"Philippina, the more I think about it, the more upsetting it gets, because it's bad business. Predicting the impending death of a client in front of other potential clients is bad business! If you ask me, it wasn't a trick. The parrot spoke the truth."
"That's ridiculous-oh my, it's late!"
"Don't leave me! You don't understand: I've maybe less than a week left… Philippina, I wanted so much to spend my last days with you!"
"Excuse me?"
"I've been crazy about you for months now. I didn't dare tell you. Now, in the face of imminent death, all my shyness has disappeared. Philippina, be mine, even if only for a few hours, so at least I'll have known happiness!"
Philippine rolled her eyes skyward. Just her luck. Her gaze, finding no help in the heavens, fell once more to the world below. She picked out headlights on the avenue, an available taxi. Saved!
"Dear, dear friend! I'm very touched, really, and also very flattered! You're a man who's so-but excuse me, please, here comes a taxi. At this late hour, it would be a crime to let it slip away!"
She lifted her arm and practically threw herself onto the taxi's hood. A moment later, the cab carried her off into the night.
As he was crossing Market Square, Orne stopped short before one of the machines. According to the article by Lupus, there were three in all: one behind City Hall; one in front of the elementary school, its use forbidden to minors; and the one now before him. He drew closer, curious. The automatons of lithographed iron, in their basrelief firing squad, gleamed in the moonlight. Their uniforms evoked the Empire, without Orne being able to say which, exactly: First or Second. In any case, the soldiers looked quite distinguished in their dress blues and gold-buttoned trousers, white gaiters and leather bandoliers, the appropriate expressions on the twelve faces individualized by mustaches and sideburns of varying shades, a military cap tilted to the right or the left, jammed tightly down or tossed back behind the head. Both arms, the only moving parts, were for the moment drawn back to the chest, in their hands carbines that a mechanism permitted them to aim at a post a few steps away. You were shot more or less point-blank, so there was no need to fear any inaccuracy of aim. The customer was sure to have his fill of bullets. To one side was a mechanical officer, identified by his pistol and epaulettes, mounted on a little cart that slid along a rail, bringing him to the dying man in order to administer, for the sake of good form, the coup de grace. Peering more closely at the post, Orne found a clever adjustable pedestal allowing each user to adapt it to his or her own size. Thus the coup de grace, delivered of necessity at a standard height, would not run the risk of missing. A duly lighted notice clarified a few operating procedures. The requisite restraints consisted of thin iron hoops that automatically closed around the body of the self-condemned. As for the body's disposal, a diagram outlined the workings. A door opened behind the post, which turned, then pitched forward as the hoops retracted into their housings. The freed corpse fell into a temporary casket that slid into a slot in a morgue chambered like the barrel of a gun. They'd thought of everything, reflected Orne admiringly.
A discreet cough made him jump. He turned around. In the lunar clarity, he made out a woman of about thirty with a small boy.
"Excuse me, sir, but are you going to use-"
Orne said no. He had no intention of using the machine. He was interested, very interested, of course, but he could not foresee resorting to it for the time being.
"Then, please-we're in a hurry."
He stepped aside, absentmindedly at first, as if before a telephone booth, but at the sight of the woman placing her hands on the child's shoulders and nudging him gently toward the post, he couldn't stop himself from speaking up.
"What are you going to do?"
"It has to end," the woman answered in a woeful voice. "My little boy and I are too unhappy. My husband's dead. I'm unemployed. My landlord just threw us out. We're so alone, all alone, oh God! That's why they made these things, right? So we could be done with all the misery and the loneliness?"
"Maybe, but-but you don't have the right!"
The woman shrugged. "Of course I do. I've got the right to use this machine because it's here. I didn't invent it, did I? They put it here so I could use it, and if I've got the money I will, that's all there is to i t!"
"But the boy-!"
"What do you suggest, sir? Will you marry me, feed and raise him? No, of course not!"
She pulled a gaunt coin purse from her coat and set to counting out change.
"I'm not even sure I have enough for the half-dozen," she said. "Would you be so kind as to help me out?"
"Absolutely not!"
"Whatever happened to charity? Oh, wait…I think I've got enough. Be good, sweetie, just a moment and we'll be in heaven," she told her son.
She made all the adjustments with an eye to her child's execution, covered him with kisses one last time, inserted the coins into the slot and then pressed herself to him before the firing squad.
A tinny recorded voice burst from a speaker hidden in the officer's head: "On my order… Ready! Aim!"
With a single synchronized screech, six of the metal soldiers drew their rifle stocks to their shoulders and took aim at woman, child, and Orne.
"Out of the way, you fool!" she yelled.
He only had enough time to obey.
"Fire!" cried the officer.
The salvo shattered the night.
Only the child was entitled to the coup degrdce, since there was only one per round, and the woman had in a way snuck in for free. Fortunately, she expired quickly, while the machine swallowed her son's body. After the tragedy, Orne remained rooted to the spot, shivering before the unhappy woman's corpse. What could he have done? Everything had happened so fast! The woman's words still rang in his head: "Are you going to marry me, feed him, and raise him?" No, obviously not. But what was a man worthy of the name supposed to have done? Surely not panic, stammer, and let widows and orphans die before his eyes. Feelings of guilt and impotence all but drowned him. It crossed his mind that to redeem himself he might wait for the next would-be executee and devote himself to saving him, by force if necessary. Then he remembered that he had less than a week to live. His hour might even come that night. He no longer had time for anything. Wasn't he exempt from all responsibility? The living could struggle with life, he was but a dotted outline now, barely even there. After all, who cared about him? Leaving the restaurant, his friends had all vanished, abandoning him to face the prospect of his imminent death alone. And the women! Brunehilde with her silky tresses, Gina with her peach-down skin, Philippina with her splendid bosom… Gone, flown, nowhere to be found! What was the world coming to if women no longer bestowed even the least consolatory favors on the dying?
The sound of steps interrupted his thoughts. He recognized the gypsy from the Murky Maw. She was biting her lip and her eyes glistened worriedly. "Sir-would you have seen a large gray parrot?"
She hadn't recognized him. She didn't remember having predicted, less than an hour earlier, that he had but a few days, perhaps even only a few hours, left to live.
"Did it escape?"
She shrugged. Would she be looking for him otherwise?
"I'll help you look! But please, tell me-it's a trick, isn't it?"
Orne's voice was pleading. The woman studied him more closely.
"Ah…You're one of the gentlemen from the restaurant."
"Yes! Tell me it's a trick!"
The worried gleam in the gypsy's eve gave way to one of irony. As she opened her mouth to reply, the parrot, with a great beating of wings, passed by above.
"That's him!" the gypsy cried. "Coco! Come back!"
"Coco, come back!" Orne echoed.
Indifferent to their cries, the bird staved its course, alighting for a moment on the head of the statute of Mathieu Chain, then setting off again toward the square.
"Quickly," the gypsy panted, "follow, we can't lose sight of him!"
God alone
knew why, but Orne found reason for hope in the fact that she wished him to join her in pursuing the bird. He fell in beside her. Luckily, the parrot's plumage was a very light gray, and could without too much trouble be made out in the gloom through which, with no particular hurry, it glided in an almost stately getaway.
Palaiseau, July 2001
Sweet Street
ome people never wonder what they were put on earth to do. When the time comes, a voice pipes up inside and says, be a linguist, or a bridgebuilder. The voice speaks; they listen. The earlier it speaks, the earlier they set out in search of dialects to master or rivers to ford.
Moe had found out on the late side what his purpose in life was. By all appearances, it was to read and daydream in his taxi while waiting for a fare. He wasn't proud of it. He'd rather have taken the century head-on, but, aware his own limits were quickly reached, he'd let it go.
As with many other blessings in his life, he owed his late calling as a cabbie to his godmother. She was a building super. A guardian super. A fairy godsuper. Even something of a mer-super, maybe, the way her fragrant basement apartment, bathed in a blue glow and reaching back into the building depths, reminded him so much of a marine grotto carved out by tides at the foot of a city block. For her godson, sick of scraping by at twenty-five on a string of jobs from intern to part-time temp, she painted a rosy picture of the taxi driver's trade. The tenant in 4B-one of her favorites-had plied it four straight decades without noticeable weariness or disappointment. For him, the hour of retirement had come. He was willing to sell the license that for so long had been his daily bread.
Between minimum wage and social security, Moe hadn't a penny to his name. His fairy godsuper brushed his objections aside. If it'd help get him set up on his own, he could borrow the money at a token rate. That woman was living proof evil and despair hadn't yet conquered every last corner of the world. She lent Moe enough for the license, and the car, too. The make didn't matter-it was some foreign car. It had about as many miles on it as a trip to the moon. The seller claimed there was still enough under the hood to make it back. And he was right. Seven years later, it was still running. For Moe, it wasn't only a way of getting around or making a living, but the carapace or exoskeleton he'd always lacked. He needed a protective barrier between himself and the world or, since he was a citi dweller, between him and the streets. This finally materialized in the form of an automotive chassis. Himself within and the universe without, was how he imagined it. In his safe space, he saw the steady stream of fares less as intrusion than (economically necessary) distraction from a sometimes onerous solitude. His fares were his guests. He sized them up as quickly as he could-as soon as they'd sat down in the backseat-and treated each according to his observations. He left those he felt hostile to all attempt at conversation to their own interior monologues. He and the others-most of them-exchanged a few passing thoughts on weather or traffic: was it staying good or getting worse? Were they moving or not? Some people could only parrot back the news, some had been brainwashed by the boob tube, some were demented sports fans. He adapted. "You got that right!" he'd say. When his head was filled to bursting with baloney, he met the minimum of polite conversation with an occasional nod. Sometimes he picked up a man of learning. There was no mistaking the type. Most fares, surprised, managed a polite question on seeing the scuffed spines, with their faded gilt, crammed into a glove compartment gone bookshelf. It usually had to do not with the books themselves, nor their titles and authors, but the strangeness of their presence in the cab. They clearly weren't new. Brownish, yellowish, or tannish, nick-pocked and stain-spotted, the old bits of leather dated back to the times of wigs, swords, and kings. They aroused a limited curiosity in most: when was it from, how much was it worth? Only a few asked to see, sniff, or feel them, to open them up and read a little. Moe readily complied with their requests. His beloved books were in no danger. They were already falling apart. He liked them like that. Miraculously restored copies were in fact beyond his means. His passion didn't balk at browned or worm-eaten pages. Quite the contrary: time had placed its seal on the book. Moe haunted flea markets, buying what he could: what others scorned, orphan volumes, incomplete copies, books with warped or broken bindings, fossils, wrecks, scraps, and fragments. He never turned his nose up at anything. Like a beachcomber, he picked up whatever came his way, collecting memoirs, educational and religious treatises, prayers and pamphlets, comedies and tragedies, philosophical dialogues, novels frivolous and edifying alike. Everything nourished him; everything challenged him. From this silt from the rare nuggets and the blackest follies of eras no more or less foolish than our own-his imagination extracted a compound of almost hallucinogenic qualities.
Slowly, he had started to get older. He'd married Maria, his kind of bohemian, an Ecuadoran art-school graduate, who regilded cherubs for the diocese. They were bringing up two olive-skinned kids in a small apartment whose prevailing greenhouse temperatures were kind to the tropical plants Maria couldn't live without. Moe expected nothing more from life than for this torrid, unassuming happiness to continue when fate, in the form of a seemingly ordinary fare, stepped into his cab.
It was toward the end of a rainy autumn afternoon. Since morning, every other fare had coughed or blown his nose right into the back of Moe's neck. He was sure he'd caught something; his nose was already tingling. The man in his fifties who'd just climbed in seemed to have dodged whatever was going around, Moe thought as he looked him over in the rearview mirror.
"Evening, mister."
"Good evening. Sweet Street, please. Number forty-two."
Moe must've heard wrong. He tried to think what other streets might sound like Sweet, which he'd never heard of. Not coming up with anything, he decided to ask the fare to repeat the address.
"Sorry, but… where'd you say again?"
"Forty-two Sweet Street."
"Sweet Street? You sure? I don't know any Sweet Street in this city, or around:"
"Few do," the stranger said. "Head for Granary Hall, and I'll tell you where to go from there"
Moe pulled out, awfully intrigued. After five years of driving around, he thought he knew his territory. A little more and he'd have had doubts about his passenger's seriousness. How could so "few" know of a street that a cabbie hadn't heard of it at all? But the man's gaze had fallen on the stash of books.
"Say, those books… Pardon me for being nosy, but I'm in the business: I'm a book dealer. Are you a collector?"
"Collector? Yeah, I mean… I collect them!"
"Hmm… eighteenth century? May I?" The book dealer extended a hand over the front seat. Moe grabbed two books and passed them to him.
"Thanks. Let's see now… ah! Father Margolin, an old friend! And what have we here? Mesambierre! Have you read these? What I mean to say is: Have you actually read them?"
"Sure, you gotta, it's a book. I mean, what else…"
Moe trailed off. In the rearview mirror, the book dealer frowned slightly. For him, books were for buying and selling before reading.
"Quite. But take fine wines, for example… Some bottles are so old, drinking them is no longer a possibility. They've become utterly undrinkable. Still, we don't pour them down the sink. So we keep them for display, like works of art."
"I read my books," said Moe.
His fare opened his mouth, as if about to sail that Father Margolin's sermons and Mesambierre's pastoral odes were completely indigestible today. He must have been afraid of insulting Moe, who gave every impression of having thoroughly enjoyed them. He changed his mind, shut his mouth, and set the dreadful octavo on the front seat.
"You sell books like these?" Moe asked.
"Yes, I deal in rare books. I traffic in books as old, but also as new-looking, as I can find. That's the trick of it, you see. You have to dig up three-hundred-year-old books that look fresh as newly laid eggs… Make a left here, and go straight. Where do you find your books?"
"Flea markets and yard sales."
Moe's eyes lit up. "Really?"
"Mesambierre and more… eighteenth and seventeenth of course, not very sought-after, but in good condition, at modest prices…"
"Stop here, please. Number 42 is just a bit farther down."
Moe felt cheated. Captivated by the conversation, he'd unthinkingly followed the book dealer's directions, his lefts and rights, and now they'd arrived at their destination, catching him off guard.
"This is Sweet Street? Are you sure?"
"Positively," his fare replied with a little laugh. "How much do I owe you?"
He paid, got out, and disappeared. The street was narrow; Moe had parked to let the man out, so he didn't have to drive off again right away. Now that he was alone, his curiosity about the little-known street got the better of him. He cut the engine, rummaged through the glove box, and pulled out from between two books a city map almost as worn out as they were. He knew it like a priest knows his breviary. With a quick glance, he gave himself a religious refresher. Sweet Street didn't exist, since it wasn't in the holy writ. But if it didn't exist, where had he brought his fare, and where was he right now? He swore. He stepped out of the car and, in his annoyance, slammed the door.
He looked around. Night was falling on Sweet Street. He took three steps without noticing a thing, then froze. There was something… in the air, or the light. Or in himself? No, not in him. He was just the same as before, when he'd picked up the book dealer. The same as he'd been at lunch, sitting down to lamb stew at the diner. The same as that night in Maria's arms, his face buried in her armpit. The same as last night at the apartment of his benefactress and godmother, whose birthday they'd been celebrating. The same as a year, a decade, or two earlier. So if the cause of this sensation-at once foreign and familiar, brandnew and very old-wasn't in him, it had to be somewhere around him.
A Life on Paper: Stories Page 16