And now, like an eel in the mud, I’m emerging from a viscous torpor, my lips sticky, my eyes heavy, my bladder intolerably full.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I murmur hoarsely.
My jaw is so numb that I palpate it cautiously, almost expecting to find it shattered by some fist’s mighty blow. But no, I feel only the sticky spume of sleep on my lips. I hear Nathalie’s voice as if from a tremendous distance, muted and slowed, struggling to make its way through the clouds—which I’m convinced I could touch, if only I had the strength to raise my hand—of my somnolence.
Is it a little strange that she should use the very same words as Noget? She asks, almost declares, “You’re pregnant?”
“No,” I say, furious.
But my mouth is still filled with plaster, and only a gurgle comes out. Embarrassed, I clear my throat.
“On the contrary,” I say irritably, “the only reason I haven’t had my period in a while is that I’m menopausal, and it doesn’t mean you’re pregnant just because you have to go to the bathroom, right?”
And with this a sensation of great speed begins to run through my numbed muscles. Did someone hit me? Have I been drugged?
My fingers rub the coarse fabric of the seat beneath me, too small for me, I think, feeling my thighs hanging over the edges. I carefully turn my head in the direction Nathalie’s voice seemed—with a slight delay—to be coming from.
I’ve never fallen asleep so suddenly anywhere. In this dim light, I can scarcely make out her sharp profile, her downturned mouth. Her hands are holding a steering wheel. Oh, a Twingo, like the one Ange and I used to drive. The night is deep, the road deserted. Nathalie is driving so quickly that the tiny car skids and squeals at every curve.
“Slow down a little,” I say.
Several long seconds go by before she curtly shoots back: “I don’t want to miss the boat.”
Through the windshield I see only a silent, absolute darkness, unpierced by so much as the fleeting lights of a house now and then. Are we in the country, are we by the sea, are we driving through an industrial wasteland?
The road is in terrible condition, and the car lurches this way and that. Nathalie screeches to a halt beside a hedgerow. I quickly get out. My thighs are already damp with a few drops of urine. It’s so invigorating to empty myself, a warm breeze fanning my buttocks, that, protected from the darkness of the night and the darkness of all the invisible or nonexistent things around us, I forget my embarrassment at doing this in front of Nathalie. Far below me, I hear what seems a faint splash of breakers, the soft knock of smooth stones gently stirred by the waves. I take my time. My lungs swell in tranquil joy.
When I get back in the car, I find Nathalie turned to one side, looking out the window as if to make clear that she wanted to spare me the discomfort of imagining her seeing and hearing me pee.
“Thanks,” I say, cheerfully.
She starts off again. She’s panting and puffing in a weird way. Her hair’s come undone, and now it’s hiding her forehead and cheeks. She’s not the same as before. She has a strong smell all of a sudden, not unpleasant, but like nothing I know. Silently, too fast, we drive through the unbroken darkness.
Shouldn’t there be villages, shouldn’t there be supermarket parking lots with big glowing signs?
“Nathalie,” I say.
With a quarter-turn of her head, she looks toward me. I scream, I close my eyes. Then I open them again, staring resolutely straight ahead.
A dark, fleshless face, the head of a decomposed corpse, topped with a blond wig someone put there in a spirit of ridicule or the intention of causing terror.
My lips and hands are trembling. Nathalie is dead, I tell myself. How can that be? How much of all this is real?
And her wide, lipless mouth showing irregular yellow teeth, ready to clack together at any moment in a comical chatter, that’s why she’s not saying anything, why she can’t say anything ever again.
I’m far too afraid to dare look at the hands on the wheel.
Powerful hands strewn with little red hairs holding an identical wheel, Ange looking as if he’d been crammed into a toy, but today it’s a different pair of hands, though the car is exactly the same model and color.
Nathalie’s dead, I tell myself, and I’m alive, and yet she’s the one driving, and she’s been dead for a long time, and I didn’t realize it because I didn’t look at her closely enough. I’m so ashamed, and so afraid! Where is she driving me, then? Where could this specter I was stupid enough to take for a friend possibly be taking me? Unless my place now is to be a friend to shadows, and to nothing and no one else?