Révol moves through the corridor, ignoring the people who call out to him, try to hand him papers as they jog alongside him: Three minutes, just give me three minutes for Christ’s sake, he mutters, holding up three fingers while emphasizing the word “three” in an authoritative voice. His colleagues know that gesture; they know that once he’s in his office the doctor will gravitate to that rolling, swaying chair of his, check his watch, start a countdown—three minutes, the time it takes to boil an egg: the perfect measurement—and, profiting from this moment of solitude, will rest his cheek against his elbow, flattened and bent on the desktop, just like a kid in kindergarten taking a nap in the classroom after lunch, and will sink into this brief crevice of sleep to shed the trauma of what has just occurred. Exhausted, he leans his head on his crossed arms and falls asleep. He makes the very most of those three minutes: after so many years—twenty-seven—spent putting other people to sleep, it’s not surprising that he has developed a highly efficient technique for taking a micro-siesta, even if it lasts only a fraction of the time usually recommended for recharging a human body. Everyone knows that Révol long ago lost that other sleep: nocturnal, horizontal, deep. In the apartment where he lives, on Rue de Paris, there is no bedroom anymore, in the strict sense of the word, only one large room in which the double bed is used as a coffee table, a place to store his collection of vinyl records—everything by Bob Dylan and Neil Young—and his paperwork, and long trays containing his botanical experiments with psychotropic plants. It’s for professional usage, he tells those—rare—visitors who are amazed to see cannabis plants being openly cultivated, along with poppies, lavender, and Salvia divinorum, known as “diviner’s sage,” a hallucinogenic herb whose curative virtues he has described in articles published in pharmacological magazines.

The night before, alone in his apartment on Rue de Paris, he watched the Paul Newman movie The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for the first time. The title had suggested some kind of botanical fantasy, but the film itself was something else altogether, a powerful combination of hallucination and science, which Révol loved. Moved and captivated, he formed the idea—why not?—of reproducing the experiment conducted by Matilda, the movie’s young heroine, in his living room. She had given varying doses of radium to marigold seeds in order to observe their growth, the way their shapes changed through time under the influence of the gamma rays, some becoming huge, others puny and crumpled, and still others simply beautiful. Little by little, this solitary kid began to understand the infinite variety of life, at the same time learning to take her place in the world, declaring onstage at her school’s science fair that it was possible, one day, that a wonderful mutation would transform and improve the human species. After that, he dreamily fried eggs, their yolks as dazzlingly yellow as the centers of the marigolds in the movie, grabbed a bottle of blond beer from the refrigerator door, uncapped and slowly drank it, then rolled up inside a goose-down quilt, his eyes wide open.

Révol sleeps. There is a notebook close by on the desk so that he can, upon waking, write down the images he’s glimpsed, the sequences of actions and faces, and perhaps Simon’s will be among them—his black hair rigid with dried blood, his olive skin tumid, the pale domes of his eyelids, forehead and right temple covered by a beet-red halo, the stain of death—or perhaps he’ll see Joanne Woodward, alias Beatrice Hunsdorfer, Matilda’s borderline insane mother, rushing into the auditorium after the science fair is over, emerging from the shadows in a formal evening dress, sequins and black feathers, staggering drunk, glassy-eyed, and declaring in a slurry voice, one hand planted on her chest: My heart is full, my heart is full.