23. I don’t want to know her anymore

Eventually, to my great surprise, we drive past the Toulon city limits sign, signifying the endpoint of this furious race through an invisible landscape.

“We’re going to make it,” says Nathalie.

And since her voice is soft, tranquil, and human, I steal a glance at her. I see the woman from the train again—her sharp profile, her eye like a marble pressed into her flesh, her anxious mouth. I look at her hands and see long, fine fingers gripping the wheel. Deeply relieved, I let out a laugh.

And then, all at once, we’re half blinded by a wild riot of lights, a carnival fairyland. Nathalie parks in the lot of the port. We both sit and blink for a moment before we get out. I don’t dare look Nathalie’s way too often, for fear I might find her horribly transformed again, and I’m not sure how aware she is of these spectral mutations, so I wouldn’t want to upset her with displays of fear or mistrust. It simply seems to me—and I note it with sadness and rage—that there’s no way I can like her now, because she inspires a latent, inexpressible horror inside me.

Slightly intimidated (even her!), we amble toward the glittering hulk of the ferry boat, a towering façade of flashing lights emitting a soft, saccharine music. The last passengers are just getting on. I take out my ticket, and Nathalie immediately sees I’m in first class.

“Oh, too bad,” she says, “we won’t be together.”

She seems genuinely disappointed.

“Are you going to be all right?” she asks, and so much solicitude touches and alarms me at the same time.

I don’t trust her anymore. What more does she want to show me, in what state is she sorry I won’t see her, what torments of the soul? Does she realize I wasn’t listening to a word of her outpouring of grief? Does she realize that, in a certain way that doesn’t rule out shame, I’m not sorry I wasn’t? Was she hoping to make me pay for that by exposing who knows what, even worse horrors if through some stroke of luck we’d been assigned to the same cabin?

Mumbling, I tell her I’ll manage, there’s no reason things should go badly for me now.

“Still, be careful,” Nathalie whispers. “It’s so hard for people like you, it’s so unjust…”

“What do you mean by ‘people like me’?” I ask.

She slowly shakes her head with a sad little smile, either because she doesn’t take the question seriously or because she refuses to let the answer cross her lips, to defile her mouth, and offend my ear.

“I must tell you, I don’t quite understand what you’re talking about,” I say with a certain haughtiness.

I feel a sudden surge of hate for her. She shouldn’t say such things, I tell myself, not even to be nice.

Then the disparity between our two tickets forces us into two separate lines as we enter the boat through a gap in its side, like a vicious gash in its radiant, glimmering flesh made by a wood chisel or some other such tool, puncturing and then rooting around in my husband’s tender human flesh to be sure he can never recover and come to understand just what he is or what he’s done and be filled with the idea that he deserves the evil thrust into him, and so end up resembling that evil.