有声短篇小说｜Most Die Young
“Most die young,” Professor Croze admitted.
“Define ‘young,’ ” I said, not looking up from my notebook. Professor Croze was not a pretty sight. There were white spots on the back and the sides of her tongue, and she seemed unaware of them, or unconcerned, at least—she opened her mouth wide to say even the smallest things.
“Under the age of thirty-eight,” she said.
I wrote, “Young < 38,” and underlined it twice. It didn’t matter that I’d just turned thirty-eight. I never took anything personally.
Professor Croze went on to list the main causes of death among the Pawong, a Malaysian tribe that she’d studied as a young anthropologist.
“They get murdered, of course—they’re such an easy target—or they go hang themselves in the forest when they’ve had enough. Sometimes they convince themselves they’ve been cursed, and they fade out and die within a few weeks, without any evidence of infection or disease.”
I was writing a story on the Pawong for Wide, a cultural magazine with interests so broad that no one knew quite how to think about it. From one month to the next, I’d seen it shuffle around among the entertainment, politics, and women’s-interests sections of the newsstand.
The Pawong were a small tribal society that my boyfriend, Glauber, had told me about a couple of months earlier. Glauber is a name, in case you’re wondering, and it was Glauber’s name. I’m not just making it up for the sake of the story. Glauber had been an anthropology minor in college, and random facts about faraway cultures would pop into his head on occasion, usually over dinner, when there was a lull in our conversation. “The Mehinakus are so strict about female and male task attribution that a bachelor would rather go hungry than cook for himself,” he would say, or “The Aztecs believed that the goal of war was to take prisoners, not kill the enemy, and that’s why they lost to the Spanish so quickly.”
What he’d told me about the Pawong, though, on the night we broke up had been meant not as edifying trivia but as an insult, I think, even though I hadn’t taken it that way—as I said, I take nothing personally. We’d just had an argument about a four-day weekend: Glauber wanted to go visit his parents in Burgundy, I wanted to stay in Paris. “How surprising,” Glauber had said. “What is it now? Is it the thought of getting on a train full of strangers that frightens you? Or is it seeing an old man on the verge of death?” (Glauber’s father had cancer.)
“You know what it is,” I’d said. “I can’t sleep in the country.”
“You hate it.”
“I don’t hate the country,” I’d said. “It’s just that I get bored there during the day. And then at night I get scared.”
“So it is fear,” Glauber had said. Triumph on the is. “It’s always fear with you.” He’d closed his eyes at this point, which was something that he did whenever he planned a sentence more than four words long. “There’s this tribe somewhere in South Asia, the Pawong, if I remember it right, and they don’t understand war or even conflict at all. Neighboring tribes come and slaughter them and rape their women, and the Pawong don’t know to defend themselves or retaliate. It doesn’t even occur to them that they could respond.”
“I can’t see how this relates to Burgundy,” I’d said.
“The Pawong,” Glauber had resumed, eyes still closed, “live in fear that their enemies will come back, but they don’t prepare for it. They just dread it and dread it, and teach their children to dread it, and then, when their children are properly scared, it makes them incredibly proud. My son is so much more afraid than your son, they boast to their friends and neighbors. They value fear more than we do courage, or anything else, really. You would be right at home with the Pawong.”
“You want me to go there and get raped and slaughtered?” I’d said.
“No,” he’d said. “I think you should go live with the Pawong and be their god.”
Within the hour, he’d packed and left, and although it’s true that things hadn’t been great between us for a while—we’d run out of things to say to each other, and our silences were, frankly, boring—I would have appreciated a little notice, a little time to get used to the idea of breaking up before the breakup’s implementation.
A few days after he left, I started researching the Pawong and stumbled on an article about warless societies by Professor Croze. She had only a few lines about the Pawong, but they confirmed what Glauber had said:
Shyness, fear, and timidity are highly valued among the Pawong. “To be angry is not to be human,” goes one of their sayings, “but to be fearful is.” Pawong children are taught to express and show their fear to their peers, as well as to avoid conflict at all costs. The Pawong flee at the first sign of danger, and don’t see a need to make excuses. “We are frightened,” they say, and that is explanation enough.
Two months after reading these lines, I was in Professor Croze’s office asking the obvious questions.
“How did the Pawong accept your presence amongst them if they’re so fearful? Aren’t they afraid of strangers?”
“Well, I guess I wasn’t that scary!” Professor Croze answered with a burst of laughter. “I mean, look at me!”
Because she asked directly, I had no choice but to look up from my notebook. I wondered if whatever was on her tongue was contagious and if she was going to die.
“In fact, they were way more concerned about my own lack of fear in coming to them than anything else,” she went on. “They said, ‘But what if we had been bad people? Did you think about that?’ They couldn’t understand why I would leave my home and take chances staying with them. They thought I was brave, which made me weirdly proud—except they see no value in bravery. They think bravery is a form of stupidity, actually.”
Leaving Professor Croze’s office, I got lost in the same maze of university hallways that I’d always had trouble navigating as a student. I’d noticed, back then, that the more prestigious the professors the more carefully hidden their offices were. I assumed that the Sorbonne ranked Professor Croze fairly highly, because her office had been particularly hard to find. In my time, there had been a legendary office, Professor Sarrazin’s, and every year I would hear of a student having a meltdown in some hallway during registration week, trying to find it. The “Sarrazin triangle” had direct consequences on Professor Allan’s class enrollment—that’s how I knew about it. I’d taken Allan’s class my first semester. His office was the one you stumbled upon when, after looking in vain for Sarrazin’s, you were ready to give up on “Venice in the Middle Ages” to take a shot at “Advanced Latin.” Allan’s class was always full.
At the restaurant, waiting for my sister, I refrained from Googling “white spots tongue.” My sister wasn’t late, by the way. I’m always early. This used to drive Glauber crazy. “Nothing horrible will happen if you’re a little late,” he’d say. I don’t understand why people say things like that. I mean, I know the chances that my being late would lead to any catastrophic consequences are low, maybe exactly as low as my being early would, actually—I don’t know, I’m not a math person—but I’m sure they’re not zero, they’re not “nothing,” so why say anything at all?
“Sorry I’m late,” Delphine said. “My last dog took forever to die.”
“You’re not late,” I said.
“I know. It was just a way to introduce the fact that my last dog took forever to die and maybe fish for a little sympathy.”
Delphine is a veterinarian, which is not something that she’s dreamed of doing since she was a little girl, contrary to what people assume when she informs them of her profession. As a little girl, Delphine wanted to be a secretary at a travel agency. We both did.
“I’m sorry about your dog,” I said.
“Well, it wasn’t mine,” Delphine said. “But, yeah, thanks. I treated that guy his whole life. It’s never easy, I guess.”
Delphine is married with two kids, so we never talk about her life over lunch. She’s the first to admit that it’s a boring topic.
“You need to get back on the horse,” she told me, after asking about my sex life since Glauber. She sat up straighter, scanned the room for a horse.
“I liked Glauber,” I said. “I think it’s healthy to mourn for a little while.”
“You didn’t like Glauber,” Delphine said. “No one likes Glauber. Please don’t get back together with Glauber.”
I’d had an erotic dream about Glauber a few nights before (telescopic hard-on, lavender fields) and had made the mistake of telling Delphine about it. She’d invested it with meaning. Drawn conclusions.
I guess it wasn’t really a mistake. I tell Delphine everything.
“Glauber wasn’t all bad,” I said.
“He wore oxfords sockless.”
“He was rich, though.”
“He wasn’t that rich,” Delphine said. “And you don’t care about money as much as you think you do. I mean, you don’t travel, you don’t smoke, you don’t eat meat . . . you’re literally allergic to most jewelry.” She paused, knowing she was forgetting a major money pit that didn’t concern me. “You don’t have dreams of any kind,” she added, not at all definitively, going high-pitched on the word “kind” and leaving her sentence suspended there, in the hope that I would contradict it.
“Sorry, still rerouting.”
I had nothing. Rather, my dreams were so humble that normal people would have considered them laughable. My dreams were not to get murdered, not to suffer a ludicrous death, not to think about death all the time, to live in an apartment small enough that I could see all of it from anywhere I stood. (I had already fulfilled that last dream.) I was about to capitulate when I saw Professor Allan, twenty years older than when I’d last seen him but still unmistakably Professor Allan, walk into the restaurant. Since we were close to the university, this wasn’t hard to believe, but because I’d just thought about him after so many years spent not thinking about him the surprise made me yell his name across the room. Allan turned in our direction. He looked at my face, and then right past it, to see if there was someone else behind our table. There was nothing behind our table but a chalkboard listing the daily specials. Allan walked over to us, squinting the whole way, as if he could crush my features into recognition.
“You probably don’t remember me,” I said when he was close enough to hear. “I took your class about twenty years ago.”
“Oh. Yes. You’ve been long forgotten then.” Allan relaxed his eyes.
“I wasn’t a very noticeable student to begin with,” I said. “Although, once, I made you and the whole classroom laugh by mistranslating clavicula Salomonis as ‘Solomon’s clavicle.’ ”
“Oh . . . of course I remember you.” His voice softened. “Of course, of course . . . Julie, right?”
“I’m just the sister,” Delphine said, although no one had asked her anything.
The translation fiasco appeared to have replaced me in Allan’s memory, but his change of tone seemed to indicate that he also remembered me as the poor Julie whose parents had died during her freshman year. My parents had been poisoned by their water heater—carbon monoxide—and people tended to remember that because it had happened on the same day that terrorists had bombed the Saint-Michel Métro station, right next to the Sorbonne. I’d been in Allan’s class when the bombs had gone off.
“I’m guessing you didn’t pursue a career in ancient languages,” Allan said. “What are you doing these days?”
He put his hand on my shoulder. Poor little Julie.
“I’m a journalist,” I said, a little embarrassed.
“An essayist,” Delphine corrected, encouragingly. I realized that she thought I was interested in Allan on a sexual level. I’d yelled his name pretty loud, I guess.
“She’s actually writing an essay in defense of ancient languages,” Delphine went on. “With the new education reform and all.”
“Oh, are you really?” Allan asked. It was unclear whether he’d picked up on Delphine’s matchmaking signals or was just feigning interest in my career because he thought my life had been ruined forever during one of his classes. “Maybe you should interview me.”
“That’s a great idea,” Delphine said.
“Over lunch, perhaps?” Allan suggested. His hand was still on my shoulder.
“Why not?” I said, only to please Delphine.
“She might never have been good at actual Latin,” Delphine said, “but she was always so fascinated by the Ancient Roman life style, you know? When we were kids, she read all the ‘Astérix’ comics and actually cheered for the Romans. I always thought that was the weirdest thing. Same thing happened later, when she read the Bible.”
“Is that so?” Allan said.
It wasn’t so, of course. Delphine had just invented a family memory right there on the spot so that I would have a better chance of sleeping with the guy. I’d never read the Bible, or “Astérix,” though I knew that the Romans weren’t supposed to be the good guys in either. As a child, I’d mostly just played travel agent with Delphine; we’d take turns picking up a disconnected phone and setting up imaginary people with imaginary trips. Some of our clients went to Rome, sure, but my recommendations to them were only ever make-believe pizza places.
Allan and I exchanged phone numbers, and he went to have a quick coffee at the counter before his next class.
“Is there something on my tongue?” I said, and stuck it out.
“Dude, put that back in,” Delphine said. “We’re in public.”
“Is there?”
“Why would there be?”
I told her about Professor Croze’s tongue and requested her medical opinion.
“Could be papillomavirus,” Delphine said. “Or just a fungus. Were the spots cauliflower-like in shape?”
“Are funguses airborne?”
“Come on. Eat your vegetables. You’re fine. You don’t have tongue fungus, just as you didn’t have Parkinson’s last week or psoriasis last summer.”
I wasn’t fully convinced that I didn’t have Parkinson’s. Sometimes I held both my arms straight in front of me and the right one shook a little. Glauber thought I worried too much. “It’s useless,” he’d say. “I can assure you that no human beings ever wished, on their deathbed, that they’d spent more time worrying.” “Except what if they died crushed by their own house?” I would say. “Don’t you think their last thought would be something along the lines of Gee! I should’ve worried about that sag in the ceiling more actively!” Glauber would dismiss this kind of response on the ground that, sure, there were always exceptions, but that we should be led by the rule and not be ruled by the exception. I hated when he said that, because he made it sound as if the reason I kept looking for exceptions was that I thought of myself as exceptional, whereas I believed, on the contrary, that it was my ordinariness itself that made me a better candidate for exceptional scenarios. Exceptional people died of cancer and heart attacks; it was the nobodies who suffered stupid and puzzling demises, to make up for the lack of surprises in their lives. At least, that had been my parents’ experience. I suppose they’d even been given a double dose of last-minute reparations, having died an uncommon death on an exceptional day.
Delphine called me a “good girl” after I finished my vegetables. She used the same tone that she used on her dogs sometimes, but that was all right. She loved her dogs.
Back at the office, I had a voice mail from Allan—I’d given him only my work number, in an attempt to keep things professional—informing me of his lunchtime availability for the following week. He didn’t sound very busy, which made things hard. Coming up with an excuse or two is always doable, but no one believes
you when you line up four in a row. Perhaps I could agree on the latest possible date he’d offered and then follow it with a last-minute “something came up.” Just as I was deciding to do so, I realized that I’d forgotten to ask Professor Croze to confirm my suspicion that the Pawong people, owing to the disdain they felt toward bravery, didn’t have a word for “cowardice.” I’d noticed that, to readers eager to learn something about a different culture, the lack, in said culture, of a concept that they were familiar with was more likely to pique their interest than any other factoid. A foreign language having a single word to define something that they would need a whole sentence to express in their mother tongue would also be, conversely, a pleasure-giving piece of information. Highly quotable. That’s why everyone knows about Schadenfreude and how the Eskimos have forty-something words for snow. That’s why, even though I don’t know much about Japanese culture, I do know that the Japanese have a word for one of my habits, which is to buy books, pile them up, and never read them (tsundoku). No word for “cowardice” in the Pawong language would mean that I had found my lede. I wondered what Glauber would think of my article. He’d probably think that I was a coward for going to an old—maybe even dying—professor to investigate, and not straight to the Pawong themselves.
“What’s up?” I heard Delphine say on the other end of the line.
Sometimes my sister answered the phone before I even realized that I was calling her.
“Do you think I should go to Malaysia?” I asked. “For my article?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I was thinking maybe it would make for a better story.”
I heard Delphine take a deep breath. “I have trouble believing you would consider leaving a city you haven’t got two miles away from in more than a decade for the sake of an article. You don’t even like your job. Is someone threatening you? Does your boss want you to go?”
“No. It was just a thought.”
“Did that thought pop into your head at a moment when, I don’t know, you were mulling over grand gestures to win Glauber back?”
“I like my job. I just happen to think it’s a very poorly considered one.”
“Fucking Glauber,” Delphine said.
“Everybody thinks they could be cultural journalists, because they, too, can write sentences and have opinions. Investigative journalism, on the other hand . . . I don’t know. I was just thinking maybe it’s time to take my career to another level. Nothing to do with Glauber. Glauber wanted me to go to the Pawong and be their god, for fuck’s sake.”
I was almost starting to convince myself that the idea of going to Malaysia had sprouted from my professional drive.
“You’d make such a terrible god,” Delphine said. “You’d never know what to command. You’d beg for everyone’s opinion all the time.”
“Gods don’t command,” I said. “They just sit there and get adored.”
“You wouldn’t be too comfortable with adoration, either,” she said.
I tried to picture a life among the Pawong. I knew that they lived deep in the forest, so I sat my imagined self on an ancient tree, whose dark trunk had been carved out as a throne for me. I don’t know many kinds of trees, so I pictured a cedar, even though I’m pretty sure cedars aren’t indigenous to Malaysia. Its massive roots popped out of the ground here and there to make sporadic benches on which the Pawong sat facing me. They looked frightened and wore only headbands and penile sheaths. I didn’t picture any women. It would probably smell divine inside a cedar tree, I thought, but I realized that I couldn’t imagine scents.
“Maybe I could get used to adoration,” I said to Delphine. “It’s not like the total lack of it has made my life too terribly exciting so far.”
“Life’s not supposed to be exciting,” Delphine said. “Only certain things are, like a good soccer game, or when you fall in love and stuff. Other than that, the way life works is it gets you used to absolutely everything too fast, so that it becomes harder and harder to really enjoy anything other than maybe the repetitiveness itself, if you’re one of those weird people, and that’s that.”
“But life contains those exciting things you list. It contains the soccer matches and the men worth loving, so why should we not expect the whole thing to be exciting?”
“That’s very poor logic,” Delphine said. “A bottle contains wine, yet the bottle itself is not exciting. Sometimes you’ll get a nice view from a train window, but then the same train goes through miles and miles of shit. The train is not—”
“I get your point,” I said. “There’s never a need for more than one metaphor.”
“I wasn’t sure where that last one was going, anyway.”
“Hi! I’m Carl, from Amazon fulfillment. Would you mind telling us how you feel about your online shopping experience?”
I was still partly in my cedar-Pawong fantasy. I wrote a brief e-mail to Professor Croze, asking for pictures, and Delphine must have read part of my mind, because she asked me what the Pawong looked like. “Maybe fear makes them incredible lovers,” she said.
I’d been told I was a fantastic lay over the years, and after a while I’d decided to believe it. Maybe I had my pathological fear of everything to thank for it.
“I have to go now,” I told Delphine. “To Group.”
“No one has to go to Group,” she said. We hung up.
Group. I found it unfair of Glauber to have left me on the ground that I was afraid of everything, since we’d met at Group: a group for people suffering from general anxiety disorder, which I’d joined after dropping out of the group for hypochondriacs, because it didn’t encompass all my worries. Glauber’s anxieties had been only a temporary affliction—they plagued him after he found out about his father’s cancer—and he was soon cured, but still. Where had his empathy gone? He’d behaved like one of these poor people who become rich and start looking down on the poor with more contempt than even the born-rich do, because they’re convinced that anyone can decide to stop being poor (they did it!), that it’s all hard work and will power and nothing to do with luck, and that, therefore, poor people are just lazy and weak-minded.
I usually didn’t share much at Group. I mostly went to take comfort in the knowledge that I wasn’t the only person who couldn’t help thinking, whenever she bought a sweater, that she might be found dead in it. Group allowed me to really know where I stood on the scale of worried people, whereas a shrink never told you anything about other patients.
“I’m really worried that I might go blind,” Ilse said at Group that evening. “I can’t think of a worse fate. I know certain blind people are very happy and all, but I don’t think I would have the inner resources to be one of them. And, if I have to be completely honest, which I guess is the purpose here, I think I’d rather be able to see than be happy.”
Patrick nodded once and deeply at this confession.
“I never believed my thoughts originated in my brain, the way everyone else does,” Ilse went on. “Or that my emotions came from my stomach. I feel like all of it comes from my eyes, you know? If I close my eyes longer than a blink”—she closed her eyes here to illustrate—“nothing happens. I don’t feel anything. I can’t think. So how would I manage without eyesight? And how would I watch my shows?”
That second question, which I believe was asked in jest, caused Helena to talk about her inability to commit to a TV show, out of fear that she would die before every plot line was resolved, even though she was in perfect health. Patrick told her about a Web site that streamed short films for free. “World-class directors,” he said. “Foreign. Never more than thirty minutes long.” As he was offering to give Helena the name of the Web site, his phone started ringing and he apologized profusely for forgetting to turn the sound off. He couldn’t find the phone, though. Manically rummaging through the mess of his briefcase, he kept saying “Shush” in its general direction.
“Maybe you need to take that?” Colette offered, in her signature nice-but-firm tone. Colette was the moderator.
“I’m so very sorry,” Patrick said, and at that point I felt my own phone vibrate in my pocket. I wouldn’t have looked at it if my neighbor, Yann, hadn’t looked at his. It was a text message from Delphine. “are you ok?” the text read.
“There’s been a bombing at the Sorbonne,” Yann informed us all, in an admittedly shaky voice—but no more shaky than the one he’d used, week after week, to talk about his fear of bay windows and open water.
“What do you mean, there’s been a bombing at the Sorbonne?” Ilse asked, as if the sentence could have meant anything other than the sum of its components. “everything ok,” I texted Delphine. “i’m at group.”
“stay where you are”
“you?”
“still at work. kids at the nanny’s, seb at office”
This quick exchange reassured me of the safety of pretty much everyone I cared about. I’d changed phone numbers after publishing a damaging profile of a National Front official (not that he’d threatened or harassed me, but I was concerned that he might) and got rid of Glauber’s number in the process (it had felt like the mature thing to do), so I couldn’t check on him. I wasn’t even sure that I would have. Everyone in Group was riveted to his screen, though; they had longer lists of loved ones to get through. I broke our circle to go stand by the window. The little square park, three stories below, was empty. Night was falling, and in the building across the street a TV was lit behind every other window.
“It was a long time coming,” Ilse said.
“What?”
“The attack. They’ve been threatening to hurt us for a while.”
I wouldn’t have bet on Ilse being second to run out of people to check on, but there she was, looking through the same window as I was.
“I guess you’re right,” I said.
My phone started showing concern for my survival. It blinked with government-issued injunctions to take shelter immediately and await further instructions. Notifications from news agencies gorged the home screen with partial and temporary information. Twenty-nine confirmed deaths. Mostly students. Bomb had gone off in the library, open 24 / 7 and, during winter finals, packed at all hours. A suspect wearing black gloves seen fleeing the scene. Two explosions, actually. A possible second suspect on the run. List of subway stations closed to the public.
“You’re a journalist, right?” Ilse said. “Shouldn’t you have more information than us about what’s going on?”
“I’m not that kind of journalist,” I said.
“What kind are you?”
“How do you know I’m a journalist?” I asked. I couldn’t remember ever having disclosed my profession at Group.
“Oh, Glauber told me. You know, after you guys got together, he started coming to Group on Mondays, so that you wouldn’t be in the same circle of sharing.”
“I know he did,” I said.
“It’s not advisable for couples or friends to participate in the same circle of sharing,” Ilse recited.
“I didn’t know he’d shared about me.”
“Well he didn’t exactly share about you. We just got to talking after Group now and then, you know, over cookies and tea. It was more like private conversations.”
Glauber had never told me about lingering after Group.
Behind us, Helena burst into tears. I checked my phone. Another bomb had gone off, this time in the lobby of a hotel near the American Embassy. Possible hostage situation. Patrick retrieved a crumpled paper bag from his briefcase and started breathing into it.
“He seemed to be quite taken with you,” Ilse resumed. “Glauber. I was surprised to learn you’d broken up.”
“And how did you learn that?” I said.
“He came here last week. We hadn’t seen him in months.”
“Did his anxiety come back?”
“It’s unclear,” Ilse said. “His father just died. He said he was coming for closure, because we’d helped him a lot, you know, dealing with the whole thing, but I think he’ll be back.”
“You seem pretty happy about it,” I said.
“Always nice to see familiar faces.”
I received a text from an unknown number. “Are you all right?” it said. The signature followed immediately: “This is Bernard Allan, by the way.” I don’t think I’d ever known his first name. Only a few seconds had elapsed between getting the mysterious text and the revelation of its author’s identity, but I’d somehow managed to convince myself that it was from Glauber, that he’d tracked down my new number. The disappointment made me actively hate poor Allan. Why was he writing to me? Didn’t he have actual friends? How had he found my number? Why hadn’t Glauber been able to?
“Everything all right?” Ilse asked. “Did you hear from everyone you might be worried about?”
“And others,” I said.
“Do you think this is the end of the world?” Ilse said, and she wasn’t looking out the window or vaguely at the horizon, in the way I assumed people did when they asked questions like that, but straight at me.
“Glauber told me you had an arrangement,” she went on. “He told me that when you started dating you agreed on a place to meet if the end of the world was coming and you weren’t already together.”
Glauber hadn’t lied. We’d once had a conversation about a meeting place for the Apocalypse. We wanted to be out in the world when it collapsed. I can’t remember why.
“We actually had two,” I told Ilse. “Two places. In case the Apocalypse struck exactly our first meeting point.”
“Clever!”
“I thought so, too, at the time. It was Glauber’s suggestion. Very foresighted. But then it made it complicated to decide which of the two places to go to in the event—more than likely—of the Apocalypse not striking one of the agreed-upon meeting points. We thought we would have to go to the one that was farthest from ground zero, but I’m not always good at evaluating distances. Or, what if the end of the world started at different places simultaneously?”
“Yeah, like today, right? What would ground zero be? The university? Or that hotel?”
“Exactly.”
“I see,” Ilse said, and she broke eye contact. Our fellow-worriers were mumbling stories that, judging by their grave faces, involved us all dying in a very near future.
“Do you think he’s waiting for you?” Ilse asked. “At one of the two meeting points?”
“I sincerely doubt it,” I said. “I’m not so sure what’s happening right now qualifies as the Apocalypse. Also: we broke up.”
“Well, as of last week, he didn’t have a new girlfriend or anything. And he did ask about you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“There wasn’t much to say,” she said. “You never share.”
“I guess I don’t,” I said. “I come here to listen. Just listening helps.”
Ilse nodded to signify that she understood, but she squinted in a way that made it clear that what I was saying was all very abstract to her.
“Do you mind telling me what they were?” She was still nodding. “The rendezvous points?”
“Why? Do you want to go?”
“Keep your facial expressions where I can see them.”
I’d meant it as a joke, but Ilse was dead serious.
“If that’s O.K. with you, of course. I mean, it would have to be. Otherwise, I’d never know where to meet Glauber, anyway!”
I told her what the two meeting places were—the Nespresso boutique by my office and the nicer Nespresso boutique by the Luxembourg Gardens—and she just left. No one tried to stop her.
The Pawong wouldn’t have let me or Ilse leave without trying to stop us. They would have reminded us that the subways were closed, that subways were dangerous places, anyway, with all the germs, or that it was a long walk, that walking contained its own threats, like low-flying birds, or things falling from buildings (flowerpots, bodies), that we would expose ourselves to potential chemical fallout (none of the authorities seemed to be considering the possibility that the bombings were a chemical strike; I was), that Glauber wasn’t worth the trouble. And he wasn’t. Delphine, on the other hand, was alone at her practice, worrying about her children, her husband, me. Delphine wasn’t used to worrying the way I was.
As I walked, I forced myself to be amazed by the efficiency of those government warnings I kept receiving, forced myself to have grownup, level-one social thoughts about how our government, so divided, so pathetic, so disrespected, still had the power to send a message to us all, to have everyone, for a brief moment at least, be on the same page. Well, everyone but the terrorists, of course. And me. Although the terrorists were probably following instructions and hiding out, too. Chances of running into them were low.
My phone vibrated in my hand. It wasn’t Glauber.
“You didn’t respond to my text,” Allan said. “I’m worried.”
I answered something along the lines of “I’m fine,” but in a far more convoluted way. I’d answered Allan’s call only because it meant that I would have to talk, and hearing my voice shaping correct sentences dictated by my brain reassured me whenever I felt panicky. It meant that I was still there. An ambulance passed.
“What are you—walking around town?” Allan said. “Don’t you know what’s happening?”
“May I ask how you got my personal number?”
“I called your office.”
“And they just gave it to you?”
“I was worried,” he said.
“Eight hours ago, you didn’t even remember who I was.”
“Well, you’ve changed quite a bit. Last time I saw you, you were a teen-ager. But of course I remember you.”
“Only from a couple of faculty meetings they made you go to back in the day. How to deal with a bereaved student. Look, I’m not even writing an article on the second death of dead languages. I’m writing an article about the Pawong tribe. Unless you know anything about them, I don’t see a reason for us to have lunch.”
“Well, I read Croze’s books,” Allan said. “I’m worried about her, too, actually. She stays late at work sometimes. She’s not picking up her phone.”
It surprised me that Allan and Croze were friends. It always surprised me to find out that ugly old women had male friends.
“Her office is nowhere near the library,” I said, trying to reassure him. “Plus, this morning, her tongue was covered in white spots. Maybe she’s at home, nursing some kind of virus or something. Maybe she doesn’t even know what’s going on.”
“That’s just how her tongue is,” Allan said.
“Is it a fungus?”
“I don’t know, really. I think it’s just discolored.”
I was silent.
“I’ll ask her about it, if you want. If she ever picks up the phone. Would that leave you more inclined to have dinner with me?”
I don’t know which part of our conversation had got him thinking he could upgrade to dinner, but I appreciated his boldness.
“Only if whatever it is she has isn’t contagious,” I said.
I managed to have the phone call last exactly until I reached Delphine’s practice.
“i’m here, about to knock,” I texted Delphine. “don’t be afraid. it’s just me.”
She came to the door before I knocked.
“Do you still keep beers in your vaccine fridge?” I asked.
We made our way to the consult room and Delphine answered my question by opening the black drawer at the bottom of a small refrigerator full of vials.
“Help yourself,” she said.
There was a dog on her consult table, a big freckled thing with front paws the size of smaller dogs, on which its head rested. The other two were missing. The other two paws.
“Her owner left when she got the news,” Delphine explained. “Something about getting home to her kids. I was about to put her dog down, and then she just left.”
“Are you supposed to wait until she comes back to do the injection?”
“She said I should just go ahead and take care of it. She wrote me a check and everything.”
The dog shivered when I touched its head. “You’re going to die,” I told the dog, but I said it nicely. “It’s O.K. to be afraid.”
“That’s just mean,” Delphine said. “Give her a break.”
“She’s standing up for you,” I told the dog. “You’re in good hands.”
Delphine had been watching the news on her desktop computer. She’d muted it when we came in, but her eyes were still drawn to images I couldn’t see from where I stood. She’d had three beers already.
“How long does she have, if you don’t put her down?” I asked.
“One, maybe two months of increasingly horrible pain.”
The dog started licking my forearm. Her tongue was freckled like her body.
“Can you turn the screen around?” I asked Delphine. I wanted to watch the news, too.
“The wires are too tight, actually. Come sit by me.”
Delphine turned the sound on and dragged another chair over. I didn’t want to leave the dog alone, so I carried her to the chair and nestled her hind-leg stumps into my lap.
The news showed people who had gathered on the security perimeter of the university. Some held flowers, as was customary, I guess, since I’d seen on TV other groups of people in the aftermath of other catastrophes hold flowers. I’d never questioned the practice before, but, having just walked through empty streets for more than forty minutes, I wondered where they’d found their bouquets. As far as I could tell, all the shops were closed. Delphine and I had had a real hard time finding flowers for our parents’ funeral, because so few florists had been able to meet the demands that the attack on the Saint-Michel station had engendered.
There was a picture of them, our parents, on Delphine’s desk. The dog yawned.
“Is she in pain right now?” I asked Delphine.
“She doesn’t seem to be.”
The dog had no idea what was going on. TV had bought her two more hours of life.
“Maybe we can wait a little to put her down then, no?”
“You mean until the next time she has a seizure? Like, in two days?” Delphine looked at the dog, then at the news, then at me. “Sure,” she said. “If you take her home until then.”
My phone chimed. An e-mail from Professor Croze. “Here you go!” it read. She’d attached four black-and-white pictures. A Pawong house, a Pawong dinner, two Pawong men fishing, a Pawong family. They didn’t look afraid. Or cowed. Or meek. Or, for that matter, friendly. They actually looked kind of scary.
I texted Allan to let him know that Professor Croze was safe, and that he should e-mail her. The news now showed images of windowsills all over town on which people had lit candles. I had candles at home, I thought. There’s a certain type of man who thinks that scented candles are a romantic gift. Glauber was one of them.
Around 6 a.m., after a tired news anchor announced that two suspects had been arrested, I walked Delphine to her nanny’s, then home. Her husband and kids asked me to stay for breakfast, and they wanted to know everything about the dog I was dragging in a dog-wheelchair, but I told them that I needed some sleep, that I would come over for dinner instead.
Glauber was waiting for me in the hallway of my building, by the mailboxes. He apologized for showing up unannounced, but he’d had no other way to make sure that I was all right. “You changed your number,” he said, and then sneezed. He was allergic to dogs, but it seemed a bit fast-acting for an allergy.
“I’m still at the same e-mail address,” I said.
“Who checks their e-mail during a terrorist attack?”
“Did you see Ilse last night?” I asked. “She told me about your father. I’m really sorry.”
“Why would I have seen Ilse?”
“She was looking for you.”
I invited him upstairs. We fucked, but it was meaningless. Nothing more came of it. I didn’t even tell Delphine about it. After he left, I fed the dog leftover mashed potatoes and lit some candles.
Four days later, the dog had a seizure. Delphine came over to give her the injection. I held her while she died. I felt her getting heavier almost instantly, and her body seemed to shrink in my arms, compacting the way that my winter clothes did when I vacuum-sealed them for storage each spring. She would take up less and less room from now on. I held her until I was completely sure that she wouldn’t wake in a panic, and then for a few more seconds after that.
We buried her in Delphine’s yard that night, and Delphine kept the wheelchair at her office, to give to the next dog who needed it.
来源：纽约客（2017.01.02）
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