The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  Passengers glanced up at her as she walked, their eyes bright with interest set in faces starched with boredom. She imagined how the passengers had seen Regi run past and thought: here is a man in a hurry. Then caught the sight of the four of them and thought: here is a man in trouble. The train went into a curve. Regi disappeared as the train’s curved path took away their straight-line view. She followed the others through one car and into the next, then into yet another, the total angle of the bend in the tracks seeming almost acute. Then the train straightened—she could feel it by the way her body felt less pulled—and the view ahead was of an empty aisle, no Regi, not a soul. Only elbows and feet and the drooping corners of newspapers.

  “Where is he?” Jade asked.

  “Come,” Gaudin said, pulling Jade toward him. “We’ll start all the way at the front and work our way back here. You two walk toward us.”

  “Right,” Chase said.

  “Look into everything. All the bathrooms, the private compartments.”

  A conductor was checking tickets in the current car. He and Gaudin exchanged a few comments.

  “He says the next stop is Orange,” Gaudin said. “We only have a few minutes.”

  “Go,” Chase said, waving Gaudin and Jade forward.

  The speed at which Bianca had followed Chase to this point in the train was now replaced by a slow careful pace as they started their search anew.

  “You take the seats and spaces on the right side,” Chase said. “I’ll take the left.”

  “Okay,” Bianca said.

  A strange fear came over her as her eyes tracked over the sleeping kids, backpackers, grandmothers and businessmen. She could not recall exactly what Regi looked like and was afraid her eyes would inadvertently miss him. She had seen him unconscious, but without a glimpse of his eyes and expression, he could have been anyone. They neared a bathroom. Bianca tried the door but it was locked. Chase stopped.

  “It’s okay,” Bianca said. “Go ahead. I’ll wait for this one.”

  He nodded and began scanning the next car. Far down she could barely see Gaudin and Jade backtracking, and then the train curved and they were taken out of view. She waited outside the bathroom as the doors of the car behind her closed. The tight space here over the coupling was noisy. Doors led off to the outside. Bianca entertained the idea that Regi had jumped, until she saw the blur of landscape through the window. The river had disappeared, though she didn’t know which ribbon, the river or the train’s tracks, had swung away to account for the absence. She knocked on the bathroom door. Then again. She tried the door but it remained locked. Bianca moved near an exit so as not to be in sight when the bathroom door opened. When it did, a young boy emerged, his hands on a belt that seemed too wide for his body. Bianca sighed, half in disappointment, half in relief. She put down the box of ashes, then bent down and helped the boy notch his belt. She watched him enter the car behind her. He turned and said something to her in French, and, not understanding, she smiled to pretend she did.

  Looking outside, she saw the outskirts of a town. She shook her arms then picked up the ashes. It felt strange, how heavy they were. She turned and hurried through the next car, and the next, a diner, and the next until she met up with Chase waiting outside a bathroom. The train gradually began to slow. She remembered reading once that it took these fast trains miles and miles to come to a stop, and then she wondered if it wasn’t cruise ships she was thinking of.

  “Nothing?” Chase asked.

  “No.” Bianca headed into the next car. There were only a few passengers here, and none of them looked anything like Regi. A few had already begun to stand and find their bags and purses in anticipation of their stop. The bulk of the next carriage was occupied by individual compartments. Through the curtains she saw small groups asleep or playing cards or sitting before open briefcases and laptop computers. She checked the length of the car, aware of the train’s constant deceleration as she moved into the next. There, in the space between carriages, she met up with Gaudin and Jade arguing with an official.

  “It was an accident,” Jade said. “We were looking for someone.”

  The official responded to her with a stream of French from which Bianca could only decipher a few words.

  “An accident,” Jade said, slowing down her words. “Ac-ci-dent.”

  “What is?” Bianca asked.

  “I walked in on a couple,” Gaudin said.

  “Doing a little locomotive and caboose,” Jade added.

  “I have a tendency to walk in on these kinds of things,” Gaudin said, then sighed. “You didn’t see Regi?”

  “No,” Bianca said. Noticing Chase was not behind her, she glanced down the empty aisle. “Chase has him,” she said, hoping. “He’s waiting outside a bathroom, the only place we didn’t check.”

  They squeezed through the crowd of rising passengers into the car in which Chase waited. Through the windows, Bianca could see the name of the town sliding into view in large blue letters on the station building. Orange. As the train neared a complete stop, she felt as though she were walking in place in relation to the station outside. They reached Chase as the doors opened and clogged with disembarking passengers, those not headed further to Arle or Avignon or Marseilles, but like them, for this town with the name of a color.

  “Wasn’t he in the bathroom?” Bianca asked.

  “No.” Chase moved to a window and searched the departing passengers. Gaudin joined him.

  “There,” Chase said.

  “I see him,” Gaudin added.

  Bianca followed Chase off the train, her feet hitting the concrete, her face met by a hot dry air thick with the hot-honey smell of herbs.

  “Our luggage,” Jade said.

  Gaudin pulled aside a stationmaster and spoke to him as he pointed to Jade. “He’ll help you with our bags,” Gaudin said.

  Far ahead, Chase stood atop a bench, surveying the crowd.

  “Where are you going?” Jade asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bianca said. “We’ll come back.” She couldn’t bear the idea of staying behind with luggage while there, ahead of her, ran the man whose pale thin face she now saw and remembered, his eyes like coals as he turned to look at them.

  Regi’s arm lay in a sling, making him seem to clutch something to his chest as he disappeared into the train station. She followed Chase and Gaudin through the holes in the disembarked crowd. Just ahead, Regi stumbled into a carousel of travel pamphlets, spilling paper across the polished floor. Bianca moved in Gaudin’s wake, watching the Rorschach stains of sweat on the back of his shirt. They ran out of the building and into a square rimmed with an outdoor cafe and run-down hotels. In the center of the square stood a few trees. In the shade, Bianca could see Regi mounting a white motorcycle behind a figure in black leather and a red helmet. Before they could make it halfway to the trees, the bike roared out onto the hot unshaded asphalt of the road. All that was left behind was a short black skid mark and a squeal that made Bianca’s ears tender.

  Behind the cloud of blue exhaust sat a motley of parked taxis. The driver of one, an older man in an unbuttoned shirt, opened the doors of his Nissan. They climbed in, Gaudin taking the passenger seat and pointing out the direction of the motorcycle to the taxi driver. The inside was cramped and hot and the driver didn’t seem to like being rushed. From the back seat, Bianca could hear dispatches over the radio. Chase rolled down his window and beat the side of the car with his open palm, as though the taxi were an animal. They started off with a jerk, then left the square. Bianca turned around. Through the back window she could see the train leaving the station. In its place, amid an island of luggage, stood Jade. And then Jade, too, disappeared in the distance.

  They sped through an intersection and down a street lined with decrepit colonial-style architecture. Bianca was heartened when she saw the motorcycle and the white band of Regi’s sling just ahead. She realized that in Chase and Gaudin, Regi must recognize his father’s long arm. And by being w
ith Chase and Gaudin, Bianca felt as though Regi were fleeing her as well. She enjoyed that. The motorcycle accelerated.

  They followed Regi down several more streets into a neighborhood where the buildings’ facades were more colorful and in better repair. The taxi’s meter ticked as they entered new zones. Gaudin had his hand out the window, gripping the roof as though to keep something there steady and affixed. They stopped abruptly in front of a square, throwing Bianca against the seat in front of her. She stepped out after the others and saw the bike as it sped across the square, maneuvering easily around the large bronze balls that blocked off the square to anything but pedestrian traffic. The motorcycle exited through an alleyway in a cloud of startled pigeons. The taxi driver climbed from the car and said something to Bianca in French. She didn’t understand his dialect, and shrugged her shoulders. She could hear the motorcycle punch into a higher gear and then it was silent from the growing distance.

  The drive to their hotel was slow and uneventful. The color and architecture of the street turned to reddish brown. The same color met them in an immense wall, many stories high, at the end of the street. Above the wall, Bianca could see that the sky had turned dark with storm clouds. A cool breeze entered through the open windows of the car.

  “Théatre Antique,” the driver said, then asked a question.

  “He wants to sell us tickets for the musical festival,” Chase said. “He’s the slowest taxi driver in all of France. He probably won’t find our hotel, either. We’ll be taken down some lonely road and forced to buy truffles.”

  The taxi driver turned his head and smiled at Bianca. “Truffes? Oui?”

  Gaudin nudged the driver to prevent him from hitting an oncoming car.

  “Where is this hotel?” Bianca said. She could see the driver smiling in the rearview mirror. There was something curious about the way people smiled to words spoken in languages they didn’t understand. It seemed both to compound their ignorance and create a feeling of complicity. The drive took them away from the wall of the Théatre Antique. Bianca had read up on the town that morning in the guide book to France David had brought from home. An ancient capital had occupied the hill that loomed ahead during the second and first centuries b.c. Later, the area had been Roman, with soldiers quartered on the hill. Bianca could see the ruins of arches and columns melded into the structure of the town’s buildings. But of all the historical facts—armies, wars, cities, growth and decline—the one that struck her as they drove was much more recent. How, in 1924, a flood in the region covered the center of the town under two meters of water. Enough to cover the taxi completely, to make every turn another avenue of drowning.

  They arrived at their hotel as the first drops of rain began to fall.

  “Looks like we won’t have to buy truffles,” Chase said.

  The hotel seemed fairly new, at least in comparison to the dilapidation around it. Inside, a miniature pool table stood beside the front desk. Behind the lounge rose a large spare staircase lit from a skylight above. Bianca smelled garlic, despite a mask of lemon-scented cleaning solution hanging in the air. Chase held the keys to several rooms.

  “This should be fine,” Gaudin said.

  “Yes,” Bianca said.

  The concierge led them up the stuffy stairwell. The walls were dabbled with the faint shadows of rain streaming down across the skylight above. The concierge led Bianca to a room as Gaudin and Chase took two rooms further down the hall. She closed her door and placed David’s ashes on the writing desk. Left alone in the yellow and blue interior of the room, she fell onto one of the beds and listened to the ventilator rattle to a stop. A listlessness settled on Bianca like desert dust. At that moment she had few desires that held a place in her thoughts. Instead, short tenancies of what she should do stumbled through her mind. Whole waiting lists of action which she would need to take but which all appealed to her without a shred of interest. As happened whenever she felt tired and in need of sleep, Bianca felt herself roll into a low-down funk from which everything seemed high and impossible, else easy and meaningless. She stared at the ceiling and thought of the ceiling in the Hotel Pasadena in Paris. Already, she could not remember it. But despite being tired, her mind was not still. Her thoughts were constantly opening and shutting themselves like a triptych, one pane holding the world with David, another the world of her dreams. And, lastly and newly painted, the incarnation of a world all but erased of David’s presence, a world that carried on so smoothly, apathetic no matter how injured she felt.

  Bianca rose from the bed and opened a window. Far up the narrow street she could see an ancient arch, like a smaller Arc de Triomphe. The street was gray and grimy, as though this rain was the first to have fallen since the flood of 1924. She spotted a cherry-red trailer sitting in the traffic below, its sides painted with scenes from a circus. Then she realized it was the circus, part of a convoy passing beneath her. When the light changed and the traffic cleared, she caught a view of a dank bar across the street. Two Dobermans cooled themselves in the doorway as they watched the passing cars. She christened them Gaudin and Chase. On the walls of the crumbling buildings opposite the hotel were the remnants of painted advertisements and logos for products most likely long out of production. Directly across the street, pigeons roosted on the tops of partially closed wooden shutters below a terra cotta roof. Above, the sky was dark and colorful, a gradient of storm and sunset. Swallows darted feverishly over the rooftops. In the distance flashed bolts of lightening whose thunder rumbled like the trucks passing her window below. She sighed, in a good way. She could not see one thing that reminded her of home, except, perhaps, the lightning and thunder, but those were things tainted with fear long before she and David had traveled to France. Then the storm made its entrance. The cold brushed against her face and made her feel naked and stripped. She felt as though she had forgotten to wear something—a scarf, or earmuffs, something to keep in the heat and cover the skin.

  The street was dark when Bianca recognized their taxi pulling alongside the hotel. Chase and Jade emerged, lugging suitcases. The window sill was puddling with rainwater. Bianca closed the window and opened the door and stood there listening to Jade and Chase several floors below. The rain drummed on the skylight, the rain silver against the blue-black blur of clouds. She thought of the title of David’s book, the one on Chopin’s travels. It was called Zål, a word in Chopin’s mother tongue which, if she remembered correctly, connotes melancholy, a sense of resentment and anger, regret, and a yearning for what’s out of reach. A catch-basin of a word for the darker emotions between love and fear. Zål. Thunder shook the walls. She hurried down the stairs, her arms before her, her hands ready to help pick up their bags. For the distraction of work.

  Chapter 17

  Chase lugged his suitcase of clothes and his metal case of camera equipment up a stairwell that felt like a greenhouse in summer. The hotel’s elevator was out of order, and having seen a chambermaid attempting a repair with nothing but a screwdriver and the pounding of the side of her fist, he was wary about using it even if it began running. She had been cussing softly as he passed her for the stairs, as though adequate to voice her frustration but quiet enough not to reach the elevator’s finicky mechanics and worsen them.

  Even the hallways were hot. Chase could feel the moisture of sweat and rain accumulate between his shoulder blades and trickle down the avenue of his back. By the time he entered the air-conditioned relief of his room, he could only think of a drink of water and a shower. The hotel room was like any other: a bed, a writing table and chair, an adjoining bathroom with white tile and miniature soap. An air-conditioner rattled above the door, then shut off. He gazed at it with suspicion, as though it had shut off to spite him. In the icy water that ran from the faucet, he washed his face, then drank from the tap, tasting the residual soap from his face on the flat of his tongue. He spat, dabbed his face with a hotel towel, and examined his failed attempt at an extra close shave that morning, back in Paris. Going a
gainst the grain had left his face bloody and raw and only now was the puffiness subsiding.

  Standing in the steady spray of the shower, Chase tried to remember the restaurants in the area. His last visit to Orange had been to help a friend move, a journalist who’d had enough of the traffic of crime and politics in Paris and had moved to Orange with a girlfriend he’d since married. Toro had a young son and a one-year-old daughter and sent religious Christmas cards, though he’d been an atheist the last time Chase had seen him. Before leaving Paris, Chase had contacted Toro by phone and arranged to meet him in town late the following afternoon. To catch up, and to catch. Toro would know the local stories and gossip.

  Stepping from the shower, Chase dried off and left the bathroom door open to help evaporate the steam. He liked the mirror, a cheap one that distorted his physique to a vertical advantage, but it quickly fogged over. He finished combing his hair in front of another mirror above the desk. Here, he seemed bloated, like the face of someone unsuccessful at masking a belch. He opened his suitcase, took out fresh clothes and dressed while he recalled the day so far, of running after Regi, and of what Bombay had told him. He noticed a second door near the writing table and tried it. It opened into the adjoining hotel room where he found Gaudin sitting in bed, his back against the headboard, shoes still on his feet, a phone book spread open on his lap like a meal.

  “Hey,” Chase said.

  “Your room any bigger?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t seem convinced.”

  “No, I was thinking. Why would Regi run like that?”

  Gaudin shrugged. “Maybe he’s afraid of getting his picture taking. Of all the soul you’ve been draining from him with Kodak or Fuji.”

  “Agfa.”

  “Agfa.”

  “Maybe he’s afraid of his father and, consequently, you.”

  “You, too,” Gaudin said.

  “No one’s been afraid of me in my life.”

  Gaudin placed the phone book aside and ran his fingers through his boyish hair. He rubbed his eyes with his palms and yawned. “We can talk tonight. Right now, I think I have the restaurant narrowed down. I just need to sleep on it for a few minutes.”