Life Form

by Amélie Nothomb

  If this can reassure you, you are by no means the first inveterate liar ever to write to me. And you’re not even a true inveterate liar, because you were aware of your invention, so much so that you have become the first person to have voluntarily removed your mask. Of all the people who have written to me, there have been some whose lies were blatantly obvious the moment I started reading their letters, others whose trickery took me as long as four years to detect, and still others whose stunt I have not yet discovered. Besides, to get back to what I said at the beginning of my letter, as long as it does not hurt anyone, inveterate lying does not bother me in the least.

  I would also like to congratulate you: your scheme was so clever I was in no danger of ever finding out, had you not confessed. Well done. There is a crook in every writer, so I take my hat off to you as a colleague. When an untalented inveterate liar tries to ensnare me with a blatant falsehood, I feel afflicted. Fraud, like the violin, demands perfection: for a violinist to give a recital it is not enough for him to be good. He must be sublime or nothing. And in you, I am saluting a master.

  Sincerely,

  Amélie Nothomb

  Without realizing, I had used his “sincerely” to end my letter. And indeed, in this letter, I had displayed a rare sincerity. My only omission was that I had been annoyed by his “I did want to attract your attention.” How often have I read this sentence? And it is such a pleonasm. If you’re writing to someone, it’s because you want to attract their attention. Otherwise, you wouldn’t write to them.

  But this could be excused because for once it didn’t come with the sentence which follows that formula nine times out of ten: “I couldn’t bear it if you treated me like everyone else.” There are numerous variations on this nonsense: “I’m not like other people,” “I wouldn’t like for you to speak to me as if I were just anybody,” and so on. The moment I read this sort of thing, I throw the letter in the wastepaper basket. To obey their injunction. You don’t want me to treat you like everyone else? Your wish is my command. I have the deepest respect for everyone. You are asking for exceptional treatment, therefore I shall not respect you, I shall throw your epistle into the wastebasket.

  What I cannot stand about this statement, other than the fact that it is stupid, is that it is oozing with contempt. Contempt that is all the more reprehensible in that it has been ascribed to me. It is something I am absolutely allergic to, I cannot stand any form of contempt, whether it has been addressed to me, imputed to me, or I have simply been a witness thereof. As for holding everyone in contempt, that is even more revolting. It is simply inadmissible not to grant a stranger the benefit of the doubt.

  I’ve had gingerbread with honey. I love the taste of honey. The word “sincere,” so fashionable nowadays, takes its etymology from “sine cera,” literally “without wax,” which is a reference to purified honey, of a superior quality—for there was a time when swindlers would sell you a nasty mixture of honey and wax. All those people who misuse the word “sincerity” nowadays ought to have some good honey therapy to remind themselves whereof they speak.

  Baltimore, February 27, 2010

  Dear Amélie,

  I was even more stunned by your letter than you must have been by mine. I don’t know what I expected but certainly not that.

  I think your reaction was very beautiful. The only other person who knew about my lie was my brother Howard. He doesn’t share your tolerance, to say the least. When I was sending him the e-mails to copy out for you, he would greet them with a “God you are such a sicko” or some other equally refined expression.

  Go figure: you’re not blaming me, and as a result I feel in the wrong. I feel I need to justify myself, but you’re not even asking me to.

  What I told you about my life until I turned thirty is the truth: drifting, sleeping rough, poverty, and finally hunger. But when I touched bottom I didn’t join the army, I went home to Mom and Dad. It was a hell of a humiliation to go back to living with my parents at the age of thirty, without a single accomplishment to my name. My mother thought by buying me a computer she was rescuing me. “You can design a website for our gas station,” she said. As if a gas station needs a website! I could smell her pretext a mile off. But I had no choice, so I set to work. I found out that I wasn’t too bad at this line of work. A few local businesses asked me to do their websites, too. I made some money, which allowed me to bail Howard out of debt.

  In fact, that was my undoing. I had just spent ten years doing nothing but walking and starving; now, switch those verbs to their opposites and there I am adopting the lifestyle of a programmer—never using my legs and snacking all day long. My impression that my mother had given me that computer for me to redeem myself was so strong that I didn’t leave the screen for an entire year. I did not stop except to sleep, wash, or share a family meal—more eating, again. My parents could not see beyond the version of the scrawny son who had returned to the fold; they didn’t notice I was putting on weight and neither did I. I should have looked at myself in the shower, but I didn’t pay any attention. By the time I realized the extent of the disaster—and that’s the word for it—it was too late.

  If there is one ailment where prevention is better than cure, it’s obesity. To notice that you have ten or even twenty pounds to lose, that’s nothing. But to find out one fine day that you’ve got sixty pounds to lose is something else altogether. And yet, if I had started even then, I could have saved myself. Now I have two hundred and ninety pounds to lose. Who has the courage to try to lose two hundred and ninety pounds?

  Why didn’t I ring the alarm bells when I found out I was sixty pounds overweight? I had some thorny computer problems that day, and I needed all my energy and concentration: no way could I start thinking about a diet. The next day was the same, and on it went. The mirror confirmed the verdict of the scales: I was fat. But I swore that it didn’t matter: who was looking at me? I was a programmer, I lived in my parents’ tire warehouse with a computer that didn’t give a damn how much I weighed. I put on a sweat suit and an XXL T-shirt and you couldn’t tell. At mealtimes neither my father nor my mother noticed a thing.

  When I was walking across America, like any self-respecting Kerouac wannabe, I tried the drugs that were available on the road and in the desert, which meant a lot of drugs. Your buddies always have some substance in their pocket: “Share the experience,” they tell you as they hand you some. I never turned it down. Some stuff I liked, other stuff I hated. But even the drugs I really got hooked on never amounted to one-hundredth of the addiction to food I suffered from. When I see anti-drug campaigns on television I wonder what they’re waiting for to warn us against our true enemy.

  That’s why I can’t even begin to lose weight: my dependency on food has become invincible. It would take a straitjacket, size XXXL, to stop me eating.

  When I hit two hundred and seventy, my mother said to me, stunned, “You’re fat!” I replied that I was obese. “Why haven’t I noticed anything until now?” she cried. Because I’d let my beard grow, and it hid my triple chin. I shaved it off and discovered the face of a stranger, the stranger I still am.

  My parents ordered me to lose weight. I refused. “If that’s the way you want it, we won’t have you at the dinner table anymore. We don’t want to be witnesses to your suicide,” they said. And so I became a solitary fat man. It didn’t bother me not to see my father and mother anymore. In the end, that’s what’s so awful: nothing bothers you, you can accept everything. You think, no way will I ever become obese, because that would be unbearable: it is unbearable, but you bear it.

  I’m at a point where I don’t see anyone anymore, other than the deliveryman who brings me the food I order over the phone or the Internet, and nothing fazes him: he’s probably seen it all, in Baltimore. I put my dirty laundry in a garbage bag; when it’s full, I put it outside the garage door. My mother washes it, then brings the bag back to the same place. That
way she doesn’t have to look at me.

  In the fall of 2008, I read an article about rising rates of obesity among American soldiers based in Iraq. In the beginning I thought it was my brother Howard who should have put on weight and not me. Then I began to envy those obese soldiers. What I mean is that they at least had a real excuse to be fat. Their status made them seem like victims. Some people might say it wasn’t their fault. I was jealous, because they had people feeling sorry for them. It’s pathetic, I know.

  But that’s not everything. There was a history behind their pathology. And I envied them for that, too. You’ll tell me that mine has a history, too: well, maybe it does, but I don’t know what it is. According to the facts, there was a cause for my obesity and yet in my mind there was no connection to the laws of causality. Living full-time on the Internet creates such a sensation of unreality that it’s as if all the food I had been devouring for months had never existed. I was a fat man without a history and as such I was jealous of those who had been incorporated into History with a capital H.

  When the war in Iraq began, they contacted me and declared me unfit due to obesity—already! At the time, I was glad I was fat and I thought it was hilarious that my idiot brother got sent over there. And so my nothingness in front of the computer continued: eight years of nothing, with nothing to show for it in my memory, and yet I couldn’t just forget those eight years, since they had burdened me with over two hundred pounds. Then I read the article about the obese soldiers. And you came into the picture.

  It was the conjunction of that newspaper article and the discovery of your existence that gave me the idea for my lie. For a start I’d been intrigued by the idea of a novelist who writes to her readers on real stationery. I ordered your books translated into English and although I can’t say why, they really struck a chord with me. You’ll probably be annoyed, but it was one of your characters who gave me the idea for my lie, the young Christa in Antichrista.

  Suddenly this new interpretation of my obesity began to seem like my salvation. For my version to become real, it had to receive a stamp of approval from someone outside. You were perfect for the part: well-known, and responsive. I don’t know if corresponding with you did me good, but I do know I really enjoyed it: you were assuring me of a history. I had really begun to believe that I was a soldier in Baghdad. Thanks to you, I had something I have never had: dignity. In your mind, my life took shape. Through your gaze, I felt myself exist. My fate was deserving of your consideration. After eight years of nothingness suddenly I was experiencing incredible emotion and delight. Even if your letters only reached me in scanned versions, they seemed so terribly real.

  I would have liked for things to go on like that forever, but you wanted to see a photograph of me in uniform. And then in the summer of 2009 newspapers the world over announced the withdrawal of our troops. Howard, with his usual rotten luck, was in the last contingent; he only got back to the US ten days or so ago. In short, when I realized that I could no longer go on with the lie, the only solution was silence.

  I got Howard to send me all your letters. It was so moving to see them for real, to touch them. I printed out my own letters, which I had archived, and put together a file with our successive messages. Do you know what I called the folder? “Life Form.” It came to me instinctively. When I think back about the dozen months or so spent corresponding with you, and I remember that before that I had had no life at all for nearly ten years, these words suddenly seemed incredibly important: thanks to you, I was now granted a life form.

  In theory, life form can refer to the elementary existence of amoebas and protozoa. For most people, that brings to mind a sort of disgusting swarming, nothing more. For someone like me who is familiar with the void, even that in itself is life, and so I must respect it. I loved that life form and I am nostalgic for it. Writing back and forth worked as a kind of fission: I would send you a tiny particle of life, you would read it and make it double, your answer would multiply it, and so on and so forth. Thanks to you, my void was being filled by a little culture of fluid. I was marinating in a sauce of shared words. There was a voluptuous delight in this that nothing could equal: the illusion of having meaning. The fact that this meaningfulness stemmed from a lie did not in any way detract from its delight.

  Our correspondence has just resumed after an interruption that lasted as long as its reign. Will it be as good as before? And now that I have told you the truth, will it give rise to a new life form? I’m not at all sure. How can you trust me now? Even supposing that out of the goodness of your soul you could go on writing to me, something has been broken inside me: I was never able to forget that I was lying, and yet I loved the conviction that writing this lie brought to me. You are a writer, you know this only too well. But I’m a neophyte, and I can’t get over it: the most intense thing I have ever experienced is something I owe to the shared fiction of which I am the author.

  And now my fiction has been demolished. You know the appalling truth. Even the best kept prisoner on the planet can escape. But no escape is possible when the prison is your own obese self. Lose weight? LOL. I weigh nearly four hundred and fifty pounds. Why not deconstruct the pyramids of Egypt, while we’re at it?

  So let me ask you this: what do I have left to live for?

  Sincerely,

  Melvin Mapple

  The conclusion to his epistle upset me greatly. Melvin’s dementia must have been contagious because I immediately bought a plane ticket to Washington. The international operator found me Mapple’s phone number without too much difficulty. Allowing for the time difference, I dialed his number. A breathless voice answered, “Is that really Amélie Nothomb?”

  “You ran to pick up the phone, didn’t you?”

  “No. It’s next to me. I can’t get over the fact you’re calling.”

  Melvin spoke as if he were constantly out of breath. It must have been due to his obesity.

  “I land in Washington on March 11 at 2:30 P.M.. I want to see you.”

  “You’re coming for me? I’m very touched. I’ll meet you at the airport. Then we’ll take the train to Baltimore.”

  I hung up, afraid I might change my mind. As I have a prodigious talent for recklessness, I ordered myself not to think about the trip anymore, so that I couldn’t decide not to go through with it.

  Melvin’s voice had sounded joyful over the telephone.

  Just as I was about to leave, I received a letter from the American. I took it with me to read on the plane.

  I waited for the Boeing 747 to take off, so I could no longer run away, then I opened the envelope:

  March 5, 2010

  Dear Amélie,

  You’re coming to see me. This is an extraordinary gift. I don’t think you do this for all your correspondents, all the more so when they live so far away. What am I going on about? I know you’ve never traveled this far for anyone else. I’m very touched.

  At the same time, I wonder what I wrote that made you decide to come. Without realizing, I might have maneuvered in such a way as to make you feel sorry for me, and I’m not very proud of that. Well, what’s done is done. I’m happy.

  As I told you on the telephone, I will come to meet you at the Ronald Reagan Airport. I’d like you to know that this will be an extraordinary event for me. I haven’t been out of Baltimore in nearly ten years. And when I say out of Baltimore, I should say, to be more precise, out of my street. And even that isn’t really accurate. My last raid outside the tire warehouse dates back to President Obama’s election, on November 4, 2008: it was to go and vote. Fortunately the polling place was at the end of the street. Still, it nearly killed me, I came home dripping in sweat, as if there were a heat wave on. The worst of it isn’t the effort of walking, it’s the other people staring at you—that’s what makes you sweat. Yes, the epidemic of obesity in America has not yet dissuaded other people from staring. When will we have a president who
weighs three hundred pounds?

  In short, going to meet you in Washington will be an expedition. Please don’t think I’m complaining, that would be out of line, when you are crossing a whole ocean to come and see me. Simply, I want you to know that I am aware of the importance of this event. Nothing on earth will stop me from being at the airport on March 11 at 2:30 P.M.. You’ve seen my photograph, so you’ll recognize me.

  You didn’t say how long you are staying. I hope it will be a long time. I’ve asked my mother to make up my old room in case you want to stay at my place.

  I’m waiting for you.

  Sincerely,

  Melvin Mapple

  I thought this was a very good letter. I liked the way he said, “Without realizing, I might have maneuvered in such a way as to make you feel sorry for me,” which was a change from the endless “I hope you don’t think I’m trying to make you feel sorry for me” that some of my correspondents put at the end of their sagas, when they tell me how their parents beat and tortured them when they were little.

  As usual, I managed to get myself a window seat. When traveling by plane I always have my nose up against the window: even the tiniest cloud catches my interest. But this time I didn’t manage to lose myself in the contemplation of the celestial landscape. My brain had a pebble in its shoe.

  Halfway across the Atlantic, this mental pebble managed to find a voice: “Amélie Nothomb, can you tell me what you are doing?” Most hypocritically I replied, “Well, when all is said and done, I am a responsible adult who has decided to go and visit an American friend.” “An unlikely story! The truth is you haven’t changed since you were eight years old: you think you have been endowed with mysterious powers, you imagine you will touch Melvin and he will be cured of his obesity!” I blocked my ears, but the voice continued. “Of course! I hadn’t quite found the words for it, with you speech is rational, it’s what’s underneath that is not rational, but you think you’re going to save Mapple, even if you don’t know how you’re going to go about it. Why else would you be going all the way to the United States just to see a simple correspondent?” “Because I feel an affinity for this man who, at least, does not indulge in paraleipsis.” “You are crossing the Atlantic for an absence of paraleipsis? What a laugh!” “No. It is the rarest of virtues, an absence of paraleipsis. I am capable of going a very long way in the name of my semantic convictions. Language, for me, is the highest degree of reality.” “The highest degree of reality is that you are about to meet an obese inveterate liar in a tire warehouse in Baltimore. A dream companion for a dream destination. All for the sake of an absence of paraleipsis. If someday you happen upon a correspondent from Outer Mongolia who is the only one of his kind not to make mistakes in the use of the possessive apostrophe, or who might even have an interesting take on the illocutionary conditional, will you go and visit him in Ulan Bator?” “What is the point of all this rhetorical clowning?” “And you, what is the point of this trip of yours? What makes you think your miraculous presence will help that poor lunatic? If he wants to do something about it, which is not at all a given, you’re not the one who can get him out of the fix he’s in. If it were simply a matter of wasting your time, it wouldn’t be so serious. But have you given any thought to how uncomfortable you are going to feel around him? You had things to write to each other, granted; what will you have to say to each other? You will be faced with hours of silence with this fat man, first at the airport, then during a long train ride, then in a taxi, and finally at his house. It’s going to be hell. Given the absence of conversation, you won’t be able to avoid staring at his fat, and if he realizes, you are both going to suffer. Why inflict this on yourself, and why inflict it on him?” “It might not be like that at all.” “No, of course not, it might be even worse. You are about to meet a programmer who in ten years has spoken to no one but the pizza deliveryman. When you get to Baltimore, he will feel so bad that he will sit in front of his computer so he won’t have to deal with you. The man is sick and you are even sicker because you’re going to his house. You’ve gotten yourself in one hell of a mess. Well, now you’ll have to deal with it, you pathetic idiot.”