The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  But no matter how convincingly he thought he’d resuscitated his sense of innocence, the act of sitting in a cell infused a guiltiness into his conscience. Self-righteousness had never been the quickest emotion to rise from his gut. He was a fat, wrinkled fifty-nine-year-old Dane who felt he’d perhaps done more people wrong than he’d ever realized. Punishment, even for a crime he hadn’t committed, seemed in order. There was the drinking, and perhaps he’d failed at raising his niece, and there was his quickness to judge, and not least the women he’d hurt and the drinks he set up before sick eyes, night after night. Weren’t the sum of these things, and the ones he’d forgotten, as harmful as attempted murder? Worse, because they were directed at more than one person?

  After a tasteless breakfast, Baptiste entertained a frail hope that the voice was gone for good. He hadn’t heard it in days. Perhaps his drinking had given him a taste of dementia he’d never thought would take up tenancy so early, with his head only half gray. He swore he’d never drink again. He pictured the mumbling aged who strolled by his cafe chatting at shadows. They had seemed nothing but local color or the expected toll of hard years. And yet, could he prove himself to be any saner? Did the voice that brought him here begin as a little spasm in the brain, in lobes full of bad electricity? Had he, too, now joined in the dialogue between the seen and unseen? No, he refused to believe this. It must have been the years of alcohol. But there was a glitch in his reasoning. When the voice came, nothing shimmered on the border of play and senility, nor, for that matter, between sobriety and drunkenness. The words had a clarity and volume that seemed impossible for his mind to construct, despite his shoved-aside acknowledgment that all he touched, felt and smelled were constructions. Let it be the alcohol, he prayed.

  Around noon, the door to his cell unlatched and began rolling aside. A young guard stood in the opening. A sweat-drenched shirt Baptiste had hung to dry on the door’s bars became tangled in the automatic locking mechanism. The guard closed the door halfway and tugged the shirt out, dropping it into the cell, the shirt’s center marked by a grease stain that flared at the folds, like a star. Then the door opened fully again and Baptiste was led out of his cell.

  On occasion, Baptiste had seen the guard take a snapshot of his girlfriend from his shirt pocket during his rounds, holding the photo between his curled forefinger and thumb as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a restlessness stemming, perhaps, from being separated from the more important duties of wooing and sex.

  “What’s her name?” Baptiste asked, patting his own shirt pocket.

  The guard said nothing, then “Madeleine” and Baptiste felt the lie in the pause. It saddened him that the guard felt there was some kind of danger in imparting his girlfriend’s true name. Corridors later, the guard moved from behind him to open another door, then waited—like the most temporary of servants—until Baptiste entered the room.

  Bombay sat waiting at a wooden table. Her hands were folded as though in prayer, her face whiter than he remembered from her last visit. A thin vein meandered down her forehead as though to handle some new flood of blood.

  “Uncle,” she said, rising. She touched his hand as he sat down.

  He tried to show a good face, in spite of the embarrassment he felt for her to see him now. Bombay was fine and slender, while he knew he appeared hopelessly raw and wounded. That they both ran with a bit of similar blood was a wonder.

  “How are you?” he asked in the mother tongue of his forgotten dream.

  “Okay. I’m getting along.” She answered in her simple Danish, telling him both that she was being truthful and recognizing his desire to mask their conversation from the guard.

  Baptiste had moved from Denmark in his teens. Twenty years later, Bombay, only a child, had been sent to him when her parents disappeared. Everyone believed her parents had abandoned her for a cult. They had, in fact, drowned off the coast of Skagen, the northernmost point of Denmark, where they’d gone for the special light but had not stayed on land to view it. There were no fishermen in their family past, no knowledge of currents that run swift, nor of the temporal magic of buoyancy. No foreboding that keeps one praying and thanking and praying again.

  “I don’t think they believe me,” Bombay said.

  “About what?”

  “I told them you were taking a nap while I was on the boat with Ferriswheel.”

  “I was taking a nap.”

  “Yes, but they don’t believe it.” Bombay opened his hand then tightened it back into a ball.

  Baptiste felt something in his hand and opened his fist to find only the fading red crescents his fingernails had pressed into his palm. His nails were long, like a guitarists, and made him feel the passage of time since the arrest.

  “Now the pistol,” she began. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Baptiste didn’t have a ready answer. He couldn’t tell her he was trying to exterminate a flock of pigeons harboring a voice box. He could not, in so many words, tell her he was delusional. He avoided her eyes.

  “You have to tell me,” his niece said. “You have to tell me so we can get you out of here.”

  “I don’t know why I did it,” he said. It was the same thing he’d told the police, the attorney, even Bombay, several times before.

  “And you didn’t know there was a private investigator inside Regi’s apartment,” she stated.

  “Right. I was just shooting some pigeons.”

  “If they come upon something to link you to Regi’s fall, then they’ll have you on another count of attempted murder, and on the death of the American.”

  “But I wasn’t there.”

  “With that pistol, you’ve given them freedom to interpret everything. A gun, my God! If there’s anything good here, it’s that Regi didn’t have a bullet in his back.”

  The guard sat in a chair now, the picture in his left hand. The touch of Bombay’s hand brought Baptiste’s face forward again.

  “Everything at Le Coin is fine,” she said. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

  “Good,” Baptiste found himself saying, though he didn’t know quite what he meant. Le Coin felt a place out of the past now, some building that had long since met the wrecking ball or fallen behind the borders of a new regime that excluded him from its land.

  “Do you remember when the next shipment of Regi’s wine is coming in? Regi says it was supposed to come in a few days ago.”

  “He’s good enough to drink wine, now?”

  “He has his arm in a sling, but looks fine.”

  “Good.”

  “But about the shipment of wine.”

  Baptiste shrugged into the hard blue of Bombay’s eyes.

  “It’s Tuesday today,” she said, but this didn’t help him. He pretended he was thinking through the question, then shook his head. He remembered that Tuesday was the day he cleaned the windows of Le Coin. A routine that, from his present confinement, felt like following narrow animal trails in the countryside, dew brushing on his ankles on the hard-packed certainty of travel and free range.

  Bombay reached down and lifted a bag onto the table. She took out a pad of paper and set a pen atop it, diagonally. For a moment, Baptiste forgot he had asked for the pen and paper. He drew the pad to himself. In asking for it, he’d repeatedly told the guard it was not for his confessional. But he could not bring himself to say the truth, that he needed to put down the words because the words told him to. He feared the words would continue endlessly unless he shaped them into ink, unless they could fall free from his eyes and ears and dry, like tears and blood. But he continued to entertain the faint glimmer that he no longer needed these things to exorcise the internal monologue. The voice had been absent for days. He folded back the cover and was met by a delicate blue cross-hatch on the paper.

  They rose. Bombay hugged him across the table and he took in the smell of perfume and held his breath as they parted, as though to keep in the smell. He breathed in again, but the air held but a
faint ghost of the smell. “Come again,” he said, and it sounded so much like he was greeting a customer that he said it again, more softly and sincerely.

  “I will,” she said, and was gone, exiting through the doorway into freedom.

  Back in his cell, Baptiste sat down on the cot. The oblique shadow of weave was hazy on the wall. He thought he smelled rain. He opened the cover of the pad, removed the pen’s cap and traced a few circles on the back until the ink flowed. He feared the act of locking his knees together and placing the pen to the paper; he feared the voice. He locked his knees together, put the pad down on his legs and held the pen to the paper. He waited. Daring the voice.

  Something woke him at dusk. Through the window he could hear rain falling in clots down unseen guttering. And something else. His hand groped along the floor for the fallen pen.

  — My name is David Ferriswheel.

  Chapter 10

  “Faen!” Baptiste drew out the Danish cuss until it shivered in his mouth like something alive. A heavy weight shot up his spine, hovered around his heart and fell down to his toes. He dropped both pen and paper and rushed to the toilet, one hand battling to aim as he held the wall for balance with his other. His underwear was moist.

  When Baptiste talked in his sleep, the last exhaling words from his own mouth would sometimes freeze him awake, convincing him that someone stood in the same room. “With you tomorrow…” his own voice would utter, or “…ways of doing things,” or a simple long “ohhhh,” that hung in his ear like a ghost. But this voice, the voice from the streets, the voice of pigeons, was too loud for dreams.

  — Take your time, it said.

  Baptiste clenched, released, his fear a diuretic that made drinks he hadn’t yet consumed trickle out. He waited, pretended to have trouble with his zipper. He knew, moment it went up, the voice…

  — My name is David Ferriswheel. Had my distrust of boats blossomed into a phobia, I’d be home now, done with a vacation, instead of whispering these syllables into your bulbous ear, watching the occult appearance of my words in your handwriting.

  Baptiste scribbled to keep up with the thin, dark voice. When it paused, all other sounds—footsteps in the hall or the general murmur of Parisian traffic—seemed poised on the edge of a new word. Baptiste felt like a schoolboy copying down the teacher’s words, many of which he’d never heard before, the teacher reciting somewhere unseen behind him, pacing. A possible stride sweeping past at any moment. Baptiste crawled backwards on his cot until he felt the wall along the length of his back. He ran his tongue against the grooves of his molars. He sniffed. The air was thick with the smell of perfume, as though the paper had absorbed the odor of Bombay. He brought the pad to his nostrils and inhaled, trying to stay in the comfort of the perfume’s covering. But the paper smelled solely of pulp and ink.

  — Your nose is a peach pit, the voice said. Look. You transcribe like a fatted Moses, all bread and beer. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. Or, Hippopotamus means river horse. There it is, black on white. Mingus, mangoes, mongoose. Or, zooop zooop. Ha! Even those words indelibly solidify. Watch yourself. I feel a gobbledygook of commandments coming on tonight.

  “Who are you?”

  — Apparently nothing but the shapes on paper and the language in your ear, Monsieur. Oh, I’m so sad. But look at you. A cot, a sink, a toilet, a ghost’s words written in your hand. The letters you would like to see materialize on these drab walls are a-l-i-b-i. As for your being here, my posthumous apologies. Possibly. I haven’t had time to think this out. You’re not innocent yet.

  “I didn’t do it,” Baptiste said.

  — What?

  “Push.”

  — But you hear me. Perhaps deep guilt stirs awake new senses? See, how can I trust you? You may be the backslapper. It comes to this: we are now joined in a deeper way than nouns, verbs, and articular glue. There is guilt. Baptiste, where were your hands when Regi did the dive? Where are the people who saw the accident in that evening hour, those who witnessed death from the corner of their eye and took that rod-and-cone memory to some Parisian outskirt? You tell me, buddy.

  “I was asleep. A nap. I take one every day,” Baptiste said.

  The guard walked past. “What?”

  “Nothing,” Baptiste said, and the guard continued on, photo of his girlfriend in his hand. Madeleine, Baptiste thought. No, that name had been a lie. Baptiste left the cot and watched the guard walk away. His throat tightened shut around a desire to talk to the guard, to start up a conversation where he could see a moving mouth. To talk to the guard about the guard’s girlfriend felt akin to freedom. A car honked outside. He picked up the pad and pen and sighed.

  — What?

  Baptiste felt he needed to say something in defense of himself, something to cast off the guilt that everyone had been laying upon him so heavily. But all that came out was, “Please slow down.”

  — Ah, even my words are heavy and sinking and, you notice, I cannot say things simply. Everything comes out an addendum to an addendum. I seem only able to talk the way I write. Wrote.

  Baptiste took down the words as quickly as he could, keeping up with the voice only by lapsing into quick phonetic spellings. His comprehension was good, his ability to write the language, abominable. The words lacked logic. The pause in David’s voice wore on until its absence was almost worse than the voice itself. Baptiste scanned the half page of scrawl before him. In the dusky light, the lines were like loosely strung threads. He read one and it seemed a violation to hear it in his own inner voice. You’re not innocent…

  — Ready?

  …yet. He started a new sheet.

  — I came into the world the son of a high school history teacher and a piano instructor. Uneventful upbringing, ended up as a music history teacher, making the idea of conscious choice rather muddled, befuddled. Traveled a bit, married for love and money. A lip sees. No.

  “What?” Baptiste asked.

  — Love and money. Dot dot dot. Ellipses.

  “Oh.”

  — So, that’s my entrance. I went out like this: river boat dining on the Seine, a shadow falling from a bridge, myself smothered. Always saw life as the span between two hospital visits, two beds. An A B C B A structure, my mother would have said. First the bed of conception, then the hospital of birth, then life. And at the end of it, another hospital, the one I die in, another bed, the bed of mother earth to lie in. No ideas of bridges and water, no offshoots of discombobulation. Paris is not a city in which to die. There’s too much architecture.

  The voice’s tone calmed Baptiste. Ruminations directed at no one, the voice perhaps not a voice specifically after him. Paris is not a city in which to die, he finished writing. He tried to stay impassive and hold a stenographer’s detachment.

  — Okay?

  “You’re still talking too quickly,” Baptiste said.

  — Take it more slowly? Okay. Slow-ly. Left off where? A B C B A. Where the second hospital should have been. Instead, I’m on a boat that’s moored on the left bank, the sound of the engines replaced by the mismatched dirge of sirens, a wailing from several directions, occasionally joining for one matched tone of urgency. The moon was coming up. When I was young, I believed the moon was God. But stop a moment.

  Baptiste flexed his writing hand, shook it as though it were a wet dog.

  — No, I don’t mean for you to stop. I meant my digressions. A B C B A. What a strange night that was. When the sirens cut out there was a voluptuous silence hanging overhead. Voluptuous. It had curves. It had mass. Like this.

  David’s voice paused. Baptiste listened, listened, then found himself gasping for air, the unbroken silence asphyxiating. “Go on,” he prodded, as much to hear the sound of his own voice, as David’s.

  — All the sounds, all the sounds we hear, seemed that night to be the fringes of some enormous non-sound. Even the noise of traffic sounded so distant, so disconcerting, like temporary deafness after listening to high volumes. The night ai
r then was cold. I saw Viking ships approaching, long thin oar blades sinking into the water and emerging with the tips dripping with river water, red in the reflection of Notre Dame. I’ve been told Vikings once attacked Paris. What are you Baptiste?

  “I was raised Lutheran. But that was a long time ago.”

  — I’m talking about your blood.

  “Danish.”

  Voluptuous silence.

  — The oar blades stopped tracing their ovals of intimidation as the men on the boat began using them to plumb the depths of the Seine, as though hoping to touch something solid. When they were alongside, the Vikings pulled themselves from their craft onto the deck of the bateaux-mouches, their thick calloused fingers wrapping around the steel railing on their way up and over. Knuckles like boxers. I moved, but couldn’t feel my body running. Where my quick gait should have scissored, I saw only the floor of the tourist boat. I jumped to the shore.

  — Emerging onto the bank, I moved quickly to street-level up a flight of steps. I kept myself hidden behind the closed booksellers’ stalls fastened over the stone railing. Each time I jumped, I caught a frame of action. Jump: I could see the section of the boat I had been occupying. Jump: I spotted myself in the same dead embrace from which I had departed, bodiless. I seemed dignified, with none of the slackness of slow death or the insectile rigidity of sudden incapacitation. With Regi’s body atop mine, we appeared to have gone down together in some conspiracy of suicide. Jump: A few Vikings stood around the body with a look of disappointment. When I peeked over the bookstalls yet again, the Vikings were heading for the stone steps. I concealed myself behind a tree as these men from a long-past era roamed about the intersection, the traffic oblivious to their presence.