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Far from such din, when blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to drown them out. This is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better. I must have butterfly hearing.
I watch them without the sound, the way you watch flames in a fireplace.
Note that I still say “my magazine,” despite the misleading nature of the words, as if that possessive pronoun were one of the fragile threads linking me to the living world.
Now I am the prisoner and he the free man.
They say that all Chinese are superstitious, and if my true fate were known, not one of those charming little Chinese miniskirts would ever dare sit on me again.
Although at the moment the page is utterly blank, I am convinced that someday there will be a message for me there. I am waiting.
They carried out as best they could their delicate mission: to ease our burden a little when our crosses bruised our shoulders too painfully.
I have put it off so long that now, on the brink of this bungee jump into my past, I feel suddenly dizzy.
How can I describe waking for the last time, heedless, perhaps a little grumpy, beside the lithe, warm body of a tall, dark-haired woman?
Our farewells were brief, our lips scarcely brushing together.
I am already running down stairs that smell of floor polish. It will be the last of the smells of my past.
Not for a second does it occur to me that I may be dying.
Before it hits the ground, I have time for one last thought: We’ll have to cancel the play. We would have been late in any case. We’ll go tomorrow night. Where could Théophile have got to? And then I sink into a coma.
Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking. I’ll be off now.
