Every time I switch on my computer I feel a twinge in my phantom limb. For years I've kept a photo of Monument Valley as my screensaver, and every morning, when I sit down to work, for a moment I think that straight road through the desert between Arizona and Utah is still there where the photo on the screen shows it to me. For more than a year now it has been the fruit of my own private hallucination.
It haunts me at every hour of the day or night and shows itself in the most insidious and painful ways. A friend invites me to his graduation ceremony at Stanford and my first reflex is “I'll go!”, then that same twinge reminds me that there is no more Stanford, no more California, and perhaps no more friend either. It takes me a few minutes to recover from the hallucination; I breathe, I stretch my legs, I close my eyes and I focus on my new world.
But it isn't easy: my brain keeps the neurological (and geographical) map of the missing limb active, the nerves send signals even though they no longer have anything to stimulate them, and cerebral plasticity completes the deception, making me believe in what does not exist.
A few days ago I was looking for a flight to Mexico — I was actually tempted by Canada too, a kind of double American surrogate — but the prices were really far too high. Then all of a sudden Skyscanner flags a cheap flight for me. I was one step from booking when I noticed it had a layover in Dallas. I fell for it again: first an itch, then a burning, finally a sharp pain right there, where America used to be.
If only I could stop over in Dallas and save a few hundred euros on the way to Mexico: that city Skyscanner shows me so invitingly isn't there, it's only the deceptive memory of an extinct habit. I try taking an aspirin but I know it won't be enough.
America was amputated from me on 20 January 2025, but I still feel it in its place. To tell the truth, something had already started to go wrong back in 2017. Strange pains during the night, pins and needles. I began to worry when I had trouble moving it: it slipped out of my control, it hid, it reared up, it made strange noises. I kept telling myself: “surely it's not a stroke?”. Then I felt a bit better for a few years, I thought it was all sorted out, but no. Since last January it all started again at excruciating levels. I saw various specialists, had every kind of test, but in the end the prognosis was grim: it has to be amputated, no way around it.
I couldn't believe it, I told everyone: there has to be another solution, how am I supposed to live without America, it's a part of me, I can't give it up. But in the end I had to give in: a clean, precise cut and let's hear no more about it. Yet this is exactly where I was fooling myself. I thought amputation would solve everything. Sure, at first I braced for the trauma, I was ready for a long rehabilitation, but the experts told me I'd get used to it in the end. “These days there are excellent prosthetics” they'd tell me, and there I was, believing them.
Instead, from the very first time I woke up, America was still there, or at least that was my hallucination. The sensation that it had stayed attached to me, with its whole retinue of pains, jolts, itches, was more than real. The nerve signals were still firing; a book, a film, a piece of news, a photo was all it took, and there was America at my side again. It speaks to me from books, from films, from the news; sometimes it's a warm feeling, comforting, almost like love, other times it's an irritation, an embarrassment, a despair.
It consoles me not to be alone. The syndrome is extremely widespread; it strikes heads of state and government too, entire countries in the grip of the same hallucination. All of them convinced that America is still in its place, there for us as always. As for the prosthetics, they're still being developed, they'll certainly be very expensive, even though plenty of people believe that by some strange miracle things might go back to the way they were. I don't believe it; I'm already on the waiting list for a transplant.