The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier

Author:Hervé Le Tellier [Le Tellier, Hervé]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2021-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

TABLE 14

FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 2021, 8:30 AM

HANGAR B, McGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, really? Now back from his interview, Victor is hovering between anger and unbridled laughter. The future feels so uncertain that the writer wants to make a cool, detailed catalog of what’s happening in this hangar. Hangar, such a strange word. Like coat hanger and not far from hangman, and here they all are hanging in the balance. He’s taken out his notebook and a pen, and is trying to cut himself off from the shouts and noise. He jots down: An attempt at exhausting an improbable place. Wait, no. Why walk in Perec’s shadow? Why does he never break free of influences and tutelary figures? Why, when he’s not afraid of being an impostor, is he just a little boy on a quest for accolades?

He looks at the page thoughtfully, and writes, Airplane mode.

“The date: March 11, 2021.

“There are lots of things in this hangar. For example: about a hundred ocher tents, a field hospital, rows of long tables, an improvised basketball court, dozens of prefab units, public toilets, metal barriers, in double rows, an ‘information’ center with no one to give information, an ‘ecumenical space’ indicated by a sign in six languages, four water fountains, and plenty more besides.

“The weather: too hot and too humid for the time of year.

“Draft inventory of everything strictly visible: firstly, the letters of the alphabet, A to E, on one wall of the hangar, a capital H for ‘Hospital,’ the words ‘Air France’ (on the cabin crew’s bags), brands on passengers’ clothing, ‘U.S. Air Force’ on the ground, ‘Danger’ and ‘High Voltage’ on electric fuse boxes. Slogans on the walls: ‘Aim High, Fly-Fight-Win,’ the motto of the U.S. Air Force, along with the Seventh Bomb Wing’s motto ‘Mors ab alto’ and the recruiting line ‘Do something amazing.’ ”

Victor writes unhurriedly, mechanically. Having read a lot, translated a lot, and seen too much nonsense beneath surface prettiness, he would think it indecent to inflict yet more inanity on the world. He really couldn’t care less that extravagant prose emerges from the simple “displacement of a pen on the page,” he doesn’t believe he is “all-powerful in the face of every sentence,” he has no intention of “closing his eyelids to keep his eyes open,” and—in this soulless place—he certainly won’t “withdraw from the world to mark it with his own turmoil.” Besides, he doesn’t trust metaphors. The Trojan War must have started like that. Still, he knows that it would take only one of his sentences being more intelligent than he is for this miracle to make a writer of him.

Victor watches all these disparate lives, all these shifting anxieties in the outsized petri dish of the hangar—it really is a funny word—but can’t decide on which one to focus his attention. He surrenders to the fascination of lives other than his own. He’d like to choose one, to find the right words to describe this creature, and succeed in believing that he has come close enough to it not to betray it.

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