Our Life in the Forest Read online

  Well, anyway. For year two, I drew a man, who looked like what I imagine my father looked like, dead, killed by his toaster (I drew the toaster as well). For year one, I drew myself and Marie. I drew us. Year zero: our birth in the same year. I drew two women, with big bellies, my mother and another mother, holding hands. I drew my mother wearing the checked raincoat she always wore.

  Here I am telling you my whole damn childhood.

  The shrinks told me I’d done a bad job integrating my timeline: it was too grim. Admittedly, my life had not been without tragic events. So they told me. But has it not come to that for all of us? (I remember that sentence, its slightly odd syntax: But has it not come to that for all of us?) Did I really care about connecting my birth with Marie’s? We were not twins. Twins, identical or not, share the same uterus. Apparently, when you come to draw your half, it’s normal to depict it as smaller than yourself. In my drawing, Marie and I are exactly the same size, which is the absolute truth. (Marie, as I mentioned, is even slightly taller than I am. Sort of longer—from lying down for so long.)

  For year sixteen, I didn’t draw the death of my mother. It was too painful. I drew a dog. The shrinks thought that was good.

  Where was I?

  You couldn’t tell from looking at Marie’s face if she was in pain or not. I would have liked to lift up one of her arms to see if it caused her pain, because my lung had been removed from her. But don’t even think about lifting up an arm. It’s forbidden to touch the halves. They’re hooked up in every which way, fed intravenously, et cetera. She was breathing peacefully. She didn’t look unsettled. The halves breathe through a little nasal tube. Which dispenses, continuously, what used to be called laughing gas (ha!): enhanced nitrous oxide. It’s also an anaesthetic, so I learned: hence the absence of any signs of suffering in her features?

  So. The first time I saw her. My mother was not allowed to come with me. She died soon afterwards; she joined the father I never knew. She had the same sort of stupid domestic accident. An electrical mishap. The subsequent devastating events meant that a lot of housing and electrical installations were declared illegal. The fact remains that I was left alone at the age of sixteen. Nothing unusual there. The shrinks steered me towards their own training. There was a strict quota for shrinks, but they could always help me find a job.

  A terrible time.

  I got my dog licence. I called my dog Wolf. Let’s be clear: it was not a wolf-dog. I think they’re reserved for the police. He was a good dog, a whippet, a little greyhound. Super-fast. Wolf. His name was in honour of the wolves of St Petersburg, who terrorised people, preventing them from living peacefully in their new residential estates. On his record card his name was Docile. Really, what sort of a name is that? ‘Docile, heel!’ Anyway, I never said ‘Heel’ to my dog. I hate clichéd expressions. And any sort of orders. It’s something I’ve come to realise in the forest.

  They delivered the dog to me when my mother died. It’s a form of orphan benefit. Supportive relationships are the key to neuronal integration. Obviously, orphans have a harder time of it. The shrinks used a certain number of compassionate strategies. There are a lot of orphans, so they have to breed up a lot of dogs. Very occasionally cats, but cats are less supportive.

  He was a real dog. A modified dog, of course, but a real dog. A real non-human animal. I signed for the delivery quickly and read the record card while the drone deposited the dog. He had been given a tranquilliser injection for the trip. He also had an implant in order to adapt to life in an apartment, the type of windowless studio I lived in. The implant neutralised a range of urges, like sex and running. Docile. Docile, my arse. I can say it here: I removed his implant. I could feel it rolling under my fingertips, in the fold of skin under his ear. I pulled the skin hard—the dog was compliant, of course—and gave a snip with the scissors. We have all become surgeons in this world.

  In the forest, our dogs run. They run fast. What joy!

  Later, I found a dog, not born in the breeding factory or anything. I didn’t give him a name. What gives us the right to name them? We are neither their parents nor, technically, their creators. All the dogs in the pack that travels with us now are called Dog, and we assume they consider us as a group of human animals, each recognisable by our olfactory trace.

  During my first year with Marie, I wished I could take her to the zoo. A completely unrealistic wish, of course, but I couldn’t suppress it. I mean, I even dreamed about it at night. When I was little, my mother sometimes took me to the zoo, and then she no longer had the time. The main attraction at this zoo were the mammoths. They have managed to recreate several couples elsewhere on the planet: I think there’s a pair in the Leipzig Zoo, another in China perhaps, and then ours. There were also dodos, which look like huge turkeys, and a Tasmanian tiger. Several bears, a group of penguins, a whale in a huge aquarium and all sorts of extinct animals. But the mammoths were something else. I wanted to see them again, and show them to Marie. It was a stupid idea, obviously—she had never even seen a dog, or a pigeon, for God’s sake.

  Mammoths are a magnificent sight. A mammoth’s body is one long slope, the body rising towards the head. The head is enormous, as are the tusks. It’s as if the enormous neck is a buttress for the edifice of the head. They walk slowly; swinging in front is their immense curved ivory scaffolding, which looks as if it’s been handcrafted. I’d never seen anything like it. A mammoth’s coat is a chestnut colour, almost orange, and very thick. Their little eyes look at you as if they’ve known all about you forever. A memory like a mammoth’s. And that languid calm. In the next enclosure there was the little herd of female Asian elephants from the breeding factory, their surrogate mothers.

  The Tasmanian tiger always made me sad because he was alone. And restless, nothing calm about him at all. He would roam around his enclosure, around and around. He ended up excavating a deep tunnel along the fire fence; you could watch his twitchy striped back pass by in front of you. The rest of his body disappeared below ground level.

  In the forest, I’ve come to understand that zoos are museums of extinction. And that the whale, although fully whale, had something artificial about it. Firstly, despite the efforts of the humans, the aquarium was too small. A whale is not exactly designed to swim laps. And also, even if it was supposed to be the same whale each time, at whatever age I was, five, eight or eleven, I knew that they replaced the whale on a regular basis. She’d been called Willy for ever and ever, and they were always re-cloning her, because whale clones are very unstable and have a lifespan of only a few months in an aquarium. That made me sad too. Such an enormous load of fish sold at high prices to fish fanciers. Don’t forget that the fish sales paid for the breeding, processing and handling of the next whale. Needless to say, this form of systematic animal harvesting, condemned by some, obviously doesn’t encourage the development of research on non-human animals—I mean on their life expectancy, their sustainability. The cloning of non-human animals is nothing more than slaughter—that’s what I’ve been told in the forest. Anyway, my dog Wolf has been alive for six years.

  So. Suffice it to say, I never took Marie to the zoo. And I understood very quickly that Marie could not be taken anywhere. Technically, she was not untransportable, but in fact there was no way at all of carrying her. And, anyway, it was already such a business getting there, to the Rest Centre—I was going to say to the zoo—getting myself there.

  In the beginning, my mother requested time off and took me. She didn’t want me making the long trip all by myself. First we caught a tram, then we got off at ground level and went by communal taxi to the north gate. They let taxis through, even taxis packed like sardines. There were always mechanical bugs in those old automatic taxis; sometimes they wouldn’t let you out at the right spot.

  As we approached the edge of the city, the sky became redder and redder. The last stop was already in the zone, then a stretch of countryside with empty sheds and abandoned rubbish tips. After that we had a lon
g walk along a disused train line to the entrance of the grounds where the Centre was located. So, the trip took us more than three hours, one way. All the Centres are set in remote places out on the fringes of the city. And my mother was only allowed up to the gate with me.

  In the beginning, rain, hail or shine, she would wait for me, sitting wherever she could. She would start knitting or turn on her low-tech reality device, slip on her headset and try, as she told me, to detach herself from the situation. After all, Marie was her child too, in a way (even if later I learned that not one bit of my mother’s genetic material was in Marie).

  I would head across the grounds, glancing back at my mother as I walked. That’s how I see her in my mind now. I don’t know why the image that comes to mind when I think of her—you know, when I think of her without thinking about her, when she comes to mind—is this woman sitting on the ground against a high gate, huddled inside a checked raincoat, hunched over but craning towards the virtual images, her face forward, half-hidden by her headset. A tortoise.

  After a few visits the tortoise started to object—always when I was going through the identity check. It was embarrassing. She put on a whole performance in front of the robot cameras, as if that was going to achieve anything, insisting that she too wanted to go inside and demanding to see her other daughter, and what the hell were they breeding inside? ‘She’s my daughter!’ she screamed, and I was at a loss to know whether she was talking about Marie or me. ‘It’s her body!’ yelled the poor woman. Eventually, they dealt with the situation, the increasing number of visitors, by building a small shelter for the support people, with heaters, benches, a coffee machine and state-of-the-art speakers transmitting augmented reality. They constructed the shelter exactly where my mother used to sit. But she was already dead by then.

  There’s this African tale—the tortoise who flies with the birds. The tortoise is presumptuous enough to fly, and then for some reason the spell breaks, and the tortoise falls from the sky and is crushed to death on the ground. Since that day the shell of a tortoise has looked like the pieces of a puzzle stuck back together.

  Where was I?

  I’ve seen tortoises in terrariums. Sometimes you can also see one in the forest, wild or released back into the wild. I like to imagine it’s my mother.

  It approaches very slowly and I give it some grass to nibble. I keep the dogs at a distance. I’m wearing my mother’s old checked raincoat and leaning against a trunk. During the whole time it takes for the tortoise to come closer, I’m thinking, trying to remember that person who always called herself—with such kindness, and such passion—my mother.

  Let’s get back to it. We followed the old train tracks on foot and my mother sat down in front of the gate and I had my ID check and I went in.

  I don’t know if I was shocked the first time I saw Marie. In fact, I find it difficult to remember. The first time has become part of the other times. They all merge together. So much for chronology.

  I saw this extremely pale face, which had never seen the sun. Eyelids closed, the eyelashes casting a shadow, like several rows of eyelashes beneath closed eyes. A beautiful fringe of eyelashes. Perfectly still eyebrows, a smooth forehead, cheeks without a single flaw. And the sheet under her neck. Not exactly a sheet but a sort of space blanket, shiny, pearly white. A material better suited for their protection, apparently. They’re very sensitive to skin irritations. Their exposed arms, covered by a white garment, the same for girls and boys, with puffy sleeves, fitted down to the last nanometre. Like a bubble of fabric around them—which we removed as soon as the halves arrived in the forest. And the hands, especially the hands. Bare. We weren’t allowed to touch them. But once we’d managed to get permission, it was for the hands.

  We were allowed to rub cream on their hands. That’s what you do to people in a coma.

  I feel like I should be focusing on the first time, on the meeting, as it were, on my first memory of her. Or my first contact with her. But nothing comes to mind. Quite simply, I think I was stunned.

  So I massaged her hands and nothing happened, no expression at all on her face. Not even a quickening of her breath or a change on the encephalogram—which was not a flat reading, no, just very regular.

  I’m telling you the specifics of all this because people are always talking such nonsense about the halves.

  All the other treatment to do with cleanliness, excretion, et cetera, and especially muscular exercise and the prevention of pressure sores—all that was carried out by a specialist team, without us, outside visiting hours. They also shaved the halves’ heads. I should have begun with that: there was the resemblance, of course, what we called the mirror effect, but, in particular, there were those shaved heads. For hygiene or whatever. It was weird. On top of everything else. I would have really liked to do her hair.

  I knew the whole business of massaging their hands served no purpose, beyond the initial satisfaction of the physical contact. We knew the halves weren’t dead. They weren’t mannequins or anything. Their skin was warm and soft and normal and, as is the case for all of us, their breath contained vapour. Anyway. So I preferred simply to hold her hand. And I stayed there a long time, sitting on the folding chair next to her bed.

  Honestly, when my mother died it was a weight off my shoulders. Don’t go thinking I’m a monster. What I mean is that, from then on, I could stay for as long as I wanted, for the whole visiting time, without worrying about my poor mother, left behind, sitting outside, her back against the gate, craning forward over her low-tech virtual world, the rain or blazing sun beating down on her.

  I knew the way by heart: tram, communal taxi, then walk along the train tracks after the zone. I didn’t care at all if it took me one hour or three, or if it was a bit dangerous, because I had the whole day to myself. For me and Marie, whom I contemplated in her sleep.

  As a result of holding her hand, things happened that I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t stayed there all that time.

  We were never technically alone with our halves. I forgot to state the obvious: there was always a nurse with us, male or female. They were robots. Humans tend to fall asleep in this type of situation. Robots never get bored.

  The male or female nurse stood tirelessly at the foot of the bed, with Marie and me in his or her field of vision. That was how the monitoring system worked.

  ‘Don’t you want to massage her hands?’ the male or female nurse would ask. I answered no, because if you said nothing, you’d have this bunch of robots on your back the whole time. He or she gave a stupid little smile. And, fifteen minutes later, the same question, or a variation on it. Did I want a glass of water? Trit trot, off to the drinking fountain, trit trot, back with the glass of water. I wanted to smash them in the face. Those big bastards, ratting on us. You’re not drinking your glass of water? Yakety-yak.

  I tried to concentrate on the minuscule variations between her hand and my hand. I spoke to her. I told her the tale about the tortoise, for example. I also spoke to her about my mother—our mother, I should say. I tried to describe my mother in neutral terms. I don’t know if such a thing is possible. I didn’t want any trouble. I laughed to myself as I recounted her crazy habits, how she used to imitate bird songs in the morning to compensate for their absence, and how terrible it was (I imitated her imitating them), how she unplugged all the appliances for a few minutes a day ‘to have some peace’. Peace, my arse! (Anyway the appliances killed her—she was electrocuted.) I would have liked Marie to laugh with me. For her to laugh, full stop. At me miming my mother. I must have looked like a lunatic jumping up and down by myself on my folding chair.

  You never knew when the doctors were going to do their rounds. I think they were human beings, but perhaps they were new-generation robots. They moved so quietly in the dormitory that we used to joke they were on ball bearings. They had a kind word for each one of us. I don’t know what they called that place but we called it the dormitory. I was one of the first visitors to the dor
mitory, presumably thanks to my mother, who was always kicking up a fuss, and who had spent so much time and energy on procuring the forms and helping me to fill them in, et cetera. And after a while there were ten of us visiting at the same time. The dormitory was huge: an old guardroom in a chateau that had been converted into a private hospital. There were old fireplaces, closed off to prevent draughts. Everything was painted white, even the fireplaces, with a plastic waterproof coating that looked like a plaster cast, like a space that was completely washable (which it was). It smelled like disinfectant and flowers; I mean, I think it was floral-scented disinfectant. Our halves gave off no odour at all, or very little—just the handcream (which they supplied). It was absolutely forbidden to bring anything into the Centre. We had to go through sensors, et cetera. And when there were almost as many visitors as halves, we were actually queuing. Back then, we were all between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.

  I tried to think of what to say to her. Honestly, I racked my brain. I got to the point of telling her about the films I used to see on Sundays. The doctors told me that Marie didn’t have the slightest idea what the cinema was. Fair enough, since according to them her brain is empty. 102008-Thingamajig-Whatever is a non-person, they kept telling me. A bundle of organs. Contingency provisions and life insurance. That’s that. I don’t know why, but I saw her as the future. A blank page to write on. So much possibility. Raw material, in a way. Afterwards, a lot of us developed Pygmalion syndrome. (Pygmalion was a mythical Greek sculptor.)

  I’d see dreams gliding beneath her eyelids. She dreamed like cats: her eyeballs moved and her fingers twitched slightly, as if she wanted to scratch something. What was she dreaming about? About lying there? About sleeping? About the rustling of the sheet? Or about her birth, possibly her only waking experience? About a purely organic experience, moist and red, internal, about the beating of her heart, about the expansion of her lungs? (Of her single lung.) Sometimes I’d wonder about the limbo she was held in; perhaps it was not some sort of white material but rather a black abyss, in which she was chased by hunters. A stifling universe, where she saw organs throbbing, decomposing or ready to swallow her. I woke up with a start. I was having Marie’s nightmares.