But if I had made it easy on myself by choosing June—or Juin—it was still somewhat hard because I spoke almost no French, and understood even less. A few words—merci, au revoir, est-ce que je peu regarder, bonjour—but Is it okay if I look?, while suitable for the shops on the rue de St. Andredes Artes, isn’t what you hear from the person rifling through your clothes while you’re still in them.
I wanted to speak French, understand. I found myself falling into French-ish cadences when I spoke, fancied that I heard a lilting quality in my voice that I hadn’t had back in London or Scarborough. But I just couldn’t manage the tongue.
Nonetheless, I got by. What I do is a language, whether you do it on a beach in a quaint British resort town, or on the last tube of the night rocketing under Big Ben, or on the paved banks of the Seine where no stars shine except the ones you bring with you.
I liked it by the Seine best, even without amenities. In Scarborough, I sometimes saw the inside of one of those pretty-as-a-picture hotels, like the Hotel St. Nicholas, and once even the Grand Hotel. Although I did have to leave before dawn could even light the water because the man’s wife was driving up from Sussex to join him and he had to air out the room.
In London—fabulous London—I had a good, if brief, thing with two gentlemen who loved each other so much that they had no love left for anything or anyone else. They let me be part of it for awhile but ultimately I had to go and leave them to each other.
Then there was the couple in Queen’s Gate Gardens—I didn’t get the exact address. Even briefer with them: one little night. But every night spent under a real roof was one more victory. And they were responsible for sending me to Paris, at least indirectly. It was because they took me to the tube in their own car, bought me a little card to ride all day, and wished me good luck. And lo, as they say, I got some.
People fantasize more than they know in situations like that—riding on the tube, I mean—and it was like being in a candy store with a blank check or something, a real embarrassment of riches. I binged. When I stopped to think—or reflect, or maybe just gloat—a lady executive with a beautiful briefcase and a rich overnighter bought me a ticket to Heathrow and took me aboard her Air France flight. She liked me well enough to kiss me good-bye at Customs.
I napped on the Roissybus into town in spite of its being my first time in Paris (everyone needs a little downtime). The driver came back to wake me at L’Opera, where everyone else got off and I discovered that in spite of my binge on the British tube, I seemed to have run out of something important.
Luck shifts all the time, so I didn’t worry. I wandered around and the weather held. Pretty town, Paris; Paris in Juin, anyway.
But yes, I did see the beggars. I think their children must have been drugged to sleep so much. There were also the homeless like me, who had no fixed address. Not so bad, really. You may think the tourists on the boats wouldn’t care for the view of us there on the banks of their pretty Seine. But all you have to do is smile and wave. Then they smile and wave back, figuring you must be all right after all.
The Batobus Edith Piaf passed by full of people hooting and hollering, and most of them weren’t tourists. Then I saw her. She was pulling her clothes back on and giving them all what we used to call the “international symbol of disdain.” She was a filthy, skinny blonde with hair cut short the way they do in some hospitals to forestall the lice. She was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a young, pretty little thing and I could tell she was completely bewildered by having to get dressed. The Batobus people were obviously yelling for her to leave it off, and she looked such hate at them that I half-expected their gas tank to suddenly explode and engulf them all in a fireball. But nothing happened. She kept struggling into her dirty shirt and jeans. I was tempted to go down and see about her. Even at this distance I could tell that she was what I was, but she didn’t seem to know it.
“Va te faire fautre!”
She was pelting some stupid tourist with pieces of rock or brick and he was completely confused. He had obviously meant to take some shots of the Seine and he’d had the misfortune to pick her spot for it. All he had to do was move maybe ten steps in any direction and that would have cured it. But he was too stupid to remember where he was—that is, not in his own country—and was trying to argue with her. It was quite a show. Yelling, she drove him back a step with a piece of rock, stooped to pick up another and flung it at him with all the strength in her skinny arm. It bounced off his leg and he howled in both pain and fury. She got him in the shoulder with another rock and he howled again, louder. People were stopping to watch, the locals laughing, the tourists looking fishfaced and unhappy the way tourists do when they see people being themselves rather than on display for their entertainment.
The fourth rock got him just above his right eyebrow. Then he didn’t want to talk any more. He held his camera off to one side and went for her, so she let him have it smack in the chest with another piece of rock. I was behind him and as he took another step toward her, I pulled him back. At the same time, someone else popped out of the crowd and did the same to her. She scrabbled and fought like something feral, but the group closed up around her as efficiently as an automatic door.
The stupid tourist twisted away from me angrily. “Kesker say?” he demanded in his unbearable hick accent, as if he would actually understand the answer if I gave it to him in French.
“You were on her spot,” I told him in English.
He brushed back his stringy brown hair. Too much hair tonic; he must have been one of the last fifty people on the planet using Vitalis. “What spot?”
“Her spot. The one where she lives. How would you like it if she stomped into your living room—no, better, your bedroom—and began taking pictures of whatever struck her fancy?”
He looked like he was going to argue with me and then took a second look. “And what the hell are you supposed to be—the fuckin’ beggar police?” I was still wearing the Knights Templar coat I’d come over from the States in because it made me look less like a vagrant and more like an old hippie or just an especially affected eccentric. “Haven’t you been to the Louvre yet? You don’t recognize me? My picture hangs in there,” I said, gesturing at the building visible through the trees from where we were. I still have no idea why I told him that. Perhaps I thought he’d be impressed, or scared. The crowd hiding the little blonde roared with laughter, the sort of noise French royalty must have heard just as the guillotine came down. It was a bad moment, because I wasn’t sure who the laughter was meant for.
Fortunately, the stupid tourist wasn’t so stupid that he didn’t know he was supposed to be scared now. Clutching his camera with one hand, he backed away from me making stay-there motions at me with his other hand. I stayed, but the crowd started to creep toward him on the other side. Panicked, he turned and fled up the steps to the street, while the crowd roared more of that scary laughter at his back. They all watched him go and then as one turned to look at me. Some of them shifted position and I saw her, now firmly in the grip of a copper-haired boy and a piss-yellow-headed woman who could have been his mother or his madame.
The skinny blonde’s face was pinched, defiant but also somehow pleading, or maybe just wary. Hers would be an old story: Don’t hurt me. All right, don’t hurt me much. All right, don’t hurt me much without paying twenty francs in advance, okay?
I went toward her and held out my hand, unsure if the rabble would let her come with me or if she would even want to. But I managed to pull her away; it felt exactly like uprooting a weed. It wasn’t the explaining that took so long but persuading her to believe it. If you need someone to believe something, make them go for a walk with you. Walking takes up most of the energy they’d use to disbelieve you. You have to be thorough and convincing, of course, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you’re telling the truth. And if you’re a liar, goddamn you to hell, who needs you?
With the blonde, the language barrier was against me. Her English wa
s spotty and my French was worse. Then there were her—to put it mildly—emotional problems.
“But who are they?” she kept asking me in French. “Who?” Apparently even what I told her was not enough to alleviate her revulsion at their pure inhumanity. But why shouldn’t they be inhuman, since that is exactly what they were.
All right, I’ll confess: I love this. Once I discovered that I was a data-gathering device rather than a true human, I embraced my nature—if nature is a word you can use for a manufactured thing—and fully cooperated with my raison d’être. You are what you are and while it may be pointless to hate it or love it, it’s easier to function loving it than not, yes?
(Still feeling fine and français, you see.)
So I walked the skinny blonde homeless thing along the banks of the Seine and told her the facts of our life. And yes, she thought I was a psycho, trying to put one over on her so I could lure her to some place where I could rape and murder her.
I took her to a public facility and I showed her how it was impossible for me to rape anyone. When I discovered my true nature, you see, I decided to dispense with the frills and dodges and I carved off anything I didn’t think was absolutely necessary.
It wasn’t hard, or even painful. You see, what pain really is, is a failure to understand. My complete understanding was something I can only describe as an über-satori—my understanding was not only an embracing of my true nature but a conquering. And let’s face it, most humans would regard the complete conquest of pain as unconditional victory within the human condition of being alive.
And then there’s most of us, who are compelled to partake of the human experience without ever becoming human. Maybe that was supposed to make me care more about real humans. It didn’t.
She tried to beat me up.
She tried to make me believe it was for these outrageous paranoid-schizo lies I was telling her but I knew by the bleak look in her eyes that she not only believed me but my telling her had cleared up the mystery of why she was the way she was as nothing else ever had—her fucking gut was telling her I’d spoken the truth. And her gut also told her to beat me up. I countered her fists with my forearms and when she got too active on me, I just held her by her wrists until she tired. Eventually she was crying into my front and wanting to know Qu’est-ce que je faire? over and over between sniffles.
“Well,” I told her, “that isn’t too hard. You fare the way you’d fare, regardless.” Her English wasn’t good enough to appreciate the pun, but some things I find irresistible even when I’m the only audience for them. Perhaps that’s part of the conquest of existence, too.
“No, seriously now, listen. Ecoutez,” I said to her mixing a little bad French with sign language and English. “I’ll show you all the things you can do voluntarily that you didn’t know you were doing all along. There’s no way you can’t do those things because the mechanism works too well. I’ll show you how to yield your information at times more convenient for you so that you can do whatever you want. Almost, anyway; close enough for government work, certainly.”
She didn’t get that either.
In the middle of my explanation of how to yield, she clapped both hands over her ears and ran away crying. I kind of figured what to expect after that and she didn’t disappoint me. The one she sent was named Gaston—I swear—and he was infuriated with me. Who did I think I was to tell the cherie she was nothing more than a poupée, and what odious cult was I proselytizing for, or had I just drunk too much antifreeze during the last pressing in some cheap vineyard. I admitted to nothing and denied nothing. Gaston was certainly not like us and could never understand. But what he lacked in knowledge—of any kind—he made up in heat. She had obviously decided to bring her formidable talents to bear on him, to make him take her side. Which, ironically, proved I was right. Only we can exert such power over humans, since our chemistry triggers their own obsessions.
Do I sound unbearably smug? I should.
I had to kill Gaston. He pulled a knife on me.
Even if it was a sad, rusty excuse for a jack-knife, I had to kill him to prove my point to her. He still could have killed me, after all, if I’d been weaker, if I’d been some scared tourist, say, or new to this kind of life. And as I’d suspected, when I was tending to the remains, I discovered that Gaston had killed two people in his time. If I reveal that one of them was the man who had raped a person who had once been his woman, would you feel bad for him and terrible anger for me? How about if I tell you that the other was the infant that was the issue of this crime? Will you then see me as Gaston’s justice caught up to him at last? How is it that you insist that your lives, all your lives together, do not mean nothing?
It was only after I found that I had been manufactured for the sake of information-gathering that I actually felt free enough to gather some. I thought my little blonde would come around to the same point of view, but when Gaston’s body bobbed to the surface of the Seine with the features and other important parts carved off and scared the Bateaux-Mouches tourists, she called the police. But what the hell, they came to us there under the impassive Louvre, and they questioned us, those of us who would allow ourselves to be questioned, and she accused me. Pointed her finger, said I did it, said she could prove it—if they would just undo my culottes, they would find that the parts that should have been there had been carved off in just the very same fashion as Gaston’s.
The police knew her as the woman who often entertained the tourists with her nude sunbathing; besides, they had no desire to see me or any other of the vagrants sans culottes. They talked to me, although no more closely than they talked to anyone else, and there was a story in the papers and some pictures. She got herself a knife and threatened to use it on me if I came near her again. She also got herself a couple of protectors and threatened to use them on me as well, though the way it actually went was, they used her and smirked at me over their shoulders while they did.
I shrugged, continued to gather information, and June continued to be beautiful.
When I was full of experiences, it was time to yield to those who had made me. I had the strong sense that they would not come to the Seine, that I would have to find some other place where they could take from me. I didn’t understand why, but my understanding was not required.
I took a little walking tour in everwidening circles, rode the Metro, found L’Opera again. Something about the arrangement of the steps and the statues … I climbed to the third step from the top and settled in to wait. I hated being in sight of the beggars who worked the streets and the entry-ways to the Metro but those who created me don’t argue or bargain—I would yield, or I would cease.
I stayed on the steps for two days without moving. Their sense of time is different from ours, so I didn’t know how long it would take—two days, five days, a month, whatever. People went up and down, refusing to see me; the police came and made me move to one side during the day. And the weather held, and held, and held.
On the third morning, clouds moved in just about the time the sky began to lighten and the air became heavily humid. I had been asleep or passed out; I went from oblivion to a state of being completely alert, sitting up on the hard stone steps. It took a few moments for me to understand why: there was no sound. I could see cars moving; some of them glided right past me where I sat, but it was like watching a silent film.
Overhead, the clouds were boiling, also in silence. I laid myself down on the steps spreadeagle. It wasn’t comfortable, no, but that wasn’t the idea, after all. I watched the clouds continue to boil and then to swirl slowly and unevenly clockwise. Appropriate to the hemisphere, I thought dreamily. A fragment of newspaper caught on my foot and then flew up into the sky, mirroring the motion of the clouds as it did. Far inside, lightning flickered almost too fast for the eye to see and too bright to bear, a harshness that turned the clouds into a negative image of themselves.
The spiral in the sky became tighter, narrower and I felt the familiar pulling
from within myself. It felt like what I imagined a tide would, or love.
My two English gentlemen passed before my inner eye, and then the business lady who had brought me to France. She had been hoping for that, I realized now; she had been hoping for love when I had come to her on the Underground, backed her up against that smeared, graffitied rear wall of the carriage rocking and swaying and put my mouth against her eye, I had been bringing love—bringing something, anyway—rather than taking away.
Perhaps knowing she had simply broken even was what had made her kiss me good-bye. It isn’t often that human compromise doesn’t involve some kind of loss. And all that went up to that flickering, spinning cloud-flower in the sky, too. Feeling what she’d felt, I cried a little or at least tears ran from my eyes, because I was an emotion machine as well, when the information called for that kind of context.
The cloud-flower seemed to grow larger and to lower as well; I thought I could feel the cold vapor swirling on my face, the cold wind doing strange things to my eyes. There was the sensation of hard stone at the back of my head suddenly overridden by a more powerful pulling than before, as if I were about to be turned inside out.
And then nothing. I was lying on the steps with the rain pouring down from the dirt-gray sky, though above me was one new shadow. Just a blur at first, it resolved itself into a familiar figure, soaked completely through and miserable, angry and curious at the same time. She had my forelock in her dirty fist. She pulled me up to a sitting position. Something about the rain she yelled into my face, barely audible over the sound of it beating down on the pavement, making a fist of her free hand, threatening me, then pointing at the sky. I tried to shake my head and then settled for just looking bewildered. “What?” I asked her. “What are you saying? Qu’est-ce que tu dis?”
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 44
