That much I know. Janya’s headed out to go back to the market before it closes. She wants to get the figurine of the little boy for me.
I can see the entire apartment as if through a wide-angle lens, the corners distorted, the walls coming up toward me. I am floating above everything. It seems to me like I’m dying, or dead. Yet I am conscious of the fact that this is an event, that I am in the midst of something happening. Everything is still. Time stops.
There are small, almost imperceptible signals at first. It’s like what happens when a DVD gets stuck, and the image freezes for just a fleeting, disorienting second. Then, in a series of stroboscopic images, I see things as their opposite: trees are red, the sky is yellow, my hand, held before me with a mix of shock and wonder, appears as in a film negative, a shadow, the skin translucent and the bones showing through.
Now I can see Janya coming in. She stops at the door, frozen in shock. Something, maybe a cry, comes out of her mouth, but all I hear is a fuzzy sound, like a drawl. She drops the paper bag she’s been carrying. There’s a dull crack as it hits the floor, like something splitting inside my head.
I don’t see what’s happening as much as I feel it. I’m in her arms. She grabs a pencil and holds it between my teeth to prevent me from biting off my tongue. The pencil cracks in two. I’ve stopped convulsing. My body goes limp. I’m breathing slowly. My eyes are wide open. I’m gazing blankly at the ceiling, gazing, it seems, at me. She holds my head up, dabbing her scarf on the sweat that’s beaded on my forehead.
I don’t want to move. I fear that the slightest movement, the slightest noise, will dispel such a clear, unmistakable vision.
“Something’s happened,” I tell her. “Someone’s spoken to me.”
“Who?”
“Mathieu.”
“The lost boy?”
“The same fucking one.”
* * *
“Was that what the vertigo was all about?” Janya asks me.
“What vertigo?”
“Bangkok. My apartment. Mai tai.”
“No. I don’t know. This hasn’t happened in a while.”
“When was the last time it happened?”
“Not sure. Months before my parents’ accident. Since then, I’ve been completely well.”
“How did you get well?”
“I was in a monastery.”
“What?”
“My parents put me in a monastery. They asked the monks if they could, you know, heal me.”
“This is getting really bizarre, Mathieu.”
“It’s right there, half an hour by ferry from Cannes. You can see it from here. I often wondered if they ever remembered me, and asked themselves if I was okay.”
“And does that have something to do with the lost boy?”
“It’s got everything to do with the lost boy.”
She’s looking very distressed.
“I feel like telling you the whole story, but I’m not sure I want to.”
“No boundaries,” she says.
“You sure?”
“We made an agreement.”
“There are dozens of other reels left by Sylvain and Annette—discarded films of an aborted project that took them from Normandy to the Philippines. They contain the rest of the story.”
“You said you think the boy’s spoken to you. What could he have possibly said?”
“I don’t know. He said everything’s already been revealed. I think.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either. I think it’s something to do with his being lost. Maybe he’s trying to tell me what really happened.”
“That’s so Stephen King.”
“I know. Yet I didn’t feel spooked at all. I wanted to know.”
“Did you, like, you know, speak to him?”
“I think I tried. But I was kind of frozen. My words were coming out weird, like what happens during a nightmare, when you want to do something but can’t.”
“So that’s all he said, that everything’s been revealed?”
“One boy will be lost and another will be saved.”
“What?”
“That’s what else I remember him saying.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s something from one of my parents’ films. It was a prediction some mystic in Normandy told Annette.”
“Maybe it’s your mind, Mathieu. That happens, you know. Maybe it’s you recalling your mother’s film.”
“You know what? I think you’re right. Of course that’s what it is. It just sounded so real. The voice, I mean. Like it was whispering close to my ear.”
“I’d like to see them.”
“The other films?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a whole bunch of them.”
“We have a whole bunch of time.”
“Okay. Get yourself comfortable.”
“Are you going to be all right?”
“I’m perfectly fine.”
“You sure?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s absolutely nothing. A little wine would be nice.”
She goes to the kitchen to open a bottle. Along the way, she picks up the paper bag she had dropped coming in, to throw it in the trash. I haul the boxes out and lay out the reels in as chronological an order as possible. As I spool the first reel, I hear the sound of glass crashing, and a loud gasp from Janya.
I rush to the kitchen to see what’s happened. A dark red puddle has spread around her feet. At first I think she’s hurt, but it’s the wine from the bottle that slipped from her hand. She’s staring at the trash can, where she’s just emptied the bag. At the bottom of the can, instead of the figurine of the little boy she thought she’d purchased, the grinning gargoyle has been smashed to smithereens, hardly recognizable except for its perfectly intact face, its long, pointed tongue sticking out.
