Panting mightily, Jarry reached the third platform, less than a third of the way down. Only 590 more steps down to sure and certain ambush. The rifle, cartridges, and high-wheeler were grinding weights on his back. Gritting his teeth, he started down the steep steps with landings every few dozen meters.
His footsteps rang like gongs on the iron treads. He could see the tops of the booths on the second level, the iron framework of the Tower extending all around him like a huge narrow cage.
Norpois would be waiting at one of the corners, ready to fire at either set of stairs. (Of course, he probably already knew which set Jarry was using, oh devious man, or it was possible he was truly evil and was waiting on the first level. It would be just like a right-wing nationalist Catholic safety-bicycle rider to do that.)
Fifteen steps up from the second level, in one smooth motion, Jarry put the ordinary down, mounted it holding immobile the pedals with his feet, swung the Rhino Express off his shoulder, and rode the last crashing steps down, holding back, then pedaling furiously as his giant wheel hit the floor.
He expected shots at any second as he swerved toward a closed souvenir booth: He swung his back wheel up and around behind him holding still, changing direction, the drainpipe barrels of the 4-bore resting on the handlebars.
Over at the corner of another booth the front wheel and handlebar of Norpois’ bicycle stuck out.
With one motion Jarry brought the Greener to his cheek. We shall shoot the front end off his bicycle—without that he cannot be mounted and fire; ergo, he cannot duel; therefore, we have won; he is disgraced. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
Jarry fired one barrel—the recoil sent him skidding backwards two meters. The forks of the crocodile went away—Fortune’s smiling face wavered through the air like the phases of the Moon. The handlebars stuck in the side of another booth six meters away.
Jarry hung onto his fragile balance, waiting for Norpois to tumble forward or stagger bleeding with bicycle shrapnel from behind the booth.
He heard a noise behind him; at the corner of his eye he saw Norpois standing beside one of the planted trees—he had to have been there all along—with a look of grim satisfaction on his face.
Then the grenade landed directly between the great front and small back wheels of Jarry’s bicycle.
C. High Above the City
He never felt the explosion, just a wave of heat and a flash that blinded him momentarily. There was a carnival ride sensation, a loopy feeling in his stomach. Something touched his hand; he grabbed it. Something tugged at his leg. He clenched his toes together.
His vision cleared.
He hung by one hand from the guardrail. He dangled over Paris. His rifle was gone. His clothes smelt of powder and burning hair. He looked down. The weight on his legs was his ordinary, looking the worse for wear. The rim of the huge front wheel had caught on the toe of his cycling shoe. He cupped the toe of the other one through the spokes.
His hand was losing its grip.
He reached down with the other for his pistol. The holster was still there, split up the middle, empty.
Norpois’ head appeared above him, looking down, then his gun hand with a large automatic in it, pointing at Jarry’s eyes.
“There are rules, Monsieur,” said Jarry. He was trying to reach up with the other hand but something seemed to be wrong with it.
“Get with the coming century, dwarf,” said Norpois, flipping the pistol into the air, catching it by the barrel. He brought the butt down hard on Jarry’s fingers.
The second time the pain was almost too much. Once more and Alfred knew he would let go, fall, be dead.
“One request. Save our noble vehicle,” said Jarry, looking into the journalist’s eyes. There was a clang off somewhere on the second level.
Norpois’ grin became sardonic. “You die. So does your crummy bike.”
There was a small pop. A thin line of red, like a streak of paint slung off the end of a brush, stood out from Norpois’ nose, went over Jarry’s shoulder.
Norpois raised his automatic, then wavered, let go of it. It bounced off Alfred’s useless arm, clanged once on the way down.
Norpois, still staring into Jarry’s eyes, leaned over the railing and disappeared behind his head. There was silence for a few seconds, then:
Pif-Paf! Quel Bruit!
The sound of the body bouncing off the ironworks went on for longer than seemed possible.
Far away on the second level was the sound of footsteps running downstairs.
Painfully, Jarry got his left arm up next to his right, got the fingers closed, began pulling himself up off the side of the Eiffel Tower, bringing his mangled high-wheeler with him.
D. Code Duello
A small crowd had gathered, besides those concerned. Norpois’ second was over by the body, with the police. There would of course be damages to pay for. Jarry carried his ordinary and the Greener, which he had found miraculously lying on the floor of the second level.
Proust came forward to shake Alfred’s hand. Jarry gave him the rifle and ordinary, but continued to walk past him. Several others stepped forward, but Jarry continued on, nodding.
He went to Pablo. Pablo had on a long cloak and was eating an egg sandwich. His eyes would not meet Alfred’s.
Jarry stepped in front of him. Pablo tried to move away without meeting his gaze. Alfred reached inside the cloak, felt around, ignoring the Webley strapped at Pablo’s waist.
He found what he was looking for, pulled it out. It was the single-shot .22. Jarry sniffed the barrel as Pablo tried to turn away, working at his sandwich.
“Asshole,” said Jarry, handing it back.
XIX. Fin de Cyclé
The bells were still ringing in the New Century.
Satie had given up composing and had gone back to school to learn music at the age of thirty-eight. Rousseau still exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, and was now married for the second time. Proust had locked himself away in a room he’d had lined with cork and was working on a never-ending novel. Méliès was still out at Montreuil, making films about trips to the Moon and the Bureau of Incoherent Geography. Pablo was painting; but so much blue; blue here, blue there, azure, cerulean, Prussian. Dreyfus was now a commandant.
Jarry lived in a shack over the Seine which stood on four supports. He called it Our Suitable Tripod.
There was noise, noise everywhere. There were few bicycles, and all those were safeties. He had not seen another ordinary in months. He looked over where his repaired one stood in the middle of the small room. His owl and one of his crows perched on the handlebars.
The noise was deafening—the sound of bells, of crowds, sharp reports of fireworks. Above all, those of motor-cycles and motor-cars.
He looked back out the window. There was a new sound, a dark flash against the bright moonlit sky. A bat-shape went over, buzzing, trailing laughter and gunshots, the pilot banking over the River. Far up the Seine, the Tower stood, bathed in floodlights, glorying in its blue, red, and white paint for the coming Exposition.
A zeppelin droned overhead, electric lights on the side spelling out the name of a hair pomade. The bat-shaped plane whizzed under it in near-collision.
Someone gunned a motor-cycle beneath his tiny window. Jarry reached back into the room, brought out his fowling piece filled with rock salt and fired a great tongue of flame into the night below. After a scream, the noise of the motor-cycle raced away.
He drank from a glass filled with brandy, ether, and red ink. He took one more look around, buffeted by the noise from all quarters and a motor launch on the River. He said a word to the night before slamming the window and returning to his work on the next Ubu play.
The word was “merde!”
AFTERWORD
There are wild men (and
women) in literature, and then there are Wild Men.
One of the Wildest was Alfred Jarry (1875-1907). The author of the Ubu plays, precursor to Dada and Surrealism, and so on and so forth. He lived an hallucinated life (the examples I give in the story are mild compared to some real ones, but totally in character). He spoke in the royal “we,” tried every drug and drink he could get his hands on, and influenced everyone around him. The books to read are Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years and Bill Griffiths’ (the creator of Zippy the Pinhead) The Man With the Axe.
Shattuck’s book is about the whole Belle Epoque and was the initial in-spi-ration for the story. All across the whole history of French art and literature in the late 1890s stretched The Dreyfus Affair, which split French society apart even more than the Vietnam War did America later. It had everything; militarism, injustice, anti-Semitism, and usually, Catholics vs. Prots.
Along with all that: film was just being invented (there are various inputs in the story that would take filmmakers 30 more years to learn), aviation was just around the comer (earlier here in my story), the bicycle was changing society (the way I referred to this story years before I wrote it was as “the velocipede story”), the Eiffel Tower had just been built for the 1889 Paris Exposition.
This is the world that is, as prefigured in the story, about to blow itself up in 1914.
I wrote this finally in October of 1989—the first half anyway—which I read, with primitive visual aids, at Armadillocon. It says here that I finished it March 8 of 1990 (a really long time but I was busy with other stuff, too). I mailed it off to Arnie Fenner then at Ursus Books in Kansas City, who, with Mark Zeising, was publishing my next collection, Night of the Cooters, as a joint venture. (The book had a Don Punchatz cover of Slim Pickens riding an armadillo at a Martian war machine outside the Alamo.) “Fin de Cyclé” was the original to the collection.
Gardner Dozois (of Asimov’s) called me, wanting second serial rights on the story. (There was a six month’s exclusivity on it in the collection.) I told him he could, if he published it after August of 1991. He sent me a contract, and later money, and it was published Mid-December 1991 as the cover story.
The cover was by Nicholas Jainschigg, showing Jarry on his high-wheeler, leaning against a wall with his elephant gun while Saturn splashes down into the Seine.
Just after I got it, Neal Barrett Jr. called.
“I just got the Asimov’s,” I said. “I got the cover story. Not only is it beautiful,” I said, “It’s directly from the story.”
“You’re lying,” said Neal, “That never happens.”
And he hung up on me.
It really happened once. Neal, honest-to-gosh.
This one was up for the Hugo in 1992; like all of them so far, I lost handily.
YOU COULD GO HOME AGAIN
The Joint is Jumpin’
They had slipped their moorings at Ichinomaya, Japan, in the early evening of September 15, 1940, amid the euphoric shouts of well-wishers, fresh from the Tokyo Olympics that had just ended.
Wolfe hadn’t noticed the crowds. He’d arrived late, a couple of new shirts (specially tailored—the Japanese weren’t used to six-foot-six men buying off their racks, and he’d had to get the address of a British men’s shop from someone at the American Embassy) in one hand, his old suitcase and bulging, torn briefcase in the other. He’d barely made it; the boarding platform was being unbolted at the bottom as he ran up to it.
He’d been shown to his stateroom; felt a lurch as they got under way. Then he’d folded down the couch that made into an upper and lower berth, and had sprawled across the lower one and had slept for a little more than an hour.
He awoke near sunset. The bell in the dining salon was ringing. He was disoriented. Then memories of the last two weeks had come back to him; the Olympics, the crowds, being a giant once more (as he used to feel in America before the operation and the weight loss) in a world of Lilliputian Japanese.
He put on his robe, found the Gentlemen’s washroom for his set of cabins, showered, then shaved, something he’d forgotten to do during the last two days of bon voyage parties.
He went back to his stateroom, made up the couch and changed for dinner. Then he laid his things out on the desk while sitting on the folding, backless stool which fit under it. (Wolfe was glad of that: he’d usually had to take the backs off chairs in the old days—his body had been so tall and thick, chairs had seemed like toys that cramped him, making him feel like a golliwog in some circus act.)
He went to the reading and writing room just after dinner (he’d had double portions of everything) and dashed off a postcard or two, which he knew he would forget about if he didn’t do it then. He could have put them in the pneumatic tube that took them straight to the mailroom, but decided to take them there himself tomorrow. Instead, he read over the passenger list.
It was the usual kind for a trip going back to Europe and America from the Orient the long way, going west. Wolfe had traveled every possible way in his life: luxury liners, tramp steamers, ferries, airplanes, coal barges, buses, a thousand different trains, cars (after that National Parks thing—six thousand miles in twelve days with two guys that led up to the illness that almost killed him two years ago—he’d sworn never to ride in any automobiles but a taxi cab again), bicycles, hay wagons, once even roller-skating for two miles with some kids when he lived in Brooklyn.
There were the usual two dozen nationalities on the manifest—lots of Americans, Brits, Frenchmen, Indians, Syrians, Swedes, Germans, a Russian or two (probably White), some Brazilians and Argentines, an Italian count, and several Japanese.
In all, there were 320 passengers and a crew of 142 on the first leg of this trip. Several would be leaving in India, more no doubt getting on there, going on to Egypt, then up to Italy, and the rest of the European stops.
As he read the list, a man with sergeant’s chevrons on his R.A.F. uniform came into the writing salon, nodded, sat down and began scribbling on a small pad.
Wolfe heard music in the air. They must have cleared away the last of the dishes from the evening meal, the stewards would have pulled back the tables, and the band begun to play in the main salon. He finished the postcard in his (since the operation) much smaller and more controlled loopy scrawl. He looked at his watch. It had been an hour since he’d eaten. Time had a way of getting away from him lately.
He stood, nodded to the R.A.F. man, who gave him back a strange smile. The man was heavily tanned, though blondish; his eyes stood out like bright blue marbles in a brown statue. It reminded him of the face of one of the stone angels that used to stand on the porch of his father’s shop in Asheville.
Wolfe checked his own reflection in the corridor mirror—brown suit, buff vest, white shirt. Thinning on top (he turned his head far to the left, smoothed the bit of hair that always stood at right angles over the scar from the brain operation), cheeks now a little sunken in a long wide face (three teeth removed, and seventy-five pounds of lost weight), eyes too big and bright. He pulled on the knot of his black tie with its Harvard Club tie tack, grimaced to make sure there was no food on his teeth, and went back to the main salon.
He eased his way through the few couples who stood talking at the doorway of the ballroom. Art Deco metal palms arched to each side of the opening, forming a heart-shaped portal in a glassine wall.
It was smoky inside. Candles were lit on the tables; waiters went back and forth between the chairs and the dimly-lit bar on the right side. Wolfe made his way toward it, where other men traveling alone, and a few women, stood watching the band.
Bars were always something Wolfe had liked in the old days.
The band—clarinet, banjo, violin, cornet, drums, bass and piano—were on a small raised platform. The unused piano looked dull and grey from the bar area. Probably the light, thought Wolfe. The band was in e
vening wear. They played “Marie” but, as no one was singing, it sounded thin. A spot for dancing had been cleared; no one was taking advantage of that, either.
“Bourbon and Coca-Cola,” said Wolfe to the barman. That was one thing about a trip like this. Everyone was first-class: there were no passen-ger divisions, no one-deck-for-you-Mr.-Average-Guy, the other for the Hoity-Toity. That was one reason Wolfe had chosen to travel this way.
He got his drink, turned, and leaned against the aluminum bar with his right elbow. He saw, with some discomfort, two women looking at him, talking back and forth. He knew, without a second glance, that they were asking each other whether that could be him; no, he’s tall but too thin-looking, and much older than his photos. (The one on the jacket of his newest book had been taken two years ago, before the operation. Not that he didn’t look bad enough then, he just looked differently, and worse, now.) Wolfe focused his attention toward the front of the salon. He’d had plenty of shipboard flings in his time. (The great love of his life, so they told him in those fuzzy first days at Johns Hopkins, had started on the Berengaria in 1926. To him it was only a skewed memory. When he had seen the woman, Aline, for the first time during his recovery, he had been puzzled. This woman—twenty years older than me, hard of hearing, hair going grey—was the love of my life?) But in the last two years, some memories had come back. (Wolfe sometimes viewed himself as standing on the far northern shore of Canada, looking out to sea, and occasionally an iceberg, heavy with remembrance and emotion, would drift toward him from the North Pole of Time, crash into him, immersing him in a flood of scents, thoughts, visions, from a past usually closed off to him as if he were locked in a vault with no key.) He recalled some of the affair with Aline; the memories were fragmentary. He remembered fights as often as lovemaking, jealousy of her theater friends as well as the quiet afternoons in Paris hotels, an attempt of hers at what he first thought of as suicide, which wasn’t.
Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003 Page 16
