Consequences (14 page)

Contrary to all expectation, a light was on in Myriam's window. He dragged himself to the intercom, gave his name, and slid to a sitting position against the door.

Later on, in the middle of the night, his eyes still open in the dark, he finally calmed down. She was asleep. His hands had stopped trembling, his panting had subsided, and his brain was no longer on the point of exploding. Even Marianne wasn't any better at taking care of him when he was like this, despite forty years of experience. He lit a cigarette. No light or sound came
from outside. He turned toward her and drew nearer to take in her smell—her neck, shoulder, hip—moving his nose along her body a few millimeters from the surface of her skin. Reading someone that way often wasn't very easy, but in Myriam's case it was turning out to be really difficult. Several texts seemed entangled. Several images superimposed on one another. Not that there was anything unpleasant about it. Mysterious, obviously, but not at all unpleasant. On the contrary.

He wondered if he might have fainted between the moment he rang her doorbell and now. He couldn't remember a thing, Astounding. Day was immediately giving way to night.

Whatever had happened, he needed to be with this woman more every time. There wasn't much he could do about it.

Why hadn't he met her twenty or thirty years before, to gain time? What had been the use of all those young women, all those students? The shadow of Marianne flitted through his mind for an instant; then he put out his cigarette.

Sleeping with this woman seemed like his chance to stop being an adolescent. He couldn't have said whether they'd done it or not during the night, but his body felt like a recharged battery, and he wasn't going to regret it when the time came again to muster the energy to get through the woods.

So it had to come to this: that cursed police officer getting a heart attack, or whatever it was, practically in his arms. So something like that had had to happen. What a stroke of fate. If that wasn't cursed, then what did you call it? If that didn't beat all rotten luck, then what did?

Feeling sorry for himself wasn't going to help. Better to conserve his energy for efforts that would be worth the trouble. No choice but to accept the deal, as far as he was concerned. He
had an unforeseen problem on his hands and was going to have to take care of it. You had to accept the cards you were dealt, if you didn't want to get thrown out of the game. He knew the rules.

He got up at the crack of dawn and dressed as he watched Myriam sleeping on her stomach, wearing only her brassiere. It was chilly outside; a thin sheet of translucent fog hovered over the lake, which was changing from gray to silver. He shivered, yawned, then got behind the wheel of the dew-covered Fiat, started it and backed into the road below, while keeping an eye on the flower beds the condo development was so proud of, and with good reason.

It was barely six in the morning, and the streets were deserted; ironically, he was taking the beltway again, the same road where the police officer had appeared a dozen hours ago. Then he was moving off toward the hills that were just emerging from darkness.

He checked out the area methodically before getting out. If things were a little out of hand, if the scene was tottering on its foundations, you had to be extra careful, become even tougher in order to keep your equilibrium. When he was certain there was nothing in the way, he put one foot outside and looked up at the path he was going to have to take with the body of the policeman on his shoulders. He sighed. The guy had to weigh around 175.

Merely getting him out of the backseat took several serious tries, not to mention the anguish he felt when he thought about being caught in the act, which laced the slightest move with hysteria.

By the time he'd hoisted him to his back and was ready to
start the climb, he was already sweating—and, for good measure, even covered with blood, completely smeared with it, whereas he was somebody who flinched at the slightest drop, the type who took the trouble to iron his trousers.

Certainly is hard not getting your hands dirty in this life
, he thought to himself, as he moved through the undergrowth under his burden—these motorcycle cops weren't exactly little girls.

He was lucky to be in relatively good shape, when you took into account the number of cigarettes he'd gotten away with smoking nonstop. The rumor was that his mother hadn't stopped smoking for a single moment when she was pregnant, and that was why he and Marianne had the vice: it was buried in their genes. He pictured their father leaving the table without a word in the middle of the meal, because the smoke bothered him, as she waited for a reaction from him—as everybody waited for a reaction from him—and got nothing. Then you heard the door close, and the dishes began to fly.

In the early hours of morning, as the cock crowed, after a full three-quarters of an hour of uninterrupted effort, while the sun broke at the bottom of the valley, at the end of one of the most intense efforts of his life, he hauled himself up the final part of the path leading to the pit—that gaping mouth set back behind a damp, slippery protuberance. Good. Winded, pallid, shaking, he stopped for a moment. Then, under the first rays of the sun, listened to a cricket.

God knew the heap of problems he was avoiding in acting this way. The ordeal he'd just been through was nothing compared to the potential squabbles with the punctilious police, who were too often quick to see some miscarriage of justice. He
blotted his forehead with an already damp handkerchief. It was going to be a beautiful morning. He was pleased about being able to settle this mess so quickly and smoothly, because he had a strong feeling that, very soon, other issues were bound to require the highest degree of attention. That police officer popping up out of nowhere. To begin with, it wasn't the kind of job you did if you had a weak heart. Unless you were a major nut.

He pushed the policeman's corpse to the far edge of the fault and then catapulted it in, using his two feet for leverage. Then he crept toward the pit to be sure that everything was in order, that nothing was visible, that the shadows were blotting it all out. Everything was perfect. This time, the officer's body had properly plunged straight down, avoiding the obstacle met by Barbara's.

At least this page had been turned. He let out a sigh, rolled onto his back. This pit was a veritable trump card. The sky was turning blue, crows flying, whirling, across it. Certainly the darkness of the pit released its share of negative energy that didn't make you want to come camping in the vicinity, but he thanked Heaven for having placed this terrible abyss in his path—even if he'd nearly been swallowed up by it himself. The pit was a true-blue ally. He'd hidden there for three days and three nights once, without moving, already getting ready to tremble in every limb when night would come, his teeth chattering in advance, moaning in anticipation like any child his age. . . . And yet, against all expectation, in complete contradiction to his morbid prognosis, he'd felt protected, secure, soothed; despite this cavernous silence and this endless blackness that had seemed to be hissing around him and had nothing to do with the thirst and hunger gnawing at him, despite the biting
cold and the reprisals that were waiting for him in one way or another when they got their hands on him again, he'd considered himself relatively satisfied by his stay in its mineral and moss coziness. He seemed to be in solid with the creature that haunted this place. And it was capable of turning off the light and closing the door. Bolting the lock.

Closing his eyes, he almost fell asleep on the cold stone. The problem came from the fact that when he thought about Myriam now, his heart beat harder, his breath quickened. Difficult to ignore. Especially since this was such a new feeling, such an unknown one. Nobody had prepared him for it—the funniest thing was that he actually had written tons about such a feeling; no story would work without dealing with it or working it in in some way; and yet, irony came from the fact that he'd blackened thousands of pages describing something he knew nothing about. Mind-boggling, really. Quite a few of his characters had fallen in love, but what did he really know about it? Did he know what he was talking about? Today had brought the answers to these questions.

Regardless, the system he and Marianne had set in place and that had allowed them to get through four brave decades without too much fallout was about to be smashed to bits. He lifted himself onto his elbows and examined the tips of his shoes stained with blood.

Obviously, it would be better not to run into anyone in the filthy, blood-streaked shape he was in. He certainly could have claimed an inconveniently hemorrhaging nose as an excuse, though he looked more like a cranky horse butcher on his break than a decent man suffering from a nosebleed, no matter how severe.

Therefore it made sense to go down cautiously, keep an eye open to prevent any new incident from happening on the way back. He wasn't a big fan of that feeling of vulnerability experienced when you lose control of a situation, that feeling of gradually losing your cover, and he'd had more than his share of it these last few days. Not that he was against the unexpected, the kick of something new, a lesson, ups and downs, epiphanies; but didn't he need to get his strength back between each drill, instead of facing one after another or juggling them all at the same time?

He rubbed himself down with damp, dead, black leaves, in a kind of gross grooming session meant to allay suspicion in case of some unwanted encounter, or else to avoid being beaten up out there by a mental retard. It was still early enough. He certainly had more of a chance running into a doe in this area than any kind of nitwit, but he walked bent and silent, half running, taking advantage of the downward tilt of the ground.

He fell three times. The third time, his coccyx made a little noise and an icy flash went right through him. Even so, he got back up—surprised that luck wasn't in attendance these days and that this third fall had seemed bad enough to paralyze him, to keep him from reaching the car and leave him rotting in the woods with tears streaming down his face, howling with rage that nobody would hear. When he started walking again, he felt only a vague discomfort, and it faded away quickly.

As he got back behind the wheel of the Fiat, he let out a scream and jumped so high his head hit the ceiling. It felt like he'd sat on a tremendous needle.

He felt around down there with his hand, but there was nothing. No more pain, either; it had disappeared
instantaneously—leaving behind some doubt about its authenticity. Firmly holding the steering wheel and gritting his teeth, he made a delicate attempt to sit down again, acutely anxious about the next setback fate might have in store for him.

Half reassured, and having finally settled in, he managed a few rotations of his pelvis, arched his back, bent forward, coughed, but without incident. Difficult to know what to trust, whether you were imagining things the entire day—a person and his body distrusted each other the majority of the time, though no one liked to talk about it and risk being unmasked.

“Why'd I ever think that we were ocean waves?” Frederick Seidel—the great Frederick Seidel—wonders in a recent poem. He looked at his watch. He'd asked his students to launch into several trains of thoughts starting at that line, and he had a little less than an hour before appearing in front of them in a change of clothes with his color restored, a clean body and a clear mind. He drove faster—took advantage of the fact that he was alone to do some completely tacky toe/heel pumps that his Fiat 500 would hardly appreciate after having racked up a total of 93,000 miles.

Marianne was still home—not very surprising. He went past the house and, after a minute, headed back the same way, shut off the motor. He entered from the back. In the entrance mirror he discovered how frightening he looked, and a weak groan escaped his lips at all the blood on his clothing, his face. He heard his sister in the kitchen, talking to the coffee machine. “Would you mind making it stronger for me this time? What—I didn't push the right button? Oh, come on now!”

He took advantage of this by slipping upstairs on tiptoe. If
he did without breakfast, he could take a bath. After a second of hesitation, he turned on the bathtub faucets. When it came to cleanliness, he'd been well trained. Very well trained.

He got undressed. All his clothes were sticky, and they stunk. As the water gurgled out and misted up the bathroom, he checked himself out in the mirror. The blood had drawn rivulets on his face. No one would want to be seen in such a state, but that was how Marianne discovered him as he was about to step into the bathtub, with that gleaming mask covering his face and hands like a butcher's.

Everything he'd tried to avoid, obviously. Since she of course opened wide, horrified eyes and then slapped her hand over her mouth. Of course. What else could he have expected? And she didn't move an inch.

“Can't you see I'm not wearing a stitch?” he murmured.

There was no sense talking about it. Talking about it didn't help anything. She didn't like what she saw, and neither did he, to say the least, but there was nothing they could do about it. They weren't going to talk about it again. No. “We'll talk about it this evening; not now, please. Let me take my bath, okay? Don't make me late. You know they've got their eye on me. They're not going to let me get away with anything anymore.”

He'd grabbed a towel and quickly wiped his face; all that steam, the mugginess of the place, contributed to a passable outcome, made his face seem almost acceptable, normal. Now, with the same towel, he hid his crotch.

When she'd had enough, she turned on her heels and quickly went back to her rooms on the ground floor.

By evening, he'd have found a way to present things to her that satisfied them both. He heard her car starting as he slid
into the bathtub and lit a cigarette. As his coccyx touched the bottom of the tub, he winced again.