NaNoWriMo - Day 4 - Lizzie part.1

 Transgression n°3 : la langue

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To her, it was clear from the beginning that the most important detail had been overlooked. Not that it would change anything, of course. What she thought mattered very little, if at all, regardless of the fact that she was absolutely right and they were desperately wrong.

Therefore, she was forced to hold it all back. They wouldn't have understood, they wouldn't have accepted the outburst of plain, brilliant reasoning. They were not ready to embrace it. They were not intellectually equipped to cope with it.

There seemed to be no room in the current context (as there was probably no room in this world in general) for those who had a sharp and instinctive insight on the most complex situations.

And there was certainly no desire, in the indigenous population currently gathered in the living-room, for little Lizzy to start expressing her opinion about the ragged way the case was currently being solved in the television set. A babbling child was bad enough to everyone's opinion. A babbling child emitting its squeaky noises when there was a program on was bordering crime against humanity.

Little Lizzy knew that only too well and even though she was confident that what she had to say would solve the case and allow everyone to switch to a far more interesting activity than letting their brains slowly fry in the vicinity of a flat screen, she curled up in her over-long jacket and did what she knew to be expected to do: she kept her mouth shut, and after a second of hard and wise thinking, she came to the doubly wise conclusion that not only it was better that way, but that she also would benefit starting to enjoy keeping things to herself.

Things, all sorts of things, most things actually, were treated decently when they remained within the borders of her head, whereas they were almost systematically chased, debilitated and crushed when she had the misfortune to let them accidentally slip out.

"It doesn't make sense, girl, you don't know what you're blabbing about!", "leave grown up things to grown ups and go play in your room" or "oh, just shut it will you!?" were sentences that she was well used to hear, and the very same ones that she had come to define, in the clairvoyant heart of youth, as "not kind".

"Not kind" is, of course, an understatement. Or it was rather a kind statement depicting an utterly unkind attitude. Lizzy's family could not be counted amongst the kind people. What saved them was that they were not mean either. Basically, they were just useless.

 

I became aware of the existence of Little Lizzy the day of the explosion, or rather should I say, at the exact moment an explosive charge expertly hidden under the decomposing seat of a derelict barber shop I was passing by chose – or was programmed to, set off.

It is queer, how time twists at crucial moments. It took me a while to recompose the chronological events of the day preceding the accident – and for that matter, the days before that, and the years before. I am aware that past time is supposed to enter a phase of progressive blurring once we look at it from the little cross indicating the present on a timeline, but this was different. It was as if my perception of present and future had suddenly expanded into a vast canvas of interwoven threads I was looking at from so close – or with such an acute eye, that I could perceive the outlines of every single filament, every single atom making its structure. Or maybe it was the past that had shrunk to almost nothing, to a thumbnail of itself. Had it not been for the persistent feeling of it, I could almost think that I had been reborn just then, in the chaotic dispersion of polygonal glass, multi-sized shards of feasted-on-by-termites wood, and abrasive dust. All I could remember in the immediate aftermath was my newly enlightened inner perception of the laws of gravity. The blow had torn my 128 lbs. from the asphalt in one single swift vector. I was nearing the end of one of my long customary fasts and in spite of being considerably lighter than usual (I had lost 35 lbs. in little more than three weeks), my decaying and weakened muscles and aching joints were having a lot of trouble carrying my body step by step.

That’s when I saw her. Of course, I didn’t have the faintest idea at the time about whom it was that I was actually seeing, but for a very bright moment, she was there, her back resting on a wallpaper I had never seen in my life, her denim-clad legs tightly pressed against one another, only splitting up near the ankles for balance, her heels one foot away from the baseboard. Her head was bending on the side a little, but that was a deliberate drop, her hair neatly parted in the middle and hanging on both sides, showing just enough amount of grooming to still look lively. She was staring ahead –straight at me, if you believe; one eyebrow raised and with a half-surprised, half-condescending look on her juvenile face. Obviousness told me that she could not be more than nine years old, but truer would be to say that she had an ageless glow about herself that made it almost impossible for me to focus on the defining elements of developmental stages that could have made my observation more accurate. The vision was very brief, but I knew that it had to mean something, not for the sake of a mere pro-mystical enthusiasm, but because it was too realistic to carry nothing else but a simply symbolic message. I had not imagined her as a blurry and foggy apparition: I had seen her. I had had a glimpse of her surroundings; I had caught her in a moment of her life that I was sure had both a prequel and sequel. She had been resting there, coming from somewhere, going somewhere, doing something. And as insane as it may sound, I was absolutely certain that whatever it was she was in the middle of or on her way to, she had seen me as well.

 

How strange it was then, to find myself lying on the flank, my spine curled backwards around a pillar. My eyes were rolling insanely inside their orbits, and I had to fight hard to regain control over them. When I finally managed to do so, I tried to move my neck and was surprised that it would obey such a preposterous request in the position it was in. I suspect my arm might have helped somehow, but I cannot imagine how it could have done it, since I was barely aware I still had one, and maybe even two, logically attached somewhere to my upper bust. I could not make out the shape of my legs, let alone move them, because they were covered in dust and debris and seemed to be buried in the concrete. I could not feel nor hear anything but a throbbing in my forehead and buzzing vibrations in the area of what I guessed to be my ears, right and left (although I was not so sure which side was which).

A few of my senses came back. The sight first, as I already said, followed by the tactile sensors all over my body, face first then all the way down (or rather sideways, since I was still lying on the hard ground). The hearing was gone, except for the incessant buzzing, but I knew it would come back eventually. At last – and I regretted it immediately, I got the smell back, and almost simultaneously with it, the taste of sick material erupting from the deep bottom of my digestive chamber. The vomit, not having been able to gather the remnants of any solid food, was composed mainly of bile, exquisitely mixed with an acre coating of dust. I remember clearly hosting a twisted and funny thought. Twisted because I was nothing but the Ground Zero of my previous self and funny thoughts are not supposed to invade your mind under such circumstances. I remember thinking: “oh yes, now I intimately know the literal meaning of ‘dis-gust-ing’, because I could picture the guts convulsing like voodoo entranced serpents in my bowel and wriggling towards the exit. I did not care much about the consonants’ inversion and was instead disappointed by the non-existence of an actual verb: to disgust. Or dis-gut. “Whatever” I told myself. The snakes were leaving their acid trail on my lips and I came back to my senses and decided to refrain my grammatical bewilderment for the time being. “There’s a time and a place” I thought, “you’re being sick, language analysis can surely wait”.

 

One question was haunting me, and not the one I would have expected to be taunted by after what had been, after all, the splendidly improbable combo of a vision and a miraculous escape from a terrorist attack: I was not questioning my sanity at all…but…what on earth had I done, or looked like, to deserve that condescending look, from a nine year old?

 

t.b.c.