Audio: Camille Bordas reads.
Iread a lot about famous people and how they died. Or just what diseases they had. I started with actors and writers, but now I’m down to congressmen. Painters, too, I read a lot about, but only because my brother has so many books about them. (Is it “has” or “had”? The brother is gone, but the books are still here.) My brother loved painters, paintings. Me, I don’t really know what to do with a painting, how long I’m supposed to look at it. I prefer movies. Before I watch a movie, I check how long it will last.
My brother was always going to die young (he had cystic fibrosis), but still he thought maybe he’d last long enough to study art history at the Sorbonne, and then some more at the École du Louvre after that, and then maybe have his own gallery in Paris one day. He painted a little bit himself, Thomas, but he wasn’t very good at it. That’s what he said, at least. I liked his stuff, I think, but mostly because I liked him a lot. When it comes to art, I can’t really tell what’s good and what isn’t. What’s easier to tell apart than Good Art and Bad Art, though, is a prestige illness from a regular one. It’s not up for debate that mental illnesses have had the most cachet, historically. Manic depression, schizophrenia, anorexia nervosa—anyone who was anyone had one of those. Then come certain S.T.D.s, like syphilis, or aids, but it seems odd to me that S.T.D.s should have cachet, and I wonder why some of them do and others don’t (herpes doesn’t get you any points, for instance, even though you can die from it), but I guess it’s not worth thinking about S.T.D.s too much, since there’s no way I have one of those, or ever will, if things keep going at the rate they’re going, dating-wise.
We’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. Everyone says probably narcolepsy, but they can’t really confirm unless they do a spinal tap, and my mother is against that. She’s scared a spinal tap will be too painful or leave me paralyzed. What frightens me about it isn’t so much that it will hurt as that it might confirm narcolepsy. I don’t want narcolepsy. Narcolepsy is one that people make fun of. It isn’t even mental. It doesn’t matter that Nastassja Kinski and Churchill had it. It’ll be forever at funny-disease level. Unless someone very hip gets it soon.
•
I went to a third neurologist on Monday. He gave me a sheet of paper with a perfect circle in the middle. He asked me to draw a clock inside it, showing the time of my choosing. These things, you always think there’s a trick, so I asked if there was a trick, but he said no, no trick, just draw a clock. I wondered what time would make me the most interesting case. I made a mark for every minute and drew a clock that said eight-twenty-five, but then I realized that both hands hanging down in the lower half of the circle might be interpreted by the doctor as indicating depression, so I added a second hand pointing up to twelve, for hope. Depression is not one of the mental illnesses that get you a lot of cred. The doctor barely glanced at the drawing.
•
Later, in the parking lot, I asked my mother what she thought the clock test was about.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll look it up online when we get home. Do you remember what time you drew?”
I nodded, then she nodded. Whenever possible, she liked to double-check my results against the Internet.
“The first two neurologists didn’t ask me to draw any clocks,” I said.
My mother seemed to believe that this meant the one we’d just seen was a better physician, that he’d know what was wrong with me.
She always came with me to these appointments. I was fourteen, still a child, sort of, so I thought that it had to be that way, that she had to come to ask the doctors the right questions, but when she’d sent me to the first shrink, and then the second, they’d both asked to see me alone, and she’d seemed to understand.
•
I was afraid sometimes that there was nothing wrong with me. Something was going on, for sure, what with the absences at dinner and the sleeping fits during the day, but sometimes the body does weird things, and doctors don’t have a name for the behavior, or they can’t find it in their books, and, because the symptoms aren’t too worrisome, they just send you home to keep on living, telling you only to come back if things get worse. That’s what they’d been doing with me.
I thought I might have a fake disease, one I’d developed only to get my parents’ minds off my brother. That would’ve been shitty of me, worrying them for nothing, but I couldn’t ignore the possibility. I’d read on the Internet that sometimes when a child died a sibling became mysteriously ill, in order to give the parents a goal, a reason to live. (Save the remaining child!) I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted what I had to be real but treatable. Or manageable, at least. I wanted something with some cachet. Like, nothing intestinal.
Heart conditions have cachet. Marfan syndrome is respectable, because they think Lincoln had it. Lupus has cachet, too, but I don’t know if that has to do with who had it (though people like Flannery O’Connor had it, and maybe J Dilla) as much as with what it evokes. It’s hard to argue against a disease that has so much metaphorical weight, what with the idea of your own body attacking itself. If you’re not terrified by that, then you’re not alive. Also, the name itself. Lupus. Whoever named lupus “lupus” knew what they were doing.
•
I’m not interested only in old diseases. Every Tuesday, I read the obituaries Francine Eliot writes for Inventaire. It’s important to stay in touch with what your contemporaries die of, I think, and to keep up with new illnesses, too. Medical mysteries. A few months ago, for example, on the radio, I heard about a wave of babies born without arms in the Southeast. They were just starting to look into it. I wondered what had spurred the investigation—when exactly one armless newborn had become one armless newborn too many. But that’s neither here nor there. One thing we know for sure is that I have all my limbs.
My father gets Inventaire in the mail every week, has since forever, for the international-politics section. Every time we move (we move every year or so, for his job), it’s a conversation, a worry: will the mail be forwarded to our new address seamlessly? Will there be a lag in his delivery of Inventaire? My mother reads it after him. Her favorite part is the books section. Thomas only ever looked at the last page, the obituary of someone who’d “left us” that week. He’s the one who got me hooked on it. Growing up, because of that page, I’d believed that only one person died per week, that a paper shrine in Inventaire was what awaited us all at the end of this. It was only when Debbie Reynolds died just one day after her daughter during Christmas Blues 2016 (Christmas Blues = deaths occurring right after Christmas) that I’d realized people died all the time, everywhere, every second. After that, I started seeing death everywhere. It was like when you’re taught what “offside” means in soccer: once you understand the rule, you see it non-stop and call offside constantly. That January, John Hurt and Emmanuelle Riva died a couple of days apart. Same thing happened the following summer, with Sam Shepard and Jeanne Moreau. (Jeanne Moreau made it to Inventaire’s last page that week, not Shepard, which was at the root of an explosive argument between my parents.) A guy named Eric Schweblin used to write the page, but he died, too, and the lady who wrote his obituary got his job. Francine Eliot was younger, more in touch with the times. She started writing more and more obituaries for nobodies, for the regular people who died in terrorist attacks, for example, or for this or that early victim of the covid pandemic. Thomas liked when it was a nobody week in Inventaire’s obit, but I didn’t see the point in learning facts about people who would be remembered only for dying tragically, not for something they’d accomplished during their lifetime. It was too depressing.
When Thomas died, though, I sent his photo and a few details to Francine Eliot, to see if she would write about him. She never responded, and it’s been seven months now, almost, so I know it’s not going to happen, but I still cross my fingers every week that it will be him on the last page of the magazine.
•
My mom explained later what the clock-drawing was all about: “It’s to see if you have dementia. It’s routine, but they still have to check.”
She said that it didn’t matter where I’d drawn the hands of the clock, because all that the doctors were interested in was whether I’d drawn them and the numbers they pointed at within the circle.
“So at least I don’t have that,” I said. “I don’t have dementia.”
We’d ruled out a number of things by now. MRIs were clear. I wasn’t having mini strokes. It wasn’t epilepsy. I was sad, yes, but not depressed, the psychiatrists had concluded. Blood tests showed nothing other than a little anemia.
“Maybe I’m transgender,” I told my mother.
It was something I’d been thinking about. Maybe the reason I slept so much during the day was that I couldn’t stand being in my body.
“Why would you say that?” my mother said. “Do you feel you’re a boy? A man?”
“I wouldn’t mind being one sometimes.”
She seemed relieved to hear this. She took a deep breath and said that wishing to be a man was just a normal part of being a woman.
“Wanting to be a man is different from feeling like you’re a man,” she added.
“Is it? How do you tell the difference between a feeling and something else?”
She took a shortcut then. She’d been taking these more and more, lately, but they were always shortcuts to what she wanted to say, not to where I’d been going.
“We don’t want another boy,” she said. “We don’t want to replace your brother. We’re very happy with our little Johanna.”
•
The next day, Inventaire came in the mail. Francine Eliot had written a nobody obit, the first one since Thomas died. I read it over breakfast, before school. The nobody had been blue-eyed. He’d done nothing with his life; he was being celebrated only for having lived, for having had dreams. The biggest of these dreams had been to publish poetry, but, because life had denied him that satisfaction, Francine Eliot was giving it to him in death, by publishing a sonnet he’d written in his old age.
Fuck that, I thought.
Why did he deserve the space? Thomas hadn’t got what he wanted from life, either. I wrote an e-mail to Francine Eliot right away, via the magazine’s contact page. My first impulse was to let it all out, the anger, the disappointment, to tell her everything that was wrong with the nobody’s poem (rhyming amour with toujours), how much more interesting my brother had been, but then I became sleepy and took a short nap on the desk. When I woke up, I was in a completely different frame of mind, bordering on suicidal, and I deleted what I’d written. I replaced it with a lie. I told Francine Eliot that I was myself dying, and that my only wish before I died was to read my big brother’s obituary as written by her. I didn’t want her to write mine when the time came, I just wanted to “see him alive again in [her] words.”
•
At school, they didn’t mind the sleep attacks anymore. By they, I mean the teachers, of course—who the hell knows what the kids were thinking. As I said, we moved every year, so, in general, there was no sense trying to make friends, but particularly not here. Big brother dying three weeks into the school year, and now the sleeping—who wants to hang out with the new girl? Anyway, the teachers were nice. They’d all liked Thomas, the little they’d got to know him, so they were keen to give me a break. I’m assuming they’d all read the first few results of a narcolepsy search on Google by now, too, and had been reassured by the following statement: “While scary, the episodes are not dangerous as long as the individual finds a safe place in which to collapse.” In their classrooms, there was always a table my head could fall onto.
I averaged three attacks a day. Most of them lasted between ten and twelve minutes, but they’d been getting longer lately, and I was waking up more and more slowly. Even once I was awake, it had begun to take a minute or two before I could start moving my body again. I’m guessing that everyone has had those nightmares in which they’re conscious of an imminent danger but can’t save themselves because they can’t move. I’d always thought that the scary part was the specific danger of the nightmare—the killers coming for you, the monsters, whatever—but it turns out it’s the paralysis that gives you the cold sweats. You could see your happiest memory play again and again, or a young Paul Newman walking toward you with a bunch of roses: if you can’t move, you’ll want to scream. Which was what I wanted to do now, when I woke up and couldn’t move. The thing was, though, I couldn’t really scream, either, so I made these embarrassing sounds instead, throaty mm-m-ms that were a bit sexual, I guess, and made everyone laugh.
I tried not to attempt screaming that day, in French class, when I woke up to the sight of my neighbor, Victoria, writing a list of people to invite to her birthday party. (I wasn’t on it.)
There was a column for girls and one for boys, and her issue seemed to lie with the girls. She kept going over the girl column like she was composing a poem and there was a perfect rhyme she wasn’t seeing, her right hand running her pencil eraser along her neck.
By the end of class, I could move freely again, but Victoria was still stuck with her list. Everyone left the room but us. I always stayed in classrooms during breaks and recesses. People thought I did that because of the narcolepsy, and I think they felt sorry for me, but really I liked the silence, the empty rooms, looking at what everyone had left behind.
“Is it your first time throwing a party or what?” I asked Victoria.
“What?”
“It shouldn’t be that hard to know who you want to have at your party.”
Victoria looked surprised that I could speak. Surprised and suspicious.
“I know how to throw a party, thank you very much,” she said. “I’ve seen movies.”
“So?”
“So, there’s always a party.”
We hadn’t seen the same movies. My favorite ones were “Léon (The Professional)” and “My Girl,” with Anna Chlumsky.
I asked Victoria if she didn’t have a class to get to.
“It’s P.E. now,” she said. “You don’t need to be on time for that.”
That was the silver lining of my mysterious illness: I hadn’t had to suffer the indignities of phys ed in about six months. I’d jumped at the chance to get a medical dispensation. The people I understand the least in life are those who insist on participating in phys ed even when they have a good reason not to. There was a girl like that in my previous school—she had six million ulcers or something, a rare condition, but she still went every week, and we had to watch her pain, the contortions in her face when she caught a ball, and we had to pretend it was all right, she was strong, she asked for the ball. She threw up after every practice. The film she had to be playing in her head to endure this, I can’t relate to at all. I don’t want to be the freak that I am, but there are still limits to what I’ll do to fit in.
“I think it’s going to go away,” Victoria said to me, out of nowhere. “Your falling asleep like that. I think it’s just the way your body goes through the trauma for now, but then it will all fall into place. One day it will stop, and you won’t even realize it. It will be like the last hiccup in a hiccupping fit. You never know it’s the last.”
“I think I’ll know,” I said, but she went on with more examples. “It’s like how your parents don’t remember the last time they tucked you in, or read you a bedtime story. Ask them, you’ll see. They don’t remember the last story they read you. One day, they just stopped doing it.”
She coughed twice after she said all this, turned away from her list to face me as she did, like she thought it was worth seeing. Her eyes didn’t narrow as she coughed.
“The list I’m making,” she said, “it’s not for a party. It’s just a list of people I’ve had violent thoughts toward.”
“How violent?”
“I have an anger issue,” she said. “I’m working on it.”
I’d thought it was short for a birthday-party guest list, but now, knowing what it was, it seemed rather extensive.
“How violent are the thoughts?” I asked again.
“Pretty violent. And it’s not just thoughts. Sometimes I have dreams so violent and gory I have to close my eyes in them. You ever closed your eyes in a dream?”
I had, in fact, twice. The two times I’d dreamed of Thomas since he’d died.
“Last week,” Victoria said, “I dreamed I was crushing Miss Barbette’s skull against a kitchen counter, over and over and over again. I couldn’t watch, and I told myself, in my dream, even though I knew I was dreaming, to close my eyes. The sounds were spot on, though. It’s really fucked up, what your brain can come up with, in terms of sensory details.”
“What did Miss Barbette ever do to you?”
“Nothing, really. That’s why dreams don’t count as much. The people you see in them, they’re stand-ins for other people.”
“Who was she a stand-in for?”
Victoria shrugged.
She’d never actually been violent, she explained. She only ever had the thoughts, but the thoughts were becoming bothersome. They encroached on her concentration, messed with her grades.
“That’s why I’m making the list,” she said, tapping the eraser against the piece of paper. “I need to get to the bottom of what it is that makes me think violent thoughts about these people in particular, so I can fix it.”
I looked at the list. The only thing the people on it had in common was that they were idiots, but then some other idiots hadn’t made it onto the list, so that couldn’t be the only criterion. I’d never had thoughts or fantasies about committing violence. I wondered if I would ever have to resort to violence in my life, physical violence. I wondered if not preparing myself for the option would make me more or less likely to succeed at it. Maybe you have to surprise yourself with your violence, I thought, if you want it to work.
“When did it start?” I asked. “When did you start having the violent thoughts?”
She couldn’t tell exactly.
“It was progressive,” she said. “Unlike your condition. It’s not like one day I was fine and the next I started daydreaming about murdering people.”
“My thing was progressive, too.”
“Well, not really. I was there when it started. That German class? You didn’t half fall asleep.”
“Fair enough.”
I think she was trying to convince me that what she had was worse than what I had, which I guess is what teen-agers do. When it comes to suffering, they always want the upper hand. Me, I know it’s not a contest, because Thomas always said “It’s not a contest” when I tried to rank Francine Eliot’s obituaries from best to worst life lived. I kept all of Inventaire’s last pages and organized them from best to worst in a binder. My favorite life Francine Eliot had written about so far was Tom Petty’s. Michel Serres’s was second. Favorite didn’t mean I thought these men hadn’t suffered (I know everyone suffers), just that they’d had a lot of good times. The worst life in the binder so far—I won’t name names, because I don’t want to cause more pain to the family, but it’s a woman, though the person just above her is a guy, and I keep hesitating between the two, and I keep the woman last only because of her gender. I wondered who Francine Eliot was going to eulogize next week, if she knew it already. Would she consider Thomas at all?
I asked Victoria what her favorite movies were, but she said she didn’t really watch movies anymore, only TV shows.
•
Lunchtime I spent mostly on my phone, refreshing my in-box every few seconds, like the Facebook guy at the end of the Facebook movie, I thought, but really like anyone anywhere at all times. The mundanity and the drama contained in such a small action. A flick of the thumb, not even, and you could give yourself a little heart attack waiting for a new message to appear in bold. Every time I refreshed, I thought that this would be it, that Francine Eliot had been hitting Send the moment I’d hit Refresh, and I could almost see her name appear in my in-box, faintly superimposed over the last e-mail I’d received (Caran d’Ache: New colors available!), but it was always an illusion. I wondered if anyone had ever died while refreshing their in-box, and thought how interesting that would be for Francine Eliot to write about. I almost e-mailed her again to suggest she look for that person.
I wasn’t supposed to wander too far from school, but I walked five blocks to buy cigarettes anyway. I’d smoked a few with Thomas before, in secret of course. He wasn’t supposed to smoke with the cystic fibrosis, and he didn’t really, just thought he had to live a little, if he was going to die young. When he died, he’d had the same pack for five months. I’d finished it after the funeral, thinking they would be the last smokes I’d smoke, but that hadn’t quite worked out.
The guy at the counter of the corner tabac, where they didn’t ask you to show I.D., told me I looked all melancholy, and I responded that melancholy was the happiness of being sad (Victor Hugo), and that I was presently feeling no form of happiness whatsoever.
“Ouh la,” he said. “I don’t actually care! Maybe go write a song about it?”
He wasn’t mean, though, kind of just admitting that he couldn’t do anything for me, which I appreciated—the honesty. So I gave it a shot. I didn’t write a song, because I know nothing about music, but I tried a poem:
I thought it wasn’t too bad for a start, but it ended up putting a lot of pressure on whatever followed. The nobody from Francine Eliot’s latest obituary didn’t seem like such a loser anymore.
•
When my mother picked me up that afternoon, she made a comment about the cigarette smell. “You don’t want to ruin your teeth,” she said. “You have such a beautiful smile.”
I had that big gap between top middle incisors, les dents du bonheur, as they call it, “happiness teeth,” like Vanessa Paradis. Because of my teeth, I’d known who Vanessa Paradis was before I’d learned the name of our President or anyone else famous. It was nice for a while, to hear all the “How cute! Just like Vanessa Paradis!,” because I loved her (she was beautiful and no bullshit), but then, as years went by, I understood that it wasn’t the teeth that made her beautiful but something from within, and that I didn’t have that something, only the teeth.
“Vanessa Paradis is a smoker,” I told my mother.
“Well, she has the means to whiten her teeth all the time, I guess.”
“We do, too,” I said.
We kept talking about it like that, like the main issues with smoking were cost and cosmetic side effects, and like happiness teeth were something to take special care of, even though I just wanted normal teeth, because I wasn’t happy, and having happiness teeth when you weren’t happy was a cosmic “fuck you.” I’d asked my mom if we could fix them into being just regular teeth—the way Joy changes her name to Hulga in “Good Country People” because Hulga reflects her personality better—but she’d said no. I told her smoking kept me awake.
My father had mentioned a few weeks earlier that my issues could be related to my inner ear, and so we were on our way to an E.N.T. now. I could tell that my mother thought it was a bit of a waste of time, but it was the first time my father had actually suggested something, so I think she wanted to reward him for participating.
The E.N.T. seemed to have no idea why we would want his opinion, given my set of symptoms. We were in and out in fifteen minutes. While we were in there, Francine Eliot responded. She was sorry for my loss, and to hear that I was dying, blah blah blah, but she was under strict contractual obligation to eulogize only the newly dead (this week’s or last), and so she couldn’t write about Thomas, who’d been “gone” (I hated that she used the word) for a few months already.
I thought about Victoria, how I would’ve reacted to the e-mail if I’d been her. I tried to have violent thoughts toward Francine Eliot. I imagined her in her office, responding to my e-mail. “Inventaire is a time-sensitive publication.” I imagined slamming her face into her keyboard, slamming and slamming until the squares imprinted on her skin, but I couldn’t get into it. I fell asleep in the car on the way home.
•
At dinner, my mother pretended that my father’s idea hadn’t been too bad, that at least we’d ruled something out. I don’t know why she insisted that he feel included in our quest. He was retreating more and more into himself, like fathers in the movies. He was just barely there. He was some sort of crisis-solver for big-time companies, was good at it apparently, at observing in detail and spotting what the problems were, and he was supposed to, I think, know a thing or two about perseverance and resilience, but he never shared his knowledge with us about what made people happier or more effective. I guess we didn’t ask, but still.
I asked my parents if they remembered the last time they’d tucked me in or read me a bedtime story. My mother said of course not, but my father had a clear recollection of the exact moment when he’d realized it had become ridiculous.
“I remember,” he said. “You had a zit on your forehead, a real red-and-white one with pus, and I thought, Maybe she’s getting too old for this.”
“A zit?” I said. “How old was I?”
“I don’t know . . . five? Six?”
“And I had a zit?”
“It was just one zit.”
“Even babies can get acne,” my mother said, before she took another one of her shortcuts and displayed a new way in which she’d misunderstood me. “Do you think if we went back to tucking you in at night, that would solve your issue?” she said.
I asked if they remembered the last time they’d read a bedtime story to Thomas, but neither of them did.
•
In bed, I read that week’s obituary again, the blue-eyed failed poet’s. I cried a bit, not for him, but because of his blue eyes, because they reminded me of the Michel Pastoureau lectures about color that Thomas and I had listened to on the radio during the first covid lockdown, in March, 2020. In the one about the color blue, Pastoureau had said that blue eyes had been seen as ridiculous in ancient Rome, the eye color of fools and idiots. Pastoureau didn’t say this, but this was how Thomas had interpreted his words: being blue-eyed in ancient Rome was kind of like having a mullet today, he’d said. I’d laughed at that for a long time. Thomas hadn’t quite understood why. “What’s so funny?” he’d said. “You’re funny,” I’d said. “Blue eyes in ancient Rome were the mullets of today! That’s hilarious!” Sometimes I was too nice to him. I’d remember he would die before me and pretend he was funnier than he was, or smarter, but this wasn’t one of those times.
•
I went to the kitchen for water and saw my parents dumb in the purple TV glow. They were on, like, Episode 98 of some show. I couldn’t deal with TV shows anymore, they were becoming too long, and you never knew in advance how many seasons they would be renewed for. I like books better, movies, too, because you know when they’ll end. Especially books, though. You hold the remaining pages in your right hand, you pinch them, flip through them. You get a sense of your progression.
“That was a good one,” I heard my mother tell my dad. They couldn’t see me, as I was in the darkness of our hallway.
“Watch another?” my dad said, and after launching a new episode he wrapped his arm around her.
I didn’t think they were getting over Thomas. I didn’t think they ever would. But it still made my intestines turn to stone when I saw them act normal.
•
The next day, after French, I asked Victoria if maybe she thought her anger issues could be solved by engaging in some actual violence.
“You mean, if I did beat the shit out of these people?” she said, fanning her list of enemies under my nose. She’d been working on it some more.
“Yeah. Like, maybe you wouldn’t like it. Maybe beating them up would make the whole fantasy of beating them up disappear.”
“Or I might like it a lot.”
“Wouldn’t you want to know?”
I told her she could beat the shit out of me if she wanted to. “As a test,” I said.
She said I was crazy.
“I won’t tell it was you,” I said.
She repeated that I was crazy.
“Maybe we can help each other out. Maybe if you beat my face in, break my teeth and all, that will wake me up for good. And maybe it will make you realize you actually don’t want to be violent, that actual blood is gross.”
“Your teeth are cute.”
“I didn’t ask what you thought of my teeth.”
“Makes you unique.”
“I wouldn’t mind new ones.”
It took some more convincing, but Victoria ended up accepting my offer.
“Tomorrow after class,” she said. “I’ll bash your face in.”
•
The following morning, I smiled at myself in the mirror, to see my teeth one last time before Victoria broke them, make sure I wouldn’t miss them. We didn’t talk to each other the whole day. I didn’t fall asleep at all, not even in German class. I was afraid of the pain that she would inflict later on. I kept on wondering how serious it would be.
When we met behind the school at five, like we’d planned, I told Victoria that maybe we ought to keep it that way: the threat of her beating me up had kept me from falling asleep, it seemed, and maybe it had provided her with comfort throughout the day? Maybe this was the solution to both our problems—to make a date every day for her to beat me up without actually having to go through with it? She said no, that she wanted to beat me up right now.
It seems to me that I lost consciousness immediately, so I can’t say whether Victoria enjoyed hitting me or not. Being knocked out was different from the sleeping fits. The images I saw there were more slide show than movie, stills superimposed and morphing into one another without apparent logic. Rainbows became dollar bills at the center of which Vanessa Paradis’s smiling face suddenly erupted, and then more rainbows turning to dollars. Which was weird, because I’d only ever seen American money in American movies, had never held a dollar bill myself. I half remembered my head hitting the ground only because it broke the cycle of rainbows / dollar bills / Paradis. When my head hit, the image that appeared and stuck was that of an Inventaire obituary page with my name on it. I distinctly saw it. Not a photo of me, not a glimpse of what Francine Eliot would say about my short life, but my name. How did she find her nobodies? Did she just scan obituaries in local newspapers? And pick the dead person whose set of dates told a story? Would she recognize my name from my e-mail to her? Were the names a factor when she decided which nobody to memorialize? Johanna Sahlins. Was it a good name?
I spent four weeks in the hospital, the first one mostly unconscious. While I was under for some other thing, they did a spinal tap and concluded that what I had wasn’t narcolepsy. They rebuilt my teeth, gap and all, which I was pretty pissed about, but my mother said I’d specifically asked for them to be reset exactly the way they’d been. I was on a lot of meds, though, and I don’t remember it.
When the police asked who’d done it, I pretended not to remember. I saw a new neurologist for the “amnesia” and had to draw another clock in an empty circle. I placed the hands at eleven-ten this time, which I’d read on the Internet was what most people did.
•
For a week or so, in the middle of my hospital stay, I shared a room with an old woman with diverticulitis. She talked about the Holocaust a lot. I don’t exactly remember what she said. I must have talked to her about Vanessa Paradis, because what I remember is her saying that Vanessa Paradis wasn’t happy all the time, and that I should get over myself. The way she said it made it sound like she knew it for a fact, like maybe she’d been Vanessa Paradis’s therapist or something. A friend.
My mother brought me the new issues of Inventaire as they came, but I didn’t open them. I didn’t want to know who’d died that week, where they’d fit in the binder.
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Another thing the diverticulitis lady said was that I should stop comparing myself to others. That others should never be the measure by which I determined my own worth, because that pool was shit, other people were shit, and so it was setting a low bar for myself. When I asked her what I should measure myself against, she said fictional characters, that characters in books were less flaky than real people. Then she sort of spaced out and said that she missed her mother, that she couldn’t quite remember her face. No one visited her the whole time she was there. At eight-twenty every night, she watched the stupidest show I’ve ever seen, some cheaply made soap whose scenes we were supposed to believe had taken place that very day, a show where the characters’ concerns were supposed to mirror those of regular French people. The show had been airing every weekday for eighteen years, longer than Thomas had lived.
Victoria visited me once, but our mothers stayed in the room the whole time, so I couldn’t ask if she thought beating me up had solved her problem. She gave me the latest on school life, like it concerned me, like I’d been part of it before. When she left, my mother said she was happy I’d made a friend.
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At night, the old lady with diverticulitis pretended to be fed up with my stories (I regained energy around nine, long after visiting hours, and told her everything that crossed my mind about Thomas, how close we’d been, each other’s only friends, really, what with the moving and changing schools all the time), but I think deep down she liked listening to me. I never stopped talking until I was sure she was asleep for the night. She was discharged ten days before me, and I kept watching her stupid show even after she left. I didn’t change my mind about it, it was no “Léon” or “My Girl,” but maybe I had to accept that nothing was, really. Even “Léon” wasn’t really the “Léon” I’d seen as a child. I didn’t like the scenes they’d added in the new cut. And I had to forget they’d made “My Girl 2,” if I wanted to enjoy “My Girl” again the way I had the first time I’d seen it. I didn’t like it when they added stuff, or made a sequel just because. But I guess they had to. ♦
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