Now I’m scared. Scared that something will happen to us. I’m imagining horrors, I can’t help it. I construct catastrophic scenarios, gruesome sequences of events, tragic coincidences. Every night when I go to bed, it occurs to me that I may not wake up. A mass presses down on the left side of my chest and stops me from breathing. Or else I notice a diffuse pain in the pit of my stomach and suddenly feel afraid that my body’s damaged flesh is host to one of those invasive cancers that’s about to declare its presence.
My children are too young to lose their mother. That’s what I’m thinking just as I close my eyes.
Dr. Felsenberg calls these “morbid thoughts. ”
They reveal, he says, an old sense of guilt.
It’s grueling. It’s a spiral that sucks me in, absorbs me, and against which I’m powerless. The morbid thoughts can crop up at any time, as images or words. When I try to describe them, they lose their texture, their heat, they no longer seem so tangible. They appear as what they are: constructs produced by anxiety, distant, hypothetical threats. But in the moment, they stop me from breathing.
The temperature has suddenly plummeted. There’s been a frost for several nights in a row. Sand trucks criss-cross the city before dawn to keep ice from forming. At first I thought that the cold might cleanse everything, eliminate the germs, bacteria, vermin, eradicate all the invisible filth we’re surrounded by, and then the cold itself became a sly, insidious danger, another distinct threat in my hideous night thoughts.
I didn’t say anything to William about Mathis. Probably because I’m sure this comes from me. Perhaps more generally the problem comes from me. I’m the defective cog hidden within a middle-class machine that has worked since the dawn of time. I’m the grain of sand that jams the mechanism, the drop of water that inadvertently falls into the fuel tank, the black sheep dressed up as a homemaker. My deception is at the root of this disaster. I dreamed of a cozy family apartment that I could go into raptures about. I dreamed of bright-eyed children raised in an atmosphere of kindness and comfort. I dreamed of a peaceful life centered around their education and my husband’s well-being. I didn’t ask for more than that and I stuck with it. I thought that would be enough. Keep a low profile, do the vacuuming and make the snacks. Let there be no misunderstanding: I am where I wanted to be. Nonetheless, I’ve veered off course. Perhaps I used to be a seagull trapped in an oil slick, but now I’m strangely like the crow in the story my grandmother used to tell me, the coarse bird with the jet-black plumage who dreamed of being a white bird. Because this is how the fable goes: the bird first rolls in talcum powder, then flour, but the trick doesn’t last long and soon it’s gone. So then he dunks himself in a pot of white paint, in which he gets trapped. I am that black bird who wanted to become white and who betrayed his own kind. I thought I was smarter than that. I thought I could imitate the call of the turtle doves. But I too have lost the use of my wings, and where I am now, struggling is useless.
I can’t speak to William anymore. I just can’t.
The longer I spend looking at what he writes on the internet—traces that will never be erased, lasting imprints that someday will reveal the deformity of the monster—the less I’m able to talk to him. My husband has become a stranger.
I’d like to be able to forget what I’ve read. To ignore the swamp surrounding us, which will soon invade our living room. Not to turn on the computer. But I can’t.
Yet every day that goes by, I create a new lie, much bigger than the ones that made me and William second-class crooks who were never unmasked. I keep quiet and continue to fight the dust and carefully turn the dial on the washing machine, plug in the blender and the iron, change the sheets and wash the windows, leaving no smear visible, even in bright sunlight.
Which is the real William? The one who disseminates his bitter prose under the cloak of anonymity or the one who goes around with his face visible in a dark-gray suit, suavely tailored at the waist? The one who wallows in the mire or the one who wears immaculate white shirts carefully ironed by his wife?
I must tell my husband that I know.
Maybe these two parts of him will join to make just one? Perhaps I could establish a link between the two entities? Perhaps then I’d understand something that’s eluding me?
Sometimes I think of that ball of crumpled paper, abandoned in the trash can. I wonder if, without realizing, William was hoping that his double would be discovered, thwarted and jeered at, and at last someone would send him to the dungeon in handcuffs.
I need to find a solution for Mathis. I don’t want him hanging out with Théo. Yes, I say “hanging out with,” like my mother did, so there you go. I don’t want him coming home from school with him or sitting beside him in class. I’m sure that boy is having a harmful, unhealthy influence on our son, apart from the fact that he’s leading him to drink.
I’ve requested a meeting with their head teacher, Ms. Destrée, through the school’s website.
I’ll talk to her. I’ll explain.
And then at the end of the academic year, we’ll send Mathis to a new school if we have to.