by Luke Davies
I walk and walk. In the other direction from the Petit Pont, on the Right Bank side of the Ile de la Cité and the Ile St Louis, there are seven other bridges to explore, as well as the Pont St Louis which joins the two islands. After my early haphazard explorations of all the bridges, I decide to walk out each day on a series of expeditions, each in honour of the contemplation of a different bridge. For the Seine, I see, is a rupture in the heart of Paris, and the bridges are the sutures that bind it back together.
I start my new journeys at the Pont St Louis. The tiny bridge is closed to cars. On weekends it is crowded with buskers—bad clowns usually, breathing fire or juggling tenpins for the tourists—but today it’s a grey Tuesday and I’m pleased by the emptiness. In certain light before storms the grey slate roof of the Hotel de Ville across the water takes on a steel-blue sheen bordering on bruised purple. The statues on its roof turn pale, fading green against the austere sky. Further in the distance is the medieval Tour St Jacques, brooding and ominous, so mundane at the base, rising up to the magnificent asymmetry of its gargoyles, as if the tower were built solely for the purpose of repelling the attacks of airborne demons. My eyes wander along the old stone apartment buildings that line the Quai aux Fleurs and I wonder what kind of people are living in them. The flower dock. Rich people, I guess.
If you relax enough you can see things that aren’t there any more. In Paris, my cortex seems to be opening to a luminescent universe. What I initially think are some kind of hallucinations—worrying term—I come to realise are instead this more relaxed way of seeing.
So it is no surprise when the stone river walls and the footpaths of the Quai aux Fleurs take on a sudden sunburst of colour and there before me, layer upon layer, is every flower ever unloaded from a barge. A thousand years of flowers, finishing their journey from the rich soil upriver. The flowers burst the seams of the atmosphere, spilling over each other in cascading torrents until finally my eye can take in nothing more than chaotic arrangements of colour, and I blink hard, and the chaos goes.
I watch the water. A school of debris floats by. A white shopping bag drifting aimlessly reminds me of Sydney, of the jellyfish that float around the ferries at Circular Quay. The same formlessness, a transparent membrane. Then the first drops of rain begin to fall and I hurry home.
I love the river, and all the bridges. But I miss the ocean: that feeling of well-being that comes after a winter swim at Bondi, the salty skin tingling. Back at my apartment, as the storm opens out and lashes the bamboo and the tiger lilies on my terrace, I run a bath and throw in handfuls of sea salt from the kitchen, thinking that perhaps I can trick the cells in my body into believing they have taken that plunge into pleasure. The afternoon turns dark from the low clouds. I turn the radio on softly and light a candle in the bathroom before sinking into my mini-ocean. It doesn’t feel like Bondi, of course, but the music and the water relax me so much that I realise what I miss, yet again, is Matthew Smith. I don’t cry so much these days but in a salty bath on a dark day huge exceptions can be made. I thought I was getting better some time ago; maybe it was only hydroponic hooch and temporary Baxters. You’ve got to watch out for those screens and illusions. Sometimes there is nothing for it but to batten down the hatches at the same time you open the floodgates. At all times Time makes all the rules, and like the Buddha said—or more likely the Brahma, pacing out his godly billions of aeons— ‘Impatience is the only sin.’
The spring days lengthen; it’s around the central cluster of bridges, and heading a little west, about as far as the Pont Royal or the Pont Solferino opposite the Garden of the Tuileries, where I spend most of my time on my dusk adventures. I like to linger on the cast-iron Pont des Arts, which leads across the river to the main courtyard of the Louvre. It’s a wooden-planked pedestrian bridge with benches running along the middle; beneath it the tourist barges ply their trade up and down the Seine. The bridge is a meeting place for groups of students, for lovers.
In summer the city is crowded with tourists. Sometimes even the Parisians relax, those few who remain, as if to confirm that semi-miracles are possible. The latest dresses are tried on. The girls bare their shoulders and the boys get new tattoos. At times it seems a festival has come to town, so light is the mood of the collective desire to slow down. At other times the whole city is jittery with the teeth-grinding excesses of too many strong espressos and the attempt by the crush of visitors to diligently ‘do’ all the tourist sights in world-record time. I maintain my own pace.
By July it is staying light until ten in the evening and beyond. Long slow evenings when, in the course of my walks, I realise the city is so soft that it has never fully settled into the contours of its design, even after so many hundreds of years. The buildings as they stand are but the preliminary sketches, and only with the falling of light do they take shape. Paris is a city that has never accepted the hard-edged symmetry of its architecture, since it is forever busy fuzzing those edges with the graze of its grace.
On the Pont des Arts gnats hover, silhouetted against the pink sunset, around the trees in their neat boxes. The bateaux-mouches, the tourist boats, start to fill up. Their blinding arc lights shine up through the cracks of the bridge’s wooden slats. Around 10 p.m. the pink drops out of the sky and the vapour trails from the jets flying southwards from Charles de Gaulle airport become purple against the weak blue.
I turn and cross to the opposite railing and stand looking in the other direction, east. The sky to the east, away from the setting sun, has darkened first. The river here is split in two by the Ile de la Cité. For a long time I stare at the split in the river, at its sharp stone point where two lovers sit beneath a single tree. The night hardens, the softness of the city secreting itself into the cracks between buildings, to rest and reappear at the next dusk. A split in the river. I think of what it means. You could go in two directions. Towards Matt. Towards the future. On the other side of the arrowhead-shaped Ile, the river meets itself again.
The true night begins at last. The indigo drops downwards and blankets the city, stone by stone, from the roofs down to the streets. The city darkens shade by shade, in much the same way I imagine that snow falling in still weather accretes itself onto buildings in greater and greater whitenesses.
But high in the sky, where the long-vanished sun, from around sunset’s curve, still sends its rays to shine onto the upper atmosphere, there remain traces of light. I tilt my head upwards; light streams overhead, like the confluence of endless river systems: the rivers of photons that evening becomes. The streams tangle themselves together into vast silt estuaries, the muddied expanses between darkness and light, spilling ultimately into the deep ocean of night that expands on its own king tide to wash the blue atmosphere into nothingness.
Suddenly a flock of swallows reels chaotically, deeper and deeper into the dimness of the receding dusk. In their darting motions they seem to me a school of fish. At isolated moments—here is one, a school of birds in a tender Paris dusk—the pain of Matt’s absence moves away by just a fraction, as if a cog has loosened on the wheel of grief. My eyes fill with tears once again. These are somehow good tears. The birds disappear, away to the depths of the river of night.
Tom
I’VE LED A GOOD LIFE I’VE LED A GOOD LIFE I’VE LED A good life. Inside my father’s head the many noises compete and from the chaos of machinery come headaches, blinding, monstrous, mindless. There are times, I imagine, when a single voice rises. This can either be a great relief— as when the giant propellors of a jet wind down and you notice finally the thin whine of a lone cicada—or its opposite: the high tension of concentrated malice as your ears ring in the silence. His weird fragmented diary continues.
After Matt dies, after those months alone, the television and hydroponics, the various Baxters and my leaving for the far side of the planet, I am awash in my own grief. And in the meantime my father is furthering his disintegration. I will try my best to tell the story of the inside of his mind. I
don’t know how much of it I’ve got right. It only seems that this version of the story makes sense to me. Nobody could reach inside him now, not really. It is extraordinary how a human being can dry up, freeze, shut down. It is simply terrible, the frailty of the human mind.
‘I’ve led a good life’—it’s the voice of malice inside Tom’s head, drowning out all the other voices. He clenches his jaw. He hears also—a sound from the real world—the grinding of his teeth.
He has stopped working. He sees a psychiatrist. It’s a delayed reaction from the four years in prison, he’s told. What you’re undergoing could possibly be described as a very minor psychotic episode. But very minor. It’s not all that uncommon. The doctor prescribes Melleril. Tom says he feels tired all the time. All this information is relayed to me, after his death, by Tess.
On Melleril all the voices and the machinery are still there. The only difference is that they seem to be coming from underwater. It’s a hideous form of distortion in what he recognises as an already distorted situation.
And he knows now—and here is the truly tragic thing— he knows that he is losing his mind. He wants there to be something he can do about it. He knows it’s all connected: Dan and Tess, prison, our drifting apart. I imagine that the love he feels for me is so powerful, his heart is scalded with the overload of pain. He can’t stand the thought of losing me, but the truth begins to dawn on him: that he will die long before I do.
Losing his mind. It’s a frightening image. To lose something like a mind, just like that. He can only picture simple things, like ‘losing his wallet’. The sudden realisation, the panicked search through pockets, the double-checking, the trying to calm down and think, the going back over the day’s events. When did I last see it? Was it at the supermarket? Did I have it out then? He is slipping down an icy slope. He will never find that moment to feel the warmth of the sun on the back of his neck. He is afraid. He wishes it were an all-consuming thing, but there remains a tiny corner where he sits and observes the descending turmoil. What he hates is that the corner is so small. He was a doctor, once; he could join the dots and make the leaps. There was a decent life. And now the world is shrinking to a point.
He reads nothing but chaos theory, unsure of whether it’s good for him or not. He is interested in fractal geometry. It is a slender point of communication between us. First I feign interest and then it really grows. I will even take, at his urging, a couple of his chaos books to Paris. I will read them in a city whose very beauty is a chaos of beauty. After he is dead I will go through them again, try to make sense of the underlinings. He underlined the word ‘fractal’. Fractal, I read, means any geometrical structure that has details on all scales of magnification. No matter how big or small you make it, you still see extra new details you didn’t see before. Theoretically, then, infinite smallness is a fact: that is, a regression of scale that never ends.
Contradicting this, there is the infamous Planck Length. The physicist Max Planck suggested that the smallest physical structures—the smallest details—in the universe do actually have a minimum size-limit. We can go inwards and inwards and smaller and smaller for quite a while, but somewhere there in the exquisite distance is a rock bottom beyond which matter does not get any smaller. My father considers this to be a place of sleep and meditation where the consciousness of all things at last becomes inert, at peace. He remembers morphine: oh do not go gentle into that goodbye. It is suggested that the Planck Length is a million-million-million-million-millionth of a centimetre. (Approximately.) Beyond this, nothing.
But to my father, whose life is shrinking so rapidly, both options, infinite fractal regression or Planck’s end-of-the-line, must be equally horrific.
It had begun years earlier, innocently enough, in a time devoid of innocence. In prison he had read Dr Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature. It was hard going, but he learnt some things. He knows from fractal geometry that the coastline of Britain is infinite. He knows that should he bend a thread, carefully, through every small twist and bend made by the outline of a map of Great Britain, he could then calculate the length of the coastline by measuring out the length of string against the map scale. He knows that should he do the same thing with a more detailed nautical map of the country, the coastline would be longer again. He knows that if he were to take a one-metre ruler and walk the entire coastline, measuring every nook and cranny, then the circumference of Great Britain would be very much larger than that which he had initially measured in the map. He knows that were he to measure it with, say, a one-centimetre rule, the length of the coastline of Britain would be vastly larger again.
And if you could measure the molecules along the water’s edge with a ruler one photon in length? He realises, as Mandelbrot realised, that finally the idea of coastline disappears altogether, because one doesn’t know any longer where is land and where is water.
In the same way that coastlines dissolve, so too, I imagine, does the idea of his life, and he feels already that he no longer knows what is his body and what is the memory that he will become.
He hopes that other books will help him. He goes back to some of his favourites. He tries to read some geometry, some physics, a biography of Franz Josef Liszt. His hands tremble and the words jump around on the page until the very page itself is nothing but a clean white surface on which a thousand black maggots writhe. I shiver to think of him dying so slowly like this.
There seems to be absolutely nothing for it but to weather it out. The Melleril does nothing but turn down the volume a little and muffle the high treble range. His mind is lost in a blizzard.
Before I leave for Paris, whenever he sees me, I sense the enormous effort he is making to hold back the tears. Later I always imagine his body trembling with the exhaustion of it. Perhaps I do nothing more for him now than define the huge gaps, the absences, the passage of time that has run riot through his own life. First you are this and then you are that. Time clunks forward and you mark best the changes by external events: falling leaves tell you of autumn, your daughter grown up is the heart-stab of loss. Around this time I am so far removed from the Isabelle he once had in his life. Who am I now? A young woman with her own concerns. I wonder if I could have changed anything, could have reached him. Where has he been? He thinks of prison and as always his heart starts to beat too rapidly. And the years since prison: where, indeed, has he been? Once upon a time he inhabited the earth.
He tries to remember me from the time before he was arrested. He writes about me in his diary. If he goes back far enough he can remember the joys of those earlier years, when I was a tiny flame-haired fairy prancing through our world, and we lived in a tight triangle of Tom and Tess and me. Rectangle if you include Uncle Dan. But when he tries to move to my early adolescence, the clarity of his memory begins to fade, as if at this point the two of us, father and daughter, had begun to recede from each other’s lives. Was it she or I who went away? he thinks. And then he is inundated by a wave of guilt. Of course, he thinks. It was me, Tom. Tess had proved love to be a betrayal. And yet I can’t stop loving her, he thinks: she is all I have, for half a life. But Isabelle is my one and only. My best and closest, my fountain of joy. And what did I do around this time, when Isabelle was a teenager?
I started staying at work forever. I started cramming in the patients. I started falsifying Medicare records. I started the long haul that would lead six years later to imprisonment. The whole thing developed a momentum that after a while seemed pointless to arrest. It was money, of course. It was greed. I can’t deny that. I thought that if I had unlimited money then I could prove to Tess that I was the best. Ever since Dan, whenever that happened, it was like she had gone away from me. Was unable to come back.
Fuck my brother. Fuck you, Dan. I loved Tess. How could I stand in her way? These were human things: desire, or lust, I don’t know how to give them names, I don’t know what they really mean. No longer know. I thought that, with enough money, it was you that I would hurt,
not Tess, not Isabelle. And yet family works this way: I go to my grave without confronting you, because that’s how families work. That’s how family works. And I wish it was otherwise, so fuck you. You fucked my wife—for how long, I don’t even want to know—so fuck you.
All that was in his diary, too. A difficult book to read, even today. He can’t hold on to a train of thought for too long. Anger and guilt and self-condemnation attack him incessantly like obscene filthy birds. Isabelle, Isabelle. Where was I? he thinks. He was trying to think about Isabelle. But now his mind has jumped to Tess.
It is summer in 1965. They are buying an ice-cream at Balmoral Beach. Tom is wearing a towelling hat. A thick triangle of Pinke Zinke cream protects his nose. Tess is nineteen years old. To Tom it seems she radiates light.
Tess is wearing tight blue and white checked pants. They are low-slung at the hips and come up short above the ankles. Sandals, and a cotton shirt tied above the belly button. And Tom is thinking, I don’t know much, but I know I can grow old with this girl.
‘Let’s get our stuff,’ he says.
They run to the car, a ’48 Packard, and pull out towels and bathing costumes. When they emerge from the change rooms in the pavilion they hold hands as they walk onto the sand. There are children everywhere, and the screech of birds, and the soft lap of the harbour water, the absence of waves which settles in the air like hypnosis.
They spread out their towels and lie down and doze for a while. When it becomes too hot they go into the water, breast-stroking out towards the shark barrier. They pause and gain their breath, smiling at each other. Tom holds on with one arm to the support pillar and with the other pulls Tess close to him. Their legs entangle underwater. The sunlight makes speckles in Tess’s eyes, and drops of water hang suspended and glinting on her long lashes. As they kiss, Tom cannot exactly work out which thing is more delicious: the coolness inside her mouth or the taste of salt that settles on his tongue.