Syndrome E

31

Eugenie was tickled pink to be leaving. She jumped up and down and squealed with delight in front of the hotel. Sharko, meanwhile, carried his suitcase to the taxi that was waiting for him at the foot of the building. No embassy Mercedes to bring him back this time. As agreed, he had returned the photos to Lebrun at the police station, at 2:00 p.m. on the dot. The embassy’s inspector had come alone, and their brief conversation had not gone entirely well, especially when Lebrun had noticed the bruise near Sharko’s nose. Sharko had said something about slipping in the bathtub. No further comment.

Alone on the sidewalk, the cop looked around him in the vain hope of seeing Nahed, telling her good-bye, wishing her good luck. She hadn’t answered any of his calls, no doubt on embassy say-so. His throat tight, he got into the taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport.

Eugenie sat next to him for a while, then vanished during the trip. Sharko could finally enjoy the landscape without the shouting in his head. His only real moment of respite since arriving in Egypt.

Earlier that day, Taha Abou Zeid, the Nubian doctor at the Salaam Center, had called him to confirm his suppositions: the two other victims had also suffered the effects of the mass hysteria, in its most aggressive form. And according to the recollections of several doctors, who of course had not kept any records, the girls had remained symptomatic until their cruel deaths.

That was the point in common.

The collective hysteria.

The same link that might have united the five anonymous bodies in Gravenchon.

The taxi left the city center and took the Salah-Salem expressway. The breath of Cairo was slowly absorbed into the cloud of exhaust.

His forehead flattened against the window, alone with his dark thoughts, Sharko saw a train in the distance. Outside the car, near the smokestacks, four men clung on as best they could, gaining footholds on pipes or stepladders. Whatever their religions or beliefs, they huddled close together to avoid falling. And they fled into the wind, into the sun, toward the burning dust of Cairo. These men were risking their lives to get out of paying a three-pound fare, but they were smiling and seemed happy, because their poverty reminded them, better than anyone, how much life was worth living.

Then Sharko saw the ones at the airport, who crowded at the discount windows for flights to Libya, a large canvas bag their only luggage. These people, on the contrary, were fleeing Egypt to try to wrest themselves from poverty. They were heading for a country where oil decided everyone’s fate. Someday they’d be sent back home, or perhaps they’d end up in some rickety skiff off the Italian coast.

Sharko had never seen the beauty of the great pyramids, but he did see that of a people whose only luxury was their dignity. As his plane rose into the air, he recalled the joke the Coptic taxi driver had told him while bringing him to the church of Saint Barbara, the night of his meeting with Nahed:

“Someone asks three people, a German, a Frenchman, and an Egyptian, what Adam and Eve’s nationality was. The German answers, ‘Adam and Eve exude good health and vital hygiene: they must be German!’ The Frenchman declares, ‘Adam and Eve have sublime, erotic bodies: they can only be French!’ But the Egyptian concludes, ‘Adam and Eve are naked as jaybirds, they don’t have enough to buy shoes, and yet they’re convinced they live in Paradise: what else could they be but Egyptians?’”

After fifteen minutes in the air, Sharko started leafing through the book on mass hysteria. As Dr. Taha Abou Zeid had briefly explained, this phenomenon had cut across time periods, nationalities, and religions. The author based his thesis on photos, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with specialists. In France, for instance, witch hunts in the Middle Ages had provoked an inordinate fear of the devil and mass acts of insanity: screaming crowds hungry for blood, mothers and children who cheered to see “witches” burning alive.

The cases in the book were astounding. India, 2001: hundreds of individuals from different parts of New Delhi swear they were attacked by a fictional being, half man, half monkey, “with metal claws and red eyes.” Certain “victims” even leap from the window to flee this creature, who’d surged right out of the collective imagination. Belgium, 1990: the Belgian Society for the Study of Space Phenomena suddenly receives several thousand sightings of UFOs. The most likely cause was held to be sociopsychological. A sudden mania for looking for flying objects, exacerbated by the media: when you want to see something, you end up seeing it. Dakar: ninety high school students go into a trance and are brought to the hospital. Some speak of a curse; there are purification rituals and sacrifices to remedy the situation.

Sharko turned the pages—it went on forever. Sects committing group suicide, panicked crowds, haunted house syndrome like the Amityville Horror, collective fainting spells at concerts… There was even a chapter on genocides, a “criminal mass hysteria,” according to the terms of certain psychiatrists: organizers who plan coldly, calculatingly, while those who execute sink into a frenzy of wholesale destruction and butchery.

At bottom, there was no real explanation for these outbreaks, which were given various names: mass psychogenic phenomenon, mass or collective hysteria, epidemic hysteria, mass syndrome of psychogenic origin… It didn’t appear in the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV, but its existence could not be denied. Scientists spoke mainly of psychological root causes, but could not explain what triggered the phenomena—the seismic epicenter—or their very real physical manifestations: vomiting, nausea, joint and muscle pain…

Shortly before landing, Sharko shut the book and gazed out the window, at nothing. A bloodthirsty, sadistic individual might be seeking something in hysterical phenomena, and mutilating, killing, and stealing eyes and brains to get at it. Why? What ends could possibly justify such barbaric means? Was there even an end?

The lights of Paris finally appeared three thousand feet below. Thousands of people, huddled in front of their computers and television screens or glued to their cell phones. In a way, this was the most modern and dangerous form of mass hysteria: a vast group of humans, their minds linked by the world of images. A modern madness from which no one could escape.

Not even Sharko.