David fell behind Chopin and switched places, moving himself farther from the bridge’s railing. He felt he was close to some kind of scale of judgment, and he couldn’t say with any confidence that he had put more into this storehouse Chopin was describing than he’d taken out. Perhaps he’d put more in, but only for selfish reasons, to take it out later for himself. He remembered feeling—when he’d been young and an avid reader—that each day was not long enough to both live and read exclusively, and so he had sacrificed his time and spent it reading, storing up knowledge of foreign relationships, of death and fear, longing, and the thick rich brews of being human. All this he’d saved for life’s winter when he would be worn out, sick, or unable to understand the simplest thing. Then the stories and the experiences in them could bring him back, nourish him through the dark periods. If he’d been guaranteed a long life he wouldn’t have pursued such hoarding, but it was the not knowing that had made the reading urgent, the ever present possibility of sudden nonexistence. Realizing he’d never written this idea down, David questioned if it was his. He felt it lift, riddled with holes. He was hit with the wind off the river and was filled with the essence of perfume.
David turned to look at the river the way one looks at the intersections of past accidents. The boats of Chopin’s time were gone, replaced by barges, white motorboats and floating trash. When they reached the other side the bridge, the streets were once again clogged with automobiles. The avenues were wider, gunning with modern traffic, the posted bills more colorful, trash more prevalent—the wisps and cylinders of modern gods, the remains of edible hosts. The pavement was hot and hard beneath David’s feet. He recognized the sweetness of the modern day in the air again.
“What are you doing?” Chopin asked, watching David as he inhaled deeply.
“This odor in the air. I think it’s an additive in the gasoline,” David said.
He followed Chopin down the present-day, yet still-old streets and past apartment buildings with sails of clothes hung out to dry. The feeling of afternoon already tainted the air. Chopin’s funny white tie and breeches made David smile.
“Did you die like that?" David asked. "In those clothes?”
“It’s a Polish custom to pick your own grave clothes before you die,” Chopin said, examining himself. “This is what I put in my will. But they buried me in evening dress. It’s too hot for evening dress. I’m thankful that someone remembered my wish. I can only hope that whatever book that detail lies in is at least read once in a while. And you? You died like that?”
David looked at his shorts and the obscene blood-red T-shirt. He shook his head. “No. I don’t know why I’m wearing this, or why can I see myself now.”
Chopin smiled. “They’ve started remembering you,” he said. “They have stopped grieving over your name—if you’re a man people can grieve over—and have begun to do it with you in mind, with pictures, with memories. Their idea of the physical you. Perhaps they are reading you, just as they are reading me, playing me, picking apart my history in a rain of footnotes. And as long as this goes on, we go on.”
“So I see myself and am talking to you because someone is thinking of me?” David asked. He felt no bounds on himself, felt as though if he wished to stop walking he could do so without someone imagining him at pause. He continued walking, he told himself, because he wanted to move. “So an eternity of shorts and bare feet.”
“Who said eternity? Feel grateful for being able to see yourself now.”
“Still.”
“What was the point before you went out—how by the way?”
“Bridge over the Seine. My translator fell on me from a bridge.”
“What was the point before this fall?”
“I don’t know,” David said. “I guess there wasn’t one.”
“And so there should be one now?”
“Okay, touché. But that means I’m powerless.”
“As I have said, this depends on how they think of you.”
They walked along the bank, passing bridges, booksellers’ stalls and Notre Dame. David watched the vehicles swirl past in a tight flowing wash of colorful BMWs, Peugeots, Opels and the occasional high whine of a Vespa. “Wait!” he said. “There’s Baptiste. A man who hears what I say and is writing it down.” Chopin seemed unimpressed. “But what I have to say comes out in bits and phrases, little repeated thoughts I’d written down or put in books or told people.”
“Then,” Chopin said, “Your luck depends on what you wrote or said.”
David sighed. He wished he were alive and awash in all the quandaries that had seemed so hellish while alive, but now seemed trifles. His ability to see himself, his ability to talk to Baptiste or Chopin—as absurd an experience as it seemed—hinged upon his legacy. And how long could these memories last? How long could he always be present in someone’s mind? If he could continue until the last day of those who had known him, what would happen then, when there was no one still alive who had ever known him? He could be trapped by what he’d written down, by the reading of a smirk in a photographed smile, relegated to having no history, or the wrong one.
David felt himself seized with angst at this crisis of a kind that would never have occurred to him while living. No one had ever told him of this, of disappearing after dying. Now it seemed impossible for him to affect any change unless he could get back to Baptiste and somehow communicate, if only from scraps of previous words, how he felt. How much he loved his friends, how much he loved his wife, though he perhaps was never able—either with words or actions—to completely articulate his feelings.
“I had this dream last night,” David said, feeling a memory wash over him. “Not a dream, exactly, but that kind of a thing.” When Chopin did not respond, David continued. “We live near the beach. My wife and I. In this vision we have children, playing down on the sand. We don’t really have any kids, but in this vision we do. I am rubbing suntan lotion on my wife’s eczema. She’s wearing a huge hat that makes her appear part of the stands at opening day at some steeplechase. In the distance come the soft footfalls of hoofs on sand, and then the sight of a man riding down the beach on a horse. The man has his hand at his side, reaching for something like a weapon. In her usual way of gaining closer inspection, my wife raises her sunglasses from the bridge of her nose. She watches the horse’s gallop collapse into a trot before becoming a full halt. The rider dismounts. In his hand isn’t a weapon but a large placard of trinkets which he leans against the horse’s heaving flank. The horse moves away slightly, making the board fall flat on the sand. The man rubs the horse with the flat of his palm to keep it still, then sets up his wares again. Affixed to the placard are accordion postcards, metal pins, sunglasses. While feeding the horse an apple, the hawker tries to sell me these souvenirs of correspondence, adornment and protection. Elemental things I wish I had now, along with a beach, water and a horse. After buying some postcards, I lay back in my beach chair. I’m reading this book, a mystery novel, except it keeps using so many of my own phrases in it, all twisted round. I look up occasionally to keep an eye on my two sons who tread water. The waves dissipate in parabolic sheets that lay a brief frill on the sand before the sand turns dull once again. And out at sea, behind my playing boys, a Viking ship slowly approaches, oar blades already reaching for my sons.”
“I avoid being alone in order not to think,” Chopin said, putting an arm on David’s shoulder. “Don’t you find that to be good advice?”
David saw compassion in Chopin’s face. “Yes.”
“Show me your bridge,” Chopin said.
They trotted down a flight of stairs to the Seine and walked along the esplanade amid topless women and the lean pairs of gay men with straight randy dogs. A sleek mongrel trotted up to David and sniffed his pants.
“It sees me!” David remarked aloud to Chopin. “A ghost dog.”
“It smells you,” Chopin said. “We smell. The dead.”
“Of what?”
“Breathe dee
ply.”
David filled himself with the wind and tried to detect any unusual odor. He smelled his arms, his hands.
“Try harder.”
David couldn’t smell anything but the faint perfume of the city.
“Sweetness,” Chopin said.
“That? The odor of perfume?”
Chopin laughed. “Where are we but in one of the largest repositories of the famous dead. I could read until midnight a list of names you’d recognize. We are in the capital of perfume, expensive imitations of our odor—the scent of legacy.”
The dog trotted to sniff Chopin then ran back to two men tanning on the stone banks of the Seine. As David and Fryderyk passed the bronze sunbathers, David could smell the scent in the air more easily. He was stunned that the deep attraction to perfume could have its pull in something so simple: the unconscious desire to smell of legacy, the closest immortal odor.
Reaching the underside of the closest bridge, David inhaled the stench of a century of urination. He stood there and breathed it in while others hobbled past with clenched nostrils, or dashed like army recruits through a cloud of tear gas. “And that’s the smell of?”
“Piss,” Chopin said. “Nothing more. Come, let’s move on.”
They found stairs and worked back up to street level. The heavy traffic created a paradoxical appearance of slowness and calm at the noon hour. They approached the bridge and began to cross it, David trying to find the spot where Regi became gravity’s sport. He searched for clues: blood spots, broken glass, matchbooks. He couldn’t tell exactly where Regi had stood until he saw a boat approach.
“I remember when all this started,” Chopin said. “Boats and Venetian-style gondolas plying the summer evenings. I never dared go aboard—they seemed such an indulgence. One knows Paris if one lived here as long as I. Seeing the city from the water only makes one feel half-buried, anyway.
Overhead, David saw a thinly-seeded sky of swallows. They rain-danced through the humid air in quick oval pivots. Behind him he could see traffic, and below, the dark water of the Seine sending a tourist boat his way. Table umbrellas cast faint shade on the upper deck. Behind the boat, David saw the not unexpected prow of the Vikings’ ship, the oars rowed with patience.
“See them?” David asked.
Chopin nodded. “Why don’t you show me the fall?”
David shook his head. “It’s too high. And not with them there. I wouldn’t do it if I were an Acapulco cliff diver.”
“Pay them no heed,” Chopin said, already unfastening his tie. “Remember, as long as you have a legacy you’re not in danger. Besides, what is remembered about these marauders’ attack on Paris? They were paid to leave. Not exactly all that blood-thirsty. More indolent.”
“Nevertheless,” David said, uncertainty making anchors of his feet as he followed Chopin onto the edge of the railing. Had he left enough of himself to survive such a fall as this? He hoped he was a keepsake in the personal storehouses of those whose lives he’d crossed. The Viking ship bobbed in the wake of the tourist boat. All the northern eyes of the Viking men were fixed on him.
“As an experiment, let’s see how it happened,” Chopin said. And at that moment, David felt Chopin’s hand on his back, then a sudden weight as Chopin pushed with more force than seemed possible from such a delicate body. David reached behind for the bridge but already he was falling, his being filled with the horrible sensation of unstoppable plummet. The water and the waiting Vikings moving closer in the uprush of wind. He plunged head-first into the Seine, missing the underpassing tourist boat by only a body length. He could hear the churn of the propellers, but the sound quickly fell away as he sank deeper, down to where heavy cold currents lay like solid bands along the bottom of the Seine. His hands entered mud. The faintest glimmer of gas bubbles rose from the disturbed bed, boiling along his face, one rising into a nostril and filling him with the odor of fecund decay. There were pebbles on the bottom, but even the smallest stone weighed an impossible ton to him. He floated upwards and broke the surface.
The air rained oars. David grabbed a blade and held its flat side over his head like a shield. Disoriented by spray and the sound of laughter, David found himself pulled closer to the Vikings’ longboat on the oar he held as protection. He was slightly calmed by the intricate weave of carving on the bow and sternposts, reasoning that any people who could carve so delicately couldn’t also be berserk. But pulled closer, his eyes rose up the bow where the carving culminated in the head of a beast. Fear slipped back into his heart. He imagined these men were bitter to find themselves here in Paris, rather than Valhalla. Hands reached out for him and yanked him roughly aboard onto planks reeking from the caulk of animal fat. He felt his body temperature plummet as the hands left him. David backed into the bow. The Vikings grinned, though in a strange way, like they’d caught some giant rare fish. They were clad in rough sweaters, the wool sprouting out between the opening in their chain mail. They wore leather shoes on feet that tapped in deliberation. David counted at least a dozen men.
“Remember what I said,” came a shout from above. David spotted Chopin overhead, holding a lamppost for balance as he worked at removing his shoes.
“‘Remember what I said,’” David repeated to himself as he tried to stare down the Vikings. Water dripped from his shirt and shorts and impregnated the wood beneath him as he moved slowly to the other side of the boat, nearest the shore. “How about rowing me to the bank?” he asked, pointing. The Vikings muttered, drew fingers through their long combed hair, perhaps sensing that David could not yet be taken, not when he was still remembered. One of the men cleared his throat, leaned over the bow, and spat. Then the men set their oars back in the locks and maneuvered the boat to shore. Chopin waved from the bridge above. Not completely trusting these marauders, David leapt from the boat a few feet short of the shore. River water slipped into his lungs and set him gagging as he reached for the solid stone of the bank. The Vikings laughed. David felt an oar blade pat his rear as climbed onto the shore. He hurried for the stairs that led from the quay back up to the bridge, and only then paused to look back.
“Ja,” one of the Vikings said, answering a laughter of Norse words. The men pushed at the bank with their oars, returning them to the river’s imperceptible current. Aboard, one of the Viking men slapped another on the ass, who in turn pantomimed David’s struggle to the shore.
He didn’t know if they would understand his gesture, but David set his middle finger into the air all the same. He reached Chopin intent on pushing him into the river—tuberculosis or not—but found himself too late. Chopin had removed his shirt and pants. His shoes sat neatly beside the folded clothes. The composer stood backwards on the railing. He held his arms skyward then took a step backwards into the river, entering the river with hardly a splash. David rushed to the edge and peered into the glaring water. Fryderyk’s head emerged, then the whiteness of his upper back as he made breast strokes against the river’s current. Chopin turned onto his back and kicked to keep himself in place. “Your turn,” he shouted from below.
David felt a remembrance of this moment creep into him. Everything felt vaguely familiar. He removed his own wet shorts and shirt, rung them out and hung them on some ornamentation to dry. Hadn’t he once had a strange dream about Chopin swimming in the Seine? Had he told Bianca? David stood on the railing once again. Beside him stood a pair of tourists snapping a photo of the river with the Eiffel tower far in the distance. A warm breeze moved across his face and David, for the moment, felt something akin to contentment. Think, he told himself. Weren’t you happy? Didn’t you sometimes feel joy? Yes. And someone was remembering that now. Remembering even your dreams. This very second. David felt a semi-sweet elation. He leapt into the Seine again, but this time fearless, the cold water invigorating against the stifling heat of the city. The cold rushed to evacuate the heat from his armpits, like the cold hands of a lover suddenly there, when least expected. When he emerged to the sweet perfume of Paris
air, the Vikings had passed into the shadow of the bridge and were drifting back to their camp. David followed Chopin to the shore. They left no footprints on the bank, the water evaporating like alcohol from their bodies.
After an hour of diving—cannonballs, flips, all without fear of injury—David felt a foretaste of what it must be like to be a master at something. All his life he’d known the paths to take toward honing a skill to perfection, but he never seemed to get much farther than the trailhead. He felt he had seen many things in his life, but not known the things themselves, as though life had been a zoo with all the signs removed. At the same time, David began to wonder not only what it was he should be doing with however much time he had remaining, but what it was that had filled him with so much fear. He felt drunk.
David and Chopin basked naked on the shore, their clothes spread beside them to dry. Chopin drew a metal tin out from a pocket in his breeches. Naked, he was impossibly thin. Something seemed to have been taken out of his gut, making him stoop. Bent like a half-opened pocketknife, David remembered someone commenting. Chopin opened the metal tin, took a candy and left the box open for David.
“What are they?”
“Laudanum drops,” Chopin said. He patted his chest and coughed slightly. “Opium-based.”
David took a drop and moved it about on his tongue, relieved to be able to relax without the constant fear of vanishing from himself. The sun ticked off degrees in the sky, the warm feel of it broken occasionally by the shadow of a passing dog’s muzzle. The heat on his skin felt glorious.
David sucked his fifth laudanum drop. From his vantage on the bank, the bridge’s construction seemed a marvel, a magic levitation of arched stone. He almost didn’t want to call them arches, more like ovals with the topmost bend reflecting in the water. As he wondered about the construction, he felt a stirring in his blood, a suspicion that his French ancestry encompassed someone who’d built this very bridge. He thought he felt in his shoulders and calves some distant remembrance of maneuvering the weight of the capstone. It had brushed that percentage of his blood while the horses pulled the stone. He remembered lying on this bank for lunch afterwards and watching the strained horses, alert and amorous, a stallion with a penis dangling, like a trunk. He thought he could recall a band at the end of the bridge, playing for the entertainment of the workers who were helping to join the two banks ever more closely together. They marched in place, as though waiting for the bridge to be completed so they could cross. He remembered massaging his shoulder and wishing, like a baby, he had a glass of cold milk to drink—like he’d once had when visiting a friend out in the country who drove a rich man’s carriage—milk to get him though the rest of the day, the pouring of a tall glass of winter, the season borne in the teats of a cow who thought only of grass and pressure, which she knew only by the sensation of weight, then less weight, then later, weight again.
The Path Of All That Falls Page 15