— What were men doing dressed as figures from the past, or, what were men from the past doing in a city that wore the dress of the past but was all speed and light? When enough time had passed to allow my thoughts to spread themselves and dry, my body was being closed up within an ambulance that had parked at street level. The Vikings moved errantly through traffic, occasionally shouting to each other in a sharp and minced language, like Icelandic. I ran into the intersection, matching my speed with the ambulance as it pulled away, fearful it would accelerate from me, leaving me behind amid the swirl of cars and swords. The posture of the Vikings changed from search to pursuit as I closed in on the customized Mercedes. I reached out my unseen hand and felt it close around a metal handle on the back of the car. I leapt onto the bumpers and brought myself close as the ambulance moved into the density of the city.
We left the Seine, the marauders and the bridge behind. I hugged the ambulance, the sideways pull at corners so intense—and the fear even more so—that I would be flung out into the city and into the arms of men with swords.
“You see Vikings?” Baptiste asked. “I, who can’t even see you, are telling me that you see Vikings?”
— Yes. A small band of them.
“They’ll say my delusions are themselves having delusions,” Baptiste said. “And you are telling me, why?”
— I don’t know. Because you can hear me.
Baptiste tore the written pages from the pad and set them face down on the cot. He rubbed his sore fingertips for a minute. “Okay,” he said, ready once more. “So you’re a ghost. What’s it like?”
— A strange complacency, really. In the morgue, I sickly hoped for an autopsy, for a glance at my secret insides. But my body stayed closed and quiet, as though in some deep hibernation, belied only by the dry streambed of blood from my left ear.
— Murder or accident, hand or wind? I examined my body, easing in between the coroner and his assistant to view my feet and head from odd vantages. They stripped me and turned me over. My back was a sky of molar constellations I had not known to be so dense. A Milky Way of damage from weekends getting sun. Meanwhile, in another room, an autopsy was underway, not mine but a fat man’s. Under a blather of French banter, two men laid out the body and ran a scalpel from sternum to groin, the body parting like two thick slabs of rubber. I was surprised to see the neat packages of organs, bloodless, as though they’d been wrapped in cellophane. Until then, I had taken the maxim that we are all the same on the inside as a form of positivism. But at that moment I wanted my own body to be opened and some new organ discovered, anything to differentiate me from the anonymous fat man lying parted on the stainless steel.
— By then my thoughts were all spasms of confusion, unwilling to let in the reality of my predicament. And then the sensation that overcame me was of feeling that my life before had been but a brief intermission between infinitely long states of non-being. I pondered what to do, as it seemed nothing else was going to happen. I was hit, ironically, by the same questions that sometimes troubled me in life: how long did I have, and what did I have to do in that time?
— Another man came into the morgue’s office as I sat. He was in his late fifties, early sixties, gray-brown hair, a tired air about him. The coroner seemed to know him and they joked about something and went into the back. The police arrived again. Everything revolved around Regi, son of a politician, they said. At least I heard Regi’s name repeated often. I suppose their summation was that Regi plummeted from the bridge onto a passing boat, fatally crushing me. This American, David Ferriswheel, was in the middle of a light meal at the time. Snapped neck. No pain.
— When this man, Gaudin, finished at the morgue, I followed him into a foreign quarter of the city. He carried a small tape recorder with him, the kind you use for dictation. He took it out occasionally as if to add a comment, though he never did. I followed him, first on the RER, then the metro—the democracy of transportation bearing lovers, businessmen, musicians, addicts, investigators, even ghosts. With a bearing of absolute disinterest, Gaudin turned his eyes to the tunnel walls just beyond the windows. I imagined I was somewhere in his mind, a name soon to be snuffed out by the fatigue of this man’s day or from lack of easy recollection. He had probably forgotten my face already. I have that kind of visage. I used to have a beard, I have to say to people at parties. Oh, that’s right. How are you?
— There on the metro, I spoke to him. Pardon Monsieur, I said. Will you be looking into the matter of my death? He moved in his seat and sighed, making me feel as though my question were too simple to warrant an answer. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a thin billfold which he checked, bowing out the leather sides to reveal a meager wall of euros. He did not look up.
— I’m David, I began, but he stared out the window again, smiling slightly at thoughts doubtless more pleasant than my own.
— So, Baptiste, that is where I come in and go out. In the space of a few meters. A boat, a bridge, a fall, a falling upon. A simple death unless one widens the frame, spotting Vikings and pistols, jail cells and dictation.
“But what do I have to do with these things?” Baptiste asked.
— This. A few days after my death, the sun slouching toward afternoon, I was in Regi’s apartment window observing you at work outside your cafe. I had followed Gaudin since morning, trying to listen to him discuss Regi’s case with the photographer Chase. I followed them up to Regi’s apartment across the street and watched you through the window. Tedium seemed to lock your eyes in an aloof gaze. You wore an untied white apron. Behind me, the incompetent duo were reading bookshelf titles, then talking with your niece, Bombay.
— The street lamp was covered with pigeons, like the crowns of trees on a riverbank in flood. The ornate bracket that suspends the lamp from the exterior wall had begun to flake in an exfoliation caused by countless generations of pigeon shit. Monsieur, I shouted in a high voice. Any bread for us pigeons? Once more I used this falsetto voice. Any bread for us pigeons? Then you raised your head. Our contact surprised me as much as you. Since the fall, I had tried talking to a T-shirt hawker, a businesswoman, a gorgeous Italian blonde, a young boy, even a nun kneeling in the Sacre Cour like a mannequin of a nun praying, the closest thing I could find to the spiritual world. But I was like a desperate penitent in a deaf world. Not a soul in a crowd could hear me. Your glance in my direction was the first contact I’d made.
— How you interrogated everyone in the cafe after those birds appeared to mock you! Kicking out people whose faces you read as rousing rabble or making mischief, eventually shooing away all your customers. You shut yourself inside the cafe when my pecking, bread-hungry requests on behalf of the birds turned into taunts. Even speaking sincerely, attempting to tell you my plight, did not seem to bring you out. Then you emerged with your mistake in your hands. A pistol. Planting your feet firmly at the curb, you took aim and fired, parting a feathery breast and sending the other pigeons colliding as they beat upwards into the long rectangle of sky.
— It comes to this: I was still enraptured by the mystique of being unseen, putting into practice the teases we fantasize about as we wait at the drop-off point of sleep. If no one could see me, it begins, the things I would do. People I’d follow, places I’d climb, words I’d whisper. You know it. But no one hears you. Soon you find yourself speaking for the birds. And for whatever reason, my prank aroused in you the necessity for a small massacre. Look. You smile sadly as you take this all down. See, you aren’t delusional. Unless, of course, I am some conscious density in your madness. A tumor. Which would hurt me more than you, if you think about it. In any case, I’m sorry. Regret, I’ve found, needs no body.
Baptiste’s throat was dry and sore, as though he’d been speaking aloud every word he wrote with the pen, now painful to hold between his fingers. He drank from the sink in his cell, cupping the water in his hands and slurping until his lips touched his palms. The room was hot in the morning bake and he cupped more water a
nd ran it over his face and head. The drops which fell on the floor seemed dark as wet paint.
He felt relieved that the voice was not the product of his imagination. And though not a religious man, he’d always kept open the possibility of ghosts. His great uncle had seen his wife’s face floating before him at the moment of her death, despite being separated from her by a great distance. His grandmother had been said to be clairvoyant, and he had an aunt who read cards. When he was young, he used to be able to find things he’d lost just by thinking of them, but this ability went away once he started school. Was the sum of these things enough that he should be receptive to David’s words? As soon as he felt himself moving onto this level of questioning he shivered again with the frightful re-realization that here he was taking down the words of a faceless voice.
The first slice of sun cut through the window and into the room. Baptiste did hear a call to morning prayers far off in the distance, again as though the outside were not Paris—the city with too much architecture to die in—but some Middle Eastern city experienced in making death nonchalant. He stared at the pen and the mass of written pages. He heard nothing and wondered if the light had something to do with the silence. But immediately upon touching the pen, David began speaking again.
— I stayed in Regi’s apartment while they hauled you away. The light turned hazy with evening. I watched the way the air moved, filling the curtains in the window with a living mass. Inside the apartment, Bombay had begun ransacking the place, flapping books as though to goad them into flight, shining a flashlight in the wide cracks in the wood floor, feeling the inside of lamp shades for clues, knowledge, bugs. Before, on the boat, she had been all smoothness, like velvet, but now she was jumpy. Hours later, with the air cool on my back and the curtains slack, I watched as she sat amid the jumble of her search. She took her flute in her hands and pursed a kiss on the mouthpiece. I heard no notes, just air hissing, like a gas leak. And then she dropped the instrument into her lap and sighed. She stretched out on the floor, her back bowing like an insupportably-long arch that lowered and lowered but never quite touched the floor.
— Which is where what I know ends. Ahead, only a mystery of which I am an accidental—yet so ominously coincidental—member. Regi plummets. Why? Who was he beyond my translator? Where was he going that led him to this end? He came like some untrackable meteoric comma. I feel an easy commiseration with the disinherited moon. Nights, when I lie in parks wondering what to do, I say to the moon, Go ahead and steal babes from the womb.
Baptiste remembered the moonlight on his pillow, thought of the word lunacy and the Latin root. He shivered as David continued.
— If Regi fell accidentally, then anything could have changed the course of that afternoon, including you and I ending up here under these circumstances. The time in which he took to tie his shoes that morning. How much he drank, how long he dawdled in front of a urinal. Anything. I can also ignore these things and go for fate or synchronicity. But I’ve also considered the non-accidental. Had you been at bitter odds with Regi, you would have used your pistol earlier, rather than push someone from a crowded bridge. With a bullet, Regi would have buckled to the ground in some back alley. Unless, stockpiled in the salt mine of your desires, you have some anger that requires a tactile revenge.
— If, in life, I was never sure what I was to do, I am fairly certain, in death, that I need to discover why I crossed over so abruptly. And there is my undecided concern for you. If innocent, then were it not for me and my ventriloquism, you might not be in this cell wearing the guilty hat. But nothing comes out clean. Complications abound. Had you not fired a gun from your cafe into the late Regi’s apartment, your case would have been much helped. There might not be a case. So don’t blame me, blame your trigger finger.
— So what do we look for? A pusher? A nudger? An unbalancer of perfect pivot? But oh, Baptiste, even with this mystery, why am I still interested? Nothing matters. Nothing matters. This phrase is nearly all I have. Saying this phrase matters.
David fell silent. If Baptiste had felt a sense of being directly addressed at dusk, now, in the early morning, he felt as though he were listening to David’s thoughts—words not for his ears, even if his ears were the only ones which could hear David’s voice. Baptist’s hand was cramped and curled upon itself like the paws of old dogs. He shook it in the air and hoped for a longer pause this time from David. From the end of the corridor, he could hear the old war criminal crying. Someone told him to shut up and the sobs hushed and Baptiste, for the first time, wondered why he himself was in a cell alone and in such company, and then he realized that the authorities perhaps believed he was suicidal. It would explain the guards’ frequent visits past his cell. Baptiste smiled morosely at the idea, then stood up in a shiver of fear. His tailbone ached. The guard passed his cell again. Hands at his sides. Baptiste pissed into the toilet while shaking the cramp from the fingers of his right hand. The voice no longer frightened him. Even the idea of David as a ghost seemed plausible to him. Anything matters. Anything.
Baptiste braced for more words, but only the distant hum of traffic washed in again. Silence with curves.
Chapter 11
The prison hallway reverberated with Viking tongues as David tried to negotiate an exit from the building. He wondered how they’d found him. Each transom brought the hope of escape, but each unlocked door also brought the possibility of finding himself trapped in a blind hallway with his leather-footed pursuers. The Vikings wore the odor of strength, a musky suspension of sweat and grime that seemed unstoppable. David moved down a hallway toward an office area by shadowing guards as they opened doors. He’d long since left the confines of the cell blocks, but the building seemed never-ending, its bureaucratic perimeter thick, and himself, inextricable. Kafka with a Möbius twist.
David saw nothing of himself as he ran down the hallway. Only the fluorescent lights encased in glass and chicken-wire and the two shimmering reflections of the light running parallel in the buffed floor. Were it not for the shouts and smell of his pursuers, he could have forgotten his fears. Before the Vikings penetrated the prison, David’s missing sense of proprioception—of his body in space—had made him feel complacent and distant. He’d felt waves of emotion, but couldn’t judge which was truest. Fear, hope, regret, guilt, or lust. They passed in and out of his mind so quickly that the only mark of their passage seemed to be the descriptive word itself. But with the Vikings behind him, he knew the surviving emotion, the one which kept him from disappearing. Fear.
The unmarred floor ahead was broken by sheaves, reams, folders, binders and a loose-leaf cornucopia of paper that spilled from an office with an open door. David went inside and saw beige-colored bookshelves crammed with more material. The paper rustled in the draft from an open window. A clerk sat at a desk sticking the eraser end of a pencil up his nose and picking at his beard. The pencil hung there, clenched, until the clerk let it fall into his waiting hand with a sudden flare of his nostrils. He wrote something down with the pencil, then shoved the pencil into the opposite nostril.
The draft flowing in through the open window caught David’s attention. It was heady and cool, as though from a newly-washed season. It flowed freely, unencumbered by bars or wire mesh. David climbed over the window ledge and gazed at the building’s courtyard. A passing storm had glazed the asphalt. Beyond the prison’s gates he saw only stone and darkness.
David dropped down to the courtyard and made his way to the gate. A pair of guards sat inside a booth watching TV from a small hand-held set. David wished they’d order him to stop, acknowledging his presence by drawing their guns. Such a sight, now, would be tantamount to happiness. He caught the arc of Viking voices behind him. Turning to look back at the building, David tried to locate which yellow-lit window provided a glimpse of his pursuers and which was the lit portal to Baptiste, his only means of communication with the world.
Back within the proper noun that is Paris, with the silent s, always on
the upswing, David’s first inclination was to regain access to Baptiste. But he knew reentering the prison, now, would put him into the arms of the Vikings. He needed to wait. He searched intersections for an entrance to a metro station. Now, at this hour of sleep, the streets were full of the cold metal of parked cars. A car approached from behind him, the cast of its headlights glistening in the rearview mirrors of a dozen parked cars. David scoured the wet asphalt for a penumbra of his own body, but saw none. He passed rue after rue, checking the architecture at intersections to help point his descent into the old city. Moonlight fell slowly from high overhead. Finally, he found a metro station. He jumped the turnstile and trotted down the tile steps into the underside of the city, the tight walkway tunnel widening to the semi-circular expanse which served both as artery and vein. The air was hot and old.
David walked alone over the scattered blue confetti of ripped metro tickets. The concrete floor was split in two by a trench filled with dark rock aggregate striped over by railroad ties. The tracks lured his eyes. They were bright silver except where nicks betrayed the heart of black iron. He felt a sense of descent reaching for him, and quickly backed away from the white-striped rim. Lining the upward sloping wall behind him ran a row of orange bucket seats. He took one, but the sense of support was transitory. The lip of his chair was a frayed weave of fiberglass, like weak string set in brittle amber. He raised his head and saw the matching row of orange seats on the other side of the tracks, at the wall of sloping yellow and orange tile covered by billboard-size advertisements, the one opposite him pitching a vacation in Thailande. He reached into the blue waters, the green-headed cliffs, the dancer with a permanent smile and fingers bent back at the threshold of pain. He had always wanted to visit Thailand, he thought. Or had he?
The far-off electric buzz of an incoming train took his attention off the Asian strand and to the black mouths of the continuing tunnel. Dim yellow lights within marked the curve of the tracks with as much visibility as a gas-lit boulevard. He gazed deeply in the direction of the approaching train, extrapolating the continuation of the subterranean curve. The station, marked oberkampf, marked a straight line in a journey of endless curves, a moment of stillness in a vertiginous gut. The structure of the ground above, the Haussmannisation that had weakened disorderliness and secrecy, seemed a plane disengaged to the one which housed the metro tunnels.
The Path Of All That Falls Page 12
