Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [104]
As for me, I wasn’t so brave. I retreated, and when I turned around I couldn’t see her anymore, but the tree was shaken and trembling. The tree was going into convulsions and howling dickhead, asshole, get the fuck out of here, go roll in your shit. A psychiatrist took me by the arm, dislocating my shoulder, and I asked him if there were any rooms free. That cracked him up, because they were emptying the mental hospitals to fill the prisons. I thought of the policy of family entry and settlement and I felt like going back home.
I left the walls of the hospital thinking about my father, the general-in-chief of the middle class, who never knew his grandchildren, but always had faith in social progress and the great chain of being. He also used to say you had to get a good education, be equipped for life without killing yourself, and find a nice cushy job in the public sector.
Others
I hadn’t done anything to improve my anemia. I didn’t even know if I’d had a biopsy in Cochin or a bio-psych in Sainte-Anne. This kind of word problem could torment me, unsettle me to the max. I never should have walked on my head. A bunch of young hoods saw my weakness right away: “You sick, or you dead already? What were you doing with the crazies? Why’re you hanging out in front of the prison? Why don’t you go home?” They called me a dirty Frenchman; they must have been Arabs or blacks, I have a problem with colors. I said I had indeed passed by the hospital, the convent, the asylum, and the prison, and I’d heard the walls crying, but I hadn’t seen anything. There’s nothing to see on rue de la Santé. Nowhere. I could have walked by shop windows, brasseries, and cafés, I still wouldn’t have seen anything. There might’ve been bright lights, they might’ve been laughing in there, oh yes, but I would’ve walked on. I’m broke, nothing to sell nothing to give. I’m tired. When I go out I get claustrophobic. Outside not at home. At home’s bigger than outside. This city is a dead city the way a language is a dead language. Obsolete. Nothing is alive. People are thinner and thinner. They have the thickness of a light jacket, of spandex tights, jeans with holes in them, or a DVD. I tell these young assholes I can’t hear them, I can’t see them, I don’t even know if they’re there every day, dealing, hassling people, waiting while waiting for life to wait for them. Life doesn’t wait for anyone. They don’t exist. They’re sub-shits.
I tell them that because Hassan, the gardner, is behind me with a big pitchfork and he’s strict about the rules. He doesn’t like to see pre-delinquents smoking in his garden, sleeping on his lawns, or challenging honest passersby.
“You okay?” he asks me.
I don’t tell him I’m just out of the hospital, he doesn’t give a shit. I tell him I’m okay. He tells me about the garden. I don’t give a shit. I wonder what the teenagers are thinking. They’re not thinking, they’re waiting, they push things out of their way. I don’t know what Arabs think either, you never know what they’re thinking, they don’t think, they pray. Hassan gardens while he prays, maybe he prays while he’s gardening. Who knows. I don’t know what women think either—they talk, but do they think what they’re saying or say what they’re thinking? And when they think they don’t think about me but about Brad Pitt or George Clooney, I can tell. I don’t call that thinking. Anyway, my aggressors aren’t black or Arab or young, just morons. You have no idea what morons are thinking. A wild boar, a tiger or a snake, even a mosquito, you can imagine, but a moron? He thinks about himself. He doesn’t think of others. I don’t think of others either, but at least I try to think for others. I hear the walls crying. I don’t piss on prison walls, I don’t tag the walls of hospitals. Suddenly I realize I’m in Hassan’s arms, like an