The waltz of Mephistopheles

"This is where I used to play as a child."
François's gaze is lost in the immensity that stands before him. This gigantic plain with low vegetation looks like a Russian landscape, but it's located in metropolitan France. He's looking at the few trees that had the strength and the courage to stand in the midst of this ungrateful expanse of land, with a detached face. Specifically, he's at his parents' home, and even more precisely, at his mother's home, as his father, a diplomat, died in a plane crash a few years ago.

This unfortunate death, this "accident of work", this "risk of the profession", this absence of patriarch, he does not really regret it. Dad never cared for him. He just didn't have time. Always between two flights, or between the two breasts of a minor prostitute in God-knows-what South Asian province, the paternal figure, tanned differently over the seasons and "work" destinations, was hardly ever in the house. And then Mom couldn't stand his infidelities anymore. Hits in the face, too, were hard to endure. Actually, François and his mother were rather happy to know that he was abroad. During a few days of respite, they could savor the salvific assurance that violence was gone on a journey.

François prefers not to think too much about all of this, especially when he's looking at the plain from Mom's garden. These moments require a certain solemnity, a respect for nature that results in silence. So, instead of thinking about what his life was like in Dad's time, he conducts his mind to what he sees. He tells himself that if he was working, if he was making money, he might have one day the opportunity to buy this big space where the human species has not yet left its dirty mark.

Unfortunately, the hope of growing other trees seems compromised. The nearby town, five kilometers away, and especially its huge power plant, the only building perceptible from the house of Mom on days when the visual field is not too crowded with fine particles, are probably responsible for the infertility of the surrounding soil. Two years ago, the stream's water even became red. 

A voice suddenly breaks the peaceful silence of this half-dead landscape. "Francois, come eat!" This voice, sweet, tender, is that of Mom. After several calls, François finally gets out of his reverie and slowly walks towards the house. In lack of maintenance, it really needs some care. Some windows are broken. Dirt has invaded the outer and inner walls like climbing honeysuckles. Since Dad's death, things have gone worse. Once living like kings, they now live like poor people. The floor is never washed; the mud carpets the dirty black and white checkered tiles of the living room. Roaches took over the kitchen sink and the spiders built a very dense network of wires through the rooms, as if to connect different nests, different filthy fiefs that would be the corners of this unhealthy shack.

In the room where Francois and his mother are busy eating, or rather swallowing their meager ration of potatoes, is a portrait of Dad. Mom, consumed with intolerable loneliness, kept a memory of her late husband, who for so long humiliated her. In Mom's idea, it wasn't that bad. At least, if he was still here, like before, well... from time to time, she wouldn't have to bear the terrible weight of this solitude on her shoulders. François isn't very enchanted by this portrait. The latter bears the marks of the angry outbursts of the young man: the frame is broken.

Mom isn't feeling well. She coughs a lot, and sometimes spits blood. François finally called the doctor, because the state of his mother is becoming unmanageable. After furrowing the muddy road that leads to the house of two hundred square meters, a vestige of a financially prosperous time, the doctor finally passes the front door, hosted by François. "Do not wipe your feet Sir, it's not worth it." He leads him to the bed of his mother, a magnificent matron whose misfortunes and almost beggar-like life have failed to erase the beauty. The doctor remains stunned for a few seconds. Lying on the relic of her married life, she resembles a dying Cleopatra VII, bitten in the breast by the cobra of Amon-Re.

He pulls himself together, then begins to prepare his equipment. The diagnosis is reassuring: it's only a benign hemoptysis. However, the doctor still wants to inject a sedative into Mom, because the coughs are often painful for the chest. This quite ordinary medical gesture will make everything fall apart. Everything will be destroyed. This fragile balance; the old house, the existence, or rather, the sustenance of these two beings, everything will collapse. But let's not go too fast. 

François has had another life. He wasn't always this young man of the countryside, running from delusion to delusion, blindly pursuing dreams that are already broken. He wasn't always spending his days wandering like a dog under the pouring rain of this forgotten place. There was another period in his existence: the Paris life.

Sent to the capital to do marketing studies, François quickly became accustomed to skipping school. The days he attended class at university can be counted on the fingers of one hand. More rebellious than ever against the attitude of Dad, who was now free to beat Mom without anyone knowing it, he decided to deny everything attached to the fatherly image. The beautiful palace in the middle of country where his parents live? He didn't want to go back there. His studies, motivated by Dad to reach a correct financial situation? He didn't want to do them anymore. The luxury student apartment rented by Dad? He didn't want to live there anymore. He left it and sent a letter to his parents so they were warned.

What is left then? François still had time to build relationships, especially with Andréas, a young marginal who slept in an abandoned building in La Chapelle. He met him near the university. Andréas was sprawled on a bush, looking stricken, and successively emptied different bottles of different cheap liquor. Everything fell into place at that moment. The rebellion he was wanting so much, he had it just in front of him, personified by the miserable Andréas. After the beginning of a rather hostile conversation, the two individuals ended up sympathizing. As this kind of story often happens very quickly, it only took a few weeks for them to become inseparable.

Andréas had agreed to host François, who joined him in his Pharaonic concrete dinosaur, where scrap metal, beer bottles and spoons accumulated and strewed the ground. François quickly became aware of the monster that was slowly devouring Andréas: heroin. After more than a year of daily consumption, there was not much left of this sad character. His face was covered with pimples, one of his teeth was rotting; his eyes with dilated pupils made him look dazed, his look was cold and distant, empty.

The daily life of an addict isn't easy, so François decided to accompany his new friend to kill the deadly boredom of dormitory towns and car parks. The two companions walked a lot, but always found what they were looking for; the famous magic powder. Fascinated by this rather unusual routine, François didn't last long before falling and becoming an addict in his turn. He went through all products: LSD, ketamine, ecstasy, cocaine and ended up falling into the endless chasm of opiates. The terrible escalation also went through his way of consumption: sniffing, smoking and, finally, intravenous injection.

The son of a diplomat gradually lost his mind, and the evenings became more and more unreasonable. Urges, too, were getting stronger. He couldn't stand more than two hours without his fix, which led him quickly to no longer have money, and therefore to obtain what he wanted by using the conventional means of this milieu: handbag theft, physical assault, racketeering, begging; most of his nights were spent in jail. His mental state was degraded: sometimes paranoid, maniacal or violent, he couldn't stand to be a prisoner of himself any longer. But the addiction was too strong, so it continued.

He too now beared the traces of this fury of life, as evidenced by his yellow eyes, his putrid breath, the curvature of his back and especially his porous arm, like a sponge, pierced with a thousand holes, created by injections, more and more precarious, in the toilets, in car parks. His life was hell. One day, he collapsed after five days without sleeping, his feet bleeding. Mom and Dad ended up learning about the horrible reality of their son's life, through absence tickets from the university, and numerous prosecutions in the correctional court their son attended.

Taken away from his toxic environment, which are these souls bathing in the most ultimate perdition, François was forced to quit. The methadone and subutex prescribed by the toxicologist helped him spend his boring days in the countryside. His weaning went pretty well and he eventually got cured from addiction. But here we are, the doctor comes at home one day and his past resurfaces at the mere sight of the syringe containing the sedative for Mom. His memory makes him scroll through the film of his life, fragment by fragment.

When he gets out of his thoughts, the doctor is already gone. It's been half an hour since he's standing still in front of Mom's bed, like a stone. She's now sleeping peacefully, you could swear she's dead. François decides to go back to the plain for the pleasure of his eyes. While leaving, he notices the bill left by the practitioner on the table.
 
Days are becoming long. The serenity he thought he had found back in this rat hole is threatened. His thoughts are polluted by the idea of diving back, as if heroin had insidiously ingrained its roots in his nervous system, infecting synapses and neurotransmitters. His blood is sick, saturated with disgust. Parasitic insects have laid toxic eggs inside his organs.

Morning rises slowly in the house. The sun comes out hesitatingly of the horizon, showering François’ sleepy face with its cowardly light. It's the day after the village feast. He came back very late last night, and drank a lot. After an inert sleep, his eyelids finally open, leaving him to glimpse the decayed ceiling of his room. His skull, hammered painfully by his brain still bathing in ethanol, is hot. His cracked lips let go a groan of fatigue and discomfort. This is how François wakes up in his vomit, half naked, with a confused memory.

As he walks through the house, looking for his dear mother, he smells a scent that catches his attention. The putrid, unbearable odour seems to be emanating from the living room. Arriving there, and seeing his trophy of yesterday evening, a dead dog apparently eviscerated, as there’s a knife close to its body and that its intestines have partly poured on the table where the small family takes its meals, his eyes widen. Without thinking he may have gone a bit too far last night, he turns his thoughts instantly to Mom: "She will kill me when she sees this."

Mom isn't there. He remembers that an old toad of the village, a rustic peasant who raises chickens in his "farm", if one can call it a farm considering its state of decrepitude, had approached his mother and ended up taking her to his home. She probably spent the night there. Abandoned in his repulsive palace, François sits on an old wooden chair. While gazing at the remains of the animal on the table right in front of him, he thinks. He tells himself that his family, the people who love him and that he loves, he lost them when he was forced to leave Paris. Even though Mom was striving to make life in the country seem less unbearable, he wanted more than anything to find his old companions.

He immediately leaves the house, taking a little money in the drawer of his mother, and heads to the train station, located at the center of the village. Instead of walking on the dirt road that could make him meet Mom, still ruffled with her disgusting somersaults with the farmer, he decides to cut across the fields. 

As if to take away a last memory of his rural life, he immerses himself in the landscapes that surround him, aware that this is perhaps the last time he has the opportunity to admire them. The rain begins to fall again, turning the soil into a quagmire. After an hour of walking through this severe shower, François arrives at last. The place remained the same as the last time he saw it, that is to say on his return from Paris. There was already this piling up of out of order wagons, all tagged with exotic invectives. At two o'clock, the train creeps on the rusty tracks of the railway and takes him away.

A sleep of lead and a few hours later, the vertiginous buildings of the great inhuman city finally show through the windows of the train. Huge towers, suburban blocks, public housing, railroads, roadside interchanges, slums, improvised whorehouses behind garbage cans and piles of waste on the sidewalks seem to welcome their old friend back with open arms. The wildlife too, is jubilant: the traders in a hurry who try to avoid as much contact with the common people as possible, the bohemian bourgeois returning from a vernissage, the foreign-accented workers who come down from the cranes to find their women and the idiots who roam the ill-famed streets in search of psychotropic drugs, sex, or simply to satisfy an irrepressible desire for blood, gratuitous violence at the edge of a deadlock, a furious and wild desire to do harm for nothing, to break someone who has a happier life, the need for domination over another being; all have remained the same, as if they had been waiting for ages for this brave François to return and bring them a reason to continue their way of life as if they were the small elements of a gigantic ant-hill: Paris.

Planted like a stake on the dock, at Gare de Lyon, in the midst of travelers who, unlike him, carry luggage with them, the young Francois is in a trance. In reality, he can't see what's happening in front of him, even a meter away. His sight, his sense of smell and even his touch are inactive because his whole being is focused on his brain activity. He's in one of his phases of deep thought, a kind of gift he received at birth. From the outside but also from the inside, this reflection could be likened to transcendental meditation. In his mind, the images, the skits jingle happily in a noisy and heterogeneous shambles. What he sees first and foremost is powder. Explosions of powder, more or less white according to its purity, from the uncut product to the Mexican black tar, and nightmarish images of memories that cost him a lot: crushed glass, or ammonia. It's aesthetic, almost grandiloquent, as if dynamite exploded under a pile of flour, in slow motion. 

In a thrill of ecstasy, he even feels the sweet and saving sting of the needle, a beautiful highway intended to circulate the acetylated morphine into his veins, where it will settle and slowly but surely provoke internal rotting of the body. Enthralled, caught in the intensity of the moment and this instant reverie, he can almost feel the first effects after an injection: the sense of vertigo, the head swinging back and the unpleasant smell of vinegar that tickles the nose during a few minutes, sometimes causing vomiting.

A traveler jostles him involuntarily, pulling him out of his fleeting evasion. François has only one idea in mind: return to his stronghold. To go to Gare du Nord, a famous place for dreamers mad with morphine, he chose to take the metro. After all, the sum stolen from his mother before leaving him gives him the means for it. Dipping in this atmosphere, he feels like a fish that was released after years of choking in the open air. The faded faces of the middle class returning from work, the shrill noise of crying babies, the comforting sound of their mother repeating to them "we'll be home soon, sweetheart," the mixed smell of the sweat of the passengers and the metal of the infrastructure, the semen of eternal loners in their corner, viciously watching the passengers they could have talked to if their lives had not skidded to turn them into human rubbish, into choristers of the sick spirits; he missed this little universe so much.

No time to lose: just out of the underground, he goes to Lariboisière hospital to get a free injection kit. While leaving, he crosses the lost glances of the survivors of Ambroise Paré street, who try to sell him some capsules of antidepressants. Obnubilated by his idea, he continues his way without even looking at them. In fact, he didn't even hear or see them. It's not François who's walking, it's his terrible addiction, incarnated by a skeleton with a vaulted back, covered by a skin with cadaverous whiteness. In order not to lose control and find the courage to walk through the falling winter night, he looks around. The streetlights rise like antennas towards paradise, hidden by a sky lined with threatening clouds.

The journey is long, and François no longer has the habit of crossing whole neighborhoods on foot. He still remembers the abominable pain of entire days of wandering under the blazing sun of the eighteenth arrondissement, at the time when he was able to walk for hours, despite the pain, the fatigue, the hunger and the neurotransmitters desperately screaming for serotonin. 

Speaking of hunger, he now thinks it might be time for a snack. Searching for drug can take hours; he will be dead well before, so he decides to go to a grocery store still open at this time. On the road, in a narrow, dimly lit street, he sees near the garbage cans a strange mass covered with litter. What he discovers after having loosely removed the nauseating mass of rubbish is even more repulsive. The key element of his Parisian past lies just before his eyes: Andréas.

It took him several seconds to realize, not because of the shock but because the face of his friend is in such a state that it is difficult to recognize it. Half of his teeth are on the cobblestones of the alley. His cheeks, chin and forehead have many gaping wounds. His face was stabbed so violently that the skull is practically open. Completely upset by this frightful vision of horror, François moves back a few steps to see the extent of the damage. Used syringes litter the ground.

Suddenly, he changes his attitude. He feels no pain, no anger, no disgust, but a sudden desire to lose himself. A fix, he thinks, will probably clean his mind and take the memory of this terrible scene away. He starts running to find a dealer a few hundred meters away. The police is observing, these days, it's repression. Heroin has become so rare in the city that its price has exploded. Too bad, he buys a dose and rushes in a dismal parking lot.

While François's spoon slowly heats up in the glow of his lighter, he feels like a presence is wandering around. Suddenly, a rather large silhouette appears at the other end of the parking lot. The latter begins to approach him. Little by little, the outline becomes clearer. The mysterious form is that of a man, probably in his forties. He stands in front of him: "Can I sit down with you?"

François agrees feverishly and attentively observes the stranger who comes to keep him company. "What's your name, by the way?" He asks in his soft, throbbing voice. "Dan". Dan had blue eyes, with a sort of desperate melancholy in his look, as if he had accepted the fact that the path he had chosen to take was hopeless. Indeed, it wasn't difficult to guess that Dan, with his slight Anglo-Saxon accent, was a being similar to François. His cheeks dug by drugs are evidence of more than a decade of hell. As the product warms up in François' brown spoon, a relic that he kept secretly, a conversation begins:
- What is this accent that you have?
- I'm American. I have only been in Paris for twelve years.
- United States? What are you doing here, then?
- Detroit, the city where I come from, is bankrupt. I came to Paris because I was offered a good job, but I messed up...
- How is life there? I mean, where you're from.
- Michigan is a strange place. Often, I and my parents went on vacation to the Upper Peninsula, always in the same place. I have family in Houghton, we slept at home. The winters were beautiful, despite the intense cold near the Great Lakes. I studied, but as unemployment is a real scourge there, I left my little world for Paris, boosted by a friend of my father.
- What was it, your work?
- You will never believe it; I was a bank employee. With the suit and everything!

As the two new friends discuss, the drug is ready. François has already placed the filter on his syringe. Dan asks him half, but he refuses, arguing the exorbitant price of such a commodity in these days. "How, you leave me like that? I made efforts to be nice!" He disappears instantly, grumbling.

The needle's stainless steel intrudes into a vein of François' forearm. This sting awakens many past wounds. It's like being stung in a thousand places at the same time. The precious and devastating substance makes its way into his dormant brain, and the journey begins.

An explosion is heard. Its green and purple smoke parasitizes the sky and all the surrounding landscape. The trees and hills are swept in a nuclear blast. At the bottom of the crater left by the cataclysm occurs a strange ritual. Men with horses' heads look at François, completely sucked into his imagination. They are followed by a procession of dead clowns. Then everything stops and the decor changes to give way to a love story, or rather a mirage of love.

This hundred-year-old oak that is being shown by his imagination, François has the feeling that he's knew it since forever. His mind wanders: "This oak... of our love of ether he was the witness, in a moment of misunderstanding so particular. I fondly remember these paths that we were walking just to see its branches, so that its immensity overshadowed our youth mistakes. In the twilight, your blond hair took on an orange tone. We were numb, so lost by the newness of the sensations, as if we were learning a new language. I remember our hot bodies despite the fact that we were fully naked. In winter, when the cold was beginning to devour our skin too much, we were meeting at the castle of this notary who was never there. We climbed the short gate of the homestead, crossed the rose garden and stopped at the greenhouse, which strangely seemed impervious to the cold environment. Evenings, in winter and in summer, were heavy-hearted. In an ultimate embrace we swore to meet again soon. Each time, the same hope that one day we would no longer have to separate. May it never happen again, we whispered naively. Sometimes, we were going to the ball. Red and blue lights were sliding on the floor. Your head on my shoulder. My mouth in your hair. As if we were alone, outside of this world."

In an ecstatic state close to transfiguration, unable to feel, hear or see anything of the surrounding environment, François is now lying in the middle of the parking lot, revisiting, like a memory, a story he's never experienced, an evasive lie, a final piece of his sanity.

A chandelier allows him to see through a long dark hallway carpeted with black and red striped carpets. The scent of the air becomes more weird and mysteriously intoxicating with every step, so he keeps moving forward. Arrived in a room draped on all sides, he contemplates a pool with pink water in front of him. The fog invades the disturbing mansion, and from this smelly smoke come three medusas. The snakes that make up their hair gently caress his face. The decor changes again.

It seems that the conversation he's had with Dan the American is altering his thoughts. Around him now, are snow-covered trees. Turning around, the view of an immense expanse of icy water is being offered to him. It's Lake Superior in winter. A disturbing, immutable sadness floats in the air. His body moves at the speed of light, as if he were in a bubble floating above the breathtaking sights of Michigan. He sees the poor children of Flint, playing in snow, blackened by the carbon of diesel wrecks crisscrossing the sad streets of the city. His heart disintegrates under the gaze of the rust belt. The images become blurry, the descent is initiated, the effect of the product fades.

Overwhelmed by a feeling of failure and helplessness, François feels the visceral need to return to his green paradises, his magnificent synthetic, molecular, almost real adventures. Fate is kind to him, as the dealer has remained in his place, and he has a few grams left, which will be enough for the night. Outside, the cold is unbearable. Even slums are abandoned. During the transaction, the dealer and François both feel like they are the only two survivors of an apocalypse of blizzard and emptiness. There is no traffic on the ring road. The sky is deep black, it seems infinite. 

The frost crackles under the poor quality shoes of François. The resonance of wind on the drum of his ears, reddened by an unreasonably low temperature, results in the perception of a deafening whistle, even more painful than the frozen bite of a winter night in the heart of Paris. A little more courage and his destination will be reached. It's said that everyone has taken refuge in a gallery dug under a motorway junction, on a construction site abandoned by the public authorities.

The installation is miserable. A sheet of metal is roughly placed against the entrance to the gallery (a simple hole dug in the concrete) to protect its "residents" from the icy storm coming from outside. Everything is strangely calm. Generally, the fights between drug addicts for a crack pebble or a half gram of morphine are usual, they even punctuate their life. Second unusual thing, no one is controlling who gets in, so François enters, without anyone preventing him, in a stinking and obscure gallery, apparently uninhabited.

However, the feeling he felt when arriving in the parking lot comes back. If he's not alone, why is it so quiet? Perhaps the solemn recollection for one of them who died in the night, carried away by the vice of an air pipe which would have dissolved his soul with ammonia and baking soda. It still seems inconceivable. Like himself, when he discovered the crumbs of his friend Andréas hidden under garbage bags, the lost minds are unable to feel empathy. It usually disappears, escaping through the smoke of a puff of crack, or in the vomit that is expelled laughing after a fix too loaded.

The worries are confirmed when, rushing into the dirty hole, a smell of sweat and feces, which is typical of these night camps, reaches his nostrils. Another perfume, well known to François, belongs to the folklore of these hamlets of survival: the abrasive smell of burning crack.

As he arrives in a particularly dark section of the tunnel, a man grabs him violently. Of African descent, his eyes with blood vessels appearing and bursting, with marks on his left thumb, he looks like a "maudou", a crack salesman in the drug jargon. Suddenly, the voice of Dan the American is heard: "It's him, get him!" Then comes a horde made up of a dozen inquisitors, encircling François, whose anguish blows up the dopamine receptors. These ravaged faces, these defeated mines, are very telling. 

Looking attentively at each element of this small, ethnically diverse colony, one can observe degrees of misery, degrees of addiction, different depths of sinking into the quicksand of methodical alienation, a fate impossible to conjure, brought by the almost dogmatic consumption of opiates, benzodiazepines and other means of escape in absolute precariousness, the bottom of the pit, which some members of this community have obviously already reached.

Abruptly pinned to the ground, held by several people, he anxiously awaits his judgment. Dan appears, dropping a little of his saliva on his frightened face as a sign of humiliation. "So, where do you hide it?" François replies in a trembling voice that he has no more. The search starts. Soon, the coveted powdery goods are spotted, nestled in one of his pockets.

In the confusion caused by the discovery of a small bag of whitish dust, our intrepid hero, or rather what's left of it, tries to run away at full speed. But these legs are no longer made to run: the long walks across the city, and across the plain when he returned to Mom and Dad, have suffered irreversible sequelae, which means that it only takes a few seconds before François collapses on the ground. To neutralize him, he is hit on the head with a huge iron bar found on the site. He also gets thrown some bricks, stolen on this large playground.

"Maybe we should leave him here, he's starting to seriously hurt," Dan says in the middle of the angry community. It's impossible to reason anyone, everybody is in a trance under the devastating effect of crack crystals. In the general murderous madness, someone brings a screwdriver out of nowhere. The one of them who seems to be the most sick, almost all of whose teeth are absent, without any awareness of his actions, approaches to slide the screwdriver into a nostril of the poor victim, who's completely overwhelmed by what is happening to him. While the object is almost pushed down to the handle, and an intense flow of blood escapes from his nasal passages, François, probably too stunned to feel the pain, sketches a grunt, to the surprise of the audience, with wide eyes, who applauds the performance. The scene is surreal. 

The screwdriver reaches a maximum depth and an eye begins to take off. Totally oblivious to what is happening to him, and in a last outburst of brain activity, François begins to think. His brain is still running at full speed, while the rest of his body is in a devastated state. It's one of his trances that starts again. Now, instead of fantastic situations, parallel universes, non-existent animals and neon-lit skies, images of his childhood are parading in his dying subconscious.

He pictures himself with his father, probably around the age of four. The diplomat was a tall fellow who would have been given anyone's trust without asking. His angelic face, leaving no indication of what was happening in the intimacy of his semi-manor in the country, made him look twenty years younger than his real age.

Together, when Dad's schedule allowed him to be in France, they went fishing, fifty kilometers away. Their little expedition lasted the day. This one moment of respite between the tantrums and the absence of the patriarch was also an opportunity for François to escape, just for one day, the sad plains where he and his family were living, the surrounding lakes being too polluted to be able to fish for something other than old wrecked cars and the dead bodies of people who have been missing for ages.

Although he has always shown a profound contempt for his father after his death, he secretly cherished those precious moments which allowed him to develop as a human being, like a flower blooming on a pile of manure. Maybe he could have had a better life if everything had gone well from the beginning.

One tends to say the opposite, but childhood is decisive in the life of a human being. If the events are favorable at the dawn of existence, then they will be all the time. The damage is irreparable. Some people are aware of this, others prefer to suffer the weight of an overwhelming defeat before disappearing forever.

Maybe if he had continued his studies, everything would have changed. He would've had Mom's house renovated, and bought land on the surrounding plains that are so dear to him. Maybe it should have been this way. Perhaps he was trying in vain to escape from the prison in which his ungrateful youth seemed to have locked him up forever, before crumbling in his own prison. 

Perhaps by reasoning Dad, or helping more Mom, the broken pieces of his family could have been glued together with love. The singing mornings, the hearty breakfast prepared on the table, the smiles that put one in a good mood. The bright days, where the academic results wouldn't have drastically dropped from year to year and would have led to more interesting study choices than this marketing training, for which he had never experienced any interest. The glorious evenings, hearts harangued by hope, like a challenge to the setting sun, knowing that it will show again its ugly nuclear mass the next day. The serene nights, a moment conducive to the assimilation by the brain of knowledge acquired during the day, a peaceful sleep, restorative, without anxiety. All this could have happened, but the many occasions were thrown into the garbage by François and his parents, a charming family with a repulsive fate.

The last thoughts before death will be appeased ones. The spirit has finally found a sanctuary while the final mutilations are operated on the body of François. In peace with himself, ready to leave for the other world, he enjoys a last moment of tranquility while a pool of urine, the final reaction of a body unable to defend itself, trickles into his pants, providing a pleasant warmth between his paralyzed legs.

(2017)