A Drop of Night

by Stefan Bachmann

  I’m assuming he’s referring to the iPads in the armrests, the flat-screens showing screen savers of beaches and waterfalls, the random potted mango plant next to the jump seat.

  Miss Sei ushers us into a lounge, all white leather and shiny black wood. Sofas curl along the walls like huge Persian cats. A bar stands in one corner, three Art Deco stools and a bunch of brightly labeled bottles poking up like glass chimneys. Red Spikes, Norse God, and the others file past us, through a glass door and into the jet’s next compartment. Miss Sei gestures us toward the sofas and follows them, wordless. Dorf pauses. He smiles at us.

  “All yours!” he says, and sweeps his big hands out on either side. “I’ll see you in Paris, bright and early tomorrow morning.”

  He ducks after Miss Sei. A door slides shut. We’re alone.

  Wait, that’s it? No introductory speech? No “Welcome, young chickadees”?

  We sit in a semi-catatonic daze for about a millisecond. And now Jules says: “This. Is. Awesome,” and sprawls himself all over a sofa, and it’s like no one even thinks this is bizarre. Lilly bounces from barstool to mango plant to waterfall screen saver, cooing appreciatively at everything. Hayden goes to the bar and starts clinking through the bottles. I sit down on a couch, hook one leg over the other, and watch the carnage.

  Will eases himself onto the sofa next to me.

  Neither of us speaks. The pilot tells us to prepare for takeoff. I glance over at Will. His hands are on his knees. His eyes are serious, like everything he’s seeing is an epic tragedy. I agree, Will.

  Jules and Lilly are on their phones, laughing about something, and I get sour grape-y for a second, wondering if they remember the contract stipulations about no social media and no sending pictures, or if they’re just doing whatever and hoping they won’t get caught.

  Will clears his throat. I glance over at him. He clears his throat again and says: “There aren’t any seat belts.”

  His voice is gorgeous, deep and quiet, and it has a slight drawl, the a’s and r’s softened to buttery nothings.

  “Nope,” I say.

  Silence. That must have been his entire repertoire of small talk, so I decide to help him out. I wave toward the others. “Gonna be a blast, huh. Nine hours with these people? And then two weeks. And then another nine hours. What we really need are cages. And tranquilizers.”

  He peers at me. His eyes go a shade bluer and a shade curious.

  “Cages and tranquilizers!” I say again, louder. The engines are revving up. The lights on the runway spread away in twin orange lines, like well-trained fireflies.

  One of Will’s eyebrows cricks a little. “No. But seat belts would be a good idea.”

  Um . . . right. I don’t know how to communicate with people who don’t understand sarcasm. Supposedly you can tell the intelligence of someone by how well they recognize humor. I don’t know if it’s true, but I live by that. It’s a comfort to assume that when people don’t think you’re funny, it’s because they’re just stupid people.

  “Okay.” I scoot an inch away from him and slide my headphones on. “Good talk.”

  End of that relationship. I hit the screen on my iPod. Music flows.

  I watch the cabin slant as the plane takes off. Will doesn’t move from the sofa, which strikes me as awfully gallant of him, considering I just scratched his name from my mental Book of All Things. I close my eyes and wonder if maybe I could get along with these people. It’s not impossible. People make friends sometimes, just by accident.

  “Hi!” Lilly squeaks, and practically pile-drives herself between Will and me. “We didn’t really meet before. I’m Lilly. Hi.”

  My eyes snap open. I was listening to Ingrid Michaelson, and I was at that part of the song where you can actually hear the smile in her voice. Let’s get rich and buy our parents homes in the south of France. I love that part. I listen to the whole song for it.

  “Hi,” I say. I don’t take off my headphones.

  “What’s your name?” Lilly asks. She smiles at me encouragingly.

  “Anouk,” I say. “Didn’t you read your folder?”

  Lilly’s smile splinters a tiny bit, but somehow she keeps it in place through sheer force of will. I look at her curiously. She doesn’t seem brilliant. She doesn’t seem like she can climb a wall or scuba dive, either.

  “That’s a cool name,” she says. “Is it Russian?”

  “What?” It comes out annoyed. I slip my headphones down my neck. “No. Dutch, I think. Or Flemish.”

  “Ooh, my aunt lives in Flemings!” Lilly says. “Yeah. In Wisconsin.” She touches my knee and gives me another smile, like living in Flemings, Wisconsin, is an accomplishment.

  It is. I don’t know how anyone does it.

  “Congrats to your aunt,” I say, moving my leg. “No, really, Flemings, Wisconsin. Wow.”

  Lilly’s eyes go sharp. For a second I think she’s angry, but nope: it’s the same look she gave Will before deciding to not-hug him. Only this time she’s decided that whatever my problem is, it’s not going in the good-deeds-for-later folder. It’s going to be dealt with now. She pulls her scuffed-up chucks onto the sofa, wraps her bedazzled arms around her knees, and starts talking. It’s like watching waves come in on a beach, or someone vomiting after a party: endless, and you wonder where it all comes from.

  Will looks over at us, slightly alarmed. Now he gets up and moves to a different sofa. Take me with you! I want to scream, but he’s not so good with mental telepathy. And Lilly’s nowhere close to done.

  She talks about baking quinoa vegan brownies. Her alternative-hippie homeschooling parents, whom she clearly adores. A 3-D-looking tattoo of a fly on her arm, which she now realizes was a bad idea because it makes her look like she has the plague or is demonically possessed. She was grounded for getting that tattoo, and when she was done being grounded she got a second tattoo on the sole of her foot. She sang The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” in her high school’s talent show and didn’t win. She doesn’t actually show me the tattoos. And why is she still in high school?

  I throw my head back and stare up at the little lights in the ceiling. Lilly’s barely even breathing between paragraphs. She’s definitely too enraptured by her own stories to care that I’m being socially abominable. Her voice becomes a buzz in the background. Everything becomes a buzz. Air systems, jet engines, the clinking of glass—all of it fades into a single flat line of sound.

  I sit up. Glance around. It’s so weird. Like an eerily slow-moving dream. Hayden is lying on a sofa, sipping Orangina through a straw. Will and Jules are next to each other, and Jules seems to be trying to make conversation, and Will seems to be trying not to die of awkwardness. I look to the sliding panel that separates us from Dorf and the rest of the jet. The glass is frosted, shot through with clear strips. I see a sliver of Miss Sei—a leg, some skirt. One eye wide, watching me.

  There’s a beeping, sudden and shrill, and sound envelops me again. The captain’s voice breaks through the speakers: “Miss Sei, Professor Dorf, we’re coming up on some turbulence. Would you like to—”

  A commotion on the other side of the glass. The speaker goes off in our compartment, but I can still hear it, muffled, in the one ahead of us.

  I shiver. Lilly looks over at me, questioning. I slide my earphones back on and turn the music up loud.

  Aurélie du Bessancourt—August 29, 1789

  Mama returned to her chambers well past midnight. I heard her on the stairs, the noisy clatter of her shoes as she hurried up, her door creaking shut. An airy, velvet hush descended. But still the château seemed to groan and shift, as if some small object at its heart were pacing, unable to come to peace.

  The next morning Mama joined us for breakfast. Her face was drawn and pale, her eyes oddly watery. I should have realized something was not right. Were I not such a fool, I would have silenced my sisters with a severe look and we would have eaten quickly, communicating solely through glances and the tapping of silver, and then f
led to dusty, unused guest rooms where we could discuss the matter in private. But I wanted dreadfully to hear tales of the new palace. When my sisters crowded around her I joined them, asked Mama if the palace was very large, and how many candles it must take to light the hallways, and was it warm in the depths, or bitter cold, and was there a salle d’Apollon like the one in Versailles?

  She would not speak a word. She sat gingerly at the table, peeling an orange with a paring knife, cutting it into neat, jewel-bright wedges, and when the servants brought her a bit of fried liver in a painted china dish, she blanched and pushed it away. We continued to chatter mercilessly. We would not cease. And after a while Mama began to weep, putting her hands to her ears, and the orange lay on the table, a knobbly spiral of peel, and the rich flesh within hacked to bits.

  5

  Exhibit A—I had a boyfriend once. I was fifteen. He was fifteen. He had green eyes and floppy hair and liked Vampire Weekend, and if that doesn’t guarantee a life of shared bliss, I don’t know what does. We were going to get married. Move to the West Village and have zero children and drink tea and live a life of bohemian ennui. It didn’t happen. Green-eyed Boyfriend was expelled for pouring lighter fluid all over the bike stands and setting them on fire. Not even to protest anything. Just because. It was okay, though, because he didn’t know we were getting married. I never actually talked to him. The height of our romance consisted of me ignoring him all the way through chemistry, and the instant I heard about the bike stand incident I was over him anyway. People who are dumb enough to light bike stands on fire are not people I want to share a lifetime of bohemian ennui with.

  Exhibit B—Two years earlier, when I was thirteen, I went to the library and checked out all the books I could find on sociopaths and bizarre human psychology. The librarian probably thought I was deranged, but I wanted to be sure. I figured if I had a medical reason to be mean and angry, things would be simpler. It turns out having medical reasons to be mean and angry doesn’t actually help you become less mean and angry. It doesn’t fix you.

  I lean my head against the window of the black Mercedes and watch the landscape rush past. It’s an endless conveyor belt—frosty green fields, gray sky. We’re whooshing along a six-lane highway. Behind us are two more Mercedes—long, low cars with tinted windows. Ahead is another. We’re like a shiny, furiously speeding funeral procession.

  Jules is lying on the seat across from me, staring up at the ceiling. Professor Dorf and a driver are up front behind darkened glass. Will, Lilly, and Hayden are one car behind us. I’m starting to regret this arrangement. Jules is much too effusive for me. He has this way of laughing loudly and then looking at me cautiously, like the only reason he laughed is because he wants me to laugh, too. I don’t like that kind of pressure. Still, it’s better than being in the other car. Lilly’s trying to drag Will out of his shell, and I don’t know what Hayden’s doing. He didn’t stick with Orangina for long on the plane ride, and his reaction to all the alcohol was to become very slow and buzzy, and speak in short, dramatic sentences about the sky and the tarmac. But maybe he’s knocked out cold by now. I wish Jules were knocked out cold.

  He’s just being friendly, Anouk. He’s just a nice person. It’s possible. But this is where Exhibit B comes into play. I don’t believe in the whole “deep down people are basically good” notion. I think deep down is where people are the worst.

  “And so for our social sculpting class this one guy got a bunch of horse manure and mixed it with Plasticine until it was this really glossy brown, almost like chocolate, and he put it in a bear-shaped mold and called it ‘Poo Bear,’ get it? It was, like, a commentary on how culture is packaged to look appealing but is basically crap. It was brilliant.” He raises his eyebrows in admiration and looks out the window.

  “Except Winnie-the-Pooh isn’t crap,” I say. “Winnie-the-Pooh is amazing.”

  “What? It’s not about Winnie-the-Pooh, it’s— You’re missing the point.”

  “No, I’m not. ‘People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day’? That’s brilliant. If Mr. Social Sculptor wanted to be all clever and subversive, he should have made a shampoo bottle out of crap, called it ‘Sham-Poo,’ and it could have been a commentary on all the toxic chemicals in commercial shampoo, and then he could pretend he’s a crusader against multinational cosmetic corporations instead of just skewering children’s books he’s probably never read.” I click my tongue. “Missed opportunity there.”

  “Don’t you study art history?”

  “Is that a legitimate question, or are you trying to shut me up?”

  Jules laughs. I know he’s doing that inquisitive little sideways look right now.

  I keep my gaze fixed on the landscape outside. We landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport about 10 A.M. Paris time and were whisked straight from the tarmac to our waiting motorcade. We didn’t even have to go through Immigration.

  I get a quick blur of kebab restaurants, bright signs, and concrete-block houses as we pass through a town. Jules starts talking about bands I’ve never heard of. I wonder if he’s just trying out subjects until I latch on to something. Sorry, my life consists of reading Tolstoy in original Cyrillic and watching foreign-dubbed Hollywood movies on repeat until I understand the dialogue through context. Also dreaming up Machiavellian revenge. Also being irritating and pretentious. At least we have that in common.

  I slip the blue folder out of my bag and page through it. Jules starts talking about a book, still staring at the ceiling. (“It’s called The Beauty of Chartreuse on the River Styx, and it’s about quirky teens who fall in love and die.”)

  I see Lilly’s one-sheet:

  Lilly Watts—skill set: audio and visual sensitivities.

  What does that mean? That she can see and hear?

  I flip further. I really want to be sleeping right now. I didn’t even doze on the flight over. I changed out of my pointy witch shoes at the Paris airport in favor of some sensible-looking crepe-soled brogues, but my toes still hurt, and all I want to do is lie down on the black leather seat and conk out. I force myself to read:

  Very few records of the Marquis du Bessancourt and his family have survived. Many of their papers were likely destroyed to avoid capture and the widespread repercussions against aristocrats during the Reign of Terror. Surviving documents show that Frédéric du Bessancourt was born in 1734 as the only legitimate child of a local nobleman, later rising to prominence as a banker and businessman under Louis XV of France. At this time, he also gained a reputation as a scientist, natural philosopher, and a frequent lender to the king and his successor, Louis XVI, financing much of the monarchs’ lavish lifestyle. In 1774, the marquis married Célestine Gauthier. They had several children.

  All records of the Bessancourt family cease after 1789. They are never mentioned again, either in revolutionary propaganda or in prison registries in and around the city of Paris. It is at this time that we assume he and his family fled underground, escaping France shortly afterward and reestablishing themselves under other names in England or Germany. Construction on a subterranean palace may have begun as early as 1760 in the vast caverns under the ancestral château. The palace, known at the time for unknown reasons as the Palais du Papillon (Palace of the Butterfly), has sat untouched for two hundred years. It lies below the water table, in bedrock, inviting the possibility that some areas are partially or entirely submerged. We have no definite idea how large the palace is, how structurally sound, how safe. Regardless of its current state, it will be a treasure trove of revolutionary era detail and perhaps the most significant discovery from eighteenth-century Europe in history.

  We are pleased to have you with us on this momentous expedition and hope that this project will be a rewarding and enlightening experience for every one of you.

  It’s signed with an illegible scribble. Underneath is written, helpfully:

  The Sapani Family

  “Hey?” Jules is looking at me. I wonder how long I’ve been ig
noring him. “You okay?”

  I drop my head against the window again and make some indeterminable noise against the glass. For some reason he takes that as a no.

  “You know,” he says, as if pondering some major philosophical revelation. “You’re a weird one. Normal people would be like, ‘Yayyy, going to France with an awesome person named Jules and also exploring a two-hundred-year-old site, yayyy!’” He waves his hands with each yay. “I can’t figure you out.”

  “I can’t figure me out, either.” I watch a twisted old tree by the side of the road grow closer, larger, gone. “Also, normal people didn’t go on this trip. Just so you know.”

  He’s probably making a face, being weirded out. I don’t care. I do care, but at some point you have to stop caring, or you become Chernobyl-dead-zone levels of crazy. I am excited to be here. I can’t wait to get into the palace, start discovering things, forget about New York, forget about college and the next sixty-plus years of my life that I have yet to muddle through. I just don’t know how to communicate that to people.

  “So, what are you here for?” Jules asks. “What are your stakes?”

  I jam my feet up onto my seat and stare at the tips of my sensible brogues. I can’t actually tell him. What am I going to say, that I’m being all Huck Finn and running away? Rebelling against the status quo, searching for redemption, trying to find an identity outside of being a punching bag for my dysfunctional family’s psychoses? Because that’s what I’m here for, and I don’t need him to tell me that what I really need is therapy/some people have actual problems/those shoes are Prada, how could you possibly be unhappy?

  “I’m here for the experience,” I say. Lie. “And to practice my signature forging.” I sling a wrist across my forehead. “Those selection rounds, whew! Got any dotted lines requiring signatures from parents and guardians? I’ll sign them for you.”

  “You forged your parents’ signatures? Do they even know you’re here?”