said. “For a while, it is interesting. And then, like everything else, it becomes boring.”
Jacques, meanwhile, was leaning back in his chair, with the air of a critic watching a drama staged for his benefit.
Joë gave a solemn nod in Jacques’ direction. Jacques stood and washed his hands in the sink in an open anteroom.
Simone heard the sound of a cabinet being opened, a faint clatter of metal and glass.
“On account of my condition, I am granted surcease from pain…” Joë said. “As a student…before the war…I sought out that substance Homer refers to as nepenthe, frequenting back alleys and the docks. I was forced to strike some dark bargains to obtain it…But I won’t shock you by telling you all that. When I was wounded, my body was on fire and at the same time, I was so cold—the ambulance ride, each bump and jolt an agony—and finally, a nurse with the face of an angel saying, this will help with the pain, and in that moment, my whole life became utterly clear to me: I was destined to have this wound. Indeed, this wound existed before I did, and I was born to embody it.
“I’m like a man besotted with love, who bores everyone with endless babbling about his beloved…I love my wound—not a simple love, mind you, its mixed with hatred and resentment,” he gave a wave of his hand, “as all real love is.”
Jacques set about preparing an injection from a rubber-stoppered glass vial. Then, tying a tourniquet around his friend’s arm, he slapped his flesh until a vein stood out, blue-black beneath the pale flesh.
“In English, they use the word ‘painkiller.’” And here he made his right hand into the shape of a gun. “I rather like to imagine an American cowboy”—those last two words in English, the word cowboy repeated for the sheer pleasure of saying it. “He strides through the dusty town, spies the pain—a black blob, slithering about on the ground between the saloon and the horse rail, takes aim and fires. But in truth, this drug doesn’t actually remove the pain, it’s scarcely dead, only one is now able to observe it from above.”
Jacques administered the injection and Simone, feeling faint, looked away. So this is what the room of a poet looks like, she thought, taking in the rows of books surrounding Joë’s bed, the magazines printed on cheap newsprint scattered on the floor. The cover of one showed a photograph of a woman wearing a horned Viking helmet with her tongue sticking out, the cover of another proclaiming DOWN WITH ART! She wondered if later on she would be able to get up the nerve to ask Jacques, “What does it mean? Why is the woman wearing a Viking helmet and why is she sticking out her tongue?” and “Am I hopelessly old-fashioned because I believe in art?”
“Ahh,” Joë said, as the needle entered him. “I would be a poor host indeed if I traveled to a distant shore and left my friends behind, waving to me from the dock.”
Jacques drew another dose into the syringe.
“Oh, half of that. Half,” cried Joë, “she’s slight and this is her first time.” Then, cocking his head to one side, “It is your first time, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Simone murmured. “I’m a bit—what will it be like?”
“Ah,” Joë said, “we are going to a place where words cannot follow.”
“I am going to—demur.”
“Very well,” Jacques said, filling the syringe, and wrapping the tourniquet around his own arm, using his teeth to tighten it.
Joë worked his lips and tongue. “Ah, the taste of bitterness in my mouth! It lets me know that my beloved morphine is entering every pore and orifice of my body. What is it that the Bible says? ‘In bitterness we find the sweet?’”
“What book of the Bible is that from?” Jacques asked.
“The Gospel According to Joë.”
“Bitterness,” Joë said, and then fell silent. A few minutes later, he said, “Our minds are acutely tuned to bitterness because poisons are bitter. The brain awakens in its presence. Chefs will tell you…”
“Chefs will tell you what?” Simone finally ventured.
“Hmmm?” Joë asked. “What did you say?” and lapsed into silence. After a while, a long while, he said, “Has he told you yet that he is Egyptian? Your Jacques?”
“Yes.”
“And that his spirit is a tortoise. He’s told you that, am I right?”
“Yes, he’s told me that.”
Simone wondered if she was one in a line of women who had been brought by Jacques to kneel before the altar of this demigod.
“When I,” Jacques’ voice was deep, “when I, I was, in Madagascar…”
“Ah,” Joë sighed, “I love these stories that begin When I was in Madagascar…”
The thought crossed Simone’s mind: Was it possible that the two of them were—she did not know the word to use—had a liaison of an intimate nature? When Joë had said that prior to the war, to his injury, he had obtained this drug on the docks and been forced to strike some ‘dark bargains,’ had he been referring to—she could only imagine the cover of a cheap novel she had seen displayed at a book kiosk, a sailor slouching with his hip jutted out, a sultry gaze at the viewer from beneath half-hooded eyes. In this world where all the rules were different, might friends also have—an unnatural connection? How could it be—after all, Jacques was married and Joë a paralytic. Perhaps this flirtation was, like the threatened duel, a playlet he put on to make his life in this shut-up cell more diverting.
There were so many questions she wanted to ask: How did he experience his inanimate legs? Did they seem to him to be familiar objects, like the shoes we wear daily, almost part of our corpus, but objects nonetheless? Or did he feel towards them a kind of grieving anger—the way once-beautiful aging women regard their faces, now mottled and creased by time? And as for the other business of the lower body—the passing out of waste, arousal—how were those things managed?
At length Joë said: “‘To enter the kingdom of heaven, one must become as a little child.’ Now that’s really from the Bible. Our Lord and Savior,” and here Joë gave another one of his giggles, “said it.”
“Now, why did you say that?” Simone asked.
“Because I felt like saying it,” Joë said.
“No, but how did it relate to—the previous conversation?”
“It didn’t, my darling, it didn’t. I merely said it—because I said it.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said, rolling up her sleeve.
Jacques roused himself from the chair, trudged to the anteroom, opened the medicine cabinet, prepared a dose for her. She watched as the needle entered her arm, saw the flesh clinging to it as Jacques withdrew the syringe. “Press your finger, there, so you don’t get a bruise.” His speech was slow, as if his tongue and lips had thickened.
She
