She tells her boyfriend about it the next day. Lunch break is over, and they’re standing beside his desk. I can’t remember how she said it, exactly, which words she used, but she felt like something had shifted, and she owed it to herself to tell him. She doesn’t wait for his response, but goes and sits down, her back very straight.

 

She starts eating more. She always liked to eat before, too. I don’t know if she realizes that she isn’t eating to nourish herself anymore, but to comfort herself.

 

She has everything a person needs to be happy. Her childhood is privileged, sheltered. She’s healthy, pretty, intelligent. She lives in Paris, goes skiing in the winter and swimming in the summer, visits museums abroad. She comes from a good family in a nice neighborhood; she’s been well brought up, she knows how to behave in polite society. She’s white, with French roots going all the way back to Charlemagne and to Morvan I, king of the Bretons. She was raised in the Catholic Church, brought up to care for others, and one of her grandfathers gave his life in the service of France. Her father is successful, and so is her mother. Both of her parents are industrious, they love their jobs, they work in high value-added industries; their lives are active, abundant, fertile. They’re busy, clumsy, tender parents, and deeply loving ones.

 

When she’s alone, she talks to an enormous white yeti that only she can see, and to Pandi Panda, her old stuffed bear. They protect her; they make her feel safe, and she can tell them anything. She still sucks her thumb. She often holds the yeti’s hand when they’re out in the street, or when there are too many people around, when she can’t manage to keep an eye on everything all by herself.

 

Some days, the things around her talk to each other, and she can spend a whole hour in the bathroom, not moving, listening to their conversations in her head.

 

Some nights, in the years that follow, right when she’s in the middle of a dream, something interrupts the story—something, a specific spot she notices on her body that starts turning, faster and faster, and the whirlwind gets bigger and sucks her in, and the edges of her body start to crumble away, little by little—but she can’t look away; her body is a desert, shifting and dissolving; the sand is viscous, and it pours into her mouth. There’s nothing to hold on to, and she slips and slides and melts, and when the whirlwind has filled up the whole space of the dream, when she’s just about to disappear, she screams. She wakes up with a start, and she listens. She’s afraid of actually having screamed, of having woken her parents. There’s something horribly dirty about the dream, something she must never tell.