Franck Thilliez: Syndrome E

They got into the car. Sharko turned the ignition and pulled out.

“Who should I talk to about my hotel room? I know I sound like a broken record, but I want a large one, with a real bathtub.”

Ludovic Sénéchal lived behind the Marcq-en-Baroeul racetrack, in a calm town right next to Lille. Discreet neighborhood, “contemporary”-style single-family brick house, lawn small enough so you wouldn’t spend your entire Saturday mowing the grass. Lucie raised her eyes toward the upstairs window, a wry smile on her face. It was in that charming little room that they’d made love the first time. A kind of online dating package: you meet for fake, then for real, you sleep together, and you see how it goes.

She’d seen. Ludovic was a good man in every respect—serious, attentive, with a heap of other sterling qualities—but he was definitely lacking in the thrills department. Quiet little life spent watching movies, putting in his time at the Social Security office, then watching more movies. Not to mention a real tendency to sink into moods. She had a hard time imagining him as the future father of her twins, the one who’d cheer them on at dance competitions or take them bike riding.

Lucie slid the key into the slot, but saw that the door hadn’t been locked. It was easy to guess why: in his panic, Ludovic had left everything as it was. She entered the house, bolting the door behind her. It was large and handsome, modern, with all the room she and her girls lacked. Someday, perhaps…

She remembered where to find the cellar. Their private movie screenings, with beer and freshly made popcorn, seemed somehow memorable, timeless. Walking down the hallway, she came across broken or toppled objects. She could easily imagine Ludovic feeling his way upstairs, completely in the dark, knocking everything over before he managed to get her on the phone.

Lucie went down the flight of stairs that led to the mini-cinema. Nothing had changed since last year. Red carpeting on the walls, the odor of old rugs, seventies ambience… It had its charm. In front of her, the pearlescent screen quivered under the white light from the projector. She opened the door to the minuscule projection room, which was hot as an oven, owing to the powerful xenon lamp. A loud hum filled the space, the take-up reel spun uselessly, the tail of the film clacked in the air at each rotation. Without thinking, Lucie pressed the fat red button of the power unit, a mastodon weighing 130 pounds. The rumbling finally stopped.

She flipped a switch and a neon light flickered. In the small room, empty film cans, tape recorders, and posters were stacked haphazardly. It was Ludovic to a T: an organized mess. She tried to remember how you went about loading a film: switch the feed and take-up reels by slipping them onto the projector arms, screw on the knobs to keep them in place, press MOTOR, align the film sprockets with the rollers… With all those buttons in front of her, the operation was more complicated than it appeared, but with a certain amount of luck Lucie managed to get the machine working. Through the magic of light and optics, the succession of still images would be transformed into fluid movement. The cinema was born.

Lucie switched off the neon light, closed the door of the elevated booth, and descended the three steps that led to the screening room. She remained standing against the back wall, her arms folded. This small, empty room, with its twelve green leatherette seats, had something profoundly depressing about it, just like its owner. Staring at the screen, Lucie couldn’t help feeling a vague apprehension. Ludovic had talked about a weird film, and now he was blind… What if there was something dangerous about these images, like… like a light so sharp it could ruin your vision? Lucie shook her head—that was idiotic. Ludovic had a brain tumor, end of story.

The beam of light titillated the darkness and briefly lit up the white rectangle. Then an image of uniform black spread over it, followed, five or six seconds later, by a white circle that settled into the upper right-hand corner. Suddenly, music rattled the walls—a jolly tune, the kind you used to hear in old street carnivals, among the wooden merry-go-rounds. Lucie smiled at the awkward splutters that were plainly audible; the sound track must have come from an old 45, or even a 78.

No title or credits. A woman’s face appeared in close-up in an oval that occupied the center of the screen. All around this oval, the image remained dark, a kind of grayish, almost black fog, as if the cameraman had put a mask over the lens. It made you feel like a voyeur peeping through a keyhole.

The actress struck Lucie as beautiful, hypnotic, with large, enigmatic eyes that gazed directly at the lens. She was about twenty, with dark lipstick, jet hair brushed back, a kiss curl on her forehead. One could glimpse the top of her checked suit and pure, immaculate neck. Lucie was reminded of those family photos, the kind you find inside austere pendants hidden in grandparents’ jewelry boxes. The actress didn’t smile and seemed a bit distant, the kind of femme fatale Hitchcock would have loved on his set. Her lips moved, briefly: she was saying something, but Lucie couldn’t make out what. Two fingers—a man’s fingers—entered the frame from the top and spread the lids of her left eye. Abruptly, jutting from the left, the blade of a scalpel slit the eye in two, rightward, in the throb of circus music and the clash of cymbals.

Lucie jerked her face away, teeth clenched. Too late: the image had struck her like a blow and it filled her with rage. She had nothing against B horror movies—she often rented them, especially on Saturday evenings—but she despised this method of suddenly splashing something horrific over the screen without any warning. It was cowardly and low.

Suddenly, the fanfare stopped.

Not a sound, other than the harrowing thrum of the projector.

Shaken, Lucie looked back at the screen. One more scene like that and she’d turn the whole thing off. After her time in the ER, she’d had quite enough of blood.

The tension had ratcheted up a notch. Lucie no longer felt quite so assured.

The projector continued to send out its cone of light. The next image was the soles of shoes. By a translatory movement, they receded into the distance. The sky shone reassuringly. A well-dressed little girl was on a swing, smiling broadly. It was shot in black and white, silent, even though the girl could be seen talking at various points. She had long, fair hair, blond no doubt, and she radiated liveliness. Her eyes caught the light; the shade patterns from the trees played over her skin. The lighting, the camera angles, and the expressions drawn from her childish face suggested that this was the work of a pro. Most of the time, tracking shots—he must have swiveled around with a handheld camera on his shoulder—stayed on the girl’s eye: clear, pure, and full of life, it palpitated, the pupil contracting and widening like a diaphragm. The white circle did not budge from its position in the upper right, and Lucie found it hard to ignore. It wasn’t that it attracted her—more like it irritated her. She couldn’t say why, but she felt a prickling in her stomach. The scene with the slit eye had definitely affected her.

Next came some very quick cuts focused on the girl. A jumble of disconnected sequences, as if in a dream, which could be situated in neither time nor space. Certain images skipped, probably because of the quality of the film. It flitted from the slit eye to the swing set, from the swing to the little girl’s hand playing with ants. Close-up of her childish mouth eating, of her eyelids opening and closing. Another, in which she petted two kittens in the grass for two or three minutes. She kissed them and held them tight against her, while fog—Lucie couldn’t help wondering about the technique used here—closed in around her. When the girl raised her eyes to the camera, she wasn’t acting. She was smiling in complicity, speaking to someone she knew. Once she came toward the camera and began spinning around and around. The image spun as well, accompanying the dance and, amid the fog, provoking a sensation of vertigo.