The Narcissist

By David Antonelli

Jean is a young aspiring “American in Paris” whose entire existence is turned on its head when he returns from Algeria to be with his lover Jillian only to have her vanish mysteriously just days later.

Refusing to believe she is dead, he embarks on a life-altering quest through Paris and rural France, convinced she the secret of her disappearance lies in the works of French surrealist poet and diagnosed schizophrenic Antonin Artaud, while also confronting the disturbing notion that if she is not dead the reasons behind her disappearance may be even more horrifying than her possible murder.

Forced to cooperate with her thesis advisor and bitterly jealous suitor Poilblanc, Jean immerses himself in the labyrinthine world of Artaud, losing himself in an increasingly nebulous maze of clues, which only seem to lead his quest further into absurdity.

His life spirals into nihilism and sexual excess as each inexplicable event (including an exploding doll’s leg sent to his address by a mysterious Jacob Sodergren) only deepens his uncertainty and suggests that her disappearance was part of a much bigger conspiracy, possibly directed against him for reasons he cannot begin to fathom.

Just when he resolves to give up and move on, the novel takes a surprising turn and the bizarre and shocking truth behind Jillian’s disappearance is finally revealed.

The Narcissist is comparable to Paul Auster's now iconic Cities of Glass from The New York Trilogy in its mixture of surrealism with psychological suspense. Metaphorically speaking, it is a stylish Film Noir classic written by Arthur Rimbaud and directed by Louis Ferdinand Celine, a work of literary fiction that defies all categorization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Antonelli
• Release date: Dec 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781458039415

David Antonelli

David Antonelli was born in Chicago in 1963. He was educated at The University of Alberta, Oxford, Caltech, and MIT. In 2010 he published his first novel The Narcissist, followed by The False Man in 2011. His film credits include Inbetween (2008), which was nominated for awards at several international film festivals, Finding Rudolf Steiner (Documentary, Official Selection Calgary International Film Festival 2006, now available on DVD), Lucifer Gnosis (short), Forever (16 mm short), Dreaming (16 mm short, named in top three at the Montreal International Student Film Festival, 1989), La Toyson D’Or (16 mm short), and The Chalk Elephant (16 mm short). He currently lives in Cardiff and teaches at the University of Glamorgan.

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The Narcissist

By David M. Antonelli

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

David Antonelli on Smashwords

The Narcissist

Copyright © 2010 by David M. Antonelli

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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There are a few people I’d like to acknowledge:

Paul Antonelli is thanked for designing the cover page. Marylu Walters is thanked for editing an early version of this manuscript. Joanne Kellock, is thanked for guidance while writing the early drafts of this book.

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The Narcissist

By David M. Antonelli

Who goes there? Is it you, Nadja? Is it true

that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life?

I can’t hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me?

Andre Breton, from Nadja.

1.

The Vanishing

I

I’ve always associated the smell of hot gunmetal with sex. Sex and disappearance. In the North African trenches it was no different. Two weeks after I was sent to Algeria on a UN peacekeeping mission a small war broke out. An army of Muslim extremists had taken a small village and my French battalion had surrounded it. By morning we had dug small trenches beside the main roads. By nightfall we were challenged. A Molotov cocktail blew thirty yards away from the front of our trench. Half of us reached for our grenades and the Lieutenant shouted out the order to attack.

More out of confusion than a desire to obey the Lieutenant’s orders, I shot my first bullet. Then a second. I’d never fired a gun outside of a shooting range. Even the smoke was hot. I trembled at the thought of where the bullets had ended up, but in all the spray of metal and flesh it somehow seemed like an afterthought. The lieutenant signaled for me to shoot again. I ignored his command and turned my gaze upwards to the thundering white bomb light of the sky. I closed my eyes. My head filled with a rush of images. I could see Jillian at home in Lyon, her thick brown hair falling over her slender white shoulders as she flipped through a copy of Antonin Artaud’s Theater and its Double on her lap. I wanted her naked. Naked right there in front of me.

I heard an explosion and opened my eyes. Then another. The blast of light was so intense it even killed its own shadows. I wanted to disappear into my memories of Jillian. Vanish into the essence of her being.

Another cocktail blew, but this time the explosion was closer. When the smoke cleared, I saw a soldier lying face down on the ground as if he was staring through a portal into another world, far more interesting than our own. I ran over to help him. I turned him over. It was René, a twenty-year old soldier from Dijon who had just got married a month ago. I felt sick to my stomach as I looked down at his cold white figure, still shaking in a pool of mud. The center of his stomach had been gouged out, leaving a wet red hole the size of a cannonball; few threads of blood had spread out across his forehead like frays in a fine fabric. The sight was almost beautiful. The horrible ecstasy of death. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to get away.

I turned around and looked down the length of the trench.

We’re all fools! a voice from down the trench shouted. We’re all fucking fools.

Kerosene! Give me kerosene, shouted another voice. I’ll burn them all alive.

The second voice stopped and the first tapered off into a kind of pathetic whimpering. Soon it was inaudible, drowned out by the metallic screeching of the rockets overhead. A dark-haired soldier, whose face I couldn’t place tossed his rifle, bled of all its bullets, to the ground and searched desperately for a grenade. I heard another explosion and a shower of earth and metal covered my face with a layer of hot dust. I stumbled as I pushed up against the muddied trench wall to clear my eyes. I wanted to disappear that very instant. The shatter of bombs, the maddening simulacrum of blood and color, the flood of images through my pounding head: I wanted to vanish into the whole mad carnival of light and sound. Only in my imagination could I still feel the warmth of Jillian’s skin up against me. Only there could I be back in Lyon.

I dropped the gun and checked my pants for my mobile. Perhaps she had sent me a message.

Jean! Pick up that gun and stop whacking off, shouted the Lieutenant. He shoved me in the shoulder. I pulled my hand out of my pants and knelt down to pick up the gun. Instead of standing up to resume fighting I crumpled down into the mud and pulled my knees up to the tip of my chin. The lieutenant kicked me but I didn’t respond.

Coward, he sneered. He lifted his rifle to eye level and started firing.

In the evening the fighting subsided. We slept under the clear breeze of an Algerian night. It was hard to believe that such calm could exist so soon after such carnage. Five young soldiers were nominated to rotate the night watch. This meant I was able to rest. I sat and stared at the night sky outside my tent. I imagined I could see Jillian’s curly head of hair and delicate chin in the patterns made by the coils of gun smoke that still hung in the air. A breeze shook the bivouac and the smoke cleared away. The moon was now visible and a thousand constellations burned through the indigo quadrants of the sky.

The next morning the Lieutenant barged into my tent.

They surrendered, he said.

What? I asked, still not quite awake.

Not all of them. Just this batch.

How many?

Forty.

Where are they?

"I’ve assigned some men to drive them to the jail to the west. We’ll keep them there until further notice.

So, it’s over?

There’s more of them.

Where?

To the south.

Are they advancing? I asked.

No. Not yet, he said. He pulled me closer as if to confide a secret. Not yet. But if my intuition’s right, they’ll try to trick us into passivity while they circle to the north and take us by surprise on our way back to Algiers.

When do we go? I asked.

Why? he asked as if to question my devotion. Are you in some kind of a hurry?

No, I said.

Good. We have to keep watch. Exercise patience. Vigilance. We can’t let them ambush us. We have to stay put.

For how long?

"Indefinitely. You’d better not be in a hurry. For your sake, that is. Believe me, indefinitely can be a long time."

If that’s what it takes, I said with a false sense of dedication.

The next morning I received a letter from Jillian. I read it immediately.

Dear Jean,

I’m sorry I haven’t contacted you earlier. I’m writing this letter from a hotel just outside of Barcelona. I’m sitting on a balcony tea table with a note pad in my lap. The courtyard below me is lined with marble gargoyles and manicured bushes. In the center is a swimming pool. Its still waters are almost like a mirror. I can see the forms of reflected birds on its glassy surface. How I wish you were here with me! Since you’ve left I’ve missed you so much. Although it’s only been a few months, my heart is growing tired of all the hurt. The summer has robbed me of the joy our love once gave me. How can I keep my feelings from evaporating when you are gone? If I always talk about you to my friends, they get bored and change the conversation. If I freeze my feelings somewhere inside me and try to lead a normal life, I feel like you don’t even exist at all. Don’t get the wrong impression. I love you more than ever. When I say that our love no longer brings me pleasure, what I really mean is that I love you so much that all I feel is pain in your absence. I need to see you. I need to have you beside me.

Oh, Jean! I’m sick of the world. For my entire life I’ve been possessed by other people’s desires. I’ve blindly let my life become little more than the sum total of every one’s life around me. With my early loves. With you. With my work on Artaud. I need more. I need to feel life flowing out of me and into others and not the reverse. Yet I’m far too world-weary to simply say I want to be free. People always say they want freedom. But what is it that they really want? More money? More possessions? More lovers? More time alone? Ultimately they just want more. That’s what their freedom is. Greed. But, I’m possessed with different lusts. That’s why I love Artaud. He tore the veil away from things and peered beneath them. He saw through all the world’s lies and wasn’t afraid to shock people with his outrageous revelations:

"In a world in which every day one eats vagina cooked in green sauce or penis of newborn child whipped and beaten to a pulp, just as it is when plucked from the sex of its mother."

Yet I feel I’ve been a student for far too long. I’ve read Artaud’s notes, letters and plays over and over again until I’m blue in the face. I can even rewrite whole paragraphs from memory. The time has come for me to drop the books and stop reading about how I should live, and simply live. Yet I’m afraid that this decision might affect our love. My new direction seems so abstract that I don’t quite know how to start. All I know is that my life will change when my thesis is finally completed. That is why I need to be around you. I don’t want this change to leave us apart. I want us to change together. I’m afraid if you’re not back soon that something irreversible will happen and our love will never be the same. I’m going back to Lyon in just a few days.

Please come back soon.

Love, Jillian

I stuffed the letter in my pocket. My stomach tightened. It was far worse than I had expected. Since I was sent to Africa I lived in fear of her leaving me for another man. Now I knew my enemy was more fearsome than any potential suitor could ever be. Somewhere in the depths of her thoughts it lurked without shape or color, lacking all substance or even semblance of substance. The burning heat of the desert had become for me a metaphor for her growing disenchantment. Although her letter confessed the power of her love, it also revealed its precariousness. As the hours at the bivouac dragged on I imagined countless scenarios in which she grew resentful of my absence and lashed out at me by taking another lover.

Hoping to bury my anxieties, I went about my business as did all the other soldiers. I performed my obligatory watch duty. I cleaned the tents. I cooked and washed as ordered. But nothing I did could clear my head of my love for Jillian. I just wasn’t cut out to be a soldier. Maybe I would make it as sailor, skimming over the silvery death wash of the sea. Or a pilot. Flying through the skies in a screaming metal boomerang. But not a soldier. Not in the dirt. To confront an enemy, in short, death, so close to the same black clay that I would one day be buried in somehow seemed wrong. If I died at sea I could imagine myself riding off to heaven on the backs of golden dolphins. If I died in the sky I’d be swept up by some great silver bird and flown off into the crisp blue heavens. But if I died in the dirt, that would be it. I would simply die in the dirt: my skull cracked, skin smeared with blood and sweat, lying flat on the same pile of mud and gravel I spent every day of my life.

The desert was quiet for the next three days. The soldiers began to loosen up. Where two days ago the Lieutenant would insist on sending at least two men to the well on the nearby hill for water, now he was only sending one. For at least the moment, the feeling of impending danger had subsided.

On the fourth day the Lieutenant sent me to get the evening water supply. Like the other soldiers had done, I suspended the two large metal water canisters on opposite sides of a long rod balanced on my shoulders. As I walked up the hill I watched the sun going down, massaging the horizon with its deep red rays as it sank slowly out of view. When I reached the well I found a man lying face down in the sand. He appeared to be dead. His skin was dark and he was clothed in the enemy uniform with its characteristic red sash over the shoulder. I knelt down and shook him. His head rolled over and his helmet came loose. He had a small thin nose and feminine cheekbones with glistening black hair cut straight across the upper forehead. His dark brown eyes suddenly opened and his thin lips grimaced in pain as if he knew he was done for. He curled into a fetal position and reached for his stomach. I checked for a wound but he pushed my hand away.

Why don’t you kill me? he said with an Arabic accent.

I can’t kill a wounded man.

Then I’ll fight you to death. Nobody’s going to take me.

I don’t want your secrets, I said.

I have none to give. I’m a deserter. You’ve got nothing to gain from me. I have to get back to my mother in Biskra. She is sick and my brothers don’t care. They forced me to come and fight. Even she forced me. She said her life was less important than the triumph of Islam. I can’t let her die. She called me a coward when I suggested I stay behind and take care of her.

Typhoid? I asked. I’d heard there’d been an outbreak in Tunisia.

The doctors aren’t sure.

The sun had set and a cool wind blew through the sand and then his hair. The sky had taken on the deep azure of those in Spanish nativity scenes. I looked at him with sympathy. If I could do anything to justify my part in the desert war it was to help him. The thought crossed my mind that he would make the perfect travelling companion if I, too, chose to desert. I had to get away from the fighting. He’d know the roads to the coast. If we could escape together he could help me elude both the rebel and UN forces on my way back to Jillian. With any luck I could make it to Tunis and catch a boat to France.

He grabbed my hand and pulled it towards his wounded stomach. You have to help me find a doctor.

I’ll help you but only if you make sure I get to Tunis.

He nodded his head in agreement. The way I saw it neither of us had the luxury doubting the other’s intentions.

I filled the water containers and washed his wounds. He’d caught a piece of shrapnel in the stomach and one in the thigh. I wrapped both wounds in some bandages that I had in my first aid kit.

My belly hurts so much I almost forgot about my leg, he said. In the throes of war everything has a chain of command. Even pain has its pecking order.

They aren’t deep, he said. I just have to keep them clean.

As long as they don’t get infected.

I took the water back to the camp and told the Lieutenant that I’d left my hat behind at the well. He cautioned me to be more careful and I nodded compliantly. When I got back the soldier was standing there with a look of troubled dignity on his face. I felt I could almost trust him and experienced a new sense of security in knowing he would guide me through the desert and back to Jillian. Even if it turned out to be a set up, I knew I could always shake him later.

II

I had been living in Lyon for almost one month when I first met Jillian. I had managed to save enough money in America to support myself for almost a year. After that I had plans to join a French peacekeeping mission as a part of my obligatory military duty to fulfill my EU citizenship requirements. Although I was born in France – an industrialized suburb of Paris, in fact - my family moved to Detroit when I was six years old and I never had the opportunity to move back and explore my French roots. I was always attracted to the idea of the American in Paris - the sherbet colored buildings, the outdoor cafés, the art galleries, and the promenades with the quiet hush of secret romantic encounters under the shrill dome of a leaden, glassy sky. In more reflective moments I even entertained the idea of one day writing the great American novel, but I felt I had nowhere near enough experience to even begin. I needed to read more books, listen to more music, meet more women - in short, I needed to live. After my first few weeks in Lyon I realized there was no way I could ever go back to Detroit: sprawled out in all its grim humidity with a skyline that looked like an alien installation rising from the dust of postwar Dresden.

I first met Jillian at a place called Façade, a small bar in downtown Lyon that was popular with art students because of its minimalistic black walls and collection of original Raymond Pettibon prints. It was in the middle of Rue Mercier, a few blocks from the opera house. She was wearing black pants with a black leather jacket and black suede buckle-up shoes. Her hair was tied back except for the bangs, which dropped in a schoolgirl fashion to just above her slim black ballerina eyebrows.

She stood up and walked over to me.

Then, death, she said. She had a British accent.

Sorry? I asked, surprised that such an attractive woman would come over to talk to me out of the blue.

The olive trees of Saint Rémy.

Saint Rémy?

The solitary cypress.

What?

The Café at Arles.

The black ring, I added, guessing she was trying to play a word association game with me.

No. No. She started to shake her head and laugh. "It’s a poem, silly, she said. Artaud."

Sorry, I said.

Aren’t you going to ask me to sit down?

Please. I’m Jean. I extended my hand.

Jillian.

Our conversation ended after a few minutes and I went home. All the way back I was enraptured by the reflections of the traffic lights off the puddles of rain in the street. The next day I woke up and took a cold shower. While standing in front of the mirror, I imagined black and white film clips in which Jillian and I were meeting in empty Prague cafés or on sunlit Brazilian terraces. So enthralled was I by my own fantasies that I bumped into the mailman on my way out to catch the bus to the library. I crossed my heart as I waited at the bus stop and swore that I would go back to Façade every night until I saw her again.

We met later that week and talked all night. She came by herself and, apart from the occasional man who stepped up to give her his regards, we were left alone. She told me more about her thesis project on Artaud.

He was deathly afraid of sex. He used to say that every time someone masturbated that he lost a bit of his desire to live. People captivated his desires with their boring actions, crushed his dreams with what they passed off as love. He was a totally private person who could carry on relationships on a completely internal level. She darted her eyes back and forth in rhythm with Mirror in the Bathroom, which had just come on the jukebox.

Time and narrative, she continued, holding a glass of Sambucca to her lips, are external things that don’t belong in performance art. In the same way that people’s rules and habits destroyed him, the literary model of drama was destroying theater.

It was clear she was more versed than I in literature but I managed to sway the conversation to film and music, areas I was more comfortable with. We both liked Bunuel. I was amazed that she could recount to me almost frame by frame the dream sequence in Los Olvidados where a wild bird ravages a young boy’s room. By the end of the evening the conversation had shifted to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. I walked her home and when she offered her phone number I promised to call her as soon as I could.

A week later we went out to a small tavern by the river. After a few cups of coffee and a bottle of wine we ended up going back to my apartment. Ten minutes later we were in bed.

She apologized for her behavior the first night we met.

"I was so drunk. You must have thought I was barking."

Barking?

Barking mad. Just barking, she repeated. I get like that sometimes. I’m surprised you wanted to talk to me at all after that. I was being so pretentious.

"Not at all. Anything’s better than the old do you know what time it is?"

I don’t know. If a guy comes on to me in a simple way I respect him more than if he tries to be too clever.

It had been hardly a week when I learned that she had another lover and I was just a part of her weekly itinerary. His name was Adrien. He was a moody sculptor with a long sleek nose and a mass of thick black hair that tumbled from his head, giving him the appearance of a Tatar warrior. He wanted to marry her before they had even met. He said he’d seen her in the cafés and was never so sure about anything in his life as when he walked up to her for the first time and proposed. She turned him down cold six times and finally compromised by agreeing to go out for dinner with him.

Meeting Jillian had set off something like a depth charge in my heart. I could feel the underpinnings of my very being shatter into a thousand pieces and reorder into something like a mismatched jigsaw puzzle whenever we made love. I had to get closer to her. Touch the being inside her. I was convinced that we were somehow spiritually destined for each other and that we shared every thought and attitude. She penetrated my skin like a ghost, entering my every corpuscle, thought, and feeling. There was something distinctly supernatural about her. Something almost of the Anima.

Before I met her, my most powerful sexual encounters were always alone. When I was still a virgin I used to lie in bed on Sunday mornings and dream of my perfect lover. She was modeled on figures from books I’d read or films I’d seen. She had red hair, chestnut hair, blond hair. She was at once Caucasian, Asian and black. We met in railroad stations, under trees, in the country or in alleyways. When I was in school I’d gaze off into space while the teachers were lecturing and think about my next meeting with this imaginary lover. At sixteen I lost my virginity as awkwardly as any one else. I was surprised at how plain it felt. Not near as uplifting as my imaginary encounters. Years - different partners even - changed little. Eventually I became disillusioned and surrendered to the thought that I was destined to go through life without ever finding a perfect match. Jillian changed everything.

A month after we met I was introduced to her parents and her sister Annette. They were visiting from Manchester for the weekend. Her father was a dour Baptist who seemed to disapprove of everything. Her mother was equally religious but expressed her faith in an almost opposite way to her husband, as a sort of blissful naïveté. You could imagine her in a spotless white apron directing a Sunday school sing-along. Annette was a cheery first-former who always looked like she had just stepped out of a Bentley. Her hair was blond and her skin pale. While some British women looked unhealthy in their pallor, she flourished in it, as if it were emblematic of the higher brand of existence in her possession. Although one could easily take her for a snob on first meeting, she was actually just the opposite. As I quickly found out, she owned a couple of rare Stooges bootlegs I’d been looking for and we hit it off instantly. With all her picnic baskets of social etiquette, it was hard to believe at first she was such a rebel in her musical tastes.

One day, Jillian, Annette and I spent an afternoon shopping together downtown. That evening the three of us went to a small restaurant for dinner and found Adrien frowning into an interior decorating magazine as he languished over his coffee. I spotted him out of the corner of my eye before Jillian noticed he was there. Immediately I suggested we go somewhere else.