Our Life in the Forest Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  IN THE NEAR FUTURE, a woman is writing in the depths of a forest. She’s cold. She’s lost the use of one eye; she’s down to one kidney, one lung.

  Before, in the city, she treated patients who had suffered trauma. And she would travel out to the Rest Centre, to visit Marie, her ‘half’, her spitting image, who lay in an induced coma, her body parts available whenever the woman needed them. The woman fled, along with other fugitives and their halves.

  But in the forest the reanimated halves start to behave strangely…

  Recalling Pig Tales, Darrieussecq’s bestselling debut, Our Life in the Forest is a chilling tale laced with humour, another brilliant novel by one of France’s most exciting writers.

  ‘An exceptional novel.’ L’Observateur

  ‘Reading Marie Darrieussecq is a true delight for the soul.’ Ouest-France

  ‘I did not shoot the wretched in the dungeons.’

  Sergei Yesenin

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Our Life in Forest

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Praise for Our Life in the Forest

  Copyright Page

  OUR LIFE IN FOREST

  I OPENED MY eye and bang, everything came into focus. It was clear. Almost all of us had our halves with us. And it was scary just how clingy my half was. A sissy. That’s what I called her: Sissy. I had lost all notion of social graces. The only thing that worked with her was to push her around. A bit.

  Time to get a grip. I have to tell this story. I have to try to understand it by laying things out in some sort of order. By rounding up the bits and pieces. Because it’s not going well. It’s not okay, right now, all that. Not okay at all.

  She was immature, but that’s normal. Considering the life she’d led. Considering the life she had to lead. Well, anyway. But I don’t want to start in on my half. I’m sick of her. I could start with my patient, the clicker. Patient zero, in a way. I think it’s thanks to him that I understand. He went mad, like a lot of people. Because of his work—at least, that’s what he came for in the beginning. In the beginning, don’t we all come for a reason that isn’t the right one? I say that from experience.

  First of all, let me describe my current situation—right now, because I’ve got a feeling I have to move fast. I don’t have much time. I can feel it in my muscles, in my bones. In my remaining eye. I’m not in good shape. I won’t have time to reread this. Or to write a plan. I’ll just write it as it comes. So:

  Around me I see an encampment in a forest. Tents and tarpaulins. Holes in the ground. Braziers. The canopy that protects us from the drones. A pirated internet set-up and a few DIY robots. Composting toilets and iron-fisted management. Back to basics.

  The main advantage of halves is their flexibility. They can adapt to anything. Their biggest flaw is that they understand nothing. I had to teach mine everything. And I mean everything. Let me tell you: she didn’t know how to walk. And that’s just the beginning of it. Take a big, soft body, almost forty years old, even if she barely looks twenty-five, a gorgeous girl, and stand her upright, verticalise her: she opens her eyes, and then bang. She falls down. It’s funny, that strapping young woman all of a sudden on the ground.

  I learned how to verticalise during my internship with the babies. It works up to around four or five weeks. After that they’ve grown too much. You grab an infant by the head and buttocks: there it is lying in its cot, pretty well useless, and, hey presto, you verticalise it, put it upright just like you and me. Like the Homo sapiens sapiens that it is. And it opens its eyes. Magic. Even if it appeared to be fast asleep. It looks at you, looks around, contemplates its surroundings. It works every time.

  It made us interns laugh, good, affectionate laughter. Anyway, verticalising my half—I was going to say my intern—was a big deal seeing that she’s as tall as I am, 1.67 metres and half a centimetre, to be exact. I’ve always hung on to my extra half a centimetre. (To tell the truth, she’s a good 1.68 metres tall: she hasn’t been shrunk by life.) Well, anyway. So we worked it out with the other escapees. A few of us got together to verticalise our halves. We held their legs and shoulders by propping them up against a tree. I mean, what hadn’t we already done to them anyway? Well, mine opened her eyes every time. Without fail. And she examined me. It was touching, but uncomfortable. Those blank eyes: dread, there’s no other word. Where do you begin? I told her my name, Viviane, and then hers: Marie. My name’s Marie too, obviously, but I’d chosen Viviane as my fugitive name. You have to comply.

  Next came walking. Like a baby. It didn’t take long; it was as if their mode of life had somehow instilled in them a certain amount of human data—first walking upright, then speech. The main thing was to beef them up, and to strengthen their tongues and jaws too; in short, to coach them in walking and in speaking. Orthopaedics and speech therapy was precisely what we were doing, in the forest. We worked on accentuating their human posture; we made them discover their voice. My professional training was useful.

  Admittedly, we don’t have much to do in the forest. Our activities are limited at the moment. It’s a matter of fleeing in an organised fashion, but fleeing requires a lot of energy, believe me. We can’t risk carrying the halves out on stretchers like we did in the beginning. There are too many of them now. They have to walk—fast. They had to learn to run. They turned out to be useful for cooking, carrying water, digging tunnels and erecting tents, et cetera. Don’t think I’m implying they’re all women; there are men as well as women, of course, and even a majority of men.

  Right. So where do I start? I don’t think I have to explain the elementary precautions we’re taking. They’re obvious: the jamming of our digital data, of our identities, et cetera. The logistics of our disappearance. Our disappearance, the one they don’t get to decide—that’s what annoys them the most. We have all disappeared. Except that they know we’re here, in a sort of reverse mirror of the world.

  The planet is small. We discovered that pretty quickly. I mean, ever since the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Magellan and Cook and whoever else. (Columbus, Magellan and Cook were explorers.) And ever since we dived into the ocean depths, and onto the Moon and Mars, and Jupiter’s satellites, and then the habitable planets, we no longer really have anywhere to hide on Earth. It’s self-evident. And yet, oddly enough, we still manage it. It’s extremely uncomfortable. You have to forgo what most domestic animals are entitled to: dry straw for shelter, accessible food, care and protection. If you accept having your feet constantly wet, and never again drinking coffee, and if you can forget about hot showers (I’m only mentioning the things I miss most), you’ll manage to stay hidden. To disappear. As long as there are forests.

  The logical thing would be for them to burn them all down. Or they could stockpile the wood from the native forests and plant huge fields of trees on a cleared forest floor, beneath a chequered canopy: no more undergrowth, no more gloomy light. It’s on the drawing board. But I don’t have time here to elaborate on ideas you already know, and which perhaps (one can only hope) you oppose. I am writing in order to understand, and to bear witness—in a notebook, obviously, with a graphite pencil (you can still find them). Nothing online about it. As lacking in technology as was the huge amount of manual energy expended at Lascaux or in the Sistine Chapel—well, I don’t really want to compare myself to them. (Lascaux is a famous painted cave, and the other place is a famous church, also painted.) I bet my notebook will end up buried in a tin. Perhaps with me, before too long. My half will join me much later, in her own time. Of the two of us, Sissy wil
l have the better life. The best life possible. Sometimes I say to myself that our ultimate aim in life, the most noble thing we can do, is to protect our halves.

  I’m the elephant here. I’ve lasted a very long time. It doesn’t happen often, but I’m going to end up in our cemetery, buried with the rites we established for ourselves. At least, I hope so. The vast majority of us die without understanding. Sometimes it goes to my head, the fact that I understand what’s happening. Even if I don’t understand everything.

  Where were we? Time to get a grip. I’m cold. Patient zero, the clicker. Are you aware of what a clicker does? Their job is to teach the robots all our mental associations, so that one day they’ll be able to make them instead of us. Which would allow them to work empathetically, et cetera. The clicker came to speak to me about the infinite tedium of his duties. It is envisaged that the project will be completed in about fifty years. But, until then, the job consists of staying seated in front of your device, and clicking every match between words and images, or words and sounds, or sounds and images, or colours and emotions, that sort of thing. You can even do it in your head if you agree to have your device implanted. You can do it while you’re walking or under the shower, except it requires—as the clicker explained—complete focus. It seems like a mechanical process, but it demands concentration and speed. You’re endlessly performing a task the mind can do but which discombobulates a robot. And which is nevertheless difficult to conceptualise. The only solution is to multiply the links, click, click, click, until the robot has been supplied with everything we could possibly have thought up until now, everything we could have felt, everything humanity could have experienced.

  Blue = sky = melancholy = music = bruising = blue blood = nobility = beheading.

  Click, click, click, click, click.

  I think the last forest will have disappeared before the first robot is up to speed. We’re nearly there. Fifty years. I won’t be around for it. I’ll have fallen to bits by then. I’m glad I didn’t have a child.

  So. The clicker. My clicker, if I can call him that, found himself stuck in a sort of cubicle where, all day long, he had to associate concepts like ‘sadness’, ‘horror’ or ‘revulsion’ with different types of attacks. Dismembered bodies, et cetera. Eventually, the images left him cold, but he didn’t manage to get himself transferred to another job. He would have liked to work in the artistic section, for example—to associate Beethoven (a nineteenth-century composer) with ‘beautiful’ or ‘musical’, that sort of thing. But the clickers are controlled by somewhat rudimentary robots: it’s a bit like when a shopping website suggests you buy shoes because you’ve just bought some, or go on a cruise because you wrote that you went somewhere by boat. Is the sight of blood always a bad thing? Is it always associated with horror? The clicker was asking himself these sorts of questions, all for a wage of two dollars an hour. Perhaps he was becoming subversive. Clickers get so bored that they spend their time chatting online; indeed, they unintentionally become real snitches. (Some of them do it intentionally.)

  The first thing he asked me to do, when he came to see me, was to stay silent. That was a shock. This is not right, I said to myself. This one’s going to cause trouble. I was trained to formulate a diagnosis, which is not that difficult, and then to steer people towards the most appropriate treatment—towards whatever will do them the least harm, as I say. But that’s already expressing an opinion, it seems. I’m supposed to be perfectly neutral and benevolent. I manage to be benevolent because, for the most part, the patients are in my good books. If I sense something’s not right, I refer them to my supervisor. (He’s a strong-minded man; he even treats deviants.) Well, anyway, once I’ve made a diagnosis, such as hysteria with severe paranoid or obsessive tendencies (I have my own frame of reference, which I adapt according to the case), I listen to them talk for a bit, and then I direct them towards the various methods of treatment. But this particular patient, the clicker, did not want me to touch him, did not want me to speak to him, did not even want me to oversee his treatment. He wanted to ensconce himself in the armchair and, as he told me, rest.

  ‘Rest?’ I said. ‘Do you have a death wish?’ And he replied, ‘For pity’s sake, shut up.’ So I latched onto the word pity and pointed out to him that death and pity were probably the concepts he would have to deal with most in his profession. But he told me he didn’t want to talk about his profession—that it wasn’t a profession, just a job, hard graft, his bread and butter, slave labour—and that if he could spend the half-hour granted by the occupational medical service, here, doing nothing, saying nothing, just resting and daydreaming, that would be fine, thank you very much.

  Because of my diagnosis of ‘depressed, suicidal tendencies, possible burnout’, he was entitled to two sessions a week. Seeing him was also restful for me. Once I’d got used to the silence. His, but also my own. I have to say that I talk most of the time—perhaps too much. My supervisor says I prattle. The most effective treatment is Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), punctuated every thirty seconds by calming words. Inevitably, I was disturbed by this non-tactile and aphasic patient. My supervisor just said to wait and see. Literally. To be there, dependable. The main thing, said my supervisor, was that the patient knew he could come. The most important requirement of shrinks is that they are there. So that’s what I did. The patient came, and he came back, and he ensconced himself in the armchair, and sometimes I wondered if he was asleep with his eyes open.

  My supervisor was old; he’d been around for years and had made it into the new era, which meant he was experienced. Thanks to him, I put up with the anxiety of my patient’s silence and immobility. I no longer even asked the question ‘What are you thinking about?’, to which the clicker would invariably reply, ‘I think I’d do better to rest at my place than stay here’, and I’d invariably reply that, actually, he did not know how to rest. And he’d ask me to shut up, for pity’s sake. When I told my supervisor about the session, he also told me to shut up. So I complied.

  I first met my supervisor when he was my own shrink. I was living a normal life: I worked, I took my dog for walks (I had a dog permit), I went to see Marie every fortnight. But no one could possibly think it was easy. Because of my circumstances, I’d been granted some free sessions with the shrink, two a week. I’d obtained visiting rights to Marie, thanks to my mother’s persistence. And, all things considered, they’d observed that it did us more good than harm to visit our halves. There was even a period—you might remember it—when they advertised on the radio: in between advice to wash your hands and to drink when it’s hot and to cover up when it’s cold and to stay at home, those who belonged to the Generation were invited to make contact with the Rest Centres.

  All of a sudden, I realise that’s what they were called, Rest Centres; it just goes to show that it’s useful to write things down, in order to clarify your ideas: rest, like my patient zero’s favourite word.

  Well, anyway. Rest Centres were where they kept the bodies. The bodies of our halves. It’s still done, but I don’t like to talk about it in the present tense. If I talk about it in the past tense, it feels like we’ve won. Where they kept the bodies…Back then, we didn’t call them halves. I hadn’t yet fallen in with anyone from the Generation, at least anyone involved with the Generation. Back then, I was going out with a guy called Romero.

  Of course, I found it strange seeing Marie for the first time. How old was I? Fourteen? So I began a course of therapy. Two sessions a week to talk about Marie, and talk some more about Marie. Most people, all they do is talk about their parents. Or, if the worst comes to the worst, about their partner. About their children, their work, their lack of work. And me: about that girl lying there. They’ve really messed us around. And that’s being polite.

  I didn’t know I was pretty. At first, it was my narcissism talking. Honestly, I was fascinating. Then I figured out that Marie was much more beautiful than me. It wasn’t exactly a mirror. She was the
fascinating one, not me. I tried to get my head around the fact that she was not me. But it’s not easy when you’re faced with someone who sleeps the whole time. We would have had to converse. We would have had to meet. They use the word meet, but nothing happened. And yet there was a way of waking them up. Among visitors, we shared tips: speak into their ear firmly, not loudly, but with authority, an authoritative whisper. Their eyes opened. Their eyes opened briefly, as if in response to a large flashbulb. Their eyes opened so wide, huge and, let’s be clear, terrified: we just had time to step back and stare into the large, panic-stricken whites of their eyes. Then their eyes closed again. And their faces sank back into their terrible serenity.

  Marie is prettier than I am, I said to myself. That should have reassured me, actually. The psychologist from the Rest Centre disagreed with me. The psychologist said that we had the same nose to the millimetre, the same eyes, the same smile, the same jaw, everything, everything exactly identical, and so therefore I’m as pretty as Marie. But it’s not true. Back then, Marie seemed to be forever immersed in a milk bath. Even today, her face is so smooth I want to murder her. She looks like the Mona Lisa. (The Mona Lisa is a famous painting from the sixteenth century.) When she was asleep, you’d have thought she was a horizontal Mona Lisa. Mysterious, contemplative. Thoughtful, my arse! Back then I didn’t call her Sissy. That came later, when she had to be taught everything, and was frightened of everything, of the slightest scratch, of life in the forest. No, before we escaped, I called her Marie.

  Don’t count on me to structure all this coherently. I’m trying to follow a chronological thread, but it’s not working. I should be telling it in order, but in my poor head it’s like a leafy landscape with lots of valleys and alternative paths and people waiting, all half-dead, for me to let them speak, lickety-split. They’re all speaking at the same time, and everything connects with everything else: the past with the present and with the future, what’s happened with what’s going to happen.