She’s insane, Louise found herself thinking as she sipped some very hot tea with milk and sugar, Amelia’s main fuel. She wondered if she really was – if it could be said that she really was, despite everything – her mother. She’d just arrived, she had sand everywhere: in her hair, under her nails, within the exquisite whorls of her ear. But what was upsetting her, what was getting in the way of this reunion, what was gumming up the delicate machinery of her dreams, was this abstract sand, this poetic (albeit darkly, despairingly poetic) sand that Amelia kept talking about.
Yes, I left it all because it was all corrupt. Your father, me, everything. The irony is that, as vast as the world is, there’s still no escaping it; and that in trying to extricate myself from this corruption, I only ended up making it worse. I just wanted to protect you. I’m not sure I succeeded.
No, Louise said, not only did she not succeed, she actually failed outright. Because she never really left. Louise told her mother about her childhood touched by a spectre. A strange presence that wasn’t continuous but dissociated, alternative, a visitation on some nights, and I wondered how that was possible, if I wasn’t going insane. Amelia rolled her eyes. Was this woman a monster, Louise wondered, or was it just an act? For my benefit, the same way people crook their fingers to form a wolf’s shadow on the wall of a child’s room? She didn’t let herself be intimidated, she went on the offensive, decided to be just as obstinate. Now I know it was my father. That he wanted you so much, that he thought about you so much, that he conjured you. It’s not a matter of words or choice, it’s a matter of love. And pain. It’s possible to be contaminated by someone else’s pain. Even when they never mention it. The funniest part is that I’ve wondered, always wondered, if the truth actually was that he had killed you. Can you imagine that? Him – a murderer? Louise laughed, but Amelia did not say anything. Amelia furrowed brows that the sun had bleached white. It’s the opposite, I guess. He kept you alive. If you survived this long, if I thought I knew you even though we didn’t talk about you, never talked about you, it’s only because of him.
She looked at this stranger, a woman on the cusp of old age who somehow looked younger, no doubt because of the love she had refused to give – as if she had saved up a life or two this way. Could such things be just a matter of credits and debits? Have I gone the wrong way? Louise wondered, having given her all to get this far – but I didn’t do it for her, or for my father. I did it for myself, myself alone, so I wouldn’t have to eke out a living, or a dying, so I wouldn’t have to live or die half-heartedly.
Louise’s throat went dry; a bitterness choked her and seeped into her words, and all of a sudden, she felt tired, miserable, unable to speak. She’d come all this way, and in vain, why hadn’t she stayed in the comfort of her own life, the one her father had kept her in like a cage – why hadn’t she stayed back there, in that self-declared first world, which was ablaze all over, and in the blaze of which she had known friendship. Her freedom might have been illusory but her friendship on the other hand was wholly true; that much she could be sure of. In her deep disappointment, her mind turned to her friend. The one who’d never lied. Her sidekick, her confidant, the wan one, his arm linked in hers during the protests they had gone to almost religiously, as if rubbing together their shoulders and hips and dreams could ignite something, a spark, a kind of justice, a better world. How childish, she thought. And yet she missed those foolhardy risks she had thought she was taking, even though she had had no idea what danger, true danger, was. But it had built character. In one sense, they had all been children’s games; in another, they had been an introduction to struggle. Two sides of the same coin, her head on David’s lap as he had instilled fresh, soothing saline drops into her tear-gas-reddened eyes, artificial tears that rinsed her irises of all that they had seen; and they took turns, it was her job now, his head like a Roman statue’s (but blunted, as if lost in the sand and found much, much later, after his name, his power, even his renown had been forgotten) on her lap, in a ritual of purification and solidarity. Another world.
Just say the word and I’ll come with you. He spoke little but spoke well. He spoke the way he cut, he who hadn’t shuddered while slicing her arm open to remove the chip. As if I were a cat! Louise declared, and David hadn’t wavered. Just say the word and I’ll come with you. But she had decided this trip was one she needed to make alone. Maybe she’d been right. Here she was, in a makeshift camp, beside a woman who was, had to be, insane. Louise got up. Night is falling, Amelia said, you should stay here, but she didn’t really mean it, local custom put those words in her mouth. The young woman refused, she was going to head back to where she came from, unroll her sleeping bag under the wall of a hotel in ruins, it was just two hours away, she wouldn’t have dreamed of lingering here, she was sure it would be the death of her if she did. No, better to go back where she had her bearings, amongst soldiers and deserters and mercenaries, some her age, David’s age, which, come to think of it, was crazy.
*
Her sleep, in what was or wasn’t a bedroom, was strange, her head swathed in a veil like a bride, to ward off leering eyes, mosquito stings, and the sand; and her dreams, too, were strange, like after-images of coral or urchins in this place where there had once, years before, been a sea, one that had since dried up and now haunted sleepers and lulled them.
*
The next day, however, Amelia came back to earth and came to her. For just a little while, she let go of her fixations, she was truly there, after two hours’ drive, facing this young woman to whom, despite everything, she still owed something. She’d had trouble getting there, trouble talking, at first she walked around the abandoned hotel, sniffing like a lost animal, more puzzled than worried. Louise didn’t say anything; she watched Amelia. She stayed perfectly still and the woman finally approached her. Sitting down, in the half-darkness, and simply saying: I’m listening. To you. And Louise began talking. Louise didn’t know how to speak to a woman who, once, might have been her mother, and so she didn’t talk to Amelia so much as she talked to herself. To the encroaching night. She said things she had never before managed to think; things that, having now been put into words, seemed to change state and even change essence, like a plant that looks nothing like the seed it grew from. Maybe this is what she’d come here to find. A voice of her own. And with this voice, Louise talked about the love she had for Paul. A love so strong that it weighed on her, that it blanketed her and slowly pushed out all the air she had, as she breathed in and out, turning the air she could breathe into its opposite, air that smothered her. She had never confessed this, not out loud, until now. He’s lost just about all my respect, she said. I’ve had it with him. The world’s on fire and he acts like nothing’s wrong. He’s been lying to me my whole life. He was lying to me when he tucked me in. When he was cooking. He lied to me in restaurants, at the pool. On the street. Everywhere. The only time he was honest was when he was asleep. Only then.
Amelia thought for a long while, so long it seemed she wasn’t going to say anything. No words came to her. Just a quick, sharp breath. Then: You’re being hard on your father. And to top it all off, you’re wrong. Paul gave me his word when I left, he swore to me that he would never talk to you about me. So that you wouldn’t have the childhood I had. I needed to be dead to you. I couldn’t even be a bad mother; I couldn’t be a mother at all. Look at me. See? See how awful I am? That’s not what a child needs. The truth is, I was afraid. I was so afraid that I wouldn’t know how to love you, that maybe I would look and find it in you as well, this awfulness that’s swallowed me up, and the world as well. I have no idea whether I’m suffering from it or spreading it. Maybe both. What I do know, what I know without a shadow of a doubt, is that my mind isn’t well. It might be far-sighted, but it’s not well. I’m not well. And I wanted to spare you. Paul has simply been respecting my one wish. My final wish, in a way; you might have noticed – but in the falling night, there’s barely anything to see, barely anything at
all – I’m living on borrowed time.
Listen carefully. Forget what I told you yesterday, and if you can’t forget it at least don’t take it to heart. I keep making the same mistakes. The truth is I’ve been thinking about Paul for years. I’m still thinking about us. Here, in the night, in the dark, my ideas are clearer, I can finally see. And what I see, in this scene moving further and further back in time even though it always feels like it’s not long ago, but just far enough that I can’t go back to it or touch it or take it in my arms – take you both in my arms – yet still close enough that I can lay my eyes on it – what I see is this: Paul saw me as I was, exactly as I was, and he loved me. And he still loves me. Maybe in spite of himself; at heart, whether or not he accepts it doesn’t matter much. Any man capable of that, of knowing another human being exactly as she or he is and loving that human being, even when he’s been betrayed, even when he’s been abandoned, when he’s been left all alone, that man deserves love, deserves respect, because his heart is beating against the times, because he’s fighting like a swimmer against the current. You can’t do anything for the world that’s about to end or the world that’s about to come if you can’t see or understand that this man, as he is, is already the resistance.
Louise looked at this woman disappearing into the darkness and tears welled up in her eyes as her body reacted to something – violence? relief? – because this stranger, wholly cut off from her, wholly ensconced in her choices, maybe her madness or simply her nature, which she hadn’t been able to ignore – this woman had just given her back her father, the only family she had. Maybe she’s lying to me, Louise thought; I could spend the rest of my life trying to understand her. But then my life wouldn’t be mine and she would have had two. No daughter should be haunted by her mother.
Night made its way into the ruined hotel, through the bullet holes, through the empty windows, with their glass shards lying all around them like treasure, invitingly, a fatal blurring between inside and outside. Night came in, night touched Louise who had never experienced such darkness, a perfect black, and yet even there, after a minute passed, she could see. Yes, she could see something there. They grew silent as the night fell and as the struggles to come took shape before them, came into focus. Louise made out or thought she could make out patterns, forms, like those connect-the-dots children’s drawings, which in reality – here, in the desert, in the war she had come to realise was brewing – were an initiation into the sky and the night as it falls.
6
Paul’s troubles began not long after his daughter left. It was the lights, he said, the light bothered him. It had a way of creeping in. He banished all the screens from his bedroom, down to the alarm clock, which he hid under the bed; even then, he complained, I can feel it, I can sense the blue LED, I know it’s there, I know it’s glowing, it’s unbearable. Sylvia found him one of those aeroplane sleep masks. But even so the light somehow wormed its way to his optical nerve, it drove him crazy, he put up blackout curtains, darkroom curtains, shutting out the vague halo of street lights and the coloured beams that sometimes rose up from the bateaux-mouches on the Seine and which he had loved up to that point. It made no difference: pale dots swam everywhere on the underside of his eyelids. He couldn’t escape. I think I’m sick, he finally said to Sylvia. He ended up stripped down to his underwear on a hospital bed, inhaling the vague smell of disinfectant, trying not to stare at the drab fluorescent lights above him. He did what he knew he shouldn’t; he researched his symptoms himself, learned all about light pollution. Its effects on mammals, some forms of cancer resulting from working at night and from the blue, sickly blue light he’d been running away from ever since childhood. Its effects on the birds so disoriented that they lost their bearings, crashed into buildings and bridges.
He had tests done. So many questions; and when they asked him his age, the number he heard coming out of his mouth seemed unreal to him. Completely made-up. He was asked increasingly strange questions, about whether or not he had been exposed to particular substances. What do you mean, Paul asked, thinking of Amelia’s smile, Louise’s smile, was he paying for all that as well? Chemical substances, for example, have you to your knowledge been exposed to flame retardants? And this time he wasn’t sure how to reply, he shrugged like his father had done. In the X-rays Paul saw a ribcage, an arm, a thigh, none of which he recognised as his. This shadow of his body had been invaded by luminous spots he suspected should not be there. He remembered having already seen similar images, if they were indeed images. He remembered having come up with the idea that it was light, luminous points, that had killed his mother, but all that seemed distant to him, buried in memories of a childhood he hadn’t enjoyed and that he wasn’t even connected to any more, apparently, as a result of forgetting. The truth was, before he had fallen ill, he had long since ceased to remember that there was something there to remember.
Is this how it all ends? he wondered. In this constant, wan light, which he had tried all his life to avoid, to outrun, and which was now eating at him from the inside out?
He was reluctant to go and get treated. David begged him, and finally convinced him. The young man seemed to have developed a strange fondness for him, unless he’d been explicitly given instructions to care for him. In Louise’s absence he was the one who came and helped. He ran errands, seemed to know Paul’s tastes and wishes without ever having to ask. At least stay for dinner, Paul said every time he showed up, and the young man apologised before excusing himself. One night, however, he did stay. Can I ask you something? Paul said, and after a moment’s pause David nodded. He was a loyal being, utterly honest and wholly loyal, Paul thought, a little awestruck. What game were Louise and you playing the first time you came here? At first his visitor pretended not to remember but Paul pressed the question. With your video-game headsets. You know what I’m talking about. The pale boy – the young man – looked down; under his nearly white lashes he smiled. Promise not to make fun of us? Paul replied: I promise.
We were animals. Roaming around a city in ruins, flooded by water and overrun by trees, and in the ruins of what had been our school and was now just a caved-in roof, just twilight, we built our shelters. What animals? Paul asked. Oh, wild animals. Wolves, foxes. Sometimes birds. We saw the world through their eyes – sometimes it took a really long time to figure out where we were. In one of our homes, for example. Because grass had completely grown over the furniture and entire colonies of insects were living in the walls and under the floorboards. They were even crawling around in the books.
But why? Paul asked. What was the point of all that? Did you get anything out of it?
I don’t know, David confessed. Just that we weren’t the centre of the world, maybe. Maybe that it would all go on, even without us. But I don’t really know. He was quiet for a minute and added: It was just a game, you know. He often asked him what they were up to, and when he said they he meant Louise and him and the other self-effacing young people who had deserted everything Paul himself knew of the world. Everything he had coveted. David never gave him an answer. David, if I took a photo of you, would you show up in it? And David tried to stifle his smile, failed, broke out in laughter. It’s been so long since I’ve tried. You know, that goes against our – and here Paul expected him to say beliefs – principles.
I’m tired, Paul confessed. I’m very tired. David looked him up and down calmly. What would help? he asked. I don’t know, said Paul. Often he slept in his strongroom, a kind of tomb; yet even there, the lights still plagued him. The city still bothered him. What would help you, David asked, and Paul was touched that this young man would devote so much attention to someone he wasn’t even related to. Not much, I’m afraid, said Paul the businessman, the man of power. Paul who at the same time was the abandoned lover, the abandoned father. Unless it’s possible to restore the night to its original darkness, he sighed, and he wasn’t sure any more whose line that was, his or someone else’s; he was a bit ashamed of it; but David
nodded solemnly, as if there was nothing more sensible in the world. And that was the last line Paul remembered, because after that the light swallowed up his entire field of vision, and he lost consciousness.
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