At nightfall, after the children were fed and asleep, Christophe dressed in dark clothes and slipped out of the farmhouse as silently as possible. The egg whites would have to be culled from Lucien and Joseph, the reluctant old bats. Surely the lord would forgive a theft with such honorable intentions. The moon waxed favorably through a ring of mist and Christophe could see his own breath escaping in light blue wisps as he jogged the road. It was a cold and humid night, and the dew caused the countryside to scintillate in sporadic bursts beneath the moonlight. Christophe turned left on the road and stretched out his hand to stroke a fern frond bowing over the asphalt. His hiking shoes squeaked and the road curved to the right for a long stretch, then to the left. There, outlined against the blue-black landscape, Christophe could see the crudely cemented cinderblocks of the gypsies’ house, abandoned long before it was fully built, a burned trailer sitting across from it on the wild lawn. Lucien and Joseph did not have to worry about the thieving no-good gypsies after all. The family was swept off with the same broom as the rest of the countryside. The man, his wife, their two teenage children. All useful. All taken.
As the old man approached the gate he slowed and quieted his footsteps, eyes sweeping the darkness behind the chain-link fence for signs of life. A dog. A stray hen. Perhaps even one of the brothers having a late-night stroll. Unlikely. The dog was long dead, his howls not heard for at least a year, the hens would be in their coop before nightfall, and the brothers were fat and very old, older than Christophe even. They needed their sleep.
Christophe pushed one shoe into the chain link and prepared to hoist himself up. Instead he froze, considering something for a moment before uncoupling himself from the fence. The knob grated as it turned, but the old man could not hear it because the wind was hissing in his ears. Christophe pulled the gate open and slipped inside.
The courtyard was bare and empty. The two-story house cast a long shadow and its black windows reflected no moonlight. To its left stood a chicken coop shoddily cobbled from rough planks, a small padlock securing the door. Christophe ran his fingers over the latch and wiped the flaking rust onto his pants. The nails were loose in the rotten wood. From his coat he removed a screw-driver and wedged it between the latch and the door, using it as a lever to separate them. It gave easily and he did not have to struggle. He entered the coop.
Christophe could hear the hens scuffling in the darkness. He produced a plastic lighter from his pocket and struck the flint. Seven birds lined the roost. Two were asleep. The rest watched the old man with their black eyes. They smelled intensely of rotten straw and bird shit. Christophe shushed them as he had seen Lucien and Joseph do, but they did not seem agitated. The old man examined the nesting boxes and found thirteen eggs in the plastic containers. He took eight, slipping them carefully into a plastic bag hanging from his wrist. The hens said nothing. Christophe closed the door behind him and pushed the latch nails back into the wood. They were looser than before, but the brothers would probably not notice. He crept back across the courtyard towards the gate, making sure to close it behind him.
A dull joy rose in the old man’s breast as he walked towards the farmhouse. He did not notice the moon as the clouds drifted from it, nor did he reach out to touch any plants. He walked upright and absorbed in thought, a black shape on the grey road.
Tonight Christophe did not feel old. His bones did not ache in the usual manner, and instead of sleeping he rolled up a piece of scrap paper and used it to light the oven. Because it consumed a great amount of gas, the old man had not used the oven in years, but tonight he would make an exception. Meringue was by definition a wasteful and frivolous thing. He lit two candles so that he might see his workspace and cracked four eggs, passing the yolks back and forth in their shells, and letting the whites drip into a bowl. The yolks he kept separately for tomorrow’s soup.
Christophe beat the egg whites with trembling arms, driving the whisk in tight circles until the mixture looked like sea foam. As he walked towards the pantry Christophe heard the buzz of a fly and turned to see its enormous shape projected onto the wall, black against the orange light. He watched it fall into the bowl and go silent. In the pantry he felt around in the darkness and carried various paper containers into the light until he found the caster sugar. He walked back over to his workspace and set the sugar next to the bowl. He could see a small hole in the mixture where the fly had entered it.
Christophe pushed his finger into the hole and attempted to scoop the insect out, feeling instead the vibrations carried through the hollow muck, the relentless beating of the fly’s wings in the foamy darkness as it struggled to remain alive. In that moment he glimpsed the tremendous solitude of death and the old man cried out, his shadow billowing in the flickering candlelight as he staggered backwards and collapsed against the sofa. Slowly the old man’s head dipped until his chin was resting against his breast and his face was lost in shadow. He stayed that way until the candles had halved.
18.
Florian spent the entire winter in his new home. He masturbated until his foreskin was numb and his fingers were numb and his ejaculate grew clear and then barely came at all. With each climax his pleasure became more skeletal and exquisite. The boy’s testicles were made of hard, frostbitten dirt, and they slowed Florian with the raw weight of their protest. Only sleep could silence them. Each night the boy wrapped himself in the covers and felt his bones and muscles growing painfully as he listened to the wind roaring in the broken windows. At dawn he rearranged his clothes and ventured half-heartedly through the front door.
His first steps were always agony. He took them eyes closed and trembling, following the same path through the backyard until his heart settled into a middling discomfort and his eyelids parted to allow for sight. There was so much of everything. Every leaf was made of smaller leaves, and each of those were made of leaves smaller still, and this continued until the mind could not comprehend what any of it meant. The boy no longer cared what could be found beneath a stone, or what might lie at the bottom of a puddle. When a snake dies, it deflates and lies limp on the ground until it evokes nothing but the exhausted memory of past fear. Florian was no longer afraid of the wilderness, nor did it beckon him. It was a burdensome and intricate thing. It did nothing but explain itself again and again. Only ejaculation had the power to briefly lift the veil of that grey winter.
But the girl remained. She did not make Florian blind with pleasure, but smoldered instead beneath the surface of his unease. Sometimes when he journeyed to the farmhouse to retrieve food from the basket he would find her riding her bicycle around the courtyard or sitting by the pond, lost in some reverie. Her presence never failed to stir pain. Florian felt the heartache of standing in the antechamber of all creation, its manifold sights and sounds carrying faintly through an opaque membrane he dared not touch. Only the knowledge of Lea’s existence gave Florian the strength to continue living. Each day before rising, he lay on the bed with his eyes closed and conjured her smell. It supplied him with some semblance of resolve.
Over the course of his daily wanderings, Florian discovered a nearby building, long and windowless and flanked by bushes and trees. Its walls were beige and its roof was grey and its single door was made of shiny white plastic. The exterior was bare and monolithic and conjured no thoughts. This calmed Florian greatly.
One day, after a few hours of staring at the building in silent worship, the boy’s toes had gone numb from the cold. The sun was disappearing behind the building and a glacial wind began strafing the countryside. For the first time, Florian walked towards the building and opened the door. Once inside, the boy’s eyes were drawn to the natural light coming through a long strip of transparent plastic embedded in the metal ceiling. It gave the room a grey and shadowy look. A row of fluorescent tube lamps hung on each side of the strip. They were unlit. The room was entirely covered in tile and Florian was mesmerized by this rigid geometry. Faint boot marks led through several rows of white-grey racks containing plastic tubs. Each of these was lined with cheesecloth stained by the black and turquoise arabesques of long-dead mold colonies. Only a faint smell of decomposition remained, and it seemed to be coming from behind a doorway blocked by a transparent plastic curtain. Its filthy strips reflected the boy in blurred sections. He probed these with his fingers, finding them malleable. They crackled as he pushed them apart.