He wasn’t even aware that his whole body was shivering gently. He hadn’t fainted, but the thoughts couldn’t circulate anymore through the slowly freezing channels of his brain. Sometimes his mind felt sluggish, like a lethargic fish rising from placid, inky depths, approaching the thin skin of ice that covered the surface and leaving behind, just before vanishing back into the darkness, a tiny trace, a blink, an instantaneously erased ripple of astonishment: so that’s what dying was … Diving lazily like that, into torpor, icy coldness, deep down to the calm black place where soon there would be no more Nicolas, no more body to tremble, no more consolation to seek, no more anything. He no longer knew if his eyes were open or closed. He felt the steering wheel against his forehead but saw nothing, neither the car door nor the stretch of snowy road and the fir trees framed in the window. At some point, however, a beam of light struck his eyelids: it moved around, going in different directions. Nicolas thought fleetingly of the nocturnal traveler, then of a gigantic deep-sea fish swimming around him, enveloping him in its phosphorescent aura. He would have liked to sink down, farther and farther down with the fish into the great depths, to escape from the traveler, to avoid seeing his face. He almost screamed when the flashlight beam blinded him as the car door was opened. A dark form leaned in, bending over him, and he seemed to choke on his own cry. A hand touched him as a voice said, ‘Nicolas, Nicolas, what’s the matter?’ When he recognized that voice, his entire body relaxed: muscles, nerves, bones, thoughts – everything began to melt, to flow endlessly, like tears, while Patrick was gathering him up in his arms.
He must have opened his eyes again, because he remembered the car door hanging open behind them while Patrick carried him back up the drive. In his hurry to get him inside, Patrick had neglected to slam the door shut, and the image of that door sticking out from the side of the car like a broken fin had fixed itself in Nicolas’s mind. Later on, to make him laugh, Patrick and Marie-Ange told him that while they were rubbing him, he talked constantly about that door, saying that they had to go back and shut it. They were wondering if he’d survive, and he – he was concerned only that the door shouldn’t stay open all night out on the road.
Then there had been light, Patrick’s face, and Marie-Ange’s, and their voices saying his name over and over. Nicolas, Nicolas. He was with them: their warm hands were moving over his body, rubbing him, wrapping him up, and yet they were calling him as though he were lost in a forest and they were part of a search party to find him. He lay in the undergrowth, wounded, losing blood, and heard their anxious voices in the distance calling, ‘Nicolas, Nicolas, where are you, Nicolas?’ But he couldn’t answer them. Once, steps rustled in the leaves: they were passing close by him without realizing it, and he couldn’t make himself heard – they were already moving away, going off to search in another part of the woods. Later, Patrick picked him up again and carried him upstairs. They laid him down, put heavy blankets over him, held his head up so that he could drink something quite hot, which made him make a face, but Marie-Ange’s voice insisted, said that it was good, he had to drink up. The glass was tipped and the burning liquid poured down his throat. Feeling began to return to his body, which was shot through by great, long shivers of such amplitude that they became voluptuous. He undulated under the covers like a big fish flapping its tail in slow motion. He kept his eyes shut, had no idea where he’d been taken, knew only that it was a safe place, that he was warm, that they were looking after him, that Patrick had come to save him from death and had carried him in his arms to this warmth and this safety. The voices around him had dwindled to murmurs; some slightly scratchy material was rubbing against his mouth. His body kept trembling with long, slow, convulsive movements that went down to the soles of his feet, where they lingered as though desirous of going farther, of stretching him out even more. He was so small, tucked into one end of the bed, cuddled under the blanket as though he were in a cave, and the foot of the bed seemed infinitely far away, and higher too. It towered over him like a gigantic dune, rising way up into the sky and slanting down to vanish beneath his cheek. Down the vast slope of this dune rolled a black ball. It was only a small spot at first, when it left the summit, but as it descended it grew bigger and bigger, enormous, and Nicolas could tell that it would take up all the space, that there would be nothing left but it and that it would crush him. The humming sound it made grew louder as it came closer. Nicolas was scared but soon realized that he could make the black ball retreat whenever he liked, could suddenly send it all the way back to the top, condemned to a fresh descent that he would again be able to interrupt before he was smashed. Just before: all the pleasure lay in letting the black ball get as close as possible, in escaping from it at the very last moment.