The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  Bianca put David’s photos and notes on the nightstand and reached to extinguish the light. Only then did she realize that the TV, mounted high up in the corner, was still on. The channel previewed the broadcasting schedule for the remainder of the early morning. Swift and lean computer graphics clashed with the quiet of the city and the grand ornamentation of night. She’d noticed a preponderance of blue hues on French TV: blue titles, blue fades, blue backgrounds, like a world without trees. Like a city always looking at the sky. The channel went into a documentary of a saxophonist. She had the sound off and couldn’t tell if he’d been any good. Next door, her inebriated neighbors sang a cappella. After a couple songs, someone knocked faintly at the door. Bianca slipped from the bed again, arching her feet to keep as little contact with the cold floor as possible. She turned off the TV and opened the door.

  “I didn’t wake you, did I?” Jade asked.

  “No. I just climbed into bed.” Bianca felt she could relax now, as though the true reason she had been unable to sleep was that she had been waiting up for Jade. “Did you have a nice time?”

  “Chase is so strange. We kept running into people he knew. He’d talk to them and then he would hurry me to a different bar. One place he just waved and led me out. This guy seems to know a lot of people, though you’d think it was really just that a lot of people know him.” She laughed. “I like him. He seems perpetually embarrassed.”

  “Did he tell you anything?”

  “One place we went to had some photos he’d taken of this one mountain range. Wait wait wait. I’m sorry, we kept moving about I had to finish my drinks quickly.” She laughed, then thought for a moment. “Regi’s a coke dealer. Or, rather, his father is. Chase says Regi’s been skimming the profits.”

  “So his father was trying to kill him.”

  “Or just scare him. Oh, and Chase says we should go to a music festival.”

  “These guys like concerts.”

  “Not for the music. Chase said Regi’s down there or going down there. He wasn’t sure. But he and Gaudin are leaving tomorrow.”

  “Where?”

  “He didn’t say. The south somewhere. And they’ll be here tomorrow after breakfast to pick us up.”

  “At the hotel?”

  Jade nodded, heading to the bathroom. “I insisted we go with them. I hope that’s okay. I mean, it seemed what you’d want.”

  “No, it’s fine. It’s fine. I would have insisted, too,” Bianca said, climbing back into bed. She combed the ceiling of this foreign hotel room. Cocaine. Theft. The last things she would have considered complicit in David’s death. She wondered what ceiling she would spy tomorrow. Bianca felt for her travel clock and set the alarm for just a few hours distant. She did not want to be left in Paris. While Jade used the bathroom, Bianca tried to cross over the indistinct boundary between feigned sleep and the act of attempting to sleep. Something about desire, will, surrender. Lately, she’d begun to jerk awake, just as she reached the point of sleep. She’d used up the pills days ago. Jade turned out the bathroom light and climbed into bed. Long after Jade’s breathing was slow and distant beside her, Bianca fell and surrendered herself to falling. She told herself that it was, after all, only sleep.

  Bianca and Jade split an orange Fanta outside the Gare de Lyon train station. They’d packed after breakfast and were picked up in a taxi by Chase, who’d now momentarily left them as he entered the station to find Gaudin. Though Bianca had managed a few hours of sleep, the act had the semblance of an unwilling relinquishment to it, so that she now felt as tired—and unable to sleep—as she had been while waiting for Jade the night before.

  Bianca took another long swallow of soda. The carbonation seethed down her throat. In front of her she could see the tight compactness of old Paris. She was more than willing to exchange the dead-ends of the city for the hopes of answers in the Provence region, but more and more she felt a distaste that her grief and her husband’s death had become a case, reduced to the chessboard of logic and clear procedure, intent upon resolutions that would do nothing for David. And yet there was no alternative but to board a soon-departing train and leave Paris behind. A sick idea had entered her head lately: how much easier her life would be if David had been killed in an automobile accident by a driver to whom he had no connections, a crash with no cause but someone’s negligence, a misjudged glance, bad timing. These things she could accept, though never before would she have considered such a death as enviable.

  “Ready?” Gaudin asked. He had come up behind them. He held a large leather satchel in one hand, a sport coat draped and nestled between the handles. Chase followed.

  “Found him inside,” Chase said.

  “I had to have my coffee,” Gaudin said. “Shall we go?”

  “Yes. I think so,” Jade said, holding up the last of the drink for Bianca. “Have the rest.”

  Bianca took a final sip, then picked up her purse and the bag in which she had placed the box of David’s ashes.

  Chase led the way, pushing a trolley piled with their suitcases. The Le Train Bleu restaurant occupied the second floor against one wall of the station, while the opposite end lay open to the tracks where sleek TGVs grumbled for want of speed. The interior of the Gare de Lyon station glimmered with noise, the hissing scrape of live wires announcing the approach of trains yet a half kilometer off. The trapped voices of passengers reverberated to a mushy white noise off the glass and metal. Bianca didn’t like the openness, the lack of a near wall to block off a percentage of her surroundings and make that portion harmless. They stopped in the middle of the floor. A small utility cart whined past and she felt the air of its passing brush her cheek. Gaudin reached into his satchel and removed their tickets. He fed them into a machine for a quick validating bite, then, glancing up at the track numbers, ushered them with two pulls of his bent fingers, reminding Bianca of the gesture of a waiter finding just the perfect table.

  Not until their train left the old quarters of Paris for a backdrop of modern cemeteries and newer, shabby apartment blocks, did she notice they had picked up considerable speed. Earthen barriers, like dikes, rose on either side of the tracks, making the window a verdant blur pocked by the quick strobe of billboards. Then the earthen walls fell away and the city was replaced by green fields and pockets of forest from which rose a haze of moisture and pollen. Not until Bianca compared the train’s speed with that of cars on a distant highway was she startled by the acceleration of the butter-smooth ride. What was the sentence she’d read last night in David’s notes? How Chopin, upon hearing about the invention of a locomotive that could reach speeds of fifty miles an hour, remarked how unpleasant train travel would be in the future. Bianca wondered what Chopin would think of this velocity.

  David had once said that the first trains represented the stage in the evolution of mass transportation at which people were willing to sacrifice their own lives for speed.

  “What about horses?” she’d asked. She remembered they’d had this conversation on one of those nights when he had trouble sleeping and would lie in bed, wanting to talk.

  “The horse is like the rider, though,” David had said. “It wants to survive. A train, though, has no self-interest. A derailment or a rupturing boiler are as natural a fate as going forward on two rails.”

  She couldn’t help but think of this conversation as the train barreled forward with an odd smoothness, a pretension of immortality.

  “So how big of a dealer is Wrest, and how much has Regi taken?” she asked. What she really wanted to know was why she should trust Gaudin or Chase, now that she knew how their employer made his money.

  “You mean his furniture business,” Gaudin said, raising his voice slightly.

  “Right, his furniture business.”

  Gaudin shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Pretty big, I’d guess,” Chase said. “He ships furniture up north, too, Bombay told me.”

  “And you didn’t know this before?”

&
nbsp; “No,” Chase said. “I don’t think many do.” He turned his head and looked out the window. “Can we switch places?” he asked Gaudin. All four of them had second class seats around a small table.

  “What is it?” Jade asked.

  “I can’t sit with my back to the direction of travel. I get sick in my stomach.”

  Chase and Gaudin exchanged places. Gaudin slapped Chase in the gut as they passed each other in the aisle. “How is it when you row a boat?” Gaudin asked, taking a seat beside Bianca. “Get sick then?”

  “I’ve never rowed a boat,” Chase answered, sitting beside Jade.

  “Would you like the window seat,” Jade asked.

  “No. This is fine, thank you.” Chase smiled at her, then turned away, as though to stop his grin from widening further and injuring his cheeks.

  The retreating landscape near the window’s far edge was like liquid. Bianca read Chase’s face and tried to predict the approaching landscape from his expression, much as she’d tried to judge his character from his smiles or frowns. Then she saw Jade and sighed. Jade’s ability to enjoy herself both heartened and saddened Bianca. Although Jade would always have the possibility of new relationships being jinxed by her past marriage—by having to admit that she was wrong about something that seemed so completely right, and that the same thing could happen again—Bianca was envious. Her own relationship had ended so dramatically as to make the final run of its course impossible to predict. Would she and David have been happy ten years down the line? Was disillusionment and heartache preferable to what she had now? She felt she needed to avoid becoming a practitioner in that alchemy that transformed grief into only a flickering sadness. She wanted to at least keep herself in love’s exhaust.

  “How fast are we moving?” Bianca asked, turning to Gaudin beside her.

  Gaudin pouted his lips a moment. “Two-thirty, two-forty?”

  “Kilometers?”

  “Yes. That would be…one hundred and fifty maybe, in miles. A little less.”

  “That’s fast enough,” Jade said.

  “Depends on your destination,” Chase said.

  Bianca leaned her head against the side of the train. There was something fraudulent about this travel—no click of the rails, no Doppler moans. It was all or nothing, fast or standing still, safe or fatal. She had spent the last few weeks in her own rhythm of sustenance: sleep, meals, sleep, in the way of animals who cannot smile. Here on the train, her vision fastened on the blur of passing signs, her eyes jumping from one sign to the next. She was struck by the dialect of loss her ears lay upon every sound. The rapid whoosh of passed signs, the French in the air of the train car—both were tainted. It wasn’t just sorrow that made her feel this way. She knew that undefined sorrow would eventually extinguish itself without the fuel of a reason. But she wasn’t only sad about the irrecoverable past, but of a future, too. One which would not play out in the general way she’d predicted and hoped. She could no longer say a word to David that would lodge itself in his ear, or hibernate there to awake months later in a recollection of a conversation. David’s passing seemed like a twisted disappearing act in which the magician never returns the volunteer to the land of material flesh; he was like a dove who leaves only a feather from its journey through the magician’s portal to non-being, taking with it the trick.

  “It’s so green,” Jade said.

  Bianca turned to the window again, but felt a little sick. She tried to only gaze at the distant part of the landscape that didn’t lose form and blur. The word pastoral entered her head and she felt as though they were intruding upon this field, this landscape that seemed to come from the past. Chase showed Jade where they were on her map of France. The distance they’d crossed in the span of only a few hours seemed in violation of the hazy uncertainty which is the bed of answers, as though they would learn nothing in Orange because the town, like the train, would be sleek and fast and bear within it no mysteries, no consequent answers. She closed her eyes and imagined religious pilgrimages that must have traversed this land, imagined day-long journeys which they, on the train, were crossing in minutes. What had become of the dangerous woods, of the toil of travel, of bad weather and the immensity of the compass’s worth? Bianca felt something like the fear of open spaces, like in the train station, but no, hers was the fear of everything shrinking, of the reduced scale over which they bulleted. She felt like a giant—every delicate thing slipping beyond her field of vision. She latched onto conversations, but as she fell into a wayward sleep, they snapped, sprang up again, incongruous. Why do wine bottles have the little indentation on the bottom? What size do you wear? That was a big one. I talk in my sleep. Look at the hot air balloon. Two of them. To help the waiter pour the wine, by putting his thumb in the hollow space, the punt. What do you say in your sleep? I went for a balloon ride in Napa Valley, in California. The balloonist made a pass at me. In my sleep, I say, “Here kitty.” I say, “Here kitty-kitty-kitty.”

  Bianca woke and opened her eyes. Jade was immersed in a travel magazine. Chase’s seat was empty. Beside her, Gaudin had also given in to dozing. Her eyes settled on his repose. There was something attractive in the sadness of Gaudin’s face. He was like a man with an undiscussed past which writes itself on the face anyway, partly covering the underlying boyishness with an accumulation of fatigue. She sensed he was attracted to her by the way he asked so few questions, acting as though he had known her for the longest time. That and the glances he stole, though she wondered if these looks were just his way of examining the world around him. If not, she felt sorry he seemed to be the type attracted to those in loss.

  “Lunch,” Chase announced, emerging from the aisle. He deposited four plastic-wrapped sandwiches and four cans of mineral water on the table, then slid into his seat. The cans were dewy with condensation except for where Chase’s fingers had been holding them. Gaudin breathed deeply, opened his eyes and reached for a can, as though thirsty out of boredom.

  “I’m starving,” Jade said, taking a sandwich and handing another to Bianca.

  Bianca held the bread, the limp cheese and the thin line of meat pressed against the plastic wrapper. It seemed like something she’d been asked to look after for a few moments as a favor. She gazed out the windows on the opposite side of the train, where the landscape had changed dramatically. The Rhône river ran flat beside them now. On its far shore rose a chalk-colored nuclear power plant that made her think of the San Onofre facility back home. Outside, she could see rock rising to a bluff as the train hugged the bank of shallow pock-marked caves, reminding her of the hills above Laguna Beach, or farther north, in Malibu. The trees even wore the same dusty green. She let the sandwich drop to the table, wanted to close her eyes and open them to something completely unfamiliar, to stop the places at home from becoming tainted by similar places here, in the country that had violated her present and future. The face of a donkey standing near the tracks blurred past, then another, the tail twitching pendulously like a semaphore in her eyes. A man stood beside the donkey, looking, for a split second, like David. Long after the train whipped past, she could still see the head of the donkey, white like a ghost.

  “He’s on the train,” Chase whispered, pointing behind Bianca. A leaf of sandwich lettuce fell from his lips in a quick spiral of descent.

  “Who?” Jade asked.

  “Regi.”

  Gaudin craned his neck, then rose from his seat and followed the direction of Chase’s finger. Bianca turned too, but saw only the closing of the pneumatic glass door that led to the next car. All day she’d felt a bit uncertain about leaving Paris, but to hear that they shared the train with Regi made the decision seem as fortuitous as it did right.

  “Didn’t he see you?” Gaudin asked, getting out of his seat.

  “Of course. He saw all of us.” Chase leaned into the aisle. “Look at him go.”

  “Is he with his father?” Jade asked.

  “Wrest, on a train?” Gaudin shook his head. “That’s har
d to picture. Come on. Let’s have a talk with him.”

  Bianca watched him head for the door and help it open, impatient for the smooth relaxing of the pneumatics. There was a youthfulness in his movements, as though he were a boy intent on the fun of a pursuit. Even the manner in which he squeezed through the doors seemed exaggerated. He gestured for them to follow.

  “Now you can meet Regi,” Jade said.

  “I have met him,” Bianca admitted. “At the hospital.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Unconscious.”

  Bianca saw another donkey through the window. “Let’s hurry,” she said, sliding to the aisle. She picked up the weight of David’s ashes. It seemed wrong to leave the box here, on the floor by her seat. She caught a glimpse of Regi running far down the aisle, one of his arms in a sling. She wanted to know how it had felt to fall, to see her husband below him, what it felt like to kill a man simply by one’s weight. Closer still were Gaudin and Chase, temporarily blocked by a beverage cart. Jade came up behind them and put a hand on Chase’s shoulder.

  “Why would he run from us?” she asked.

  “Perhaps we frighten him,” Chase said, over his shoulder. “Or maybe he doesn’t trust his father. Maybe his father hasn’t forgiven him.”