13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [68]
“That’s not bad, is it?” she asks tentatively.
“Good Lord, no. It’s lovely. My hot, moist jungle creature—you are my Florida flower.”
“So I will drive you mad and swallow you whole, will I?”
“That is entirely possible, and might be entirely pleasant. I just hope my wife didn’t hear any of that!”
His wife—oh, his wife is just below them! She’d forgotten. She looks so stricken at the thought that he tells her not to worry, that he’s certain the moans didn’t travel down through the floor. After all, he has never heard her with Henri. Louise has a moment of near mortification at that observation, but instead decides to hit him with her pillow and laugh. “Well, I will make sure to make more of a ruckus next time!”
AFTER XAVIER LEAVES, SHE does not have the stomach to go fetch her husband at Pierre’s house. She does not have the stomach for anything, not even a light dinner. She feels ill and shivery, downright feverish. She suspects she picked up a cold on her excursion to the country. She makes herself a tisane before bed and sits bundled in blankets, letting the soothing herb-scented steam rise to her face from her cup before she takes her first sip, attempting to understand how it is possible for her to be so happy and so unhappy at the same time.
Paris
June 6th
Dear Sir,
It has been a while since I’ve written you; I am sorry. I have been in the hospital. One day on my way to work, I fainted in the metro. There was a swirl of activity around me, and some woman knelt on the floor and tucked my jacket under my head, holding me there until the train pulled up at the next station, where they would call paramedics for me.
Unable to speak or move, unable to hear anything except a crackling hiss like a detuned radio, all I could do was look up into the woman’s face as she looked down at me, and the woman’s face was this face:
I would have given anything to be able to speak, but I could not move a muscle while my eyes faded to black, though I could swear they were wide open. I felt a wave of feverish trembling radiate through all my limbs from my solar plexus, then nothing. Total obliteration, as if my body had flung out my very soul. There were no dreams, and when I woke up the next morning, I had no idea where on earth I was, or even who I was. I stared at the ceiling for entire minutes, gathering myself, gathering the information that paramedics back home ask of those who have been stricken to make sure they are still inside themselves: my name, the date, the identity of the current president. What was most strange about my predicament is that physically I felt absolutely fantastic—better than I had in many years. I felt strong, as if I owned the whole world. I felt that I could walk striking the ground with my heels as if it would crack beneath me. Everything felt crisp, and I was ravenously hungry.
The doctors seemed not to believe me when I explained to them that I was very well and that I wanted to go home. They cited the fact that I suffered a bizarre symptom when I fainted on the metro: I bled from the ears. They took a thousand scans and tests and squinted at images of my brain intensely in their doctorly fashion, looking for the source of my ailment. But there was no ailment. Even my fevers, which had haunted me for months, had completely abated. They kept me under observation and asked me many questions to make sure I was quite well, and sane. In order to convince them of the latter, I had to omit from my answers many of the things that have been happening to me lately.
I am quite sane. It is not 1928. I did not look up into Louise Brunet’s long-dead face when I fainted in the metro. I do not feel a strange extraneous sentience in my flesh, permeating my blood, flowing through me while it laughs softly at me. Softly like an amused parent watching the blunderings of a child before gently setting the child straight.
For over two weeks I avoid the record; I avoid