Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  It was glued to a wall, part of a series of posters Caroline had seen splattered around the city although she’d never stopped to read the tightly spaced lines with almost nonexistent margins. Renard stood still in the middle of the empty sidewalk reading one. He had his hands in his pockets, his head tilted back while he read. The task of reading owned him; he was inaccessible. She wasn’t able to shout in a voice loud enough to travel across the street, and he didn’t seem to notice her, or he was deliberately ignoring her. Even the way he put his hands in his pockets excluded her. She began to walk in the opposite direction, but two men huddling in front of a doorway snickered at her, and she quickly turned back the way she’d come.

  “Hey, girlie.” It sounded like a net hidden between them, ready to catch her as she passed, but when she turned around and looked over her shoulder they were only handing a bottle back and forth from one to the other.

  Renard was gone from his post, but seeing him down the street, she ran to catch up. Her footsteps clattered behind him, still he didn’t look back. She touched his sleeve. He turned around with a start and looked at her with hostility. Caroline crossed her arms over her chest. She couldn’t retreat. He had to be made to be sympathetic to her predicament. Perhaps he was only surprised to see her, unused to meeting anyone by chance in this way. A man who spent his days going from place to place looking after crazy invalids like the man upstairs probably led a quiet, introspective life.

  “Where are your parents?” His expression softened a little as if he were figuring something out, adapting himself to the situation.

  “My mother is out,” she lied instinctively in order to protect herself. Maybe he wasn’t the man she thought he was. Maybe he would try to get her to go back home. Caroline tried not to sound out of breath; she tried to sound as if she hadn’t been looking for anyone in particular and finding him on a street not far from her apartment was an unexpected coincidence.

  “Where did she go?” He made aimless conversation.

  “I don’t know.” She wanted to sound as detached from her parents as she felt, as if she hadn’t seen them in years.

  Then she couldn’t stop talking. Words poured out of her mouth about subjects as trivial and as serious as her hunger, the men who followed her in the street, the cost of new shoes. She had spent so much time imagining Renard that she was certain he would be sympathetic if she confessed how miserable she was. Renard didn’t seem to be listening to her, but he clasped her hand anyway, smiling, nodding vacantly at a passing woman. He hailed a cab and took Caroline to his, apartment, a single room in Montmartre.

  “You could be sent to Charenton.” Felix leaned over his desk.

  “I don’t know how to write any other way.”

  “This is a warning. You could spend the rest of your life writing on stone walls.”

  “What other kind are there?” Jules scratched his head.

  “Can I stay here?”

  His room was very small, closetlike, and windowless; there was only a narrow bed in it that seemed to fill the room, and this was discouraging to her. She had imagined he lived in a place with a large kitchen capable of making enough food for Louis and other charity cases, its bedroom on an upper floor would be enclosed by curving glass doors, and on one side there would be a balcony with a view of the city. In this setting she would seduce him. His imagined innocence made her the aggressor, the one who offered unknown and unknowable gratification. She had no acquaintances who lived in a ground-floor flat in the back of a building that smelled of mold and industrial cleaner. The sound of a train ran close by from time to time, so she knew she was near a station. Caroline wasn’t sure she wanted to stay, but she had convinced herself she had no place else to go. She wanted to have no place else to go, to ensure that whatever happened to her was out of her control. If she had no choices, whatever happened wasn’t her fault. Outside the province of Jules and Maryse there could be other rules, and she could find a new language, one that might sweep her up and make her a child bride. She would never have to see any of them again.

  Renard put his clothes on a chair. Unclothed his tight little body looked vulnerable, but raw and terrierlike. Caroline thought of a small, nippy dog you couldn’t escape or control, but she didn’t scream. His hands were stained yellow from smoking, and in the harsh light it looked as if he had gloves on. He stroked her hair and unbuttoned her dress, and the touch of his fingers gave her chills. Her dress was blue, ink spots near the hem. She smelled like school paste. He decided he would write about Caroline as if she were a smart aleck, a wiseass with a dirty mouth, a girl who got what she had wanted and deserved: a girl who would have to leave when it was over. He would put her in a cab. She could go wherever she pleased. He might stop bringing packages for Louis. It was getting tiresome, and if he stopped Louis would be forced to take care of himself. No one else would. That would be the best thing for him. Renard, after all, had things to do. The inky dress on the floor reminded him of how his pleasure produced leftover things; they seemed to go hand in hand. Like eating lobster, there’s more left over when you’re done eating than when it first arrives on your plate. He would use that metaphor somewhere. The building shook slightly, and he could hear someone going upstairs just on the other side of the wall. He hoped she wouldn’t be sick. He had no reassuring gestures, only what she could misinterpret as comfort.

  Back on the street, Caroline felt she had emerged into a world placed on a spit and turned upside down, as if what had happened in Renard’s room happened suddenly to absolutely everyone else at the same instant.

  The police didn’t search the apartment. They arrived on cat’s paws, careful not to displace papers, overturn coffee cups or inkwells. They stood in the doorway as if separated from a museum exhibit by a velvet rope, as if they’d been explicitly told: Don’t search. When they read out the arrest they cited the victim’s name.

  “I’ve never heard of her,” Jules said.

  “That’s nothing to us,” they answered. “Finish getting dressed and come along.”

  Jules had put on his jacket before he realized what they were talking about: the corpse clutching a camera.

  “She was a man, a man dressed as a woman, but still a man.” He took a few steps backward. In their confusion about the identity or sex of the murder victim there might be a way out for him. “You must be looking for someone else.”

  Maryse felt she had woken up at the wrong address.

  “What woman? What did he do?”

  “It wasn’t a woman’s body. The corpse was a man dressed as a woman.”

  “That’s not what we’ve been told.”

  “You said she was stabbed near place Maubert?”

  “Yes.”

  “I found the body, it’s true, but he was already dead.”

  “Did you report what you’d seen?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He didn’t have an answer.

  “Then don’t be stupid and come along.”

  “A man dressed as a woman, what is he talking about?” Maryse grabbed one of policemen’s arms. “Why are you wasting your time arresting the wrong person when you ought to be out looking for kidnapped children?”

  An officer wrote something on a piece of paper that read Inquiries for missing children can be made at the rue de Rivoli office, and they led Jules downstairs. She leaned out over the railing as they took him away. At the sound of heavy boots stepping almost in unison people peered out of their doorways. Jules looked up at her, imitating the bug-eye stares on faces as he descended. He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand how serious this was. The arrest had something to do with the writing he’d been doing that he never let her see, of that she was certain. Even if the accusation of murder was a trumped-up charge, the wall of uniforms, as they spiraled down the stairs, paralyzed her.

  “No one answers my questions at the rue de Rivoli, or anywhere else,” she shouted at the retreating police and at Jules. Caroline had disappeared
into thin air, as if a Méliès cinema trick.

  Murder or forgery, whatever Jules was involved in, she never knew the full story, he’d stopped telling her everything. She was cut off from him, and from every person she had ever known. Her mother and sister, all were estranged from one another, and she wasn’t even sure where her sister lived anymore. But what was worse, far worse, were Caroline’s clothes, school books, and drawings that screamed at her every waking minute, which were most of all possible minutes, since she rarely slept anymore. She would refuse to move out until Caroline reappeared or was found. Above Maryse’s head even the recluse had opened his door a crack.

  Alone, Maryse lay down fully dressed and tried to sleep. She knew a few things. She knew what Jules wrote and who he wrote for. Once he was locked away the police might come back for her. Instinctively she wanted to leave the city so that no one could find her, but Caroline would be part of that “no one.” Slowly and silently Maryse became angry at Caroline, invisible and deliberately remote. When she was next fully awake it was late afternoon. She sat in a chair without moving for hours, facing Jules’s desk, mentally cataloging what objects could be sold. Toward evening she went out looking for her daughter again, asking the old women who sat in front of their buildings if they’d seen her.

  “She walked north toward Montmartre.”

  “No,” another one said, “she was running away from a man.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “An Algerian.”

  “Jewish.”

  “None of those. He was a tall white man with a turned-up nose, thin moustache, and a goatee, fashionably dressed, but his clothes weren’t new.”

  This seemed to be the description the three finally agreed on, and Maryse described him to all she met. It was turning colder and darker, and in a park children milled around, able to see their breath, pretending to be smoking before mothers or older children came to take them home. There is no “not there” like a child’s “not there.” All the children were younger than Caroline, but she asked them if they’d seen a blond girl, thirteen years old, wearing a blue dress. They shook their heads. Maryse walked to Montmartre and back showing Caroline’s photograph to shopkeepers, gendarmes, to other old women who watched the streets.

  At night she walked past the closed cafés.

  After the riots in front of Houdin’s theater, no one on nearby streets wanted to talk to her about a missing child.

  The nearly empty street was littered with broken glass and drifts of torn paper eddying in the breeze. Newspapers, posters, wrapping paper, advertisements, shoes, hats, clothing, even a marble counter broken into pieces, all kinds of objects looted from the shops blew around her while soot-gray men with brooms tried to contain the piles they’d worked so hard to assemble before wind blew the papers into anarchy again. Maryse picked up what looked like a personal letter, handwritten and crumpled into a ball. She smoothed it out, but rain had smeared the letters into a bluish watercolor, a series of horizon lines, nothing intelligible at all. The piece of paper, she realized, was cut into the shape of a human foot. She tossed it back into the gutter. One of the men shook his broom at her and told her to watch her step.

  There were many other missing children, too many. She couldn’t bear to read or hear anything about the fighting or the trial, and found herself avoiding newspapers of all kinds. She kept Jules’s papers locked away without telling anyone, but the police didn’t return.

  Caroline found her way to the station. In the confusion of the panicked crowds she was able to slip unnoticed onto the train to Montreuil, and from there made her way to Star Films.

  A devil sat in a wooden pumpkin coach crying. His tail swung back and forth, half a ham sandwich lay on the seat next to him. A blond woman in a long transparent dress sat at the other end of the set. The dress was hiked up above her knees, and she twisted her hair up and then let it down again. They didn’t see or hear Caroline, and she didn’t know how to begin to talk to them. The glass house was plain, not castlelike as she had imagined it would be. A sort of partitioned-off studio or office lay to one side of the set, half wooden walls, half open windows, and she stepped inside it to get out of the way of whatever was going on. Fake beards hung from pegs to her left. No one noticed when she took one down and twirled the beard around by its elastic, twisting the cord on her index finger. She pulled a chair close to the open part of the partition and watched the devil and the barefoot woman in the strange dress sob without comforting one another. Sooner or later, she thought, they would get back to work and see her watching them. When asked, she would tell them without hesitating that she intended to stay forever.

  Outside, the courtyard was being swept; the concierge leaned against a statue of Hermes and looked up at Claire’s window on the lower floor, the better class of tenants lived here. The man who usually visited Claire Francoeur would, she knew, return at night. These two had a kind of partnership which was different from some of the others who’d rented apartments from her in the past. The swipes of her broom echoed across the courtyard. Her niece had left her some newspapers before she bicycled off, and she went into her office to read about plans for the 1900 World Exhibition. She thought of the new century as an artificial yet dangerous precipice. A cataclysmic change might not be marked by anything as recognizable as four numbers marked on a calendar but might occur on a Thursday afternoon or Monday morning when nobody was looking. She would ignore the fireworks and stay indoors. Walking outside she looked up one more time, but Claire’s windows were shuttered. She was supposed to move out soon.

  Actualities and Preconstructions

  On the morning commute to his job at Star Films, Fabien looked up from his lists just once, quickly, and in that random glance out the window saw two boys clenching boards with long nails hammered through one end. They stood on the edge of a runnel that ran parallel to the train tracks. A few days earlier the stream had been deep from rain, but it was now stagnant and green. The boys were killing frogs. They pounded each frog so that the nail pierced it, then they pried it off. He used to kill frogs the same way as a boy, putting them into a bag or stringing them around his neck so that the frogs, until untied, fried, and eaten, looked like a twitching garland, an Elizabethan collar made of green legs. But there was something else in the water that the boys pointed to suddenly, screaming and shouting at the train as it rushed past. It was a long shape like a body, which, if that’s what the shape had been, must have surfaced as the stream dried up. He was alone in his compartment and didn’t know if anyone else on the train had seen what he had seen. The image of the boys went by in a flash, but Fabien was sure he had seen slimy hands, muddy clothes, and a body lying facedown in the water.

  Méliès was an adored man. His silent movies drew larger crowds than the Lumière brothers’ films. He offered escape hatches, transformations, jokes. No one wants to see what they can see every day, he said, they want to see what they can’t see. Then he began to think about filming what everyone looked at but didn’t really see. The Dreyfus trial had split families, including his own. Is Dreyfus a spy? Yes, no, maybe. Méliès didn’t think so, and if he could film what he believed he saw, others might agree.

  A man dressed as an apothecary examined glass bottles, beakers, jars with arrogant, obscene-looking snouts, and coils of tubing going nowhere. He placed a head, identical to his own, on a small table and after selecting a stop-cock and curved pipe, connected a length of tubing from a whitened bellows to the base of the head. Rolling up his shirtsleeves, he proceeded to pump the bellows. As it grew, the severed twin head expressed mute alarm. Its eyes rolled upwards, a febrile sweat broke out on the brow, and its mouth opened in a silent scream, then just as it seemed to near the bursting point, the apothecary smiled with grace and deflated the head. The apothecary, Georges Méliès himself, wiped his hands on his full-length apron. He was bald and against a black background his head appeared free floating, able to look at his smaller self with terror.

  “Y
ou play the apothecary’s assistant dressed as a clown,” he said.

  Fabien waited offstage, his face covered with cracking white paint. When the head was reduced to its normal size, Méliès walked on, picked up the bellows, and began to pump again. The terrified head grew larger and larger, finally bursting in a cloud of smoke. Fabien, with Méliès’s help, was thrown out the window. On his way past painted fenestrations, Fabien accidentally kicked a box which had held the allegedly rubber head. Although the box was a real cardboard box, the head hadn’t been rubber; it was Méliès’s own. The illusion of its isolation in space and subsequent enlargement was an optical trick. Poor frangible hat filler.

  Georges Méliès loved the severed head trick as much as he enjoyed domineering his real and imaginary assistants.

  Out the window, Fabien, out the window and to the moon.

  “At least,” an actor in a bottle suit reasoned, “the fractious decapitated head is usually his own, and that it’s a fat head is only natural.”

  But I’m the fool, Fabien crossed his arms over his chest, as if proud of his role, as if by declaring his position he was pulling the rug out from under everyone before he could be knocked over himself. During his first months at Star Films Fabien had tried to manage his pratfalls by attempting to detach himself from his body, to try to feel as if someone else was being thrown around, but he couldn’t really convince himself of the separation. His head had remained firmly attached to his shoulders so far. Georges told him his humiliation was part of the constructed illusion of a film, and therefore his embarrassment couldn’t be real. It was only a byproduct of Méliès’s bonhomie. He wanted everyone to laugh at all times. The actor adjusted his bottle costume, twisting in it so his eyes appeared in a slot directly under the stopper.