Chloe Aridjis - Asunder

Lying there, just lying there . And yet, from the moment he appeared to the moment he departed, Pierre exerted his influence. How could it be that someone who spent most of his time immobile could have such a strong hold on my friend? From good morning to good night, Daniel was in some kind of a trance. It didn’t matter whether Pierre was awake or asleep or, as it appeared most of the time, somewhere in between. Was the temperature in the living room warm enough, Daniel wondered, or should he turn up the heating? Would the sound of the coffee grinder wake him, or the toaster’s chime?

Afternoons, Pierre tended to awaken as if by some inner alarm clock. From one second to the next the unwound toy on our sofa would start to move and sit up, and Daniel would rush over to offer him coffee, which he would down like a shot of whisky. After Pierre bathed, another activity he relished judging by the time it took him, they would slip on their coats and set out. Daniel would ask whether I wanted to come along. Half of me wanted to say yes, but then I’d imagine walking alongside them while they discussed their business, every now and then turning, out of belated courtesy, to ask me a question, and I decided I’d rather be on my own. Well, what did I expect; the balance of a ship is always tipped when someone new comes onboard.

And so I did what I had always done best. I stood back and observed, withdrew into the quiet, neutral zone that felt comfortably familiar, registering voices and movements without interfering.

Yet as the days wore on, that long, smooth expanse of patience began to curl up at the edges. Often I’d leave the two men to their hermitage and go for walks on my own. I spent an inordinate amount of time window-shopping and came to know the ornaments and mannequins in the shopfronts near us quite well, imagining a secret dialogue between the shiny black marble of the local undertakers, the bright red machines at the twenty-four-hour laundrette and the pouting plastic heads in the wig shop. I also walked further, through lavish gardens and humbler squares, down imposing avenues and narrow streets full of stalls, and entered every church I passed to warm myself for a few minutes.

Pierre stole six days from our twelve in Paris, large black Xs in the calendar. He turned Daniel’s attention away from me and I found myself wanting it back. Christmas came and went, or maybe it was New Year’s, in any case, a night like any other apart from what our guest contributed to dinner, four bottles of wine with fancy labels and a bag of white-capped gingerbread biscuits he must have found at a shop on rue Mouffetard unless he brought them from Sweden. We lit candles, worked our way through a chestnut casserole, then spent two hours tidying up while Pierre sat pensively on the sofa, saucer balanced on knee, smoking one cigarette after the other.

Late one morning when Daniel was out I decided to vacuum the flat. We had yet to do any cleaning and I’d begun noticing large dustballs in the corners that floated up whenever someone walked past. If I didn’t clean, no one would. I made my way down the corridor to the living room where Pierre lay asleep on the sofa. At first I avoided the area but after cleaning all around it, including the invisible moat encircling Daniel’s desk, I slowly advanced towards Pierre, noticing a few especially large clumps of dust by his briefcase. Despite the machine’s loud rumble he didn’t stir.

Once I finished, I returned the vacuum cleaner to the cupboard and went to have another look at Pierre. It was fascinating to see how profoundly he slept. I had never witnessed such deep sleep in my life, a sleep that seemed to block out the present so determinedly, it was hard to know in what time zone he existed.

My eyes fell on the briefcase. There it sat, just waiting to be opened and inspected. Tiny screaming devils jumped up and down in my head and, despite never having trespassed in my life, I couldn’t help but listen. The latches made a snapping sound. Pierre didn’t react. My fingers trembled as I lifted the lid.

Yet inside I found no secrets, at least as far as I could tell, only a small, personal arsenal for survival: eight opaque medicine bottles with labels in Swedish, two bundles of addressed envelopes from foreign lands, three felt-tipped pens, a couple of books in French by strange-looking characters named Michaux and Daumal, a thick leather address book with loose pages, six bags of liquorice coins, and a red plastic comb with two missing teeth.

Pierre mumbled something behind me. I jumped up and turned. His eyes were still closed, he was in the exact same position as before. I quickly relatched the briefcase and returned it to its place. Pierre mumbled again, something like turkey gurgling in various languages, a kind of sleeptalking Esperanto, and I took it as a warning, issued from beyond, to stop prying.

I hurried away just in time. Daniel was at the door, key turning in lock.

The following morning I rose to discover the men had gone out. Alone, I cast my eyes around the flat and after a full wander was gripped by an overwhelming magnetism, as if someone had thrown a lasso round my waist and was pulling me, towards Daniel’s desk. Until then it had been silently and unconditionally off limits but now, as the day before, I felt entitled to explore.

The desk gave off an aromatic wooden smell as if the drawers were full of shavings. A few books in Slovenian lay piled in a corner beside a very smooth, very white stone that seemed to have come from the sea. Closer to the centre were Daniel’s implements, a French-English dictionary and four other books, a stack of manila folders, the mug holding pencils and pens.

I picked up a lined page torn out from his notebook, from what I could decipher mostly scrawls about the snow leopard, and was wondering how it would look shredded into smaller pieces, half a word here, half a word there, when I was distracted by a book. Dozens of pages had been marked with strips of paper that emerged from the top and sides. What drew me to it wasn’t the obsessive marking, however, which I’d often seen in books at Daniel’s flat in London, but the cover. It was an explosion of white against black, like a self-combusting, dust-cloaked star: the ghostly spasm of a woman in a bed engulfed by the darkness of a room.

Intrigued, I drew the book closer, opening it to a random page. Upon seeing the first pictures I was so startled I almost took a step back. Inside, dozens of black and white photographs of somewhat savage women, much more intense than the women I’d been seeing on the street, rose to greet me. Most of them wore nightgowns or else fitted dresses or two-piece outfits that called to mind brothel residents from another era. They stood, sat or lay in bizarre positions, one with her back arched into a bridge, another swooning in a chair with her right leg stretched outwards and her wrist twisted counterclockwise. One woman stuck out her tongue to the left, another smiled dementedly into the distance. Another sat with folded arms and a crooked mouth while disembodied hands jabbed pins into her temples. Another had a face like an empty cage, her agitated hands like the birds that had flown away. Others stood in odd, rigid positions, their arms at ninety-degree angles to their trunks. In every picture there was something deviant, one body part that refused to conform, like branches rejecting the sun.

The text was in French but I didn’t need language to read the faces and bodies lost in disorienting studio black. Unframed, the figures floated like dying stars at the centre of the page, or, pinned to a bed, like cosmic butterfly nebulae without the symmetry. As much as I tried, I couldn’t understand who or what they were, what all this energy, white against black and body against bed, could mean.