Underground Time by Delphine de Vigan

the man whose breathing he could hear. He talked to him for half an hour. In the end the man opened the door and Thibault went into the bathroom. The man was calm. He let Thibault listen to his chest. He took his pulse. He told the man that his blood pressure was much too high, a trick he often uses to convince a patient that hospitalisation is necessary. The man agreed to an injection. They talked for another ten minutes and then he gave in.
    Even in the depths of delirium, even in the most acute manic episodes, there is a crack. A tiny chink of lucidity through which you have to intervene.
    The ambulance arrived. Thibault stayed with the man until he got into the vehicle. Once the doors had closed, he instinctively looked up. Behind the glass the little girl was watching him.
     
    What will she remember of these images, of this time in suspension, of these days when things slid out of control?
    What kind of adult do you become if you have discovered at such an early age that life can collapse? What kind of person? What does it equip you with? What are you missing?
    The questions returned as they did every time. The questions come when it’s all over. When he’s finished work and left behind people who’ve been destroyed whom he’ll never see again.
     
    Thibault got back in his car. Lila’s perfume hung in the air, an invisible trace which tore at his throat.
    He turned his mobile back on. Two new addresses were waiting for him. The first of them wasn’t too far. He turned the key in the ignition. He was assailed at once by her absence. In compact form.
     
    As soon as he’s in the car, her absence presents its challenge.
    At a red light, he’s thinking of her. When his foot presses on the accelerator, he’s thinking of her. When he changes gear, he’s thinking of her.
    It’s half past twelve and he isn’t hungry. There’s a hole where his stomach was. A rough pain. Something oppressive, burning, which doesn’t call for any food or any comfort.
     
    He met Lila one autumn night in the Bar des Oies, in that part of the street that climbs towards the sky. Before then, they had bumped into each other several times near where he lived, outside the swimming pool or near the baker’s. This time they were so close it was impossible to miss each other. Leaning on the bar, he looked at the bracelet on her wrist, which didn’t go with the rest of her outfit, it contradicted it. And then her thin legs and her too high heels, and such fine ankles that he wanted to hold them between his fingers. He had just finished a twelve-hour shift. She had come up to him or the other way round; he couldn’t say, he doesn’t remember. She wasn’t like the women he went for, but they had several drinks and then their tongues met. On the bar Lila had caught hold of his left hand and stroked his scar with the tips of her fingers. There was chemistry between them – foreign bodies sometimes mix, go well together, merge. Between them it had been a physical thing without any doubt. And as he hadn’t entirely given up on his childhood experiments, he had wanted to see if this mixing of skins was capable of transformation, and of completion.
    If the chemistry – by contagion or diffraction – could spread and turn to passion.
     
    But very soon he had collided with her. Collided – that was the word. Very soon he collided with her reserve, her distance, her moments of absence. Very soon he understood that she could only love him when horizontal, or when he held her on top of him by her hips. Afterwards, he would watch her sleep on the other side of the bed, remote. From the start, he had collided with the air of indifference with which she countered anything that smacked of emotion, with her closed expression the morning after, her gloomy moods at the end of the weekend, her inability to manage the simplest goodbye.
    Even after the most intense nights, in the morning she offered him this closed face, on tiptoe, without any sign of