Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074)

by Lain, Douglas

  “My problem is that I like Bergson,” Natalie said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The girl protagonist Cecile, she goes on and on about how she’s can’t stand philosophy, how she can’t understand Bergson,” Natalie explained. “But I quite liked Bergson.”

  Gerrard swirled small packets of sugar into the bitter cups of coffee they’d purchased.

  “It’s still bitter,” he said. Gerrard poured more sugar into his coffee and then stared into the small cup as the sugar dissolved. He watched bubbles on the surface swirl and break apart as the sugar and coffee mixed.

  Gerrard took another sip of onion soup as Natalie continued reading. Sometimes her lips moved as she repeated the same lines over and over again to herself in an attempt to do something new with them.

  “Listen,” she said. “‘I thought of Cyril. I would have liked to be caressed, consoled, reconciled with myself.’”

  “What of it?”

  “Do you feel reconciled with yourself?” she asked.

  “The problem is that you’re trying to live out that novel as if you’re not fictional already,” Gerrard said. “Haven’t you noticed? Our names are already like the characters in your novel: Gerrard and Natalie?”

  “Oh, yes,” Natalie said. “I see what you mean. We’re both of us characters in a novel.”

  “Either we’re in a novel, or a dream, or some other unreal thing. There’s something unfinished about us.”

  Natalie covered her face with her hand, shielded her eyes from the sight of him. Then she took Gerrard’s hand and kissed his fingers. “I know the people who wrote the Strasbourg essay. Do you want to meet them?” she asked.

  Gerrard said he did. Of course he did.

  Natalie leaned in close, so that her lips brushed against his ear, and then whispered a line from her book: “‘I wanted to bruise him, so that he would not be able to forget me for a single moment all the evening, and would dream of me all night long.’”

  She sat back again and took a sip from one of her paper cups. “Terrible,” she said, but it wasn’t clear if she was referring to the novel or the soup.

  “I’m not joking, though,” Gerrard said. “We’re living out some sort of fiction.”

  The sound of Edith Piaf singing “Milord” came from the jukebox as Gerrard tried to explain it to her.

  He’d come to regard dreaming as a concept rather than an experience. In lycée he’d read André Breton, Louis Althusser, and other Marxist philosophers who explained that dreaming wasn’t just something you did while you were asleep, but it was pervasive in the waking world. For Althusser, for example, the dream reconstituted itself daily in the material world.

  You could find the dream in the factories, in the arcades, and on the streets. The dream was what guided you through relationships. The dream told you who you were and what was expected of you.

  Gerrard had also read about the Dreamtime and the Aboriginal concept of the dream. For the Nunga people the dream was the moment of creation and it resided outside of historical time. It was a realm, a land, accessible through ritual storytelling.

  “Or you can find it in a pop song,” Gerrard said.

  As he listened he decided Piaf was a contradiction. Her sadness opposed the grandeur and conformity contained in her chosen genre. She was a woman born in a brothel and trained to turn her misery into sound, and “Milord” was both a promise of liberation and a command to conform. She voiced the collective despair of the proletariat but made that despair a romance. She sold the masses back their will to survive as a kind of rebellion.

  “Piaf was one of your father’s favorites?”

  Natalie put down Sagan’s book.

  “Yes.”

  He’d listened to Piaf when he was a teenager, during the occupation, and he wouldn’t tolerate talk of Edith the collaborator, the drug addict, the tragedy. Piaf represented France before the war. Her songs were unpolluted by the German occupation, and uncorrupted by imported American rhythms.

  “Your father took you to the demonstration,” Gerrard said. “You saw what happened to the Algerians.”

  “What?” Natalie wrapped her arms around herself, knocking over a cup of what was originally onion soup but looked more like mud as it spread across the table.

  “At the Rex cinema your dad held your hand tight, bruised it because he was terrified of losing you in the crowd.”

  “How do you know that?” Natalie asked.

  Gerrard told her that they were characters, that he could read or dream ahead, and that the song “Milord” was what connected one scene to the next.

  * * *

  When, in 1961, the police opened fire into a crowd of thousands of French Algerians dressed in their Sunday best, Natalie and her father hid under the marquee. There was blood on the street, on the cobblestones, and they were screaming. Everybody was screaming against the bullets, against the death, and in the chaos the police started to work with clubs and handcuffs. As the Algerians retreated, trampling one another to get away, the police rounded up a few survivors and pulled them in.

  “We crouched in an alcove of a British import shop, I can remember the boxes of tea, chamomile and orange spice. Our breath made clouds,” Natalie said. “My father was swearing under his breath. He had lost his camera in the crowd and kept peeking around the corner, looking toward the muffled screams, glancing down at the sidewalk, staring into the confusion looking for the orange-and-green shoulder strap reflecting light from between scuffling feet. He didn’t spot it.”

  Natalie’s father, she told Gerrard, was a liberal journalist. He’d taken her along to the demonstrations because the word was that the event was going to be huge, that it was going to be peaceful. A hundred thousand Algerians were to march through Paris, but the chief of police had blocked off the Metro stations in Arab neighborhoods. Ten thousand police were working at holding it all back. Her father hadn’t known that the officials of Paris were willing to kill that day. He hadn’t known that people would be fishing the bloated bodies of men, women, and children out of the Seine for days after.

  The police pushed them under, drowned them, made them disappear.

  “You and your father witnessed a massacre,” Gerrard said.

  “How did you know?” Natalie asked.

  “This coffee is terrible,” Gerrard said. “I can’t get it sweet enough.” He tried a spoonful of Natalie’s onion soup, but the soup tasted terrible too. It tasted like mud. Gerrard asked Natalie for one of her cigarettes. Maybe the smoke would get rid of the bad taste.

  “We were lucky not to be Algerian or be mistaken for Algerian. The police didn’t shoot us. We were grateful for that,” she said. “He’d lost his camera.”

  Her father had been terrified after, kept telling her over and over again that they weren’t to speak of what they’d seen. His daughter couldn’t be heard talking about that, about the demonstration.

  “They drowned children in the Seine,” Natalie said. “But wait, how did you know?”

  “You want to know how? I told you. We’re unfinished, fictional,” he said.

  Natalie looked out the glass wall of the café at the sunrise. The orange sky hadn’t changed since they’d gotten up that morning. She took a sip of her coffee and Gerrard took a sip from his. It was still hot but terribly bitter.

  “You have to test reality. That’s how you do it. You test the present like you would if you thought you were dreaming. Pinch your nose and hold it. Can you still breathe? Find a light switch and flip it, does the lighting in the room change? Look at the clock. Can you figure out the time?”

  Natalie stood up from the table, walked to the front of the café, and looked out at the orange sky. She found the light switch and turned off the overhead light, but nothing happened. She turned and looked back at Gerrard, and then pinched her nose for a moment and waited to gasp.

  Something was wrong. Natalie pushed her hair out of her face and then came back to the table and sat down again. She
picked up her coffee and hesitantly took a sip. It was bitter.

  “I’m asleep,” she said. “I’m dreaming.”

  11

  Natalie took him to see Debord not long after that. When she and Gerrard arrived at Chez Isou, Debord’s gang was passing a mimeographed copy of the comic strip Barbarella around their table. Chez Isou was a tiny café on Rue du Four, a sliver of space in a limestone building where oversized tables were surrounded by assorted wicker and wooden chairs, tiny booths, benches, all of it wedged in by a scratched-up Queen Anne upright piano. It was where the revolutionary members of Parisian bohemian life got drunk on red wine and gin, and Natalie was glad to be there even if she didn’t look forward to Debord asking after her progress with the Sagan book. That had been his assignment for her and she was pretty sure he wouldn’t approve of how she’d been handling the project.

  Someone dropped the comic strip in front of them and Gerrard picked it up and held it so she could see. A male astronaut in an orange space suit and a fishbowl helmet climbed across the bare breast of a statue of Barbarella and in the next panel two female astronauts were shown climbing out her mouth. The girl astronauts wore green space suits with fishbowls and held phallic ray guns. They shot white clouds over the head of the man in the orange suit.

  The text in the girl’s speech balloon had been altered:

  In the spectacle’s basic practice of incorporating into itself all the fluid aspects of human activity so as to possess them in a congealed form, and of inverting living values into purely abstract values, we recognize our old enemy the commodity.

  Guy had his arm around the neck of another student, some rebel in a leather jacket from the Sorbonne, but Guy was wearing a dingy off-white wool sweater and looked too French, too middle-aged for the scene he was in. Sure, most of the café-scene radicals were old, in their midthirties, some even in their forties, but Guy looked particularly old. He was sitting at the head of the table with his much younger Greek girlfriend Isadora standing behind him, with his arm around the shoulder of this boy from the Sorbonne, and he was clearly already a bit drunk and still drinking steadily.

  Isadora was playing with Debord’s spectacles. She put them on and then put her hands on Debord’s head and played with his hair. Finally she returned his glasses to him and sat down beside him, to his left.

  Natalie tried to get his attention. “I’ve brought a friend with me,” she said as she moved around the table.

  “This is your Cyril, yes?” Guy asked Natalie. “You’ve been working on living out the Sagan book?”

  Cyril was the name of Cecile’s young lover in Bonjour Tristesse. She ignored his challenge. “His name is Gerrard,” Natalie said. “And he’s got a game to teach us.”

  “A game of strategy?” Guy Debord asked. Madame Isou came by with a bottle of gin and poured it into metal cups for Isadora and Natalie.

  “It’s a game about time,” Gerrard said. “More of a technique than a game really.”

  “It’s a dreaming game,” Natalie said.

  Most of the crew was already drunk. They were giggling over their altered comic book, smoking cigarettes and clapping one another on the back, and not listening. Natalie ran her fingers along the tabletop, accidentally fingering cigarette ash, and then playing with the ash on purpose, drawing a face with it. She drew a smile, and then brushed the smile away.

  “A game about time and dreams?” Guy asked. “Dreams as such are a dead end. Besides, time has stopped. The present is static. Fashion itself, clothes, music, philosophy, all of it has stopped. The capitalist world wants us to forget the past and give up on the future,” he said.

  “This game involves remembering,” Gerrard said.

  But Debord wasn’t listening. He wanted to talk about Françoise Sagan and how the author he’d selected for Natalie had been making vaguely leftist statements from her Ferrari as of late. Debord loved reading about the idle rich because these stories illustrated both how hollow the utopias on offer always turned out to be and how the libertine impulse was caught up in another better one. Françoise Sagan and free love were grasping after something else, something like emancipation proper.

  Natalie had heard all this before.

  “You know how Bonjour Tristesse could have been a better book?” she asked.

  “How?”

  “If Cecile had done her homework and learned something. That way the whole stupid mess would’ve turned out differently.”

  Guy leaned across the table and smiled. “Let’s have another glass of wine.” He poured from his own bottle for Natalie and for himself. It was white wine, a bit too sweet, but she swallowed it, gulped it all down in one go, while Debord took a small sip from his glass.

  In Sagan’s book the main character had broken up her father’s second marriage in order to avoid reading Henri Bergson. Cecile’s father’s new wife expected that Cecile would pass her philosophy paper and make something of herself, but she’d wanted nothing more than to drift from beach to restaurant, or to spend her time between clean sheets in a hotel bed where she might count the motes in the air. Avoiding the hard work of study had been one of Cecile’s conscious motivations in the book, whereas Natalie had read Bergson, Sartre, and many others. What’s more Natalie thought that Cecile wouldn’t have had to give up much in the service of Bergson’s phenomenology. Bergson had, after all, said that sex appeal was the keystone of human civilization.

  Gerrard put down his glass. “‘In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present, which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.’” He was quoting Bergson. “That’s what my game is about. It involves drawing the past into the present. Using memory as a catalyst to change the present.”

  Guy wanted another drink and poured again from the bottle the lady had left behind for them. The three of them sat behind glasses of wine and watched the café scene move. Even though they were all sitting still everyone was also moving fast, faster than Natalie could track. Isadora was a blur to her, mostly yellow and red. The wine bottles were emptying out around them, the conversations a meaningless jumble of words.

  “Airplanes, automobiles, street lamps, telephones, umbrellas, some everyday consumer items like detergents and Orangina,” Gerrard explained to her.

  “What are you saying?”

  Gerrard told her about Guy Debord, about how Debord’s family had driven to Cannes from Paris, directly south, when the Nazis took Paris. They’d driven to Cannes in Debord’s mother’s 1929 Traction Avant. It was a fancy car, one of the few luxuries they’d held on to after the Depression hit. By the time of the German invasion the Debords’ prospects were nil, but they escaped Paris in time.

  Natalie hadn’t thought of Debord’s childhood before, or of how he might have survived the German occupation.

  Isadora and Guy were by the piano now, and Isadora took a gulp from a metal cup, sat down on the piano bench, and started playing France Gall’s “Jazz à Gogo.”

  “I know what we need is jazz with a gogo,” she sang.

  “Down with yé-yé!” Natalie shouted back at her. “Down with the society of France Gall!”

  But Isadora just kept singing the insipid yé-yé song.

  Everyone continued drinking, but Guy was the most inebriated by the time Natalie and Gerrard stood to go. He picked up the Barbarella comic strip and pressed it against the side of the wineglasses he carried as he followed them to the door.

  Outside they stopped and discussed the best way back to Nanterre, neither of them sure when the last train left.

  * * *

  “I want to tell you a story,” Guy said. “Do you have time for one more drink?” He had three glasses with him, and they each took a glass and toasted each other. Guy Debord took a small cautious sip from his own.

  “I’ve lost a f
ew to madness,” Guy said.

  “Lost what?” Gerrard asked.

  “Friends. I’ve lost them to madness, Gerrard.”

  He told them of a Russian comrade who had contributed great things to the revolution back in 1953. Back then they’d still considered themselves artists, and his friend had thought himself a poet. They’d worked together, this poet and Debord, on theories of urbanism. They’d worked to understand social space.

  “His ideas about architecture, about articulating time and space, were quite good. He could write.” Debord leaned against the wrought iron fence that bordered Chez Isou’s outside tables. He looked up at an electric street lamp on Rue du Four and remembered. “‘We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the Dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup.’ Ivan Chtcheglov was quite good, but he went mad. They locked him away, and ultimately they destroyed him. The psychiatric doctors wiped him clean with drugs and electricity.”

  “What kind of madness was it?” Natalie asked.

  “The usual kind. He believed we were secretly directed by the Dalai Lama. He thought that there was a black light in the Eiffel Tower,” Guy said.

  “A black light?”

  “He resolved to destroy the tower. Went out one night to topple the thing but ended up somewhere like this. He ended up drinking, and then destroying the wineglasses, the dishes. Then he started throwing tables and chairs,” Guy said.

  The three of them stood under light from street lamps. Guy blew out puffs of smoke from his cigar and took sips from his wineglass.

  “We should be going. The Metro,” Natalie said.

  “His wife turned him in to the police. He was declared insane and then they destroyed his mind,” Guy said. “You should put this dream game aside. It leads nowhere but to mysticism at best and psychosis at worst.”

  “You think so?” Gerrard asked.

  “I know what game you should play instead.”

  Gerrard borrowed a Gitanes cigarette from Natalie and then took a swig of wine because he didn’t like the taste.