“You should go home.”
I tell him the kids are blocking my way. He drives them away with the back of his hand, like flies. You’d think he’d done that all his life, driving young assholes away like flies. I know them, he says, they’re not really bad. I blurt out that’s exactly what I tell my children about wild boars, snakes, and tigers, they’re not bad, but that being said, it is not unpleasant to see a fence, a wall, an ocean, and a few virgin forests between them and you.
The teenagers are threatening me behind Hassan’s back, they’re cursing me out, they’re cursing my mother and my children to the seventh generation, they’re saying they’re going to whip my ass. In their pants they have either fat dicks or huge knives, but it’s the same humiliation of my human person.
“Leave him alone, he’s crazy in the head,” one of them says. “Go finish yourself off,” he says to me. “We don’t play with dead people.”
“Don’t listen to them,” says Hassan. “They’ll play with anything.”
In the elevator a neighbor, blocked breathing, impenetrable face. He looks at me while looking somewhere else. It’s almost like we’re turning our backs on each other while forcing ourselves into a merciless face-to-face confrontation. He looks around thirty, with a fresh, pink complexion. Each new generation is an invasion, a recent wave of immigration trying not so much to integrate into society as to disintegrate me. We have nothing to say to each other and we don’t say it. Well well, he has a little pimple on his lip, that’s normal. One, two, three, four, the floors go by without saying what they’re hiding like the walls on rue de la Santé. The neighbor doesn’t bat an eyelash. Me neither. I look at the pimple on his lip. Our bodies are close. There is nothing between us. As I say that, I don’t know if I mean that nothing separates us or that we have nothing in common between us. I can see his face as if he were an enormous sphinx, or the Mona Lisa, every detail, but a huge mystery. I don’t particularly believe in the existence of God but the existence of man remains to be proven. A lot of absence in all that. I have an urge to poke his pimple to verify its material existence. The elevator stops at the sixth floor and the neighbor gets out, says goodbye. No smile. Fuck him, that asshole.
Home. It’s on the last floor; above that, there’s the sky. I feel like I’m on vacation here, in transit — away from the world and life. I’m closer to the sky than to the street. The world is locked out. I see the world on TV, it has the consistency of a plasma screen, nice colors, and often there’s background music to muddle up the commentary.
I was wrong to go out. Without the French medical-social system that provides access to free care, I never would have left home, given the price of the scan, the fibro test, the colon test, the ultrasound, and a friendly word of advice.
“You sure took your time,” says Sarah. “What’d you do?”
“When? Nothing.”
(It’s true almost nothing you might as well say little and badly done but after all far away means almost and in a bad way but after all hidden elsewhere or else hidden here crouching inside but disaffected like totally devitalized so this evening nothing more, no thanks, I’m full, a few more steps yes preferably in town without the seasons coming down with the noise and the back of the crowd and the back of the walls and already come back to sleep no doubt or eat to talk a little alone or not watch television and then turn it off and say something always the same thing about finally going to sleep before getting a cold from a window that’s not closed well or shade from a tree there outside night pain and fear of giants first then dwarfs and all kinds of flying and crawling insects in great numbers and a foreign language but not more than a hasty translation than the idea you have of it now furtive with cloud and whirlwind so to be grabbed with a certain precaution before making honey from it on the contrary from your surroundings shapes and noise in the house maybe joyfully but still sort of always the same thing joyful toothless that is pretty little might as well say almost nothing next to two bumblebees in the left ear and the right ear and a sty on your eye first and then deafness and glaucoma the next day and stiffness of the hands and feet and the mouth and lights out of love to the disgust with moving and saying the essential minimum not to mention vain naïve pain and fatigue because well all that why again what can you say if not to warn once again about what whoever didn’t already happen every day and before days of a necessary or optional absence or presence for the proper functioning of the troops or the end of hostilities how to know without foreseeing the ability to worry or despair generating reactions of joy explosions of hatred but I should be asleep already gone to or remained asleep here or there in the same state of a dead or ignorant ignored thing.)
“Nothing? No news is good news. Did you buy some wine at the Nicolas store?”
“Meursault.”
“What’s that package wrapped up with tape?”
“It was in my mailbox this morning. It must be the iPod you ordered on eBay for Chloe’s birthday.”
“Cool! Did you see my leopardskin tights?”
“You dyed your hair again?”
“Yes, to relax a little. I went to the bank because of that business of unpaid rent, it’s a crazy story.”
“It’s always a crazy story.”
“We’ve never been so alone, fused together in the same madness,lost in a world that has the consistency of a fantasy, it worries us to death. I read that in a book by Dardenne, I’m going to write something about it.”
“You’re lucky you can still write.”
(As for me, all I’m good at is waiting for the results of the biopsy. It’s like waiting for a verdict. Ten years, twenty years? A few weeks? And at the same time I don’t give a damn. Nothing I can do about it. The die is cast.)
“Where are the kids?”
“Julien’s at his PlayStation and Chloe’s sleeping over at her girlfriend’s.”
(I have no power over their lives. Here or not here, same thing. I floundered around all day whereas the street was straight. I screwed around, I nearly, I don’t know what I nearly did, I nearly did something I didn’t do I didn’t smile enough, I looked pissed off all day, not what you call an honorable exit.)
“When do you get the results?”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“Talk louder, I’m in the shower.”
Nobody pays attention to me with my dickhead and my asshole. The world turns. Women blossom. China is catching up with the rest of the world. I go out without waiting. Waiting for what?
It’s cold, night. Rue d’Alésia, deserted. Shutters closed. Bar-tabac shop lit up. I’m in the café at the very bottom of rue Glacière and rue de la Santé, the light in the jailhouse is diffuse at night, it isn’t lit. Walls eat up the blackness of the sky. Anemic streetlights shining very weakly on the barbed wire. The street is full of murders, fits of madness, creeping illnesses, and a whole planned contagion. The threat of an epidemic, gangrene. Dirty tricks. Everything is maintained there, a shadow zone, like a nuclear power plant. You have the feeling something’s going to happen, finally.