“Simone came back to Paris and we began to spend almost all our time together. She shared an apartment with another girl, so we preferred to meet at my place. Once, she’d fallen asleep there, when Abe showed up at around three o’clock in the morning, drunk as usual. I told him that Simone was in the bedroom and he looked at me with an idiotic grin on his face. What he did then left me speechless—he went into the bedroom and gently lifted the blanket, gazing for a long while at the sleeping naked woman.
“‘You’re a lucky man,” he murmured, and then let the blanket drop. He quickly turned on his heel and left, forgoing his usual ritual of showering and changing.
“Shortly after that was the night everything went wrong, the night I told you about … But we’ll talk about it later, I’d like to rest for a little while now.”
He took a small device out of his pocket and pressed a button on it. The nurse appeared and helped him leave the room.
Walter came in and said to me, “If you’d like to go fishing, I’ll accompany you. I’ve prepared everything we need. The creek is less than a mile’s walk from here.”
I told him that I wasn’t keen on fishing and also turned down his invitation to accompany me on a stroll around Freeport. I went back to my suite, read for a few minutes, and fell asleep.
I dreamed of Julie again. She was standing in front of me, heavily made-up, wearing kinky clothes, and her double stood next to her.
“I didn’t know you had a twin sister,” I said.
We were in an empty room. I was sitting on a sort of throne with a carved wooden back, and the two women were standing, their long shadows covering me like a shroud.
“I don’t have a twin sister,” said one of the two, “and I’m not Julie. I’m Simone.”
I woke up panting in fear. I knew she was in love with me even before she told me. These things can happen during therapy, especially when the psychologist is male and the patient is female or the other way around, and it’s called “transference.” There are patients who have a huge affective need, which they project onto the person they associate with safety, responsibility, and attention.
When I explained this to her, Julie tried to convince me that, in her case, it wasn’t anything of the sort.
“I like you a lot,” she told me, “I admit it, but I don’t see what the problem would be.”
“A therapist–client relationship”—I avoided the words doctor and patient—“in this situation would be not only immoral and unprofessional, but also highly risky,” I told her.
“Every relationship is risky, James. When people are in love, they open up their souls and more often than not they end up getting hurt, maybe even maimed for the rest of their lives. Not because their partners are bad people, but because they can be cold or fearful or both. Have you read The Divine Comedy?”
“One of my professors considered it compulsory reading for any future psychoanalyst,” I told her. “According to him, Dante’s work best reflects the way in which people imagine their inner hell.”
“Well, in Canto 3, there are some mysterious lines. In that no-man’s-land before hell begins, which is neither damnation nor life, the poet sees a character of whom he says, ‘When some among them there I’d recognized / I looked, and I beheld the shadow of him / Who made by cowardice the great refusal.’”
“Yes, I know them. Dante was referring to Pope Celestine the Fifth, who had abandoned his throne in the late thirteenth century.”
“I don’t care who he was referring to and I’m not interested in history. I’m too fond of dreaming to destroy my fantasies with stupid games about truth and reality. The supreme truth is always in the belly of the woman who gives birth, and not in books. The primitives knew this very well when they fashioned their goddesses.”
I remember that she got up from her armchair, her eyes half-closed, as if in a trance. She took off her clothes with slow movements and stood naked in front of me, her legs slightly apart and her arms by her sides.
“Nothing more than this exists,” she told me, “life is right here, running through my body. Beyond this, there’s only nothingness.”
I didn’t say a word. I made no movement. She was extraordinarily beautiful. The seams of her lingerie had left light marks on her skin, like old scars.
“‘The great refusal,’” she said and moved toward me, walking around the desk. “It seems that all of us must choose between the nothingness of limbo, and the pain of hell. Which do you choose, James?”
seven
I TOOK A SHOWER, lingering for long minutes under the hot water, trying to pull myself together. The memory of Julie left me with a feeling of profound, harrowing sadness, which I felt physically, in every cell of my body. At the same time, I tried to weigh the risks that Josh would be exposed to during hypnosis.
He was waiting for me in the living room, sitting in an armchair in front of the coffee table. The room seemed very familiar to me, as if I’d been there for months. Just as I sat down, he began to narrate the story. His tone was different, stronger, and the words rapped out like bullets, as if he were eager to rid himself of the burden of recounting the events as quickly as he could.
“Simone told me that she’d met with Abe. He’d come looking for her at the foundation and insisted on talking to her in private, so they’d gone to a nearby café.
“For two hours, Abe had done nothing but talk about me behind my back, inventing all kinds of awful things about me. He told her that I wasn’t at all what I seemed to be and that my real intention was to make a fool of her, to drag her down into one of the perverse games I apparently liked playing with women. That when we’d come back from Lyon, for example, I’d told him that I’d fallen in love with her younger sister, Laura, and that I planned to invite her to New York in order to seduce her.
“Obviously, he didn’t use these exact words but the most vulgar language conceivable. He told her that I was a lecher, that at university I’d raped a friend of his, whose silence I’d then bought with money. He confessed to Simone that he was thinking of going to Mexico to hide from me, but that he wanted to leave Paris with a clear conscience and not to have to live with the thought that her life had been destroyed because he’d introduced her to me.
“Simone told him she didn’t believe a word of it and asked him why he hadn’t said anything to her before then, if that was really the way things stood when it came to me. Because he didn’t know how serious things were, Abe explained to her. It hadn’t been until we got back from Lyon and I’d mentioned the word marriage that he realized my game was getting out of hand.
“And if she could bear to face the truth, he promised he would supply her with all the evidence to prove that what he was saying was true. That evening, all she had to do was visit him at the suite where he lived, somewhere in the 18th district. He told her that he had letters and photographs that he’d stashed there and which he had no intention of taking out of the building.
“After Simone finished her story, I was lost for words, trying to comprehend what exactly had caused Abe to come up with such a pack of lies about me. I tried to persuade her not to go to him. But she was already determined to do it, not because she believed for one second that Abe was telling the truth, regardless of what ‘proof’ he was going to show her, but because she felt sorry for him. She was convinced that he’d suffered a nervous breakdown and was rapidly descending into madness. Gradually, with patience and kindness, she hoped to pull him out of it and convince him of the unreality of the world he’d created in his mind.
“I told her not to play with fire. Neither of us was a psychiatrist. I remembered a former acquaintance at college, a guy named Green, whose psychosis had erupted during our freshman year. He built in his room on campus a kind of altar around a TV set, adorned with empty toothpaste tubes and remains he’d picked out of the garbage. When the ambulance eventually came to take him to the hospital, the paramedics had a real battle on their hands with him, even though he was short and puny.<
br />
“I asked her whether she’d considered even for a second the fact that her life—or our lives, if she would agree to let me go with her—might well be in danger if Abe took the final step toward outright insanity.”
As he approached the end of his story, I noticed that he was becoming more and more agitated and disturbed. At first he’d seemed quite sure of himself, even if he was visibly anguished by all those memories. Having reached this part, he was like a balloon from which the air was slowly draining, his face as pale as a corpse.
His breathing was becoming quicker, and he kept fidgeting with his hands, smoothing an imaginary crease in the corduroys he was wearing or fiddling with the things on the coffee table. It grew dark, but he didn’t seem to notice, and we continued to sit in the gloom with the lights off.
“In the end we reached a compromise—she’d meet with Abe, but I’d be there, hiding somewhere. And the meeting wouldn’t take place in Abe’s room, which was probably in some trash hole full of drunks and junkies, but in a decent hotel.
“She agreed to it.
“The next day, I rented a suite for two nights at the Hotel Le Meridien, paying cash in advance. It wasn’t far from the restaurant where we’d first met. I packed a couple of things and moved in there. Meanwhile, Simone called Abe and told him that she’d meet him, but only at the address she indicated. Abe replied that he’d be there the next day, at nine p.m.
“At eight o’clock in the evening, Simone arrived at the hotel. I desired her—we made love whenever we were together—but the rooms of the suite already seemed haunted by Abe’s spirit and it would have felt like he was there looking at us, so we contented ourselves with smoking a joint. Simone only took a few drags, but I think I overdid it, and also downed a few glasses of brandy. At nine on the dot, when Abe arrived, I was already feeling potted. I hid in the bedroom.”
The room was in almost complete darkness, with only a faint glimmer from a full moon seeping through the window to cast a wan light.
“I could only faintly hear what they were saying in the living room, because they were both talking in low voices. But I realized that Abe was still telling lies about me, and that Simone was contradicting him. At one point I thought I heard Simone calling for help, so I opened the door and rushed into the room.
“Nothing had happened. I’d probably only imagined I heard that cry. As I told you, I was quite stoned. Simone was sitting in an armchair by the window, the cherry-red curtains closed. Abe was sitting on a small settee in front of her and had his hands under his thighs, as if trying to warm them. He looked at me in shock and reproached Simone for having betrayed him.
“I can’t remember clearly what happened over the next hour or so, until the film reel broke entirely, as it were.
“Abe continued to utter monstrous lies, starting from the moment we met and finishing with my arrival in Paris. He claimed that I’d painstakingly woven a conspiracy aimed at tarnishing him in Simone’s eyes, so that I could destroy their relationship. He used the most vulgar expressions imaginable and punctuated his speech with gestures as obscene as his words.
“Simone and I said almost nothing at all; we merely let him spill out his venom. I poured brandy into some glasses and sat on the rug in the living room. Except for Abe’s words, anybody who had seen us would have thought we were three friends having a drink together, smoking, and reminiscing.
“There was a large wall clock in the living room, above the TV. I remember that it was midnight when I looked at it for the last time. I was confused and couldn’t be bothered to argue with Abe. I repeatedly asked myself what we were doing there. I remember that at one point Simone went to the bathroom and I was left alone with Abe, who had stretched out on the floor.
“He told me he hated me and that he wished I were dead. I had a strange, disconnected feeling, as if everything he was saying referred to a completely different person, someone I didn’t even know and about whom I didn’t care at all, so his words couldn’t hurt me. I was still sitting on the rug, leaning against an armchair with my arms folded around my knees. It might seem weird, but I fell asleep.
“When I woke up, I was no longer on the rug but on the couch. My whole body was aching, and my head felt like it was about to burst. The clock read eleven minutes past two in the morning. A couple of bottles of brandy lay empty on the floor. There was nobody else in the room.
“I went into the bedroom, then into the bathroom, and it was there that I found Simone.
“She was lying in the tub, her hands folded over her chest in a macabre funeral posture, her eyes closed, her face horribly damaged and covered in blood. Her head had been smashed in with a marble lamp stand, which was on the floor under the sink. Abe was nowhere to be seen.”
He paused, as if groping for the words.
“Not even to this day do I know why I did what I did next. The most plausible explanation was that, after I’d fallen asleep, Abe grabbed the marble lamp stand, went to the bathroom—I remembered that she’d gone in there before I fell asleep or passed out, I don’t know which—killed her, and then fled.
“But I was still too stoned to understand how that tied in with the fact that I hadn’t heard anything and that there was a trail of bloodstains from the bathroom to the living room.
“I thought that maybe I’d collapsed on the couch after I’d tried to stop Abe. Or might I have killed her while under the influence? But why would I have done such a horrible thing? What exactly had Abe said to me, before I passed out?
“Until morning, I cleaned the room. I polished everything to remove all fingerprints and I cleaned up the bloodstains as best I could. I was trembling violently and all I could think about was how to escape from the trap I suspected Abe of having laid for me, in order to destroy me forever. I vomited a few times, and then I began to think about how to get Simone’s body out of the hotel.
“In the morning, I hung up the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and went to the shopping center across the street, where I bought the biggest suitcase I could find and some new clothes for myself. Simone had been small, so I was able to stuff her body into the suitcase along with the clothes I’d been wearing that night. I still had one more joint left and I found a number of small bottles of whiskey and vodka in the minibar, which I drank one after the other until I plucked up the courage to call the reception and ask them to help me carry my suitcase outside to a cab. I had this permanent feeling that the whole thing was nothing but a nightmare, that I wasn’t really in a taxi, in Paris, and that Simone’s body wasn’t in the suitcase in the trunk.
“When I got back to the Rue de Rome, the concierge asked me how my trip had been and I told him it had been wonderful. I asked him whether he’d seen Abe and he answered that Monsieur Abe hadn’t set foot there the whole time I’d been away. I lugged the suitcase up the stairs to my apartment and stretched out on the bed.
“I realized that I was rapidly passing from one extreme mental state to another, each worse than the last. In a situation like that, first comes the initial shock, which paralyzes you, roots you to the spot. Once you get over that, there comes a second state, which prompts you to feverish action—you have to do something, straightaway, to escape from the dangerous situation. Tiredness vanishes as if by magic, you discover unsuspected reserves of strength, make swift decisions, and act accordingly. Your mind works with a speed you’d never have thought yourself capable of. But after that, the payback comes: exhaustion and an awareness of what has happened, which punches you right on the jaw. Each minute, I was reliving the moment when I’d found Simone’s body in the tub and realized that she was dead. Each time, I felt the shock in the pit of my stomach.
“Not only had I lost Simone, but it was also possible that I might have been the one who had ended her life. I was in a foreign country and it was highly likely that I’d be made a patsy even if I were innocent. It would have been a piece of cake for the prosecution to convince a jury of my guilt, whether the accusation was grounded in tr
uth or not. And Abe was nowhere to be found. I didn’t even have his address.
“I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the door of the closet where I’d stashed the suitcase. I kept thinking it would open at any second, like in a horror film, and that Simone would step out, her face disfigured, her arm pointing at me accusingly. I had some brandy in the apartment and I drank it, but the only effect was that it made me sick and I vomited again. Finally, I remembered that I had some sleeping pills somewhere. I found the bottle in a drawer and I swallowed a few. I fell asleep fully clothed and didn’t wake up until the next morning, when day was already breaking outside. I’d slept for eight hours.
“The first thing I did was go to the closet and open the door—it was empty. My legs almost collapsed. When I pulled myself together, I discovered that Abe’s things had disappeared too. I supposed that he must have come and taken them away. Looking for a suitcase, he’d found the one in which Simone’s body was hidden. Why he’d still taken it, I was unable to fathom.
“I took a shower, changed my clothes, and went to the concierge. I asked him whether he’d seen Abe, but he said he hadn’t. He had only just come on duty and the night concierge had already gone home.
“Later that evening, the police came to my door. I must have chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes, so my hands were shaking and I was barely able to stand up.
“There were two of them, uniformed, one of them in his late fifties, and the other about the same age as me. When I opened the door, the first thing I saw was the vanished suitcase between them. Strangely, I felt almost relieved: I was going to pay for what I’d done, if I’d really done it, but things would at least be over one way or another. I invited them inside and confirmed that I was indeed Joshua Fleischer, an American citizen.
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