The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  “What about your knee,” the medic said, pointing. Gaudin noticed the blood on his pants.

  “Leave it.” He leaned forward to speak to the ambulance driver. He could only see the road and, to the sides, sunflowers extending upward to the top edge of the windshield. “Drive to the Théatre Antique. It’s an emergency.”

  “We’re going to the hospital,” the driver said, turning on the ambulance’s siren for emphasis.

  “Shut that off,” Gaudin said. “Just drop us off, or you’ll have another person back here, soon.”

  “This isn’t a taxi service.”

  Gaudin glanced back at Chase, pulled his pistol out, and showed it to the driver. “Relax,” the driver said. “Maybe I’ll drop you off at the theater.”

  “I know a shortcut,” Chase said.

  Gaudin followed Chase on a trail that snaked up the hill and around the periphery of the outdoor theatre. His knee throbbed. They made their way unnoticed past a military policeman, then emerged from the pine trees to the sight of thousands of people, heads turned to the stage where a choir sang Mozart’s Requiem. Behind the stage and rising higher than the highest seat loomed a giant stone wall, here and there studded with remnant Roman marble and pockmarked throughout with the battle scars of men and the elements.

  From this distance, the music came to Gaudin like the sound of a woman humming to herself. They scrambled down to the topmost row of stone and searched. He could see where he and Bianca had sat, just the other night, to take in Don Giovanni. A bad choice for a widow, in retrospect. Gaudin took in lungfuls of smotheringly warm air. Night was falling, the Mistral wind filling in the day’s wake and making it hard to discern anyone, let alone Wrest, in the audience. He would have much better seats than this, Gaudin thought, and motioned for Chase to follow him down the steps and toward the orchestra.

  He had searched for someone in this theatre once before. Then, his search had been through a pair of binoculars, at least until Emilia, who Wrest had sent him out to follow, waved him over. They spent the concert together. Now, descending into the great spill of audience, everyone looked foreign. The music came to him more readily now, especially with the choir ahead, there on the vast black stage that seemed like a plane of night. Behind the choir stood the remnants of the staging for Don Giovanni. On the far sides of the immense wall rose two metal towers erected just wide of the seats. It might be best if they stood at the exit and looked for Wrest as the performance ended, he thought to himself. And it was then, looking at one of the towers, that he caught sight of Joël there, climbing upwards, and just ahead of him, Wrest.

  “Right. I see them,” Chase said.

  The orchestra was only a couple dozen rows below them now, and the music carved through the ache of his temporary deafness to his ears, the voices of the choir growing in crescendos until he almost couldn’t hear the orchestra. They walked toward the side exit until they reached the base of the light tower. Metal rungs were welded to the inside of the scaffolding and reached up to the lights. Gazing upward, Gaudin had trouble seeing either Joël or Wrest from all the glare, but he could feel their ascent in the vibrations on the rungs.

  “Up we go,” Gaudin said. His leg was stiffening, making the climb difficult.

  “I hate heights,” Chase said, when they were still only a few meters up.

  “What’s to like?” Gaudin answered. He paused halfway up to catch his breath. The number of rungs seemed to have multiplied. Glancing up, he saw the soles of Joël’s shoes, then the far-off emptiness of a night sky perceptibly darker. When, whole minutes later, he reached the top of the wall, Gaudin crawled out onto the stone on his hands and knees, astonished at how high they had ascended. Something in the stone made Gaudin want to sit down, to bring himself closer to what, at this height, seemed too narrow a place for a man to tread. He peered over the side towards town and saw the white roofs of two ambulances, their headlights cast out over several tables. The tablecloths looked like safety nets, the waiters, firemen. Several police cars pulled up as he watched. Past them, he could see tile rooftops stretch into the darkness, like an endless scatter of red petals. He could see the river, and farther away, the pale wash of sunset-aimed sunflowers in the valley where Wrest’s farmhouse lay. The mountains beyond were lost in haze. And on the other side of the wall, the audience, the bleach-bright stage, the darkness of the hill. And over everything, the huge drum of night, descending. Dead center was the sight of Joël standing behind Wrest, a knife glistening under Wrest’s chin. Gaudin limped forward, his legs shaky from the height, his knee cold as the wind slapped his pants. He felt light-headed.

  “God, how I hate heights,” he heard Chase say behind him.

  Joël’s voice came on the wind. “Everything,” he said. “I’ll let you keep everything you see below you, every damn thing that’s yours and every thing that isn’t, if you can bring Bombay back.”

  Wrest gray hair was bristling and his usual sneer-smile was replaced by a mouth gasping for breath.

  “Bring her back,” Joël commanded, shoving him closer to the edge of the wall. “See those stars?” Joël asked. “They’re yours. Just bring her back. See those fields? Yours. Just bring her back. See the town square, the cafes?” He took the knife away from Wrest’s neck and shoved him to the other edge of the wall.

  Joël saw them then, and returned his knife under Wrest’s chin. Gaudin thought he saw blood.

  “The music?” Joël continued. “The audience? Yours. Just bring her back.”

  “Think about what you’re doing,” Wrest said.

  Then Gaudin saw Regi emerge from the opposite light tower, beyond Joël and Wrest. He walked, slowly, casually, stopping only when Joël spotted him.

  “Keep back!” Joël said. He turned to Gaudin and shouted the same.

  “It’s us, Joël,” Chase said. “Get away from the edge.”

  There’s nothing but edges here, Gaudin thought. The music rushed up the face of the wall from the stage below. He could see a few bright upturned faces in the darkness of the audience.

  “He’s going to pay,” Joël shouted over the music. The tips of Wrest’s shoes overhung the ledge.

  “Put down the knife, Joël,” Gaudin said.

  “Don’t put down the knife, Joël,” Regi said, just steps behind Joël now. “How does this work, Gaudin?” he asked. “Do I use my left hand or my right, or both? Do I need a running start or just a finger?”

  Joël’s eyes flashed. “Get away from me. Or I’ll push him.”

  “I’m counting on it,” Regi said.

  Gaudin saw a dark bloom spread over Wrest’s crotch and down one leg. Gaudin reached behind his back and pulled out his pistol, leveling it at Regi, then Wrest, then Regi. The deadliest weapon was still Regi’s palm, ready to push.

  “Put that away, Gaudin,” Regi said. Regi was right behind Joël now, just a step away, just a push. The forgiven son who didn’t ask for forgiveness. Gaudin could see Wrest trying to shift the weight of his body to his heels.

  The sky was black now, and the music harsh from the bright pit of the orchestra. There would be no payment from Wrest, no retirement home with Mediterranean views. There was just waiting or action. If he shot Regi, Regi would probably still manage to send his father and Joël over the edge. If he shot Joël, Joël and Wrest might fall, and then there would be Regi to deal with. And if he shot Wrest—there wasn’t any advantage to shooting Wrest. It would just feel good.

  His finger felt fat between the trigger and the guard, and then, still undecided, he heard shots and felt his chest burst. He fell to the stone. Pain gouged him in the thigh, like teeth as he scrambled to his hands and knees, his pistol scraping against the stone. His gun went off then, belatedly, discharging into the wall, the recoil jerking his arm up as though it were tied to strings. He fell flat against the stone again and saw only the audience. From below, the music began disintegrating. First the choir, then the instruments, until only a single cello remained, briefly, playing notes tha
t seemed but the faintest embodiment of Mozart’s Requiem. A dark murmur washed into the audience, punctuated by shouts. Then he saw, on the hill behind the crowd, the flash of bullet fire, innocent, like someone taking a drag on a cigarette. The military police. A few bullets hit the colored spotlights and he glimpsed the top arcs of thrown sparks, like small, private fireworks. The audience quivered, then split toward the exits.

  The wall seemed to buckle beneath Gaudin in his dizziness. He turned onto his back and felt little pain, only weakness. His fingers reached beneath his shirt and for a moment he thought his finger had lodged itself in his navel, only to feel the indentation unending and wet. Then, not for the first time in his life, he sensed he was dying. He’d been in this situation before, and afterwards always felt he’d been melodramatic. Nevertheless, the fear swooped in. Of how dying should be so much more complicated, far-off, not now, not here when there was nothing he could do to shoo it off. All through these thoughts, Gaudin felt a wall approaching him, much like the one he lay on, but black, smooth, taking out the stars, the hills, emptying him of all feeling until only one remained, that he was really going to die. And the thought hit him again, and again, and the last sensation he had was of the pistol leaving his hand and of having nothing to hold, and nothing left to hit him.

  With Gaudin’s pistol in his own hand, Chase crawled forward. His arm burned from a grazed bullet. He could see some of the gendarmes and military police scurrying down the top of the hill, reaching the top row of seats. Chase had never heard the sound of a crowd panic before. It was like the breaking of waves. It was like ground glass. He gripped the stone beneath him, not so much afraid of being hit again as of the force of an impact pushing him closer to the edge. Ahead of him lay Joël, the knife dropped from his hands, his mouth draping vomit over the side of the wall. Wrest sat like a boy on the edge, his legs over the side, looking over his shoulder where Regi once again stood on his feet.

  Regi reached a hand to his father.

  “Get away,” Wrest said.

  “Take my hand. Look at you. You’ve pissed in your pants.”

  “Get away,” Wrest repeated, then turned his head toward Chase. “Chase! Get him away. This isn’t my son anymore.”

  Regi crouched behind his father and placed his arms on his father’s shoulders. Chase aimed for Regi.

  “My little paparazzi. You try anything and I’ll shove him off with my last movement. You’ll be the one they find with the gun.”

  A couple shots from the hill grazed the stone around Chase’s face.

  “I’ll get you off, Chase. No charges, nothing. Free as a bird,” Wrest said.

  “I hate you both,” Chase said, feeling a kind of strange anger he’d never felt before. It was worse than when Jade had been rushed to the hospital. It was anger without worry, anger without thought of repercussions. Rage. He hated Wrest. He hated Regi. He even hated Gaudin now, too, the investigator investigating his own crime, though it hit him for the first time now that Gaudin was dead, and it gripped his heart with a pain he knew was just a glimpse of what he would feel later. Later. This was what was important to ensure. Survival. Endurance. Remaining.

  Physically, the gun felt just as it had in the car earlier that day. The polished metal was made for just this. And yet, he couldn’t bring himself to shoot, until, in a fraction of a second, the act slipped free from his head and to his finger and he felt the recoil.

  “Again!” Wrest shouted. There were screams in the audience now.

  He’d missed. He felt the stone shatter around him again from the fire of the military police and closed his eyes, and when he opened them he saw that Regi had been hit. Some kind of internal ballast seemed to shift within Regi and he fell forward onto his father and then the two of them slid over the edge of the wall. Chase rushed forward and grabbed a hand and felt the incredible weight pulling himself forward, until he could see straight down at Wrest’s hand in his, and far below, Regi falling like a diver toward the black stage. And then there was just the sound of wood cracking far below.

  “Please,” Wrest said, grabbing Chase’s other arm.

  Chapter 20

  Bianca and Jade sat out on the hotel’s rooftop patio. Bianca had been reading the French portions of Baptiste’s journal, but had skipped his words to read the pages written in English. Mozart’s Requiem came to them on the breeze, but Bianca imagined some stronger wind was pulling away the music between them now, because she heard only fragments, just when her ears had became most adept at filtering out the oceanic hiss of the Mistral. Since David’s passing, she had found her surroundings uncomfortable, as though all the concrete things she had known were now spectral. She gazed up at the night sky. She had never noticed stars the way she did now, tied up with distance and time, the light still coming from stars long dead. Neither had she spent much time considering her own death, that gray-haired thing she had accepted all her life without feeling the low tremble of fear that shot her awake nights, now. Here she was, existing but once among a trillion stars whose light mystified her. It depressed her unimaginably. She felt forever on the cusp of loss. The stars above flickered.

  On the pages Chase had given her, she heard something like David’s voice. At first, she didn’t believe David was anything but memories and words, but there was something ghost-like in this paper existence. Nearly every phrase came back to her in his voice, as though the pages she held in her hand were the hodgepodge assortment of what David had said or written in his life. Or, like the closest thing to his thoughts themselves, before they found order in words and syllables and reached her in a conversation. The closest thing to who he was, and who she hadn’t completely known.

  She had only read a few sentences, but began again.

  — Baptiste, you platen, you pen. Ignore your cramped hand because I have been living in visions lately. Movement has grown thick and reluctant, then pure speed, time-hopping. I think, then find myself doing the act: crossing a street, coming to you, exploring Avignon with my name half-erased, lucky to emerge in the evening thanks to Chopin there beside me. I find myself acting, then thinking the act. I feel a noncompliance on the part of time. Everything is metric, except for time. We cut the behemoths—millennium and centuries—by tens, but then fall into the twelfths of months, sevenths of days, twenty-fourths of hours, sixtieths of minutes and seconds, before taking up divisibility by tens again at the sliver end. How this moon pulls! My time flows smooth and languorous when languorous is called for, quick, when quick is the last thing I want. It is so quick now. Let us call every meeting a chance, like the quick streak of a falling star. Chopin calls it tempo rubato, stolen time, the tempo of being in fluctuation. I feel but the stealing.

  — Bianca. Why have you been putting me on stretchers? Again and again I have to climb off, step from the ambulance doors. You have been pouring a beach of sand over my footprints. I want to say to you, remember me, remember me—the endless handstand, the night-train tryst, the sharp tan lines from Acapulco—yet I feel more of me is being forgotten. That forgets itself. I have seen you crying and have myself gone away crying and wishy-washy, in a deep down funk.

  — Bands of white, quick fast sunlight. Too young. I have looked but Bombay is nowhere. This poor young Dane who has taken with her a bit of myself. Bianca dear, how will you be able to know what degree of infidelity I had in my heart’s last beat if I don’t know myself.

  — Your memories are my Styrofoam protection. I am the minds who remember me, who picture me now. I am not myself, this slightness of nothing, nothing, nothing. Chopin hands me his laudanum drops. Remember reading my notes? The line about Chopin taking laudanum drops, as you tried to fall asleep shortly after that fall? As you took your own medication to swaddle yourself with sleep.

  — The drops fall into my mouth. They soothe, extend, bring me to fantasizes. Chopin and I are entering the Théatre Antique to hear Mozart’s Requiem. Chopin pulls me with one hand and removes his pocket score of the Requiem from his coat with th
e other. He smiles at me as though we are finally traveling after a long period of waiting, though if we are it must be time rather than distance, and it is time and I am there and I can only hear the faintest scribble of your pen Baptiste, because I am seated with Chopin in the curved bowl of the audience. Chopin hums the melody, his eyes closed. Then, what a sight! I can see the audience rise slowly from the amphitheater, seated on air, Chopin among them, and myself here beneath on the empty stone, cast in the dark shadow of the rising audience which is lifted higher than the spotlights, higher than the statue of Caesar in his niche. Look, the half-bowl shape of the crowd begins to loosen, some rising more quickly than others, all taken up toward the sundown-tinged sky, the coral-colored clouds on the deep blue, the Dentelles de Montmirail range emerging to the east, the yellow fields of sunflower between. I am both among them and on the ground. And now, the whoosh of a TGV train on its way south to Avignon, the speed distracting the eyes and ears of the audience from the music. Darkness suddenly arrived. The bulk of the crowd settling down slowly, some down beside me to stone, others a few meters above their seats. High above, a handful float like balloons among the swirl of swallows, birds with beaks agape and shrilling amid the death of moths. And then comes a pop pop pop which settles everyone but Chopin, a pop pop pop which deadens the music and takes away the uplifting, a pop pop pop which is the spit of a metal bird with a fixed beak. Pop pop pop. And the audience runs for the exits.

  — And faster than that TGV, Chopin and I are in Avignon, and it is day. I am unable to name what I see for you. A tree could be a building; a building a speeding Vespa. My vocabulary of sight is suffering mange. I feel the mystery unraveling, losing its curls, twists, knots, until all that seems left is an ungraspable strand.