Paris Noir

ELLE ET MOI: LE SACRIFICE by JAKE LAMAR

S. has changed her hairstyle. It happened during the rentrée. Before, her chestnut brown mane had hung loosely, girlishly, about shoulder-length. Now she wears it quite short, swept away from her forehead, with a little upward flip at the bottom. It has an early 1960s look about it, this hairdo – and it accentuates her long, porcelain throat. She is no more and no less beautiful to me than before. In fact, S. is not really beautiful at all. But there is a great beauty about her, as Georges Guétary once said of Leslie Caron.

Anyway, I am devoted to her whatever she does with her hair. Because we are meant to be together. I know this. I’m serious: I know it. Like you know you’re you when you look in the mirror. I look at S. and know what our destiny is. And she looks right through me.

Maman mocks me, tells me I have no chance. I hadn’t told her my concept of destiny with S. All I said was that I thought S. could be interested in me. Someday.

‘That’s your medication talking,’ Maman sneered. ‘Do you really think she’d be interested in a mental case?’

This is what Maman always says when she wants to hurt me. But I know I am not a mental case. I was a troubled young man, yes. But I’m OK now. I am completely lucid. And Maman knows I’m not crazy. She wouldn’t call me a mental case if she thought I really was still sick. She says it now just to humiliate me, to rub my nose in the stinking shit of my past.

Besides, Maman doesn’t want me to have any women in my life. She wants me all to herself. She always has. Maybe that was my problem, eh? I’d like to have this all out with her, hold the mirror up to Maman. But I never do. I will, though. Someday. When I can afford my own apartment.

Maman and I live together in the same dreary flat in a characterless street in the fifteenth arrondissement. This is the apartment in which I grew up, the only home I have ever known; the apartment in which my father died, four years ago, back when I was a mental case, living in a hospital among other mental cases. Every once in a while, Maman tries to make me feel responsible, as if my psychiatric condition caused Papa’s heart attack. But she dare not harass me too much about that. Because we both know the truth. Maman always said this place was too small for three people. She lived alone with Papa during my first two years in the hospital. She lived completely alone, after my father’s death, for two years. She has now lived alone with me for two years and she definitely prefers me to utter solitude, as well as to Papa. She always preferred me to Papa. Would always rather touch me than touch Papa.

But we don’t talk about that.

I need to get my own place, some place where S. and I could be alone. Maman is wrong. I plan to tell S. everything about my past. And I am certain she will understand. She wouldn’t coddle me, wouldn’t excuse the errors of my youth. She would be firm yet compassionate. Who knows? It might even make me more interesting to her. Hey, I’m not just a twenty-four-year-old computer geek. I’m a twenty-four-year-old computer geek who spent four years in a mental hospital! I’m sure S. would begin to see my time in there the way I do. Some young people spend four years at university. Some spend four years in the military. I spent those formative years of eighteen to twenty-two in a nuthouse. This was my sentimental education.

The guys at work needle me for what they call my ‘crush’ on S. Not that I talk to them about it. Not really. But I have occasionally spoken about her to my colleagues, four computer geeks who – except for the fact that none of them ever spent four years in a mental hospital – are pretty much just like me. They don’t know I was hospitalised. They just think I spent four years jerking off, watching TV, reading sci-fi novels, surfing the Internet and playing video games while collecting unemployment hand-outs and sponging off my parents. That’s what a couple of them did for four years after high school. For me to think I might have a chance with S. (yes, it must be obvious, even without my explicitly stating it) I’m conveying to my colleagues that I consider myself somehow superior to them. So they must relentlessly take the piss out of me, try to cut me down to their size. Of course, I do consider myself superior to them. I don’t tell them that. Just as I don’t tell them that it is my destiny to be with S. Not a ‘crush’. Destiny.

My colleagues suffer from a common form of self-disgust. After all, we’re just five losers working in a computer repair service centre. We make very little money. We know we’re smart but it’s not like any of us got into one of the grandes écoles. We’re neither handsome nor charming. How dare I consider myself superior to any of them? Especially in terms of attractiveness to any woman, let alone a woman like S. My four colleagues and I, it must be said, are able to occupy a level field of sexual conquest. This is another source of their feelings of intra-office egalitarianism. We have all partaken of the Nerd Girl.

Ombline, the Nerd Girl, works in Accounting at the computer repair service centre. She is the female version of the five of us ‘technical consultants’. Smart but unsuccessful, not especially appealing to the eyes. She’s a bit overweight, a bit pimply. A little older than us computer geeks, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Still wears her slightly oily, slightly dandruffed mousy brown hair in juvenile pigtails. But Ombline, the Nerd Girl as my colleagues call her, is the seductress of the computer repair service centre. Even though she still lives with her parents, in a drab concrete slab of an apartment building in the downscale nineteenth arrondissement.

I learned Ombline’s modus operandi just as my four colleagues had before me. Ombline invites you out to dinner. She gets quite drunk and demonstrably horny. She invites you to her apartment. You quickly greet her aged parents, who are always sitting in front of the TV, looking just barely alive. You repair to Ombline’s bedroom. She puts on some loud music – usually the Rolling Stones, circa 1971. You have hurried, almost furtive sex, only half or three-quarters undressed. It’s like you’re both sixteen and worried that her parents might burst in at any second. Ombline comes quickly, easily, even faster than you. After some awkward post-coital fondling she tells you you have to leave. You say goodbye to the parents who are still sitting in the living room, clinging feebly to life, in front of the TV.

Over the past two years, Ombline the Nerd Girl has regularly fucked the technical staff in a sort of five-man rotation, one man at a time, three to four weeks between each man. So there is no jealousy. No sense of competition even, since none of us believes that Ombline is worth fighting for. And she seems perfectly happy with the situation.

Naturally, I haven’t told Maman about Ombline. I don’t know what Maman thinks about my sex life. She asks no questions. But then I got careless. I mentioned, rather subtly, I thought, my feelings for S. I could understand why Maman would get upset. It was, after all, my – how to describe it?… too intense - attraction to a young girl that got me sent to a mental hospital for four years.

But we don’t talk about that young girl.

What, I begin to wonder, is Maman’s game? On the one hand, she seems worried that I might confront S. with my feelings. On the other hand, Maman taunts me, seems to be trying to goad me into doing just that – confronting S.

And what would happen if I did? Would S. understand the intensity of my conviction? My utter certainty that we are destined to be joined together forever? I would have to explain to S. that these are rather recent feelings. Though I had admired her for many years, thinking of her, talking about her from time to time with my fellow inmates during the four years I spent in the hospital, it is only in the past few months that this idea of mine, this idea of our shared destiny, has blossomed into an article of absolute faith.

I know that if I did express all this to S., she would be taken aback. Probably be slow to embrace my point of view. It would take time for the idea to grow on her. She is, after all, a wise and mature woman, some years my elder. And she already has a man in her life. As far as I can see, she is trapped in an unhappy marriage. Though, of course, you can’t even call what they have a marriage, can you?

‘Send her an email,’ Maman says. ‘Tell her everything you feel. I know you. You’ll be more honest typing this all into a computer than you would ever be speaking to her face to face.’

‘I don’t even know her email address,’ I protest.

‘I’m sure it’s very easy to find,’ Maman retorts.

It’s my turn with the Nerd Girl. Lying on Ombline’s bed, in her adolescent’s bedroom – still decorated with Noir Desir posters from 1994 – each of us three-quarters undressed, sticky and sated, we say nothing for a long time. We’re listening to Mick Jagger warble ‘Wild Horses’ at high volume.

‘What would you think about starting a serious relationship with me?’ Ombline asks as the song fades out and silence fills the room. Well, not total silence. I can hear the sound of the TV coming from the living room. Ombline’s aged parents are watching an old episode of Navarro.

I tell Ombline I cannot commit to her. She is not upset. She tells me she likes me best of all the technical consultants and she wants me to be her one and only lover and I) since I know she has the pick of the crop, and 2) since I know I’m not going to get any easier or better sex anywhere else, and 3) since I know that, someday, I am going to want to get married and have children, I might as well face reality and decide that, yes, I want to commit to her.

That’s when I tell Ombline about my feelings for S. Perhaps, I go into too much detail, explaining my whole conviction of destiny. Ombline tells me that I’m sick. She tells me I should be put back in the hospital (until that moment, I never knew she had known I’d been hospitalised). She tells me to get out of her bedroom or she’ll call the police.

I dress hurriedly, scurry through the living room, barely say goodbye to Ombline’s decrepit parents, hunched before the flickering TV screen.

I catch the Métro back down to the fifteenth. And while Maman sleeps in the next room, I write the email to S. I put it all down. Everything I feel. In 2,222 words. I find her address easily. Just as Maman knew I would. I send the message at 02.22. Two has always been my lucky number.

I will not tell you what I wrote to S. It is too intimate. It is between S. and me. At least, that is how I wanted it to be.

I barely sleep. In the morning, over breakfast, I tell Maman about the message I have sent.

Maman takes a bite of her croissant, chews contemplatively, then says, her voice thick with scorn, ‘She’ll never answer.’

‘Salut, Jean-Hugues,’ an unfamiliar, deep male voice says.

I am sitting in a corner booth in a café near my house, reading a Norman Spinrad sci-fi novel. It is late on a Saturday morning, early November – unusually, bitingly, cold for this time of year in Paris. I look up, expecting, of course, to see someone I know. Not one of my computer geek colleagues. I know their whiny voices too well. I brace myself for the sight of one of my old acquaintances from high school, someone who has recognised me as the troubled boy from their class, despite the fact that I have grown a thick beard, as a kind of disguise, since getting out of the hospital two years ago.

But as I look up, I see before me, in the smoky air of the café, two men I have never met before. They are practically identical, maybe forty years old, the two of them sporting shaved heads. Not cleanly shaved: each large, finely shaped skull bears a thin layer of greyish stubble. Both men wear black leather jackets and black pants. You might take them for a homosexual couple. But there is nothing remotely delicate about their appearance. If they are fags, they are tough, violent fags.

‘Do I know you?’ I ask, stupidly, since I am sure that I do not.

‘No,’ one of the stubbleheads says as they both sit down at my table. ‘But we know you.’

From this moment on, everything has a strange, dreamy feel about it. One of the stubblehead twins talks, the other never says a word. He just glares menacingly at me. The talking stubblehead tells me that they have read the email I sent to S. last week. They know that I was in a mental hospital. If I send another message to S., if I try to contact her in any way, they will make sure that I will be put back in the hospital. Or worse. I could very well be put in prison – for a very long time.

‘Think about how that would hurt your mother,’ he adds.

I think about it. I couldn’t care less. But I say nothing.

I assume these guys are part of the most private, inner security team that S. has. I cannot help but feel flattered by their attention.

The guy who has done all the talking asks if I understand what he has just said to me. I say yes. The stubblehead twins rise, tell me one more time to stay away from S.

Just as they are turning to leave, I blurt out the question: ‘Has she read my email?’

They both smirk at me. The talkative stubblehead nods, then says: ‘Do you really think she’d be interested in a guy who looks like a garden dwarf?’

Then they walk away, chuckling.

I take this, the entire encounter, as a challenge.

Over the next nine or ten hours, everything happens in a kind of dreamy haze. I wonder why the stubbleheaded goons only decided to confront me today, nearly a full week after I sent my email to S. It must be because she is making an appearance in a grande halle des expositions in my very arrondissement this Saturday night.

That is the immediate, specific reason for the goons showing up to try to intimidate me.

The larger reason is that they want to stop me from really making myself known to S., to confronting her face to face. Hell, for all I know, S. might have read my email and found me a fascinating young man, someone she would actually like to meet. Probably it was her husband – sorry, the man in her life, the father of her four children, who has never bothered to marry her – who sent the goons to try to intimidate me. He’s scared. Terrified that I will steal his woman from him. That she will see me, our eyes will meet, and she will experience a total coup de foudre - love at first sight.

This all seems so clear to me Saturday afternoon. I must make myself known to S. I must confront her. Face to face. Tonight. At the convention centre. I know the back exit, where all the featured guests, all the celebrities, leave the grand hall. I will be waiting there tonight. I will make myself known to S.

There is only one huge problem. The men who would thwart me now know my face. ‘A garden dwarf’ they called me!

That Saturday afternoon, I stand before the bathroom mirror, scrutinising the image before me. Yes, it’s true I have let my hair grow long, my beard is a bit bushy and unkempt. And, I see it for the first time, my nose is rather bulbous. A shocking moment of self-recognition. I do resemble a garden dwarf.

If I am to confront S. face to face I must make my face unrecognisable to the stubbleheaded security men. Standing before the bathroom mirror, I take in hand my dead father’s electric razor. I shave away my whiskers. I then apply the buzzing razor to my shock of head hair. By the time I’m finished, I look not unlike the stubble-head twins themselves.

This way, I should blend easily into the crowd outside the grand hall. Even the security men will not recognise me, for I will look so much like-one of them, so little like a garden dwarf. But S. will see me for who I am. The moment our eyes meet, she will realise that I am her salvation.

‘Aren’t you staying for dinner?’ Maman asks absentmindedly, not even looking at me, as I walk through the living room, wearing my winter coat on this cold November night. Then, just as I am about to pass her, she glances up, sees me with a clean-shaven face, a head of ultra-short stubbly hair. ‘Jean-Hugues!’ Maman shrieks.

I do not pause to explain or to comfort her. I just keep walking, right out the front door.

S. was smiling at me. I am sure of it. S. looked directly into my eyes. And she was smiling. Right at me. Her destiny.

I am, for these last few moments before my eternal notoriety, just another face in the crowd. I stand with all the other ordinary citizens behind the police barricades that have been set up outside the back exit of the grand hall. Suddenly, the building’s metal doors swing open. A squad of scowling security agents streams out, clearing a path, scanning the crowd with menace in their eyes. I see the stubblehead twins. And I see that they do not see me, do not recognise my face in the crowd.

Then I see S., hurrying out of the building. The very sight of her, in the flesh, takes my breath away.

It occurs to me, at that moment, that some public figures are akin to human sacrifices. Think of JFK, Martin Luther King, John Lennon. Considering that last name, it occurs to me how odd it is that the human sacrifices moved from being politicians and religious leaders to popular celebrities.

But, no matter: Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Mark David Chapman: the names of the men who carried out the sacrifices will be forever linked with those of the luminaries they slaughtered. Is it not the same glory?

A mere second after I first see S., I spot the man across from me, on the opposite side of the police barricade. He is an older man, maybe fifty. He wears steel-rimmed glasses and a black baseball cap. I see the deranged look in his eyes. And I think: do I look like that?

I can understand, on some profound but, for me, unknowable level, how one might love S. and, at the same time, want to destroy her. But that is not me. I cannot allow this madman in the cap and glasses to possess the glory of the assassin.

Three seconds have passed since S. emerged from the metal doors at the back exit of the grand hall. She strides confidently into the cold night air. She is absolutely radiant, her smile a beacon, her eyes glowing, her new hairdo bouncing as she walks down the column of admirers. The chant erupts: ‘Say-GO! Say-GO! Say-GO! Say-GO!’

She is approaching me, quite quickly now. I catch a glimpse of the stubblehead twins, one on each side of the aisle formed by the police barricades. One of them, the talkative stubblehead, looks directly at me. I quickly look away and spot, across the lane carved out by metal barriers, the man in the black baseball cap and steel-rimmed glasses. He is reaching into his jacket pocket. I see the gun emerge in his hand.

‘Ségolène!’ I scream.

Her name explodes from my mouth, involuntarily-That is when she turns and looks straight into my eyes. She is no more than six feet away. And she is smiling at me. She knows me. I am sure of it.

All is instinct now. I see the man in the cap and glasses extending his arm, pointing the gun at the presidential candidate’s head.

Surely, you have heard those stories about people being gripped by a superhuman strength, an instinct beyond the realm of actual physical capacity, triggered by an immediate crisis. The mother who lifts a car off a child trapped beneath its weight, that is the classic example.

I don’t know if what I instinctively do fits in the same category. But I leap over the police barricade and lunge in front of Ségolène. The gun fires. Just as Ségolène’s smiling face passes out of my vision, I am nearly blinded by the flash of the pistol. I feel the burning sensation in the centre of my forehead. It is indescribable, the pain of hot metal blasting through bone and into the brain.

As I lie on the ground, flat on my back, several actions register at once. The talkative stubblehead pulls out his gun, fires and kills the man who wanted to shoot Ségolène Royal but shot me instead. Deafening screams. Everyone, it seems, is screaming. Except for the candidate, who is quickly surrounded and whisked away. To safety. People are gathering around me. I hear screams and questions. People screaming questions: What happened? Did he do it? Who is he?

As the blood pours into my eyes and I feel life slipping away, exactly like wakefulness slipping away as you fall asleep – only a trillion times more powerful, the sensation – I think only of S. She was smiling at me. I am sure of it. She looked directly into my eyes. And she was smiling. Right at me. Her destiny.