Our Life in the Forest Page 5

  For God’s sake, even asleep, how do you live through the fact that, one by one, your organs are being removed? Wouldn’t you somehow be aware of it, dimly?

  As soon as I’m sick, hey presto, they fix me up with one of Marie’s organs.

  The doctors told me that what I thought were her dreams were nothing but a nervous twitch in her eyelids, a tic brought on by immobility. After all, they explained, our eyes are not programmed to stay permanently shut. No doubt 102008-Thingamajig-Whatever’s eyelids wanted to open from time to time to exercise the muscles; to exercise the capacity for opening, as one of the doctors explained—a surgeon, to be precise. ‘When it’s possible, it has to happen,’ he explained. ‘We restrict the movement in 102008-Thingamajig-Whatever’s eyes, her legs, et cetera, but they have to be seen as springs that want nothing more than to be activated.’ I think that was his clumsy way of justifying their scientific method: what is possible inevitably occurs. He had no idea (perhaps he was a robot) that I was distressed by what he was telling me.

  The shrinks told me that it was quite likely my half could dream. That even a dormant brain reacts to stimuli. That the mere touch of a hand, or the sheets, or the faint noises from the corridor, would probably be enough to produce primitive dreams in these chronic sleepers. After all, a dream is nothing more than a neuro-electrical discharge that produces random images gathered during the day by the unsleeping person. Constant sleepers collect this material however they can. In us, the sequencing of these mental discharges seems to produce stories, whose incoherence should alert us to their random nature. According to the shrinks, the superstition attached to the interpretation of dreams no longer has a place in our day and age.

  But Marie’s dreams spoke to me. I dreamed them. They were dark, motionless voids. This is not good, I said to myself.

  Marie’s fate became the most important thing in my life. I pretended to be passionate about my studies (indeed, when I started work I really liked looking after my patients). But Marie was constantly in the back of my mind. Not in the back: she was the permanent screensaver of my thoughts. She was there, dozing in my brain. I visualised her in my grey matter; she took on the shape of the lobes of my cerebral cortex; she was implanted in the spirals, curled up. I talked to her all the time. I was connected to her all the time. Even with her, I prattled. When I was moving my knitting needle into a patient’s field of vision, introducing soothing words every thirty seconds—your phantom pains will disappear, no one is stalking you, everything will be all right, you will become accustomed to the absence of your arm—I had to unplug this sort of mental current directed towards Marie. Sometimes I thought that my words alone, communicated to her by some kind of telepathy, were keeping her…if not awake, then at least not dead in her limbo.

  The doctors never failed to remind me that I was breathing with one of her lungs. And, later, that I was filtering what I drank with one of her kidneys. And then there was talk of my taking one of her eyes, when I suffered serious trouble with my vision. Surely, I said to myself, this type of physical relationship is bound to create a bond.

  With the explosion in the number of visitors, the doctors started calling us by our names and avoided referring to the halves by their numbers. It was something I noticed. Nicknames were encouraged, like Pépette or Momo. Those two were right next to Marie in the dormitory. ‘How’s Pépette going today?’ the doctors asked my neighbour. It was a way of asking her how she was, given that there was never any problem with the halves, despite the organ removals—which proved that they were a good thing. If you never move and never expend any energy, you can live for a very long time. You never wear out. Ha! Sustainable bodies. Sustainable bodies, my arse.

  It was Momo’s awake half who came up with this thing of speaking to them, right into the ear, in an authoritative voice. Momo’s awake half was Moses, one of the very few black people in the Centre. I forgot to talk about that.* I’ve also barely mentioned the male–female discrepancy: there are approximately a third more men than women. It’s something my girlfriends without halves, who only have jars, or nothing, call luck: ‘You’re lucky to be able to meet so many guys.’ In Psych, I have to say, the students are mostly female. Anyway. Luck, my ovaries. That’s not at all my thing. I did, however, try to glean as much information as I could from the male visitors. There was no available information about the halves, only rumours, fake info, nonsense. The training we received at the Centre, in order to be granted regular visiting rights, was mostly about individual adaptation, the anatomy of the organ removals and that sort of thing, as well as the fact that their brains were empty.

  Speaking into their ears in authoritative voices, but still in a whisper. Well, anyway. We had to wait until the doctors left the dormitory, pretend to cuddle our halves, without touching them, just resting our heads on the pillows and whispering. Trying to look sentimental, melodramatic, whatever we felt like. Increasingly, concepts like ‘melancholy’ or ‘nostalgia’ were associated with the word half—it was the robots’ way of getting a grasp on things. Those decent clickers organising the world into intelligible categories. Half = incompleteness = likeness = emotional attachment pathology = nostalgia = compassion = depression. Well, anyway. We whispered, we sang lullabies (as if the halves needed to fall asleep!), and then, all of a sudden, we said, ‘Wake up!’ Or variations along the lines of: ‘Aren’t you sick of sleeping the whole time, you layabout?’ Or even: ‘Get up, you fat slut!’, depending on our mood. We had fits of laughter. The robots on standby snapped to it, but for them hysterical laughter = adolescence = innocence, so it was all okay. And the half would open her eyes. Both eyes. At once. An awful, anxious, terrified look on her face. That moon-shaped face. It looked like it was all about to happen: they were going to push themselves onto their elbows and stand up.

  But it only lasted a second. Their eyes closed again. Their dumb faces sank back into the depths of their expressionless masks. They really didn’t look that much like us. They all looked like each other.

  I developed a disorder called prosopagnosia. I could no longer recognise faces. I could no longer even discern the objective similarity between Marie and me, between Momo and Moses, between Pépette and Juliette. But it was especially bad outside: I got faces mixed up. The doctors and nurses all looked alike, and, once I walked out of the Centre, and was in the communal taxi and the tram, it was all déjà vu: every new face looked familiar. Once I was back in my neighbourhood, worn out from the long trip and the day at the Centre, even the people I knew, the baker, or my old neighbour in the upstairs apartment, seemed—in a disturbing, not reassuring way—to have a definite degree of family resemblance. And the worst was that I didn’t recognise my mother in photos, not in 3D or even 4D.

  The shrinks explained to me that déjà vu is a neural condition. The exhaustion of all those trips. You should have a rest. You’re developing a morbid attachment—we’re seeing it more and more in the Generation. Consider déjà vu as a form of augmented reality: when you see an ordinary thing, a face, recognisable or not, or any landscape, it’s endowed with a certain cognitive coefficient—on seeing whatever it is, you supplement the fact that you think you’ve already seen it. It occurs in whichever lobe of the brain, a defective synapse that connects memory and vision. The brain thinks it remembers, whereas it’s only seeing. Memory becomes a parasite on perception.

  Holy mackerel! They made me sit a whole lot of tests. Nothing to report. My condition settled down. And then, months later, it actually got a whole lot worse. When it came to facial recognition, I was confusing vertical and horizontal lines. Morbid prosopagnosia. I contracted a serious degenerative disease in one of my eyes. They’re considering a new transplant in the not-too-distant future.

  I have green eyes, quite an unusual green that verges on turquoise, with a golden halo around the pupil. I really like my eyes.

  I don’t mind telling you that the news was very unwelcome. And to think Marie would be disfigured, one-eyed, thanks to m
e. But her eyes are useless, the doctors told me. Not long before, they had enrolled us all in a ‘self-reboosting’ training course, to improve our self-esteem: it wasn’t our fault if we were afflicted with nasty illnesses. It was due to air pollution, the coal we were sent by retrograde countries that still used it for heating, chemicals in food, genetically modified organisms everywhere. We got sick. There was nothing we could do about it. That’s what the halves were there for.

  I put off the surgery for as long as possible. Anyway, I could still see well enough. They weren’t about to teach me how to see. I’m the one who does the seeing, not them, I told myself.

  Well, anyway. One of my dormitory neighbours, Romero, was in the bed opposite—that’s how I got to know him. He only came to the Centre two or three times. Afterwards, he was the one who contacted me to ask if we could see each other again; I hadn’t even thought about him. But he was good-looking and he was always explaining stuff to me, and he was perhaps the only person I have ever met who talked more than I do.

  He didn’t fall for the halves in the slightest. He told me that the halves would never wake up because they were not programmed to; they were unable to do so. He went further than the doctors: the halves were merely receptacles for organs, our organs; that is to say, from the start they were nothing more than waste material. At least we pay tribute to corpses; we bury them and cry over them. They are bodies that contained people. But the halves were already only dismembered bodies: a jigsaw of detachable organs, in abeyance. Hence the reasoning behind the jars: the vital organs are cultivated and maintained for their own sake, without the confusion of a humanoid likeness. Our so-called halves, he explained, are jars in our own image, neither more nor less. Sophisticated sarcophagi that are really just containers.

  Romero was brilliant. He hadn’t developed any sort of morbid attachment for his half, for his proto-jar, as he called it. He had never tried to wake up his half. ‘What’s the point?’ he would say. Perhaps it was sport that helped him adopt such a detached position. He was super-sporty. In fact, in addition to his job, he competed in pentathlons. For those who don’t know, modern pentathlons involve cross-country running, horse-riding, swimming, fencing and shooting. The complete athlete. An extremely expensive sport, but the country was at the forefront in this area—horses in perfect condition were made available for the athletes, along with pistols (loaded with blanks, of course) and buttoned fencing foils.* And of course swimming pools and athletic stadiums.

  Romero’s body was spectacular. In perfect proportion, lithe and strong, like a Greek god’s. And his face, too, was completely different from that of his beanpole of a half. Tanned from all the outdoor sport and fresh air, toned to perfection, even his jaw, the cheeks chiselled from his physical exertion. A red-blooded man. Romero was a guy with a strong will. He used to say, ‘I am the complete man.’ I understand why he couldn’t identify with that thing lying there.

  Romero was lucky: he’d never fallen ill. They had never interfered with his half. He didn’t have any scars on him. That’s also perhaps what I found attractive about him: his extraordinary good health, as well as his total absence of guilt, and for good reason. I could picture the body of his intact half. Under the hypoallergenic material of his isolation bubble. Pallid and soft, of course, but with no incisions. Never scarred. When I pictured Marie’s body, under her various layers of space blankets, I projected onto her my own scars: the bulging one under my breast, and the one on my lower back, on the right side. I saw it when I twisted in front of the mirror at home: it was also red and raised. The two spots where her organs had been transplanted. What did her body look like? Was there a hole under the sewn-up skin? Did they make an effort to give her aesthetically pleasing scars?

  Romero was smooth and strong. Hardly ever available because of his training, but when we saw each other it was good.

  Where was I?

  Oh yes. The walk along the train tracks. That long walk to go and see Marie—let’s not call it a stroll—did me good. When it comes to the shrinks’ talk of pathological attachment, I wonder if I wasn’t addicted to walking. To the movement of my legs and also to the unfolding of the landscape.

  It was a wooded landscape. There are, of course, a few trees in the city, mostly plane trees and pines, but no forest, obviously, not even a grove of trees. The very last scheduled stop for the communal taxis was the paper plant. They still make paper for women’s sanitary pads and that sort of thing. As soon as I caught sight of the paper plant, I had to walk for a long time with the stink of pulp in the air, and then it dissipated once the train tracks entered the forest. Of course, the wire fencing along the tracks prevented me from going into the forest, but all the walking meant I had time to feel detached from the city. I don’t know how to say it: my rational thoughts remained back there, in the city, disintegrating as the journey continued. The rhythm of my walking allowed me to concentrate simultaneously on Marie and on the trees, as if the two things went well together. People don’t walk very often anymore, and in any case never on the actual ground. I let myself be carried along, my head in the trees and my heart with Marie. Sorry to be sentimental.

  I had no idea about the names of the trees, but they looked real. I mean, they hadn’t been planted simply for fodder or wood. The huge fields of trees along the train tracks gave way to a forest like the ones in fairy tales: it looked wild and rampant, but was in fact tiered, small trees beneath big trees and ferns further underneath. I listened out for birdcalls or animals—one can always dream. But I never saw any on those trips.

  And then I reached the grounds of the Centre. The metal gate opened onto a little sealed road, which must have been for private-vehicle access only. The trees here looked even more ancient, towering and huge. And then the chateau appeared in the distance, scarcely more than a country house, if you want my opinion. It had once been a five-star hotel, and a sanatorium, and before that a real chateau, I believe. And then I’d swipe my ID under the robot cameras at the gate, et cetera.

  At the mammoths’ zoo, I also had the chance to see a lot of trees, extinct trees. Mahogany and ebony, the black poplar and the Easter Island toromiro tree and the western red cedar from Sichuan and the Basque oak. I took notes. I like plants a lot. We don’t think enough about what a tree is. Indeed, the root of the word clone is the Greek word κλών, which means ‘twig’. (I didn’t read that on my device—we’ve banned them—but in an old etymological dictionary that I cart around with me from camp to camp. I’m doing research. It helps me.)

  Anyway. Where was I? The trip, along the train tracks, the walk, alone. But once visiting restrictions were eased, I hardly ever had the opportunity to walk the distance by myself. They ended up organising communal taxis that went up to the chateau and back to the gate.

  During years eighteen and nineteen of my timeline, I observed the almost exponential growth of the movement to reunify the halves. I think the word half became truly widespread, even popularised at that time. Re-u-nite all our halves! That was the slogan in those days. As if joining the pairs was going to redeem the whole Generation. And then things went from bad to worse. Everything shut down. There was a new wave of attacks, et cetera. We were frightened in the tram, in taxis; we were frightened at school and in the shopping centres; nobody went into the street anymore and never, ever anywhere directly on the ground. We hardly ever went to the Centre. I would say that, as of year twenty of my timeline, I must have only gone there twice a year at most. And there was Marie, who didn’t change a bit, I mean she didn’t age. At thirty, you’d have thought she was twelve, if it weren’t for the two bulges under the sheet, her breasts. In fact, even today she has the mental age of twelve, Miss Sissy.

  And a lot of people disappeared. It was the period of huge waves of kidnappings. The waves crashed down on us. The news service broadcast a sort of weather forecast of the tides of kidnapping and the deluges of disappearances and the floods of attacks. It was a time of disruption, which left us feeling help
less, and perhaps guilty, because if you get yourself kidnapped—through being foolhardy, too daring, outspoken—it lands your employer and the whole community in hot water. It leaves a hole in the social fabric. It was always made very clear to us that there would be no ransom payment, and there never could be. During the waves of kidnapping, we stayed home as much as possible. Protected behind our miserable seawalls. Locked away behind our piers. (They’re metaphors.) We even stopped getting deliveries: the delivery guys frightened us, especially the drones. But it’s difficult, in fact impossible, to stockpile food in our extremely small living quarters. I slept on sacks of rice and lentils. I felt safe in my bed. It was an illusion, of course, but in my bed I could take time to summon up my safe place. I wandered around in my forest from a long time ago. I tried to remember moments from a long time ago, in the forest beyond my grandparents’ house, swampy and full of frogs. Well, we heard them singing. (I don’t know if you say ‘singing’ for frogs.)

  What’s more, the lift had broken down. Permanently broken down. The robot repairers no longer came to my neighbourhood, and the lift robot itself no longer talked to us. Dead. Kaput. My very old neighbour upstairs was quite simply dying of hunger, incapable of facing the twelve flights of stairs. I already thought I was going to drop dead from asthma myself. A few of us got together to do her shopping. Nice neighbours, good sorts, like me. I had a soft spot for that old neighbour. She kept plants on her landing—she nurtured them from cuttings year after year, real plants that grew towards the light filtering through the roof. She was lucky (sort of) to live on the top floor; even though there are leaks, you get the fanlight. In our type of neighbourhood, the downstairs floors are dark. Anyway, we made arrangements: she got money out of her wardrobe and gave us enough to buy her potatoes, bread, half a litre of milk. An apple every now and again. Another neighbour managed the roster on his device and sent us notifications. It was easy. And then that neighbour got into trouble because they told him we were an association. He should have asked for a permit. Come on! So we made the arrangements verbally, as it were, by passing notes to each other under our doors. All right, written arrangements, if you like. Without using our devices. And then, dammit, another resident found the old woman lying dead in a pool of blood, her wardrobe open and her pittance gone. A terrible time. We even had to have a whip-around to pay for her cremation! The plants died. I tried to look after some of them at my place under a lamp, but actually it’s true: plants can’t survive without sunlight.