Corpse Vision
April 11th, 2011
Joe Decker drinks because he can. In 1920s Paris, alcohol flows freely unlike Prohibition America. He thinks he has come to Paris to write his novel, but he has come to Paris to block his visions with alcohol. The visions that started when he touched his first dead thing as a boy, the visions that no longer haunt him—until he sees a beautiful woman on a bridge over the Seine, a beautiful woman who died horribly, a beautiful woman he could have loved.
A historical fantasy short story by World Fantasy Award winner, Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Available for 99 cents on Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Smashwords, and in other e-bookstores. Also available in the e-collection, The War And After, available for $2.99 on Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Smashwords, and in other e-bookstores, and in print in The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & John Helfers, available in regular bookstores or through this link.
Corpse Vision
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Copyright © 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Joe Decker couldn’t remember who poured him into the taxi that brought him to Le Café du Dôme. Either way, it had to be one of the Midwestern boys—gangly Jim Thurber or the new guy —whatsisname? William?—Shirer. Neither of them knew Decker had a room at the Hôtel de Lisbonne—him and everybody else at the Trib except that old stick Waverly Root. Of course, without that old stick, the paper wouldn’t get out everyday for the ex-pats and tourists to read in their little Left Bank cafes. Some were saying—mostly the folks over at the Paris Herald—that an alcoholic wave was sweeping through the offices of the Paris Tribune, making it damned impossible to get anything out let alone a daily paper.
Like the deadbeats at the Herald could talk. What they said about the Trib applied to the Herald as well: Each and every day, a goodly proportion of the staff was insensate due to drink—half because it was there and half because it wasn’t.
Joe Decker didn’t drink when he worked. He drank after he worked, and then only because he didn’t want to face his typewriter in that little room off Boulevard St. Michel. If anyone had told him he’d be writing hack in Paris while he was supposed to be writing his brilliant first novel, he would’ve laughed.
He’d come to Paris with $300, his typewriter, and a one tiny suitcase of clothes, figuring that, with the franc worth damn near nothing against the dollar, he could afford one year, one year of typing, one year of thinking, thinking, thinking. Six months later, he had 5,000 words of unadulterated horseshit and fifty dollars, barely enough to pay for the room which he was heartily sick of.
Besides, no one in Paris had heard of Prohibition or if they had, they thought it one of those crazy American ideas that would never work.
Oh yeah sure, it would never work. It had never worked him into a huge thirst, which he tried to slack on nights like this when he’d turned in his copy on some stupid tourist gala no one here gave a good goddamn about but which actually got sent home because the folks back at their parent paper, the Chicago Tribune, thought such things were the important goings-on in Paris.
He remembered heading down the twisty back stairs of the Trib building, the presses thudding, the air hot with fresh ink. Funny man Thurber had come along and Whatsisname Shirer, still all googly eyed because he hadn’t seen anything like this back in Ioway or Illanoise or wherever the hell he was from, and they’d planned one drink, just one—and the next thing Decker knew he woke up in this taxi with a throbbing headache and a mouth that tasted of three-day old gin.
In his exceedingly bad French, he’d asked the cabby where they were going. The cabby just waved his hand imperiously and said, “Le Dôme, Le Dôme,” and Decker wasn’t sure they were heading to the Dôme because Thurber or Whatsisname had told the cabby to go there, or because the cabby, like every other French taxi driver, knew the Dôme was the place to take drunk Americans so that they could get home.
Decker’s head was too fuzzy to conjure the words to get the taxi to the Hôtel de Lisbonne. Besides, he wasn’t sure he had the scratch. The ride to the Dôme was gratis—or would be if he couldn’t find a franc or two—because someone there would cover the fare, if not one of the patrons then one of the uniformed police officers who paced the beat near the taxi stand.
He would have to promise to pay them back. And he would pay them back. He had paid everyone back, which was about the only good thing he could say about himself at the moment.
Nothing he did was any damn good, not even the daily copy he wrote for the Trib. The words were fine, the prose was solid, the assignments stank. His friends were just as miserable as he was (although, as Wave Root said, miserable in Paris is like happy everywhere else), and there wasn’t even a woman in the picture. Well, not a relationship woman. There’d been more than Decker’s fare share of one-night women. He might have even had one tonight.
The thought made him search his pockets as the taxi pulled up on the Rue Delambre side of the Dôme. The café had been on this corner for nearly thirty years, but only since the War had it become a haven for Americans. Know-it-all Hemingway, the only one of Decker’s acquaintances who had finished his novel after he arrived in Paris, called it one of the three principal cafes in the Quarter, and the only one filled with people who worked.
No one who worked was there now. The tables on the terrace were empty, the chairs pushed out expectantly. A glow fell across them from the café’s open doors.
Decker staggered out of the taxi, handed the driver the lone franc he’d found in his front pocket, and had to grip the pole marking the taxi stand to keep from falling.
Not only did he have a throbbing headache, but wobbly legs as well. He had to stop drinking, that was all there was to it.
“Coffee?”
Decker still had one arm wrapped around the pole. He thought maybe the ubiquitous uniformed policeman had spoken to him, but he didn’t see an ubiquitous uniformed policeman. Instead, he saw an elderly man sitting against the wall, beneath the awning that someone should have rolled up by now.
“Or are you one of those British gentlemen who prefer tea?”
The old man spoke the oddly clipped English that Parisians learned—not quite British upper-class, but not quite British lower class either. Continental English, Root called it. Incontinent English, Thurber always amended when Root had left the room.
“Water would probably help,” Decker said, not sure he should let go of the pole.
“Water will help. Alcohol dehydrates the system. That is half of what causes the so-called hang over.”
The old man put a deliberate space between “hang” and “over.” It was those kinds of errors that Decker usually found funny. The French often mangled English idioms, like the time the editor at Le Petit Journal had introduced Decker to his assistant, calling the man “my left hand” — and not meaning it as any kind of joke.
“Monsieur,” the old man said with a wave of a hand. “Une bouteille d’eau.”
Decker was going to tell him that the waiters here never showed up when you wanted them, and certainly wouldn’t show when there were only a few customers, but the waiter who appeared, happily prying the top off a bottle of water, contradicted his very thought.
Of course, the old man wasn’t just French. He had to be a regular. French regulars were prized at places like this, places which the Americans had taken over, like they had taken over most of Montparnesse just south of the Luxembourg Gardens. It was essentially an extension of the Latin Quarter without being in the Latin Quarter at all. It had been that way since the 16th century when Catherine de Medici had expelled students from the university. They had set up shop here
and called it Montparnesse.
Decker knew such things about Paris, indeed, he had become a font of Paris trivia in his two years at the Tribune, all learned with bad schoolboy French and only a modicum of charm.
“It would be nice if you joined me,” the old man said to Decker as the waiter put down the empty bottle and a single, rather grimy glass.
“Easier said than done,” Decker said, not certain he could let go of the pole and remain standing.
The old man had a croissant in front of him and, despite the hour, a cup of coffee. He wore a proper black suit but no hat, which looked odd in the thin light. His hair was a yellowish white, speaking of too many hours in cafes around cigarette smoke.
As Decker lurched closer, using tables and the occasional chair to maintain his balance, he realized that the old man’s beard was yellowish brown around his mouth. His fingers were tobacco stained as well. But he held no pipe and no cigar or cigarette had burned to ash in the tray in the center of the table.
Decker made it to the table and sank into the chair the old man had pushed back for him. It groaned beneath his weight. He tugged his suit coat over his stained white shirt. He had to look as filthy as he felt.
The old man poured water into the glass. The water looked clear and fresh despite the fingerprints on the side of the glass.
“You are an American newspaper man, yes?” the old man asked.
“Yes,” Decker said, not that it was a hard guess, given their location.
“Joseph Decker, the American newspaper man, yes?” the old man said.
It gave Decker a start that the old man knew his name. “Is there another Joe Decker in Paris?”
The old man ignored the question. “ “I have a story for you, should you take it.”
Everyone had a story for him. Usually it was the kind of thing tourist rumors were made of, like why there were no fish in the Seine. But the old man didn’t look like someone who would give Decker a song and dance.
Of course, Decker wasn’t yet sober, so he had to assume his judgment about all things—like the kind of man the old man was based on how he appeared—was probably flawed.
“It’s two a.m.,” Decker said, “and—”
“Three a.m.,” the old man said.
“Three a.m.,” Decker said with a flash of irritation, “and I’m drunk. If you’re serious about this story thing, we’ll meet here tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to sleep this off, and we can talk then.”
“I do not go out in the daylight,” the old man said.
Two years ago, Decker would have rolled his eyes. But by now, he’d seen and heard everything. There were guys on the copy desk who didn’t go out in the daylight either, saying it hurt their precious eyes.
Decker went out too much in the daylight, seeing things that sometimes he wished he hadn’t.
He flashed on her then, body crumpled beneath Pont Neuf, feet dangling over the edge of the walkway along the banks of the Seine, pointing toward the river.
He closed his eyes and willed the image away.
“And that is why I do not,” the old man said. “You see them too.”
Decker opened his eyes. The old man was staring at him. The old man’s eyes were blue and clear, not rheumy like Decker had expected. Maybe the old man was younger than Decker thought. He’d met a number of those guys in Paris—men in their forties who could pass for someone in their eighties by their clothing, their white hair, and their gait.
“I don’t see anything, old man,” Decker said.
“Nonsense,” the old man said. “It is why you drink.”
“I drink because I’m lonely,” Decker said. Because he kept writing the beginning to that damn novel over and over while Know-it-all Hemingway sat in this very café with his stupid notebook and scribbled story after story, book after book. Decker drank because he hated writing puff pieces for the folks back home, puff pieces about touristy restaurants and American musicians and writers like Know-it-all Hemingway. Decker drank because the stories he wanted to cover “would discourage the tourist trade from coming here.” He drank because Paris wasn’t the answer after all.
“You drink,” the old man said, “because it closes your mind’s eye. I have watched you. You see too much.”
“You’ve watched me?” Decker was getting more and more sober by the minute. “You’re following me?”
“If you recall,” the old man said with the patience people reserve for drunks, fools, and children, “I arrived before you did. But I must confess that I have been waiting for you.”
“Me and all the other American hacks,” Decker said.
The old man smiled, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. The smile was friendlier than Decker expected. “Admittedly, you American hacks, as you say, are dozens of dimes—”
Decker winced.
“—but I, in truth, have been waiting for you.”
Decker drank his water. It did clear his head, although he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted his head cleared. “What’s so special about me?”
“You see,” the old man said again.
This time, Decker did roll his eyes. He drank the last of his water, and stood up. “Old man, I’m so damned drunk that this conversation isn’t making sense. How about I meet you here tomorrow at midnight, and I promise to be sober. Then you can tell me your story.”
“It is your story,” the old man said.
“Whatever you say,” Decker said, taking the bottle of water and heading north.
He had a hell of a walk—at least for an exhausted drunk. Normally he wouldn’t have minded the jaunt up to the twisty little streets near the Sorbonne. The Hôtel de Lisbonne was on the corner of Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and Rue de Vaugirad. All he had to was walk the Boulevard St. Michel toward the Seine and he’d be in his bed in no time.
But he usually avoided the Boulevard St. Michel. He avoided a lot streets in Paris, at least on foot. The old man was right; Decker saw things. But he usually attributed those things to drink or to too much imagination.
The soldiers he always saw marching through the Arc de Triomphe wore no uniforms he recognized. They marched in lock-step, their heads turned side to side as if they were little tin soldiers with moving parts.
But he didn’t always see the soldiers there. Sometimes he saw a flag that he didn’t recognize with a Fylfot in the middle. The Fylfot, an ancient elaborate cross, was supposed to ward off evil. But he somehow got the sense that the Fylfot itself—at least as used here—was the evil.
On the Boulevard St. Michel, he saw students rioting in the streets. The students were grubby creatures, with long hair and carrying signs that he did not understand. Sunshine shone on them, although he only saw them when it was dark.
Because of these visions, he studied Paris history, and found nothing that resembled any of it. The soldiers were unfamiliar, just like the flag, and the students too filthy to belong to any modern generation. He could dismiss such things as figments of his imagination.
But the woman—she had been real.
He had touched her, her skin cold and clammy and gray from the elements. Her eyes had been open and cloudy, her lips parted ever so slightly.
He had found her six months into his trip to Paris. Shortly after, he had wandered into the offices of the Trib, such as they were, and offered up his services.
Novelist, eh, kid? The man at the copy desk had asked.
Yessir.
You know how many novelists we get here, hoping for a few bucks? At least two a day. Sorry.
I have experience…
Those fateful words. I have experience. And he did. From his college newspaper to the Milwaukee Journal—yes, he had been a good Midwestern boy, once too, a boy who didn’t like near beer. A boy who actually had dreams for himself.
Five thousand words of horseshit later, stories about the tourists (Mr. and Mrs. Gladwell arrived this afternoon on a trip that has taken them from their home in Lincoln, Nebraska, to New York City through London, and now
here, in Paris, where they are staying at the Ritz…), stories about everything except the woman, crumpled beneath Pont Neuf.
Somehow he made it to the Hôtel de Lisbonne without seeing anyone, real or imaginary. The front desk was empty, so he reached over it and grabbed his key.
As he climbed the dark narrow stairs to his room, he heard a typewriter rat-a-tat-tatting. Someone was working on something, maybe a short story, maybe a novel, maybe a freelance piece for Town and Country.
He unlocked his room and stepped inside, then stared at his own typewriter, gathering dust beneath the room’s only window. A piece of paper had been rolled in the platen since sometime last month, with only a page number on the upper right hand corner (27), and a single lowercase word in the upper left.
…the…
As if it meant something. As if he knew what he was going to do with it.
The paper was probably ruined, forever curlicued, although it didn’t matter. If he finished typing on that page, he could pile the other twenty-six pages on top of it, flattening it out.
If he sat down now, nearly sober, the old man’s words still echoing in his head (You see them too), he would write:
The woman discarded at the foot of the bridge looked uncomfortably young. Her brown hair was falling out of Gibson Girl do, now horribly out of fashion, her lips painted a vivid red. Part of the lip rouge stained her front teeth. If she were alive, she would turn away from him, and surreptiously rub at that stain with her index finger.
He looked away from the typewriter, from that little accusatory “the.” The description of the woman did not fit with the bucolic piece he had been writing, a memoir of Germantown Wisconsin in the days before the war, when he had been a young boy, and his father was still alive, tinkering with his new Model T, his mother tutting the dangers in the new-fangled machinery, the bicycle he himself had built from a kit, with the help of the man who lived next door.
Those were the kind of books people read now, memories of times past, not bloody, dark stories about dead women on Paris streets.
Decker took off his suit and hung it up, although he didn’t brush it out, like he should have. He lacked the energy. As he pulled off his shirt, he realized the stains were worse than he had thought. Long, brown stains up front, looking like blood.
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