Breakneck

by Nelly Arcan

  “François! François!”

  The child started sprinting down the sidewalk in the triumph of boyhood, cutting past the passersby who parted to let him go. His mother began to panic, she ran after him, yelling, “François! Stop! Stay there, François! Stop!” But François loved the idea of a chase, the hunt was on and he was the prey, he ran ever faster, letting out a constant high-pitched cry, beautiful, almost a chant. Then his mother understood that she would cause the worst possible outcome, she changed her tone, now she was shrieking, “Françooooois! Stooop! Stooop! Stooop!” The game wasn’t funny anymore, and the boy halted in mid-stride. He watched his mother run toward him, he didn’t know what to do, he was already beginning to apologize with his posture, the way he put his hands in his pockets, almost ashamed. Once she’d caught the child, she fell on her knees and burst into tears, trapping him in her arms like a wild beast.

  Poor mother, poor child, Rose lamented, thinking of the quantity of tears this woman would shed for her boy, and the indecent weight of those tears on him; he would have to take measures to protect himself from this great fear of the world unless he wanted to live like a drowning man.

  After they watched the mother crying over her child, the couple returned to Marc’s house.

  “Why don’t we go out and eat at Chez L’Épicier tonight?”

  “Good idea,” he replied, taking her by the waist and guiding her upstairs.

  In the bedroom, Rose gave Marc the only part of her she could: her mouth. She worked his cock the way you watch a dish in the oven: calmly, mind elsewhere, without pleasure or disgust, with gratitude for this man who never sought to come between her and her desires, who instead helped them along.

  Later, in the bathroom as she was getting ready to go out, she looked at her pussy in a small mirror. A Jivaro doll. The inner lips had disappeared.

  “For every woman, it should be natural to be able to show her body without shame, hang-ups, or fear.”

  Rose put the mirror back in her handbag and closed her eyes to concentrate on the conviction she’d woken up with after the operation, the one she had worked to keep alive.

  There was still plenty to do.

  JULIE O’BRIEN WAS jogging outside, earphones on, “Under my Thumb” blaring, a Rolling Stones song in the warm air of July. She was making her way toward the Mountain that she would scale then go back down to Java U, where she’d write for a few hours, relaxing in front of a tuna sandwich, why not, and a glass of carrot juice.

  While running up the mountain on the Mount Royal Avenue side, she saw Charles. He was sitting on a bench, easily recognizable with his fashionable haircut, wavy, golden locks upon his head, a metrosexual haircut, or was that ubersexual, it depended on your point of view. He was looking straight ahead as if in deep meditation. Julie ran toward him, realizing as she slowed down how hard she’d pushed herself.

  To try and catch her breath, she leaned against the bench, but her wind escaped her so she unhooked a water bottle from her belt, hoping that the drink would calm her. Charles was concentrating on whatever it was he was looking at, and hadn’t detected her presence, his mind had left his body and was travelling through memory where the world was falling apart in a way he could not comprehend. The order of things was broken, his head was a pool table where the triangle of numbered balls was broken by the cue ball, it seemed to him it kept on breaking over and over again, shooting the balls toward the four corners of the table in a thunder of collision and destruction.

  “Charles? How are you?”

  Charles turned toward her but his eyes seemed unable to focus on her. Then, as recognition loomed, he jolted backward.

  “Charles?” she repeated, leaning over him slightly.

  “You, here? You were looking for me? You followed me?”

  “No, I saw you by accident. With the good weather I’ve been running on the Mountain more often. Why?”

  Julie sat next to him and Charles calmed down a little. His beautiful full lips searched for words, while the mouth in his three-day beard produced no sound.

  “What’s happening? You’re scaring me.”

  “You sent me those pictures over the Internet?”

  “Pictures? No, I haven’t sent you anything.”

  “Strange. I was sure it was you. To make me understand how sick I am. To punish me.”

  The traffic was dense on Park Avenue, techno music poured from a convertible with the roof down, four teenage boys scanned the sidewalk for girls eager to show off their booty.

  “It wasn’t me. I swear, I’m not trying to punish you. I never wanted to punish you. I just wanted . . . ”

  Julie didn’t know what to say, it was clear she had often wanted to punish him, and they both knew it.

  “I got some pictures. Weird ones. I don’t know who sent them to me. Someone who knows me, for sure.”

  “Pictures of what?”

  Charles went silent and put his head down.

  “Porn?”

  “Yes. Well, I guess.”

  “Maybe they were sent automatically, to promote a site you visited. Have you thought of that?”

  “No, that’s not it. They were taken for me, with a goal in mind. But it’ll be okay, it’ll be okay.”

  “Listen. I put a lot of pressure on you for the shoot Saturday, but if you don’t want to, we can forget it. No problem.”

  Charles rubbed his face with his hand, then looked at his watch that was at eye level.

  “Maybe you need to get out of the world of photography and images, at least for a while. Maybe the proximity to bodies . . .”

  “No,” Charles interrupted. “It’s the opposite.”

  Charles was smiling now, but his smile was fragile. When Julie tried to stroke the back of his neck with her hand, he twisted away from her again, as if facing a dentist’s needle aimed straight at his open mouth.

  The conversation was over, and Julie resumed her run without pushing it. She knew that by pushing too hard, she’d gotten Charles into a place where she couldn’t reach him. For her as well, life was an endless battle, a world without war or mass graves, where the horrors of the globe were a pitch in a marketing meeting for the United Colors of Benetton, where misery and famine were mostly seen at the box office, where the bloody reality of countries destroyed by armed conflict could be digested in the expression of your personal opinion, but her world without war or mass graves was still, when you looked closely and carefully, full of shit.

  Without knowing it, men had fought for this world of freedom, this life of endless choices; the massacres of the past had led to these lives that held no danger, except perhaps from yourself, and now, as you stepped over the slaughter of History, you could despair about your own life. But everyone had his cross to bear, a dead god on his back, the saviour’s corpse, Julie thought. For now, her only care was to scale the Mountain that, like everyone else, wore a cross at its peak, a fossil, the vestige which said that somewhere near here, a god had lived.

  EARLIER THAT MORNING, Charles Nadeau had made his way to the studio like every other morning to select and touch up the photos of a sixteen-year-old model, a breathtaking beauty, though inexperienced. She would be the cover of Elle Québec for the month of September, the most popular edition of the year. In the host of pictures he would find a few good ones, but he knew, even without looking at them, that most had been spoiled by the model’s reflexes. Despite his warnings and recommendations to remain natural, and without any particular intention, she had pushed her lips forward like a kiss and narrowed her eyes, believing, no doubt, that she was giving added strength to her look. Models, in their poses, were often preceded by horrendous clichés.

  The previous day’s shoot had tired him more than usual, and he still hadn’t quite gotten his energy back. That morning, he’d felt oppressed by the extraordinary number of people walking every which way, coming toward him with their magnetized lives, despite it being so early. The material existence of other Montrealers was
intolerable, impossible to escape, as if each body that passed raped his own.

  On the screen in his dark studio, he examined hundreds of photos and felt, after half an hour, as disgusted and impotent as he had when looking at the pornographic images in his repertoire which he had since erased.

  Yet the two couldn’t be more unlike each other in Charles’ eyes. The model was wearing a series of white dresses, and everything had been whitewashed, cleaned, with no possible entry, and Charles couldn’t see the link between the virginal, impeccable body of the model and the brutality of what got him hard. There was something foul about moving from pornography to fashion, like a bacteria; the results of the shoot were contaminated by his new point of view on them, a gift of clairvoyance that revealed the rot despite the appearance of the pictures, despite their decency. Julie would have said she’d added that word to his vocabulary—decency—just for him. Something had changed in those pictures that were decomposing before his eyes, he could make out a swarm, seething activity, yet still indefinable.

  On first inspection everything seemed normal, the young model looked like a bride in a fluffy wedding gown, but things didn’t stay so simple for long. Charles dug deeper than the surface, revealing that this beauty was metal-plated, gold leaf over a bloody background, a flowery shroud that hid crude flesh and its organic workings. It was as if the cleanliness of the photos revealed, in the limpidness of the model’s skin, in her dense grain, carefully made up, in the purity of her young body, what this body would become and what it already was: an inanimate, putrid thing. Her smooth, hermetic adolescent body, that once would have comforted him, now threatened, loomed. Her seamless beauty seemed about to fall apart. It shocked him, and his own body reacted with discomforting sensations: muscle pains and headaches, an almost perpetual state of fatigue.

  Despite that feeling, he worked for more than two hours. His sight gained further acuity through the exercise, and it kept advancing the borders beyond which the body no longer existed.

  He returned to pictures he’d worked on in the past, a few years ago. They too were contaminated. All these pictures that had once given off light, that had been filled with a soft wind of beauty, like fairies landing on a silvery veil over the darkness, now revealed a hidden face, and wore a death mask. Before his eyes, the skin peeled off and showed what lay beneath: injured flesh under alluring pouts, come-hither looks, open, rouged lips, cute curls cascading onto bare shoulders, long legs, juvenile bodies with no fat, both bony and soft, true models.

  Death was there at the heart of beauty, and his own body, faced with death, pulled back, found ways to turn away, whether he was sitting or not, in front of his computer. His thoughts followed the same movement toward shapelessness, lost in troubled water, muddy bottoms, and the end of life, the genesis of which took the form of messages sent to him. But what was he being told?

  He managed to choose the best photos of the young model, a dozen or so, but then he had to penetrate them with his cursor and move over them to touch them up. He knew this would be the worst part: as he zoomed in on various parts to fix them, the whole disappeared and the parts emerged, magnifying skin that didn’t look like skin anymore. He was moving into a place never before seen that vomited marine creatures from the deepest abyss where no light had ever shone before that instant. As he feared, every dilated pore, every fine line on her skin, every blemish and red vein at the corner of her eyes seemed like an infringement to him, spittle sticky like a foretaste of the tomb.

  A little before eleven o’clock, he left the studio to get some fresh air, walked briskly toward Pine Avenue and, without forethought, entered a hair salon. The shampoo did him good, but when he sat in front of the mirror, in front of his own image, he felt that same feeling of disintegration, that same toothless face behind his own. He couldn’t follow the flow of words from the hairdresser; the face in the mirror belonged to another. He closed his eyes, communicating to the hairdresser that he was overworked, a passing thing, probably just the beginning of a cold.

  He found the energy to return to his studio and finish his work, having had the time to take a long detour all the way to the Mountain and then Saint Lawrence Boulevard, all the while reasoning with himself that his face couldn’t be any other face but his. The photos were only just photos, after all, they couldn’t be signs from hell meant for him to decipher.

  Throwing the last of his strength into his work, he was as productive as usual, controlling his sight and forcing himself to consider only the surfaces of images likely to be looked at. But an event broke down his resistance, this time for good, and from then on he would never be able to doubt that there was a hidden program of destruction lurking behind his life, and the lives of all others.

  A message from an anonymous email address arrived with the usual brief ping in his inbox, the address he almost never used, and gave only to those close to him. He didn’t recognize the sender’s address, and was about to delete it without reading it, but the subject line attracted him: Something to be licked.

  “THIS IS WHAT I WILL SOON OFFER YOU, IN PLEASURE AND WITH LOVE,” he read. There was no signature.

  The pictures were an open mouth, they were what was vomiting and what was vomited. It was the inside of a body, he figured, in any case, something human.

  He explored the details as he had with the young model’s photos, without understanding what he was looking at. But his heart was beating and his lungs were compressed, he felt his being desert him, trying to escape what the screen was forcing on him. In one of the pictures, he saw something he recognized: two fingers, two fake nails, a French manicure, exploring the middle where there was an opening. In the last picture, a finger entered the hole, and the manicured nail was lost from view.

  Charles could barely swallow; he had understood what he was seeing. A woman’s genitals. He’d seen the same thing on the Internet, but now he could not keep his eyes in check, he saw the surfaces folded over themselves like a pair of gloves. It was a naked pussy that had no more skin because death had taken it for itself, a pussy like a path open to him, a hidden message. Through this pussy he would discover what was expected of him, and what had been trying to come to the surface for some time now. The pussy on the screen was about to open its mouth and say something important, but Charles wasn’t ready to hear it, he turned his head away, his strength left him and he could not face the unbelievable object that showed itself to him in such dramatic fashion, impossible to avoid since that morning.

  Outside again, he wandered a second time toward the Mountain to try and make sense of his thoughts. There, he met Julie. Obviously she was behind the pictures, who else could it be?

  Returning home, a constant buzz filled his head and broke his last link with the world. The swarming of pictures into decomposition had moved into him, into his mind where his new-found gift of clairvoyance lay. It continued haunting him to make sure he could hear its uproar.

  X

  * * *

  THE SHOOT

  IT WAS A GORGEOUS DAY. The sky, uniformly blue, was pure and cloudless, except in the distance, if you looked close enough, over the Jacques Cartier Bridge, small rips of cotton, tender clusters just over the horizon. The sun was low and strong, yet delicate and discreet, a ball of light that kept its distance, tied to the Earth by an invisible wire. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, but summer was alive and golden, August was approaching quickly, Julie feared, hell had waltzed into Montreal to open wide the doors to its oven, at least until autumn.

  Julie noticed that the guardrail had been repaired. She tested it and it had swayed; shoddy work. To be careful, she placed the picnic tables and the bottle-green parasols to block the path to the guardrail, unless you made an effort to climb over them.

  She’d spent the previous day making food to feed the crew both during and after the shoot that would be a kind of celebration. She made sandwiches of all sorts, with cold cuts and grilled vegetables, and potato and chickpea salad. She also bought
a dozen bottles of flat and sparkling water, two litres of orange juice, grenadine syrup, lemons and cherries and, of course, to pay everyone for their efforts, eight bottles of champagne, two of which were already on the roof—Veuve Clicquot, to be drunk after four o’clock in the afternoon, at least by her, and while eating, and out of the sun’s glare. The reserves were kept in the shade, at the edge of the deck, in two large containers filled with ice that she would replenish if need be.

  She had organized everything with unusual effort, surprising even to her. Perhaps, she thought, she didn’t need to love to live, maybe the best way to live was without love.

  At first, there would be only her, Rose, and Charles, four hours for a photo shoot, giving Julie time to define the perfect angle to capture their bodies. André and Bertrand would join them at 4:00 pm giving them enough time to review the pictures that Charles would transfer onto his laptop equipped with a high-speed connection even on the roof. The rest of the day would follow the particular inspiration that came to them; either everyone would go home or continue to celebrate there on the roof, inviting the building’s residents to join them. Olivier Blanchette, the cameraman with whom she’d worked during Children for Adults Only, would come and film the shoot. He would stay for the party. Julie was sure he could wrap his head around the concept.

  Her body was lightly tanned and her muscles scarcely defined, but she was slowly getting back into shape, her relapse now seemed to be part of a distant past, a bad patch experienced by someone else, a story she heard. As she got older, the distance between her and her memories lengthened. They fell away from her like a book she’d read a long time ago, then forgotten.

  She was leaning against the guardrail, but far from where the lightning had struck, sunscreen on her shoulders speckled with clusters of freckles. Her left shoulder had healed, though when she was tired or lifted heavy weights, her injury awoke in warm, rough waves, almost sensual.