The Narcissist
By David M. Antonelli
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
David Antonelli on Smashwords
The Narcissist
Copyright © 2010 by David M. Antonelli
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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There are a few people I’d like to acknowledge:
Paul Antonelli is thanked for designing the cover page. Marylu Walters is thanked for editing an early version of this manuscript. Joanne Kellock, is thanked for guidance while writing the early drafts of this book.
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The Narcissist
By David M. Antonelli
Who goes there? Is it you, Nadja? Is it true
that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life?
I can’t hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me?
Andre Breton, from Nadja.
1.
The Vanishing
I
I’ve always associated the smell of hot gunmetal with sex. Sex and disappearance. In the North African trenches it was no different. Two weeks after I was sent to Algeria on a UN peacekeeping mission a small war broke out. An army of Muslim extremists had taken a small village and my French battalion had surrounded it. By morning we had dug small trenches beside the main roads. By nightfall we were challenged. A Molotov cocktail blew thirty yards away from the front of our trench. Half of us reached for our grenades and the Lieutenant shouted out the order to attack.
More out of confusion than a desire to obey the Lieutenant’s orders, I shot my first bullet. Then a second. I’d never fired a gun outside of a shooting range. Even the smoke was hot. I trembled at the thought of where the bullets had ended up, but in all the spray of metal and flesh it somehow seemed like an afterthought. The lieutenant signaled for me to shoot again. I ignored his command and turned my gaze upwards to the thundering white bomb light of the sky. I closed my eyes. My head filled with a rush of images. I could see Jillian at home in Lyon, her thick brown hair falling over her slender white shoulders as she flipped through a copy of Antonin Artaud’s Theater and its Double on her lap. I wanted her naked. Naked right there in front of me.
I heard an explosion and opened my eyes. Then another. The blast of light was so intense it even killed its own shadows. I wanted to disappear into my memories of Jillian. Vanish into the essence of her being.
Another cocktail blew, but this time the explosion was closer. When the smoke cleared, I saw a soldier lying face down on the ground as if he was staring through a portal into another world, far more interesting than our own. I ran over to help him. I turned him over. It was René, a twenty-year old soldier from Dijon who had just got married a month ago. I felt sick to my stomach as I looked down at his cold white figure, still shaking in a pool of mud. The center of his stomach had been gouged out, leaving a wet red hole the size of a cannonball; few threads of blood had spread out across his forehead like frays in a fine fabric. The sight was almost beautiful. The horrible ecstasy of death. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to get away.
I turned around and looked down the length of the trench.
“We’re all fools!” a voice from down the trench shouted. “We’re all fucking fools.”
“Kerosene! Give me kerosene,” shouted another voice. “I’ll burn them all alive.”
The second voice stopped and the first tapered off into a kind of pathetic whimpering. Soon it was inaudible, drowned out by the metallic screeching of the rockets overhead. A dark-haired soldier, whose face I couldn’t place tossed his rifle, bled of all its bullets, to the ground and searched desperately for a grenade. I heard another explosion and a shower of earth and metal covered my face with a layer of hot dust. I stumbled as I pushed up against the muddied trench wall to clear my eyes. I wanted to disappear that very instant. The shatter of bombs, the maddening simulacrum of blood and color, the flood of images through my pounding head: I wanted to vanish into the whole mad carnival of light and sound. Only in my imagination could I still feel the warmth of Jillian’s skin up against me. Only there could I be back in Lyon.
I dropped the gun and checked my pants for my mobile. Perhaps she had sent me a message.
“Jean! Pick up that gun and stop whacking off,” shouted the Lieutenant. He shoved me in the shoulder. I pulled my hand out of my pants and knelt down to pick up the gun. Instead of standing up to resume fighting I crumpled down into the mud and pulled my knees up to the tip of my chin. The lieutenant kicked me but I didn’t respond.
“Coward,” he sneered. He lifted his rifle to eye level and started firing.
In the evening the fighting subsided. We slept under the clear breeze of an Algerian night. It was hard to believe that such calm could exist so soon after such carnage. Five young soldiers were nominated to rotate the night watch. This meant I was able to rest. I sat and stared at the night sky outside my tent. I imagined I could see Jillian’s curly head of hair and delicate chin in the patterns made by the coils of gun smoke that still hung in the air. A breeze shook the bivouac and the smoke cleared away. The moon was now visible and a thousand constellations burned through the indigo quadrants of the sky.
The next morning the Lieutenant barged into my tent.
“They surrendered,” he said.
“What?” I asked, still not quite awake.
“Not all of them. Just this batch.”
“How many?”
“Forty.”
“Where are they?”
“I’ve assigned some men to drive them to the jail to the west. We’ll keep them there until further notice.
“So, it’s over?”
“There’s more of them.”
“Where?”
“To the south.”
“Are they advancing?” I asked.
“No. Not yet,” he said. He pulled me closer as if to confide a secret. “Not yet. But if my intuition’s right, they’ll try to trick us into passivity while they circle to the north and take us by surprise on our way back to Algiers.”
“When do we go?” I asked.
“Why?” he asked as if to question my devotion. “Are you in some kind of a hurry?”
“No,” I said.
“Good. We have to keep watch. Exercise patience. Vigilance. We can’t let them ambush us. We have to stay put.”
“For how long?”
“Indefinitely. You’d better not be in a hurry. For your sake, that is. Believe me, indefinitely can be a long time.”
“If that’s what it takes,” I said with a false sense of dedication.
The next morning I received a letter from Jillian. I read it immediately.
Dear Jean,
I’m sorry I haven’t contacted you earlier. I’m writing this letter from a hotel just outside of Barcelona. I’m sitting on a balcony tea table with a note pad in my lap. The courtyard below me is lined with marble gargoyles and manicured bushes. In the center is a swimming pool. Its still waters are almost like a mirror. I can see the forms of reflected birds on its glassy surface. How I wish you were here with me! Since you’ve left I’ve missed you so much. Although it’s only been a few months, my heart is growing tired of all the hurt. The summer has robbed me of the joy our love once gave me. How can I keep my feelings from evaporating when you are gone? If I always talk about you to my friends, they get bored and change the conversation. If I freeze my feelings somewhere inside me and try to lead a normal life, I feel like you don’t even exist at all. Don’t get the wrong impression. I love you more than ever. When I say that our love no longer brings me pleasure, what I really mean is that I love you so much that all I feel is pain in your absence. I need to see you. I need to have you beside me.
Oh, Jean! I’m sick of the world. For my entire life I’ve been possessed by other people’s desires. I’ve blindly let my life become little more than the sum total of every one’s life around me. With my early loves. With you. With my work on Artaud. I need more. I need to feel life flowing out of me and into others and not the reverse. Yet I’m far too world-weary to simply say I want to be free. People always say they want freedom. But what is it that they really want? More money? More possessions? More lovers? More time alone? Ultimately they just want more. That’s what their freedom is. Greed. But, I’m possessed with different lusts. That’s why I love Artaud. He tore the veil away from things and peered beneath them. He saw through all the world’s lies and wasn’t afraid to shock people with his outrageous revelations:
“In a world in which every day one eats vagina cooked in green sauce or penis of newborn child whipped and beaten to a pulp, just as it is when plucked from the sex of its mother.”
Yet I feel I’ve been a student for far too long. I’ve read Artaud’s notes, letters and plays over and over again until I’m blue in the face. I can even rewrite whole paragraphs from memory. The time has come for me to drop the books and stop reading about how I should live, and simply live. Yet I’m afraid that this decision might affect our love. My new direction seems so abstract that I don’t quite know how to start. All I know is that my life will change when my thesis is finally completed. That is why I need to be around you. I don’t want this change to leave us apart. I want us to change together. I’m afraid if you’re not back soon that something irreversible will happen and our love will never be the same. I’m going back to Lyon in just a few days.
Please come back soon.
Love, Jillian
I stuffed the letter in my pocket. My stomach tightened. It was far worse than I had expected. Since I was sent to Africa I lived in fear of her leaving me for another man. Now I knew my enemy was more fearsome than any potential suitor could ever be. Somewhere in the depths of her thoughts it lurked without shape or color, lacking all substance or even semblance of substance. The burning heat of the desert had become for me a metaphor for her growing disenchantment. Although her letter confessed the power of her love, it also revealed its precariousness. As the hours at the bivouac dragged on I imagined countless scenarios in which she grew resentful of my absence and lashed out at me by taking another lover.
Hoping to bury my anxieties, I went about my business as did all the other soldiers. I performed my obligatory watch duty. I cleaned the tents. I cooked and washed as ordered. But nothing I did could clear my head of my love for Jillian. I just wasn’t cut out to be a soldier. Maybe I would make it as sailor, skimming over the silvery death wash of the sea. Or a pilot. Flying through the skies in a screaming metal boomerang. But not a soldier. Not in the dirt. To confront an enemy, in short, death, so close to the same black clay that I would one day be buried in somehow seemed wrong. If I died at sea I could imagine myself riding off to heaven on the backs of golden dolphins. If I died in the sky I’d be swept up by some great silver bird and flown off into the crisp blue heavens. But if I died in the dirt, that would be it. I would simply die in the dirt: my skull cracked, skin smeared with blood and sweat, lying flat on the same pile of mud and gravel I spent every day of my life.
The desert was quiet for the next three days. The soldiers began to loosen up. Where two days ago the Lieutenant would insist on sending at least two men to the well on the nearby hill for water, now he was only sending one. For at least the moment, the feeling of impending danger had subsided.
On the fourth day the Lieutenant sent me to get the evening water supply. Like the other soldiers had done, I suspended the two large metal water canisters on opposite sides of a long rod balanced on my shoulders. As I walked up the hill I watched the sun going down, massaging the horizon with its deep red rays as it sank slowly out of view. When I reached the well I found a man lying face down in the sand. He appeared to be dead. His skin was dark and he was clothed in the enemy uniform with its characteristic red sash over the shoulder. I knelt down and shook him. His head rolled over and his helmet came loose. He had a small thin nose and feminine cheekbones with glistening black hair cut straight across the upper forehead. His dark brown eyes suddenly opened and his thin lips grimaced in pain as if he knew he was done for. He curled into a fetal position and reached for his stomach. I checked for a wound but he pushed my hand away.
“Why don’t you kill me?” he said with an Arabic accent.
“I can’t kill a wounded man.”
“Then I’ll fight you to death. Nobody’s going to take me.”
“I don’t want your secrets,” I said.
“I have none to give. I’m a deserter. You’ve got nothing to gain from me. I have to get back to my mother in Biskra. She is sick and my brothers don’t care. They forced me to come and fight. Even she forced me. She said her life was less important than the triumph of Islam. I can’t let her die. She called me a coward when I suggested I stay behind and take care of her.”
“Typhoid?” I asked. I’d heard there’d been an outbreak in Tunisia.
“The doctors aren’t sure.”
The sun had set and a cool wind blew through the sand and then his hair. The sky had taken on the deep azure of those in Spanish nativity scenes. I looked at him with sympathy. If I could do anything to justify my part in the desert war it was to help him. The thought crossed my mind that he would make the perfect travelling companion if I, too, chose to desert. I had to get away from the fighting. He’d know the roads to the coast. If we could escape together he could help me elude both the rebel and UN forces on my way back to Jillian. With any luck I could make it to Tunis and catch a boat to France.
He grabbed my hand and pulled it towards his wounded stomach. “You have to help me find a doctor.”
“I’ll help you but only if you make sure I get to Tunis.”
He nodded his head in agreement. The way I saw it neither of us had the luxury doubting the other’s intentions.
I filled the water containers and washed his wounds. He’d caught a piece of shrapnel in the stomach and one in the thigh. I wrapped both wounds in some bandages that I had in my first aid kit.
“My belly hurts so much I almost forgot about my leg,” he said. In the throes of war everything has a chain of command. Even pain has its pecking order.
“They aren’t deep,” he said. “I just have to keep them clean.”
“As long as they don’t get infected.”
I took the water back to the camp and told the Lieutenant that I’d left my hat behind at the well. He cautioned me to be more careful and I nodded compliantly. When I got back the soldier was standing there with a look of troubled dignity on his face. I felt I could almost trust him and experienced a new sense of security in knowing he would guide me through the desert and back to Jillian. Even if it turned out to be a set up, I knew I could always shake him later.
II
I had been living in Lyon for almost one month when I first met Jillian. I had managed to save enough money in America to support myself for almost a year. After that I had plans to join a French peacekeeping mission as a part of my obligatory military duty to fulfill my EU citizenship requirements. Although I was born in France – an industrialized suburb of Paris, in fact - my family moved to Detroit when I was six years old and I never had the opportunity to move back and explore my French roots. I was always attracted to the idea of the American in Paris - the sherbet colored buildings, the outdoor cafés, the art galleries, and the promenades with the quiet hush of secret romantic encounters under the shrill dome of a leaden, glassy sky. In more reflective moments I even entertained the idea of one day writing the great American novel, but I felt I had nowhere near enough experience to even begin. I needed to read more books, listen to more music, meet more women - in short, I needed to live. After my first few weeks in Lyon I realized there was no way I could ever go back to Detroit: sprawled out in all its grim humidity with a skyline that looked like an alien installation rising from the dust of postwar Dresden.
I first met Jillian at a place called Façade, a small bar in downtown Lyon that was popular with art students because of its minimalistic black walls and collection of original Raymond Pettibon prints. It was in the middle of Rue Mercier, a few blocks from the opera house. She was wearing black pants with a black leather jacket and black suede buckle-up shoes. Her hair was tied back except for the bangs, which dropped in a schoolgirl fashion to just above her slim black ballerina eyebrows.
She stood up and walked over to me.
“Then, death,” she said. She had a British accent.
“Sorry?” I asked, surprised that such an attractive woman would come over to talk to me out of the blue.
“The olive trees of Saint Rémy.”
“Saint Rémy?”
“The solitary cypress.”
“What?”
“The Café at Arles.”
“The black ring,” I added, guessing she was trying to play a word association game with me.
“No. No.” She started to shake her head and laugh. “It’s a poem, silly,” she said. “Artaud.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to ask me to sit down?”
“Please. I’m Jean.” I extended my hand.
“Jillian.”
Our conversation ended after a few minutes and I went home. All the way back I was enraptured by the reflections of the traffic lights off the puddles of rain in the street. The next day I woke up and took a cold shower. While standing in front of the mirror, I imagined black and white film clips in which Jillian and I were meeting in empty Prague cafés or on sunlit Brazilian terraces. So enthralled was I by my own fantasies that I bumped into the mailman on my way out to catch the bus to the library. I crossed my heart as I waited at the bus stop and swore that I would go back to Façade every night until I saw her again.
We met later that week and talked all night. She came by herself and, apart from the occasional man who stepped up to give her his regards, we were left alone. She told me more about her thesis project on Artaud.
“He was deathly afraid of sex. He used to say that every time someone masturbated that he lost a bit of his desire to live. People captivated his desires with their boring actions, crushed his dreams with what they passed off as love. He was a totally private person who could carry on relationships on a completely internal level.” She darted her eyes back and forth in rhythm with “Mirror in the Bathroom”, which had just come on the jukebox.
“Time and narrative,” she continued, holding a glass of Sambucca to her lips, “are external things that don’t belong in performance art. In the same way that people’s rules and habits destroyed him, the literary model of drama was destroying theater.”
It was clear she was more versed than I in literature but I managed to sway the conversation to film and music, areas I was more comfortable with. We both liked Bunuel. I was amazed that she could recount to me almost frame by frame the dream sequence in Los Olvidados where a wild bird ravages a young boy’s room. By the end of the evening the conversation had shifted to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. I walked her home and when she offered her phone number I promised to call her as soon as I could.
A week later we went out to a small tavern by the river. After a few cups of coffee and a bottle of wine we ended up going back to my apartment. Ten minutes later we were in bed.
She apologized for her behavior the first night we met.
“I was so drunk. You must have thought I was barking.”
“Barking?”
“Barking mad. Just barking,” she repeated. “I get like that sometimes. I’m surprised you wanted to talk to me at all after that. I was being so pretentious.”
“Not at all. Anything’s better than the old do you know what time it is?”
“I don’t know. If a guy comes on to me in a simple way I respect him more than if he tries to be too clever.”
It had been hardly a week when I learned that she had another lover and I was just a part of her weekly itinerary. His name was Adrien. He was a moody sculptor with a long sleek nose and a mass of thick black hair that tumbled from his head, giving him the appearance of a Tatar warrior. He wanted to marry her before they had even met. He said he’d seen her in the cafés and was never so sure about anything in his life as when he walked up to her for the first time and proposed. She turned him down cold six times and finally compromised by agreeing to go out for dinner with him.
Meeting Jillian had set off something like a depth charge in my heart. I could feel the underpinnings of my very being shatter into a thousand pieces and reorder into something like a mismatched jigsaw puzzle whenever we made love. I had to get closer to her. Touch the being inside her. I was convinced that we were somehow spiritually destined for each other and that we shared every thought and attitude. She penetrated my skin like a ghost, entering my every corpuscle, thought, and feeling. There was something distinctly supernatural about her. Something almost of the Anima.
Before I met her, my most powerful sexual encounters were always alone. When I was still a virgin I used to lie in bed on Sunday mornings and dream of my perfect lover. She was modeled on figures from books I’d read or films I’d seen. She had red hair, chestnut hair, blond hair. She was at once Caucasian, Asian and black. We met in railroad stations, under trees, in the country or in alleyways. When I was in school I’d gaze off into space while the teachers were lecturing and think about my next meeting with this imaginary lover. At sixteen I lost my virginity as awkwardly as any one else. I was surprised at how plain it felt. Not near as uplifting as my imaginary encounters. Years - different partners even - changed little. Eventually I became disillusioned and surrendered to the thought that I was destined to go through life without ever finding a perfect match. Jillian changed everything.
A month after we met I was introduced to her parents and her sister Annette. They were visiting from Manchester for the weekend. Her father was a dour Baptist who seemed to disapprove of everything. Her mother was equally religious but expressed her faith in an almost opposite way to her husband, as a sort of blissful naïveté. You could imagine her in a spotless white apron directing a Sunday school sing-along. Annette was a cheery first-former who always looked like she had just stepped out of a Bentley. Her hair was blond and her skin pale. While some British women looked unhealthy in their pallor, she flourished in it, as if it were emblematic of the higher brand of existence in her possession. Although one could easily take her for a snob on first meeting, she was actually just the opposite. As I quickly found out, she owned a couple of rare Stooges bootlegs I’d been looking for and we hit it off instantly. With all her picnic baskets of social etiquette, it was hard to believe at first she was such a rebel in her musical tastes.
One day, Jillian, Annette and I spent an afternoon shopping together downtown. That evening the three of us went to a small restaurant for dinner and found Adrien frowning into an interior decorating magazine as he languished over his coffee. I spotted him out of the corner of my eye before Jillian noticed he was there. Immediately I suggested we go somewhere else. But before I could muster up a decent explanation, Adrien had already jumped out of his chair like a pop-up illustration from a children’s book and was tapping on her shoulder from behind.
“Jillian, what a surprise,” he said with an air of artificiality.
“Adrien!” she said uncomfortably. I pretended to ignore him and turned to Annette, who was playing with a shrink-wrapped toothpick that she’d just picked up from a porcelain bowl in front of the cash register. Annette passed a sardonic grin in my direction as if to voice her mild disapproval of Adrien.
“Perhaps you’d all like to join me?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “We wouldn’t want to disturb you.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, turning his eyes to me in jealousy.
“No, really. We shouldn’t. We were just toying with the idea of a coffee, but we changed our mind and were just about to leave.”
“But you just walked in. You haven’t even had the time to decide.”
Annette took the plunge and walked outside. I followed her, leaving Jillian and Adrien inside. We waited in silence for what seemed like hours. We could see him pressing up against her and gesticulating wildly with his hands. The maitre d’ was getting nervous and kept hovering around in their vicinity, his white linen towel tucked neatly under his arm. I tried to see Jillian’s face to gauge her response to what I saw as an imbecilic onslaught, but her back was turned to the window. Finally she turned and came out onto the street - almost liquid with its yellow stream of headlights and bustling crowds of smartly dressed couples. I knew it was a bad sign when I noticed Adrien waiting for her inside.
“I know you’ll hate me for this.”
“You’re not…”
“Adrien’s upset and says he needs me more than ever.”
“Jillian. Get a grip on yourself,” said Annette. “You told me this morning you don’t even love him.”
“I have to help him.”
My mouth dropped. I was speechless. That morning I was convinced we were closer than ever and it would only be a matter of time before the others would peel away from her life like old paint from the walls of a great historic palace. I was devastated.
“I’m sorry, Jean. I’ll call you first thing tomorrow.”
I turned away. I walked Annette back to Jillian’s house and went back to my small apartment. I drank enough vodka to convince myself that she really loved me and only went off with Adrien as a sign that our love was strong enough to overcome any small crisis.
The next time I saw her was the first day of winter. We hadn’t spoken for over three months. There were tiny epaulettes of snow forming on a marble statue of a nude boy outside my apartment. I hardly knew what to say.
III
It was twilight. The constellations were just becoming visible in the sky as a faint imprint of the cosmos spread across the eastern half of the horizon. We crossed miles of sand flats before we found a main road. My companion and I walked in complete silence. At times I was afraid his story was some fabrication designed to lead me into a deadly trap. Under the frigid beauty of the desert stars almost anything seemed possible. Occasionally we’d stop and I’d pour water from the flask in his survival bag over his stomach to keep the wound clean. He’d shriek when the water touched his skin. When the first hints of dawn became visible I finally asked him his name.
“Munif,” he said without expression.
“It seems so strange that we’re deserting together and we don’t even know each other’s names.”
“You could be a spy.”
“I could have taken you prisoner earlier if I wanted to.”
“And then tried to torture me?”
“If anything, it seems more likely that you’d be luring me away for torture and interrogation.”
“You think I wounded myself on purpose?”
“No. But you could already have been wounded.”
“Then why are you here if you don’t trust me? I know the desert like the hairs on my chest. You put a lot at risk to come with me. If I were your commander and I found out I’d have you shot immediately.”
“I have to see my girlfriend.”
“Love is more important to you than war?”
“Isn’t that why you’re leaving?”
He pulled a jack knife from his pocket faster than I could react and brandished it in my face. The slim blade winked in the light of the dawn. I jumped back.
“Do you really think I’d kill you? Do you? Americans are so frivolous. You make friends too easily. Then you toss them away like old clothes when you’re bored. Love, murder – it’s all the same to you.”
“I’m just trying to save you,” I said.
“Save? Let me show you the meaning of true sacrifice.”
He took the blade and cut a long gash across his forearm. I pulled back, but he grabbed my arm and slashed it in almost exactly the same place. I pushed him over and jumped on top of him. I cocked my arm back and held it there like a loaded gun.
“Now we can finally trust each other,” he said.
I wanted to hit him, but I couldn’t. He was my only conduit back to France. Without him I’d be left to die in the desert. I looked at him in silence until the blood dripping from my cut had formed a dark pool on his chest. The image was almost sexual. With the dark hair of his chest slightly visible under the thin muslin of the damp fabric, I couldn’t help but think of Jillian. I traced the figure of her face into his shirt and collapsed into his chest. She seemed so far away. So utterly and completely far away.
“We need to move,” was all he said.
By noon we reached a village. It was surrounded by a ring of lemon trees. In the distance I saw a Moorish style tower in what must have been the center. The sun had deepened in color from the pale yellow of morning to a variegated bronze. I squinted as we passed a small stable.
“The sun is very powerful,” said Munif. “I once had a friend who made a telescope out of the bottoms of bottles and jars. He would stare at the sun for hours trying to see beneath its yellow surface to what was lying inside. Then he would draw sketches of what he thought he saw. Great cities of glass and metal with men flying on pulsing bulbs of light or carpets of pure energy. It’s amazing what the mind can come up with when it is desperate for a solution.”
He stopped and took the water canister out of his side bag.
“Let’s get you to a hospital,” I said. “The quicker you recover the sooner you can get back to your mother.”
“You’re not just going to leave me there?”
“I need to get back to Lyon.”
“Yes,” he said with hushed understanding. “But it would still be best if we went together. The time you save in leaving me here may not be worth the trouble. If you run into Muslim soldiers, you’re dead. If you run into French soldiers, the result is no different. On top of that there’s bandits and the heat. You’d never make it alone. Wait and we can go to Tunis together and then you can take a boat across the Mediterranean.
After some thought I agreed with him. Although I still had doubts about his intentions, it seemed like the safest plan.
“It’s the sun. I can tell it’s making you crazy. Like my friend with the jars. Don’t let it infect your mind with strange ideas. You have to view it as something like a dealer in a casino. Something that is necessary for the smooth operation of things, yet something that can never be trusted and ultimately is your enemy.”
We walked until we found the local medical station. It was located at the end of a dusty alleyway in a small shack with an imbricated clay tile roof. A few rats scurried through a nearby gutter.
“Just tell them we’re travelers and were attacked and robbed,” said Munif. “Then they’ll take me with no identification papers. It’s run by missionaries. If we told them we were deserters they probably wouldn’t tell, but I wouldn’t risk it.”
We walked inside. The linoleum tiles were covered in a sticky brown film and the walls were cracked. It looked more like a place for the infliction rather than treatment of diseases. There was no air conditioning. Behind the desk, which was the only piece of furniture in the room, sat a slim oriental nurse. She smiled, but the Swiss cross on her white sleeve was far more reassuring.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Munif stepped up to the desk and pulled open his shirt.
“We were attacked by bandits. They took almost everything.”
She tented her eyebrows and leaned forward, examining the wound from behind her desk.
“It looks awful.”
Munif explained that the bandits had chained him up and whipped him with a long metal cable with rusted frays dangling from the end. Then he embellished the story even further. He explained how I was an actor dressed as a soldier for a part in a film and that I had saved him by pretending that I was a real soldier and threatening to open fire on them. He lied with such frankness his tale seemed almost believable. The nurse accepted his account without a flinch and took him to the back room to treat his wound.
An hour later he came out fully washed and smiling, his dark hair now curly where before the sweat and heat had ironed it flat. “Shall we go?” was all he said.
We cut through a valley of palm trees on our way out of the city. We passed an old man wearing nothing but a white cloth wrapped around his waist and a pair of sandals. He was trying to sell a goat. Munif smiled knowingly and stopped to appraise the animal’s teeth for a moment before moving on.
That night we slept under a lemon tree. I awoke to find Munif rummaging through my shoulder bag. I watched his slim arms move with quick fluid motions under the cool light of the desert night. He pulled out a pile of my belongings, but it was too dark to see what exactly they were. Then he picked them up and walked away from the lemon tree. The desert sky was so bright that I could see him reading something from the pile. When he was finished he quietly opened my bag and stuffed my belongings back inside. I was shocked and angry at his actions, but since he was my only way back to Lyon I decided to wait until morning to see if he had actually taken anything before I confronted him.
The next day we set off for Tunis. After rummaging through my bag I saw that had taken nothing. Munif told me that we would be in the ancient city by nightfall. At noon we stopped for water and he broke out laughing.
“What?” I asked nervously.
“You have to answer me one question.”
“Which might be?”
“Why didn’t you try to stop me last night?”
“Stop you from what?” I asked, feigning astonishment.
“Don’t pretend you didn’t see me. I could see your eyes glimmering from fifty feet away. Moonlight isn’t that dim.”
“All right,” I conceded. “I did see you. But since you seemed to return everything I thought it best not to mention anything. Maybe you were just testing me.”
“I wanted to read the letter I saw in your bag to make sure you weren’t a spy. I wasn’t sure I could trust you.”
“It was from my girl friend,” I said. “But I guess you know that now. I hope you’re satisfied.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He looked slightly embarrassed.
The two of us walked in silence to Tunis. By the time we reached the outskirts it was sunset. We shared one last cup of water and went to sleep under a tree in a small park. When I woke in the morning he was gone.
IV
Disappearance. As if the word and the woman had suddenly become one, I shrunk away from her in defeat. But wasn’t that precisely why I loved her? Jillian was always vanishing from me when I needed her the most. Like Degas’ ballerina, she was a creature dangling from a thin thread that reached down from some higher realm. I’d always taken her passion for Artaud’s Theater and its Double as consubstantial with my own relentless craving to slip away from my outer life and into my most secret fantasies. Her thesis was written certification that she and I were woven from the same cloth: the world of dreams and the imagination. But to have her only as a dream would have been unbearable. My mother always said I preferred dreams to the truth, but Jillian was the one thing in life where dreams and reality hit a singularity and became indistinguishable.
The night after she left with Adrien, leaving me to walk her young sister home through the downtown alleys of Lyon, I felt I had suddenly fallen in the heart of a deep black abyss. But the next morning I awoke to new optimism and hoped that it was all just a glitch and she would call back in the next few days effusing regret over her actions. Although I desperately wanted to call her and find out what had happened, I realized that my pride was at stake and it was her duty to call me and apologize. I always found that to win a woman back the worst thing to do was scamper around on her coat tails. But I waited for weeks without hearing from her and my hopes rapidly faded. She had no doubt accepted Adrien’s plea for her hand in marriage. I cursed his dirty tactics. I hated him for showing up all desperate and morbid claiming that somehow she was letting him down by not loving him the way he loved her. But was this the truth or was there something more? On the hope that I could find out what had actually happened I tried calling Annette in London. I felt I knew her well enough and that she would somehow be able to talk some sense into Jillian and help me win her back before it was too late. So strange I thought, reflecting on the absurdities of my actions as I walked over to the phone, how I’d convinced myself that some secondary agent like her sister could sway something as vast and unpredictable as Jillian’s heart back into my hands with something so small as a few words of endorsement. In desperation I tried dialing Annette’s number several times but always got some strange man’s voice.
After months of suffering my heart grew tired and I was slowly able to turn my mind to other things. By late autumn, I had almost grown accustomed to her being out of my life. I looked back on our relationship as a fleeting romance and began to applaud myself for at least having a fling and not spending my entire life in military training or locked inside a book. After all, having loved her and lost her was better than not having loved her at all. I started to ask out other women. I even kissed a small French waitress over a barstool one night. We were trading coy glances all night while I sat at the bar reading a book as she trolleyed back and forth from the bar to the outdoor tables carrying a tray of beer and liquor. At just about closing time I mustered up the courage to touch her shoulder and kiss her as she passed. She responded with a huge smile, but her reaction seemed like enough of a reward and I decided not to take it any further.
It was exactly three weeks after that kiss when I saw Jillian again. It was the first day of winter. She was hiding behind a pair of dark sunglasses walking alone down the same street I ran into her the day after we’d first met. At first I didn’t recognize her. She jogged up to me with a pile of papers clamped tightly under her arm. But it was not, as I found out later, entirely by accident that we crossed paths.
“Jean, what a surprise,” she said as if nothing had ever come between us. She shook my arm.
“Oh, Jillian,” I said numbly. I treated her as I would a stranger. It had been so long I felt I didn’t know her anymore.
“Jean. That’s no way to greet someone you haven’t seen in months.”
“I just don’t know what to say.”
“Why don’t you ask me what I’m doing?”
“You married Adrien and you’re trying to finish your thesis. Your personal life was too complicated and you were getting nowhere with your work. So, you decided to marry so you could graduate.”
“Wrong. Dead wrong.”
“What, then?”
She took me by the arm and escorted me back to Façade. At first I was reluctant to follow her in.
“Jean,” she said, desperately trying to break my guard. “You have every right to be mad at me. I’m grateful you’re even talking to me. It was awful what I did to you.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. What makes you think I even cared?”
“I know you better than that. You were always my favorite.”
“Is that an honor or a curse?”
“Come on. At least let me explain. But there is so much that I don’t even know where to begin.”
“So full of clichés. I don’t even know where to begin, she says. Do you think I do? Well, maybe I do. Maybe I do know after all. You walked out on me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Jillian.
“And then what?”
“I had to. My life was such a mess.”
“Who were you seeing?”
“Nobody,” she said sullenly. Her eyes were so deep with surrender I couldn’t help but let go of my anger and touch the palm of her hand.
“Nobody?” I repeated.
“I had to isolate myself.”
“So why did you run off with Adrien that night?”
“You don’t know what really happened. He was so upset. He was on the brink of despair and seeing you with me was the last straw.”
“And you fell for it.”
“Jean. Please. You’re more compassionate than that. He burned my name into his wrists with match sticks and said he would do it again if I didn’t come home with him.”
The desperation of his actions put me at ease. I now saw Adrien as less of a rival and more of a man to be pitied. I relaxed into my seat and listened quietly to her outpourings. My gaze moved back and forth from the fiery reflections of the candlelight on the tabletop to the deep wet flames of her eyes. My heart slowly opened up to her. I could see her as that frail fey creature again, dangling like a circus ballerina on that long gold thread from another world.
“I stopped seeing everyone. I isolated myself for months, but Adrien kept calling me. Sometimes he even threatened suicide.”
“Suicide?” Although it could have been a ploy to get Jillian away from me, I still felt bad for all my petty jealousies against him. How could I be so low as to hate a man who would consider taking his own life on account of my own success?
“But eventually he stopped. He still loves me, but I think he realizes it’s no use forcing me and we can only be friends.”
The night slipped onward as smoothly as the Sambucca flowed into our glasses and then our mouths. It all came out. Our meeting was no accident. She realized she needed me. She said I was the only one who could understand her on a deeper level. I was the only one who shared her passion for literature and psychology. She adored my love of beauty in its most abstract sense. When she was with me she felt we could communicate without even having to speak. She just needed to get away to see how she felt. Isolate herself. Separate the essential from the inessential. Let her soul crystallize, as she put it. We walked home together. She invited me into her apartment. But I refused, telling her that I needed time to think about it.
I called her the next day and we slept together that same night. We snapped together like tiny magnets thrown in a jar. Click. It was over. We were sealed. Through her window I watched the snow settle on an awning across the street. The soft white mantle almost seemed to breathe as it grew outwards in all directions. I was finally alive.
But my happiness was to be short-lived. A week later I received notice that I had to leave for North Africa in six months to fulfill my military duty.
V
I took the ferry from Tunis and arrived in Marseilles that evening. I booked a room in a cheap hotel by the docks. No matter how dirty the rooms were, it was still better than the trenches. I took the train to Lyon the following morning. Lyon always had a soothing effect on me. It’s something about the slow quiet waters of the intersecting Rhone and Saone rivers. Across the Saone from downtown there is a Romanesque cathedral that casts a heavy elephant-shaped shadow as the sun is setting. The elephant had already cast its shadow by the time I reached Jillian’s house.
She lived in a late nineteenth century brick town house west of downtown. I opened the white wooden gate, admiring its perfect row of pointed fence posts. I felt I was passing through a portal into an imaginary garden. All around me were statues, flowers and shrubbery. I walked by a tall granite monolith surrounded at the bottom by tiny blue flowers. Although I’d walked through that garden countless times before it seemed somehow different, somehow renewed. There was a distinct dreamlike quality that I’d never sensed before. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that everything, from the stone toe of a gargoyle at the foot of her front stairs to a bee that buzzed by my head, was an illusion without any concrete existence. I walked up the steps to the heavy oak door.
I knocked. There was no answer.
I knocked again, this time much harder.
Still no answer.
I tried the handle. The door opened freely. I walked in. There was a distinct smell of burnt coffee in the front hall. I passed into the living room. It was in perfect order except for a complete set of clothes lying neatly on the couch as if the person wearing them had vanished in mid-conversation. The smell of coffee gave way to that of a musky perfume. It wasn’t anything I’d ever smelled on Jillian before.
I walked through the elongated living room and into the small, claustrophobic kitchen. The counter was covered in breadcrumbs. An empty bottle of wine lay crudely beside the remodeled porcelain sink. The browned cork was sitting beside it like a used condom at the foot of a bedpost. I picked up the bottle and checked the label. Nothing special.
I heard footsteps upstairs. I tiptoed through the living room and out the front door. Then I heard singing. A woman’s voice. I stood in silence as the voice got louder and louder. Then I heard steps coming down the staircase. The words gained definition. The faintly echoed chords straightened out, assembling in perfect cohesion. It was Jillian’s voice. She must have been in the shower. She sang in the raspy drawl of a southern negress.
I knocked and she came to the door in her bathrobe.
“Jean. You’re safe,” she said as if she’d just woken up.
“Jillian.”
She sank into me like a stone into the depths of a loch. The harder she pushed up against me, the harder I pulled her into me. There was something almost frightening about the gravity of her response. If she had not hugged me at all it would have made me feel more secure. She let go her grip.
“I got your letter,” I said.
“I was hoping you didn’t.” Her tone darkened.
“I deserted.”
“For me?”
“I would’ve anyway. A war broke out.”
“I heard. I read about it a week after I sent the letter. I was so worried.” She pulled me towards her again. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it.”
“It’s not over yet. They’ll be after me if they don’t find a disfigured corpse somewhere they can say was me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I have to lay low. I’m afraid of getting a job under my own name. I need fake ID. Maybe we can go on a long holiday. In your letter...”
“Ignore the letter,” she said, drawing away from me. “I wrote it in a state of despair. I was so sick of sitting around writing. It had nothing to do with you.”
“I understand,” I said. But I wasn’t sure that I did.
“I’m almost done. It’s taken every shred of life out of me. Whenever I have an idea - any idea at all - I find a way of funneling it into a chapter. I feel like everything I do is somehow attached to it like playground balls around a tether pole.”
I slept in her bed for most of the afternoon. When I woke up I found a tray with lukewarm coffee and cookies sitting on the night table. I took a few sips before getting up to find Jillian. She was lounging quietly in the living room under the golden light of a reading lamp. When she pulled the book away from her face I saw that she was wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with small oval lenses that I’d never seen on her before. She looked like a complete stranger. Like a librarian in a porno film. I stood watching her secretly from the door for almost five minutes without her noticing me at all. Finally I sniffled and she spotted me by the door.
“Hi,” I said.
Her initial expression was cold - unsettling. Then she pulled off her glasses and her face colored up. For a brief moment I caught a glimpse of the Jillian I’d fallen in love with so many times before.
“You look like a little boy spying on his mother,” she said.
“I was just savoring the moment. You looked so peaceful sitting there reading.”
That night we made love and I felt I was staring into the eyes of a total stranger. Even her small chiseled nose, her softly angled cheekbones, and her heavy wet lips seemed unfamiliar. Perhaps my mind was playing tricks on me. She pushed my head into the pillow as she panted heavily and irregularly. She wrapped her lips around my penis and then rubbed it with her thin bony fingers. But I couldn’t climax. Then she pulled at my hair and smiled a knowing, loving smile. She still looked strange. Even more so as she didn’t seem to sense my detachment. I shut my eyes and thought of her walking alone through the streets of Lyon two years ago. Then my mind filled the scene with smoke and dead bodies. Fire hissed through smashed windows and soldiers hollered as they tossed their bulbous grenades. I ran to her side and she grabbed me. This was the Jillian I knew. I thrust my hand up her knee-length skirt and started finger-fucking her right there amidst all the smoke and clatter. She grabbed my hand and led me inside a burning building. I didn’t care that the flames lapped at my face like the tongues of a thousand wild dogs. She pulled off her skirt but left on her bright orange athletic shirt. I liked the way the broad blue stripe across her breast accentuated the soft swell of her cleavage. I let her undress me on the splintered floor. I listened to her breathing as the sound of gunfire crowded my ears. Then she whispered in a slow and sullen voice:
yam camdou
yan daba
camdoura
The words aroused me. They tweaked an inner erogenous zone and my heart was suddenly alight. The roof of the building dissolved to leave a clear patch of deep indigo variegated by the random smearing of stars. I began to climax. I dug my nails into her clay-white skin. I closed my eyes and the whirling skyscape of my mind turned suddenly into a million gun barrels poking down into my face. I screamed.
“What’s wrong?” asked Jillian.
I opened my eyes.
“Nothing,” I said. I pulled away from her and spread out my arms. She looked familiar again.
“We have to go to Malta tomorrow.”
“Why are you telling me now?”
“No, not Malta. A small island nearby.”
“Why?”
“Poilblanc.”
Poilblanc was her thesis advisor. I didn’t even answer. Instead I just admired the smooth motion of her tongue across her lips. That night I dreamed I was in the hot sands of the desert again, the cold metal bellies of fighter jets screaming over my head. Bent-up corpses like dolls in ghetto-side garbage heaps. And Munif. His sharp black eyes scrutinizing my every step. I woke up in a sweat and turned to Jillian. She was asleep. I watched her breathing as my heart welled up with joy. It was so comforting to be with her once more.
VI
The next morning Jillian woke me up and rushed me out the door as soon as I had dressed. She handed me a cup of coffee and locked the front door. It was raining. I took a sip of the coffee and she said something about meeting Poilblanc in half an hour. Then we were supposed to drive together to the coast and take a ferry out to the island.
“An old colleague of Poilblanc’s is having a few people from the French Department out to his private island,” she explained. “He has organized a dinner party by the beach.”
“He owns an entire island?”
“I guess. I’ve never met him, but he must be rich. His name is Delacroix. He’s best known for his work on de Maupassant and Flaubert.”
I rolled my eyes in frustration. It was my first day back and she was already carting me off to spend the day with her university colleagues.
“You’ll do fine. Just don’t say anything about Africa. I’m not too sure what their political views might be.”
I watched Jillian’s eyes dart around nervously as she drove us through the outskirts of Lyon to Poilblanc’s house. She seemed irritated. She kept looking down into her lap as though she were holding back some great revelation that would be utterly devastating to our love. Half way there she put on a pair of sunglasses. The smooth black molding covered nearly half her face.
“Virtual reality goggles?” I asked.
“Ha,” she jibed. “I think they’re sexy. I bought them just for you. I thought they’d turn you on.”
With her face bottled up by the glasses and her shiny black nylon raincoat hiding all but a glimpse of her purple cashmere scarf, she looked like one of Serge Gainsbourg’s muses.
“Duplicitous,” I said.
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