One must pay attention with such fluctuations!
The fetus had died with the mother.
But monsieur, you have paid for it. It is yours! Take it! It is paid for! Monsieur, it is yours!
—
Had I not known it all along, since the day she had called me in Paris, from la communauté, from the day she had called to ask me to come see her? Had I not known it from the beginning, even when I had persuaded myself it wasn’t so? Had I not known it ever since the day Miriam and I lay down together on the rotting boards over the stream, ever since she broke with her fingertip the thread of semen suspended between us? I had known it because it was true. It had always been true. Of all the things that could have happened, this one had happened. Miriam and I had conceived a child.
And yet for all that, it was still impossible. Can you not see, Father, that if Miriam had been pregnant when she drowned herself, if she had been six months pregnant when she died, and if her baby, our child, had died with her, then that child—our daughter, our Clementine—must have died before she was born?
THIRTY-NINE
Time gave way to arrhythmic oscillations: sometimes day—close and hot, a sheet of plastic sealed over the face—sometimes night—clamped down and ground in a circle, stars studding the haze like nails in a boot heel. At some point, a fringe of restless creatures, fluttering and papery, crowded the borders of my vision. They would leave me alone, I believed, if only I could manage to sleep, but they knew what I thought. Sleep? For you? they seemed to be saying. Never again!
Their agitation spread to my own limbs in the form of an unrelenting tremor that movement alone could subdue. So throughout those days in Nevers, I walked and walked, up and down the rue de la Blanchisserie, the overgrown towpaths, the crest of the levee above the south bank. I walked down past the sad espace de loisirs, the “leisure park” with its shuttered puppet theater, its ice-cream stand and muddy, man-made beach. Through the underbrush, I followed a dubious path out to an isolated sand spit in the river. Wherever I went, my feet would always take me back toward town, toward the épicerie and another pint of vodka.
When walking no longer worked to suppress the tremor, I remembered the pharmacy across from the épicerie. A pharmacy would have something to make me sleep, to disperse the fringe of chattering figures. My feet were already taking me there. With a sigh, an automatic door received me into an interior bewilderingly bright and neat.
I felt suddenly how long it had been since I had bathed, shaved, or changed clothes. To anyone in that spotless interior I would seem a spectacle of neglect. The pharmacist, however, did not seem to notice. His attention was absorbed by a scrawny, dreadlocked young woman standing at the counter. Waving a soiled sheet of paper, she shouted at the pharmacist in a lurching approximation of French. A scabby dog had flattened itself on the cool tile at her feet, taking cover from her harangue.
“Un vrai, vois-vous, c’est vrai ordonnance. Signé par médecin. Vrai médecin. Tu faut le préparer, monsieur.” It was real prescription, signed by real doctor. Monsieur have to make it.
“Once more,” said the pharmacist, slowly, as though speaking to a lip-reader. “I will fill no prescription if the prescription cannot be verified.”
“You has to! I am much pain!”
“No ‘real’ doctor would authorize opiates for someone in your condition.”
But he had to fill it! A tear had loosened the grime at the corner of her eye and she smeared it away. “Alors, then. Monsieur was accepting to take responsibility?”
The pharmacist rolled his eyes. Why, could mademoiselle doubt that he was willing? He would be more than happy to call the gendarmes for her, for her or any of her vagrant friends.
She spun around and, jerking the dog after her, shoved past me toward the door. It was only at that moment that I noticed her belly. From behind she had seemed frail, even emaciated, but I knew now that this was the girl I had seen at the train station, the pregnant girl. The olive skin of her neck and collarbone were speckled with purulent sores, and an odor of scalp and sweat lingered after the door sighed shut at her back.
The pharmacist muttered something about toxicomanes and tsiganes dégueulasses. “Addicts! Disgusting Gypsies,” he said. “And you? What do you want?”
—
On my way back toward the river, I noticed the dog first. It was whimpering behind a bench at the far end of the place de la République, where a switchback path descends the face of the old city walls. The girl was lying on her side, without cover, on the bare ground. The dog would approach her and paw at her chest, then back away, tugging at the limit of the string. The other end of the string must have been tied around the girl’s wrist, because when the dog pulled, her hand jerked a little before flopping back, inert on her hip. Her complexion, olive in the light of the pharmacy, had turned an ashy, congealed hue, tallowed with sweat. When I lifted her other wrist to take her pulse, she attempted to pull away, but with a nerveless gesture. Her eyes drifted, irises gray, flecked with gold, sclera bloodshot and tinged with jaundice, pupils constricted to pinpoints.
“Vous êtes très malade,” I said.
“Enculé donne pas médicament.”
“Vous êtes en état de manque,” I said, uncertain of the word for “withdrawal.”
A pinpoint pupil shifted past me as she repeated, “Motherfucker doesn’t give medicine.”
I asked her where she lived and said I could help her get home. Another limp gesture past my shoulder and then a struggle to lift herself. I managed at last to balance her on her feet, then with a jerk of surprising force she tried to twist
