Our Life in the Forest

by Marie Darrieussecq

  Well, anyway. Where was I? Back in the old days. When the clicker disappeared. I was really sad. Grief-stricken. After all, he was my patient zero. The one who taught me to stay silent. The substance of our most recent sessions left me hopeful, almost certain, that he had disappeared of his own accord. There was no trace, no body. But where would you disappear to, I asked myself? How would you do it? I was starting to be concerned about it, I guess. When he disappeared I sank into a deep depression. My eye operation was scheduled, which didn’t help my morale. I’d been visiting Marie for years now, as often as I could, even during the state of emergency, and I had witnessed no progress whatsoever. It’s stupid, but I think I’d started to confuse Marie with someone who was sick. Someone in a coma. Someone who could perhaps wake up one day. If I held her hand for long enough and if I said the right words to her. But no. There was no possibility of Marie waking up sometime in the future. No conceivable progress. It was very clear: Marie would remain asleep and at their disposal. Soon they were going to remove one of her eyes and transplant it into me.

  I was seeing patients nonstop. Next. Next. I was so bored that I blinked discreetly, to change their position in my field of vision. I remember: I shut my left eye and saw them shift to the right. I shut my right eye and saw them shift to the left. I played around with it, moving them about. Watching them flatten or stand out in relief, eye closed, eye open. My eyes watered. I was the one who had to be given a tissue. Or a glass of water. Which I didn’t drink. Yes, it was that period of my life: don’t drink water = see my patients come and go before my eyes = keep waiting for the clicker who was not turning up = visit Marie, a lost cause = I almost had a breakdown. During the sessions with my patients, their words floated in space as if they had uttered them a long, long time ago. Floated and remained in the air. Floated and formed filaments that wove and spun together, and I wanted to escape, but I got caught in these hanging membranes, in these tapestries of no recognisable design. I stayed logged on the whole time during the sessions, in an effort to block it all out. Boredom is a sort of web in which you become entangled—a shroud, bandages. Yes, I was logged on during the sessions, which was wrong of me, and I received information from the outside world, offers for shopping bargains, sexual encounters, games, jokes, videos of atrocities or of cats. I kept on clicking and clicking, discreetly, moving my hand beneath my chair. In order to browse better, I tilted my head, discreetly. I blinked to pause on an image; the patients could think whatever they wanted. Some of them might have read approval or disagreement into it, but either way it sped up the session. Yet the boredom only became more intense, more speedy, it accelerated, I was trapped in a toboggan chute of boredom, a bobsled runway, a rocket in a tunnel. I was falling and at the end of the chute there was no firm ground, no ending, there was only a new window that opened onto a new window and new vistas. Well, you know the feeling.

  Boredom is physical. You don’t know how you’re going to live the very next minute. You’re supposed to fit your body somewhere, in space, but it’s pointless. You’re squashed inside the three stupid dimensions, and you wish you could disintegrate. You wish you could find the portal and pass into another dimension, one where you feel light and free, where any sensory stimulation would be like the air we breathe or the water we drink—I mean good water and good air. You wish you could swim like a fish in the water of the world. Fluid. In the gaps. Not stuck in the quicksand of time.

  I waved the knitting needle that belonged to my mother—well, that person I thought was my mother—and my patients’ eyes darted from side to side, and I envisaged us as flies, bzzzz. There was a smell of dead bodies. The patients knocked on the consulting-room door and I felt like asking them to help me. I should have. I’m sure they would’ve helped me; in fact they did help me when I was in pretty good shape. Perhaps it’s paradoxical, but when I was doing well or just so-so, my patients shared in that wellness or so-so-ness. By seeking courageously how to live, they helped me to live. They were seeking solutions. It helped me to see them battle it out courageously. Come on, get a grip, I said to myself.

  But now things were not going well. I couldn’t stand my patients anymore. Their whingeing. Their obliviousness. Every time the door opened it was never my clicker. I suffered more frequent attacks of breathlessness. And then Wolf died. That dog was my only entertainment. My only companion. He died his dog’s death, a natural death. He developed a classic case of clones’ arthritis and respiratory failure and he began to suffer, like a dog. I had to come home every night to my dying dog…I suffered with him, I breathed with him, for him. I went to have him put down. It was dreadful. And straight afterwards I was supposed to have my operation. I wanted to delay it, so I could get over the death of my dog. But I needed to do better, as far as excuses go. We don’t live in a world where the death of a dog can justify a change in the schedule.

  There was, however, an incident before the operation. More than an incident, but at the time I didn’t know what to do about it. A pigeon. It came and perched at the window of my consulting room. I like to go to work because it gets me out of my studio, and also because in my consulting room there’s that little window. You can see outside. The pigeon wouldn’t leave. I was afraid it would shit everywhere and make a mess of the wall. We already get into enough trouble for things like that, so I wanted to shoo it away. It had a sort of little pipe instead of a claw. A mutant, I said to myself, but no, it was a little tube. Hollow. The bird allowed itself to be handled, as if that was exactly what it was waiting for. I opened the tube. Inside was a piece of rolled-up paper, a handwritten note: ‘Deprogram yourself. It’s blindingly obvious.’

  It seemed like the pigeon was waiting for an answer. It was looking at me with its round eye, one side, then the other, click, click, moving its head as if it was on a spring. I didn’t know what to write. I was paralysed. I had to hope that the images from this incident would not be viewed for a good while. I let the pigeon fly away. Dumb bird.

  They performed the operation to remove my eye.

  I was in incredible pain and the horse tranquillisers made me dizzy. The pain fried half my head, radiating from under the crown of my head down to my jaw. It’ll pass, they told me. Wait until they take off your dressings. In the meantime, no touching! The physiotherapy would begin later. The wound had to heal over first.

  In the meantime, it was exhausting only seeing out of one eye. I tilted my head the whole time, like the pigeon. I wanted everything to fit into my field of vision, so I could see the big picture and ease my pain.

  I went to see Marie. It was always my first instinct. My solution when things weren’t going well. When I didn’t have a clue about anything. But they did make a point of commenting at the Rest Centre, and even at work. You’d have thought they were in cahoots, coming up with the same line: ‘All those trips have made you tired.’ I was coughing. And there they all were with their glasses of water. Water, my arse!

  I had braced myself to see her with a dressing over her eye, like me. Since she’d given me her eye. Or they’d taken her eye. Right? ‘Why doesn’t she have a dressing?’ I asked them. Only the nurses were there. ‘Blah, blah, we don’t know,’ they replied. (No, I’m kidding, they didn’t say blah, blah. They replied normally.) Well, whatever, they were programmed to keep quiet.

  Under that closed eyelid, so serene, was there perhaps a gaping hole? A bloody eye socket?* Needless to say, I wasn’t allowed to touch, to feel if it was soft. So I sat next to Marie. I leaned over. And did that trick I never did anymore. I whispered in her ear in an authoritative tone. There’s never any point to it, other than seeing the terror it triggers in their eyes. Although, you know, some of them like it.

  So I sat next to Marie and I murmured in her ear, ‘Deprogram. It’s blindingly obvious.’

  Or something like that. It’s the tone that’s important. Not what you say.

  Her eyes snapped open. Both eyes. Terrified. She had both her eyes.

  ‘It’s a glass
eye,’ the doctor told me once I’d managed to get hold of him. ‘We put her real eye in a culture so it will be in perfect condition for you. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready.’

  Did he think he was preparing some mouthwatering dish?

  I’d never heard of anything like it. Seriously, this doctor seemed to be flying by the seat of his pants. With my lung, and with my kidney, they’d transplanted them straightaway. It was simple: they put me to sleep alongside Marie, side by side in the operating room, and, hey presto, the transplant went from one body to the other. The organs leaped from one stretcher to the other. That’s the image I’ve always had in my mind, from the way they’ve talked about it since I was a very little girl.

  ‘How did you see that she had both her eyes?’ the doctor asked me in an accusatory tone. ‘I hope you didn’t touch her eyes?’ So I told him about the trick where you whisper to them in an authoritative tone. He seemed to find that incredibly mouth-watering.

  I returned home, troubled.

  I didn’t buy the line about the glass eye. Even if it’s true that they make excellent replicas here. I had seen her eyes, her two animate eyes. Lightning-fast, but her animate eyes, definitely. Perhaps her eye was indeed going to be cut out for me, but later? Surely there must have been an incident report?

  It wouldn’t have been difficult to put a dressing on her eye. To fool me so I’d wait. Pretty neat way of fooling me. Fancy dress for her, in a way. Couldn’t they show me a bit more respect, after all? Spin me a more satisfactory lie? All I needed was an explanation. All I needed was to be told or not told, but not some grey area in between. If you get my drift. I was losing my bearings, reeling. I couldn’t see clearly at all, if you’ll allow me to be so literal. Perhaps they were starting to realise we found it appalling that they chopped pieces out of our halves. Perhaps they were frightened we’d protest, like my mother did.

  I had dreams in which I was eating Marie. I began with a finger; it was tasty, so I grew bolder. I continued up her hand, to her arm; it was bleeding and I panicked at the idea that all this blood was going to mean the end of my transplant deal. I woke up with a start, turned on the light and my studio was still divided in two. I still had to twist my neck around to see the whole room. To check there was no one crouched in the shadows.

  They treat us like cattle, I told myself. They infantilise us to the point of not informing us about our procedures, even when it’s our bodies! My body!

  I sounded like my mother when she got angry, the poor thing. My body, my arse.

  After I’d made my stupid disclosure to the doctor, the robot nurses were programmed to monitor us closely. It was now absolutely forbidden to whisper in the ear of the halves. We had to comply with their sleep regime. Those who got a kick out of waking them up gave me dirty looks. My friends. I wanted to say to them: so what, since our halves always fall back to sleep afterwards?

  Come on!

  A terrible time.

  I went to see my supervisor. I needed him. I needed to tell him about my dreams, and my eye, and Marie, and the transplant deferment, and Marie’s eye in the culture and her glass eye supposedly replacing it. My dreams and visions were like quicksand. I woke in the morning to see a single eye in a storage jar, growing, swelling, and all of reality—the patients, the tram, my studio, the neighbour’s plants that kept on dying—got mixed into a culture broth, full of filaments, which was the air itself I was trying to breathe.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said my supervisor (that’s what old-school shrinks always say). ‘Hmmmmmmm. Glass eye. Does that make you think of something?’

  I tried to associate, but nothing came to mind.

  ‘Ah, no,’ I said.

  ‘Hmmmmm,’ he said.

  When it was time for my next session, my supervisor didn’t open the door. Three days later, when I placed a query against his name in my device, I found out that he’d died. Terminal cancer. Terminated, I said to myself.

  So I took off my dressing. I had the devil of a time. It was stuck! It hurt like hell! But I wanted to see. As if taking off the dressing would restore my vision. But dressing or no dressing, I still only saw out of one eye. And as far as seeing goes, I was in for a shock: they had also removed my eyelids. Instead of an eye, there was a scar, not exactly a scar, more like a tight seam, a black thread that sutured the eyebrow to the cheekbone.

  I was unrecognisable.

  I stuck the dressing back on, a perfect disc of white adhesive gauze.

  I was in two minds about asking the doctor from the Centre to clarify, once and for all, the exact date of my future transplant. Would Marie be disfigured in the same way? I didn’t want them to do that to her. No, I really didn’t want that. Even in order to regain a human face.

  I’d been mulling over the pigeon’s message and suddenly I thought: Honey, if you keep asking, if you put pressure on them, you’re going to disappear too. You will be disappeared. I had a lightbulb moment. An ‘insight’, shrinks would call it. Things fell into place. The pieces of the puzzle. You’re going to disappear like Romero did after he put in a request for teeth. You’re going to disappear like Romero did after he’d filled in the request form to schedule his operation. What he scheduled was his termination.

  I understood. At least I understood part of what was going on. I hadn’t yet worked it all out—that if I was constantly breathless and constantly thirsty, it wasn’t so much that the air was polluted and that I was going without water, it was that I had only one lung left, and only one kidney left. I hadn’t yet understood that.

  Today, I need to write. I don’t know if it does me any good to write, but I can see. I see what they’re doing to us. I feel it. With the rest of my body.

  I’m lying under the trees as I write, my back against a mound of earth. I’m making an effort to breathe slowly. It’s a sunny day, even if we always stay in the shade. Every now and again I tip my head back and try to concentrate on the foliage. With my head upside down, and my single eye, I try to see things from the other side, as they say. You can’t feel the wind at ground level, and the trees above seem to be moving by themselves. They’re swaying their arms, their branches; they’re waving their green hands; they’re doing the helicopter. I try to empty my mind. To breathe. The air is marvellous here. It smells green. It smells like sap. It’s so good. Between the leaves, I glimpse confetti pieces of sky. Sequins of sky. It’s raining blue sky. The blue sky settles over me.

  Pope Francis was a twenty-first-century pope who lived with only one lung. It’s possible. Even without faith. He suffered from serious pneumonia when he was young and underwent a pneumonectomy, the removal of a lung. He died when he was very old, and was quite a good man. He looked after the poor. He breathed as well as he could, but managed to travel a lot, et cetera. Not like me. But that’s neither here nor there.

  I digress.

  Let’s get back to it.

  My dog died but another dog arrived. A stray. They exist here. They even gather in packs on the outskirts of the cities. I had never come across any around the Centre, but I think they terminate them en masse out there. It was one of those yellow dogs with dirty matted hair, the result of a long series of interbreeding between dogs of all sorts of species. Some pretty serious, non-stop mixing. It was waiting at the bottom of my building. This dog without a human seemed odd, given that it had a collar—not exactly a collar, but a thin cord around its neck. The thinnest piece of cigarette paper was rolled around the cord. Written on the paper were the words: ‘Disappear now.’

  How do you go about disappearing? How do you do it? I was happy enough to log out, but that meant ending up completely alone, without money, without a home—when you connect, it links you to the front door of your residence. You forget exactly how much every single one of our movements is networked, recorded, categorised, et cetera. Read by robots. Archived, measured, indexed. That totally ordinary action of opening your front door by identifying yourself with your hand. Of paying by simply passing through a security
gate with an iris scanner (and it works with only one eye). Of telephoning by simply activating the microphone in your ear. You forget all that. When you disappear, I thought, you can’t do anything any longer. You can’t exist any longer. You’re lost in limbo, trapped between two blades of time. I told myself that I had to stop using my body as an interface. But how?

  Later on, I learned that in the forest they collect organs, especially hands and eyes. They retrieve them from fresh cadavers. They work it out. They trade. I don’t have anything to do with that, but I know it’s the first step in any identity jamming. Basic stuff. But I’d been hacked about and tinkered with enough to accept the transplant of a hand belonging to someone else, alive or dead.

  I was reconciled to losing everything when I disappeared. I stockpiled whatever I could, like food—energy bars, that sort of thing. A water filter. Last of all, I put on sturdy, comfortable, warm clothes. And my mother’s checked raincoat. I dug up some well-made shoes. A space blanket. I told my patients that I had some post-operative complications and had to take a leave of absence.

  As well as the unit in my head, I have two implants like everyone else: one under the skin of my forearm, and one under my ear, and that’s not counting the Centre’s ID tag under the skin on my wrist. It’s not difficult to remove, but (I’m giving you a heads-up) it hurts. It’s been embedded there since I was a child. The various tissues are difficult to cut through; there’s a lot of blood. And for the forearm or the wrist, you have to grab the skin between your teeth to be able to operate with the other hand.