Threshold

by Rob Doyle

  ‘My tolerance is greater than other people’s,’ she had explained once at her flat in East Wall, ‘so I can take more than what’s usually considered normal for microdosing.’

  ‘In which case,’ I’d pointed out, ‘you’re not microdosing at all, you’re macrodosing.’

  At this she had smirked, put her black Russian beret on my head, and snapped a photograph of me reflected in her lipstick-smudged mirror.

  Kelly’s photo essay was to be based on André Breton’s novelish memoir Nadja, in which the leader of the surrealists recounts his enchantment with a fragile, preternaturally sensitive young woman, against the backdrop of Paris’s streets, cafes, squares and gardens. Of particular interest to Kelly was the mystical, even supernatural, undertone in Breton’s reflections on chance and ‘synchronicity’ (Kelly, not Breton, used this word with its Jungian baggage). Breton had failed to recognise the true import of his encounter with Nadja, she believed, because he was blinkered by ‘the atheist superstitions of the twentieth century’. She had bought a map of Paris on which she’d marked out all the sites mentioned in the book. I was happy to tag along: it was an excuse to get away from my desk, where for weeks I’d made zero progress with the memoirish novel I was supposedly writing about, as I’d told my agent over the phone in an extempore flourish, ‘sex, death and clubbing in post-Bataclan Paris’.

  The night Kelly arrived, we went to a party that my friends Ellie and Seb were throwing at their apartment in Belleville. Red wine was poured and cans of Leffe were handed out in abundance. After a couple of drinks, Kelly was feeling euphoric. ‘We’re in Paris!’ she said, flopping down beside me on the blue couch where I was guzzling Leffe. A moment later we found ourselves talking to a woman named Charlotte who had arrived a few days earlier from the US. She was a novelist, palmist and perfume maker – ‘though not necessarily in that or any other order’ – and was writing a book that had something to do with perfume and astrophysics. Kelly asked Charlotte to read her palm. When Charlotte did so, she frowned, then looked up at Kelly and seemed to hesitate before speaking. Still holding Kelly’s palm between her fingers, she said it was as if Kelly couldn’t possibly exist: she had two life lines running from opposite ends of her palm, zigzagging in contrary directions. Charlotte had never seen such a pattern before: it suggested Kelly was some sort of ‘quantum aberration’.

  ‘I told you!’ I cried.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Kelly.

  We puzzled over this a while, then Charlotte told us how she’d been having lucid dreams for years, and had finally decided to study the phenomenon. I said I envied her: for a long time I’d wanted to have lucid dreams and had read everything I could on the subject, but had managed only on one occasion to realise I was dreaming without the excitement of it waking me up.

  ‘What did you do?’ Charlotte asked.

  ‘I flew around for a while.’

  ‘Aha. That’s the first thing most people do. The second is – ’

  ‘I tried to have sex with everybody. And that’s when I woke up.’

  ‘But did you really wake up?’

  I made the thinking pose, like Rodin’s sculpture.

  ‘I dunno,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe this is the dream, and that was the true world,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘It seems unlikely,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe I dreamed you,’ said Kelly. ‘Have you ever seen Lost Highway?’ She put on a spooky voice like the bald freak in the film. ‘I’m in your house right now.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you’re just a quantum aberration.’

  Charlotte had recently decided to use her lucid dreams to have sex with children. Not, she insisted, because she was a paedophile, but because she wanted to do the most extreme thing she could think of, in the consequence-free realm of the dreamscape. It was all set up: six wide-eyed children were in a line before her, pliable and nude; she knew they would give her intense pleasure. Just as she was about to commit the transgression, however, it occurred to her that she could not be certain that such an act truly would carry no consequences. Somewhere in ‘the multiverse’, who could say that this act would not cause suffering? Who could say our dreams aren’t realities elsewhere, and our travails here the dreams of others?

  She gazed at Kelly and me in turn, sipping her wine.

  We woke to a bright, cold October morning. We were mildly hungover, which according to Kelly was the optimum state in which to conduct this kind of city-roaming mission.

  ‘It makes you sensitive,’ she said. ‘You’re less rational, more intuitive.’

  After a breakfast of bacon, blueberries and coffee, we rented bikes on the Vélib’ system and set out along the Canal Saint-Martin. The city felt oddly deserted as we curved up the Boulevard Richard Lenoir where the canal dips underground, with only homeless people on the streets.

  ‘All these refugees,’ Kelly called from behind. ‘Did you see that family by the bridge?’

  The light turned green and we traversed the broad Avenue de la République. We had a lot of sites to get through. Kelly’s plan was to limit her photo essay to exactly forty photographs – the same number as the ‘plates’ in Breton’s book that illustrate the locations, people and artworks mentioned in his story. Kelly would photograph the sites as they stood nine decades after the book’s publication, and substitute people she encountered in Paris for Breton’s surrealist friends (she had taken a portrait shot of Charlotte the night before, and one of me just after I’d woken up, sitting red-eyed on the edge of the bed). I’d read Nadja a year or two earlier and recalled a vague, digressive, insubstantial book whose core story – that of the meeting between Breton and Nadja – is over as soon as it begins, with Nadja left languishing in a mental institution and Breton pompously philosophising about why he doesn’t feel like visiting her. I’d been flicking through Kelly’s copy since she arrived, interested not so much in rereading Nadja as in reading Kelly. Her slim, battered Penguin Classics edition was busy with underlinings and marginal notes, in red ink and delicate, precise handwriting.

  Though Kelly had a lively interest in the early-twentieth-century avant-garde, I sensed that the thrust of her intended photo essay was essentially autobiographical – Kelly fathoming herself through the words of André Breton, who peered through the prism of Nadja, who gazed out at the reader from the kaleidoscope of her encroaching madness, and finally me in turn reading it all – her, Kelly, Nadja: a loop of gazes like a serpent swallowing its tail. Some of Kelly’s marginal notes were enigmatic – ‘he dies here’; ‘Nietzsche’s tears as he embraces the horse’; ‘like Stalingrad!’ – others prosaic. On page thirteen she had written the phrase ‘abominable sentence!’ next to the following:

  Such reflections lead me to the conclusion that criticism, abjuring, it is true, its dearest prerogatives but aiming, on the whole, at a goal less futile than the automatic adjustment of ideas, should confine itself to scholarly incursions upon the very realm supposedly barred to it, and which, separate from the work, is a realm where the author’s personality, victimised by the petty events of daily life, expresses itself quite freely and often in so distinctive a manner.

  What a mess! Perhaps such tormented syntax was a surrealist strategy to derail the reader, sabotaging reason and loosing the forces of the unconscious. Or perhaps Breton just didn’t write very well. I’d tried to read the sentence several times but its meaning dissolved in the time it took to traverse the pile-up of qualifications and subordinate clauses from capital ‘S’ to full stop. You wandered into such a sentence and lost your way back out, mislaid the thread of return, like a madman running through catacombs. I’d wondered if it was a bad translation, only to discover that it was executed by none other than Richard Howard, the poet who had achieved such superb translations of E. M. Cioran.

  We parked our bikes at the Place de la République and walked up the Boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle to the arch of the Porte Saint-Denis.

  ‘Breton used to walk up and down here every day, past this arc
h,’ said Kelly, framing a shot. ‘He had a premonition that something of profound significance was going to happen here.’

  ‘And did it?’

  ‘He doesn’t say. Perhaps it did and he never recognised it.’

  A motorbike rider pulled a wheelie as he tore up the boulevard, prompting a trail of Parisians to shake their heads at his noisy display of vulgarity. I sat on a bench with Nadja. I opened the book at random and found the following underlined: ‘Anyone who laughs at this last sentence is a pig.’

  Kelly was on the bench beside me. I hadn’t noticed her sit down.

  ‘Extremely handsome, extremely useless,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That’s Breton’s description of the Porte Saint-Denis.’ She flicked to the relevant page and pointed to the underlined phrase.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Shall we take acid?’ she said. ‘You’ll see a city you never knew existed.’

  We did it on the terrace of a cafe, washed down with Picon Bière, then rode the Métro from République to Porte de Clignancourt, at the end of line 4. When we emerged from the station the Boulevard Périphérique loomed before us, streaking past on a concrete flyover like a great medieval wall.

  ‘The edge of the city,’ Kelly said.

  Whereas the heart of Paris had seemed deserted, out here it was teeming: Africans and Arabs hawked their wares – runners, tracksuits, watches, jewellery, phone accessories – at tightly packed stalls that ran beneath the flyover and out towards the banlieues. We could have been at a bazaar in Algiers or Mogadishu. The strip of stalls led to the gateway of the Saint-Ouen flea market, our next destination.

  We walked beneath the Périphérique flyover, in its long broad shadow.

  ‘It’s like crossing into a different country,’ I said.

  ‘All of Paris is like that,’ said Kelly. ‘Different psychic atmospheres that you can feel changing within the space of a few metres.’

  She took my hand and we ducked into the flea market off the bustling street.

  ‘This part is called the Marché Vernaison,’ she said. ‘With antiques and stuff.’

  We roamed through narrow, quiet aisles, some of them covered, others open-air.

  ‘No wonder the surrealists loved coming here,’ said Kelly, gazing at the jumble of incongruous items – paintings, old newspapers, statues, knives, crystals, musical instruments, clocks. ‘There are so many things in the world,’ she noted, before drifting into a shop full of Japanese fans, with the words Objets Interdits emblazoned across its front. I stepped through an adjacent doorway and found myself in a room full of gods: Vishnu, Shiva, Ganesh, Buddha, Ra, Osiris, Celtic spirals, totems and demons. I peered through a glass case at a statuette of Anubis, lord of the underworld, with his head of a dog and erect human body. I recalled that Anubis was the judge of souls, the weigher of hearts; an obscure disquiet passed through me, the echo of some childhood terror.

  Standing alone in a corner of the shop, flanked by two glass cases of African deities, was a large, metal statue of the Buddha in a dark tinge of green.

  ‘From seventeenth-century Laos,’ said the grey-haired proprietor, emerging from behind a wooden desk.

  The Buddha sat in the lotus posture, one hand palm-up on his lap in a gesture of exquisite grace and poise, the other resting on his calf. The figure emanated serenity. I peered at it, drawing its peacefulness into myself as my body tingled with the onset of the acid. I wanted to meditate again, give up my dissolute habits, ascend from the sewers of suffering to the clear skies of the Buddha mind. It really was an enchanting statue, a point of stillness in the surge of the world. For two thousand years Buddhist artists had striven to perfect this and a handful of other figures in their sculptures and paintings, seeing no need to innovate. Originality to them was the whim of chattering, immature cultures, destined to be washed away in the ebb and flow of aeons, while the Timeless alone remained, the –

  ‘We’ll be closing soon,’ the owner said with a trace of apology. I had been gawking at the statue for an age. ‘Perhaps you would like to buy something?’

  ‘How much for the Buddha?’

  ‘Two thousand seven hundred euros.’ He rubbed his nose with the tip of a forefinger, where the frame of his spectacles rested. ‘But I can do it for two thousand five hundred.’

  I pretended to mull this over. Then I said, ‘What did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog seller?’

  I waited a couple of beats.

  ‘Make me one with everything.’

  He didn’t even smile. By now, I should point out, the gods all around me were very much alive, humming with energy, grinning or frowning, playful or enigmatic. Some were livelier than others, which I put down to the relative skill levels of the nameless artists, those legions of craftsmen in the eras of anonymous creation that preceded the civilisation of the selfie. I asked the proprietor whether he minded me taking a photo of the Laotian Buddha – he didn’t, so I did. As I left the shop of the gods, Anubis’s head turned to follow me with its gaze from beyond the world.

  Out in the aisle, Kelly was floating like a long, slender flower.

  ‘Alright, mate,’ she said.

  ‘Anubis was staring me out of it,’ I said. ‘I felt he wasn’t impressed with the state of my soul.’

  ‘He’s the god of embalming. A theosophist once told me I was an embalmer back in ancient Egypt. I met her in St Pat’s. Do you believe in reincarnation?’

  ‘I believe in everything.’

  ‘Me too. But look.’

  She nodded towards a man who sat in an open-fronted shop, surrounded by a chaos of old framed paintings.

  ‘He looks like a genetic splicing of Roberto Bolaño and Jean-Paul Sartre,’ she said.

  It was true, he did! Kelly began giggling as the man glanced up and grinned. He beckoned us inside. A little dog with huge floppy ears and a lustrous coat of fur scrambled out of the shadows and leaped on to the vacated chair. Another man, unshaven in a creased check shirt that wasn’t tucked in, appeared from a back room.

  ‘Vous êtes touristes?’ asked the first guy.

  ‘Oui, plus ou moins,’ I replied. ‘Mais j’habite ici à Paris.’

  ‘Et de quel pays venez-vous?’

  ‘Irlande,’ Kelly and I said together.

  ‘Ah, l’Irlande. Alors, je parle français. Lui’ – he pointed to the other man – ‘il parle anglais. Et puis lui’ – he pointed to the floppy-eared dog, who barked at his finger – ‘il parle tibétain.’

  And what was the name of this Tibetan-speaking dog, I enquired.

  The men said together:

  ‘Microsoft.’

  With that, Kelly crumbled into the kind of psychotropic hilarity I knew could last long enough for the men’s amusement to turn to offence. To distract them I tried to explain that Schopenhauer (‘le grand philosophe,’ I clarified unnecessarily) thought that the best gauge of originality was what one called one’s dog. However, I confused the word for ‘dog’ with the word for ‘cat’ – or thought I did until I realised I’d actually used the word for ‘cunt’, which is perilously similar. I reckoned it best to mumble a farewell to Microsoft and his human companions, leading Kelly by the elbow and deeper into the market.

  ‘That’s the thing with psychedelics,’ I said when we were in the clear. ‘Everything becomes so implausible. Stuff happens that would never happen were you not on psychedelics, and so reality becomes doubly questionable. If you see what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know that I do,’ she said, wiping tears from her eyes.

  Drawn by a sparkling window display, we stepped inside a white room full of crystal. The face of the young man in a black polo neck who welcomed us throbbed and pulsated – I couldn’t look at it for longer than a glance. We were in a crystalline zoo: crystal birds frozen in the air; glinting crystal lizards; lions, serpents and fish whose crystal bodies were pools of void and light.

  ‘Swarovski,’ said Kelly.

  ‘Huh?’

&
nbsp; ‘Swarovski,’ said the man with the melting face. ‘All of this crystal is Swarovski. High quality.’

  Kelly was bending over a statue of a bird in flight, shimmering with tints of colour.

  ‘You can pick it up if you like,’ said the seller.

  She held it before her. ‘It’s so heavy.’

  I drew my face in close, peering into the depths of its translucent body. Kelly’s single eye watched me from the other side, calm and soft, her blue iris multiplied in the crystal’s innumerable sides, fractal symbols from myth or religion.

  ‘My mother always said if you surround yourself with beautiful things, your mind will become beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘But the world is so ugly now,’ replied the crystal seller, who stood politely by while we peered through the bird.

  ‘Yes, but does it have to make us ugly too?’ said Kelly, gazing at me from crystal ponds.

  ‘It is not yet knowable,’ said the man. ‘We may have it in us to resist.’

  ‘Beauty will save the world,’ said Kelly, and her million eyes blinked softly.

  ‘We can defy. We can overcome. Or we can simply turn away,’ he said.

  ‘But where can we go?’

  ‘To the stars, perhaps.’

  The man laughed and it rang out in that white room for a long time, a laugh that engulfed all else, breaking free of the one who was laughing to ring on and on, delighted and predatory, tumbling into the universe.

  We left the crystal menagerie and wandered among piles of decades-old newspapers and magazines, yellowing photographs of long-dead wives, husbands, lovers, families.