From Name, which was published in April by Semiotext(e). Translated from the French by Lauren Elkin. 

Little bottles of neon-yellow liquid, the scent of pastis. Paregoric elixir, or tincture of opium, it sounds like something out of César Birotteau. You can buy it over the counter. The instructions say it’s to be used to soothe stomachache. All the junkies take it when they need a fix. Burroughs writes about it, and even Joyce in Ulysses. Over the counter, at the end of the Seventies, beginning of the Eighties, that means even kids can buy it. In the countryside, when I go to the village on my bike to buy fishing hooks or red firecrackers, which smell like gunpowder when they explode, I stop in at the pharmacy for them. Bonjour madame, two bottles of paregoric elixir, please. It’s important to be polite. In theory you’re meant to take it in small, diluted doses. They crack open the metal cap, they drink the bottle in one go, they grimace. They also put paregoric elixir in my sister’s baby bottle when she was born to wean her from the opium that my mother smoked when she was pregnant.

All that in full view of the others, in the middle of the others, I should say, since it’s especially in the countryside, far from their dealer, that they need these bottles. Maybe also in Paris, on days when they can’t get their fix, but they muddle through, I’m not sure how. The countryside in question is Grandpa the prime minister’s, it’s his town hall, it’s my father’s brothers who vie with one another to become a minister like Grandpa, it’s the sisters-in-law who have their own roles to perform, it’s the nice cousins I play tennis with, it’s my grandfather who speaks of France in exalted tones and who goes to work in his office with letterhead for each ministry he’s led, it’s my uncles who will end up being ministers like Daddy, right-wing like Daddy. The ultimate humiliation is to be the one who doesn’t inherit Daddy’s constituency, that’s how far gone they are in worshipping him. Maybe it excites him, Grandpa the prime minister, to see his litter of puppies fighting over who will be the best son. Each suffers from the others’ successes—such are the wounds of grown men. My father has always been the bad son, because he doesn’t give a shit about the minister. I often go into my grandfather’s office when he isn’t there, a place where no one comes to find me, where I can be alone. I can be alone there for hours, I sit down at the desk, I open drawers, I help myself to some paper—Minister of Defense, Minister of the Interior, Minister of Justice. I write letters, I give orders, I command troops, I govern.

Sometimes in the morning, en route to catch the bus to school, in front of the pharmacy Le Drugstore, on Boulevard Saint-Germain, which is open until two o’clock in the morning, I pick up the empty bottles of paregoric elixir and empty blister packs of Neo-codion. I know it was junkies in need of a hit who drank from the bottles, who swallowed the tablets as quick as they could, to trick their bodies, to sleep a little before sunrise, to hang on till they could meet their dealer. It’s always nice to know things other people don’t. After the public school on the Rue Saint-Jacques, I go to the Lycée Henri-IV, the crème de la crème, professors’ kids who will go on to École Normale Supérieure as long as they do everything they’re told, good kids who love their teachers, who are bored during vacation. I have nothing to say to them, either. I’m waiting for it all to end—childhood, school, parents.

Opium is decadent but bourgeois. Opium is: ambassadors, writers, filmmakers, journalists, pretty women, big apartments, travel, books, it’s a perfume by Saint Laurent that my mother wears (clearly as a joke). It’s the Seventies, it’s a vanished world. Saigon has fallen, Asia has become Communist, little by little opium is harder to get out, and they make less and less of it. Twice my father has had to go to Laos to find some. He switches hotels, he shakes off the police, he lays traps, the mountains, a village, a transaction, returns to Chiang Mai, opium in the film cans that he mails to the post office that’s holding his mail, takes a 747 to Roissy–Charles de Gaulle, and gets his drugs in Paris. It would be Midnight Express if he were caught. He does it once. He does it twice. He stops. He changes drugs.

My father loses his job on TV, he’s too wasted, we lose the apartment. They live in hotels. Rue de Buci, Rue de Seine. Small local hotels. La Louisiane, etc. For six months I live with my grandparents on the Rue Jacob. With my sister who goes to preschool. My parents come by in the morning and in the evening for dinner. I love my grandmother, I ignore Grandpa the prime minister—he’s disgusted me for a while.

No more pipes in the evening. Now it’s powder in little folded bits of white paper. It’s a silver box in my mother’s handbag. It’s the straws she cuts up. Striped red or blue on white plastic. Lines she traces with little pocketknives, with handles made of horn or ivory. Sometimes she has a little powder under her nose. And then the bags under her eyes, the gray complexion, the sunglasses. Her absence. Her falling asleep. The cigarettes that fall. That burn the sheets, the books.

Next my parents rent a flat on the Rue Bonaparte. All four of us are together again. It’s just above the Petit Saint-Benoît, an old neighborhood restaurant. French food. Red-and-white checkered paper napkins. Pitchers of wine. Leeks vinaigrette. Hard-boiled eggs with mayo. Duras goes there. Never ran into her. Yann Andréa, yes. But later, at the Flore. Looking lost. We stayed two years. Evicted. They stopped paying the rent. Alcohol during this period, and pills. The worst combination. They’re letting go. That’s all you can say, really, they’re letting go. My father is writing screenplays for television, a little. Police procedurals, episodes of Les cinq dernières minutes, slipping in beautiful women and plotlines about drugs. Sometimes for dinner we bring up croque monsieurs from the café downstairs, or we get a folded crepe in a paper wrapper at the crêpe stand on the Rue Bonaparte.

I don’t know if my sister can tell what’s going on. Even I don’t understand, at the beginning. What they tell us doesn’t make sense. Especially my mother. My father gets high too, of course he does, but we don’t see it as much, he hides out in the living room which is his office which is his bedroom, he sleeps on the couch, they no longer sleep together. My sister and I are always with her, she’s the one we see, the way she gets high, in her bedroom with the TV on, at the café, in the street, in the car.

I am in my grandfather’s study on the Rue Jacob. I have a private math lesson today. It’s a dark room that looks out on the garden. You can see the Temple of Friendship. Faux-antique columns, Directoire or Revolutionary Freemason–style. That kind of bad taste. Inside, there are my grandfather’s old papers, a French flag, bleu blanc rouge, the smell of damp. My grandparents’ home used to belong to Natalie Barney. Colette, Proust, Joyce, they all apparently passed through. This isn’t the kind of world my grandparents like. My mother is the one who told me about Natalie Barney, who told me she was a poetess, a rich American heiress, a lesbian, the younger mistress of Liane de Pougy, and many others after that. She likes this story, my mother likes lesbians. She says she tried it once, with Simone, I know Simone, we run into her sometimes in the neighborhood. I look at Simone, my mother says she tried it, but no, I don’t know if it’s true. She says she loved women when she was at boarding school, that it was normal. She tells me all of this, she tells me that if I am a lesbian, if that’s what I’m into, with my boy clothes, that it’s no big deal. That I shouldn’t hide it from myself, that’s all.

The Rue Jacob is decorated in ugly bourgeois tones of: beige and brown, nineteenth-century paintings, Louis-Philippe furniture. The bourgeoisie do not love beauty, they mistrust it. “Bourgeois” means pathetic, it means fearful, it means ashamed, it means everything it’s crucial not to be. My mother teaches me this. Aristocrats are crazy, but not about everything. There is a garden there. Useful for dogs, for playing soccer with my cousins, for parking my grandmother’s beige Renault 5. My grandfather is still a member of Parliament. He goes to the Assemblée Nationale. He’s writing his memoirs. I have never read them. Nobody cares. In the right-hand drawer of the rolltop desk there are Dupont pens and double-sided pencils (red and blue); in the middle drawer, Assemblée Nationale letterhead, I take some for scrap paper. The student who is tutoring me arrives on his bicycle. One day my parents are there, they’re fighting, we pretend not to hear. The fighting gets louder, I stare at the equation. They’re in the kitchen next door, she’s screaming, I leave the study, my father has a knife, they see me, they calm down, I go back into the study, I finish my math lesson. When I walk my tutor out to his bike in the courtyard, he opens his satchel and fastens it around the bar of the frame. I would like to do that one day. And to have a boy’s bike because I will be a boy.

We have no money left at all, everything is difficult, grocery shopping and everything else, the bailiffs come, it’s not abject misery but we’re struggling. Sometimes my mother talks about one of her ex-boyfriends, she says she has a date, that she’s going to run away. She’s started spouting nonsense—junkies are always lying. My father is never there, or he’s in his bedroom with the shutters closed, bottles under the bed. My mother has moved into the living room, that’s where she sleeps and watches TV. My mother referred to her mother as PPLH, Passera-Pas-L’Hiver (Won’t Last the Winter), thinking she was in for a small inheritance, but she dies before my grandmother.

I yell at my mother. I’m the only one left to do it. I come home from school, I examine her eyes, appearance, voice, clothes, smell. She’s been drinking whiskey. Maybe the alcohol began with little flasks in her bag. She’s always had enormous bags. Black leather. Then bottles. She hides her bottles all around her. At the café she orders whiskey and Coke. She orders them directly from the bar with our Cokes, mine and my sister’s, she says hers is Coke too. As if I can’t tell that it’s not the same color. As if I couldn’t smell it. The smell of her alcoholic’s skin. You’ve been drinking, I tell her when I come home from school. She denies it, her voice thick, her gaze unsteady. During those years I ask the same question again and again. It’s not a question. It’s not a complaint either. I’m as tall as she is, and then I get taller. Now we face off, our bodies tense with conflict, and my sister cries like I used to, when our parents fought. I don’t hit her but I understand. It did me good when this whole thing with my mother came to an end. The dead can help the living, too.

Aside perhaps from war, death, violence, work, and love, life is astonishingly unserious. It can make you crazy. Whereas drugs, yes, drugs are serious, they make people serious. They create their own laws, and people must submit to them. A junkie is an incredibly moral person. Having junkies for parents makes you grow up within a strong moral system. My real lucky break, the one everyone should be jealous of, is having junkies for parents and a dead mother.

Maybe addicts can save nonaddicts, like the poor save the rich, and the believers the nonbelievers. Maybe that’s their job, their destiny in the overall balance of the world, maybe it demands sacrifice on some obscure level of truth.

It seems as though I hardly ever see my father during this period, until the morning when I run into him on my way home from school. He tells me she passed out, that she’s in the hospital, that I should go to my grandparents’, that he’ll come by later. At first I think this is a good thing, that she will finally get the treatment she needs. But on the bus I realize I am experiencing the death of my mother, while Paris slides by behind the windows, unchanging, that death is something like that. During this period my father returns, we are reunited, during the months and years that follow, we live through them, the three of us together—he, my sister, and I—in another apartment, again on the Rue Bonaparte. Then we separate once more, I leave home, he goes to Sainte-Anne, my sister to a studio apartment. Then he has a series of studios, then he crashes here and there, and then he moves to Touraine. After my mother’s death, it’s his own way of falling apart, a slow-motion breakdown, endless, sometimes calm and sometimes not. Years of going from one hospital to another, all across France, in rehab and then in postrehab. Of getting used to all that, which gives shape to the years like the seasons. Of hearing the doctors say that he’d had a close call, that he should have died years ago, of getting used to him not dying, of getting used to it not ending. When I’m with him sometimes it seems like we are very alike in our mannerisms, our way of walking, talking, even of eating. I also eat like a junkie, standing in the street or in front of the fridge, with a blend of obsession and nonchalance. It scares me to see our similarities when I get too close, but nobody else sees them because nobody else comes to see him, because nobody sees us together.