Ninon Moise turns three, seven, eleven, doesn’t suffer from any ailments, no disease has manifested, nothing suspicious, a rather cheerful child, lulled by baleful and comical accounts, though she’s somewhat solitary, like her mother, the solitude of a little girl whose head is full of tales as captivating as they are burdensome, whose heart sometimes tightens in worry — when will misfortune strike? what will its name be? — though she’s also awaiting it with some excitement.
Ninon isn’t traumatized by these cruel stories, didn’t grow up any faster from hearing them, or any slower, just a little more alert than other children her age, forever waiting for a sign, monitoring her own body, an interior sentinel. Of course this attentiveness sometimes prompts bouts of hypochondria, but most often she floats carefree in a cloudy zone where the fictions told by her mother blend with real life, with life waiting to be lived.
Ninon is seventeen, in her final year at Lycée Jules-Ferry, in Paris’s Place de Clichy, on the literature track, she’ll take her final exams soon, lives with her mother in a three-room Hausmannian building on the Rue des Dames; she’s gone through puberty, is fairly average, five feet four, 120 pounds, 34A, some acne, unwanted hair tamed, a brunette, girlfriends, acceptable grades, the occasional swim, movie theater, mall, cigarette, vodka-OJ, parties and stolen kisses, nothing more. Average, reserved, ordinary looking, sometimes to the despair of a mother who’s secretly waiting for Ninon to be chosen, a mother who could be judged as misguided, reckless even, torn between the relief of knowing her daughter to be in good health and the impatience of seeing her struck in her turn, curious to learn what fate and the inexhaustible resources of the genome have in store for her. Esther Moise always told Ninon her genealogical sagas with such enthusiasm, irrigating her daughter’s young malleable and porous brain with legends, because she herself had never been unhappy or overburdened by the disease that struck her, awareness of her uniqueness largely making up for the diminishment of her faculties — to the point that one could suspect her of having wanted to get sick, to be anointed by sickness, join an extraordinary lineage, remove herself from the anonymous masses, and have a destiny, consolations in which Esther Moise had always taken pride.
It’s therefore time for her daughter to stand out, and it’s as though that distinctiveness can only be revealed through her genes, as though uniqueness can only be expressed by a cell line, as though the force of a person’s existence is resorbed whole by the transmission of genetic characteristics hoped to be rare and mysterious, as though that force can’t be incarnated, for example, by an act — if her daughter were to contemplate climbing Everest without oxygen, Esther Moise would undoubtedly feel no surprise, no joy, not even worry.
No warning sign will be detected, no alert, no malfunction or change in Ninon’s general state able to signal the affliction that finally strikes. If this affliction had been discreetly advancing through the silence and obscurity of her organs, she hadn’t heard it. No notable event either, no trauma or accident liable to have triggered the disease. That’s how it is, today’s the day, you need a beginning, a date, an age, it’s January nineteenth, in the morning when she wakes up. It won’t be gradual, it won’t be underlying then exponential until it fully manifests; the anomaly and the pain are absent from her body on January eighteenth, and present the nineteenth, revealed, and when her troubling and unusual symptoms appear, Ninon quickly understands that this is it, the thing she can no longer name now that she’s the host, the object, she knows perfectly well that this malady didn’t land on her randomly, that it didn’t come out of nowhere, but from a slowly formed bed of history and time, from layers of pathological strata — so, on this nineteenth of January, in the morning, existence as she knows it suddenly vanishes, an underground life takes power, the hereditary poison spreads through her body.
Normally it’s the Rihanna ringtone on her cellphone — Bitch better have my money — that wakes her at 7:00 a.m., but this morning she opened her eyes a little earlier, the bluish screen indicates 6:39 and it’s a feeling of uncustomary discomfort, of irritation and soon pain that pulls her from her sleep, like a bad dream that leaves a bitter aftertaste and crust in the eyes, a disagreeable posture that stiffens the body during the night, an inflammation of the nerves of the kind brought on by stormy weather. It takes Ninon a few seconds to emerge from this disagreeable torpor, a few seconds for body and mind to reconnect, crackling, for her bedroom to take form again—south-facing window, gray carpet, an Ikea desk in light pine—and then comes the urgent, imposing sensation of the sheet on her skin.
Lying in the fetal position, body huddled up beneath the comforter, Ninon is wearing pajama pants and a tank top, and the contact of the sheet on her naked, exposed arms is extraordinary, she can’t feel anything else, it weighs heavy (lead), it burns (acid), it chafes (sandpaper), her two pained arms seem enormous to her, a brutal, crazy, impossible sensation that matches nothing she’s ever known.
In a burst of panic, Ninon jumps out of her bed like it’s on fire, rolls onto the carpet, which likewise burns her skin, lays still on her back, holds her arms above her, prepared to find them red, scratched, bleeding maybe, her skin raw, flayed, but nothing, the epidermis is smooth and white and the pain recedes as quickly as it appeared, like a hallucination gone without a trace.
Ninon brushes her fingers along the inside of her left arm, then the outside, slowly sweeps down from shoulder to hand then back up again, does the same on the right arm with extreme caution, hyper alert, but only feels slight pressure, a light stroke, really nothing abnormal, nothing violent. And yet she has no doubts about what just happened, about what her body just experienced. Ninon knows she wasn’t dreaming; still lying on her back, she bravely grabs a T-shirt rolled into a ball from the foot of her bed, brings it closer with some apprehension and rubs it delicately against her forearm: at the first contact of cotton with her body she lets out a cry of surprise and pain, the fire is back, biting, she drops the shirt, then, still on the ground, picks up everything within reach, wool sock, canvas knapsack, stuffed unicorn, crumpled piece of paper, leather pencil case, each time brings the object to her skin, places it gently against one arm or the other, and it’s always the same electric shock, the same venom, which evaporates as soon as the contact ends. Her arms remain intact to the naked eye, her skin barely reddens, the pain fades away, leaving no aura.
Before the strangeness and scale of what’s happening, Ninon doesn’t hesitate, it’s irrefutable: the inescapable family affliction has just struck like lightning.
/ / /
Life Sciences by Joy Sorman was published on October 12, 2021 by Restless Books. The excerpt above appears here with permission of the press. First published as Sciences de la vie by Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2017. Click here to acquire the novel from Bookshop.org.
“It’s an often dark tale about women who struggle with health issues that the medical establishment cannot—or does not want to—cure, or even identify. But stories can be changed, and Ninon might just be the woman to do it. Life Sciences is an immersive, harrowing novel about the power of stories to turn a captivating fable into a prophecy.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews