13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [75]
(and why not after all?)
oh, how heartily I laugh—because there it is, a little piece of me embedded right here in the documentation,
an artifact saved from the future and preserved through time until the future is once more in the past an artifact that I slipped into the box myself during a moment of monkey trickery that I cannot now recollect
but it is real
but I am a falsifier
but there is no way to know unless you toss the coin
to find out please.]
LOUISE IS WOKEN UP with a start by Henri’s cool hand laid gently on her forehead. When she opens her eyes, she sees his weary concerned face looking down at her. She can see that he has just gotten home: his coat is still on. When he came through the front door and saw signs that she had returned, he didn’t even bother taking it off before looking for her and finding her here asleep, tangled in sweat-dampened sheets.
“I was all set to be angry with you,” he says, “but now you had to foil it all by being ill. Have you been like this long?”
“I’m sorry; you can be angry with me. I feel a lot better.”
She realizes when she speaks these words that they are true: her fever has completely broken and now she feels fine—only a bit disoriented by the black, annihilated sleep she just had. She feels as if Henri has pulled her up suddenly from a pool of dark water, and she is still getting her bearings as oblivion slowly drips off her in the midday light. She looks around the room to make sure that the apparition from this morning is truly gone; she recalls him fading away bit by bit from his feet up, until only his eyes were left there, hovering—then nothing. When she blinks, she thinks she sees their white negative images still imprinted in her.
Henri pulls a chair up by the bedside and sits on it, the same one that the apparition had sat in. She would think that fellow a chimerical delusion, except she can see the strange little coin he left her still sitting on her nightstand. She will have to save that, to remember. Henri doesn’t notice it; he is mainly concerned about one thing:
“Did you go away with a man?” he asks.
“No.”
“You still love me, then.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you leave like that?”
Louise searches for a plausible reason through the lifting fog in her brain, and is overwhelmed by the surprising multiplicity of them. Why do we not leave all the time, after all? She sits up in bed and lifts her moistened hair off the back of her neck, to cool it. As she feels the movement of air against her tingling skin, she says, “You know that girl Garance? The piano student?”
“She came by while you were gone, looking in an awful fluster. She said she would come back this afternoon to see if you were here. That’s why I returned now, to make sure that at least someone would be here to answer the door.”
“Did she look scared?”
“I think. I’m not sure. Agitated. You left because of her?”
“That morning she came by and she gave me a pile of music she’d written for me. She told me she loved me and kissed me on the mouth. Quite thoroughly.”
“She… what?”
“Exactly.”
Henri processes this information for several seconds, as if attempting to reconcile it with what he previously knew of the girl. It seems to mesh, and he says, carefully, “That is… rather sweet, in a very strange way. That’s why you went away, because Garance is in love with you? Where did you go?”
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t rational. It might have been I was getting a little sick already, and somehow my mind was affected. I just felt as if I had to get out and get some distance, as if so many things were suddenly different. I just went to the country. I stayed in Bracieux.”
“Oh. Did you go see the old house?”
“Yes.”
She wants to tell him she stayed there, not at the inn in town as he assumes she did. She wants to tell him she still has the key, but somehow the words get stuck in her throat. She wasn’t supposed to have made a copy—one of the many tiny transgressions she sprinkles throughout her existence to make it bearable