“Peru …”
He smiled.
She pressed her head to his left shoulder.
“Peru …”
“You fit the description.”
Darkness. Christelle gave a little scream. Power cut, commonly called “blackout.” He remained calm, yet concerned.
“My heart told me not to take the elevator. Blackouts compete with the angelus bell and the man in the minaret.”
“…”
“What do you do for a living?”
“Me?”
“You don’t look like an imbecile. History teacher …”
“Ex …”
“Aren’t you ashamed?”
“Why?”
“It’s a waste of energy. We live in the present moment. And what do you do to eat? The students are always on strike and it lasts for years!”
“Do you work?”
The inhabitants of the City-State mumbled when asked about their profession. High voice. Evasive answers. Narrowed eyes. Vague and uncertain look like the trains that depart and return with the diggers and students. “They shit in the train,” added Requiem, almost in tears, as if he were a tourist, or cousin to a tourist.
“Well, am I sussing out a deal?”
“Detective,” he said, ironically.
“Just a good lead.”
Noise throughout the building. The power was back. Christelle, Chris to her friends, took advantage of the situation, and changed the conversation.
“I’m inviting you to our Coupé-Décalé party this Saturday. Are you free?”
“No.”
Downstairs, they went their separate ways, delighted to have made each other’s acquaintance.
“You got any dough on you?”
“I’m poor.”
“Married?”
“Not so much.”
He had somewhat mastered the chapter on “Discussion with a young woman you meet in the elevator.” Requiem had given him the code: “Try by any means to remain neutral, cold, and forlorn.”
“Do you love me?”
He crossed the street.
SECOND NIGHT: THE NIGHT WORE HER SWIMSUITS AND UNDERSHIRTS SHE FORGOT TO WRING OUT.
Jalopies out of gas, deep-frozen products from the Galapagos Islands, knickknacks, ceiling fans, oil changes, sheep, sarcastic remarks, hearses on alert, eggs contaminated with melamine, relics, minarets as far as the eye can see, bistros, baker-deli-linen-fish-lumber stores, phone booths, internet cafés, criminal records, pools of stagnant water, garbage bags at the mercy of beggars, stray dogs, no-entry signs, mountains of refuse, black market in the merchandise and its derivatives, discotheques, abandoned locomotives, born-again Christian evangelist churches, cockfights, settlings of scores, boxing galas, mosquitoes resistant to all pesticides, booing, trolleys, wimps bankrolled by mercenaries, Neanderthals, laundries, desires, beverages, arranged widowhoods of wives of soldiers declared missing, ringworms, jeers revised and corrected by the foreign press, daydreams of dissident rebels prepared to open another front because of an oilfield, magic potions to treat unidentified diseases, backwash and backwash, cannibals, bleeders, baby chicks with their “do you have the time?”, idols with feet of clay, smoking rooms, palimpsests, cathedrals, repeat offenders in custody released on bail who return to the scene of the crime with the weapon of the crime, oriental tapestries, suicidals, the comings and goings of naked-men diddlers, assorted gaffes, superfluities, prolegomena, dark looks, erections paraphrased and channeled into paper tissues … The night came on with her swimsuits and undershirts she forgot to wring out.
All nights have this particularity: they are long and popular.
They teem with the rabble. They stifle awareness and accrue neurosis. They bind a straw mattress and a clock into an unrecognizable muddle. They come from the heart, improvise, and facilitate multiple partnership agreements between foreign bodies.
Lucien walked straight ahead. He crossed two alleyways. He stopped at the Industries traffic circle a moment, to catch his breath. Dashed into the first greasy spoon.
“I’m hungry, sir.”
“What will you have?”
“A piping hot soup, followed by veal kidneys with a bell pepper coulis.”
“Sorry, sir, we do Chinese food here.”
He trembled, just like a kid learning to pick pockets. He had but one concern: to fill his stomach.
“Sorry, sir.”
RULE NUMBER 34: watch out for hunger! Toddlers, barely weaned, have been known to take entire trains hostage, including the merchandise and everything that moved inside and out. Remote cause: the hunger that dissolves any possibility of escape. Direct result: armed robbery with bloodbath.
“One soup, two bowls of rice with any sauce.”
He sat down. They served him the food in a sort of cup.
“Enjoy your meal, sir.”
His throat burst into music with the rhythm of each mouthful. His shirt became spattered with stains, but so what! People stared at him as he wolfed down his food.
“My tip, sir.”
Lucien left the place the same way he’d entered, like a shot. He dove into the darkness in search of an unknown bliss. He was thinking of nothing. He took random streets. Stopped to admire some jugglers.
“Do you have the time?”
He soliloquized. He probed tentatively at the fog of his past. He stepped over the sleepers stretched out on the sidewalk. The city was filled with these boys who held the record for the longest slumber. The kids drugged themselves and thus glided for weeks without seeing the light of day. (A few women ventured to emulate the strategy. They didn’t last long. They were raped. Abused in their long sleep.)
He envied these kids. If only he could arm himself with the courage to do as much! If only he was that young man, covered in muck from head to toe. Maybe he was happier than those people who hide their nervous tension and attempt to take on situations they can no longer handle.
“Do you love me or don’t you?”
The City-State is one of those territories that have already broken through the barrier of internal suffering. You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same trains, the same rot, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you’ve got family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise, like a ship, you wash up on the edge of hope — a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed, the route marked out in advance. Fate sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying.
Death holds no meaning since you’ve never really lived. You cheat life. You devise a life that’s bogus. You devise a life on the basis of porn film tapes. It’s the only thing you can get hold of easily in the City-State. To escape the monotony, fever, sleeping sickness, earthquakes, cholera, and cave-ins, everyone, with the exception of those