The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  It took Marat two days to track down Sven Johanssen, teaching phys ed at a Fresno middle school, twice divorced and living with an auto shop manager. They got drunk at a bar that smelled like hay, domestic beer four bucks a pitcher. Raising his voice over a player piano in the corner, Sven explained the one-armed monster and mad Swedish bacchanalia, Esmerelda’s sleeping spot on the couch, Jasper’s huge snoring problem, the unpleasant but necessary hubbub with the eviction board due to Esmerelda’s penchant for rent-ducking. “Nice voman, ya,” he said, his face warming, “and ahl-vays ready to hahmp. Like bouncing on maarshmellows, sveet and soft. Oy, de gurl could eat!”

  Marat sped back to San Francisco in a hot lager stink, smoking and repacking his pipe every five miles, his hotboxed BMW steamy as a rainforest at lunchtime. Even soaked in relaxants, the only thing on the planet that made any sense was going back to Fresno and beating Sven senseless with the tennis rackets he kept in the trunk. His angry hands scrolled through radio stations and briefly settled on loud church music, a roof-rattling hymnal that called up fractured memories of minivan rides, the fable about his grandmother at the diner, Jasper’s mom, the one who’d cracked open the past and could probably do it again.

  A few calls around the city got him an address in the worst part of Hunter’s Point, no phone number. He went first thing in the morning. Fifteen gangsters monitored his parking job through red eyes, and he hustled up caved-in stairs and rapped the weak door as hard as he could, staying low and moving around to make for a difficult target, until an array of locks were slowly unwound and he fell inside.

  A bare bulb illuminated junky furniture obviously excavated from trash piles, a trash-bag-covered loveseat, a green plastic lawn table balanced out with folded newspaper under the legs, a couple of folding chairs and a hot plate and two twin beds in the corner, a wheelchair parked in front of a black-and-white television featuring Alex Trebek sans mustache. An ancient midget in a bathrobe held a broomstick warily. “We won’t have the rent until the Medicare check comes,” the midget said slowly, her voice a dying frog. “I told the last three that.”

  “I’m Marat,” he said.

  “Marat?” She dropped the broom and took a step closer, eyes widening like blooming black flowers. “Got your father’s eyes,” she ribbited. “Can I fix you a drink?”

  “I’ll get it,” he said, and picked two chipped mugs off the dish rack, scrubbed them with a filthy rag, and filled them up with lemon-colored water from the tap.

  “Thank you,” she said, easing into a folding chair. She held the mug under her nose. “I’m glad you came,” she said, “and I’m sorry we haven’t met sooner. I don’t get around like I used to.”

  “You need help,” he stated. “You gotta get out of here.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Her watery eyes circled the grim room. “Been home for a long time. We’re used to it.”

  “You’ll die in this room,” he pointed out. “They might not find you for months.”

  Her face shuttered and reopened, fresh purple discoloring her irises. “That’s your Aunt Tina, watching television,” she said somberly.

  “Jasper never gave you money?”

  “He tried.” Insinuating something deep and dirty, everything Marat needed.

  “Ditch this hole,” he said. “I’ll get you into the Sequoias today. It’s the nicest old-folks home in town. Gourmet meals, round-the-clock medical. They’ll take care of Tina too, from here on out, I’ll see to that.”

  “I don’t know,” she warbled.

  “They’ll be here at noon. Otherwise I’ll get this place condemned. It should have been torn down years ago.”

  “Well.” Dabbing her hand at her face like a moist towelette. “I guess we’ll try it out.”

  “Good.” He sniffed the tap water, detected chemicals and rust, then placed the mug on the table. “I need you to tell me about my father,” he said.

  “What is there to know? He’s a big star now, up from the streets.”

  “He’s had problems,” Marat said. “Made a lot of mistakes.”

  “We all do,” she nodded.

  “I need to know what he did,” he said. “He must have told you things. You must have seen things. I need to know where I come from, what’s inside me, so I can stop it.”

  A long slow pssh, air leaving the tire. “He’s my son and I love him,” she said, “but part of him will never be right.” In slow, dispassionate detail Karen described the swimming pool abduction, the impromptu stop at the gas station bathroom, the massive gravity of diamond rings. Jasper ducking prophylactics, Esmereda’s judo press and cruel taunts setting off heartbroken thrashing, self-immolation, the darkness from which he could never dig out. A decade camping in the woods under the Golden Gate Bridge, his meals begged off the visitor center snack bar at closing time. Learning to climb hills sightless and fend off thugs with sweep kicks. Washing hollowed eye sockets with salt water, padding over excisions performed with a wheelbarrow wrench.

  Nighttime trips to Tina’s bed. Forced entries and hanger abortions. Then hitchhiking to Louisiana and years on the hot sidewalks, stealing vodka out of grocery stores and singing in the sewers.

  Marat walked to Tina’s wheelchair and stood behind her, placed his hands on the taped-up handlebars and watched half of Jeopardy! over the top of his aunt’s gray hair bun while she gurgled and snored. All the details lining up, much too right to be wrong.

  How everything hurt. He kissed his aunt and grandmother goodbye, then walked to the car and called Joel. “Schedule a debate.”

  “Not now. I got major cost overruns on the Manama project. They don’t tax their own people in Bahrain, but apparently it’s OK to tax me triple.”

  “Last chance. Do a debate.”

  “So I can get my ass waxed on live television? She has the training, the pedigree, the moves. I can’t hang.” Gobbling noises, the rapid and sloppy consumption of life force. “In other words, this dirt has to be mind-blowing. Sloppy pigpen election-winning stuff. And all truth too, or else—consequences.”

  Marat waited. Fading stars wavered like scattered plutonium seeds. Him and Joel Lumpkin, a couple of genuine bastards. A long suck on the porcelain potcooker he kept in the glove compartment, and he knew what he had to do. “I’ll give it to you at the debate.”

  “There’s not gonna be a debate.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing.”

  The phone breathed in Marat’s hand. He thought about cutting free, clenching his palm and ending it with a clack.

  But what else was there than this?

  “I want the dirt before I go on that stage,” said Joel.

  “You will,” Marat declared, letting the fumes lock him shut, suffocating saturnine smoke.

  “All right.”

  The next night Marat stumbled out of a taxi in front of the Fillmore, six hours drunk, long sips from a gravity bong blipping in short-term memory banks. Brown and black spots flecked across his shirt, he couldn’t remember from what. His crotch was oily and sore, his scalp itched like a horse’s ass. His head filled with bus exhaust and honking and Robespierre’s volunteers’ voices urging pedestrians to join them, young women in designer outfits projecting cheer, men wearing limited-edition baseball caps cajoling quietly, understanding and unpushy, as if selling high-end small-room stereos, perfect for master bathrooms or pool houses or tucked away in the sailboat cabin. Their energy carried across the dirty boulevard, sweeping over the garbage pasted to the gutter with urine, freshening up the smell of burned grease wafting over from fast-food joints. Robespierre’s campaign supporters streamed from buses and cabs, parroting smiles, their eyes snapped open and dashing sprightly across the evening streetscape, something musical in their faces.

  The weight of pervasive optimism collapsed his chest like a dropped piano.

  He paid the suggested campaign donation at the door and slinked upstairs to the ballroom. Gorgeous women roamed in packs, flexing wetsuit-tight pants, tits cinched into tank tops
and necked with silk scarves, their smart eyes and sensual lipstick and hard cheeks creaseless in conversation. Crafted untidy outfits swelling with flesh, heaving in calculated disarray. He hadn’t had the courage to date a woman in years, his only sexual encounters coming in quarterly smoke-stuffed overnights to Nevada cathouses. Starved so long he wasn’t hungry anymore, his prick a forgotten wedge of cheese.

  Werewolf was on stage already. Live at the Fillmore, like Jimi and the Stones. He’d developed a stalk lately, a tiger with a broken leg, marking the territory around Tiny Jake’s drum set.

  There’s a hole where the sun once shined

  And I ain’t satisfied

  No I ain’t satisfied

  His voice sounded rich under the pink lights, helped by recent years of solid meals. Marat knew the vodka bottle was filled with water these days, part of Esmerelda’s plan to wean him off the sauce for good. He talked to Jasper on the phone once a week, mostly about baseball and movies, the years lost to the wilderness pitting every interaction. A man he’d met seven years ago after a concert in Vegas, who’d tried to autograph his ticket stub until Robespierre knocked the pen out of his hand and squeezed them together in a weird chest bump.

  He spotted Robespierre across the bar, dipping her fat lips into a beer glass and chatting with reporters about wage inequality and technology infrastructure, citing obscure Swedish ethnographers and reciting Beat poetry to drive home her more esoteric points. He punched out a finger wave and winked, but she looked past him, around him, through him, Jasper’s eyes burning hypnotically on her face like little campfires.

  Marat ordered a pint of cheap tequila at the bar and spied a dessert buffet ringed by two lines of people, paper plates piled with éclairs and fruit salad. Donations from his mother he guessed. His drink arrived, a tall glass of gasoline. Near the stage couples waltzed tentatively to “Blue Danube,” most stubbing toes and backing into each other with gentle “oofs,” with the exception of a couple sets of show-offs who’d taken lessons for their weddings. His father’s voice waded across the ballroom, carrying a strange ether that detached Marat from the room of semi-wealthy urbanites and propelled him toward his future home with ridiculously wealthy urbanites, the ones who wouldn’t risk being included in the Fillmore’s psychedelic record books if their fully butlered vacation estates depended on it.

  Through the effluvium a languid voice drifted to him: “What are you drinking?”

  “Water,” he said, staring into the scuffed bar counter.

  “Make it your last one.”

  “Gonna hang around for ‘Amazing Grace.’” The words came with great resistance, requiring focused chest compressions and a tremendous volume of oxygen. “Comes last,” he managed.

  His sister leaned against him, her lips flopping against his ears like overstuffed pillows: “Come on, Marat. Not here.”

  He turned and outlined his ongoing subversion on her behalf, all the wrong moves, meathead marketing to latte liberals, millions of dollars of misguided media buys, running the same crappy commercial over and over again, and whoever took Fisherman’s Wharf as a credible San Francisco neighborhood would vote for a cow anyhow. He was on their team, their inside man, keeping the coast clear while Robespierre’s ship set sail. She’d done a lot right in mobilizing all these people; getting rich, self-important, naïve idiots to think the job made a difference, to stop a stupid camel-fucking war in a stupid camel-fucking country with the only tangible results being a nationwide jump in funeral home business and jacked-up gas prices and deficits for decades. The most irrelevant city this side of Havana saving lives from stupidity. He’d seen men buried in blood and sand, he’d locked Iranian women in closets, he’d forfeited his arm, for all the worst reasons. He knew she was right.

  And the best part? Lumpkin wanted a debate, mid-October, television and radio, the works.

  First round knockout, bank it.

  He awoke eating fried chicken behind a supermarket, crouching in a bus aisle, throwing his necktie off a pier. His head blinking with a billion buzzing bees. The sustained functionality of his legs was praiseworthy, maybe from his father he’d acquired this knack for survival. Sweating up stairs cut into sidewalks, a police officer herding him out from under a bush, unexplained nicks on his hands. Somewhere chasing a cat and laughing about it. Streaks of salt coating his upper lip.

  Sunset stained his living room orange. Dried upchuck on his shirt, his head dumb as frozen beef. His shredded left arm stuck painlessly under his ass.

  Fuzz. Drinking water from the kitchen tap, fisheye vision, objects moving with unpredictable speed. His phone dancing to a television theme song.

  “Unh,” he croaked.

  “So. A debate.” Wind whipped through the receiver, strummed guitars mewling in the background.

  “Robethpierre?” His larynx a strip of salted fish, vacuum-packed.

  “He’s barely in third place. He’s a joke.”

  “Can athk. Publicly. Whath his plan. Take him on.”

  “I don’t see any benefit in debating the laziest, shittiest candidate for mayor in city history. What are you up to?”

  This pain in his head, a police car screaming up his nose. “Nothing,” he hocked. “Help. You. Win.” He tumbled onto the couch and nearly fell asleep, heavy gel packs weighing on his face.

  “Where?”

  “Wherever.”

  “What about Han?” Leslie Han was in second place, a centrist Democrat from the school board who wore cheap brown suits and spoke exclusively in cliché.

  “Him too.”

  Robespierre sliced through traffic, feeling a need to move quickly, to be decisive, to cut and kill. “What side are you on, Marat?”

  “Alwayth. On. Thame. Thide.”

  “I guess that’s true.” Her brother. Her crazy fucking twin brother with the gangbuster moves, so smart but so dumb, her footprints scarring his back. Their shared childhoods cared for by a witch and a wildebeest. All she’d ever had. “OK.”

  WATERLOO

  In 1815 the Emperor was no longer a lean, sinewy, tireless, eternally vigilant human tiger—the Napoleon of Rivoli and Marengo. He was no longer the consummate General-in- Chief of Austerlitz and Wagram. The mysterious lethargy which had overwhelmed him at the critical hour of Borodino . . . had been the first visit of the Evil Genius which was to come again.

  —THOMAS WATSON,

  Waterloo

  The loss of the battle of Waterloo was the salvation of France.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  The debate was to be held in Civic Center Plaza across the street from City Hall. Mid-October weather being traditionally superb, and the spirit of participation and inclusion a priority for all candidates, the event was open to the public. A local political editor, known for his aggressive questioning and rimless spectacles, agreed to moderate.

  Saturday morning, the city leached with sun. Marat stumbled into Joel’s limo, finding Joel tilted back on the long leather bench, his head on a pillow, eyes welded shut. A heavily tanned woman held a paintbrush to his cheek. His face was half normal, half apparition, a jumbie tribal mask. Thick guards crowded the seats beside him.

  A joint from Marat’s inside pocket found its way to his mouth. Two placid drags and Joel snorted: “Cut it. I gotta focus.”

  “Looks like you got surgery,” he mumbled, stubbing out on the door ashtray.

  “Running late on makeup, man. Building a better me.”

  Marat sprawled over the back bench and stared out the tinted windows. The frantic city sparkled by, double-parked Audis and lines outside brunch joints, joggers and cyclists slicing through well-dressed pedestrian traffic, windows crammed with political signs, VAN TWINKLE, VAN TWINKLE, VAN TWINKLE, HAN. “Now the dirt, please,” Joel grunted.

  The limo braked for a hill and the makeup lady clucked, her line of paint jumping onto her dress.

  “I’ll tell you during the first commercial break. Right before the section when you answer questions from the public.
When the money’s confirmed.”

  “Search him,” Joel said. A minute later Marat sat in his boxer shorts and dress socks, the bodyguards squinting at crushed scribblings in his wallet.

  “Nothing,” one of them reported glumly, “not even a wire.”

  The makeup lady dipped her brush over the tips of Joel’s hair, adding light highlights, a funky beachcomber streak. “I’m gonna need you to stay with the fellas during the show,” Joel said, “keep you on hand.”

  “Quiet!” The makeup lady’s head snapped up, prissy pride clotting her face. Marat wondered what other services Joel employed her for; his money was on masseuse and come receptacle at brain surgeon rates, another guest at Joel’s lifelong money party.

  Just like him.

  He pulled on his pants and buttoned his shirt, fast, before the metallic taste in his mouth could spread. By the time he looped on his tie they’d turned onto Market Street, trailing a lemon-colored streetcar over slippery track. He felt the tires catch toward the curb as the first egg cracked against his window.

  The street was crushed with people, kids waving signs and chanting, a sea of cameras and cellphones, helmeted policemen directing jammed-up motorists. Saucy girls licked ice cream cones outside a mediocre burrito joint. Escalators from the subway coughed up dweebs and suits, prepsters and families, freaks and crazies, confused tourists wondering what the heck was going on and searching for department stores amid the punk bands. The looks on people’s faces looking at Joel’s limo ranged from disinterest to revulsion, like he led a team of kitten-drowning nun-rapists, like he dined on human heads, like he was nothing and no one, a zero branded on his forehead. Speckled among them, a homeless element watched obliquely, interested for panhandling purposes, eyes peeled for loosely held handbags.

  At a red light Marat saw his parents and sister disembark from the streetcar. Robespierre led the way through the UN Plaza with Jasper on her arm, his father broadcasting that humongous Stevie Fucking Wonder smile as if he should be happy he couldn’t see, buying rounds and holding a motherfucking hugathon. Esmerelda was on his other side, their fingertips touching every few steps. She looked like cash these days: papered in svelte clothes and glittery rare stones; hair recently cut, dyed, and styled; the confident clean eyes of a highly productive person who’d kicked a lot of bad habits. An unlikely troika at peace with their lot, all the more aggravating when viewed from captivity with a modern-day plunderer, his moronic security detail, and five gallons of face paint.