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Nagasaki
Contents
Nagasaki
About the Author
Copyright
Éric Faye
Translated from the French by Emily Boyce
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I maximised the window in the bottom right-hand corner. There it was, full screen. A full screen of nothing. There was something odd though. Now that I had blown it up and could see the kitchen in detail, something was niggling me. Was it the bottle of mineral water left out on the work surface? Experts have been known to rely on such intuitions: the painting in front of them is a fake; they are utterly convinced of it, even without proof. They step right back and then lean in closer, in much the same way as I was inspecting the kitchen under the magnifying glass of my fears. This tableau was a fake. The bottle had moved. While I was a) in the meeting, b) in the loo, c) on the phone or d) sidetracked by a colleague struggling to interpret a shot. Was I really, totally sure that it wasn’t exactly where I had left it? For the remainder of the morning, I left my desk only to go and buy a bento box from the local Lawson, which I grazed on in front of my computer: an absence of ten minutes that I was now compensating for by not taking my eyes off the table where I would have dinner that evening. There I was, like a weatherman under house arrest in the eye of a static anticyclone. As I opened the box which held my lunch, I had the impression of looking into a doll’s house from above, with all the little neatly divided compartments filled with multicoloured items of food. And I said to myself, you could fit a webcam in each of your six rooms, split the screen into the same number of windows and do nothing from morning to night but examine from a distance the bento box you live in.
And then it was lunch time. My colleagues deserted the open-plan office, the air conditioning having given up the ghost, and, preferring to swelter rather than put up with the cicadas, I went round shutting all the windows again, leaving just one open, the one on my computer screen, which I continued to watch while finishing the contents of the box compartment by compartment. Hadn’t the bottle of water been slightly closer to the sink earlier on? A matter of fifteen or twenty centimetres, it seemed to me. No sooner had I convinced myself of this than I changed my mind again. You’re making things up, trying to rationalise your unconscious thoughts. For that matter, are you really sure those yogurts disappeared after all? You should report it, you know, go to the police: I’ve had three pots of yogurt stolen in the last few months. Come on now, calm down. Lately, you’ve been all on edge.
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