The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  David moved about the apartment looking for Gaudin. After the concert, the investigator had settled down to read a bit of David’s book on Chopin. After a few hours of note taking, downing drinks and skimming through the other books, as well as a stack of photographs, Gaudin had staggered off into the bedroom. David found his oblivious host still on the bed, fully clothed and asleep. The scuffed soles of his shoes shone in the dim light like two slanted eyes. Gaudin cupped his forehead with one hand, the other cradling the back of his head, making him appear to have fallen asleep during some phrenological experiment, perhaps hoping that he would register an insight by touch, perhaps even now while dreaming. David spoke to him again, but the result was the same. His voice went unnoticed. Gaudin held his head.

  The phone rang.

  Gaudin hardly moved. Only when the phone ceased ringing did he break from his position of sleep. The phone had rung six times, an eternity of infernal ringing to David, who hated the call of French telephones. The phone rang again, the air pierced with the tenor of emergency. This time, Gaudin answered.

  “Yes,” he muttered. “Hello. I’m sorry. I do not usually sleep so late.”

  From Gaudin’s sleep-heavy English, David knew that his wife had opened a conduit through all the dark streets and avenues. That she, like him, was presently sleepless. He placed his head beside Gaudin’s sheet-creased cheeks, but heard only the faintest murmur of his wife’s voice. He said hello to her, but there was no response. He said it again, knowing full well that not a syllable of his words would slip into the electrical stream. It was the saying of it that mattered.

  “Oh, it’s still night?” Gaudin said. “I thought it was morning already. It is quite all right. No, call anytime. Sometimes I can’t sleep either.” He turned his head aside and suppressed a yawn. “I’ve been reading through what you gave me, the notes to the book Regi was working on. No. Nothing yet. I will bring them to Luxembourg Gardens tomorrow.” He paused. “How is noon? Yes. I am, too. Good night.” He struggled to replace the phone in the cradle, and when he succeeded, resumed his phrenological position, disappearing into sleep without bothering to change out of his day clothes.

  David stepped out of the bedroom, jealous of Gaudin and the words his ear had heard. The apartment’s main room appeared different as he stepped into it, especially in its relation to the outside, as though the room were now aligned to a different compass point. Several of these different points of view flickered through his comprehension of the room, then passed. David remembered what Chopin had said about legacy and its endurance only when invoked, and David feared this late night hour when his name would cross so few minds, where sleep without dreams of him spelled nonexistence. He needed to find Baptiste, needed to rouse him tonight. The room moved again, a strange sensation, like the feeling of numbness he could sometimes create in the middle of his forehead above the eyes, or like the odd feeling of the repulsion of two magnets. David remembered similar experiences from when he was a child, perhaps five or six years old. Rooms he’d known would appear as though through another’s eyes, and sometimes even in a multitude of perspectives that would cascade, one over the other. Walls and floors and ceilings would go from being cramped to the scale of infinity, then back again. The right angles where walls met ceiling would be pinched backwards. His parents and childhood friends appeared to be the size of giants one moment, dolls the next. Perhaps, all along, he had been predisposed to losing his own point of view.

  A gust blew aside Gaudin’s top-most notes and revealed a receipt, printed with the date, time and address of a grocery store. David felt he’d do anything now for such a flimsy pale-ink slip of paper. Proof of being and place and purpose! The retained stub of one’s existence! A priceless document. Beside the receipt, printed on a scrap of paper like a saved fortune, he saw his line copied. «What kept him good was the fear of facing death during a moment of guilt.» There were now European-style quotes around the phrase. A photo lay underneath the paper. In it peeked a topless woman wearing a bonnet, her mouth the shape of surprise.

  David paced before windows that yawned open to the night. He felt he could not wait until morning to take some action, despite his oxymoronic state. He could almost hear Baptiste snoring, could begin to feel himself disappearing. David gauged the distance to the opposite building to be no more than the span of an Olympic-class long jump. Impatient, David moved out of the window and onto the faux balcony that was only wide enough for pots, of which there were several, all holding dirt and the pale dead stalks of yesteryear flowers. The stalks were the size of walking canes, then toothpicks. He shook his head to get the perspective right. From every direction came the sound of explosions, not firecrackers or sparkling fountains, but deadly reverberations; m80s and aerial shells that made the city seem the playground of military maneuvers on this Bastille Day dawn.

  David closed his eyes and felt the damp leaving the ground, his sense of self smothered by the still falling loveless night that smelled of himself, that commingling odor of evaporation, spent gunpowder and perfume.

  “Baptiste,” he whispered as he landed on the street. “Wake.”

  Chapter 14

  Lying on the grass in the Luxembourg Gardens, David felt thankful for having come through the quiet night intact. The appearance of gravel, grass, tree and sky had more constancy than the forms of the night before. The arduous task of reaching Baptiste in the late hours the night before—when David was little remembered, and in little control of his sense of self—had been rewarded with a cell empty of both Baptiste and an explanation. In his search, streets had pinched into corners, corners twisted into facades that stretched grotesquely, as though for Dali’s appreciation. At one point, the Vikings had followed him for a few blocks, but his perspective had shrunk them into the size of dolls and he ignored them, though he sensed he was being careless. Without a stronger sense of who he was, there seemed little need to protect himself. Perhaps this carelessness meant that those who held him in their hearts didn’t know the fragility of his placement there.

  Now, the morning after, David sat beside Gaudin and Chase in the gardens, trying to understand the two men’s language and gain any clue as to Baptiste’s disappearance. In the distance, he could hear the distant rumble of fire trucks, ambulances and swift-water rescue units driving down the Bastille Day parade route. Under the sun, band music filtered through the trees ringing the gardens, here on the Left Bank just down from the gray bulk of the Pantheon. He and Bianca had visited the Pantheon earlier to see Foucoult’s pendulum, but David wasn’t as interested now in proof of the Earth’s rotation as he was in achieving an understanding of the physics and crimes of Regi’s fall—and the culpability involved. And more importantly, to somehow demonstrate to Bianca what his feelings for her had been before she’d been made a widow. He was resigned to his inability to unearth original feelings for her, understanding that he rested most completely in the judgment of her heart and mind.

  David looked at the statue of Diana within the wide ring of flowers and noticed that her arrow was aimed at the distant statue of a lion. He wished he could have left something of himself in statuary, but what aspect of his life deserved stone? He’d never fought a battle, could earn no permanent seat on a horse—regardless of how many hoofs were raised. He could hold no bow and arrow, no weapon, couldn’t don military garb and hold flags or injured comrades. There was nothing about himself which he could think to mold from stone or cast in bronze. He had never been a hero. He felt his life was made of the more mundane and whimsical: dreams and the verdancy of melody, and the strength of the common and everyday. Or—unable to protest or be remembered differently—these were the things about him which were remembered. Topiary would be a more fitting medium for his life, he considered. Though, with the thoughtlessness of nights, even such leafy remainders might show a bare twiggy skeleton. The topiary art was all about creating foreign form from the insubordination of life’s offshoots. He feared, even if he could find Baptiste and c
ould communicate or keep alive a constant memory of himself, that these twiggy offshoots would take over, so that one day soon they would bud in unshaped green, fertilized by permanent forgetting.

  He grasped at the memories whose forms he could still remember: reading to Bianca about the park from a guidebook, pausing when people strolled by so as not to sound like a tourist; her reading aloud from A Moveable Feast, the part about Hemingway jogging around the locked perimeter of the park wanting in; Bianca discovering—to David’s delight—that Delacroix had used Chopin’s face as the model for Dante in the painting within the palace on the garden’s grounds. Though he could not remember his delight in the discovery, he sensed it still, the way people who’ve never visited a location can so easily recommend it as a place to see. When they’d been together in this park, he and Bianca had lazed away the hours in the green metal chairs scattered throughout the manicured garden. They’d watched children sail wooden boats across the pool and, like children themselves, eventually gazed upwards to look for shapes in the clouds: a swan with a goiter, a sinking gondola, a recliner Caesar. He rubbed suntan lotion onto her shins, massaged her bare feet, watched his reflection in her sunglasses, an image that seemed so incredibly far away. And yet, then, he could still touch a part of her, even if it was only her toes at the end of the reflection of endless legs. His perspective at night was like this reflection, contortions on the lids of sleeping eyes. Looking back, he seemed to have nothing but vignette memories of his time in the Luxembourg Gardens with Bianca, a happiness settling here and there on gifted moments, the remainder of time like the flight of sparrow-sized moths stumbling drunkenly from one garden blossom to another. Sweetness, then sweetness again. The transit forgotten.

  He remembered a line from one of Chopin’s letters. “A man can’t always be happy; perhaps joy comes for only a few moments in life; so why tear oneself from illusions that can’t last long anyhow.” Sweet delight was something David thought a shame to miss. He could only trust that he’d truly felt it, not just exhibited the signs. He could only trust that, if his life had been unhappy, at least his moments of delight had not been illusions.

  David watched Gaudin and Chase browse through photos, notes and his manuscript on Chopin. They rested their feet on two empty metal chairs. A stack of novels lay between them on the grass. Occasionally, they would exchange a few words as they each leafed through the books. David wished he could understand the French they threw back and forth, so he wouldn’t feel himself forever on the outskirts of the knowledge that could bring sense to his situation. In all likelihood, he realized, their perception of Chopin was based on what David had scribbled down for his book. The true stories, like Chopin hearing a blind man play one of his mazurkas in an Edinburgh music shop, and the apocryphal: Chopin reaccepting Catholicism on his death bed, his heart bursting with rays of light. Or were they both apocryphal? He couldn’t remember. Either way, David felt envious that stories of Chopin, true or false, could take root in the beds of the living. Envious, too, of how Chopin had left open the unhindered conduit of music as a way of passing a portion of his being down through time.

  Time. According to Gaudin’s watch, a quarter past twelve. David couldn’t remember ever having been as restless. He wanted so badly to see Bianca. At the same time, he wondered if he had truly loved her as much as he now believed. Perhaps death had cast him as having been more loyal and devoted than he had actually been. And perhaps each night stripped the minutiae of him from her memory, plugging the holes of his infidelities with finer qualities, erasing the dark musings which he had never spoken, emphasizing the rare delights. Or was this time now but the polite pause before she judged him?

  David scanned the park for a sign of Bianca, hoping to spot her familiar gait among the crowd, her arms swinging in overly large arcs. Nothing yet. Still just the three of them. Gaudin wore large sunglasses at least a decade out of style, while Chase’s were too youthful and sporty for his short stature, as though he believed he could change his body’s appearance by two oval mirrors, by capturing the viewer in his eyes. David gazed deeply into the reflection and saw only the distant curve of the garden’s horizon, a tight round world covered only by the geography of Paris. He had stared into Bianca’s sunglasses this way, once. Right here.

  Gaudin abruptly slapped closed the book he’d been reading and removed his feet from one of the green chairs. The skies roared. The colors of the American flag poured out in the wake of three fighter jets. Only after the ribbon of color had begun to billow did David realize the red, white and blue were the colors of the French flag. Despite the colors, despite the familiarity of fly-overs, parades and parks, he knew he was far from home. But then, he spotted Bianca and Jade in the distance, walking uncertainly on the bright gravel, the crowds behind them a cavalcade of a more relaxed, celebratory atmosphere. He didn’t feel any sense of homesickness. The Earth was a tight ball that rotated on an axis, covered with the night and day of Paris. Little else. David couldn’t tell whether they’d yet spotted Chase and Gaudin. A dog sniffed its way through the crowds pouring into the garden. The dog approached David, but his petting evoked no response. He let the tail slap happily against his leg, wishing the dog were approaching him because of a scent of recognition, not this perfume of doubtful legacy.

  Gaudin raised his hand and waved.

  “Good morning,” Chase said, though Bianca and Jade were too far away to hear him.

  “Happy Bastille Day,” Bianca said, when she was comfortably within earshot. “Or do you say that?”

  Away from the dimness of the concert hall, Bianca appeared fresh and younger, her green eyes bright in the flat sunlight. Jade, much younger than Bianca, perhaps not yet even thirty, seemed even younger than he remembered. Had he, too, been this young?

  Gaudin patted the empty seats. “Have a chair.”

  “I see you have your reading cut out for you,” Bianca said.

  “Yes. Chase and I haven’t found too much. Nothing regarding the book you mentioned at the concert.”

  “Hello again,” Chase said, shaking their hands, though everyone, by now, was seated. His awkwardness showed that he knew the moment was over, too.

  “I should have mentioned the book earlier,” Bianca said. “It works that way. I’ll be walking down the street or sitting and eating, or taking a shower, and I then remember little snips of conversation. I can’t remember any more about it. Just that David mentioned Regi was going to translate a book that wasn’t too favorable to a right-wing political party. But I can’t remember. Maybe it was that Regi had declined to translate such a book.”

  David stood behind Bianca now, his hands clutching the hot metal of the chair, then cautiously moving to her shoulders. The muscles through her shirt were tight.

  “He was carving up a melon with a pocket knife when he told me that,” Bianca added. “Isn’t it funny that those kind of things are all up in my head, and yet I can’t see them all at once, when I want to?”

  David was hurt by his inability to slip his hands within her shirt to touch the bare skin. He leaned forward. She had switched shampoo, and, leaning to the side, he detected a new perfume. He pressed his cheek against hers.

  “I have found nothing, but the book may surface,” Gaudin said. Bianca turned to look at him, her cheek moving David’s head with her so that his attention, too, was directed at the investigator.

  “Jade. You’re thinking of something,” Chase said.

  “I was thinking of motives,” Jade said. She took off her sunglasses and set their weight in the slacked V of her shirt. David caught the path of Chase’s eyes. “And one motive I came up with has to do with the book Bianca mentioned. The one damaging to the right. Right?” She smiled at the doubling, then continued. “Regi was pushed off a bridge. And Regi’s father is a member of that right-wing party, correct?”

  Chase nodded. “Go on.”

  “Well,” Jade said, turning now to Chase. “Maybe someone in the party pushed Regi to stop him from
translating the book.”

  A fusillade of gunfire pummeled the noise of the parade, filling the air with the dusty flight of birds. For a moment, David felt he was back at the window sill, Baptiste standing across the street. Then he heard the simultaneous gutturals of the diesel engines of large vehicles on the parade route and danger transformed itself into a salute. A wind had picked up and in the distant pond he could see toy sailboats sliding out from the clutches of young hands. A boy waded into the shallow pool and ran slowly behind his own boat, creating waves. The boat leaned heavily on its side, as though to take a turn, then tipped completely, its fabric sails soaking up the water.

  “We haven’t found any evidence of such a book, though,” Chase said. “And besides, that doesn’t explain why Regi fell on David.”