Robert Rouan is a kind of Don Quixote with a heroin habit. Strung out and desperate for drugs, Rouan stabs a drug dealer in a scuffle in the North of Paris. He is then locked up in the Santé, an old prison. After rumors spread that Rouan is a spy, he is brutally beaten and falls into a deep coma.
Decades later, Rouan awakens to an altered and damaged world, marred by wars and the collapse of the U.S. Government. What is left of America is under quarantine: where life is controlled by monolithic corporations and its inhabitants live in misery. The United Nations is now headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.
Based on his jailhouse fabrications, Rouan is hailed as a prophet by some. Rouan can no longer walk, his legs have grown too frail from disuse. His former lawyer, Jean-Marc Frenot, visits frequently. Frenot invites Rouan to the United Nations. Geneva glows with activity and prosperity. Frenot introduces Rouan to Christophe Tousant (assistant secretary general of the U.N.). Tousant, a Zen Buddhist in his eighties, a hunchback since birth, wears a white robe and sandals and in his own way reminds one of Mahatma Gandhi. Tousant advocates opening up trade and restrictions on travel for those living in the Q (the Quarantined area stretching across all of North America). Many oppose Tousant, fearing contamination and plague.
Rouan questions all that he sees and wonders if this new world is a dream, the product of his own fantasy, the product of a damaged brain...
...Day after day, Rouan watched the reports on TV as the sons of poor immigrants set cars ablaze in the suburbs of Paris. A month earlier, he watched as Hurricane Katrina struck in the United States, leaving bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans. Homeland security, FEMA, what a joke, Rouan thought. Then news came of the London subway bombings. The war continued in Iraq with more kidnappings, beheadings and terror, children maimed, orphaned and killed while the remains of U.S. soldiers were flown home in body bags. The scandal of Abu Ghraib and the controversy of detaining combatants in Guantanamo Bay was debated incessantly (Rouan thought about them often as he sat in his own cell). Why couldn't Bush and Company realize that for every human rights violation, misguided missile and the killing of innocent civilians, terrorism was fomented rather than stopped? America was not safer because of these actions but endangered by them. Rouan watched it all on the TV in his cell.
When did the world go so gray? Rouan would ask himself. When did it all go so bad? Was it after the war began in Iraq? But which one? The one that ended with half naked Iraqis waving dirty, white flags in the desert, or the one that would not end even after the death of Saddam Hussein? Or maybe it all began to go bad (for the United States at least) with the war in Vietnam—whole villages consumed by fire, the jungle itself decimated by napalm and Agent Orange? Or was that the fault of television seeing all that death sandwiched between commercials for Mister Clean, Ultrabrite toothpaste and Wonder Bread on the evening news? He was high on his soap box now (even if no one was listening except for the phantoms in his own mind). And what about him? He, too, had fabricated a hoax. The CIA had misled Colin Powell about Iran's weapons of mass destruction and he had tried to do the same with plans he'd claimed to have found. Was he any different than the CIA when they led America into war based on a lie? No, he thought, he was no different. He had put his own ego and wishful thinking ahead of the truth just as his country had used the specter of weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq.
Rouan began having a recurring dream. In the dream he saw flashes of a future catastrophe, the dream becoming increasingly more vivid and real as the days passed. The voices, the faces, the figures, loomed like giants in his mind. His imagination once again took over. In the dream it all started with just a sound, a sound that seemed to surface out of nowhere with a kind of warbling in his head. The warbling was joined by human voices. And then the voices took shape. He saw men dressed in Air Force uniforms descending into a capsule, a kind of control room that they entered after opening a Boeing blast door (Rouan had once seen pictures of one in a book). After this, there was a countdown, and then the flash of missiles as they emerged out of the earth. After he awoke from the dream, he could not let go of what it was that he saw.
Rouan decided he would begin attending NA meetings once he was released. Frenot was now optimistic that he could get him out on reduced charges. It seemed that Pat's promise of securing his release was bearing fruit, though Rouan could never be sure of what was going on behind the scenes. He only knew what Frenot told him. Perrout had softened. He'd reluctantly accepted that Rouan would not change his mind and testify against Hassan. He must also have become aware that Hassan was no longer peddling drugs. That Hassan was no longer a player in the drug trade.
Still, Rouan kept his expectations low. High expectations and big promises no longer fit into his new outlook on things. In the past, he made promises and then let everyone down (including himself). The future, he'd given up on predicting its outcome. If everything was all mapped out, if everything was certain, what of free will? He was not a puppet walking in step to some kind of predictable destiny. No, life was not about mapped out plans, the products of wishful thinking, he thought. Sometimes we stumble, sometimes we fall, he said to himself, the best of plans get scuttled and a new destiny, a new path emerges. He thought wishes were okay up to a point. But when they become a way of avoiding reality, then they became counterproductive. He would now have to unlearn what he had perfected in the way of rationalizations and lies; lies that he once wore like a tightly fitted mask.
Rouan began to meditate daily. He engaged in an informal study of the Quran with other inmates. He did, however, reject the theology of death, the radicalized version of Islam that was popular in the prison; he had developed his own views. He was becoming a bit of a mystic, reading Sufi poets when he could get a copy of their works from the prison library and when these texts weren't available he made due with Saint John of the Cross. He loved the poetry but was not quite ready to accept the notion of a transcendent and loving God. But he had gotten in touch with something, something that he could not yet define. At the very least he was getting to know himself for the first time in his life.
As Rouan prepared for his biweekly shower, Karim was nervous. This was odd, Rouan thought. But then again Karim had been acting strange for some time. Rouan's request to move to another cell had been denied by the authorities. Rouan knew that Karim had been spreading rumors about him (that he was an American spy) and in so doing had endangered his life. But at that moment nothing was bothering Rouan. He was feeling better than he had in a long time. The night before he had had a new and wonderful dream he could now focus on. In it, he was on his way back to Houston on a Air France jet. The clouds outside the window of the jet were white and beautiful (he thought he could make out the shape of a white horse). In the dream, the prosecutor had dropped all the charges. He was going home. He and Jennifer were getting back together. He would have his family and his freedom back once again. He interpreted the dream to be a sign of good things to come.
Once Rouan made it downstairs to the showers, he stripped off his clothes. He walked over and turned on the shower. Two men, a Pakistani and a Moroccan, approached him. He thought it was odd that they both were fully dressed. There were no guards in sight. Puzzled, but not frightened, Rouan turned off the shower and began to walk out. Just as he passed the Pakistani, the Moroccan produced a lead pipe and struck him on the side of my head. He touched the wound with his hand. He glanced at his hand and saw that it was bloody. The Moroccan swung again at Rouan with the pipe. Rouan lifted up his right forearm in defense and it was shattered by the blow. Rouan tried to stand as he reached out toward his attacker. Rouan's bloody hands wrapped around the Moroccans neck and he began choking him. Rouan's right arm was almost useless and the pain was unbearable. The Pakistani then jumped on Rouan and pulled him off the Moroccan. The Pakistani picked up the lead pipe and brought it down hard on Rouan's head. The Pakistani and the Moroccan picked up Rouan's body and tied his neck to a shower head with a piece of cloth. They then turned the shower on and washed away the blood.
Rouan was conscious but could not move. He was floating, hovering between worlds. He went back to the dream of the white horse. Marie appeared amidst a giant white cloud. She held her baby in her arms. She smiled so beautifully. She was so happy. The dream cheered Rouan up. Somehow, he believed, the future was out there waiting for him. The horse was so beautiful. When he petted its white mane and soft neck, the horse closed its eyes in response. He noticed that his own hair had turned white and that the horse and he were a part of each other. He did not know rationally how this could be. Then a young woman appeared above him dressed in a white wedding gown at the top of a long staircase in a grand castle. Her face radiated joy and light. It was his daughter, Terry. She threw a bouquet of flowers. Rouan reached out and caught the flowers. He was quite embarrassed since he was the father of the bride. It was a sign that he, too, would soon be married. Then Terry, Marie and the baby vanished and Rouan's mind went blank and he fell into a deep sleep.
* * * *
Rouan awoke in a hospital bed in a room he did not recognize, in a place he did not know. He had no idea where he was. He felt like he'd been crawling uphill out of the darkness for ages, digging himself from out of a dark cave far below the earth. He was exhausted from the climb. For some time (he did not know exactly for how long) he could make out the outline of a kind of reality (a dreamscape really) but no more. He could hear voices, sounds, and at times could understand what was being said. But he couldn't put it all together. It was all a blur, one endless night of shadows and sounds. It was as if he was buried under a great weight, and the way forward was blocked. His awakening was gradual. There were flashes of awareness. The outside world was in darkness. Even so, a nurse noticed a change in him. She brought in several other nurses and a doctor. A light flashed in his eye and after that flash everything changed, the world opened up. He reacted involuntarily. He tried to speak. The doctor was startled. He smiled. With great effort Rouan raised his arm slightly. His head would not move; it seemed to be anchored to his pillow. He looked round the room using just his eyes. Everyone was amazed. He'd come back from the dead. But for Rouan everything seemed unreal; he was unaccustomed to the world that he'd awakened to.
As the days passed, Rouan began communicating, speaking in short sentences, with the nurses in French. Rouan was told he had been in a coma. When he looked at his withered arms and legs, he thought he must have been in a terrible accident. He had little recall of the blow to his head. Finally, he was given a mirror. He could not believe what he saw. He was an old man, wrinkled and gray. It was a shock. He recognized his features, his eyes; the shape of his jaw but his skin seemed paler and had aged. As his strength increased, he was allowed to move about in a wheelchair. Finally it was disclosed to him that he had been in a coma for well over twenty years. He had so many questions. It was all so much like a dream. It was like waking up after a long sleep. But it was impossible to comprehend that years had gone by rather than hours. What about his family? What about his court case? Would he be returned to prison? No, he was told his case had been dismissed years before. In fact, one of the nurses told him that the hospital had gotten in touch with his former lawyer, Jean-Marc Frenot.
Frenot had aged but still was fit, agile (he was in his thirties when he first represented Rouan; he was now in his late fifties). His attitude toward Rouan had changed, the skepticism was gone. There was a look of compassion and respect when he gazed into Rouan's eyes.
Frenot shook his head and smiled, "How are you feeling Robert?" He never had used Rouan's first name before.
“I am very tired. I feel that I've been packed away in an attic gathering dust for ages.”
“We have both gathered some dust." Frenot smiled. "You are lucky to be alive.”
“It is so strange. It seems as if we were speaking just a few days ago. But I know that isn't true.”
“No one expected that you would recover.”
“Do you know anything about my family in the United States?” Rouan asked.
Frenot had expected this question but Rouan sensed it was difficult for him to answer and not necessarily because he did not have an answer but because there was something unpleasant that he wanted to keep from Rouan.
Frenot sighed: “I was in touch with both your ex-wife and mother.”
“Have you heard from them recently?”
“No.” Frenot looked away.
Rouan could see that Frenot was wounded by the question.
“There is something more. Tell me.”
“Robert, no one believed you. We should have listened.” As Frenot said this, a weight seemed to have lifted from his soul.
“What do you mean? What does this have to do with my family?” In the back of Rouan's mind, a horrible thought was taking shape, but he wasn't sure what it all meant. He was confused.
“The plans you discovered.”
“What are you talking about, the plans?” Rouan was baffled.
“About the tactical nuclear weapon that you described,” Frenot answered,
“That was a product of my over active imagination"
“Made up or not, they were prophetic. Somehow the system broke down. The computers in the United States indicated an imminent attack. There is strong evidence that the initial attack on Washington DC was a tactical nuclear weapon and not a missile. When I first learned of that, I thought back to the weapon that you had described. I went back and reviewed your notes. I asked myself if there could have been some truth he what you described. Was it something more than a hallucination? I asked myself over and over again. I became convinced that the first explosion was a tactical nuclear weapon similar to the one you documented.”
“I don't understand what you are saying. Someone used tactical weapons.”
“Initially, the United States in its confusion, after Washington was hit, released several ICBMs. This brought on a counter attack from China. Over a dozen U.S. cities were struck before anyone realized it was all a horrible mistake.”
Rouan hesitated, afraid to ask the next question. He dreaded Frenot's response. “What cities?
“The worst of it,” Frenot paused, “Houston was hit.” Frenot shook his head. “Along with Houston, a dozen more cities were hit. Fortunately, the bombings stopped before the whole country, the whole world for that matter, was left in ruins. A moment of sanity, I suppose, if one can call it that.”
“What about my family?”
A look of sadness crossed Frenot's face. “I'm so sorry. After the bombing, I did not hear from anyone in your family.”
“But many people survived?”
“Yes, many people survived. Many cities remained intact. They weren't targeted by the bombs or rather the bombing stopped before they were hit. But the bombings were just the beginning of the nightmare for America. For weeks, for months, even years, many more perished from radioactive sickness. What remained of the country, of the government was in shock, paralyzed. Washington DC was gone. There were wars of a kind between various factions, and then came well-armed battles for control by profiteers. Different parts of the country set up their own forms of government. But nobody was in control for long. That has changed in some parts of the country now. Armed militias, police, are paid for by the big companies. But there is no justice in the way they rule. There is order, but no justice.”
“How did this happen?”
“No one knows what exactly happened. Some say there was a computer malfunction. Several cities in both Russia and China were hit. Some have claimed that the Chinese had planted a computer virus in the Strategic American Command and this caused a malfunction and missiles were prematurely fired. But the damage in Russia and China was nothing compared to the United States. Actually, the United States sent out very few missiles. But retaliation came before anyone had a chance to catch their breath. Much of the old cold war mentality was still in place, the hair trigger effect. My God, the world still had its finger on the button.”
So it finally happened, Rouan thought, the thing that no one wanted to face. The monster, the Frankenstein of the nuclear age, had come down on the world and unleashed its wrath. Rouan had grown pale, his upper lip quivered with emotion.
“I believe, someone once affiliated with Al-Qaeda initiated the first tactical attack. This is what made the plans you discovered so important. I have no definitive proof of this. I have your notebook. It was given to me after you were attacked.”
“You kept my notebook all this time? But why?”
“Remember you were in a coma. I was the attorney of record. Your personal belongings were my responsibility.”
“I understand. But what I wrote was a complete fabrication. There was no truth to it. None of it was real. I was very sick. I lived in a fantasy world of drugs and delusions. I imagined I could save the world. Well, I didn't save anybody.”
“Your fantasies were a foreshadowing of what was to come. What you saw was all too real. Proof? An entire continent is in ruins. Your country is gone, or at least as far as you once knew it. Those that have survived live a miserable existence.”
“Is it that bad?”
“Yes.
“But how?”
“My mind keeps going back to that initial explosion in Washington DC. It occurred a full fifteen minutes before the ICBMs were launched. No one knows the size exactly of the initial explosion, since Washington was hit a second time by a much larger warhead. There was a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. Wars broke out from one side of the world to the other. The whole world has been marked, turned upside down, wounded by this catastrophe, famine, bio- terrorism on an unimaginable scale." Frenot let out a breath. "We'll have time to talk about this later.”
“My family, my country.” Rouan was horrified. It was more than he could bear. Frenot stayed with Rouan while he took in all of the news, sitting silently with him. Frenot even held Rouan's hand at one point.
Frenot had written several articles in Le Monde. Many pointed out that tactical nuclear weapons weren't used but rather Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles. They went on to say that the tragedy was not caused by terrorists but by a system destined to end in catastrophe. Frenot replied to this in several more articles (stirring up quite a debate) that Rouan's hypothesis and notes only illuminated the dark path that the terrorists were on and pointed out the initial attack, the trigger, for the conflagration that followed was a rogue tactical nuclear weapon.
All this speculation disturbed Rouan. Long ago he'd accepted responsibility for the hoax he concocted. Rouan thought of the old adage in intelligence analysis: that there is some truth to be discovered even in a lie. Rouan was consoled with the realization that there a kind of inevitability to it all. If the weapons exist, someone would use them. Rouan then remembered something else. The dream he had shortly before being attacked in jail. He remembered every detail of the dream: the countdown, the Boeing blast door, and finally the firing of the missiles. Rouan was convinced that the dream was somehow prophetic. This was more than coincidence. He could come to no other conclusion. Why had he been handed this vision? He consoled with the thought that he wasn't the only one who foresaw this almost inevitable consequence of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the arms race. A race that no one could win but everyone could lose. Many had warned about it over and over again from the very beginning. But no listened. Or if they listened, they took no action. The world had been in a state of denial and been awakened from its sleeping state (just as he had) by the sound of thunder in the skies. The shoe had dropped and now there was no going back. It is a wonder that the whole world hadn't been reduced to ashes and smoke.
In the following days, Frenot visited Rouan often. He gave him more details on what had gone on while he slept all those years. He gave him a kind of history lesson. He explained that electric power functioned sporadically in the United States in the years after the bombings (leaving pockets of the country without power). With a worthless dollar, commerce on a large scale became impossible. Biological weapons were released; no one had a reasonable explanation why. It was madness. There was civil unrest, massive starvation. What was once the United States was now under quarantine; in the beginning, martial law was declared and the remnants of the federal government existed but were powerless to exercise any control, and with no federal banking system and an inability to collect taxes, became irrelevant and ultimately collapsed. The country had been broken up into territories, counties, city-states. The United Nations was now headquartered in Geneva. Rouan could not believe what he was told. He asked himself over and over again, how was it that he had survived but his country had not?
While in a vegetative state, Rouan had been housed just outside of Paris along the Marne River in Champigny. Though he had been in the coma, the nurses had exercised his limbs so his muscles had not completely wasted away. Still his limbs were fragile, thin and weak. He was told he would never walk again; that his legs would never be strong enough again to carry the weight of his upper body. His heart had been weakened but his lungs were in good condition, normal for someone his age. They could have just left him to die. But Frenot and others saw to it that he had been properly looked after. Rouan was so grateful. He learned that while the blow to his head did cause unconsciousness, it did not cause the coma (or rather what was diagnosed after his awakening as a minimally conscious state). The coma was ultimately caused by an infection in his brain from his intravenous drug use. The infection eventually cleared up and after a change of medication, he awoke. It would have been relatively easy with the right medication to bring him out of his sleeping state (once the infection in his brain cleared up) but everyone assumed that his condition was hopeless; that his condition was irreversible. Who would have guessed that his grave condition could have changed so miraculously? Brain scans were done in the beginning, but bleeding from the blow to his head hid the underlying infection from those radioactive eyes. The good news, of course, was that he survived at all. The doctors told him there was no sign of brain damage.
Some days Rouan would fall into a deep depression that he could not climb out of (no matter how hard he tried). A dark cloud covered his world, time stopped and once again he was back in the Santé behind its bleak, gray walls, and once again its ghosts came back to haunt him. The United States had been taken to its knees—and so had he. But when we thought of his own descent into the depths, he would begin to recall the day of his rebirth, of his resurrection, and he found some consolation there, some hope, and gradually he would come out of his funk. There must be some reason for his survival. Other times, he'd find himself sitting beside by the Marne River looking out at that green water and he'd think about the life that it held; the fish, the plants, the turtles. Then he'd think about the future. And that gave him hope. Hope for a new world, a world without sickness, addiction, wars and bombs. He hoped for that better world. He prayed that he could be a part of it. He felt a responsibility. He wanted to make up for all the mistakes he'd made. He wanted to make amends to one and all.
While Rouan had been physically debilitated and disabled by his long sleep, his ability to communicate had not been diminished. He had begun writing in his journal in long hand. It was good therapy. But he tired easily (even after such a long sleep) and found it necessary to dictate his notes, his thoughts, to a nurse. She dutifully took down done all that he said (even at times laboriously transcribing his handwritten notes). Her name was Camille Demoulin. She had been a nurse for over twenty years. She was in her mid-forties. She had auburn hair and an alabaster complexion. She was a great beauty but without pretense or affectation. She carried out her duties with grace and humility. She looked after Rouan's every need (as she has been assigned exclusively to him since his awakening).
Things began to bloom in Champigny. Rouan spent as much to time as possible outdoors on the grounds of the center usually accompanied by Camille. The air was cool and fresh and the world was turning green once more. The blossoms hung from the bushes and were heavenly both to smell and to look at. On those days in particular Rouan would wonder again and again if any of what drifted before his eyes was real. How had all of this come to pass? Rouan had a hard time putting his mind around it all...
