The Anomaly

by Hervé Le Tellier

The truth, with love, is that the heart knows straightaway, and shouts it from the rooftops. Of course, you’re not going to come straight out and tell the person you love them. They wouldn’t understand. So, to disguise the fact that you’re already hostage to them, you make conversation.

It’s early, five in the morning, and Louis’s asleep.

A contraction of Louis is????? how grammatically horrific!

She surmised that he wasn’t proud of his bachelor life, a subject he avoided at every turn; she suspected a string of mistresses and precious little magic.

Lucie also discovered André’s vast Haussmann apartment, with its understated furniture, featuring a predominance of wood and industrial chic, cluttered with books, novels: a far cry from the cold, pared-back world associated with architects.

“Hope keeps us waiting in the corridor to happiness. If we secure what we hope for, we enter the anteroom of unhappiness.”

Its brown leaves are so dry they’re curling up; some branches are already dead. Standing there in its plastic pot, it’s the very incarnation of hopelessness, if indeed the word “incarnation” can be applied to a green plant. If someone doesn’t water it soon, David thinks, it’s going to die. In all logic, it must be possible to find a point of no return on the continuous thread of time, an irretrievable tipping point after which nothing and no one could save the ficus.

This aptly describes the orchid plant that my daughter miraculously brought back to life!

At 5:35 on Thursday afternoon someone waters it and it survives; at 5:36 on Thursday afternoon anyone in the world could show up with a bottle of water and it would be No, babe, sweet of you, thirty seconds ago, I can’t be sure, maybe, but now, what are you thinking, the only cell that could have set the whole thing going again, the final viable eukaryote that could have rallied its neighbors—Come on, guys, let’s see some motivation, let’s have a reaction, fill yourselves up with water, don’t let yourselves go—well, the last of the last has just left us, so you’re here too late, with your pathetic little bottle, ciao ciao. Yes, somewhere on the thread of time.

This is hilarious - I can hear our recovered plant saying this!

ALL SMOOTH FLIGHTS are alike. Every turbulent flight is turbulent in its own way.

BETTY THE FROG is found by Liam on a Saturday afternoon. She’s in the kitchen, behind a radiator near the sink, completely dehydrated. She’s light as a feather, translucent, a sheet of tracing paper someone crumpled and crushed into a paper approximation of a frog, its thighs and webbed feet clearly distinguishable.

This is how one of our frogs in Colorado died.

Three weeks earlier Betty escaped from the terrarium, where she must have been bored out of her tiny mind, despite the pretty, damp mosses, the gleaming green plants, and the round, gray pebbles that Sophia chose for her, plus the half a coconut shell that acts as a swimming pool, but most of all the very-much-alive black flies Sophia fed her when she came home from school. Sophia had put the terrarium on a low table near her bed, and every evening she would get up, huddled in a blanket, and whisperingly describe her day to the frog, which sat motionless under the greenery. What Sophia wanted was for Betty to be safe, and happy too, but mostly safe, sheltered from predators, that’s a word she learned, and she really likes it, maybe precisely because it sounds a little disturbing. But the frog escaped in spite of everything. She must have hopped around all over the place in search of warmth and moisture before ending up there, on the floor below, against the lukewarm metal of the convection heater. She’d been hungry and thirsty and her skin had cracked like the dirt in the yard when it hasn’t rained for days, until—frozen in death—Betty had become an ectoplasm of a frog.

The Kleffmans are collectively resigned to burying Betty, and even though they know nothing about her religion, April decides that she’s Baptist, like them; well, she didn’t have a believer’s proper, immersive baptism, but she spent most of her time in water. It simplifies things. The born-again frog will go to frog heaven. And in the end Clark will flush her down the toilet, that simplifies things too.

The worst of it is this is tomorrow’s world. We’ve thrown in the towel, and we’re each trying to scramble out of this mess in our own way, but no one’ll be saved.

the only two remaining bases on the East Coast were in Otis, near Boston, and Langley, the CIA headquarters near Washington.

Wrong! Langley Air Force Base is in VA (southeast of Richmond, and just north from Norfolk) -- but it is NOT the same nor is it located near the CIA, which is in Langley, VA.

The rickshaw weaves its way through the noisy, stinking traffic toward the Surya Tower site, with a succession of lurching accelerations and shrill blasts of its horn, and André’s amazed at the lack of scratches on the fenders of cars, amazed that their side-view mirrors survive. For once the driver isn’t one of those exhausted teenagers who’ve pooled together to buy the machine and work shifts on it in perfect ignorance of the rules of the road, entrusting their fate to Waze. No, he’s a stocky, ageless man with large aviator sunglasses, threading his way between trucks and cars with aggressive fluidity, intrepidly crossing the white line and unabashed by the dozens of vehicles powering toward him. The fact that he plows on unharmed in the surging traffic is somewhat miraculous; the translucent plastic Buddha stuck to the handlebars must have something to do with it.

This is such an illuminating, vivid description ...

Architecture’s a game, a cunning game but still a game, we won’t talk about this. Construction isn’t about playing but about making things together…Do

all things considered, spending every day missing a woman who’s no longer there will be less painful than relentlessly desiring one who’s sleeping beside him but is light-years away from him in the tepid indifference of the shadows.

Always have just a backpack as luggage.

Tired people are argumentative. Exhausted people a lot less so.

Victor also has a photograph of his late father in his wallet, a picture taken from an album, from the days when there were albums, when too many photos hadn’t yet killed photos.

the woman in charge of recruitment had asked Jamy her religion, to which the psychologist had replied: “I don’t have one.” The woman had pursued the point. “So you’re an atheist then,” she’d asked, fiddling with her pen as if she had a box to check on an imaginary questionnaire. Jamy Pudlowski had shrugged, “I don’t give a damn. To me God is like bridge—I never think about it. So I don’t define myself by the fact that I don’t give a damn about bridge, nor do I align myself with people who talk about the fact that they too couldn’t give a damn about bridge.”

Being the only representative of her sex, naturally Pudlowski starts by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen…” in the hope that one of them will pick up on the irony, but no, of course not,

“And what if there were also thousands of hells, for the shameful heretical, faithless, or free-thinking programs, a thousand Gehennas where these emancipated individuals would be burned mercilessly in unending virtual torment, attacked by red demons and devoured by monsters with ferocious jaws? And better still, why wouldn’t these genius practical jokers have imagined that every religious program was praying to the wrong god? And once they die—surprise, surprise, mate—are you a Baptist/Buddhist/Jew/Muslim? You should have been a Mormon, you moron! Come on then, off to hell with the lot of you!

without wishing to denigrate monotheism, the malfunctions of this world are much better explained by endless conflict between gods, plural.

The American president sits motionless, apparently stunned. The mathematician studies this unsophisticated man, and reaffirms the soul-destroying notion that by accumulating our individual obscurities, we rarely achieve collective brilliance.

I know no problem that can resist the absence of a solution.”

No author writes the reader’s book, no reader reads the author’s book. At most, they may have the final period in common.

he never stopped worrying about frightening her away, about startling this adorable swallow that had consented to fly alongside such an old crow. Fuck it, love—the real kind—can’t be a ball of fear in your heart. He was never relaxed and, of course, this anxiety held within it their demise.

no one should ever love someone who feels so little love for them. Why was it so complicated?

You described it as our need to reduce ‘cognitive dissonance’?” “Yes. We’re prepared to warp reality if the stake is not losing altogether. We want answers for even our tiniest anxieties and a way of conceiving the world without reexamining our values, our emotions, and our actions.

this test hasn’t been set for us as individuals. This simulation is thinking on the level of an ocean, it couldn’t care less about what each water molecule does. The simulation is waiting for a reaction from the entire human race. There won’t be a supreme savior. We need to save ourselves.”

People rarely have the opportunity to save a relationship before it’s even in danger. I want to have a second chance before I ruin the first one.