The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  He was still cold when, fully dressed, he crossed the hotel lobby. He was already late meeting his journalist friend Toro. In his pocket he had placed a sketch of the wine bottle label he’d made from memory.

  “Monsieur!” said the desk attendant.

  He turned and saw the desk attendant hold a small parcel in the air for him. “Thank you,” Chase said.

  “What happened to the woman?”

  “She’ll be okay,” Chase said, grabbing the package. The attendant didn’t completely let go.

  “I’m so relieved. I saw the police, I thought, I thought…”

  “She’ll be fine,” Chase said, pulling it free.

  “I’m so relieved. It was the wine? Is it the anti-freeze again?”

  “No.”

  “No? Good.”

  “You’re relieved,” Chase said, reading the Parisian return address that lacked a name.

  “Yes.”

  He stepped outside the hotel, where the air seared his cold skin. He opened the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of handwritten pages. He recognized Baptiste’s handwriting instantly in the photocopies. “Luc,” he said aloud. As Chase headed into the town center, he wondered who else had read the pages. Luc, certainly, but who else? Wrest? He was intrigued and began reading the text, this time a mix of French and English. A car nearly hit him as he crossed the street. He stuffed the pages back into the envelope to save them for when he had the luxury of a spare hour.

  Ahead, he heard the sound of bustling and barter, of perusal and the shifting of paper, plastic, and soles. He entered the square to find it was market day, the town center and its side arteries of streets and alleys crammed with booths and buyers. His eye caught on the yellow and blue fabrics being touted by a man with convincing faith in the durability of his cloth in any washing machine. His voice blared loudly from speakers. Chase had a desire to strangle him.

  He passed a stand of black and light green olives—and all shades in between—soaking in jars of their own oil. He felt hungry, then despised himself for wishing to satiate his hunger when he deserved nothing at all. He understood, fully now, why Bianca was hesitant about ordering dessert.

  Chase passed framed and unframed paintings and photographs, used books that gave off the odor of age as he pushed by, tourist T-shirts so thin one might as well walk topless, fruits with the color of a stormy Mediterranean in them, surplus military clothing, flowers, and a recently caught swordfish with its spear pointed to the sky, its large black eye holding the stoic gaze of all big fish that have the ability to injure. He stared at the eye and it seemed to look nowhere and directly at him, all at once.

  Chase found the cafe where he was to meet Toro. His friend appeared younger than the last time Chase had seen him. He wore a boy of about three or four on his shoulders whose tiny hands gripped his father’s glasses. Besides the glasses, all that remained on a head otherwise bald were two tufts of hair black as printers’ ink.

  “Chase!”

  They embraced and Chase felt the hands of Toro’s son drumming his head. While he would have been annoyed just a month ago, the sensation now made him jealous for a son of his own.

  “This is little Sebastian,” Toro said, when they’d taken seats at the cafe in the town square. “He has a bit of a cold today, enough to keep him out of school, but since the house is empty all day he’s been with me.” He took his son off his shoulders. “What do you want to drink?” he asked his son. “You want a soda? Go play over there and I’ll call you when it comes.”

  Chase watched the boy run off and hop up and down the steps of a shoe store. He wore shorts and bright blue socks.

  “So you’ve finally decided to leave Paris,” Toro said.

  “Temporarily.”

  “When permanently?”

  “I have a problem with permanence,” Chase said. “If I leave, I’ll want to go back.”

  “What would people say of you, right? That Chase couldn’t make it without all the cafes, without all the traffic and action, without the Parisian women? I’d have you look around more carefully before you decide to go back,” Toro said, nodding to the square.

  Chase observed how the market goers held items and put them back. Directly below the city hall he could make out a stage. Someone was conducting a sound check. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou,” the voice said, drowning in feedback. “Pardon.” The air was thick with wind, the Mistral. While he was watching, a gust swept up the short limp skirt of a young woman passing by. She wore nothing underneath. He glanced at Toro and Toro was smiling.

  “See,” Toro said. “What would you miss if you moved here?”

  “My sanity.”

  “You’ve never had any.”

  “That vision you just pointed out is probably here for the music festival. Probably a Parisian. You probably planted her there.”

  “I swear I didn’t.”

  “Still married, Toro?”

  “Another kid on the way.”

  “Really?”

  Toro nodded from behind his menu. “Doesn’t mean I’ve gone blind to my natural surroundings.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Around here you’ll find a wife who’ll give you a good weekend lay.” Toro raised his eyebrows. “Stop her,” he said, catching sight of a waitress. “I’m starved.”

  They ordered and caught up on old times, when both of them had worked for the same paper in Paris and, occasionally, gone out on assignments together. The story on the sewers where Toro had contracted hepatitis, in Cannes, where Chase snuck into Sylvester Stallone’s limousine, only to discover it was the wrong car, and how he’d been trapped, instead, in the limo of a nobody Portuguese director who seemed thrilled beyond belief to be approached in this way by a press photographer, and who proceeded to talk unintelligibly all the way to his hotel, where he bought Chase a drink at the bar and asked him where he should pose.

  Soon, Chase ran out of old remembrances that they could recollect together. He didn’t know if this was because he’d forgotten them or because more had never existed, eroding the sense he had that they had occupied more of each others’ lives. He then told Toro why he was in Orange and most of what he knew, withholding only the pages from Luc in the envelope tucked beneath his plate. But he told him about David, Regi, Baptiste, the method of shipping cocaine in a solution of wine, Bombay and the bottle she had dropped off, about what had happened to Jade and how, at this moment, he was feeling like complete and utter shit. Chase then took out his tracing of the wine bottle label and handed it to Toro.

  “What’s this?” Toro asked. “A label?”

  “Could you find out where this winery is, who owns it?” Chase asked, taking a bite of his pizza.

  “You draw this or something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sebastian draws better than this.”

  “Okay, next time I’ll use him.”

  “Where’s the bottle?”

  “The police took it for testing,” Chase said, bringing Toro completely up to speed.

  “And you hope the tests prove that it was coke that made the woman sick, that Wrest has been smuggling it and that to punish his son’s pilfering he had him pushed?”

  “Simple, right?”

  Toro didn’t answer as he examined Chase’s sketch of the bottle. He fed slices of fruit de mer pizza into his mouth. A tiny rigid tentacle reached from under melted cheese then disappeared in his mouth. Chase did not enjoy seafood without fins. He drank the rest of his wine and poured more from the carafe. He tried watching women approach against the Mistral, but all he could think of was Jade, of how she had felt up on the hill, in bed, and then on the floor of the hotel room. He could barely touch his food, despite feeling famished.

  The wind snatched up a patio umbrella from one of the market stands and sent it floating down the street upside down, like a blossom on a turbulent stream. Vendors began boxing their wares and the crowd thinned as the wind hastened the market’s final hour. Chase turned and watched as
Toro’s son pet two yellow cats that had ventured out from an alley. Toro’s son let them lap from the glass of soda beside him. The cats shook their heads from the carbonation, but continued drinking. Everything seemed calm.

  Then yesterday’s dream came back to him, but biting for all its sentimentality. He couldn’t really be in love. He hardly knew Jade. And even if he were, he had damaged his chances, damaged potential reciprocity. Only dull regret remained. He wished he would be injured for hurting her and for listening to his selfish wants.

  Toro folded the sketch of the wine label, then checked his watch. “Sebastian!” he shouted, then turned to Chase. “I’ll see what I can dig up. Do you mind paying? I didn’t realize the time. All drinks on me when we get together again.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  “Good to see you again, Chase. I’ll dig.”

  “Dig deep.”

  Toro stood from the table and slapped Chase on the back as he went off to fetch his son. Chase waved to Toro and his son as they walked away from the cafe and turned a corner, then he turned and picked at his meal. He ate the bread, drank his wine. The wind moaned like a storm at night, though it was bright afternoon. He hated eating alone now.

  Though it wasn’t his intention, he ended up sitting in a bar talking local politics to the waitress. He’d indulged in three glasses of 51, but had been stingy on the water. He’d already called the hospital twice, and twice he’d been told the same thing, that Jade would be released the following morning. He ordered a beer, trying to introduce a new taste to a tongue that had been marinating in the flavor of pastis. He didn’t want to go back to the hotel, he didn’t, for the moment, want to meet up with Gaudin and Bianca and face incriminations, even if the incriminations came loudest from his own heart. He didn’t want to talk of crime and mystery and death and sorrow. He wanted to think of pleasure, to pretend he had a rich woman at his side, there at his table, just outside his field of view. A woman who loved him, who longed for him. If he turned his head, she would be there, smiling.

  He was unbelievably tired. Whenever he closed his eyes, he felt he was falling. Fear. Ce qui le contraignait à être bon, c’était la peur de faire face à la mort dans un moment de culpabilité. He couldn’t remember it in English anymore.

  Under the combination of fatigue and drink, and with the inextinguishable presence of Bianca’s husband’s absence, Chase felt weary. He felt what he had never felt before. Old. He told himself it was just the events of the past few weeks, not that he was beginning his fourth decade. In fact, he was beginning to like the ring of the word thirty, he was beginning to look forward to the moniker of near-middle age.

  He liked the taste of lies. Licorice.

  He took the envelope Luc had sent him and began reading Baptiste’s handwriting.

  Freedom is such a strange word. To be kept in a room for so long, then have my case dismissed, sent here—and on the tab of Regi’s father! The nearness of real freedom would make any other man full of joy, but I can’t have anything back. I’ve felt guilty in other things and paid for them in a roundabout way. Recompense.

  Here, in Avignon, I am told to get exercise, am given literature, and have my blood drawn once a day. The psychiatrists treat me like I’m visiting a patient, not a patient myself. I say nothing of the voice to them, only here in this notepad. I will not be the same Baptiste when I return to Paris. I feel like I’ve had something inside me stretched so tightly it will never regain its original shape when released. The voice has me thinking of ways of hurting Wrest and Regi badly. To commit the act I haven’t yet done. Push. For involving me in narcotics. But the invisible voice tells me better ways to hurt. And I’ve been listening. This David tells me:

  «I disappear. Stupid Dane, take me out of quotes. Write my words, not yours. But you don’t. And you have every right to put me in the context of your own “therapy.” That word you may put in quotes. I have things to tell you. Zooop zooop.»

  David’s voice is fainter these days, as though speaking to me from another room, and sometimes I have to ask him to repeat a word because it comes to me so faintly. His voice is like an old man with tics. He says things which make no sense, he repeats them, he jumps blindly from one idea to another. It is becoming rare to hear him say anything that makes sense. But where once I feared a syllable from that American voice, I now look forward to hearing from him. I have given up writing most of what he says, and he is accepting, though slowly. David has told me who he thinks pushed Regi. And my news bringer has been shadowing Wrest. He has found a man with a weakness for money. David has told me that these pages I give to my doctor, Luc, wind up in Wrest’s hands as well, and gives me the opportunity to say this:

  Wrest. I know you. I’ve seen you fall onto my pages. I know the drugs you smuggle, I know your anger that someone you’d trust in your business, Regi, would harbor a little of his own greed, would fall victim himself to the drug you sell but do not use yourself. You think him weak. I know your form of punishment. I know the face you wear in public is a false one. And I know this only second hand. I know you because you are being watched.

  My ghost friend is in your apartment while you sit on your balcony clipping your nails, cutting yourself, searching for a bandage in what you think is the solitude of your home. Four drops of blood on your white bathroom carpet. Sent to the cleaners. A Wednesday afternoon. My ghost sat beside you in your car when you were driven south to Orange with your young girlfriends. He tells me you smelled of garlic and babies, that your driver almost hit a green Fiat, that you insisted your driver honk the horn of your car, long after the Fiat was past. This little transparent spy of mine has seen Regi’s repentance, has seen the look on your face when you are together with him. The man your punishment crushed knows your secrets. He tells me Regi has come after you, that his apologies are false, that his contrition is without heart. You have taught him anger and may have to face it. You deserve to lose your identity, Wrest. Lose your belief you are alone in a closed room. There is no alone for you. Are you comforted by this thought? When you lie in your sheets and slap your stomach awake for breakfast, you are not alone. Never.

  Know this then, too. You can come for me, but everything I write is also in the hands of others. It will come out if there is harm done. I am saying this to those persons: let this come out if there is harm done.

  Wrest. I have you by the balls.

  Chase’s inebriation cleared before he’d finished a single page. There was nothing in what Luc had sent him that made him believe Baptiste, but there was such an authority behind the voice. Chase found himself unable to dismiss what he read. He wished he could hear voices, clues, learn the knowledge of what drove Regi and Wrest, and who might have been the person to have pushed Regi. Baptiste had this letter as his protection. Chase and Gaudin needed their own to protect themselves from their employer. Then this thought crossed Chase’s mind: Baptiste had mentioned that his protection stemmed from having what he’d written in the hands of others. Who else had a copy? Did Baptiste mean Luc, perhaps Bombay, or—and he shivered at the thought—was he one of this group, at least in Wrest’s eyes?

  He turned to the next page. A cell phone rang in the bar, a familiar Mozart jingle, and he turned full of apprehension that he’d see Emilia there. But it just belonged to a couple of girls. Still, the tightness that had been building for the past few weeks in Paris was returning to him here, even in the dry expanse of Provence. The constriction of coincidence.

  Chase put the pages away and wandered back outside for fresh air. The day had fallen to late afternoon and the square was alive. A group of South American dancers strutted on the previously empty stage. Down an adjacent alley, Chase could see a line of waiting dancers adjusting each other’s costumes and crushing their cigarettes under the hard soles of black shoes. Chairs had been set up around the stage and the crowd was thick all the way to the surrounding cafes. Chase searched for the easiest way to navigate through the crowd when his eye caught a face in one of the ca
fes.

  At a distant table, Regi was kissing a woman. A spike of adrenaline shot through Chase. Here in the square where they’d lost him, Regi was found. Chase approached carefully as the crowd began to clap to the dancer’s steps. While he moved, Chase watched Regi’s kiss. It did not alternate to the other cheek, nor did Regi stand to leave. Chase’s assumption that he had been going forward on untainted information—never entirely assured—gave way further. Bombay had not completely clarified her relationship to Regi, but she had mentioned his asexuality. Here, the kiss still continuing, despite the crowds, despite the frenzy of colors and music, Chase wondered what, of all he knew, he could trust.

  Chase entered under the awning of the cafe. Regi was feeling an earring in one of the woman’s earlobes.

  “Hello Regi,” Chase said.

  “Yes?”

  “Chase.”

  “I can’t hear you over the music.”

  He leaned to his ear. “Chase.”

  “Of course. Hello, spy.”

  Regi wore black slacks, a blue shirt and the growth of a week’s stubble shaped into the shadow of a beard. The sling for his arm lay on the table. The woman wore black and did not look up at Chase.

  “I’ve been trying to find you,” Chase shouted.

  The woman looked up at Chase now and she was smiling.

  “Here. Take a seat,” Regi said.

  Chase put his hand on the oval back of an empty chair. “I wanted to talk to you on the train. Why did you run from me?”

  “From you?” Regi laughed and said something, but his answer was mashed by the crowd’s clapping.

  “What?”

  “I was not running from you, Chase.” Regi rapped his fingers on his empty beer glass and looked inside the cafe, his eyes searching. He put his arm up to attract attention, but gave up just as quickly. “Would you mind getting me another one, and one for yourself, or whatever you’re drinking.”

  “What’ll you have?” Chase asked the woman. Behind her, dancing continued on the stage.

  “I’m fine.”

  Chase maneuvered his way into the interior of the packed cafe. The sound of the crowd on the TV intensifying the din. It was impossible to think, too tight to breathe. He held his breath through the haze of cigarette smoke and felt a small victory when he reached an opening at the bar. He doubted that Gaudin—the one with investigating in his blood—could have accomplished as much as he had today. The work felt like the beginning of some kind of penance.