A metro pulled up, filling the tunnel. David rose, felt reluctant, anxious, reluctant again. The doors opened and he boarded. He spent much of the night below ground, transferring, returning, passing stations decorated like museums or ocean tankers or in the faded colors of an overstayed carnival. Anything to put off the inevitable climb back to the surface where the Vikings waited. He came to know intimately the gasp of closing doors, the warning siren, the electrical acceleration and darkness. The musicians who rode the metro didn’t play at this hour, their accordions and guitars hanging around their necks like burdens, the owners gaping open-mouthed in standing-sleep as they swayed home. He crossed the Seine again and again, saw its moonlit waters flicker at him through the steel trusses of a bridge, like the image of a once-grand river on old film. He learned nothing by covering distance.
Finally, at one station, he searched out the stairs. After having relinquished his movement to the metro, it felt good to be commanding his course of travel again. Above ground, nearly all the apartment windows in the grand facades were dark or dimming, the only illumination coming from the street lights and from a giant wall of tabloid magazines on the backside of a vendor’s closed kiosk. David continued onward, his ears tired from being alert to the possible sounds of his pursuers. He was soon lost, unable to point the direction back to the prison, much less to any Parisian landmark. He spent ten minutes watching to see which way the moon moved, but that did not help him navigate. He passed apartments block by block, their first floors made of the foundations of liquor stores, banks, salons and the lonely pumps of a street-side gas station, its metal security shutters pulled down with the words 24 hour service stenciled on the slats. Horses in a carousel were locked still for the night, their nostrils inflamed and clogged with black paint. Panting breathlessly. The color of fuchsia. The color of mustard. He collapsed a moment in the saddle of one, peering down to examine the horse’s hoofs. David recalled how the position of a horse’s hoofs in an equestrian statue revealed how the rider died. One hoof in the air meant the man died from injuries sustained in battle. Two meant that he’d died fighting. All four hoofs on the ground meant he’d died a natural death, or at least one disconnected from the vicissitudes of experienced war. David looked down. All the hoofs of his horse were off the ground, the entire body speared on a twisted rod of palm-worn brass. He dismounted and began walking again. The moonlight beat down hard into the narrow street. Two African women with gowns that bled color walked past him, their heads serving as the pedestals of great woven baskets filled with plastic bags from some late-night grocery run. They left a river of jasmine in the air.
Exhausted, he found himself walking beside a great outcropping of rising stone. Black jabs of iron teethed along the top like some crude forerunner to barbed wire. He followed the high wall as it turned through narrow back streets, finally opening at a gate David recognized. He’d arrived at the Père Lachaise cemetery. He and Bianca had spent an afternoon here, finding the graves of notables. Balzac, Delacroix, Wilde, Chopin and Piaf, and the thousands of others who had been buried within since the early 1800s. David’s mind turned to Bianca. How long had it been since he had slept apart from her? Where was she now? What was she doing? How did she feel? This was information rubbed clear from his own mind. He knew she must be experiencing the cut of the ax-shaped word that had swung through her life. Pain.
David slipped past the red and white tollgate and stood before the entrance. Metal gates reigned in a darkness almost untouched by city lights at this early pre-dawn hour. The fringes of rich foliage hung high over the walls, hinting at the forest within. The atmosphere of leafy verdancy which had predominated his last visit now gave way to an almost liquid darkness, giving the cemetery a sense of taking up more space than its physical size. The bars of the gate transferred a chill into his palms, in the strange way metal harbors cold. A welcome sensation, if only because he felt something. He reached and held another bar just for the feel of it. Slowly, he climbed upward, imagining the sight of his hands as they wrapped around the rods, imagining the feel of his feet as they braced against cross joints in the gate, seeing, strangely, the little pouch of emptiness behind a knee as his tendons tightened in the effort to advance upward. He moved as though he were across the street watching himself. He turned at the top of the high metal gate and from there could see into the lit windows of a few apartments, saw the couches and chairs, a tea kettle steaming with heat in a kitchen where a man walked about the room with a towel over his bobbing head. Silent coughs.
David dropped leaf-like to the other side of the gate, alighting on fine gravel without even a crunch. He looked back through the bars at the labyrinthine alleys, the buildings surprisingly bright and light-bathed in juxtaposition to the interior of the cemetery—interior, for as he turned he saw that it had a leaf ceiling as dense as any of wood, stone or steel. The large metal map posted inside was missing the coordinates to all of the most famous graves, their locations rubbed out by tourists’ fingers. When he was here last, he and Bianca had bought a map in the flower shop outside the entrance. Now, he had no destination. The path before him wove deeply inward. He followed until he reached a point where he could no longer see Paris behind him. To the sides rose chapels the size of telephone booths, illuminated only by the flits of penetrating moonlight on lichen and the silvery sheen of hard-packed earth. All about him stood testimonials to names he could only partially make out. It was more crowded than Tokyo. This idea flitted through his mind with the substance of a moth, then hardened, sharpened, picked at him like the beak of a raven. There were bodies here. The idea of walking through a cemetery at night had never frightened him. A forest at night was a far more treacherous place, both physically and emotionally. But the innocuous quality of a cemetery rested on the presumption that it was a place of rest. And there was this: he walked through the grounds. David stood still, listened, felt utter loneliness and sighed with unenthusiastic relief. Was he an only ghost?
The path rose, forked, merged, then flattened into a plateau with a layout of utter contrast to the portions of the cemetery behind him, which held the dead of old Paris. Instead of continuing down more narrow avenues, David had entered a reflection of Haussmann’s ideals. Reflecting order in rigid lines, spaciousness and open skies, this area allowed David a view of Paris. Even the dead, it seemed, were in need of city planning. And yet, for all the openness of this newer section, there was a kind of strange dread that crept from the order and into David’s thoughts. The tangle of the oldest area of the cemetery, like the oldest sections of the city itself, had been more peaceful. There, the paths he took were varied; here, rigid and fixed. Straying from the path seemed an indiscretion. In the old portion of the cemetery, David hadn’t considered his state. In fact, he’d been too preoccupied with a fear of his immediate surroundings. In contrast, the newer portion dispelled his outer fears, took control of his choices of navigation, and began to let his mind steer aimlessly, unmoored from the fastenings of immediate concerns. He began to think of his predicament again, not of being dead or being pursued by Vikings, but of his suspicion of impending vanishing and his fear of that occurring before he could get back to Baptiste and whisper words he did not yet know to whisper. Something to leave behind. Something to bring him back.
As he followed the road his mind wondered if the rigidity of line, the angle of streets, the uniform height and the fullness of the trees, spawned the inward mind. Could it be that, not finding chaos in one’s surroundings, the mind turns inward to fumble through the mess of philosophical questions? There was post-Haussmann Paris and its breed of cafe philosophers, also ancient Athens and its outdoor philosophizing within the columned order of Greek architecture. He could not think of two places with as much deliberate planning, nor with such an abundance of thinkers. Perhaps only when one has cleared away the disarray do the questions of existence and nonexistence rear their heads. Reason enough to head for jungles.
David quickened his pace near the cr
ematorium. In the gable of the building, lit by the unobstructed moonlight, he could make out the strange stone carving of billowing smoke rising from an open coffin. The crematorium’s courtyard was flanked by the walls of the entombed, the roof topped with decorative chimneys the color of corroded tin. Something about the building reminded David of the Griffith Observatory back home. Welcoming and restricted at the same time. The same conceptions of limits and limitlessness. He shouted to hear his voice, but the only sound to echo off the crematorium’s walls was the unstoppable optimism of a night bird’s song, here in the city of the dead. He concluded that if there were other ghosts, they, like himself, found themselves alone, awash in spooky solitude.
David walked beside the high walls of cremated residents, a few famous names appearing in his vision, authors and painters and politicians he’d admired, all of them stopped up in the wall for as long as the walls held. Some were stuck with unfortunate names, like that of Leopold Fucker. But David didn’t laugh, nor suppress one. He felt only sadness at the sight of the name, the only marker of being when, at this moment, he realized he did not know how his own name appeared or where—nor at what depth or height. He and Bianca hadn’t much discussed death, the actuality of its touching them. What little they’d said hadn’t gone into the logistics of their own passing. The disposing, the delegation, the dilemma, the depth or height. They’d lost a dog. Only that. There was no life insurance.
David hurried downhill into the oldest, canopied sections of the cemetery. Even if he spied the Vikings in the shadows, he’d at least have the task of hiding himself to occupy him, to lengthen his stay, to improve his chances of returning to Baptiste. He realized that fear was also good. It lived. He hoped that by keeping himself low—among the beds of geraniums and below the centuries-old trees, where the air was warmed by the decadent perfume of decay—he might keep himself heavy, making it impossible for him to rise and evaporate into open sky. He suspected the moon’s gravitation was wisping away at his ghostness. Each night and each horizon-wide pull seemed to deprive him of the ability to remember his life as he wanted. The words he’d given to Baptiste had been like buckshot, a scattering of ideas that seemed to shoot as much from past thoughts and writing as from his current mind. He found it paradoxical that, all over the city this full moon night, there were women giving birth at monthly highs, gravity inducing the living even as it pulled away the dead.
David lay down on a rare patch of lawn. Clouds drifted over a narrow gap in the canopy. He noticed it was big enough for a man to be lifted through. The sensation of drift transcended down into the ground beneath him, so that the entire cemetery seemed to move against the static night sky in the manner of docks as seen from departing ships.
He kept his eye on the moon, the grass wet and cold where he gripped it with his hands.
Chapter 12
A contrail billowed across the morning sky in the shape of an unstrung intestine. From his bed of grass, David watched the sunlight band down through the humid air and flicker on his bare feet, giving and taking heat.
Feet! With the disbelieving ecstasy of men who’ve found all their limbs intact after an accident, David ran his fingers—fingers!—through the spaces between his toes, up along his legs, feeling the damp fabric of Bermuda shorts as he rose to stand. He plucked at the red T-shirt he wore and let it fall back against his chest. The sight of his own body made him dizzy. He crouched and touched the ground for balance. He’d ended the night with the knowledge of his death, and now, what joy at the sight of his own feet!
But just as quickly, he became suspicious of such luck. He hadn’t worn these beach clothes for at least a year, and could even swear he’d thrown out this pair of shorts. The trees around him were not palm but old and unswaying, a deciduous variety with a name he had probably heard, but which did not come to mind now.
A cemetery groundskeeper walked past, his hands pushing a bin overflowing with leaves, the tines of a Japanese rake scraping a cobblestone melody behind him. David called out, but the man didn’t budge from his walk. David ran after him and touched the man’s shoulder, but the man slipped unawares from the grasp. Dejected, David walked back and saw the patch of grass where he had spent the night. Deer left greater imprints. Still a ghost, then. At least he could see himself. What to do now? Bianca was no longer at the hotel, but he held out that she was still in the city.
He wondered what he could say to Bianca through Baptiste, what words the trigger-happy Dane could scrawl down that would change for her the feel of his absence, that could change the sharpness of pain to the wilting shape of grief, eventually perhaps to something rounder, smoother, a sigh that folds into the act of breathing. He tasted his tongue, wishing there sat a backlog of words there, ready-made, wished even for the warm taste of blood. What was there to say? If, before he’d died, someone had handed him a paper and told him that what he’d write would be his last words, the sentences would have come more easily. Good-byes, words of love, affectations against mourning in the way of poets from Shakespeare to Rumi. Why couldn’t the same words suffice, here on the other side? They didn’t seem enough. They were like gestures he’d seen a thousand times, a stretch, a nod of the head. No, David thought. Even to say, My name is David Ferriswheel, is not enough. A poor, impersonal signature. He remembered his actual last words, something about paying the bill while encircled by Bombay’s temporary amour, but that hardly seemed noteworthy.
Then he remembered his last written words, the phrase that ended…the fear of facing death during a moment of guilt. He wondered if he’d be judged by it, by the implications—if the phrase were taken personally—that he was only good because of a fear of death, and moreover, a fear of punishment. All implying that he believed in a final judgment, believed or disbelieved in free will, issues which he had not yet worked out, nor had believed he ever would. He thought of his great-uncle, who’d been a religious brother until he died. David inherited the man’s heavily underlined Bible, but it had told him nothing other than that the man must have carried a pocket ruler with him. David felt as though the line that had descended upon him on the Seine was just that, a kind of sharp line under something more complex, something he’d never have the chance to explain, let alone understand.
The gardener’s rake rattled far down the path. David resolved to attempt a return to Baptiste’s cell, despite the Vikings. If that proved impossible, he’d at least return to Gaudin’s apartment building and wait out the hours there, following Gaudin whenever he exited or entered. He felt the need to spend the days carefully now, each day like a bead on an abacus where, at any moment, the calculation might be finished. His tan arms were cold. Rubbing them, he felt grains of sand caught in the hairs. He licked one arm. Salt.
David strode downhill in search of a gate. His toes gripped the cool grass and cold earth, his soles the color of platinum when he paused a moment to remove a thorn. He passed through the oldest area of the cemetery where names were worn thin by rain, cold, and winters, where moss grew quickly through the damp, throwing green velvet over a hidden feast of stone. Some gravestones were toppled, some graves cracked and gaping. These were the resting places of people who had long since left the living and whom no one knew. Nor was anyone alive who knew the people who had known the deceased. So many generations of separation that David experienced the graves as though they were museumed Egyptian sarcophagi. Without passion. He said aloud, “My name is David Ferriswheel.” What would that ever mean? And which of these buried persons were remembered for more than the gray pallor of their crypts? Only those who’d left behind masses, volumes, cart-loads of invested energy. What little he could say to Baptiste wouldn’t suffice for anything more than a good-bye. What had he known in his life that no one before him had experienced? He could think of nothing as he passed the miniature crypts. The adornments—crosses, stars of David, or the clean humanistic lines—seemed so alike. The petals of a small flower, tucked on a cornice of one tomb, seemed a more immortal symbol.
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The path staircased downward on the lip of tree roots, at times disappearing in the shade where only the strongest morning light trickled down to touch the dirt. He noticed more petals. Someone had gone through this quarter of the cemetery and put wildflowers atop gravestones and in the ornamentation of the doors to small crypts. Tiny blossoms of red and yellow and blue, seemingly too small to wilt. They punctuated the names of the dead. The petals were dewy, near-translucent, probably laid there by some Parisian girl who had long forgotten having done so, the day before. David began to count the flowers.
Over the high stone walls came the sounds of morning traffic, the rumble of engines and exhausts, the squeals of corners taken too quickly, the honking of impatience or recognition. And then, faintly, he began to hear a few notes. Music. It sounded like one of Chopin’s Etudes. David stood still a moment, and concluded that the music was coming from outside the cemetery walls, or perhaps only in his head. But the melody grew louder, sprouted harmonies and a left-handed accompaniment. He came to the twenty-seventh wildflower when the etude ended, there beside Chopin’s grave.
David approached the white marble block. On its side was a profile of the composer, while on top sat a statue of a young girl. Two tourists—oblivious of David’s presence—stood in front of Chopin’s grave while another two took a rubbing of the composer’s name from the stone block. David had taken pictures of this grave. A group similar to this one had also been making a rubbing of the composer’s name. It was eerie how similar they appeared. David passed the small group and saw the larger stream of tourists feeding up the path from the entrance. They walked quietly in slow march-like steps, cameras slung limp around their necks, their hands holding guide maps doubtless purchased at the same flower shop where he and Bianca had spent a half-dozen euros. The visitors seemed seized up by the possibilities before them, debating, in half-turns and full-halts, the path with which they wished to enter the necropolis. To David, their presence seemed to violate the solemnity of the grounds, this refuge where he felt he could lay out his grief and confusion.
The Path Of All That Falls Page 13