by Dan Rhodes
His bedside telephone rang. He knew who it would be. His girlfriend was lying beside him, naked but for the slices of cucumber on her eyes, and she tutted loudly at the disturbance. He held the receiver to his ear. It was a deafening voice.
‘De-la-crrrrrroooooooiiiiiixxxxxx . . .’
‘Good morning,’ he said, swallowing nervously. ‘So you’ve read my piece?’
Jean-Didier Delacroix had never had the intention of stitching up Le Machine. He had not planned to go in and use the time-honoured journalistic tactic of making friendly conversation and engaging him in lively banter, all the while feeding him just enough rope to hang himself. No, he was going to go straight on the offensive, putting him on the back foot from the start.
He had been ushered into a small room backstage in the seedy little cinema, and come face-to-face with the man. He was wearing a white towelling robe and a distracted expression. There were angry red marks where until minutes earlier his eyebrows had been, and his head and face were barbershop smooth.
Jean-Didier Delacroix looked him in the eye, switched on his Dictaphone and, without so much as introducing himself, began the interview: ‘So,’ he said, fixing Le Machine with an ice-cold glare, ‘how does it feel to be a living joke?’
When it was over, Le Machine felt he had not fared particularly well in the interview, but that he had not disgraced himself either. This first question had taken him by surprise, but he had not considered it unfair. He had thought for a moment before giving an answer about how it was understandable that most people would see him that way, bearing in mind the way his work was presented in the media. ‘If all I did was take my clothes off and go to the toilet in a bottle, then it would be right for people to regard me as a joke. But anyone who comes to Life will find that there is so much more to it than that.’
‘For example?’
Le Machine went into a spiel about the technical side of Life: praising the work of his sound designer, whom he saw as an equal collaborator, and the importance of the lighting and the craftsmanship involved in the glassware.
Jean-Didier Delacroix yawned, and did not ask to be pardoned. ‘Loudspeakers, light bulbs and novelty glassware,’ he said. ‘Fascinating.’
Other questions followed. Most of them Le Machine had anticipated, though he had expected them to have been posed in a less combative manner.
You have said that you feel you were rejected by Paris, so what makes you think that Paris is going to want you now?
Apart from the inevitable perverts, what sort of audience are you expecting?
Do you honestly believe that what you do deserves so much attention when compared to work of a less sensationalist and scatological nature?
And so it went on, for around twenty minutes. He had pat replies for most of the questions, all of them civil but bland, and was soon tired of the sound of his own voice. Jean-Didier Delacroix showed no sign of interest in anything Le Machine said, and Le Machine could tell this, but he stayed calm and answered the questions as efficiently as he was able, though never to his interrogator’s satisfaction. To him it was just another interview, and all interviews were ordeals of one kind or another. This time they had sent an attack dog, but that was OK. It wasn’t the first time. He even had some admiration for the man; at least there was no bullshit about him.
Jean-Didier Delacroix kept going, waiting for Le Machine to slip up, to give the line that he could quote, the one that would reveal him as a fool. So far he had only been a bore.
Time was running out, and Jean-Didier Delacroix knew he had to start wrapping things up. Out came the big question, disguised as a sardonic throwaway line: So, he yawned, what is the meaning of Life?
Le Machine knew that this was where, if he wasn’t careful, he could let himself down. He was just about satisfied with the answer he gave, but his interrogator was clearly not.
Jean-Didier Delacroix was all for egalitarianism, just so long as he didn’t have to be involved, but Le Machine had taken things too far with his suggestion that everyone who came into the room was welcome to interpret the piece in their own way, and that he didn’t want his words to influence them, to cloud their minds. Jean-Didier Delacroix knew for sure that the general public – road sweepers, Métro drivers, schoolteachers, office workers – could not be trusted to draw intelligent conclusions about a piece of art by themselves, and for the artist to refuse to offer them direction was a dereliction of duty. But then again, this wasn’t art, and if people were stupid enough to spend money coming to this show, then they deserved to be left floundering as they tried to come up with their own interpretations.
Why are you so reluctant to talk about the theory behind your performance?
For the first time in an interview Le Machine acknowledged that he was being evasive, that there was a theory, and even a story, behind it. He didn’t want to explain his work, he re-emphasised, because to do so would be to strip away any magic it might have. If an artist needs to explain their work, he said, then they have failed, and if they choose to explain it then they choose to spoil it for people, denying them the possibility of connecting with the piece in their own way. He had started to feel like a dog chasing its tail. ‘It comes back to that word again,’ he said. ‘Magic. If you are an artist then you must believe you have it, otherwise why would you bother? And if you have it why would you want to snuff it out by picking it to pieces?’
‘And you believe that you are an artist?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you truly believe that your work has . . .’ he spat the word, ‘magic?’
‘Yes, I do. But you are welcome to disagree, Monsieur Delacroix.’
‘As if I need your blessing to disagree with you.’ Jean-Didier Delacroix smiled for the first time. It was not a pleasant sight.
Le Machine was starting to disagree with himself. The words had been coming out as they always had, but he wasn’t sure he believed them any more, and he had given so many similar answers in so many interviews that they sounded to him like platitudes. The encounter had descended to the verge of quarrelling, but there was every possibility that the reporter was right. Maybe there would be no magic. Maybe there never had been, and Paris would be the place where he would find out that there really was no more to Life than a naked man shitting on stage.
‘So what are you going to give me, then? This is your only interview, and I’ve got nothing – just a load of drivel about microphones and thermostats and some repetitive whining about how terrible it is to have to answer questions in interviews.’ Jean-Didier Delacroix folded his arms and waited.
‘OK.’ Le Machine thought. A part of him wanted to tell this strange and furious man what it was all about, to reveal the true reason why he did what he did. After all, he had already told one person that day, and it had felt good to unburden himself. That had been in confidence though, and he knew he mustn’t tell the same story to a journalist. And even if he was to, they only had a minute of interview time left. It had taken him a long time to tell the story to Professor Papavoine, and that had been the reason for his late arrival at the venue. It certainly wasn’t something that could be dispatched in a sound bite. He stopped wavering, stuck by his principles and kept the story to himself.
He always liked to make sure he gave reporters something, though, even the ones he didn’t care for; it would be bad manners to send them away with nothing to work with. In his younger days he would give them a rant about his rejection of Paris, or how he had embraced his position as an outcast from the art establishment. Those days were gone, though. Today the angle he gave the reporter was straightforward: ‘After this run, I have no intention of presenting Life again.’
‘So this is the end?’
‘Yes, I believe it will be.’
He expected the reporter to ask him what his plans were. But he didn’t. Instead he switched off his Dictaphone.
The two men stood facing one another.
‘I am afraid I am unable to wish you well for your s
how,’ said Jean-Didier Delacroix. ‘I had thought you were a con artist, an old-fashioned grifter, but now I know you’re not. It’s a shame really, because I would have had some respect for you if you were simply a scam merchant. There is an art to that sort of behaviour, after all. You have a real sincerity about you though, don’t you? I think you truly believe that what you are doing has great artistic worth. You’re deluding yourself, of course.’
Le Machine looked him in the eye. ‘Thank you for your time,’ he said. ‘I hope you have enough material for your article.’
The moment Jean-Didier Delacroix had left, there was a knock at the door. His manager introduced Le Machine to Doctor Élise Rousset, and left them alone. He did as he was asked, and took off his robe. Once again he found himself naked in front of a woman he had only just met.
XXII
Lucien sat with the Akiyamas as they finished their lunch in an old-style bistro. Already that day they had been to the Catacombs, and now they were looking for a way to fill the afternoon. Lucien had bought a copy of L’Univers, and he pulled out the arts supplement, to find out what was going on around the city.
On the front cover was a photograph of Le Machine. He didn’t think he would be recommending his show to the Akiyamas. He had seen the posters and heard a lot of chatter about the man, and like a lot of people he had already come to the conclusion that he was a pretentious attention-seeker who thought that just because he called what he did art that it suddenly made him an artist. And what made it worse was that he was exactly the kind of pretentious attention-seeker that girls are suckers for, all moody expressions and meticulously tended musculature.
He smiled when he saw that the profile was by Jean-Didier Delacroix. Lucien enjoyed reading his work; for all his pomposity, he did have a brilliant mind, and he was always entertaining. He was going to rip Le Machine to shreds.
As usual, the piece was as much about Jean-Didier Delacroix as it was about his subject: it started with a description of what he had eaten for lunch, then moved on to a detailed report on the length and texture of his girlfriend’s legs, which he followed with an account of an altercation he had had with a valet at a top hotel. He had, of course, cut the valet down to size. It wasn’t until the sixth paragraph that he even mentioned Le Machine: The man who has famously, and in the name of ‘art’, gone to the toilet on stages around the world.
Then he spent two paragraphs ruminating about a forthcoming trip to Vienna, before embarking on a short and savagely comical passage about his backstage meeting with Le Machine, during which his subject had given very little away, presumably because there was very little to talk about. It had seemed to Jean-Didier Delacroix that he had attempted to create a reticent, enigmatic persona in order to deflect attention away from the simple fact that he had nothing much to say. Lucien laughed at that; in his days of dating non-Japanese women he had lost plenty of girlfriends to people like Le Machine – empty vessels hiding behind a facade of artistic mystery. And then, Jean-Didier Delacroix reported, the star of the show had announced that this was likely to be his final presentation of Life: He looked at me intently, evidently expecting me to ask what he planned to do next. I simply did not care. It took all my self-control not to laugh in his face and wish him good riddance.
Lucien was loving this. Le Machine would be reviewed all over the place, but it was Jean-Didier Delacroix that everybody would be looking to. Piece by piece, he was tearing Life down. Muscle-boy would be a failure in Paris, and girls the world over would stop fancying men like him, and start taking an interest in slightly gawky interpreters instead.
The article moved on to a vivid, riotous and wildly snobbish account of Jean-Didier Delacroix’s experience of standing in the auditorium amid the kind of people whose idea of a great way to spend a Friday night was to pay money to stare at a naked man while hoping they’ll get to see him go to the toilet. And then the lights went down.
Jean-Didier Delacroix confined his praise to the final paragraph. When the stage lights had come on, and the sound of a human body pulsed through the room, he had been stunned to find himself profoundly moved. In a moment, he had understood why Le Machine had been so reluctant to talk about his work, for to try to explain Life would be to try to explain life. It was all there, in front of him, and it was within him too, and he felt a oneness with the people around him, and that was something that had never happened to him before; he had never made a secret of his feelings of almost superhuman superiority to people who happened to be around him, but now there he was, feeling a oneness with a group of strangers about whom only moments before he had been sculpting a series of derisory bons mots. He had never been quite so aware of himself as a human being, and this was a feeling both incredible and unsettling. The religious will point to Life as being sure proof of God’s presence in all of us; the atheists will point to it as an illustration of the human body as an amazing bag of chemicals. But don’t listen to them, he wrote. Don’t listen to anybody, not even me, except as I implore you to go. And let us all hope that Le Machine does not mean what he says, that this is not the end of Life.
Well, thought Lucien, that was unexpected. Jean-Didier Delacroix had made him want to buy a ticket. He still wasn’t going to recommend Life to the Akiyamas though.
‘Ah,’ said Madame Akiyama, noticing the photograph on the newspaper. ‘It’s that man. He came to Tokyo. Akiko went to see him, and said he was very good. Lucien, could you book us tickets for today?’
‘Are you sure? Do you know what he does?’
‘Yes, he takes all his clothes off and does his business into a bottle.’
‘Well, if that’s what you really want to see . . .’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’ll be fun.’
Monsieur Akiyama shook his head, resigned to his fate. He had lost control of his life, but he wasn’t going to let it get him down.
There was a science to selling tickets for Life. Each one came with an allocated time slot for admission, but once inside, the ticket holder could stay as long as they wanted. As no food or drink was allowed in the auditorium, the organisers banked on people getting hungry and thirsty, then drifting away. In the previous stagings, the average length of stay had been between one hour and forty-three minutes (London) and two hours and four minutes (Tokyo), though some people stayed for much longer, even sneaking off to the toilets to eat discreetly hidden snacks. One boy in São Paolo had stayed for four days. He hadn’t been quite as furtive as he had thought, and had become something of a celebrity among the crew; when he finally left they surprised him with a free pass so he could come and go as he wished for the remainder of the run.
Following fairly predictable patterns, they were able to sell several thousand tickets a day. For the Paris run they were aiming to sell a total of two hundred thousand, at between ten and fifteen euros a time. They saw no sense in anticipating a sell-out. Historically there had been most demand on weekends and in the evenings, and at off-peak times it was usually possible to simply walk up and pay on the door. In the early hours of the morning the room would often be quite empty, but there would always be at least a few people there, watching the naked man as he slept, and listening to him as he breathed, as his heart beat and his stomach gurgled.
Lucien tried calling the ticket hotline, but he couldn’t get through. Following the piece in L’Univers, their lines had jammed. He borrowed Madame Akiyama’s smartphone and checked their website, but there was no availability until eight o’clock on the Tuesday morning, and they would be on their way to the airport by then. People were so impatient to find out what it was all about that even the graveyard slots were full for the coming couple of days.
‘I’m so disappointed,’ she said. ‘Maybe, Lucien, you would be so kind as to make things better by taking your clothes off right now, standing on the table and . . .’ She picked up their empty water bottle and held it out to him.
Lucien laughed, and Monsieur Akiyama looked startled. He was beginning to wonder who i
t was he had married all those years ago. And then he smiled, because he couldn’t help but be amused by her bawdy humour.
‘We could send a photo to Akiko,’ she teased.
Lucien no longer felt like crying at the mention of Akiko’s name. He was even starting to wonder whether his love for her had run its course.
Madame Akiyama wasn’t going to let the lack of tickets for Life ruin her day. They settled on a trip up the Eiffel Tower instead. It had to be done. ‘And after that, where should we eat our dinner?’
‘I know a good floating restaurant,’ answered Lucien.
XXIII
Aurélie was woken by the smell of cooking. She had a long shower, using the very nice soap and shampoo that the Papavoines left for their guests, then she dried herself on a towel that was just as soft as it looked. She put on the white bathrobe. There were white slippers for her too. She felt cleaner and dryer than she ever did after showering in her own home. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was human again, and she felt an urgent need to see Herbert, to make sure he was OK. She opened the door, and stepped into the corridor.
She followed the sound of laughter to the master bedroom, where she found him lying on the bed being amused by Madame Papavoine, who was repeatedly covering her head with a pillow case before whipping it off to reveal a different funny face each time. She noticed Aurélie, and was all How did you sleep? and Was the bed comfortable? and Are you sure you’re ready to get up, because I can take Herbert for longer if you’d like? and Please, you really must call me Liliane, and You must stay for dinner – we’ve set a place for you.
Professor Papavoine was a good cook, and Aurélie, still in her robe, started on her soup, pleased to be eating a proper meal after days of grazing on whatever was close at hand. Herbert sat in his high chair, eating peas with his fingers, banging his spoon against the tray and squawking. Newly bathed, he was doing a good job of making himself sticky again. Then his eyes crossed, and he put down his spoon and started looking very serious. Madame Papavoine picked him up and whisked him away, and a minute later she walked back in, reporting that he was taking a nap.
