didn’t have any.”
“No, but the sight of it makes me sick.” Silence. Long silence. I open my eyes. “How long have I been out?”
“Oh, about ten minutes.”
“I’m sorry. My head just went spinning and all of sudden—”
She puts a finger to my lips. “I was watching you the whole time. Watching your face. You looked so serene, like you were having a beautiful dream.”
I pull her down gently toward me. “I like you. You’re cute.”
“Cute?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what fa-rung-sayt call the prostitutes.”
“Who?”
“White guys.”
“No, I didn’t mean—”
“I know.” She starts to unzip my jeans. “Does that happen a lot? The vertigo?”
“Not since I was a kid. I was a very frail kid.”
“You look quite hefty to me now.”
“Cute and hefty. We make an interesting pair.”
We’re tearing each other’s clothes quickly, fumbling like a pair of horny teenagers. I pull out a condom from my jeans pocket. She takes it from my hand and throws it aside.
“Bareback,” she says.
“You sure?”
“Seems kind of like Russian roulette, doesn’t it, but talking to you at the bar revealed a lot about you.”
“I wasn’t aware I said anything revealing at all, except that I hated doing the tourist thing—drugs, hookers, rock and roll.”
“That’s precisely what I like about you.”
A few days later, I call to set an appointment so we can start working on our interviews. She doesn’t return my calls. I don’t see her for another week. The next weekend I see her at the same bar with the same people. The first thing she notices is that I’m no longer wearing Nikes.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “A very subtle way of comradeship.”
“I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it,” she says.
* * *
We sleep together every night and still hang out with the same bunch of people on weekends, pretending there’s nothing going on. We sit far apart. We hardly even talk to each other. The secrecy of our relationship makes it more exciting, like we’re playing a private game of coded gestures and hidden messages. This secrecy becomes the core of our relationship, a kind of mental Viagra. We keep fucking bareback, me barely able to pull out at the last minute. I ask her if she’s not scared.
“Of what? You protect yourself against those with whom you share nothing but mutual indifference.”
I can’t help an amused smile.
“That’s the closest I’ll ever get to saying I love you,” she says.
“Are you saying you love me?”
“Close.”
She says she wants a language only she and I can understand. Not French, not English, not even Thai, but a series of signs so simple no second-guessing is necessary. Text messaging, she says, is the ideal evolution of language—communication distilled to the level of basic necessity. She invents a private text message, a kind of private joke, to convey this: WSOWOB, we speak only with our bodies. This way the artificial boundaries of human interaction are blurred between us.
This gives me another idea. I suggest that we reveal ourselves completely to each other, that we reveal everything. “Everything, that is, that we wouldn’t normally share with anyone else,” I add. “Then our private barriers break down, and we make ourselves totally vulnerable to the other.”
“Is that what you want? To be vulnerable?”
“No, it’s what I fantasize. Kind of like a mental striptease.”
“Hmm. But in a striptease, it’s the stripper who actually has power over the spectator.”
“Good point. But that’s the challenge, to be able to resist the animalistic drive to dominate and subjugate. To be able to trust the other while one is weak.”
“So by revealing ourselves, we make the other weak?”
“Then the dynamics are redefined. We become a world of just us two. We are united more profoundly than any two people can be. Because trust subverts the urge for power.”
“Sounds like a theory that needs to be tested,” she says. “Under laboratory conditions.”
“Wanna give it a try?”
“Okay.”
“Tell me something.”
“Like what?”
“Something devilish.”
“Hmm. Since this is your idea, you go first.”
I tell her I would like to share the story of the lost boy. But in order to do that, she would have to come with me to my parents’ home.
“Okay,” she says. “So you want me to meet your parents.”
“No, my parents are dead. I want you to see the films they shot of the boy.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“No, that’s okay.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Show me.”
The next morning we are on the flight to La Napoule.
* * *
The brittle film flutters through the projector’s sprockets. It makes lapping sounds as it hits the framing aperture, like a dog drinking from a bowl.
His image magnified on the wall, the little boy looks just like any other two-year-old, a paper hat on his head, the crumpled brim falling over his eyes. He toddles toward the camera with a plastic pistol held aloft, like some undersized Belmondo staggering away from the cops.
There are about a dozen reels. Not a lot, strangely, considering my parents shot practically everything in their lives. Little Mathieu waddles across the frame, trips, falls, smears his face with cake—ordinary gestures from what could have been an ordinary life. There’s Annette coming into frame. Then it’s Sylvain, who’s just passed the camera shakily to her. Now Annette’s holding the camera at arm’s
