by Jeremy Bates
“Not really.”
“It is like what I told you before. In the catacombs, the above world no longer matters. I do not care if you are a janitor or a company president. Here, there are no bosses, no masters. We are all free. We are all naked.”
“And cataphiles just like to get naked,” Rob told me with a nudge and wink. “You should hear about some of the mad orgies they have. Sick fucks, they are.”
“We are not sick,” Danièle said. “You are sick.”
“You know, Danny,” Rob said, “I don’t know if it’s a language thing, but I’ve heard better comebacks from preschoolers.”
Danièle brushed past him and went to the next room.
“Seriously,” Rob said to Pascal and me. “You guys don’t agree? I keep waiting for her to bust out, ‘I don’t shut up I grow up and when I look at you I throw up!’”
“And your mother, she lick it up,” Pascal said.
Rob grinned. “Right on, bro! But it sounds sort of gay with your accent.”
Pascal shoved him. “Ta mere suce des queues devant le prisu.”
“And yours sucks bears in the forest.”
Leaving them to swap mother barbs, I went looking for Danièle. At first I had no idea which way she went, then I spotted the afterglow of her light around a corner.
I joined her in the largest room yet—and came to an abrupt halt. Three of the four walls were covered by a massive, continuous mural, a reproduction of The Great Wave, one of the most famous works of Japanese art in the world. It depicted an enormous white-capped wave roaring against a pink sky, seemingly about to swallow Mt. Fuji whole.
Bridgette and I used to have a print of it. She had picked it up at a garage sale, along with a number of old black-and-white Hawaii photos: a surfer standing next to a redwood board in the 1890s, the luxury ocean liner Mariposa at Honolulu Harbor, six-year-old Shirley Temple singing “The Good Ship Lollipop” on Waikiki Beach, the China Clipper landing at Pearl Harbor. We had framed all of these and hung them in a horizontal line above the sofa in the living room.
Danièle interpreted my stunned reaction as awe and said, “It is amazing, right?”
I nodded, but I wasn’t really listening. Bridgette was inside my head, and I couldn’t get her out. She’d been wearing a yellow cotton dress with a fat black belt that day of the garage sale. I remember because I’d teased her by calling her “Bumblebee.” Along with the print and the photos, she had two bags of groceries from the Asian supermarket down the street, and we ended up making a green Thai curry for dinner, which we ate with a bottle of relatively expensive wine. I’d just gotten the job with the travel book company a few days earlier, and we had been celebrating all week.
After dinner we’d been goofing around on the bed and she had said to me, “Should I go off the pill?”
“The pill?”
“Do we want a baby, Will?”
I was thrilled. “Really?”
“We’re getting married in three weeks. If we start trying now…”
“We’ll have been married for about a year by the time he’s born.”
“He?”
“He, she, whatever.”
She beamed. “So?”
“Yeah, I want to… I mean, if you want to.”
“Of course I want to!”
And we had rolled around and play wrestled, our clothes coming off piece by piece…
Pascal and Rob had entered the room behind me, causing me to start. Pascal started chatting with Danièle, while Rob slumped onto the chiseled limestone bench that lined the walls. He dug through his backpack, produced a couple beers, and asked me if I wanted one.
I turned my back to the mural, and the past.
“Sure,” I said.
Danièle and Pascal produced some tealights from their backpacks and placed the small candles around the cavern. Then they took off their helmets and turned off the headlamps, presumably to save batteries. They instructed Rob and me to do the same.
When everyone was settled on the limestone bench, I studied the can of beer Rob had given me suspiciously. The label read: “Bière du Démon.”
“Strongest blonde beer in the world, boss,” he told me.
I didn’t doubt him; it boasted a twelve-percent alcohol content.
“You drink this often?” I asked.
“Never tried it. But thought it would be appropriate for tonight. And they were only a buck a can at the Super U near my place.”
I popped the tab, brushed the froth off the top, and sniffed. It smelled of fusel alcohols and bitter yeast. The taste, a skunky sweetness, wasn’t much better—and then the burning of cheap vodka kicked in.
Rob made a disgusted face—I imagine I was making a similar one—but said, “It’s not that bad.” To prove he meant this, he took another sip.
I smacked my lips. The aftertaste was an unwanted gift that kept on giving. I thought I could detect a hollow fishiness, and not in the delicate sashimi type of way.
Nevertheless, the demon grog was drinkable, and drink it I would. I wanted to forget that damn mural and forget Bridgette—Bridgette who was now married and pregnant.
I took another, longer sip.
“You like it?” Danièle asked me, surprised.
“I’ve had worse.”
“It is for hobos.”
“I probably look like a hobo right now with all this muck on me,” I said. “By the way, where’s all the sand from?”
“The ocean,” Danièle replied. “Millions of years ago Paris used to be under a tropical sea. And I should tell you,” she added, “that this is one of the most famous places in the catacombs for parties. If you come on a weekend, Friday or Saturday, you will likely see many cataphiles. Everybody drinks, smokes. It can be a lot of fun. Do you smoke, Will?”
“Pot?”
She nodded.
“I don’t buy it.” I shrugged. “But if it’s around…”
“Good. I will get you high later.”
I didn’t know if I wanted to get high down here, but I didn’t say anything.
“Any chicks at these ragers?” Rob asked. “Or is it one big sausage fest?”
Danièle scowled at him. “You are married to my sister, Rosbif. You should not care if there are ‘chicks’ present or not.”
“I’m asking for Rascal’s sake.”
“Pascal does not need woman help from you, do not worry.”
Rob and Pascal began bantering back and forth in French.
“Do you know most of the other cataphiles you run into?” I asked Danièle.
“Some. But there are always new people.”
“What if assholes like those scuba guys show up to one of these parties?”
She shrugged. “Usually everyone is friendly. The people you have to be careful about are the meth heads and drug dealers. But you do not see them very often. And if you do, there are more normal people than weirdos. So if you stay together, you are okay. Do not go anywhere on your own. That is the second rule of the catacombs.”
“What’s the first?”
“Bring backup batteries.”
“No, no, no,” Pascal said, shaking his head. “The first rule is to get out again. The second is to come back. And the third is to do whatever you like.”
“You know what would be awesome?” Rob said. “A stripper pole, right over there, in the center of the room.” He had moved off the bench and was stretched out in a recumbent position on the sand, his head in one hand, his beer in the other. He would have been right at home with a couple palm frond-fanning, grape-dangling servants hovering over him.
“At one of the parties,” Danièle said, “a woman gave everyone who wanted one a lap dance. I do not know if she was a stripper, but if she behaves like that, probably.”
I said, “What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen down here?”
“Oh, so much!” She made a thinking face. “There used to be a group of women called the catachicks. They walked around in their bikinis and nothing
else.”
Pascal said something.
Danièle replied, shaking her head.
He persisted.
She shrugged and looked at me. “Pascal wants me to tell you one of our stories,” she said. “I can do this. But I have to warn you it is very scary. Maybe you do not want to hear it.”
I set aside my beer, bumped a Marlboro from my pack, and lit up. “Go for it,” I told her, exhaling a jet of smoke away from her.
“Okay…but do not say I did not warn you.” She cleared her throat. “So, it happened a few weeks after Pascal and I were sent into the catacombs for our initiation at Les Mines. We wanted to visit the tunnels again on our own, but we knew nothing then, we had no maps, so we found a guide online. His name was Henri. He charged us two hundred euros.” She confirmed this with Pascal, who nodded. “Yes, two hundred,” she went on. “When we met him, he was with another couple, a guy and girl our age, Etienne and Mari. They were very sweet. So it was the five of us. We explored for maybe ten hours. Then suddenly—and this is crazy—all our lights went.”
“At the same time?” Rob said.
“It is true, Rosbif. We do not know why, but it happened. And no one had matches or lighters. You do not know what it is like down here without any light. The darkness, it is so incredible. Wait—you must experience this. Pascal, put out the candles.”
I stiffened, then berated myself. There was no reason to be afraid of the dark. If we couldn’t relight the tealights for whatever reason, we had our headlamps right next to us.
I took a final drag and stubbed out my cigarette while Pascal went around the cavern, snuffing the candles one by one. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but when Pascal extinguished the final flame, a darkness like I had never experienced enveloped us. Only it wasn’t a darkness; it was a blackness. Black-hole black. I blinked, but that changed nothing. It was like being in some sort of sensory deprivation chamber. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t smell anything aside from the omnipresent dank musk, like time stored in a bottle.
And Danièle had said her lights—everyone’s lights—had failed them? She had been plunged into this nothingness without the reassuring knowledge she could leave it anytime she wanted? That would be a psychological nightmare. Obviously she had escaped. But what if she hadn’t? I tried to imagine what it would be like to walk alone in utter blackness, with only your hand on the wall to guide you, your mouth dry from dehydration, your throat and lungs burning from the rank air and the countless hours of screaming for help, your feet weeping with blisters, your legs jellied with exhaustion, nothing around you but tunnels and more tunnels, ad infinitum.
At some point it would hit you that you weren’t getting out of there alive. And then what? Did you give in to your despair and slump to the cold hard ground? Or did you keep pressing on, driven by the naïve hope of salvation, the sheer will to survive? Would you eventually turn on the others with you? Would you begin knocking them off one by one, either out of primal hunger or insanity? Or would the insanity not come until later, when you were little more than skin and bones, when the rats grew bold enough to sample your living flesh, when you were counting down the hours and minutes until the end?
“Amazing, yes?” Danièle said softly.
I started at the abrupt sound of her voice.
“Yeah, great,” Rob said. “Now I know what it’s like to be dead. Thanks, Danny. I’ve always wondered.”
“Will?” she said.
I found it strange to be speaking in complete darkness. It was sort of like speaking on the phone to someone, even though they were next to you.
“Freaky,” I said.
“I am going to finish my story in the dark. Is that okay?”
“Seriously?” Rob said.
“It will not take long.” She cleared her throat. “So—Pascal and me were down here with our guide and those other two people and our lights went out. It was just like this—only for real. At first we tried to get our lights to turn back on. When they did not, Henri told us he knew a manhole exit close by. He said he could lead us there, even in the dark. We walked for ten minutes, and it was the longest ten minutes of my life. I thought we were going to die, I really did. But then we saw light, a pinhole coming through the manhole cover twenty meters up. We climbed the ladder. The cover was not sealed, and we pushed it open. We were right in the middle of a street, but it was late, and there were no cars, so we climbed out.”
There was a long pause.
“That’s it?” Rob said.
“No, that is not. Etienne was missing. Mari said she had been holding his hand the entire time. Then, at the ladder, she said he told her to go up, he would be behind her. But he never came.”
“You’re full of it,” Rob said.
“I am not, Rosbif. Ask Pascal.”
“C’est vraiement,” Pascal said.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“We called down to him. There was no answer. Henri bought new batteries from a nearby store and put them in his flashlight. It worked and he and Mari went back down.”
“You and Pascal didn’t go?”
“Are you listening to me, Will? I was so scared. We waited at the top for them to return. They did, with Etienne. But he was all…messed up. He was like a zombie and would not say anything at all. We took him to a café, we gave him food and water. He finally spoke a little. It was in a flat tone, like he was not aware he was speaking. He told us he remembered walking in the dark, then all of a sudden he became very cold. He did not recall anything after that. Nothing. Not until Henri and Mari found him again, curled up in a ball on the ground.”
I frowned. “But you said he was holding his girlfriend’s hand all the way to the manhole.”
“Yes,” Danièle agreed. “And he told her he would climb up behind her. That is the thing, we have no idea if she was lying, or if…”
“Or what?” Rob said.
“Or…” I could almost sense Danièle shrugging. “I cannot answer that.”
“Bullshit!”
“It is true, Rosbif. We exchanged contact information with the couple, in case they needed to get in touch again. They did not. But I did. I needed to know if they had been playing a joke on us. So I sent an email to them about one month later. Only Mari replied. She told me she was no longer with Etienne. Apparently after that day in the catacombs his mental condition got worse and worse until his parents could not care for him and were forced to admit him to a psychiatric hospital. To this day, Pascal and I have no idea what really happened to him.”
Another long pause. The silence that ensued was deep and ominous. I wanted to turn on my headlamp. Danièle’s story might have been laughable had she told it aboveground. But hearing it here in the catacombs where it happened, in the unprecedented blackness, was borderline terrifying.
A quick snick. A flame appeared.
Pascal went around the cavern, relighting the candles.
I looked at Rob, then Danièle. In the candlelight Rob seemed half confused, half amused, like he’d shit his pants and didn’t know what to do. Danièle’s eyes were bright and intense—and not a hint of deception in them.
“Fuck me blue,” Rob said, chugging the last of his beer, crushing the can, and opening another. “That’s something, Danny.”
I said, “This Etienne guy must have had some sort of nervous breakdown.”
“Obviously, boss. Why do you think he got locked up in a mental asylum.”
“I mean while he was in the catacombs. He didn’t think he was getting out. His mind snapped.”
“But who was holding the girl’s hand all the way to the manhole?”
“He must have been.”
“Then he wanders back into the tunnel and curls up in a ball?”
“Rosbif is right,” Danièle said. “That makes no sense.”
I said, “So we’re talking about ghosts now?”
She shook her head, shrugged. “Anyway—you wanted to know
the craziest thing that happened to me. That is it.”
“But you still come down here all the time?”
“I did not come again for maybe six months. But eventually I did, yes. I cannot stay away. This place…it is magical for me.”
Pascal returned to us and withdrew three objects from his backpack. At first I thought they were really old flashlights before realizing they were juggling torches. The handles appeared to be made of spiral-wound plastic. The upper portion of the dowels were shrouded in aluminum.
He set a bottle of kerosene on the ground and held a torch for me to take.
“It is easy,” he said in that French way of his with equal stress on each syllable. “You try.”
I looked at him, but couldn’t tell whether he was being friendly or not.
I said, “I can’t juggle.”
“Just one. Like this.” He flicked the torch into the air, then caught it again. “See, easy.” He smiled at me—his smug GQ smirk.
No, not friendly, I decided. “I told you—”
“Okay, okay, I know, you cannot do it, no problem.”
He doused all three wicks in kerosene and lit them with his lighter. Orange flames whooshed to life. Still grinning—now like a showman—he began to freestyle, tossing the fiery torches from one hand to the other in a jaunty, cascading fashion.
Danièle clapped to an inaudible beat. Rob joined her. I didn’t. Pascal was really beginning to get on my nerves. I’ve been trying to cut him some slack. I knew the attitude he was giving me stemmed from the fact I was with Danièle. To be fair, I didn’t blame the guy for that. He had apparently liked her for several years, couldn’t find the balls to do anything about it, then some American rolls into town and hooks up with her, and he gets delegated to yesterday’s news. If I were in his position, I wouldn’t like me either.
But he wasn’t giving it a rest; it was one snub after another. And now this: offering to let me juggle only to prove to everyone he could do it better. He reminded me of a reporter at the Brooklyn Eagle who always caught me in the kitchenette while I was making coffee. He was a nerdy, know-it-all sort, and he would ask trivialities like, “Do you know how the Greek Thales measured the height of the pyramids?” And after you gave him an inane answer or passed, he would tell you in an offhand way, like he was an unsung genius, that Thales measured the shadow the pyramid cast on the ground at noon. He was a phony and an attention-seeker, and so was Pascal—or Chess—in his own subtle way.
