Soon.
Not tonight – I can’t. It feels as if I’d need a thousand attempts to break loose from you, to turn on my heel and never look back, to actually manage it once.
I leave in stages. I count along, telling myself: 1,000 more kisses … 418 more kisses … 10 more … 4 more. I’ve set the last 3 aside. Like three sugared almonds for good luck.
Everything is counting down. Sleeping together. Laughing together. Our last dances are upon us.
Incidentally, you really can scream with your heart; but it’s incredibly painful.
And speaking of pain, it makes the world smaller. Now I see only you and me and Luc, and that which has grown between the three of us. Each of us has played our part. Now I’ll try to rescue what can be rescued. I don’t want to brood on punishment; misfortune comes equally to all.
When will I give up?
Only afterwards, I hope.
I still want to see whether my salvage bid succeeds.
The doctors have offered me ibuprofen and opiates, which they say affect only the brain, interrupting the electronic signals running through the lymph glands between my armpits, my lungs and my head.
Some days that means I no longer dream in pictures; on others I detect aromas that remind me of the past – way back in the past, when I wore knee socks. Or else things smell very different: faeces like flowers, wine like burning tyres. A kiss like death.
But I want to be completely sure for the child, so I do without. Sometimes the pain is so bad that I lose my words and cannot reach you. Then I lie to you. I write down the sentences I mean to say to you and read them out loud. When the pain comes, I am incapable of capturing the letters inside my head. A mush of letters, overcooked letters: alphabet soup.
On occasion, it hurt me that you let yourself be lied to; on occasion, I was livid with you for even walking into my life. But never enough to make me hate you.
Jean, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know whether to wake you up and beg you to help me. Whether to tear out these pages – or copy them and post them to you. Then. Or never. I’m writing so that I can think more clearly.
Whichever way, I’m losing the ability to speak about anything else.
More than ever I use my body to talk to you. This weary, sick, southern wood, with one last tender green shoot sprouting from it; it can voice the most basic desires at least.
Love me.
Hold me.
Stroke me.
Panic flowering, Papa used to say. Great trees blossom one final time before they die, pumping all their sap into their last remaining cancer-free shoot.
Not long ago you said how beautiful I am.
I’m on the cusp of my panic flowering.
One night recently Vijaya rang from New York. You were still on the barge, selling the latest edition of Southern Lights. You would love everyone to read that small, strange, beautiful book. You said once that it didn’t lie. No sophistication, no embellishments. Only truth.
Vijaya has new bosses: two oddball cellular scientists. They think it is the body, rather than the brain, that determines a person’s soul and character. They say it is the billions of other cells. What happens to them happens to the soul.
Pain, for example, he said: it reverses the polarity of the cells. It starts after only three days: arousal cells become pain cells, sensory cells become fear cells, coordination cells become pin-cushions. Eventually tenderness only causes hurt; every breeze, every musical vibration, every approaching shadow triggers fear. And pain feeds hungrily on every movement and every muscle, breeding millions of new pain receptors. Your insides are completely transformed and replaced, but it is invisible from the outside.
By the end you want no one ever to touch you again, Vijaya says. You grow lonely.
Pain is a cancer of the soul, says your oldest friend. He says it like a scientist; he doesn’t consider the nausea such words will trigger in non-scientists. He is foretelling everything that will happen to me.
Pain makes the body dull and your mind with it, as your Vijaya knows. You forget; you can no longer think logically, only in panic. And all your healthy thoughts fall into the furrows the pain gouges into your brain. All your hopes. Eventually you too fall in and are gone, your entire self swallowed up by pain and panic.
When will I die?
In purely statistical terms, it’s certain that I will.
I was planning to eat the traditional thirteen Christmas desserts. Maman is in charge of the biscuits and the mousse, Papa will contribute the four fruit delicacies, Luc will polish the finest nuts. Three tablecloths, three candelabras, three hunks of broken bread: one piece for the living sitting at the table, one for the happiness to come, and one for the poor and the dead to share. I’m scared that I’ll be fighting for crumbs with the down and out by then.