How to Behave in a Crowd Read online

  I took the Dictaphone out of my desk drawer and pressed the REC button without even checking whether I wasn’t erasing a previous interview. I didn’t think I would really write Simone’s biography, and the little part of me that thought I actually might also suspected that when the time came, my memory would be of more help than Simone’s half-true recollections and funnel theories anyway. She cleared her throat.

  “I think my biography should start with me gazing through the car window on our way back from summer vacation,” she said.

  “When you were practicing melancholy?”

  “Right.”

  “I never really understood what you meant by that.”

  “Practicing melancholy meant looking at everything lying in front of me as if it were already belonging to a distant past.”

  “Okay.”

  “And making up stories in my head of highly unlikely futures. Trying to remove myself from the present at all costs. It’s like the opposite of meditation, in a way.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I still do it.”

  “Why?”

  “As an exercise. To boost my imagination.”

  “You can’t work on your imagination if you’re in the present?”

  “Well, to some extent, sure, you can. But you don’t have that much control over the present—say, the weather, or what other people around you will do. You mostly go through the motions, you know? The possibilities are limited. There’s too little room for analysis and most important, too little room for improvement, which is the key to all art.”

  “Do you have to imagine sad things to work on your melancholy?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Why do you call it practicing melancholy then?”

  “Because what goes on in your head when you step out of the present is always richer and more satisfying than what you come back to when you’re done. That’s the sad part. That’s what’s at the core of melancholy, not the things you actually imagine. The present is disappointing in a way that you can’t act upon while it’s happening. But once you’ve made a memory of something, you can throw away the meaningless parts and write better versions of it.”

  “Like Don Quixote?”

  “Well I don’t have that kind of imagination,” Simone said sadly. “But sure. Yes. Don Quixote doesn’t imagine sad stuff most of the time. When he thinks he’s being knighted by the innkeeper, for example, that’s not sad.”

  “I haven’t actually read it,” I said.

  “Anyway. Most people find it sad that someone would think the present so mediocre that they’d be eager to retreat to a life that is only a figment of their imagination, which is what melancholics do. That’s why they, like you, equate melancholy with sadness, but they’re wrong. Practicing melancholy and being sad are two very different things.” She paused there, before adding: “Also, being in the present sucks because there’s always something sort of annoying going on in your body, whereas if you think in another time dimension, the body becomes less of a problem.”

  “What goes on in your body that annoys you?”

  “Don’t get me started.”

  “What does all of this have to do with the funnel?”

  “Everything has to do with the funnel, Dory. We all have to go through the funnel and abandon things on the way down, and I want to be careful about what I leave behind. Lately I noticed I don’t devote quite as much time to my imaginary conversations as I used to. It made me realize I’d gone farther down the funnel than I thought.”

  “Is that what you were crafting in your head on the car trips back home? Imaginary conversations?”

  “No. The car trips were for imagining implausible futures. Or whole life stories for the people in the other cars. I had the imaginary conversations to fall asleep. I used to have a dozen of them going, and every night, depending on my mood, I’d pick one, rehearse it, polish it…that was the best way to fall asleep. I miss that.”

  “Why don’t you do it as much as you used to?”

  “I don’t even know. That’s my whole point. The funnel takes things away from you before you know it.”

  “Who were your imaginary conversations with?”

  “That’s a pretty private question.”

  “Don’t you think the readers of your biography will want to know?”

  “Well. There were quite a few different types of people. Real people, I mean, people that I knew, famous people, people I made up entirely…Some conversations were aspirational and some pure fantasy. Some I just worked on for a few days—they had to do with world events, you know, like, when they planned new reforms on the education system a couple years ago? I imagined a whole debate with the president on this. I knew the chances I would meet the president on my way to school the next day were pretty slim, but still, I imagined I would, and wrote a whole argument in my head, to be prepared when I did. A pretty powerful argument, as I recall. Some conversations were more plausible, like, when I had a frustrating teacher? A teacher I was smarter than but who pretended not to notice? Well, I imagined a whole conversation where I crushed him in front of the whole class. It was very satisfying. In my head, I had a conversation with Mr. Mohrt every single night of ninth grade, or close to it. I spent so much time on that one I’ll probably remember it on my deathbed. Just talking about it now I have whole portions rushing back to my head.”

  “What about the people you made up? Were they like imaginary friends?”

  “No, of course not. That would be sad.”

  “Who were they then?”

  “Interviewers, mostly.”

  “Many?”

  “Just two different ones. I mean, I didn’t invent much about them to be honest, they were basically faceless, we didn’t have conversations per se, they were just there to interview me. I’d pick one or the other, again, depending on my mood. One of them was just there to make me look good, ask the questions for which I had cool and smart answers. And the other one was more of an opponent, you know? I could just lash out at him and verbalize everything I thought was wrong about the world. They were both a great way to work some of my thoughts out.”

  “What kind of interviewer am I?”

  “You don’t challenge me much.”

  “So I’m the first kind. I’m here to make you look good.”

  “Both my fake interviewers made me look good. Those are imaginary conversations I’m talking about. I’m always going to have better arguments than the other guy.”

  “Always?”

  “Yes, I don’t think there really is a way around that. I tried not to make it too obvious for a while, to leave the other one a chance to say something as smart as me, but it’s hard to be a hundred percent fair in an imaginary conversation, you know? It’s like when you play both parts in a chess game because you can’t find a partner.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I joked. Simone didn’t get it was a joke.

  “Right? You’d think because it’s your brain playing both sides, it’s going to be hard picking which side you’d rather see winning, but then as the game goes on, you develop a fondness for the way you’ve been playing on one side of the board rather than the other. And I mean, of course you’re always going to win the argument or have the best lines in your imaginary conversations. What would be the point otherwise? You’re creating them for yourself, for your own personal use, so they should empower you a little. That’s why people have them.”

  “You think everyone has them?”

  “They have to. With their bosses, wives, everyone. Fictional characters.”

  “Dead people?” I asked.

  “I don’t know about that,” Simone said. “I tried once. I think there’s not as much satisfaction in it if there is no hope at all that you’ll get to actually have the conversation with the person at some point.”

  “What dead people did you try with?”

  I thought she would say the father but she said, “Romain Gary.”

&nb
sp; The only imaginary conversations I’d had had been reenactments of real ones gone bad, like the one I’d had with Sara Catalano at Daphné Marlotte’s 111th birthday party when she’d called me a perv. I never invented from scratch. What I did sometimes to fall asleep, instead of inventing conversations with actual people, was to make up extra dialogues in the movies I loved. I often imagined having a part in them. But it was hard to write myself in and keep the movies good, so I tried to have a secondary role, minor but efficient, to not alter too much of the plot. I would only be there to change a small little thing that would make the main characters happier. Like, in Return of the Jedi, for example, I was a rebel who’d been made prisoner on the Death Star, and I’d managed to escape from my cell during the panic ensuing from the first rebel-fighter hits on the station. On my way out, I saw Luke dragging dying Vader to safety, and I helped him out with that. Instead of leaving Luke and his estranged father to have a rushed last exchange on the deck of the imperial shuttle, I managed to hurry them on board and save Vader while Luke flew us away from the Death Star. After we landed on Endor, I let them both have the space and time they needed to really make peace—they had a lot to talk about, and it seemed that the few seconds Luke and Vader had been given in the real version of Return of the Jedi didn’t nearly cover everything. While they caught up, I just rested and lay on the grass and looked at the stars, and then when they were done, Luke took Vader and me to the Ewok party, and introduced me to Han and Leia, and then since Leia needed her own time to process the Vader situation, I meanwhile tried to make friends with Han. Han sort of sized me up; he felt a bit threatened (I looked good in the movie), but then I made a few jokes, told him my story, and proved myself to be a nice guy who was just happy to chill after everything he’d been through, and who, if Han wanted, could become a lifelong friend and would never put any moves on his lady. THE END. I say “THE END,” but it was in fact never the end. I got caught up in my dialogue with Han Solo sometimes, and started to write a whole backstory for my character, added him to scenes in the previous two episodes, making room for him to potentially appear in the next ones if there ever were any. Maybe it was as Simone said when she talked about her imaginary conversations and how it was impossible not to keep the best lines for yourself: I guess it was hard, even with my intention to not ruin the shape of the movie, to be such a minor character. But what if my presence in the movies I rewrote in my head made the movies bad? Of course I’d be the only one to know, yet I still felt guilty reshaping perfectly good movies by joining the cast, so I started imagining that the movies could all exist as they were, with all the twists and action the audience needed, while I ran a parallel world where little things could always be adjusted and the characters I loved would come for a while and rest, away from the drama and the tears. It had always seemed unfair to me, the amount of complications and bad luck that writers stuck my favorite characters with. And I understood it had to do with Aristotle’s rules of fiction etc., but still. If I’d cheered and felt sad for a character, he automatically had a place in my parallel world of movies where nothing traumatic ever happened.

  That winter, Denise finally lost someone. She couldn’t wait to tell me. Because it was her grandmother who’d died and not someone young, she said it was not such a big deal and fell “within the natural order of things,” but still, she’d been fond of the old lady and was going to put all she had into her eulogy.

  “You should come,” she told me. “The funeral is Thursday.”

  “I can’t skip school,” I said.

  “You skip it all the time to run away to Paris or whatever,” she said, and she was right. I just happened to not be as interested in attending funerals as she was.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  We were at the school cafeteria. Denise had taken up the habit of joining me there, even though she never ate anything. She said she only ate in the mornings, but I think some days she skipped breakfast too.

  “You should eat a little before gym class,” I said. I knew her schedule. “Have a bite of my rice.”

  “Why would I do that?” Denise said. “I’m fat enough as is.”

  “You’re the skinniest person I have ever met.”

  “Well, I know I’m not fat relative to the others,” she said. “But I’m still fatter than I’m comfortable with.”

  “Don’t you want to have tits and stuff?”

  “Am I your girlfriend now? What do you care if I have tits?”

  “I’ll come to your grandmother’s funeral if you eat some of my rice,” I said.

  “My parents tried blackmail,” Denise said. “Doesn’t work.”

  I knew I wasn’t putting enough heart into convincing her. My mind was elsewhere. It seems to me sometimes, when I look back on it, that all I wanted to do in eighth grade, whenever I sat anywhere, was to readjust my boxer shorts, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it casually, the way other boys did, reaching down there unapologetically for quick positional fixes and scratches. Since my conversation with Aurore, I’d been constantly checking my penis for bumps and depressions, but it didn’t seem like Rose had given me any of the sex diseases I’d read about on the Internet. I didn’t really know when I could stop looking for signs and consider myself out of the woods, though. It had been four months.

  “Tits…,” Denise said. “What would I do with tits anyway? I get why some girls want them. I mean, Sara and Stephanie, they carry theirs well, you know? It’s not disgusting or anything. But me? What am I supposed to do with tits? Lean against the lockers and wait for a boy to notice them? I don’t think so. No. Doesn’t suit my personality. Tits are not for everybody.”

  “My sister says personality is a myth,” I said.

  “Which one?”

  “All of them,” I said. “All fake.”

  “No, I meant, which sister?”

  “Oh. Simone,” I said.

  Denise only knew my sisters from a distance, of course, like most people, but unlike most people, she had no trouble keeping track of which sister thought or had said what, while even teachers who’d had them all in their classes one after the other talked about them like a three-headed entity, sometimes asking me in a hallway to congratulate Aurore for an article Berenice had written, or telling my whole class how my sister Aurore Mazal had once shared with her own grade incredible mnemonics for the Napoleonic wars (mnemonics that encompassed chronology, outcomes, and even some coalition details all at once) while I knew it was Simone who’d come up with them.

  “Did Simone start applying to schools yet?” Denise asked.

  I said she had, but only to the best preparatory courses in Paris. Simone still couldn’t tell what she would be famous for, so she’d decided the best thing to do while she figured it out should be the most impressive. The school that impressed her most was the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, but to even try to get in there, you had to go for two years in what was called a preparatory class, whose workload ranked as one of the highest in the world (or at least that’s what the Wikipedia page said). Then you could give the admission exam a shot (it was one of the most competitive exams in the academic world as well). All that to study some more. Simone kept talking about how it was the most prestigious school in the world for humanities, but when people (the butcher, neighbors) asked me what was new with my family and I told them about Simone’s latest ambition, they never seemed to know what the École Normale Supérieure was, and it made me sad that Simone was so delusional about the school’s fame. When I’d told her about the École Normale Supérieure, Denise had said she knew exactly what it was, but I’m pretty sure she’d lied, because she hadn’t expanded any on the subject until recess the next day, when she’d proceeded to list for me all the famous intellectuals who’d studied there, then told me that the workload in the preparatory classes was one of the highest in all the world—these weren’t the kinds of things you’d say unless you’d read them the night before on Wikipedia.

  “I’m sure she
’ll get in wherever she wants,” Denise said. I said I didn’t think Simone doubted that either.

  Denise didn’t eat any of my rice, but that night at dinner, I still asked my mother if I could skip school and go to a funeral on Thursday.

  “Who died?” she asked.

  “A friend’s grandmother,” I said.

  “That Dennis friend?”

  “Actually, it’s Denise.”

  “Oh, I see,” my mother said. “And did you know Denise’s grandmother at all?”

  I lied and said I’d seen her around school a couple of times, a nice old lady.

  “And you want to go to that funeral so you can pay your respects to the nice old lady or for moral support of the younger lady?”

  I thought maybe Aurore had told my brothers that I’d gone to bed with a girl—they’d been looking at me differently the last few weeks, and now they looked almost interested when my mother said “the younger lady.”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t think funerals are such great activities for teens, that’s all,” my mother said. “I’m just making sure you’d go for the right reasons.”

  “And which of the two is the better reason to go?” I asked. “The dead person or the living person?”

  It was a smarter argument than I’d thought. In fact, I hadn’t even thought about it as an argument, I’d just said it mechanically, earnestly, believing there would be a correct answer to my question and that someone around the table would give it to me. But no one said anything, and I realized I’d been deep by accident. I shouldn’t boast, though. I guess pretty much everything one said in a conversation about death came out with extra meaning.

  “Maybe if one of your sisters came with you,” my mother ended up saying. “To make sure you’re okay…Aurore?”

  Aurore looked up from her plate, surprised, it seemed, to be visible.

  “Why would I go to Dory’s friend’s grandmother’s funeral?” she asked.

  “Come on,” my mother said. “He went to your PhD defense.”