Our Life in the Forest Read online

  I’m cold. And my remaining eye is sore, and I keep trying to open my phantom eye. It feels like it’s there, I’m aware of its presence under the scar, I’d just have to wink and all of a sudden it would open, and my phantom eye would allow me to see what I can’t see.

  My profession, the way I was trained, was to make the trauma people have experienced seem possible. I can’t say it any other way. Even the word trauma—that needs to be discussed. By and large, terrible things have happened to all of us. More or less horrible, more or less sudden, more or less unexpected. For a human brain, the most difficult thing to understand, to accept, to manage, is the absence of any transition. For a robot, there’s no problem at all; they’re even programmed like that. But for a human being, a human being who is taking his child to school, who buys a croissant on the run and crosses the road with the little green man and waits among the parents and children for the school gate to open, without letting go of the little hand, and in the next second there’s nothing but that hand in his hand, the child’s body having been obliterated—I have a particular patient in mind—the brain quite simply cannot deal with it. The before and the after are not connected. They have no meaning. And, regardless of all the stories one can tell oneself, they never will. I was part of those teams of emergency shrinks that were sent out after the big attacks at the beginning of the millennium. A terrible time. But I also treated run-of-the-mill accidents, the car crash and the persistent noise in your head, the bang, the ringing in your ears, the phobias that take hold, routine trauma.

  And then this clicker, who was referred to me as a simple case of workplace stress. He’d been involved in a skirmish; I wouldn’t call it an attack. When he was a kid in high school, they’d all been locked inside while an assailant was walking around with a machete. Some of my colleagues are treating the assailants. I think I would have found that interesting. Well, anyway, my patient managed by himself to set things straight in his mind about this incident, which had no more destroyed his life than the day his mother announced to him that his father was not his father—some things are routine in the psychic life of human beings.

  Go tell that to a robot. He’ll give you his little concerned smile; he’ll associate ‘sad’ with ‘disturbing’ but also with ‘run-of-the-mill’, if he’s been well programmed. No, what tipped my patient over, and ended up preventing him from being productive, was quite simply the rhythm at work, of clicking fifteen hours a day in order barely to provide for his fundamental needs, and being in competition with Indians, Nigerians, Filipinos, Peruvians, all sorts of people who slave away as the planet’s underclass and accept half as much pay as a white person. When I say accept, that word also needs to be discussed. Anyway. The masses of people in the planet’s underclass who were prepared to go without sleep, that was what he found especially distressing. And the robots, of course, who never sleep. They know how to click and how endlessly to reproduce the most basic associations—love = happiness, passion = unhappiness—by grasping the difference between the passion for an idea, for a person or for, let’s say, a sport or a hobby. The point was, robots don’t sleep and my clicker really liked sleeping. He slept well. He was passionate about sleeping. Ha! He cut back when it came to food and living space, he didn’t smoke, he almost never drank beer anymore, but if he was deprived of his sleep as well, he couldn’t stand it. And he thought that was a perfectly healthy reaction. He needed, what was it, seven hours’ sleep? But apparently that’s a lot.

  Sleep is for losers. It’s what halves do. By this point in his treatment he’d agreed to talk, a little. As long as I shut up. I had no idea what to do, how to handle him, but I liked his vibe. When you’re a shrink, you’ve either got it or you haven’t: the feel for someone else’s vibe. If you don’t have it, find something else to do. A person’s vibe. Like being in love. Enjoying it. Immersing yourself in it.

  Sleep = rest = gentleness = bed = hibernation = anaesthetic = half = oblivion = death = anxiety.

  In the beginning, as a young shrink, I often panicked, so I took notes. I filled in forms. The names of the grandfathers and grandmothers, paternal and maternal, places of birth, et cetera. The mother, the father. I checked the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages, I read the CVs on my device. My elderly supervisor laughed. He was right: there’s no point. It’s all about the vibe. The patient shows up and everything comes back to you. Everything. By their presence alone—their gestures, their smell, the way they sit and look out the window or sigh and shut their eyes. The preceding two weeks or two years of therapy (even if these days no one stays for two years): it all comes back to you. In the absence of the patient it’s erased or neutralised, but it’s reactivated when the patient turns up. A whole universe. We used to call them unconscious memories.

  After all, the unconscious does exist. That made my patient zero laugh. I only dared use the word once—the unconscious. I have no idea now what I was talking about. It must have been when he was telling me about his half, although I have no idea if we said ‘half’ back then. It’s a kind of inappropriate word these days. How did we get on to this…He would go and see her—well, see him, given that his half was of course a man—perhaps once every six months, not very often. ‘Still more often than I saw my mother!’ he would say, laughing. He used to watch his half as he slept. It calmed him down. At least then he wasn’t clicking. He was dozing. How many times have we, all of us, been woken up by the staff at the Centres? How many times have we, all of us, nodded off while we were watching our halves as they slept! He even thought about seeing it as a form of therapy, of using those rest periods as a way to avoid treatment. I pointed out to him that the classic arrangement—shrink in armchair, patient on couch, connotes the shrink as a mobile figure and the patient as a half. But he asked me, please, not to use the ridiculous word mobile. The halves probably just had to be woken up, he said, and then they’d be mobile like everyone else. (I wasn’t so sure about that and the future proved me right: you have to teach them to walk.) Here we go again, he added: his brain was engulfed by the colour of the attacks. Once again he was seeing red.

  Red = blood = colour = love = cheeks = wine = confusion = politics = anger.

  How do you wake up the halves? Do they sleep from the moment they’re born? Had they always been asleep? Or only during certain periods, like bears hibernating in the old days? Being permanently asleep is not good, I said to myself. It must harm them at some point. They all wore a nosepiece that released anaesthetic into them continuously. What happened if they were unplugged? Some said they would die. It was absolutely forbidden to touch them.

  Where was I?

  We are not allowed, either ethically or at all, to talk to a patient. Everything is recorded, of course, so there was no way we were going to muck around by stepping too far outside the framework of the treatment. I say ‘too far’ because this patient and I got talking a bit anyway. I liked him a lot (that’s no reason). Back then, we thought no one, no one at all, would ever have time to listen to everything that was recorded every day in each room and each space in the human domain, or to view all those images. Those images, we said to ourselves, are made for after the fact, in case of a mishap, in order to identify victims and assailants. We didn’t count on the watchful robotic eye and the robotic memory, or the endless time that machines have, their endless capacity for crosschecking. Whatever. I’m not going to tell you everything that happened afterwards, how we were all conned—you know it as well as I do. Let’s get back to my patient. My patient and me. That could have been the title of this notebook, assuming it needs a title, but I don’t want to talk about that at all. I want to talk about our life in the forest.

  I want to testify that it is possible to be a nomad instead of being buried. Even if I’m cold.

  ‘It suits you, your hair out,’ he told me once.

  I remember that. From then on, I never tied my hair up again.

  He smiled at me and I smiled at him. He laughed and I laughed. He said to me
, ‘It suits you, laughing.’ I didn’t reply. I stayed silent. I remember that.

  Where was I?

  It’s really difficult seeing out of one eye. It changes your view of things, and not in a good way. It diminishes the world: in particular, it flattens things out. I have a sore neck from trying to extend my vision on the left. It’s as if I’ve lost half my head. Apparently, I always hold it at an angle. I am not aware of it, but the youngest among the halves make fun of me by imitating me: they walk hunched forwards like penguins (if penguins walked hunched forwards).

  It’s difficult lifting up a half. A half is at the same time submissive and insolent, a bit surly. Impertinent and sly. I’m not crazy about halves, but we’ve had to come to terms with them. After all, we weren’t about to eliminate them.

  ‘I did not shoot the wretches in the dungeons’ is a line from the Russian revolutionary Sergei Yesenin, who is one of our Heroes. (There was a revolution in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century.)

  Of course we’re armed. Our pirated robots are weapons.

  Then again. Let me concentrate, with my poor eye. My patient. My patient zero. The clicker. I was supposed to give him a few sessions of cognitive remediation therapy. But he refused. That’s not good, I told myself. How am I going to explain that? Remediation therapy works very well on traumatised people. You might say that my patient was not traumatised enough. I had to evaluate the effectiveness of the therapy every two weeks, then write up a report at the end of two months, four months or six months, depending on the length of the treatment.

  I’ll give you an example: one of my most resounding successes was when I treated the sole survivor of the Paris–Johannesburg flight shot down above the Sahara. You remember it. The woman buried herself in the sand because she had read somewhere that it would protect her from dehydration. She piled up all the bottles of water from the plane around her, all the meal trays, all the apples and even the ice-creams, melted and collected in a waterproof defibrillator satchel. She was surrounded, as far as the eye could see, by the tangled debris of bodies and metal, by seats to which corpses were still buckled, et cetera. She told me all about it. Yes, she was one who talked easily. Her husband and her two children had been obliterated; nothing of them was found, apart from a few objects. I’ll spare you the list, but I remember each one of them: the soft toy and some other thingummy she kept mentioning in our sessions. I won’t dwell on her subsequent phobia of planes—what could be more normal? And, given that she wasn’t a flight attendant, we weren’t about to go crazy trying to rehabilitate her to flying. You have to draw the line somewhere. The worst thing was that she could no longer manage to stand in a queue. She associated security checks—baggage, passports, body scanners, et cetera—with the accident. It drove her crazy, and I know what I’m on about. She could no longer wait anywhere. Not even to buy bread. Or go through any sort of metal detector or inspection. And don’t even mention a trip to the cinema. Or entering a department store. She could no longer do anything. Her life was in freefall. She couldn’t even sleep anymore, because she felt herself falling.

  Fortunately, her brain had erased the explosion. She had no memory of it. The fall, on the other hand, she remembered only too well. After all, it was ten thousand metres. This slip of a woman, thirty-five years old, falling ten thousand metres. There’s time to change your view of the world. She had no memory of the landing. She is in the plane / she’s falling / she’s under the sand. That’s the story. Before, she has a family; after, she doesn’t have one anymore. Logically, she should not have survived. In short, a miracle woman. But, she told me, the whole time she was falling, nothing happened to her.

  The syndrome of the sole survivor is well documented: the guilt, the feeling of being chosen, the mysticism, et cetera. Survival = relief = questioning = guilt = suicide. She didn’t tick all the boxes. She had no mystical belief about being chosen, no relationship with God, no metaphysics, nothing. A down-to-earth woman. If I may say so. I can speak freely about her because she is dead and, as you will have understood, left no family. She committed suicide. That doesn’t take anything away from the therapeutic method. Losing your husband and children just like that does not encourage anyone to stay alive. The therapy, even cognitive, cannot adapt people to everything—that was the conclusion of my report. I’m not afraid of calling a spade a spade. No miracle with the miracle survivor. I’m less comfortable with unexpected reactions, as in the case of my patient zero.

  My miracle survior left me a letter that was easily authenticated. It’s the only letter she left, given that she had no one apart from me—she had even stopped work. She’d become marginalised. There was no way out for her. Even so, without her letter, it would have been a close call for me, especially if she had gone ahead stupidly with non-assisted suicide. Non-assisted suicide is a nightmare for shrinks.

  Dear Marie,

  Forgive me, you have done everything you could. I can’t sleep anymore, I can’t eat anymore, even breathing has become painful because it’s the same air as in my fall [sic]. I am writing this with a sound mind and am asking for my life to be terminated.

  Signed, et cetera, whatever the date was.

  I can’t get it out of my mind that it’s a bit stupid to survive such an experience and then to ask to be finished off. Like when Primo Levi threw himself down the lift shaft. (Primo Levi was a twentieth-century writer, a survivor). Survivors have to learn from survivors. Even if nothing seems to compare to what they’ve survived. If you get what I’m saying. I haven’t read that many books, but you get bored in the forest so you read what you can—printed books, of course. And quite a few of us write. There’s a certain logic about us being under the trees with our old-fashioned notebooks and our old books, warped in the humidity, made from the same wood pulp that shelters us, and only able to be read during the day or under the light of the Moon. Not constantly connected to electricity, to the internet, or lit up all over the place. Oh, don’t go thinking I’m old-fashioned. I have absolutely no nostalgia for the past, given that it has led to our present. I’m nostalgic for the future. Whatever.

  Where was I? Oh yes, the therapeutic method. My miracle woman’s suicide. Remission for her came with Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. I was part of the only psychiatric unit not using drug therapy; instead we used three official therapeutic methods—verbal, ocular and cognitive. I had her recount the accident—it always made me a bit nervous when, right in the middle of a session, she challenged the meaning of the word accident; when she brought that up it was difficult to stop her—the accident as she had lived it, using the words she could find for it: horrific = appalling = speed = falling = cold = terror = life flashing before her = imminent death. And the death of her children and husband. Dreadful. She was alive but not living. And yet, the survival instinct. The hole she dug for herself in the sand. Like in a feature she had seen on Aboriginals. Opposite her, with my knitting needle, I interrupted her every two or three sentences and repeated her last words in a soft, soothing voice. I had her make eye movements in order to reprogram her brain. She followed the end of the needle (a sort of talisman I have from my mother; in fact it works just as well with a finger or any light source). Rapid movements, always on the same side. Then you start again with another set of sentences and the same eye movements on the other side. At the beginning and at the end of each session she had to evaluate the level of her distress, from 1 to 10. It’s a reassuring procedure. The level of distress lowers. The idea is to open a window of optimal tolerance to the highly charged emotions. And it works. Our brain is malleable. A lot more than the brain of a robot.

  I was a good shrink. Reliable. I received glowing reports. My name was on the honour roll. Patient zero made fun of me. He’s not the only reason for everything that came afterwards. But a trigger, for sure. The suicide of the miracle woman as well, I have to admit. I can still hear her murmuring: ‘Falling is nothing compared to grief.’ And also—she had this sweet, sad lau
gh—‘Don’t forget that what you call trauma is unpleasant.’ Well, anyway. Later, I read studies that said EMDR is effective, but only in the medium term. She was found at the bottom of her apartment block; she’d thrown herself out the window, six months after our sessions. Is six months medium term? I still tell myself now, in the forest, that perhaps I contributed to an extra six months of life. Which is not nothing. And I was lucky enough to know her.

  So, my patient zero. I called him that as a joke. He refused to be assessed in any way, no assessment of his mental distress whatsoever, nothing. But, since patients are required to fill in forms, he wrote zero on every one. Distress? Zero. Anxiety? Zero. The two of us ended up having a good chuckle about it, cluck cluck…My consulting room, the chicken coop.

  He had two appointments with me each week. As he wouldn’t have a bar of EMDR (Extreme Morbid Delirious Response was his version of the acronym—a lame joke), I used reprogramming methods that were more classic, perhaps more acceptable. Resistance to treatment is a phenomenon that Freud identified early on—I’m not going into it. (Freud was a psychiatrist around 1900.) I asked him to imagine a safe place. Safe-Place Therapy.

  At first, as he didn’t trust me (that’s normal), he came up with the most clichéd places possible. Because of his clicking, he was an expert in clichés: island = paradise = coconut palms = white sand = heat = turquoise sea. I pointed out to him: 1) that a safe place has to be a familiar spot, not a screensaver; 2) that these days this type of safe place was engulfed by tsunamis, et cetera. He liked my objections a lot. ‘I recognise a rebel when I see one,’ he shot back. He would not normally have said something like that, of course, but it was a response taken from a mainstream film, and robots recognise stock phrases and isolate them as sound bites. Their vigilance is not faultless. Anyway. The clicker finally coughed up a safe place, some sort of clearing. A clearing from his childhood. He was born in the country, in a bit of remaining countryside. There was a wooded reserve below his house. In this reserve, there were enough trees to form a clearing. As a little boy, he thought it was a real clearing, like in fairy tales: a wall of trees around a circle of fairies. He felt good in this clearing. It seemed to him that nothing could harm him. He was surrounded by airwaves and all that, but at least he couldn’t see any houses or roads, or schools; his father and mother were faraway; only the occasional aeroplane or drone passed overhead. There were still a few insects, firebugs mostly, some caterpillars and a few earthworms, a butterfly from time to time. So, yes, he was willing to imagine the clearing as a safe place. Indeed, it did him good. And, to tell the truth, before my encouragement, he was already imagining the clearing whenever he felt bad. I simply suggested he use this remedy more systematically.