The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  The inside of the Tex-Mex restaurant was arrayed with burnished wood tables covered by small red tablecloths. Lamps dangled on black cords from the cork ceiling. The lamp shades were ringed along their edges with bands of tiny repeating cow skull images. The ass-buffed blackness of a chair’s cushion wheezed as Chase sat down. Some of his friends connected two more tables, forming a black-topped monolith. He had to admit to feeling pretty good. Everyone around him was past thirty, and though he’d always associated with people older than himself, he felt like he was now finally joining into equal rank. He had an intense desire to just dissolve into the conversation around him, to talk and listen, listen in order to find a space to talk.

  Luc had been waiting for them at the restaurant. Chase shook his hand across the table. A friend from his days as a newspaper photographer sat beside him on one side. Luc’s American girlfriend sat across the table where Chase could only see her if he leaned to one side of the hanging lamp. She was half Asian and wore some glittering jewelry adhered to the ends of her long red nails, like pyrite in blood. Luc had a tiny triangular wedge of hair below his lower lip and was a few days from a shave. Chase knew this could only mean one thing.

  “You’re on vacation,” Chase said.

  Luc nodded and thumbed upward through his triangle of chin hair. “We’ve been spelunking.”

  The neck of his American girlfriend seemed to register the word. Chase leaned slightly to the side to see her.

  “Spelunking. Right. We got back from the caves today.” She surprised him by speaking a slangy-sounding American English.

  “You understand French.”

  “But I don’t speak it.”

  “Did you enjoy spelunking?” another of his friends asked Luc. “I broke a leg doing that, what, three years ago?”

  “Four.”

  Chase felt this little theme of caving pass gently down the table, interrupting all the small conversations, unifying them in the theme of this vacation, then fading back to one conversation among many. He closed his eyes and listened.

  “It’s next Sunday at eight.”

  “I hear he’s like Horowitz.”

  “What?”

  “If no one minds, I’ll order for everyone.”

  “Yeah,” Luc said. “I was so thirsty in that cave. That was the thing. I brought too little water and it never occurred to me.”

  “That you would get thirsty?”

  “What’s his name. He won the last Tchaikovsky piano competition.”

  “Never entered my mind. I had all the other gear, even a plastic bag to shit in.”

  “You have to use it?”

  “No, we weren’t down long.”

  “What’s Chase doing?”

  “Because you were thirsty.”

  “You can’t drink the water down there.”

  “He’s meditating.”

  “There was a small lake.”

  “Not even that.”

  “A puddle.”

  “He’s pretending he’s twenty-nine.”

  “And the water isn’t safe to drink because of cows.”

  “Above ground is farmland and the cows—the cow shit goes down through the ground into the water.”

  “Right, mind over matter. Keep pretending.”

  “The water table.”

  “That’s what’s in the underground lake—groundwater.”

  “Wake up. You’re thirty.”

  “I’m twenty-nine,” Chase said, opening his eyes and smiling at the two secretaries from the paper where he’d worked straight out of school. “I’m not turning thirty for some hours yet.” One of them stuck her tongue out, a gesture that made her instantly younger, and awfully charming.

  “The water looked clean.”

  “You should have brought a what, a filter, so you could drink it.”

  “We weren’t planning on being down that long. I didn’t think I’d need one.”

  Chase clinked his wine glass with his old reporter friend who, like himself, was bemused at the conversations. As he listened, Chase noticed how the cow skulls rimming the lamp shade were different from one another. Some bone, others with flesh.

  “I always think of Bastille when I’m in this neighborhood,” Chase said.

  “Bastille?” someone asked.

  “I ate here with some friends on Bastille Day. Not here, actually, but next door, up the street at the Italian place.”

  “With the mirrors, long and narrow?” someone asked.

  “Right.”

  “Except we were outside,” said someone else. “I know where this is going.”

  “I fell asleep in their bathroom once,” Luc said.

  “This was Bastille Day, last year?”

  “The year before,” Chase said. “Anyway, these kids come by, little Turks.”

  “Only one was a Turk.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “But you told me this story before.”

  “Anyway, these kids come by. And for my friend here I’ll qualify that only one of them was a Turk. One of the kids throws a stick of something under our table. I don’t know what, your generic Chinese explosive. They toss it from far off and begin running, this stick rolling the way you see things moving in bad films, you know, smoking and rolling like it’s never going to stop, filled with inertia because the director has switched angles in the shooting or the film’s been cut badly.”

  “Continuity.”

  “Right. I swear this thing had bad continuity. It seemed to have this extra energy and it goes right under our outside table. Me and two friends eating pesto and drinking wine and having a good time.”

  “And that’s how you lost your leg,” Luc teased.

  “Funny. Look, I could have lost a limb, you know.”

  “So what he does –”

  “I get up, I get up as it’s rolling toward us, rolling with more energy than it should have and I kick it clear out from under the table with the toe of my shoe and right back at them, straight, not even rolling. A dead straight line toward these three kid Turks.”

  “You said only one was a Turk.”

  “You tell the story then.”

  “You saved the day. But it could have been the premature end of your short-lived photo-journalism career. Could have been the end of your love life…your life.”

  Chase turned the lamp shade on its cord and saw that the skulls began accumulating flesh in sequence, filling in the sockets, covering the quivering seam where bone fused into bone down toward the nostrils, finally the whole animal there, the cow’s head. Reanimated.

  “You ever felt instantly guilty?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Never.”

  “Always.”

  “Well, I felt bad,” Chase said, resuming his telling. “I’d kicked this firecracker back at them, this firecracker the size of a pipe bomb.”

  “Which turned out to be mostly empty.”

  “I hate Bastille Day,” one of the secretaries said. “I don’t walk outside for a couple days until they use up their supply. They drop firecrackers from the windows. A girlfriend of mine, one landed in her hair. She was deaf for a month and had to have a plum-sized patch of hair shaven to treat the burn. She had to keep some ointment on it all the time that stank so bad.”

  “I’m not done,” Chase said. “So I’ve kicked this firecracker back at them, this miniature Bastille bomb, and its heading toward the three kids.” He could picture their eyes open to this smoking tube, wet and glassy and vulnerable. “And I feel guilty. I wait for it to explode, for the kids to be injured. For them to fall over the railing separating the sidewalk from the street below. For them to lose their balance and drop in front of passing cars, or maybe lose a finger or something. I mean, for a second, that’s exactly what I want to happen. It’s the kid in you, matching them age for age, the blood-lust.”

  “Serve them right.”

  “Yes. But quickly, I felt I’d done wrong. It was too late to go after the firecracker
. You don’t go after a smoking fuse. And it was such a good kick, an end to end straight-arrow line of travel, no possibility of rolling and bouncing weirdly off to one side.”

  “Like a football. An American football.”

  “No chance of that. It was a torpedo. What sudden regret. Here it’s their fault, they’re sending it toward me, toward us—wait, you weren’t there. Were you there? Of course you were there—and they send it, maliciously, toward us, you and me and whoever else was with us.”

  “This sounds familiar. What’s he talking about?”

  “And I send that firecracker back. I prevent us from losing our legs, from turning into old friends in wheelchairs that hang around and shake hands from lengths filled with spoke and chrome.”

  “Somebody stop him. He’s getting flowery. No embellishing, Chase.”

  “Okay, but I’m doing the right thing, the defensive thing and here I am afraid of what’s going to happen to these kids.”

  “You need to learn how to be heartless.”

  The American woman across from Chase turned the lamp shade as she listened to his story, winding the long black cord that grew from the ceiling. Chase could see it kink up once, twice. Then she let go and the shade spun a few revolutions, the cow’s head losing its flesh and becoming bone, then a cow’s head again past the shade’s seam, only to waste away again, and again, and then the counter-spin back to flesh, bone to flesh, only fewer revolutions this time, and then back again, stopping after a few turns of indecisive resurrection.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. The firecracker was a dud. It was mostly cardboard. It was just meant to scare us. A joke.”

  “It scared him anyway.”

  “Twice. Coming at him and going.”

  “We need another carafe of wine.”

  “Next time you tell this story, I expect the firecracker to explode.”

  “It’s Chase’s birthday! Skip the table wine, go for something better. Hey everyone, the food!”

  The conversations turned to mouth-filled murmurs, tongues oiled and numbed with wine, then fizzing with mineral water. Chase felt like he’d left the city and was sitting with friends on a starlit patio, half-drunk, whittling the hour into some smooth, kind shape that he could carry back with him into the hours of life when he forgot to talk to himself, when his inner voice disappeared amid the kilos of camera equipment on his shoulders, the sores on his heels and the erasure of traffic.

  “What’s that?”

  “Buffalo wings.”

  Someone made the sound of a cow.

  “I’d like to toast the man with the birthday. May he never be harmed by firecrackers again.”

  “Or cannonballs.”

  “Bullets.”

  “May he never be harmed by any type of projectile.”

  “Chase,” they shouted loudly. Their glasses rose while the other restaurant patrons turned sun-burned faces toward their table. The toast and stares made Chase feel famous.

  “I was going to let this one drift by,” he said.

  “He was, too.”

  “But, well, it’s good to be thirty–” Someone made the sound of a cow. “…in, three or so hours.”

  “Ah, rub our noses in it.”

  “I figure you have to start counting from conception. So, Chase, you’re actually three months shy of thirty-one.”

  “Please,” one of the secretaries said.

  “What? Shouldn’t we begin counting from the twinkle in the eyes?”

  “Conception is a place. I don’t want to know where I came into the world. It lacks, I don’t know, prestige. Mystery.”

  “So you’d rather think you just appeared, immaculate conception like? Just a trip to a hospital for your parents. The cleanliness of that? Or, perhaps, the stork.”

  “You aren’t, by chance, a hypochondriac?” Luc asked.

  “Please. Please. Please.”

  “What?” Chase asked.

  “Do you have to make us feel nine months older than we are?”

  “We should do this more often,” someone said.

  As they laughed, Chase realized that they all, or nearly all, knew each other. The large circle of acquaintance made it seem easy for him to accidentally slip out, for the ring to grow tighter and forgetful of him. It was a passing thought.

  “I was saying, the last winner of the Tchaikovsky competition.”

  “Gubler.”

  “No, that’s not his name, it doesn’t begin with a G.”

  “What then.”

  “K?”

  “Kubler? No.”

  “Horowitz.”

  “He plays like Horowitz.”

  “Did you hear Horowitz died?”

  “That was awhile ago.”

  “I just found out, though.”

  “Anyway, I was telling her that he’s going to be playing here on Sunday. Eight o’clock I think.”

  “Horowitz?”

  “No!”

  “I know, I know. I’m just kidding. We should go.”

  “I’m in.”

  “I don’t like Tchaikovsky.”

  “Yeah, I’ll have to check, but that sounds like something.”

  “He won the Tchaikovsky competition. That doesn’t mean he’s going to play Tchaikovsky. You win the Nobel prize doesn’t mean you go blowing things up with dynamite.”

  “Sometimes it does.”

  “He’s playing Chopin.”

  “Next Saturday then.”

  “Sunday.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Tell him.”

  “Because I think it’s sold out.”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah. I know someone who tried to get tickets.”

  “Couldn’t get any?”

  “He got the tickets, but they were nearly the last ones.”

  “Shit.” Someone drunkenly made the sound of a cow.

  Finishing with a bottle of the house’s penultimate wine, everyone waited to leave until Chase had passed into his third decade, plus some time to spare. At about three in the morning, they walked down the street in a tight group, half of them tottering, some more drunk than others, walking in straight determined lines that had a concentrated plumbness to them, overacting sober. Everyone began calling out good night to each other as they walked, the distance between them spreading out as they headed down into the silent black night, their pant legs whispering the growing distance.

  “Bonsoir,” Luc’s girlfriend said.

  “I thought you didn’t speak French,” Chase called back.

  “That’s not French. That’s punctuation.”

  When he reached his building he was walking alone. He noticed his darkroom light was on. The front door was unlocked and Emilia woke from where she’d been lying in a chair.

  “Hey,” he whispered.

  “Hey.”

  “You came back.”

  Emilia nodded.

  “You saw him?”

  “Regi’s going to be fine. He’s an idiot, like his father. Who falls off a bridge? Anyway, how was dinner?”

  “Good.”

  “Happy birthday, again.”

  “Thanks,” Chase said, opening a window to vent the odor of vinegar still lacing the air. Emilia closed her eyes and inhaled the fresh air. She had teased her hair, Chase noticed. From outside, the noise of late revelry bungled the purity of the stop bath’s reek. In the darkroom’s red light, he spotted the dozens and dozens of photos curled dry in the tireless grasp of clothespins. He could smell Emilia’s perfume inside. The surprise party, his talk with Ostrich, both seemed days ago.

  “You want something to drink?” he asked, opening the refrigerator.

  “There’s some champagne left, an unopened bottle,” Emilia said, walking toward the bathroom. The bathroom had a pocket door that didn’t quite seal the noise and this was something he knew and she did not and then she turned on the water and let it run and he knew that she did. He wondered what it was about women t
hat made them need to mask the sound of their toilette. Chase sat on the couch, feeling a little drunk despite the coffee-numbed tip of his tongue and the freshness of the walk home. He opened the bottle, poured the champagne and laughed. He was thirty. What the hell was that? He was thirty. He had been twenty, and now he was thirty. And before that he was ten, but that was like a different person. And before that he wasn’t at all. What the hell was that about?

  Emilia stepped towards him from the bathroom. “I wanted to give you your present,” she said, unbuttoning her blouse as she moved toward him. She had reapplied lipstick and her hair had grown fuller, seeming even darker in the red light. “Bon anniversaire,” she said.

  What she revealed to him now was an intricacy of black and red lace, like mathematics. She paused from her strip to take a sip from the champagne, and then sauntered away from him. She successfully moved aside the louver doors that concealed the Murphy bed, then pulled the bed down with some awkwardness, creating another momentary break from her little seduction. He found it amusing, but held his tongue.

  They had made love in his apartment only a couple dozen times, and it had not yet been like this, slow and with lingerie and that little smirk on her lips. It had been quick and illicit, the whole thing charged with the short young man’s fantasy of the tall married woman, or the tall married woman’s fantasy of the young, single man, a fantasy only partly diluted by the knowledge that she and her husband didn’t share bedrooms anymore. The age difference and his complicity in infidelity had charged the sex, made him somehow more of a lover, a kind of graceful, compassionate and dangerous thing. And she didn’t do anything that he took pictures of, or at least not much of that kind of thing, and this was another endearment. But now, the intimacy was slow and lacy. It was sex with champagne, and him trying to unfasten her to bare nakedness with his teeth. It felt as though the need for revitalization had entered the relationship, the kind of thing married couples did to counter the staleness of too much familiarity. She was a woman from a boudoir photo, and he was now a thirty-year-old and this seemed to change the equation. Though, yes, he put down the champagne glass and moved toward her. Yes, he straightened the supports of the Murphy bed with his foot and wet his tongue, even in his mouth. But he felt the need for a smoke and another drink already, and, most of all, a long soak in a hot bath. At this moment, with Emilia before him, he thought he saw the rest of his life stretched out before him and he didn’t know how this made him feel. For the first time, there was truth in the thought that Emilia had a son, even if Regi was a step-son about the same age as Chase.