The Queen's Caprice: Stories by Jean Echenoz

Author:Jean Echenoz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620970720
Publisher: The New Press

NITROX

LET’S TAKE FOR EXAMPLE, sitting in an empty and cubical cell of carceral appearance, a young woman named Céleste Oppenheim. She consists of a lovely tall person wearing her black hair in a pageboy, with an indifferent expression but a penetrating gaze, while her face and figure are striking enough to arouse the immediate interest of absolutely any casting or commercial and fashion modeling agency. A figure all the more riveting, by the way, in that Céleste Oppenheim happens at the moment to be wearing only a white bra and panties, there being no other clothing lying around on the furniture since there is no furniture here, neither chair nor table nor storage unit, only a bed, or more precisely, a couchette bed.

This scanty clothing does not seem to bother the young woman because it is ferociously hot in the no-frills, vapid, windowless cube with sweating bare yellow walls. Poorly illuminated by two neon ceiling fixtures, one of them crackling, the cube is equipped with an outsize radiator that explains all this heat, a washbasin, and that metal couchette bed, a single: rusty, reduced to a bedstead bolted to the floor, covered with a pad of polyurethane foam crumbling at the corners and at one end of which lies a bedspread with gray and beige motifs, folded in six, the other end being at present sat upon by Céleste Oppenheim. The latter shows no emotion when the cell door slides open to reveal two men of about forty: dressed alike in cotton duck pants of the same faded blue and sou’westers (one a candied chestnut color, the other bottle green, both embroidered on the left arm with an insignia in red silk), the men could just as well be two associates as an official with his underling.

Without speaking or entering, from the threshold they beckon the young woman, who next finds herself in a sort of storeroom, a large, dimly lit space apparently warehousing bags, crates, chests, and other boxes. Making their way among these containers they come to a small open area where, hanging from a rack, is an outfit composed of rubber and metal devices including a mask and flippers. Candied Chestnut indicates to Céleste Oppenheim that she should put all this on, while Bottle Green speaks up politely to warn her that what comes next will not be a piece of cake. His defective elocution, however, as fuzzy as a poorly tuned radio, prevents the young woman from following this speech while she is dressing, distracted as she already is by the complexity of the outfit as well as by her relief—probably—at no longer finding herself just about naked in front of two male strangers. Of the man’s stammered cautions, she basically catches only the words prudence and pressure, that last apparently the main object of his warning.

Once the young woman has donned this equipment, Candied Chestnut hands her a Btex polyester bag with huge zippered pockets while guiding her toward another sliding door, through which she passes to find herself in a new cell much like the other one.

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