by Gemma Files
There were some suicides as well. The weight of centuries pressed on me with a sullen, constant ache I frequently longed to end. In Brussels I slit my wrists and drowned, Roman-style, in a soft pink bath. In Singapore I opened the gas mains wide, and waited. In Saskatoon I was too thorough. They buried me, and I had to lie quiet while my embalmed organs renewed themselves from scratch.
Then and there, I decided not to try again. The growing threat of cremation was something to consider. But this choice was not made entirely out of fear.
After so much time, I had begun to dream again.
So I bought a ticket to America.
I mounted the next hill, scaring the moon, which shot up into the sky once more to hang above the broad, glittering highway.
America is such a wonderful country, I thought. So big. No borders to cross, no papers to show. Only the road. And the road goes on forever. Here I can be content, at last, no longer wondering what lies ahead or regretting what lies behind.
And if there is one thing I have learned, it is that there will always be another car.
Year Zero
And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.
—Ezekiel 6:16.
AT THE VERY HEIGHT of the French Revolution, after they killed the king and drank his blood, they started everything over: New calendar, new months, new history. Wind back the national clock and smash its guts to powder; wipe the slate clean, and crack it across your knee. A failed actor named Fabre d’Eglantine drew up the plans. He stretched each seven-day week to a ten-day decade, and recarved the months into a verdant litany of rural images: Fruit and flowers, wind and rain. The Guillotine’s red flash, masked in a mist of blistering, lobster-baked heat.
The first year of this process was to be known as Year Zero. Everything that happened next would be counted from then on. And all that had happened before would be, very simply . . .
. . . gone.
* * *
Then: Paris, 1793. Thermidor, Year Three, just before the end of the Terror—
“Oh, la, Citizen. How you do blush.”
I must wake up, Jean-Guy Sansterre thinks, slow and lax—the words losing shape even as he forms them, like water dripping through an open mental hand, fingers splayed and helpless. Rouse myself. Act. Fight . . .
But feeling, instead, how his whole body settles inexorably into some arcane variety of sleep—limbs loose and heavy, head lolling back on dark red satin upholstery. Falling spine-first into the close, dim interior of the Chevalier du Prendegrace’s coach, a languorous haze of drawn velvet curtains against which Jean-Guy lies helpless as some micro-organism trapped beneath the fringed, softly sloping convex lens of a partially lidded eye.
Outside, in the near distance, one can still hear the constant growl and retch of the Widow, the National Razor, the legendary Machine split the air from the Place De La Revolution—that excellent device patented by dapper Dr. Guillotin, to cure forever the pains and ills of headaches, hangovers, insomnia. The repetitive thud of body on board, head in basket. The jeers and jibes of the tricoteuses knitting under the gallows steps, their Phrygian caps nodding in time with the tread of the executioner’s ritual path; self-elected keepers of the public conscience, these grim hags who have outlived their former oppressors again and again. These howling crowds of sans-culottes, the trouserless ones—all crying in unison for yet more injurious freedom, still more, ever more: A great, sanguinary river with neither source nor tide, let loose to flood the city streets with visible vengeance . . .
“Do you know what complex bodily mechanisms lie behind the workings of a simple blush, Citizen Sansterre?”
That slow voice, emerging—vaporous and languid as an audible curl of smoke—from the red half-darkness of the coach. Continuing, gently:
“I have made a sometime study of such matters; strictly amateur in nature, of course, yet as thorough an inquiry as my poor resources may afford me.”
In the Chevalier’s coach, Jean-Guy feels himself bend and blur like melting waxwork beneath the weight of his own hypnotized exhaustion—fall open on every level, like his own strong but useless arms, his nerveless, cord-cut legs—
“The blush spreads as the blood rises, showing itself most markedly at the skin’s sheerest points—a map of veins, eminently traceable. Almost . . . readable.”
So imperative, this urge to fly, to fight. And so, utterly—
—impossible.
“See, here and there, where landmarks evince themselves: Those knots of veins and arteries, delicately entwined, which wreathe the undersides of your wrists. Two more great vessels, hidden at the tongue’s root. A long, humped one, outlining the shaft of that other boneless—organ—whose proper name we may not quote in mixed company.”
Sitting. Sprawling, limp. And thinking:
I—must . . .
“And that, stirring now? In that same . . . unmentionable . . . area?”
. . . must—wake . . .
“Blood as well, my friend. Blood, which—as the old adage goes—will always tell.”
But: This is all a dream, Jean-Guy reminds himself, momentarily surprised by his own coherence. I have somehow fallen asleep on duty, which is bad, though hardly unforgivable—and because I did so while thinking on the ci-devant Chevalier du Prendegrace, that traitor Dumouriez’s master, I have spun out this strange fantasy.
For Prendegrace cannot be here, after all; he will have fled before Jean-Guy’s agents, like any other hunted lordling. And, knowing this—
Knowing this, I will wake soon, and fulfill the mission set me by the Committee For Public Safety: catch Dumouriez, air out this nest of silken vipers. And all will be as I remember.
At the same time, meanwhile, the Chevalier (or his phantom—for can he really actually be there, dream or no?) smiles down at Jean-Guy through the gathering crimson shade, all sharp—and tender—amusement. A slight, lithe figure, dressed likewise all in red, his hereditary elegance undercut by a distressingly plebeian thread of more-than-usually poor hygiene: lurid velvet coat topped by an immaculately-tied but obviously dingy cravat; silken stockings, offhandedly worn and faded, above the buckled shoes with their neat cork heels. Dark rims to his longish fingernails—dirt, or something else, so long-dried it’s turned black.
His too-white skin has a stink, faintly charnel. Acrid in Jean-Guy’s acquiescent, narrowed nostrils.
“You carry a surplus of blood, Citizen, by the skin-map’s evidence,” the Chevalier seems to say, gently. “And thus might, if only in the name of politeness, consider willing some small portion of that overflowing store . . . to me.”
“Can’t you ever speak clearly, you damnable aristo?” Jean-Guy demands, hoarsely.
And: “Perhaps not,” comes the murmuring reply. “Though, now I think on it . . . I cannot say I’ve ever tried.”
Bending down, dipping his sleek, powdered head, this living ghost of an exterminated generation; licking his thin white lips while Jean-Guy lies still beneath him, boneless, helpless. So soft, all over—in every place—
—but one.
* * *
So: Now, 1815. Paris again, late September—an old calendar for a brand-new Empire—in the Row of the Armed Man, near dusk . . .
. . . where the Giradoux family’s lawyer meets Jean-Guy, key in hand, by the door of what was once Edouard Dumouriez’s house.
Over the decade since Jean-Guy last walked this part of Paris, Napoleon’s civil engineers have straightened out most of the overhanging tangle of back-alleys into a many-spoked wheel of pleasant, tree-lined boulevards and well-paved—if bleakly functional—streets. The Row of the Armed Man, however, still looks much the same as always: A narrow path of cracked flagstones held together with gravel and mortar, stinking of discar
ded offal and dried urine, bounded on either side by crooked doorways or smoke-darkened signs reading Butcher, Candle-maker, Notary Public.
And in the midst of it all, Dumouriez’s house, towering shadowy and slant above the rest—three shaky floors’ worth of rooms left empty, in a city where unoccupied living space is fought over like a franc left lying in the mud.
“The rabble do avoid it,” the lawyer agrees, readily. Adding, with a facile little shrug: “Rumor brands the place as . . . haunted.”
And the unspoken addendum to said addendum, familiar as though Jean-Guy had formed the statement himself—
—though I, of course, do not ascribe to the same theory . . . being, as I am, a rational man living in this rational and enlightened state of Nouvelle France, an age without kings, without tyrants . . .
With Jean-Guy adding, mentally, in return: For we were all such reasonable men, once upon a time. And the Revolution, our lovely daughter, sprung full-blown from that same reason—a bare-breasted Athena clawing her way up to daylight, through the bloody ruin of Zeus’ shattered skull.
The Giradoux lawyer wears a suit of black velvet, sober yet festive, and carries a small satin mask; his hair has been pulled back and powdered in the “antique fashion” of twelve scant years past. And at his throat, partially hidden in the fold of his cloak’s collar, Jean-Guy can glimpse the sharp red edge of a scarlet satin ribbon knotted—oh so very neatly—just beneath his jugular vein.
“I see you’ve come dressed for some amusement, M’sieu.”
The lawyer colors slightly, as if caught unaware in some dubious action.
“Merely a social engagement,” he replies. “A Bal des Morts. You’ve heard the term?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Where the dead go to dance, M’sieu Sansterre.”
Ah, indeed.
Back home in Martinique, where Jean-Guy has kept himself carefully hidden these ten years past and more, the “Thermidorean reaction” which attended news of the Terror’s end—Jacobin arch-fiend Maximilien Robespierre first shot, then guillotined; his Committee for Public Safety disbanded; slavery reinstated, and all things thus restored to their natural rank and place—soon gave rise to a brief but intense period of public celebration on those vividly colored shores. There was dancing to all hours, Free Black and Creole French alike, with everything fashionable done temporarily a la victime—a thin white shift or cravat-less blouse, suitable for making a sacrifice of one’s-self on the patriotic altar in style; the hair swept up, exposing the neck for maximum accessibility; a ribbon tied where the good Widow, were she still on hand to do so, might be expected to leave her red and silent, horizontal kiss . . .
At the Bal des Morts, participants’ dance-cards were filled according to their own left-over notoriety; for who in their family might have actually gone to good Dr. Guillotin’s Machine, or who their family might have had a hand in sending there. Aping executed and executioners alike, they dressed as corpses and preened like resurrected royalty, bobbing and spinning in a sluggish stream of old blood—trash caught in frenzied motion against the gutter’s grate, at the end of a hard night’s deluge.
The roll-call of the tumbrils: Aristocrats, collaborators, traitors and Tyrannists, even the merely argumentative or simply ignorant—one poor woman calling her children in to dinner, only to find herself arrested on suspicion of sedition because her son’s name happened to be (like that of the deposed king) Louis. And in the opposing camp, Jean-Guy’s fellow Revolutionaries: Girondists, Extremists, Dantonists, Jacobins, patriots of all possible stamps and stripes—many of whom, by the end of it all, had already begun to fall under fatal suspicion themselves.
These, then, their inheritors and imitators . . . these remnants wrapped in party-going silk, spending their nights laying a thin skin of politeness, even enjoyment, over the unhealed temporal wounds of la Mere France.
Jean-Guy met the girl who would become his late wife at such an affair, and paid her bride-price a few scant weeks later. Vivienne, her name had been. An apricot-colored little thing, sweet-natured and shy, her eyes almost blue; far less obviously du sang negre than he himself, even under the most—direct—scrutiny.
And it is only now, with her so long dead, that he can finally admit it was this difference of tone . . . rather than any true heart’s affection . . . which was the primary motive of their union.
He glances down at a puddle near his boot, briefly considering how his own reflection sketches itself on the water’s dim skin: A dark man in a dark frock-coat—older now, though no paler. Beneath his high, stiff silk hat, his light brown hair has been cropped almost to the skull to mask its obvious kink; under the hat-brim’s shade, his French father’s straight nose and hazel eyes seem awkwardly offset by the unexpected tint of his slave-born mother’s teak-inflected complexion. His mixed-race parentage is writ large in every part of him, for those who care enough to look for it—the tell-tale taint of colonization, met and matched in flesh and bone. His skin still faintly scarred, as it were, by the rucked sheets of their marriage-bed.
Not that any money ever changed hands to legalize that relationship, Jean-Guy thinks. Maman having been old Sansterre’s property, at the time.
This is a tiring line of thought to maintain, however . . . not to mention over-familiar. And there will be much to be done, before the Paris sun rises again.
“I wish you the joy of your Bal, M’sieu,” Jean-Guy tells the lawyer. “And so, if it please you—my key?”
Proffering his palm and smiling, pleasantly. To which the lawyer replies, coloring again—
“Certainly, M’sieu.”
—and hands it over. Adding, as Jean-Guy mounts the steps behind him:
“But you may find very little as you remember it, from those days when M’sieu Dumouriez had the top floor.”
Jean-Guy pauses at the building’s door, favoring the lawyer with one brief, backwards glance. And returns—
“That, one may only hope . . . M’sieu.”
* * *
1793:
Jean-Guy wakes to twilight, to an empty street—that angry crowd which formerly assembled to rock and prison the Chevalier du Prendegrace’s escaping coach apparently having passed on to some further, more distant business. He lies sprawled on a pile of trash behind the butcher’s back door, head abuzz and stomach lurching; though whether the nausea in question results from his own physical weakness, the smell of the half-rotten mess of bones beneath him or the sound of the flies that cluster on their partially denuded surface, he truly cannot tell. But he wakes, also, to the voice of his best spy—the well-named La Hire—telling him he must open his eyes, lurch upright, rouse himself at last . . .
“May the Goddess of Reason herself strike me dead if we didn’t think you lost forever, Citizen—murdered, maybe, or even arrested. Like all the other Committee members.”
Much the same advice Jean-Guy remembers giving himself, not all so very long ago. Back when he lay enveloped in that dark red closeness between those drawn velvet curtains, caught and prone under the stale air’s weight in damnably soft, firm grip of the Chevalier’s upholstery.
But: “Citizen Sansterre!” A slap across the jaw, jerking his too-heavy head sharply to the left. “Are you tranced? I said, we couldn’t find you.”
Well . . . you’ve found me now, though. Haven’t you—
—Citizen?
The Chevalier’s murmuring voice, reduced to an echo in Jean-Guy’s blood. His hidden stare, red-glass-masked, coming and going like heat lightning’s horizon-flash behind Jean-Guy’s aching eyes.
He shakes his head, still reeling from the sting of La Hire’s hand. Forces himself to form words, repeating:
“ . . . the Committee.”
“Gone, Citizen. Scattered to the winds.”
“Citizen . . . Robespierre?”
“Arrested, shot, jaw h
eld on with a bandage. He’ll kiss the Widow tomorrow—as will we, if we don’t fly this stinking city with the Devil’s own haste.”
Gaining a weak grip upon La Hire’s arm, Jean-Guy uses it to lever himself—shakily—upwards. His mouth feels swollen, lips and gums raw-abraded; new blood fresh and sticky at one corner, cud of old blood sour between his back teeth, at the painful root of his tongue. More blood pulls free as he rises, unsticking the left panel of his half-opened shirt from the nub of one nipple; as he takes a step forward, yet more blood still is found gluing him fast to his own breeches, stiff and brown, in that—
. . . unmentionable area . . .
And on one wrist, a light, crescent-shaped wound—bruised and inflamed, pink with half-healed infection. A painfully raised testimony to dream-dim memory: The Chevalier’s rough little tongue pressed hard, cold as a dead cat’s, against the thin skin above the uppermost vein.
I have set my mark upon you, Citizen.
Jean-Guy passes a hand across his brow, coughing, then brings it away wet—and red. Squints down, and finds himself inspecting a palm-full of blood-tinged sweat.
“Dumouriez,” he asks La Hire, with difficulty. “Taken . . . also?”
“Hours ago.”
“Show me . . . to his room.”
* * *
And now, a momentary disclaimer: Let it be here stated, with as much clarity as possible, that Jean-Guy had never—hitherto—given much credence to those old wives’ tales which held that aristos glutted their delicate hungers at the mob’s expense, keeping themselves literally fat with infusions of carnal misery and poor men’s meat. Pure rhetoric, surely; folk-tales turned metaphor, as quoted in Camille Desmoulins’ incendiary pamphlets: “Church and nobility—vampires. Observe the color of their faces, and the pallor of your own.”
Not that the Chevalier du Prendgrace’s face, so imperfectly recalled, had borne even the slightest hint of color . . . healthy, or otherwise.
Not long after his return to Martinique, Jean-Guy had held some brief discourse with an English doctor named Gabriel Keynes—a man famous for spending the last ten years of his own life trying to identify the causes of (and potential cures for) that swampy bronze plague known as Yellow Fever. Bolstered by a bottle or two of good claret and Keynes’ personal promise of most complete discretion, Jean-Guy had unfolded to him the whole, distressing story of his encounter with the Chevalier: Shown him the mark on his wrist, the marks . . .