13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [20]
Its coolness rolls easily along the palm of your upturned hand. It feels chilly and ticklish, downright pleasant. Now, grasp these two fused German cartridges and press the bullet tip into the pad of your thumb. Go ahead: it doesn’t hurt. It’s just a little bit of pointed pressure. It’s a bit sharp, though, isn’t it?
Take the object and aim it right between your eyes. Strike yourself with it lightly. That dull thunk padded by a thin layer of your flesh, that’s your skull. Imagine if that bullet you’re holding were traveling very fast—if it were traveling its destined speed out the dark mouth of some heated gun—and struck you in the head. The sharp point would penetrate into the bone with disconcerting ease. Your cranial plate might shatter from the impact, a little. That huge bullet (about the size of your middle finger) would get lodged good and tight in your brain.
Wait—there’s more.
You could hold it up to the side of your trachea and press there. Your breath might come a little more labored. Imagine the bullet ripping through your throat at this place: the air sucked clean out of you in the most painful second of your life.
Usually though, you don’t see it coming. Often, you get shot in the back. It could hit you right at the base of the spine, a little to the right—just where the padded flesh of your buttock tapers to an end. It will shred its way through the springy muscle tissue at your waistline, then tear its way through your viscera like so much tissue paper. The bullet will fall not far from your feet, slickly covered in your blood, but you won’t see it. You will be too busy being aghast at the gaping hole in your gut, from which your entrails will begin to spill. It will hurt so much that you will have no idea what to do with yourself except scream like you have never screamed before.
You will fall to your knees, pressing down on your gushing wound with the flats of both helpless hands. Your blood spurting from your innards—all over your clothes—in your agony you will topple. What will you do next?
I CAN SEE THAT you are getting a bit nervous now. I can see that I am becoming confused between what is me and what is you and what is them. For the moment (now that you have the smell of warmed-up metal embedded in the palms of your sweaty hands), you may put the object back down and recede from this unpleasant thought.
Il faut de la peau
IT IS MONDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1928, the start of the week after All Saints’ Day. Louise has spent a pleasant weekend with her husband. He even made love to her. This was good.
Nevertheless, Henri is back at work at the moment (it is four in the afternoon), so she is alone in the apartment again. Garance is not coming over today, and Louise does not have any immediate errands to run, so she feels restless. Of course, she could always clean something. However, this prospect does not excite her. Instead, she dashes a note on the first page of the small notepad of disposable mulch paper on which she writes her grocery lists:
Dear Sir,
—in either case not a good idea—adultery?
The whole swirling delight of it—such mutual possession is what we all live for, is it not?
Can you commit adultery without any skin-on-skin contact? No no. That is absurd. There must be skin.
Please agree to the expression of my most
distinguished sentiments,
Madam
She looks, stunned, at what she has just written. She tears the paper off the top of the notepad. She has not pressed hard on the pencil, so the imprint of what she has just put forth is not on the next page. The moment was a soft one, cleanly contained on the sheet for which it was meant.
Louise considers crumpling the paper and throwing it away. She decides not to, for the wording of her message amuses her. It diverts her that she does not even know the full name of this Sir, and thus cannot presume to address him with it. Her closing salutation also pleases her: a thing meant for business correspondence. She asks herself: what manner of business is this?
She decides to slide this peculiar eruption of hers into an envelope