Echo had not even finished locking her door when Anne-Laure was already one flight down. She stood there still holding her garbage, hoping to meet another neighbor when her cellphone rang.
It read Celine.
“Echo, what size clothes do you wear?” asked Celine in her trademark New York accent, not pausing for a breath. “Like the smallest, right?”
“What?” Echo asked.
“Do you know what size clothes you wear?”
“Not sure exactly, it depends.” Echo had never cared much about her clothes. “Why?”
“Look at something you’re wearing, quick,” Celine said, her earring making a clipping sound into the phone. “Are you a size zero or what?”
“Zero,” Echo repeated, even though she hadn’t looked. “Sounds about right.” She looked down at her flat chest, the noodle legs that made her jeans ride up and the arms that were mostly elbows.
“You know how you only own, like, one pair of pants?” Celine asked. “And how you’re still wearing that hideous jacket you found in a movie theater?”
Echo didn’t know how Celine knew about this.
“So here’s the thing,” Celine continued. “I’m going to hook you up with some free clothes. Pretty much new, really high-end stuff. You just need to come to one of my units at Rue Chapon to pick it up yourself.”
“Oh,” Echo replied, sensing there must be more to this story. “Why are they free?” she asked. “Is there something wrong with them?”
“Nothing is wrong with them. You just need to come now before the police come back and clear everything away.” There was a pause before Celine quickly whispered, “Just don’t tell anyone about this.”
Echo lowered her voice as well. “Is this, like, stealing?”
“God, no!” Celine said, and paused again, as if she was trying to explain some cultural anomaly. “Look, the girl who owned the stuff killed herself two days ago—don’t worry, she didn’t do it in the apartment; she jumped in front of a train. Luckily, I manage her building and saw that all her clothes are just sitting there in her apartment. You have to come and take some. Who knows where it will all end up otherwise?”
“Celine, I…” Echo started, but Celine interrupted by repeating the address for her to write down.
“Just come and see the clothes before you say no! I mean, the girl’s already dead.”
Her mouth was open, but Echo felt the appropriate time to refuse Celine’s offer had come and gone. Plus, she had been looking to change certain things about herself and perhaps this was all part of the plan. “Okay,” she said after a long pause, “I’ll…come.”
A month prior, Echo had met Celine by chance. Celine’s office was next door to the upscale tourist destination L’Ami Louis. The agency was staffed entirely of loud, curvaceous older American women whose job it was to assist foreigners in finding long-term rental apartments in Paris. The two ex-mistresses, a former trophy wife, and a trio of forever-emerging artists on staff were known for their taste, attention to detail, and warmth.
When Echo, a shivering twenty-one-year-old Chinese American girl, stumbled in from the rain, alone and after having just been pickpocketed on the sidewalk, Celine stepped out from behind her desk and gave her a big motherly hug. “You’re still going to have the best time in Paris,” she cooed. “So you lost your passport? There are still churches, there are still cafés, and there are sculptures that will wink at you every time you walk by.”
From then on, every once in a while Celine would call Echo, who would inevitably be wandering around the city avoiding her French studies. Over coffee, Echo would listen to Celine talk about her love life and where to eat the best chaussons aux pommes. As she listened, Echo would feel herself passing temporarily into a new world. A world without anxiousness, without dread. A world free of her own depressing thoughts.
Toward the farthest corner, between the freight elevator and the trash bins, was where Celine told her to wait. So that’s where Echo waited, even though the sour stench lifting off the bags gave her the shivers. She held her breath and swiped at her phone’s screen until she heard footsteps and saw Celine’s pale white calves emerge from the dark like teeth.
“Oh, darling, don’t look so scared,” Celine said as they hugged and a puff of perfume escaped from her collar. “This is not even a big deal!” She waved half a dozen blue IKEA bags in Echo’s face.
A week ago, a red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing had hypnotized the world by vanishing without a trace. Day after day helicopter cameras focused on large swaths of ocean or, rather, focused on the boats tugging side-scan sonar devices under the waves. Viewers were asked to imagine, beneath the blue water, fiber-optic cables combing the seabed for debris. Perhaps that was why none of the neighbors saw Echo and Celine approach the door to apartment 29. Behind their closed doors, they, too, were mesmerized.
As Echo followed Celine’s skirt up the stairs to the third floor, her footsteps reverberated down the hallway, drowning out the sound of her own thumping heart. The door was blocked off with two lengths of red tape and a police seal on the door.
“In here,” Celine whispered, waving her hand impatiently. “You’re going to lose your mind when you see this stuff.” She ducked under the tape and leaned against the door, which swung open with a soft click, and nearly without thinking, Echo followed.
Experts in the fashion industry say the first clothes that people are drawn to are instinctual. Think of your favorite clothes as a child. Then as you mature, you focus deeper into the self. Now you favor clothes that involve sexuality, yours and other people’s. You begin to reflect your profession, your mental state, then address your personal affectations. Your personhood. And then you start to look into the world. At society and history and nature. You feel for texture and you create contrasts and distance.
It wasn’t the quantity but the particularity of the clothes that stunned Echo. Floor-to-ceiling shelves were stuffed with sweaters of supernatural textures, warmed by the daylight that poured through the open windows. Shoes lined the edges of the room, facing the center, like a fabulous invisible audience. On one wall, there were racks of dresses one on top of the other, arranged by color. They introduced themselves to Echo, teaching her this and that about themselves.
An armoire of vintage cashmere coats was organized around a set of themes. This suede that felt like velvet recalled the fashions of an ancient era, while the leather referenced the recent past. A silk gown in a glass-fronted cabinet sang a ballad to her. It looked like the leaf of a celestial plant.
Celine stuck a wool dress under her chin, its hem like a melted bell. Echo inexplicably knew that the mesmerizing crotchet was done by nimble-handed teenage girls and took a week to get right.
“Look how expensive this looks! It’s not like she needs it anymore, and you sure do.” Celine kissed the air in front of a fabulous mink coat, then stuffed it into one of the large IKEA bags. “There is just so much stuff here, nobody is even going to notice you took anything.”
Echo reached for the shapely peplums and pleats, unable to quite believe she was allowed to touch them. She could feel the spirit of the craftsperson in every sewn trim, every delicate pattern, and felt the rhythm of their movements. She tipped the dead girl’s soft leather loafers, one after another, onto her bare feet.
She had no idea how much time had passed when Celine waved her hand in front of her face and said, “We have to go. Make sure you’ve got everything you wanted.”
When Echo cast her eye around the room one last time, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces still left. Celine was right, it looked exactly the same as when they first entered.
“How could anyone who owns a pair of marbled horsehair boots want to die?” She asked aloud.
To leave, they had to walk through the white-tiled kitchen to climb down the fire escape, dragging their bulging bags with them. Echo saw in
a tall vase a population of tiny red fish, all of them floating on top like the last pieces of breakfast cereal. There were some potted plants, many of them dead, but which still managed to exude a kind of crinkly prettiness. As she headed straight for the door, Echo noticed a pile of dried-up orange peels with a single cigarette, stubbed on the inside of the orange’s hollow skin, floating in the drift across the kitchen counter. Was that the girl’s last cigarette?
Once they were outside, Echo looked down at her feet and noticed that she was still wearing the pair of loafers. She had left her old tennis shoes behind.
They walked behind an empty storefront on Rue de Saintonge, where Celine hailed a cab. The driver scooted to a stop just as they reached the corner.
It was difficult to fit all the clothes into the trunk, but Celine packed it down with all her weight. She took out a handbag from the pile and said, “The rest is all yours!”
“Thank you,” Echo mouthed to Celine through the window as the taxi pulled away.
“Just call me your fairy godmother!” Celine said, beaming, the light from the traffic flooding her hair from behind.
Later, Echo would think back to this moment and wish Celine hadn’t said that. If Celine were her godmother, then this would be a fairy tale. And in fairy tales, sooner or later, the real princesses are separated from the fake ones.
Dust and willow cotton flew past the car window like snow. The driver was playing classical music, a Debussy prelude she didn’t know she recognized. A mirror embedded in the mahogany made a frame around her face.
The mirror made her look carefully at the interior of the car. The seats were made of thick, soft leather that warmed her body. When she reached her hand up, she touched the fine-grained suede of the roof. The driver was wearing a crisp navy suit and his superbly articulated hands circled smoothly around the steering wheel, making a blur of his white gloves.
Wasn’t the taxi that swerved around the corner for her a Prius?
When she arrived at her apartment, the driver got out of the car and carried her bulging blue bags past the teenagers hanging out in front of the stoop and up the four flights of stairs to her door. He bowed slightly and kissed the back of her hand.
In the next moments, she forgot what his face looked like; when she peered through her window down at the street, the car, and any trace of it, was gone.
That night, on the slow-crawling Internet that she stole from the Tunisian bistro downstairs, Echo exhumed any information she could find on the previous owner of her new wardrobe, piecing together bits of interviews and blog posts about her life.
Mega Mun was discovered at sixteen trying to sneak into a Parisian nightclub by a well-known photographer who himself was about to quit the business if not for this “creature” who revealed herself to him as a high school student on a foreign excursion. She was a splinter-thin Korean girl who managed to exude the confidence of curves. “Lots of girls try to look small, cross their legs, but Mega makes herself large,” the photographer reported to Fashion TV. Mega was known for her fluttering eyelids, which were said to be like French doors shutting against a gale. She was described by numerous sources as indolent, destructive, and sex-crazed.
Although not a single sit-down interview with Mega herself was ever conducted, it seemed many people spoke on her behalf. Narcisco said in an interview, “Mega’s crazy, but hip-crazy. Cuckoo! We can relate, you know? She’s not boring.” She was said to be ignorant of fashion trends, but somehow a mohair jacket or a well-cut trouser morphed her from insufferable child to idiosyncratic aristocrat. A few years ago, it looked as though Mega suddenly dropped off the scene, as if the world that loved her had forgotten all about her.
That is, until she resurfaced on the previous day’s fashion blogs. Alone and broke, having spent all her money on clothes, she was last photographed by an amateur street-style photographer walking through the cobblestoned streets of Rue Des Rosiers wearing a @Vetements sweater and these @Balenciaga joggers from two seasons ago. A velvet backpack from #Chanel and a pair of platform #Prada loafers with a color between black and brown and carrying a vintage mini Hermès. Then she was seen jumping in front of the train at Métro Pont Marie. She left no note.
Knowing the dates, names, locations, and brands added to Echo’s steadily conflicted feelings of having taken all the clothes in the first place. She thought about calling Celine, explaining that she couldn’t bear to wear any of it and asking her to put everything back.
But that was just a lie Echo told herself.
The very next morning a woman crossed one of the stone bridges of the Canal Saint-Martin to ask Echo where she’d gotten her jean jacket. Then she was given a free mango lassi at her favorite Indian takeout place. Later that day, while walking to the La Poste, an elderly tourist couple asked if she would accompany them to the opera at the Palais Garnier that night, as they just happened to have one extra ticket. Their daughter had to study that night. Walking across the fountain in the center of the Jardin du Luxembourg, she was photographed in her new Vivienne Westwood gown, and the photo showed up in the style section of Madame Figaro.
An anonymous feature on her appeared the following week on The Cut. An intern at Vogue had created an Instagram account for her and it immediately boasted a million unique daily visits. Stylists called her “Swaggy Librarian meets Ninja Lolita” and “Underground watercolor chic” and other things that made no sense to her. Fashion-school fans swarmed her apartment with their asymmetrical bobs, wanting to know which big-time mogul was funding her, what fashion editor was mentoring her.
“I really don’t know what to say,” Echo was quoted to have said. “I was just hot, so I took my sweater off, and then my ears were cold, so I put on a hat.”
The industry had no choice but to make up a stunt backstory for her: the girl of the moment was named Echo, she was anywhere between seventeen to thirty-seven years old, possibly the heir of a Tencent fortune, or Wanda Group royalty, or the daughter of those people who bought the Waldorf Astoria. It was a decent story, almost as exciting as the ex-con who became a famous model from his mug shot.
Twelve dresses, twenty shirts, three gowns, five coats, and fifteen pairs of shoes had changed everything. Taking the Métro every day to the dingy language school near the Opéra or having a snack in the afternoon in the least popular ramen shop on Rue Sainte-Anne, the only difference for Echo was that she now brought a sensational weekend bag with her so that she could change her outfit and reemerge with a complete and startling transformation. The clothes gave her a cool-eyed confidence; the fabric fibers must have seeped into her skin, into her molecules and bloodstream, changing her very chemistry.
Wearing the dead girl’s clothes also gave Echo a new language. This allowed her to transcend social barriers. Vogue named her one of the “7 Must-Follow It-Girls of a Quietly Mysterious and Refreshingly Timid Nature.” “Echo is bringing orphan lost girl who #speaksbadfrench to the next level,” read the caption, which received ten thousand likes and countless emoji hearts. “She always looks delicious, it’s like we all want to eat her because she’s too tasty!” More likes and cartoon bombs. Tom Ford said he found beauty in her confusion. They all agreed, in Echo, a tremendous fashion star was born.
Important-sounding people told her to do this, wear this, hold this, stand here, put that heavy triangle on your head and she did. They told her to post this, use this, link this, and then this, and she said “Sure.” They said “Très bien fait.” She closed her eyes and they put makeup on her eyelids. “Bon!” they said. “Belle!” Echo was in demand. She showed up on sets, drank cafés allongés, ate canelés, earned money for selling clothes, and used that money to buy more clothes. There appeared to be no way of turning off her new powers; it was as if someone had handed Echo a baby. A baby who screamed if she didn’t spend every night suited up, turning up at fashion events, drinking cocktails, and saying witty things about seams.
Echo ca
me into moods and desires she was unfamiliar with, and whenever it got too confusing, she just drank more champagne. She began a one-sided affair with a married socialite named Nicholas whose last name was twenty-five letters long. The Daily Mail digitally mashed their photos together and labeled them “Smitten.” She was pseudo-adopted by his family, who took her skiing in Austria, where she ate delicious cheeses and sat speechless as they sprayed champagne on one another’s faces for a week straight.
It was with Nicholas’s family on an ambassador’s yacht in Crete that Echo got to see a great blue whale. It was fifteen feet long and splashing the water with its tail. The captain beckoned everyone to the deck and Echo watched from the upper deck as the other guests leaned over the side of the boat to pet the smooth skin of the whale’s cheeks. Their hands moved right above its mouth. The whale’s body was parallel to the boat, and all around them there was sky, then a wall of waves, then sky and more waves.
Clutching her hat to her head, Echo looked deep into the whale’s large eye and the whale looked back at her. She thought they reached an understanding. The whale was playing with her, with all of them on the boat. Look, the eye said, I’m just humoring you, you small insignificant being. You? You’re not even worth killing.
Despite international efforts, six months passed and the authorities had been unable to locate any part of the missing plane. Beneath the waves in the deepest blue water, whales mistook human signals for the voices of their own kind. The sonar waves emanating from the rescue ships’ equipment gave the whales night terrors and anxiety. During these times, they were short with one another. They suffered from their nervousness and it made them miss their mothers. Low-frequency pings gave whales bad directions, to turn left instead of right, up instead of down, and it was only a matter of time before the first whales began washing ashore, dying on the gritty sand beside airport runways.
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