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

by Lain, Douglas

  “Election. Solution. Election,” Daniel echoed.

  “We could stay one more day,” Abby said. “We could keep looking?” Abby asked.

  Christopher jumped up and down, not looking for Gerrard anymore but a way through. They’d made it to the river, and even if that wasn’t where they’d meant to go Christopher would be damned before he retraced his steps. But when they found themselves by the railroad tracks, when Abby stopped to lean on the stone wall between the Milnes and the water, Christopher finally spotted Gerrard. He was on Pont des Arts, crossing over from the Louvre. He was half-covered in mud and stumbling across the bridge in the fashion of a mad derelict. He reached out to passersby, seeming to offer something he was holding to each one of them.

  They waited for Gerrard on the Left Bank, stood staring at the dome of the Institut de France, at the black and yellow stones. They stood blinking against the sun, and Christopher’s stomach flipped when he realized what Gerrard was bringing them. Gerrard had one of the stuffed animals with him.

  “Here it is,” Gerrard said when he stepped up to them. He had a stuffed donkey with him. “I brought this back for you.”

  Gerrard looked terrible. His sports jacket was ripped up the back, his face was pale, and his eyes were bloodshot. Gerrard took a breath, inhaled deeply, and then let it out. “It’s a Heffalump,” Gerrard said. And then he lurched forward and Christopher had to catch him.

  Back at the hotel the desk clerk seemed a little surprised to see Christopher and his family again. Gerrard sat down on a threadbare Louis XIV chair and closed his eyes.

  Daniel approached Gerrard, put his hand on his arm, and then poked him on his cheek with his thumb. Daniel pressed hard and when nothing happened he leaned over and put his ear next to Gerrard’s mouth.

  “He’s yawning,” Daniel said. “He’s sleeping.”

  The three Milnes worked together to get Gerrard onto their shoulders and into the elevator. When Daniel pressed the button to make the elevator go up, Gerrard startled and stood up on his own, supporting his own weight, but then he fell back. His head snapped back and cracked one of the square mirror panels on the elevator wall. Only slightly cushioned by the arms of Abby and Christopher, both of whom reacted too slowly, Gerrard slipped to the floor of the elevator and began to snore.

  * * *

  The window beside the hotel bed was open. Gerrard had thrown the sheets to the floor but even in the cool air he was still warm, sweating into the mattress. He was in the Milnes’ bed and had been asleep for nearly sixteen hours. Natalie stood beside him there, watching him sleep, and then unbuttoned her slacks. She pulled her sweater off over her head, removed the T-shirt underneath, and gathered up the rumpled sheets. She lay down next to him on the bed.

  Lying there on a bare mattress and staring at the yellow ceiling at the nineteenth-century light fixtures and elegant molding along the walls, Natalie realized that she was in an empty space, an interstice between the life she’d been born into and a possibility. The hotel bedroom was a limbo, a point or respite between the private and the public. It was not truly neutral, but a space that served to connect the two realms that structured economic and material life of a society that she was attempting to reject. And yet, lying there next to Gerrard, feeling a draft pass over her bare skin, she felt the moment, the space, was open.

  She was in bed. That was familiar and defined. A bed was a place for sleep, a place for sickness, and theoretically a space for sex. Natalie had never had sex in a bed—at nineteen, she was barred from the bed as a conventional sexual space. For her, sex was an act squeezed into an automobile, behind a bulge in the lawn of Parc Montsouris, and once in a coat closet.

  According to Debord a real revolution had to be total. If the goal was to liberate, to realize desire, this would require redefining the space people occupied in their everyday lives. Natalie wondered how a liberated bed, a redefined spring mattress, might function? How would she interact with a liberated bed? Where would she find it?

  Natalie imagined that a liberated mattress would be larger than the 190-centimeters-long rectangle that she was currently occupying. A free sleep would have to include many people. It would be a public form of sleep. She imagined a long hall with a soft floor. A liberated bed would include sheets that stretched for meters. The students and workers would curl up together on a long mattress in a university or factory hall and then there would be collective dreams.

  When she considered the bed she was in, the little mattress in the Milnes’ hotel room, and tried to connect the experience of this bed to her desire, she realized that a public sleep presented many problems. Her memories of sheets and blue comforters, of times spent drowsing on pillows, or private moments of lazy wakeful connection to the stillness of sleep did not fit the imagined pleasure of a collectivized bed. The bed blankets she’d known had been shields against light and against time. Sleep was a quiet solipsistic peace. What she enjoyed was the memory of the singular odor of her own pillow.

  In childhood the benefit of a bad cold, for instance, had been the escape it offered. Chest congestion meant that she would get to lie on her left side, hang half off her little mattress, and feel the warm steam from a humidifier on her face. Warm steam, damp sheets, and a hazy in-between space defined the pleasure to be found in the sick bed.

  How could she liberate a bed? Natalie remembered the strange clowns and little men in two-cornered hats that had populated her childhood dreams. She tried to remember the spaces these dream characters had occupied. What sort of landscapes supported the devilish midgets who’d spoken to her when she was six? There hadn’t been any ground. Her dreams were empty spaces.

  Gerrard was sleeping and she was awake. Gerrard was fully dressed, sweating in his clothes, and she was naked and growing cold.

  She shivered in the cool air and wondered what sort of future she might build. What sort of future could they create that could hang in midair and support itself without a foundation? Just who was she now? She no longer felt herself to be a university student, and while she was in bed with her former lover, she could not imagine herself as Cecile. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself as a young wife. She pictured herself sitting at a breakfast table, a clean white Formica circle with chrome trim, and imagined pouring milk into a coffee bowl and sipping from it, but she couldn’t taste anything.

  Natalie rolled over onto her left side and examined him. A rectangle of sunlight illuminated his mouth and chin. His nose cast a shadow. Looking at him, considering Gerrard as a sleeping object, she jerked with a start to realize that his eyes were open.

  Gerrard was awake, looking back at her, but she couldn’t make out anything meaningful in his gaze.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Is it still May?”

  “June.”

  Gerrard closed his eyes again and soon enough his breathing changed again and sleep returned to him. Natalie took his hand in hers and closed her eyes. She imagined that she was sick with a cold, that she was asleep. She imagined that she’d found a truly liberated bed.

  29

  (PROBABILITY A)

  Gerrard opened his eyes and saw that he was by the administrative building, under a cement overpass that connected to the factory on one side and the administrative building on the other. There was a poster printed in full color stuck to the front door, an advertisement for a Renault Dauphine. The poster displayed a clean white car on the edge of a perfectly blue lake, and a happy family with fishing poles. The family members were to the left of the car, too far away for their faces to be seen, but Gerrard assumed that they were smiling. Sunshine and health and whitewall tires. The poster was selling a completeness or harmony belied by the grim bricks of the factory, the unwashed windows, the strike itself.

  He was sleeping and wanted to wake up, but Gerrard couldn’t remember when he’d gone to bed. Where would he find himself if he did wake up? Who would he be?


  In the dream it was June 7 in 1968 and workers of all types—factory workers, students, professors, grocery clerks, taxi drivers, store clerks, waiters—were gathered outside the Renault automobile factory. The space between the concrete factory itself and the smaller brick administrative building was jammed with people on strike.

  Natalie covered the poster of the Renault Dauphine with a flyer on yellow paper—a simple line drawing of a clenched fist emerging out of a factory chimney.

  “The Fight Continues,” it read.

  Daniel Cohn-Bendit held up a bullhorn and shouted into it. “Your union, the CGT, says that we are risking a police reaction by coming here, but unlike your CGT we’re not here to lead you, or to issue commands. The workers know well enough what they must do. We just bring our solidarity.”

  Gerrard wondered if he had ever left the police museum, or if he might wake up on the Metro. He’d find himself staring out at yellow tiles on the walls of Gare du Nord. The Flins workers were arriving in buses, and the students were handing out leaflets to them, one at a time. Most were glad to take what was offered. Most of the workers joined the demonstration.

  The Renault factory workers in safety goggles and overalls locked arms with students and professors. They joined arms and blocked the street in an attempt to stop the buses bringing in scabs. Only the buses didn’t carry scab workers, but soldiers. The men on the buses were armed with tear gas canisters, plastic shields, and batons. They disembarked and assembled. They were carrying what Gerrard thought were machine guns with crazy nozzles, but when they aimed the guns into the crowd and pulled the triggers he was relieved to find out that they were tear gas launchers.

  The police marched on the crowd, pushed the workers up to the roundabout in the centre of Elizabethville, about half a kilometer from the Renault factory. A CGT official stood in the back of a pickup truck and exhorted the workers to abandon the picket and return to work. The CGT fully supported the rule of law and they were working to win the upcoming elections. Continued adventures, he said, undermined their chance for victory at the ballot box.

  Tear gas spread across the crowd. The workers put on their goggles. Gerrard reached out blindly.

  “Natalie?” he yelled.

  She grabbed Gerrard around the waist with her right arm, and he turned around to see her react to the gas. She had one hand over her mouth and nose and was holding on to his belt with the other. Tears ran down her cheeks. Gerrard pointed to his palm, but she didn’t understand the gesture, so he leaned in close to her and shouted.

  “It’s not real,” Gerrard shouted. He started to take a flyer from his back pocket to show her that the words would change, that the centre would not hold, but then remembered he was dreaming and that she wasn’t really there.

  Gerrard stepped toward the police line, weaved through the plumes of gas. He stood next to a soldier in a black gas mask, kneeled so that he could see his reflection in the plastic shield the soldier was carrying. The image reflected there was not his own, but rather was the reflection of a young boy with a girl’s haircut. The boy was wearing khaki knickers, a knitted jacket, and leather sandals.

  As Gerrard bent down to look closer, to get a better look at the image of Christopher Robin, his legs sank into the ground.

  Gerrard scooped up handfuls of clay, and stood up again. He smiled at Natalie and told her what was happening.

  “This is a dream,” he said.

  Now he was six. Movement was impossible.

  Gerrard opened his eyes.

  29

  (PROBABILITY B)

  On June 7, 1968, Natalie and Gerrard considered the propaganda posters on the gates outside the School of Fine Arts. Natalie chuckled over a poster where the artist had put Pompidou’s head on the body of a chicken, and Gerrard stood stunned in front of an image of a helmeted policeman with a wrench in his mouth. The cartoon policeman resembled nothing so much as the skull and bones symbol for poison, and the words “Renault Flins” were written underneath his obscene face.

  “What’s happening at the Flins factory?” Gerrard asked.

  Natalie started to answer, looked embarrassed, and then took a newspaper out of a paper bag she happened to be carrying.

  A few workers in goggles came up from behind them and looked over Natalie’s shoulder, as Natalie read the news aloud.

  “The workers provoked the police, and while the department has released a statement of regret and condolences there will be no apology,” the blonde read.

  “What’s that?” Gerrard asked. He grabbed the paper away from Natalie, but what he saw wasn’t a headline about the striking workers or de Gaulle.

  “University students copulate in convertible,” he read. Under the headline there was an essay describing the details.

  “Wait.” Natalie put her hands on her chest. She was wearing the same red gown from the night of the barricades, and she unbuttoned it and let it slip off her shoulders and fall to the ground. She exposed the propaganda poster she’d been hiding underneath her clothes.

  The policeman on the poster was wearing a helmet and goggles so that his face looked like a skull. The wrench in his mouth might have been a bone.

  * * *

  According to Freud the contents of dreams are repressed desires from one’s waking life, but Gerrard’s waking life seemed very far away and what he really desired was to wake up.

  Tear gas billowed out from the wrought-iron gate of the School of Fine Arts. The posters on the metal pillar burst into flames; cartoon fists and kepis and factories burned away. Police with plastic shields and batons came out of the fog and Gerrard turned and ran.

  Blinking and falling, he found himself standing by a black pickup truck outside the Renault factory. Daniel Cohn-Bendit was standing in the bed of the truck, holding up a color poster of a smiling family by a pristine blue lake in one hand and a bullhorn in the other. Cohn-Bendit examined the bullhorn as if he weren’t quite sure what it was, but he still looked quite sporty in his pink windbreaker and green dress shirt. He waved at Gerrard and then pointed toward an alley where Gerrard could see a few other students were already headed.

  “That’s the way back,” Cohn-Bendit said. He held up the bullhorn and counted into it. “Uno, dos, tres,” he said. And they all ran to an open factory door on the west side of the building. Behind the concrete walls the factory was grey and old, like something left out in the rain and now half-rotten. It was already a ruin even though it was operational. The floors in the Renault factory were made from perfect flat clay. Gerrard took his first step and his foot was stuck. He took another step and realized that the walls were made of paper. The factory was phony.

  Dreams weren’t simply unconscious impulses presented as images. They worked themselves out through a metonymic chain of associations. What did the word factory stand in for? Production? Work? Power? Father?

  Gerrard looked around for help. He called out for Natalie, for Christopher Robin, and then thought of calling for his dream mother, but realized that he didn’t know her name.

  Maybe he was in a swimming pool underwater, or maybe he’d fallen asleep in class at lycée?

  Gerrard held up his left hand so he could look at his knuckles. But his hand was transparent. He could see the walls of the factory, the machine parts and gears that were spinning out life for him, on the other side.

  Gerrard looked through his hand and then tried, again, to wake up. He opened his eyes.

  29

  (PROBABILITY C)

  Gerrard opened his eyes to pipes and wires, to the fluorescent bulbs and aluminum-framed windows of the interior of the Renault factory. He was lying on the floor inside the factory, and he stood up, brushed grit from the concrete floor off his tweed jacket, and looked to the left and then the right to get his bearings. He wanted an exit. Gerrard studied the yellow line that divided the hallway in half and decided to follow it. He could hear wheels turning and a repetitive electric beeping from overhead. Someone was driving a forklift and
there were people working above him. Gerrard decided to seek them out. He wanted to find them before the police found him.

  Gerrard was dreaming, but the dream was not his own. Gerrard had thought that knowing that it was a dream, that lucid thought, would be enough, but the dream had a structure, and there were dream police.

  He didn’t see them before they hit him. The first blow knocked him off his feet and onto his back. There were three policemen standing over him, each one seemingly seven feet tall, so big that they moved with clumsy deliberateness. They spoke to each other in mechanical clicks, and Gerrard couldn’t see their faces under their goggles. When one swung his baton the others followed, each tracing the same arc in the air with the tip of his club, each hitting Gerrard with equal force.

  First they struck him on the head, then on his ribs, and then, as he turned over and tried to crawl away, they cracked his spine. Gerrard stopped feeling the blows after that. He saw one of the police step on his right hand, crushing the bones, but he didn’t feel it happen and he wasn’t angry.

  Gerrard forgot that he was dreaming. He tried to turn over to look at the police again, to let them know there were no hard feelings. He tried to bring his hand up to protect his face from the beating that continued, but he couldn’t move. He lay on the concrete, and blood oozed out and colored his view of the yellow line so that it appeared orange. Another blow fell on his head, and another. Gerrard shut his eyes.

  The dream wasn’t his anymore. He had to wake up.

  29

  (PROBABILITY D)

  Gerrard opened his eyes and found himself on his stomach outside the Renault factory. Lying in a field, he could see blades of grass next to his head. He followed the green lines until he saw the sun, and then he looked down and waited for the moment to come into focus. He shifted his weight to see how bad the pain would be, to see if he could bend his back, and found he could do it. He sat up slowly and touched his head with both hands. There was no blood, or any other trace of what he’d imagined had happened.