She opened her eyes in the middle of this night of love and revelations. She was afraid. It was November, a cold rain was falling and clouds hid the moon. For weeks she’d been suffering from nausea. Her breasts hurt, nothing tasted as it should. Her period hadn’t come and didn’t seem to be coming anytime soon. She had to face facts. She turned to the side, and suddenly felt cold. Her skin was pale and rough from the goosebumps that never seemed to go away. They were starting to see in the dark, the eyes can adjust to nearly anything. She wanted to talk to him, but Aimé wasn’t saying a thing. He was there, right next to her, this handsome young man who had appeared in her life without warning, who’d one day helped her board the tram, who’d posted himself in front of her door so discreetly no one noticed except her, as if he appeared solely in her personal field of vision. He was breathing less quickly and seemed to be at peace. She was in love. As a child she’d sworn it would never happen to her, yet here it was, and as she lay on her side she seemed to dream more than experience this moment of irresistible distress.
On rainy nights like these the crickets stayed their song, huddled in the tall grass or burrowing for winter, and fat raindrops pounded the barn roof in slow waves. Without changing position, without even opening his eyes, in a confident, loyal movement full of unspoken tenderness Aimé picked up his coat and placed it over Jeanne, who was starting to shiver. She began to detail Aimé’s profile in the darkness that was just starting to lift from the planks of the back wall, tracing the curve of his forehead and nose, nostrils swollen with air, up to his closed lips and the beard making incursions onto the soft slope of the chin. Aimé lay silent, lost in thought, and she spoke, it came out as no more than a whisper in their moment of intimacy. At the edge of her reach she could caress his hairless chest, feel the ribs protruding from his skin, count them by running her index finger along the interstices, like tiny mountains linked into a chain; she could feel and touch the physical manifestation of his being, his undeniable presence at her side, the flagrant impossibility of his disappearing. She moved to speak and saw him literally prick up his ears, his ears moved, and his eyelids too, alert to the possibility of a truth or a mystery to be plucked from the air above him, but maybe these were one and the same thing, she wasn’t sure.
“Aimé.”
“Yes.”
Jeanne was biting her lower lip, pushing hard on Aimé’s throat, her fingernails digging into the skin. He was distant, there in body yet somehow evanescent, sitting at once right next to her and somewhere very far away.
“You’re not going to disappear?”
“No.”
“You won’t abandon me.”
“Never.”
“I need you.”
“Me too.”
“You aren’t going to die.”
“That’s impossible.”
He said this last word with a slight smile and a hint of irony that she liked a lot in him, a blend of rebelliousness and pride that made it seem as if he wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything. He started turning his head toward her, to further reassure her, hold her tight in his arms, symbolically marry her, why not? A marriage of mind and spirit, with only the two of them as bride and groom and celebrants. But at that moment they heard cries and the sounds of footsteps fast approaching, and a second later a dozen lanterns lit them up, faces appeared in the dripping windows, and Jeanne’s brother yelled louder than the others, filling the barn with cursing, a confused stream of orders to his accomplices, and death threats, and he kicked the old door, which splintered and broke. His silhouette stood in contrast with the black sky behind him. A group of men stood around him, with lanterns and pitchforks. He held a rifle in his right hand, and in his left a large white sheet he immediately threw over Jeanne, as if he’d known in advance he would have to cover her nudity and protect her innocence in the sight of these men. He threw the sheet, revealing a large red brick held underneath. He threw the sheet at Jeanne and, in the same movement, raised his rifle, his dishevelled red hair shining in a circle of light, as if aflame. A million particles of dust and hay floated around his head. As she started yelling as well, overcome by panic, Jeanne wrapped herself in the sheet and reflexively drew herself close to Aimé, who immediately grabbed her by the hips and neck. He was hurting her. She didn’t understand. He shoved her in front of him, to protect himself from the bullet that was sure to come. She closed her eyes, then opened them again on a scene that was totally transformed. She said, No, Jean, no, wait, you don’t understand. Pointing the rifle at her, her brother yelled at Aimé to let her go, now, give yourself up. Aimé, with Jeanne in his large hands that seemed to encase her, backed up toward the other end of the barn, on nervous tiptoes, naked.
The whole thing was over in a few seconds, the time it took the lightning to strike outside, as long as the thunderclap that struck right near them, uprooting a tree or reducing a clock tower to rubble. Jean broke the barn door and threw the sheet over Jeanne, and Aimé grabbed her as a human shield. Jean yelled to let her go and the others pointed their guns at the couple. There were at least eight of them, men they knew by sight, from a distance, shopkeepers and workers her brother sometimes talked to, had quiet talks with in their home, she’d seen them gather in a second-floor room that she was forbidden to enter.
Aimé held her tightly, with one arm around her neck and the other on her waist and hips. He didn’t say a word. There was a low window with broken panes, he backed up to the edge and easily pushed a leg through it. Jean yelled to let her go, now. He raised his gun to his eye to take better aim and yelled at Aimé, Give up, let her go, give up, don’t even try to resist, bastard, rapist. Aimé easily threw his other leg over the sill and, in a series of perfectly executed movements, was outside in a fraction of a second. Jeanne barely had time to notice what was happening, the word “impossible” still resonating in her ears. She collapsed to the ground, her naked body inadequately covered by the sheet. With no one there to hold her up she fell, her ankles gave out, and she ended up sitting awkwardly on the hay in the barn while the men all around yelled and sprang into action. Jean screamed at the others to catch him, not to let him get away. He ran past her and stood by the window and aimed his rifle into the night, toward the surrounding woods where Aimé had already disappeared. He swore a few times as he looked for his mark in the dark, pivoting left and right. Jeanne was sure he was going to shoot, but then he too straddled the windowsill and jumped out of the barn. The sound of the rain changed, for a second, and Jeanne started breathing very quickly, she had a hard time catching her breath and her lungs refused to fill with air.
The sheet was on her, on her shoulders, but didn’t cover her at all, she could see her naked body from above, her breasts and her sex and her stomach, which hadn’t yet started to swell. In Brody’s field and throughout the district and beyond, the manhunt had begun, she heard men shouting directions and her brother promising someone, promising God, that he would catch Aimé and get revenge. Not a single shot rang out, but you could see lamps being lit in the bourgeois houses further south. The firehouse bells clanged.
She could see herself from above, her bent neck and still-wet hair that parted at the nape and fell over her shoulders. Her breathing was fast, the words rang out with a strange metallic sound at once piercing and unpleasant. She could see herself naked and alone, the straw hurt her backside and thighs, sitting there like a doleful Madonna, hurt without understanding why or from where. This pain came from a place she didn’t know. She looked like someone trying to find an arrow lodged in some inaccessible region of her body. Aimé had squeezed her hard and sworn he loved her and would stay with her, and smiled with so much confidence she found herself unable to erase the image. He had set off barefoot into the woods. Jeanne could already see the first traces of bruising in the spots on her body where he had pressed too hard.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
FEBRUARY 1987
PITTSBURG, KS
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The year before he’d seen the comet for the third time. It seemed somehow serene, at once highly dangerous and at peace as it ran its course to the outer reaches of the solar system and back, completing its ellipse. The sight of it had made him think, as did so many other things he interpreted as portents of his absurd, uncertain longevity. Several countries had sent satellites into orbit, or probes equipped with sophisticated instruments to photograph the comet’s nucleus and gather data on the composition of the stardust disintegrating in its wake. In today’s world it was possible, conceivable, to send a probe into space and measure, in real time, the slow decomposition of a stellar object travelling thousands of miles per second. You could send messages over the waves, analyze and graph their content, this was the universe we lived in and the space shuttle sent up to explore its outer reaches had blown up on live TV, in curls of grey smoke in the blue sky, shapes like letters, you could read signs in them like clouds. No one was left indifferent, schoolchildren cried, what did it mean, even here in our faraway homes, what did it say about us, the explosion of this shuttle and the astronauts it carried, their honest smiles immortalized on camera a few minutes prior to takeoff. It set Aimé thinking.
The comet was back from a long voyage to the outer confines of the galaxy, would be back to light up our nights after seventy-six years of absence, that was how they put it, one of those phrases you heard everywhere. Aimé had observed it with naked eyes, fascinated, a tail of white and pink powder crossing the southern sky, sometimes slowly and sometimes swiftly, in a straight, hypnotic line. In his yard, amid piles of scrap metal he no longer knew what to do with, he’d set up a powerful homemade telescope. The conditions were far from ideal, but he’d managed to glimpse the small, white, triangular shape between two constellations.
He wasn’t even twenty the first time the comet passed over his head, over the island of Montreal and the entire continent at one and the same time, and had only a confused notion of how this moving light could be at once present here and falling, in one and the same way, over Illinois, and still further away, over Mexico, where farmers in their fields expressed amazement in Spanish, with unfamiliar intonation, holding their hats as they stared at the sky and crossed themselves. The experience was magical, there was no other word for it, and he had resigned himself, had started calculating: the comet had also appeared in the year of his birth, if he wasn’t mistaken, or maybe just before.
With eyes full of wonder, like everyone else, he’d watched it trace an arc across the sky, along the path predicted by astronomers. The newspapers had been covering it for months, publishing stories about the comet and retailing old legends and learned opinions from academies in London and Washington. A respectful silence descended on the town, people held their breath, Aimé could remember the atmosphere, the clear sky, the absence of smoke, and then the arrival of the light, which someone had been the first to point toward. It might have been him. City Hall had organized an intergalactic dinner event where merchants, performers, and politicians came dressed as moons and planets, came with star-shaped masks over their eyes and Saturnine hats on their heads. On the night of November 16, 1835, in accordance with the astronomers’ predictions, the street lamps were left off and the curfew was lifted, for this special occasion. Aimé broke into one of the large buildings being built for McGill College, and took up a position, alone, in one of the tower’s dormer windows, eye trained heavenward, legs dangling over the ledge. He wasn’t scared of heights.
In the last year Sir Halley’s comet had returned to its perihelion and Aimé greeted it like an old acquaintance, something that made him think incessantly and revealed something of his true nature. But it had long ago ceased to be a revelation. He thought about it more at night than during the day, it was only natural. He would wake in the morning from messianic, nihilistic dreams where he played the role assigned him in the outer reaches of space and time, in private salons where they studied serious matters destined to forever alter how men thought. He wasn’t hearing voices but did fear he’d one day start to. His tinnitus would become syllabic and he’d be visited by messages, words, and cryptic phrases. He was an aberration, an incongruity, but very real at the same time; something to be both endured and imposed on human life and on history, traced out in a long, straight line that was neither circular nor elliptical, and these very concepts he once believed he understood were now beyond his grasp. His thought and his intellect were powerless against the reality he represented, and it was getting hard for him to live with himself. In his dreams he was important.
It was all food for thought: this comet’s great beauty and meticulous course, how it never strayed from its path, whereas his life was a collection of digressions and truncated episodes that were almost impossible to fit together into meaning, trajectory, or even significance. Aimé told himself, he asked himself: Was it really possible to be conscious of everything, to witness every event in all these lives, without having a role to play in their coming into being? While he pursued this line of thinking he also tried to cleave to reason, not to give in to the magical thinking that would make him an extraordinary being. Aside from longevity there was nothing extraordinary about him. He never wanted to forget that.
Aimé gazed at the sky and felt something akin to love, love for the elegance of gravity as destiny. But what did it imply? It implied nothing. He wasn’t the son of a comet. Comets didn’t have sons. He was just a man who didn’t exist three years out of four. He became transparent, a miscalculation only later corrected, a clause hotly disputed behind closed doors at Royal Society meetings centuries earlier. In a way, in a certain way, for life to go on, terrestrial life, equinoxes, and solstices, for the days and nights to follow one upon the other, allowing others to exist, and not to be put out of phase until the inevitable correction, he would have to sacrifice himself. That was how he saw the past, and the future as well, waiting for him again and again.
It’s not like he went crazy standing there surrounded by piles of useless hunks of scrap metal and concrete that were no longer of any use to anyone, except as grotesque sculptures in a hinterland. It was just that he lost his sense of time, surrounded by fields, standing there looking at the stars and watching the universe reaching out and cracking, expanding and staying still.
Aimé was humble, you could see it in the way he walked around his house and the great care and patience with which he handled small objects. But it was hard not to think of himself as important, more important than everyone else, he felt bad but who could hold it against him? Not us, not this man who had taken part in the war that ended slavery, met presidents and suffragettes and aviatrixes and clergymen, saved animals from certain death, traversed wide-open landscapes on horse, on foot, and in a Boeing 747.
The previous year he’d seen the comet when it turned up faithfully at the appointed time, and he’d been thinking about it and about himself and what they had in common ever since. And today it was on the front page of the papers, in the news, and people were talking about it: they had just seen a supernova well outside the Milky Way. Somewhere in Chile an astronomer had pointed his telescope toward the edge of the universe and found an anomaly in the shape of a star. He’d notified the authorities. It was all unfolding live and people were amazed. You could observe the beginnings of an explosion, atomized, full of colour, silent, like ten thousand suns, a hundred thousand suns, light years after the initial detonation.
He was having trouble sleeping.
Aimé didn’t get a lot of mail. He almost never checked his mailbox, but that morning, through the second-floor window, he saw a man in a dark blue uniform get into his truck and drive off. He almost felt like opening the window to ask what it was, to yell it out. A day-old newspaper lay on the bedside table. He knew the mailman had no desire to be there and his one wish was to get back to town. The tires might even have squealed, but he didn’t hear them. He felt like yelling out but he stayed there, unable to comprehend his
own frustration, silent and bitter. Was he becoming a misanthrope on top of everything else? The sounds in his head were loud, they blocked out the constant burbling of the world. The engine noise was too far away to reach him. He went out quietly, one step at a time, stopping to pick up a jacket hanging on the wall in the stairwell and went to see.
The air was cold and dry. Aimé crossed his property with his hands in his pockets, his breath visible in front of him. His dented metal mailbox stood on the side of the road. Sometimes wild teenagers, their hair dyed every colour of the rainbow, drove by and pounded it with a baseball bat. He never heard a thing, just figured it out a few days later and came out with his toolbox to put everything back in place.
The envelope wasn’t standard size, the mailman had had to bend it to squeeze it into the box: a thick, heavy envelope, as if full of documents painstakingly collected over several years. It was addressed to his old Headlight Sun PO box, which hadn’t been current for a long time. If it weren’t for the postman it would never have made its way out here. Aimé turned it over to read the return address. Looking at his house in front of him, in a woolen jacket with his mail in hand, he looked like a strong, solitary man, the last of a long line of landlords, a patriarch who no one talked to anymore because he’d committed a sordid crime. That’s how he looked as he surveyed the immense house that had once belonged to a rich farmer, a man who owned other human beings, a house with beautiful green blinds fronted by an arch that opened onto the porch, supported by two columns and the silent baying of two mythical alabaster beasts. From here, he looked like one of those beasts, or a crazy old hermit you’d cross the road to avoid meeting, just waiting to accost you to reveal the Masonic secrets of the universe and predict your future. The trembling in his hands kept getting worse, but he hadn’t gone to see anyone, not a single doctor.
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