Our Life in the Forest Read online

  He kept on at me about it: ‘An imaginary safe place? It’s not bomb-proof, your safe place. It would not withstand, for example’—he lowered his voice—‘torture.’

  ‘Neurologically, our brain does not distinguish at all between the imaginary and the real,’ I replied. ‘You can tell from the recordings. We get negative and positive emotions mixed up; we associate badly because of our trauma. If you are frightened of spiders, for example, it doesn’t mean that you were already attacked by a swarm of spiders: that’s an imaginary fear!’

  ‘But I’m not frightened of spiders,’ said my patient patiently.

  My supervisor was right. I talked too much. I prattled.

  ‘Oh, but you’re frightened of everything,’ I said to him. ‘Why did you come to see me? Because you’re frightened to live.’

  And I pointed to the two charts on the wall, one taken from the classic Alcoholics Anonymous Treatment Program:

  Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

  The courage to change the things I can change.

  And the wisdom to know the difference.

  The other was from the principles of good management:

  Luck is only an excuse to abdicate responsibility. I know that I create my own reality through my way of handling events and of interpreting circumstances. I focus on the solution rather than the problem, on the action rather than the reaction, on opening up rather than withdrawing.

  I used to say to patients, ‘Be yourself! Come as you are! Get a grip!’

  ‘Know what you want, who you are and why you are here!’

  Now that I’m in the forest, I wonder who I was when I was thinking all that.

  I’m cold.

  With my patient zero I began to understand myself. I mean, to understand what I was saying. I spoke less and less. And he spoke more and more. It averaged out. I think we spent half the time not saying anything. Which makes for a lot of silence, especially when it’s being recorded. Even if only robots listen to it.

  I mean, when I grasped even just a fraction of what had been done to me, I often used the safe-place technique myself. When my suspicions became unbearable. I’m not even talking about the chronic pain, the breathlessness, the dizziness, my eye…no, I’m talking about the idea itself of what was done to us. Of the concept. And, in practical terms, the team that was mobilised to do it. The actions they carried out. The decisions they took. That’s when I imagined myself in my safe place.

  My safe place was already a forest. So it’s not surprising that the clicker and I got on well. I think it defined us as human animals. The forest. The trees. Most patients imagine an interior place: a room in a house, a kitchen, their childhood bedroom or, conversely, a huge, light-filled hall. For exteriors, they come up with meadows covered in flowers, lakes, or actual caves. I had one woman whose safe place was a cave under the sea—best not to be claustrophobic. But the forest is traditionally a rather disturbing place. I think so. Remember fairy tales like ‘Hansel and Gretel’. And the myth of the wolf. The wolf is among us, now, today. In the city, in the zone, and in almost all the safe places. I’m talking metaphorically. If you get my drift. I don’t know where the real wolves are anymore. Back when Tsar Whoever-it-was built St Petersburg, people refused to go and live in the far-flung estates. Not so much because they were far from the city centre, but because they were near the wolves. The Neva froze, or something or other, and the wolves invaded the city. I can just imagine the tenant explaining to the real-estate agent that it’s really nice, as a neighbourhood, but that, even so, there’re a few too many wolves. That you could never be sure you’d arrive home in one piece. Ha!

  Anyway. My safe place. I visualised a forest. I’m not about to pour out my damn childhood. For God’s sake. Let’s spare ourselves that. But I visualised a forest that I went to as a child. It lay just beyond my grandparents’ garden. In a vanished world.

  But I had a parasite leeching off me. My half. Marie. I couldn’t pretend Marie didn’t exist. Even if in my childhood I hadn’t yet met her in the flesh, or seen a photo of her, so what. Marie was with me in the forest. I mean, she was inside my head. Usually they call that an imaginary friend. Imaginary, my arse. Marie was perfectly real. A sister I’d never seen, asleep, constantly monitored, like a penned animal, but whose existence I have always been aware of. The proposal made to my parents was not the sort of proposal they could refuse.

  The moral of the story: very soon after my own birth, a surrogate mother gave birth to Marie, who has exactly the same genetic material as me, and who has always been presented as a life insurance policy, for me as much as my parents, since we all came from the same stock. A long-lasting body. If one of us needed a new organ, the transplants would be perfectly compatible. Marie = a supply of spare parts. The half = a safeguard. Anyway, that’s the way they spun it for us. And, for pity’s sake, I’m not about to dish up the same platitudes for you.

  On his patient information form my patient zero had ticked the box ‘holder of an earthenware jar’, as did a lot of the upper-middle-class. Whereas he’d told me that he had a half. But he wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t be assessed, nothing. Only spoke when he wanted to. He referred to a jar metaphorically, as ‘a potty’. ‘Sit on the potty.’ It made him laugh. Apparently metaphors produce bugs in robots. He also said that, if you want to disrupt a robot, you have to overuse double negatives. Along the lines of: ‘You’re not going to make me not believe that you have not understood that I am not a non-being.’ In any case, he was fascinated by stories about halves.

  ‘Look at you,’ he used to say. ‘You’re always coughing. You’re taking such deep breaths,’ he’d say.

  And after my kidney transplant. ‘You’re as yellow as a low-wattage light bulb.’

  Sometimes when I was with him, I felt as if I was suffocating. I’d open the door and he’d come in and my heart would start pounding. My poor heart.

  My missing eye—that’s what took the cake. And of course he was cunning and never gave me any geographical clue as to where his safe place was. He was like the butterflies that are dying out. My patient is the first person whose disappearance I have tested. I mean, I actually witnessed his disappearance, what we call a disappearance: chosen, wished for, organised by the missing person.

  He taught me what duration is. Let me explain: normally patients turn up and I choose between the three therapeutic methods. I get started and they get started and off we go. But he didn’t want any of the three methods. He didn’t want anything to happen. Half an hour is a long time. Sitting opposite each other. Not necessarily looking at each other, but doing nothing. Letting time pass.

  It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I still wondered whether I should be asking him questions or something. I held off. He looked out the window. Both he and I had been assigned accommodation without windows. My consulting room, on the other hand, was a pleasant place, thanks to this opening. You could see the reddish clouds and, twenty-five storeys below, a corner of the city. If you leaned out you could glimpse the real ground beneath the walkways, the little shops run by the illegal immigrants, the puddles of water. He told me that he used to walk there sometimes, on the real ground. You could make sense of things there.

  Most of the time, I looked at him. I’ve never got to know a face better, apart from Marie’s. I would have recognised him anywhere, even with my eye problem. Anywhere, anytime. I sighed. He looked at me. He smiled at me mysteriously. (It’s easy to look mysterious when you don’t say anything.) Then he looked out the window again. Time passed like in a clepsydra. I think that’s the word for a water clock. Like water that falls in little beads, plop, plop. Or that rolls like a little drum, brrum, brrum. You could hear our rustling, the sound of the fabrics we were wearing, the saliva on our lips, the creaking armchairs, the footsteps in the corridor. You could hear the noise of time.

  ‘That’s all splendid!’ my supervisor said.

  Supposedly this patient was finally turning me into a
psychoanalyst. (My supervisor was at least eighty years old.)

  I’ve also been trained as a sexologist. That’s the fun part. I’ll tell you about it another time.

  During my final sessions with the clicker, I talked about myself. About my anxiety over my eye. He asked me if I was certain that my illness was serious enough to justify such an operation. He said the fact that he’d had to miss out on sessions because of my so-called chronic illnesses had really got on his nerves during the whole course of treatment, and that it wasn’t normal for a shrink to let her body lead her around by the nose, and that it was as plain as the nose on my face what was happening to me, losing an eye on top of everything else. We used lots of metaphors when we chatted, despite the robots. Robots’ comprehension is literal and metaphors disrupt their crosschecking: they must have been saying to themselves that we were obsessed by our noses. Nasophiles, ha! They’re hopeless at double meanings and they have no sense of humour. Especially with spoken language, robots confuse raise and raze, sent and scent, lyre and liar, pair and pear, sole and soul, cunt and can’t…Even I didn’t properly understand the weird things the clicker said. That, in the country of the blind, one-eyed people ruled. ‘You’ve got a bit of robot in you too,’ he told me. ‘You need to grease your wheels a bit.’ I coughed and he quoted Molière (a writer from the seventeenth century who died of pulmonary tuberculosis) at me: ‘Your lungs, your lungs!’ Ha!

  One day, he didn’t turn up.

  The consulting room was completely silent. I heard a different sort of silence, an emptiness, dust motes flitting in the air, disturbed only by my weak breath, and the heat of the red sun at the window. He was no longer there. His armchair was empty.

  I stayed sitting opposite the armchair for the duration of the session. I contemplated his absence. He was somewhere. I could have sworn he was alive somewhere. Of course, I can’t write his name, or describe what he looked like, his size, his mannerisms, what he smelled like, his voice, the little wrinkles around his eyes. The inflection of his voice, never nasty, when he made fun of me. ‘Irony condemns, cynicism sanctions.’ It’s one of his sayings that has stayed with me.

  My patient, the clicker. What a damn nerd he was. One among millions and millions of clickers. The last human job for the masses in the whole world. Shrinks, for example, are still needed, but not many of them. Compassionate robots are doing better and better. Why, in the forest, am I thinking so much about my old job? It’s like I’m missing it—the listening, doing what I could according to the limitations of my methods. Well, there you go.

  He’d been there, twice a week, and he wasn’t there anymore. Nothing, no early warning sign, not a word. He was something else.

  It didn’t have the same effect on me when my miracle patient didn’t turn up. Her absence, I mean. Of course, I’d already received her letter, which confirmed her suicide and asked if I could please forgive her. Well, anyway. She also talked a lot about the halves. Even so, we’re not supposed to treat people just because they have halves. Technically, in fact, it was her husband who had a half: he was from the Generation. She only had a jar, a basic jar—heart/lungs. You’re lucky if you have a half. To be able to transplant bits and pieces, et cetera. To be able to patch yourself up all over, not just your heart and lungs. But I think at that time (it was before my patient zero), I was not at all comfortable with the idea. Not that one is ever comfortable with this idea, perhaps. Whatever, I didn’t have a clue about anything at all. My supervisor was also encouraging me to talk about Marie. I told him that coming from the Generation had a number of advantages, in terms of employment, housing, career and of course life insurance, seeing that we were all constantly ill or sickly. A lot of researchers and doctors used us as case studies. Our condition was psychosomatic: our bodies manifested the mental stress we were apparently enduring. Ha!

  That’s not good, I used to say to myself, when my miracle patient got on her hobby horse, the halves. It’s only going to exacerbate her trauma, twist the knife in the wound without providing any sort of clue about her timeline. And what’s more, it’s going to get us both into trouble. A half is absolutely no use at all in the case of total destruction of a body. But she was obsessed with the idea of returning to the desert in order to double-check the spot. The corpses. She wanted the bodies. Of her husband and of her children. It drove her mad—and let me tell you, I know what I’m talking about. ‘Do you think it’s normal,’ she said, ‘that my husband’s half is alive, and he’s dead?’ (Her children only had jars. Anyway, just try getting jars to come back to life.) ‘Do you think that’s normal?’ she asked me. And yet she knew that we are not our halves. She knew perfectly well that the thing fast asleep was not and could never be her husband, José. A tragic likeness. And yet she couldn’t help going to see him. Holding his hand in the Rest Centre. Talking to him, to her husband’s half. It was too much for her. I didn’t manage to revive the process of compatibility between her and her timeline. She committed suicide.

  Adjustment = progress = improvement = balance = overcoming = satisfaction = wellbeing = success = freedom.

  All of that happened before my patient zero, but it still upset me. I reported it to my supervisor, but I was struck with more and more frequent feelings of suffocation. I was born with only one lung. Thanks to genetics, Marie naturally had two—she’s perfect—so I underwent a pretty serious operation, at the age of three, in which they transplanted one of Marie’s lungs. I have no memory of it, but my mother often talked about it; she cried every time and that upset me. The transplant never really took properly. The scar was painful. The skin tissue is so stiff, I can scarcely raise my arm. And I’m always short of breath. The shrinks treating me at the time used to say my anxiety was compromising the success of the transplant.

  The very fact of Marie’s existence caused me a lot of distress as a child. Even though she was just a sort of sleeping sister. A twin, almost. And, for my mother, an extra daughter. A reliable stand-by. Anyway. I had trouble breathing. From early on, I was treated for asthma. I developed a bit of a complex about the scar. Left anterior thoracotomy. My breast grew—well, both breasts—over the scar, and I hoped they’d grow large enough to hide it. But no. When I was fifteen I understood that I’d be a B cup forever. With a big, bulging red mark under my left breast.

  I had trouble stripping off. Afterwards things just got worse.

  And, what’s more, that lung of Marie’s bothered me. I saw so many shrinks, it’s not surprising I became a shrink myself. I don’t know, perhaps I imagined I had a debt to repay. But not as much as my debt to Marie. Her real name, if I can say that, was a long sequence of numbers, imprinted in my memory but which I still have trouble writing down. I made a request to see her. To see 269017510200880-Thingamajig. Whatever. I remember the forms that had to be filled in, delivered one morning before I left for school. I carted them around in my damn schoolbag all day long. I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t happening in the normal way—virtually. They were real papers, hard copy. To fill in by hand. The drone came back: there were documents missing. I attached them, with the help of my mother. The drone came back again. It went on like this for weeks. This is not good, I said to myself. And then finally, ha! I got the clearance. A delivery guy came and implanted an ID tag, pop. It sat under the skin on my wrist; I beeped at the gate of the Rest Centre every two weeks. That’s how it began.

  We’re not allowed to touch them. We’re not allowed to touch our halves. I had no idea how to deal with this proscription.

  I had taken her lung. Her left lung. It bothered me.

  The shrinks did their utmost to get me to draw my timeline, but apparently my timeline integration went badly. My timeline only had fifteen squares, given that I was only fifteen years old. The first four were reconstituted memories, since I couldn’t remember anything before the age of four (which is pretty late, so it seems). Anyway. You’ve all integrated or at least tried to integrate your timelines, so you know the deal. I chose one me
mory per year, and did one drawing per square. For year fourteen, I drew a drone, to represent the long administrative procedure to get the clearance to see Marie. For year thirteen, I drew a sanitary pad with blood on it, because getting my period was a big deal for me, whether you like it or not. For year twelve, I drew the whole class, all the students one by one, leaving a big empty space for my friend Mathias Matéo, who disappeared. For years eleven, ten, nine et cetera, I’ll spare you the details. For year three, I drew a lung. The one I took from Marie. Bright red. Like cat-food animal lungs. The shrinks were not pleased. In their opinion, it meant a lot of blood on my timeline. For them blood = danger = fear = disgust = wound = attack = death (perhaps they were robots). Too much blood. In short, they were asking me to choose between my breathing and my period. Between my uterus and my lungs. They suggested I draw something more positive, like a dandelion whose seeds you blow away. A dandelion? To represent reproduction? No, for breath, air, wind. But I had never seen a dandelion, except in pictures. And, anyway, I think in a timeline you should draw things you’ve seen for real, that you’ve experienced with your own senses. Correct?