The Age of Reinvention (45 page)

The day of his liberation, Samir is released through a secret exit in order to avoid the crowd of journalists and photographers who are waiting for him. He is alone: no one—no family, no friends—has come to welcome him, and that is a relief. It is a relief to him not to have to fake contrition, redemption, the big apology—that whole social circus, leading to what? Absolution? Reintegration? So when he sees his family, his friends, he's supposed to say sorry? Fuck that! He owes no debt (he thinks) to society, but society owes him big-time. He did something wrong—something morally wrong—in excluding his mother from his life and in depriving his children of part of their history and identity, and yes, he regrets this—he has difficulty forgiving himself for this—but that's all. Everything else—the lies, the broken principles, those little compromises he made with himself—he was forced into those, he is certain of this, led there like a beast in a slaughterhouse, crushed by the machine of discrimination, isolated by society itself, equal opportunity my ass—he'd had no other choice but to sever himself from his origins, to bleed away his identity, to rip out his guts, boiling, spurting, staining, overflowing, hard lumps of bitterness and hatred swept along, infecting everything . . . and then being reborn, getting back on his feet, however weakened, however dismembered, moving forward in order to survive, free at last, do or die, as his father used to say; well, the dying's been done, so it's time to do now, to walk the walk, straight ahead, not thinking, blinkered vision, corrupting again, and under the weight of his footsteps, New York unfolds beneath him, vibrant, aswarm, and he's running, trusting his internal compass, his emotional geometry; his body, stripped down, defused, finally discharged of its tensions, of the oh-so-heavy burden of guilt/lies/shame/childhood, speeds up for a few yards and then slows down again, a way of testing the mechanism—it works—the cogs of his body's machinery not yet completely jammed—
I'm alive, I'm free
—skimming the ground, then suddenly he stops and gazes up defiantly at the skyscrapers stretching up above him in the diffracted light: an outrageous, arrogant aesthetic, the lurid beauty of the city awakening, a dusty landscape pierced with shards of iridescence. He had forgotten all this, his eyes for so long embedded in the gray walls of the prison, nothing ahead of him, nothing behind, fading to black. And at last, he sinks into the insalubrious world of basements, wastelands, ghettos, places that speak to his compromised duality, his profound ambiguity, his taste for the secret, the shadowy, and in these subterranean streets, surrounded by musicians (saxophonists, clarinetists), by illegal immigrants, by the poor and the passionately adulterous, by squealing minors, bodies electrified with desire, he walks past walls with thistles growing through holes in the bricks, then stands still so he can embrace the horizon in a single gaze, the beauty of slack water perfused by rain, and he stays there, sitting on a slab of broken concrete, until the sky turns to a ball of soot, indifferent to the damp air, to the ripples of spume that roll and vanish like the gray clouds that rise from the cigarette he smokes. Free. Free and happy. The death of ambition—at last. The obligation to succeed, the menace that weighs on you from birth, the blade that society puts to your throat and holds there until you choke, removing it only in the hour of banishment, the moment when it exiles you, purges you, strips you away like a dead branch . . . and what release there is in this banishment, which you never know is temporary or definitive, that moment when you are admitted to the brotherhood of the washed-up/the desperate/the has-beens, those people marginalized by age or failure, the homeless and the nameless, the small and the simple, the drab anonymous masses, who line up for their welfare checks, who wake at dawn, whose names mean nothing to you, whom no one ever calls back, to whom everyone says “no” or “later,” for whom no one is ever available or friendly, the ugly, the fat, the weak, the disposable women, the ridiculous friends, finally free of the fear of disappointing, the pressure created by the need to be liked, those imperatives that we force on ourselves, out of individualism/lust for glory/desire for recognition/thirst for power/mimicry/herd instinct—all those devastating effects of dreams aborted by parental authority/determinism/illusory utopias, the brutal injunction that governs the social order, rules even the most intimate relationships—Be SUCCESSFUL! Be STRONG!—he had submitted to that just like everyone else . . . But it doesn't matter as much now, when no one expects anything from him, when even he aspires only to make the most of his rediscovered identity. The blade has slipped. The next step is his.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle

English language translation copyright © 2015 by Sam Taylor

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First Atria Books hardcover edition December 2015

Originally published as
L'Invention de Nos Vies
in France in 2013 by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle

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Interior design by Paul Dippolito

Jacket Design by Laywan Kwan

Front Cover Jacket Photograph © Offset

Back Cover Jacket Photograph © Shutterstock

Author Photograph By Jean-François Paga

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tuil, Karine.

[Invention de nos vies. English.]

The age of reinvention / Karine Tuil ; translated from the French by Sam Taylor.—First edition.

pages cm

Published as “L'Invention De Nos Vies” in Paris : Bernard Grasset, [2013]

“Atria reprint fiction hardcover.”

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Self-presentation—Fiction. 2. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. 5. Legal stories, American. I. Taylor, Sam. II. Title.

PQ2680.U48I5813 2015

843'914—dc23

2015015265

ISBN 978-1-4767-7634-7

ISBN 978-1-4767-7635-4 (ebook)