Meanwhile, here we are, next to my brother’s coffin, who hasn’t even had the time to finish growing up. All in black with red eyes, regular Hallowe’en vampires, except the celebration’s all messed up. For-real devils conjured up by a god-dam mad dog, god sees, god gotcha, god breaking bits of bread for food. Is that their kind of communion? Fm all confused... I really don’t think Fm all that bright. Fve been learning things all wrong since the day I was born. I want out of here. Die... my other brother Vincent too. We’ve got a plan, the two of us. Nobody’s going to know. We’re just going to disappear, go up in a puff of magic powder! Where and when? They’ll have to wait for that little surprise ... just so they can ask the question: Why?
Let Me Borrow your Life
She is blowing bubbles with soapy water.
In the backyard of her second childhood, in the earthly garden her parents are re-inventing for her.
It is Sunday.
They are planting their flowers in the sunlight, never losing sight of her. They can’t keep their eyes off her. She is the centre of their life. Child of desire, child of expectation, child of hope. Lysandre they have called her, to combine the sounds of their names in hers, like a promise of love that will last, of happiness. A wedding of words, their word given and inscribed in a loved one’s very name and existence. Lysandre, the union of Lise and André.
Nothing is too good for her. They turn themselves into the living, vibrant playthings of her desires, and still... she withdraws far above them, into a space that seems to be out-of-bounds to them, out of their reach. She is leaving them.
Her eyes dive deep into the sky, her chest swelling with sadness, and she blows a bubble so uncertain it hesitates to leave her lips. Intense feelings, extreme and contradictory, tumble out onto her face. It hurts to see, so consumed she is by a vision they cannot see.
The more her heart is filled, the more bubbles she blows. Her sky is full of them.
They are shaken by anguish.
She gets thinner by the day, as the sky swallows her up.
For days now, they have been watching powerless this lonely voyage, moved their child’s disturbing beauty, face to the sky, which she nourishes with her breath.
Before their eyes, she takes flight through the gates of the sky.
They can no longer hold her back.
They have been moving heaven and earth to surround her with beauty and love, but nothing will do.
She can no longer bring herself to let any bubble or balloon leave her lips, because she wants to make sure every single sigh can be captured, wrapped up and sent to the world that is calling to her. She can’t lose a single one. When a balloon bursts, she bursts into tears. If one dallies, she waves her hands to waft it on its way, farther, beyond the clouds, for every single one has an urgent mission to carry out.
This has been going on for several days. Since her birthday.
Something unknown to her parents happened that day, though they surrounded her with friends and children.
In full form, Lysandre threw herself into everyone’s arms, eagerly tore the wrapping paper off all the gifts, marvelled at every one, smudged all the guests’ cheeks with chocolate-icing kisses, pronounced many words she had learned – even complete sentences – aware and happy that she had the attention of these adults so amused at her viva-ciousness and vitality. She offered herself, unabashed, like a crocus to the first rays of the sun.
André and Lise could not stop crowing about their good fortune at having a daughter so full of life and spontaneity:
“Life’s taken on new meaning since we’ve had her!”
“Her laughter fills every crevice of our day-today life,” André put in.
When the cool of day’s end crept into the garden, the adults huddled around the fireplace, their cheeks coloured by the flames, and photos passed from hand to hand, greedy for young memories.
Children gathered in the recreation room to watch new videos with rapt attention. Then Lysandre came back into the living room, tired, or so they thought, from the over-exuberance of the day. Curled in the foetal position on André’s lap, she began sucking her thumb again, as she had at the very first, her forehead warm, her pupils bright and wide, all her toys abandoned.
That night, the little girl didn’t make a sound at bedtime; it was not like the other nights, when she would cry herself to sleep, too feverish and happy to let her eyes close without a last hurrah.
She didn’t want to eat.
Since then, she has spoken little and has started stammering. She swallows nothing but milk; yet there is still no fever, just a distracted air.
André performs wonders to try and bring her back, priceless mimicry, wondrous onomatopoeic sounds, clown stunts. Nothing. Lise points out a humming-bird, the smell of a flower, but nothing draws her attention. For the first time, she will not let her mother’s arms rock her.
She blows bubbles with soapy water. The metamorphosis begins again every time. She fills with sadness, then with hope. Each bubble carries her breath... suspended... fragile, hardly there, yet so heavy with import. Will it reach its destination in time? Suspense holds her with such enormous tension, unusual for a child.
Lise and André have been consulting specialists, endlessly, but the loss of appetite has nothing to do with her health. A psychologist cannot conclude a single thing. There is no apparent cause for the sudden change in her. Surely there has been some sort of shock; perhaps the one and only clue might be the coincidence of her obsession with bubbles and balloons.
The birthday debris languishes in the garden. Streamers are twined through the branches of apple trees and flowering lilacs, in this splendidly warm spring which makes if easy to spend all one’s time outside... beyond the house, at least, with its luxurious and enveloping interior like a fleece-lined glove.
They do their gardening and they watch. She is melting before their eyes, and they are afraid of losing her: “Stay with us. Let us borrow your childhood.” Is it possible that she is returning to the place from which she believes she came? Back to the people to whom she thinks she belongs? Perhaps Lise has overfed her imagination with the legendary story of how she came to them.
“Once upon a time, there was girl named Lysandre. She flew into our lives like a bird. Heaven held her better than any mother’s womb... it brought forth birds and children, having held them a long time in its clouds. Then one day, out they came, like a dream. That morning, there was a veritable migration of little girls from out of the sky, from the clouds over China. We chose you, Lysandre, out of all of them. You fell from just the right part of the sky into our open arms, right where we were waiting for you.”
A fable invented specially for her. A fairy tale to hold off the truth for a while.
“Tell my story again, Mama!”
A hundred times Lise told it, sometimes adding details, colours, smells and seasons. With words and magnificent drawings of stars and clouds being born to the light of day. Had she told lies? Don’t we all have random, mysterious beginnings?
“When exactly should one start to distinguish between fantasy and reality?” Lise asked, “Have I been telling too many tales?”
“No, it can’t be that. She’s been hearing that story of yours ever since we adopted her. Something else has got into her, but what? We need to see the children again to find out what happened.”
Two years before, when she first came to them, Lysandre’s eyes could not have been wide enough to take everything in; her hands always gripped her toys like buoys; her heart was so lovingly overwhelmed and filled with all the love she received in doses perfectly suited to her excessive need. They had created the padded paradise of an only child emerging from the hell of an orphanage.