The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  She remembered loosening the curtains so that they diffused the bright sunlight. The room was warm and she lay down and let the heavy summer air, the sounds of traffic, and the smell of another couple’s bed and sheets make her feel like this was her home, her city, her place to forget all thoughts and sleep. And there, someplace in that indefinable space where the limbs are already sleeping and pulling the head along with them, David passed beneath a bridge and was no longer alive when the boat came out on the other side. A quick, painless snap of the neck, they’d said. She hadn’t woken up. No foreboding, no shudder at the moment, no sound of his voice or image of his face. She’d taken off her sandals and placed them out on the balcony to air. And then she moved aside the covers, lay down, and slept.

  Bombay had called then. Bianca had begun searching for a pen and paper, thinking the call was a message for the apartment’s real owners, some important call from India that she should jot down. She had even written half the message until she came to David’s name. “I’m sorry,” Bombay said.

  Bianca spent a few days waiting for her friend Jade to arrive. Even in the most calming portions of the city, Bianca’s body felt snatched and her heart homeless. She wandered, trying to escape the sound of French, the language which she had always wished would rub off on her. Now, it felt harsh, pointed and viral. She even found herself consciously keeping French cosmetics and perfume off her skin. Her eyes were nearly always darting away from the lettering of signs. One afternoon, she had followed a large group of Japanese tourists for two hours just to be lost amid a language that was not only foreign, but without menace. They had smiled at her, and she had, for the first time, smiled back.

  The morning of Jade’s arrival, Bianca stared at herself in the mirror. She laughed at her image in a way that immediately frightened her. If she hadn’t looked bad that first night, she looked like trash now. The feeling inside her had worked all the way out to the ends of her hair. Her eyes were tiny from the bloat of crying, drinking, and eating poorly, as well as the pseudo-sleep promise of pills—the lifestyle of mourning. She was definitely thinner. Her hair needed combing. Bianca showered and put on some small measure of makeup. Then she sat on the lid of the toilet crying without tears, though the feeling was still painful, like dry heaves, and reached to her paint-chipped toenails. She then felt the P-wave of panic approach, the hint of the wall of almost physical doom to come, a force that wanted to snatch her here, even in the brightly lit bathroom. She pushed it off. Don’t go there, don’t go there, she told herself angrily, trying to command her own mind.

  Several nights before, the panic had crept into her during a medicated sleep when she was defenseless. Everything approached her from that night—clear, unfiltered and unmerciful. David was gone. She would never see him again. Without her thinking of him, he wasn’t even a memory. This felt like such a responsibility. And not just that, but everyone would fall. Everyone would be crushed. Everyone would drown, including herself. And the Earth, the Sun, the wide wide Milky Way, sucked away into nothing, in time. How was it something so obvious, such a given, could be so ignored and yet inflict such fear?

  Don’t go there! she shouted to herself now, awake in the cramped hotel bathroom, clenching her hands in fists and pummeling her legs until they were the color of her painted nails. And she didn’t go there. She felt the faintest licks of doom sweep across her body and pass her by. Close, this time. So close. She felt as though to give in to this blackest shadow would mean certain death. By cardiac arrest perhaps. Or a stroke. Fuck, she said to herself. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She massaged her legs. The pain was good. This kind of physical pain was brilliant.

  When she had composed herself, Bianca took a bus to the Charles de Gaulle airport, the farthest point she’d yet traveled from the center of Paris since David had died. She and David hadn’t come through the airport, but had taken the Chunnel from England. On that train, what lay beyond the windows seemed not to be concrete, layers of shale and the weight of water, but a feeling of being above ground in a primordial night. A night where light had yet to be spoken. The darkness of possibility, David had called it.

  On the bus, Bianca had a conversation with an architecture student who was flying to Bilbao to see the new Guggenheim. The student felt compelled to point out a few key buildings as they left the old avenues of central Paris. Bianca didn’t have the heart to tell her that she found everything outside old Paris to be an ugly wasteland, these suburbs which reminded her of Rio. Bianca didn’t care for modern France. Or modern Europe for that matter, including the Bilbao museum. She was attracted to the inheritance of parks and facades from Paris’s horse-drawn past. She was a Francophile only here in the pocket of the city she and David had come to call home for a month of summer. To Bianca, Paris seemed a city emptied and now occupied by another race, impatient, restless, plunging forward and downward, caught up with the idea of speed, even if the acceleration was due to descent. She especially despised the airport.

  Inside the concrete rotunda of the Charles de Gaulle airport, Bianca rode the escalator up through the apocalyptic design of Plexiglas chutes. She spotted Jade coming down the opposite way, in a different tube. Jade had cut her hair short. Bianca knocked on the Plexiglas, but Jade didn’t see her. Bianca walked up the escalator, then rode the other tube down. The air behind her roared with the metallic crackle of jet engines. Her throat burned from the stench of aviation fuel that seeped into the interior of the airport. But she felt better. The quick glimpse of Jade helped more than she’d expected.

  They finally met up and hugged beside the luggage carousel.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m okay,” Bianca said. It seemed possible that this was true. Right now, in this brief present moment.

  They waited for Jade’s suitcase.

  “I thought the airport was in the city,” Jade said, eyes fixed on the luggage that lumbered out onto the carousel and took a tour past impatient hands. “I could’ve taken a taxi or bus into the city.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I needed to get out,” Bianca said, staring at the suitcases. “What’s yours like?”

  “One black one, and a smaller green one.”

  There was something European about the airport, or perhaps non-American was a better moniker for the color and brush of the stainless steel, for the different parabola of the security mirrors and the way in which crowds formed. A different dynamic of impatience and resignation. After twenty minutes of waiting for the luggage, she was worn out. She couldn’t even concentrate enough to recall her most recent recollection of what David had once said. What was it? What had he said? The darkness of possibility. Was she forgetting already?

  Heading back into old Paris on the shuttle bus, Bianca could feel Jade’s eyes on her. She matched her friend’s gaze and tried to smile. “I know. I look like shit.”

  “I look like shit,” Jade said.

  Bianca wondered how much of Jade’s willingness to be here was matched by Jade’s desire to visit Paris. But even then, how to refuse?

  “It’s beautiful,” Jade said, her head turned toward the windows.

  “Yes,” Bianca said. “It can be.”

  She hoped Jade could help dispel the ominous umbra around the things Bianca’s gaze fell upon. The first old traffic circle, the architecture springing to life yet decayed all the same, the parks that seemed too dark green for midday. The bus passed a metro entrance. Several dark vans were pulled onto the sidewalk and a security detail in silver helmets and machine guns seemed to guard the entrance, waiting for whatever was underground to rear up. African women with bright dresses and giant bowls atop their heads walked past unperturbed. The bus ground gears and moved deeper into Paris.

  The spiked wall of the Père Lachaise cemetery ran along their left. Shadows seemed pooled to the very edge of the stone wall, the wall itself a dike holding back a nightmare of roots and shadow. She searched the trees for a sense that David had been in this section of the city. She examined the windows
and ornate cornices of the buildings for memories in which he had been present. She searched for him in the almost stalagmite-like accumulation on the architecture he’d been endlessly pointing out. Sandcastles was a word he had used. Bulbous, too. And legacy. Legacy. David had used it often. She wished she and David had never come to Paris. That they’d taken her suggestion and vacationed in Thailand instead. She could picture the two of them on an unspoiled beach, green cliffs behind them, water the color of lapis.

  Bianca and Jade stepped from the bus into the stream of an afternoon rush hour. Car horns and a road crew’s jackhammer punctuated the air. The Hotel Pasadena was just around the corner. She’d picked it because it was half a minute from the Oberkampf metro station, not too far from the Seine, and available in this last rush of late summer tourist traffic. And it was cheap, and better than remaining in that apartment. Jade lifted her suitcase up the stone steps of the hotel. Bianca took her key from the Algerian behind the desk. A group of Americans in Birkenstocks, ponytails, and two-day beards chatted loudly in the cold, cramped lounge, their laughter carrying through the doors. American English seemed to carry so much more bravado here than it did at home, she thought. Nonetheless, she felt comforted by the sound of her mother tongue. Bianca led Jade into the tight elevator that jerked them up to their floor.

  The hotel room held two beds, a dresser and a small bathroom. The window gave a view of an inner courtyard. She hadn’t really considered the room until now, with someone else in it with her. Jade stood in front of the window and Bianca joined her, gazing at the walls of the facing apartment buildings, at the medley of drying clothes, aerials and crumbling masonry and shutters. Colors of faded blue, ocher, smells of batter, sounds of songbirds in this empty column of garden quiet.

  “Do you want to eat dinner?” Bianca asked.

  “Can I take a nap first?” Jade said, backing from the window.

  “Good idea.”

  Jade collapsed onto a bed and pried her sandals off with her toes. “I always forget how far away Europe is,” she said. “And the jet lag.”

  “You’ll get over it. Takes a couple days.”

  “What time is it now?”

  Bianca checked her watch. “It’s seven o’clock.”

  “No, I mean real time. Our time at home.”

  Bianca subtracting the hours to figure out the time overseas. She no longer considered the time difference. “Morning. Ten o’clock.”

  “That’s why I’m craving orange juice,” Jade said, her voice mumbled by drowsiness.

  Bianca lay on the other bed and stared at the ceiling. She matched her respiration with Jade’s deep and slow breathing. But though Bianca was also tired, she felt unable to lie here doing nothing when all around her—north, east, west, south, the compass points of news—the city seemed to hold answers ransom. There were answers to unfold, even if she had to wrestle the truth from the vagaries of her thoughts. There were things to be done. To see the police—despite their decision not to investigate the “incident” further, Bombay, the translator. And the bridge.

  Jade’s legs jerked. She was already dreaming. Bianca wished for Jade’s circumstances: to be single because of divorce, a willed separation. Bianca sat up in bed. Beside the box of ashes was the manuscript for David’s book on Fryderyk Chopin, as well as many more pages of loose-leaf notes. She had begun reading them during the night to help her sleep, though instead, she only entered a quasi-rest populated by figures and events from her husband’s manuscript. Jade snored for a brief moment. Bianca crept off the bed and slipped on her shoes. She couldn’t wait for Jade. She left her friend sleeping in the room and stepped quickly down the hotel steps to the alley. She followed the pavement to a larger street, then an avenue, turning corners in hopes of spotting the Seine, yet finding no glimpse of the river. At a metro station stood more policemen. A small group dressed as some kind of marauders, Huns or Vikings, walked up the stairs and onto street level. A German Shepherd growled at them. They carried plastic swords, shields and wore wigs below silver helmets. They laughed together, half-drunk, reveling, headed to or from some costume party. As innocuous as they were, they unnerved her. She walked more quickly. She passed city maps on kiosks, but followed her intuition instead until, finally, the sky opened up and she could see the steely band of water. A foul effluence of hurry and exhaust met the sweet wind coming down on the smooth chute of the river.

  She walked along the bank for a while. The sidewalks were filled with locals taking in the late afternoon, the sun turning their faces the color of gold. Bianca wove through the sidewalk crowd, her grief incognito, her legs refusing to turn until, finally, she made herself face the opposite bank and choose a crossing. She edged out onto a bridge and stopped midway across. The air tumbled together, like in rapids, wave after wave of noise forming over some hidden boulder that stretched the noise taunt before breaking it at the end. Wonderment, grief. Wonderment, grief.

  She waited for a tourist boat, spotting one far off at the bend. Eventually, the languid pace of the bateaux-mouches brought it close enough to see the blue and white striped awnings, the tilted table umbrellas with beer logos on the flapping fringes. As it passed beneath the bridge, she saw tourists sitting about on deck chairs, wearing white hats and black cameras. She felt a wave of vertigo and backed from the edge. In the lull of traffic behind her, she crossed the bridge’s span and watched the boat emerge from the other side, the flaps on the umbrellas calm for a few moments, then snapping again in the strange breeze that forms in shadow. A white hat flew into the air and spun, its bill moving end over end, finally hitting the water.

  Like this, she thought. Like this. As I lay down and slept. Like this.

  She returned to the bank. At the end of the bridge, she stopped and looked up. The bridge was flanked by sculptures of lions and cherubim. Someone had put a red clown’s nose on one of the cherubs. She wondered if she had the wrong bridge. Laughter erupted ahead of her. The party-goers, dressed in their Viking costumes, passed her and headed out across the bridge.

  Back in the hotel room, she lay down beside Jade. The dusk had given way to night. She had the urge to talk, but Jade still slept. Bianca missed David’s whispers in the middle of the night, even if what he said was nonsensical, the soft, slushy words nearly unbearable in her ear. Words that found significance in sound where, moments before, they had been camouflaged in the jungle of his thoughts, perhaps meaning nothing, perhaps as important as gospel.

  Outside their window, a Parisian siren sounded as it moved down an adjacent street, the same sound she and David had loved just weeks ago for its particular dialect of emergency. She had not taken into account, then, that every siren has a destination.

  “Jade,” she whispered, waiting for her friend to awaken. The lack of expression in the faces of those asleep unnerved her now. “Wake up.”

  “Hmm?” Jade said, stirring.

  “Wake up.”

  Chapter 7

  Chase walked with his friends toward the Place de la République. The smog had given beautiful sunsets for a week, but Chase was glad for the trade of fresh air for tropical-grade sunsets. The air smelled better now, finally. His friend Luc’s American girlfriend walked just ahead of him. She wore a thin skirt and blouse that hinted at the garments underneath. He felt someone was behind him and turned, but spotted no one he knew. Several vans were parked by the metro station stairs. A dozen policeman in silver-helmeted riot gear stood at the entrance. German Shepherds on taut leashes milled at their feet and sniffed the ground’s odor of gum, spilled beer and motor oil. The summer had been relatively calm. Chase hoped this wasn’t the upstart of new unrest—bombings or gassing or whatever, whether Turk or Kurd or terrorists.

  “Wait a moment,” Chase said. He turned to face a pickpocket with glazed-over eyes. The man’s face was dirty and his hair straggled down to a beard that spilled onto a white button shirt with sleeves too long for him. The man paused several meters back from where he’d been following, the d
istance of deceit. Chase stepped toward the man, at the same time reaching into his own jacket pocket for a cigarette. He lit it, took a drag to get it going and handed it to the man, along with the rest of the pack. The pickpocket took it and walked away.

  “Who was that?” Luc’s girlfriend asked.

  “Someone who gave me a good picture once.”

  A couple years earlier, Chase had snapped a photo of the same man—then also donning a white shirt—as he attempted to snatch someone’s wallet. The shutter snapped just as the robbed man turned, facing the thief who’d yet to hide the take, the robbed man’s face blossoming with the angry awareness of violation. The photo amused Chase and was one of the prints he had sold in a time when he wasn’t selling much of anything. But that seemed ages ago. Before pornography, boudoir photos or surveillance work. He wondered what the man had done in the meantime. Petty theft, some time maybe, probably not. He didn’t seem much changed.

  Luc, Chase’s psychiatrist friend, had a patient who stole men’s wallets—not for the money, but out of a compulsion to possess the privacy of others. He had eighty or so, full of credit cards, gas cards, club cards, photos of a wife, son or daughter, business cards, calling cards, call-girl numbers, condoms, and the boring commonality of paper bills. After a month of visits, the patient had neglected to pay his bill. When another month passed, Luc made an anonymous call to the police. The strange thing, Luc had said, was that those wallets were full of money; the man could have paid at any time. He could have parted with a little currency and paid his bill. But no, better to lose everything than to lose a little.