pass, avoiding his gaze. The boy was beautiful too. Vernon found it disturbing to think that in the outside world people continued to live, to be beautiful, to hide, to kiss. They were luminous and gentle. They seemed very far away. On the far side of the curtain of his consciousness.
*
Vernon walked for a long time. He was hungry, cold, his feet blistered, his hip ached. When he encountered people, he reached out his hand. He carried on walking. In Toulouse, without knowing why, he boarded a train for Paris. The ticket collector, an elderly cantankerous man, was furious that Vernon had boarded with no ticket and no papers. He railed at him, demanding to see proof of his identity, his address, demanding some official document. Vernon had stared out the window at the landscape flashing past, he could not even feign interest. Eventually, the man sat down on the seat next to him and wrote out the fine. Like Vernon, he was tired, he no longer had the energy to be rude. He stared at Vernon before walking away. “Good luck, what do you want me to say . . . Next time try and find something, I don’t know, a bill,
anything . . . That way at least you can pretend. You can’t do this anymore, you understand? With everything that’s happening . . . you can’t just wander around with no papers.”
Pain overwhelmed him, without warning, as though he were waking from a dream – a lacerating knife wound. It was all over. There was nothing left. The rest of the time he forgot, he forgot to think.
*
Vernon was sprawled in one of the walkways at Châtelet station, a few metres from a guitarist of about his own age. He had not tried to go any further. He had lain down, his face to the wall, he felt as though he had arrived. Every night, a métro worker came by and said, “We’re closing,” always the same worker, polite and decisive. Vernon would find a heating vent and lie down. Sometimes he had to walk some distance. At dawn, he would always go back to Châtelet métro station. As though he knew; as though he had an appointment. And yet he was not expecting anything. Everyone was dead now. All the people he had known were dead. Mariana had shown up, unannounced, the night before the convergence. He had been happy to see her. He remembered her mouth when she had an orgasm, her parted lips, her teeth. He could still remember; that was the worst of it. His throat was hard as stone, every breath was an effort.
*
It was at Châtelet that Marcia walked past him one day. Vernon did not see her. He was lying on his side, as usual. She says she did not recognise him straight away. “I don’t usually look at beggars in the métro, I’m too busy slipping past, trying to move as quickly as possible, dodging people. But I recognised you, and I thought it was someone who looked like you. I felt a chill. I went on my way, carried on to Line 4, I didn’t know what I was doing. Your name had been on the list of victims. I wonder whose body they identified as yours. They printed your picture with the others – Marc Campadre – I never knew your name . . . I cried so much. You, Kiko, Gaëlle . . . all the others. I’d fallen out with Kiko . . . he acted like a shit, you know what he could be like, and all the coke he took made him more of an arsehole. I regretted it. I felt sorry I’d never picked up my phone, and said, c’mon, it’s O.K., why don’t we meet up? I bumped into Gaëlle one night at a Saint-Laurent soirée, she told me a little about the convergences, she said I should come along, but I never did. We always manage to convince ourselves we’re too busy. I didn’t know whether I should see you again. I knew I had hurt you. I wasn’t toying with you, I was always honest – but I had other things going on, I didn’t have the headspace for being in love. But it meant a lot to me that you were . . . When I saw your name among the victims, I suddenly realised that I cared about you more than I’d realised. You know how it is, there’s no arguing with the smallest violin in the world . . . When I saw you in the métro, I thought I was hallucinating, I kept on walking . . . but just as I was about to board the train, I came to my senses, I turned back. I wanted to be sure. And there you were. You were in such a state, chéri . . . It wasn’t the sight of you that scared me, it was the fucking awful smell . . . I must truly love you like a brother to have bent over you because – and I know I shouldn’t really say this – you stank like rat’s piss . . . Your lips formed words, but there was no sound, you were silently delirious. If I’m honest, I hesitated. I knew that if I stayed, I’d take care of you, help you up, move you into my place, and that would completely change my life when I’d only been in my new apartment for two months and I was happy being on my own . . . I knew I’d look after you and it was pretty obvious that it wouldn’t be an easy ride . . . I could have talked to a cop, said, you know that guy everyone thinks is dead, I’ve just seen him, look! But I couldn’t do that to you. I didn’t want to do that to you. When I saw you pressed against that wall, stinking of piss and muttering to yourself, I thought, for fuck’s sake, I would have been better off staying with you the first time we met . . . I’m sorry to say that, but it’s true. So I talked to you. Passers-by slowed and stared at us, wondering what the hell I was doing there, shaking some guy who wasn’t moving . . . they thought you were dead. People say that Parisians would step over a corpse in the métro without breaking their stride. That day, I found out it was just an urban myth: everyone wanted to do something – is there anything I can do to help, do you think it’s serious? Parisians come in all shapes and sizes, there are arseholes, sure, but there are good Samaritans too, and let me tell you, if you want them to leave you in peace, you’ll have a hell of a job . . .”
Vernon Subutex Three Page 31