French Rhapsody

by Antoine Laurain

  ‘Where’s the bloody fire brigade, for God’s sake!’ complained the head keeper, as two more cables gave way, projecting a rat into the air which then landed at his feet, causing him to jump.

  The rat righted itself and scurried off to join the others.

  ‘How much does the installation weigh?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Karim.

  The last cables snapped and Bubble broke free. A great shout went up across the park as the structure began to lift off the ground.

  *

  No clear explanation for what had happened was ever given. The most likely cause was advanced a few weeks later. Since Bubble covered the pond, which was the main water source for the park rats, they had decided to get rid of the impediment that was preventing them from quenching their thirst. Rat specialists saw the incident as a brilliant demonstration of the abilities of their favoured species.

  Now floating ten metres above the ground, Bubble moved with grace. Tourists had taken out their phones and, in order to capture the work for ever on their memory cards, extended their arms towards the work as if performing some ancestral rite of allegiance. The rats, rapid and furtive, had departed for their hiding places as fast as they had appeared. A strange silence now reigned over the gardens, and the wind created little ripples on the rubberised canvas of the giant brain which seemed to make it even more like a living being. Bubble drifted gently over towards the gardens’ gates, heading towards Place de la Concorde. The tourists, gazing upwards, walked in silence, as though following a mysterious deity. Some, their arm still outstretched, must be filming a video on their phones, giving them the wild-eyed look and strange gait of sleepwalkers.

  Bubble rose higher as it entered Place de la Concorde. Now it was exactly twenty-five metres above the ground, just over the Obelisk. Cars stopped suddenly and screeching tyres, crunching bodywork and swearing could be heard. In the distance a scooter driver righted his bike and limped off. One after the other, vehicles stopped and drivers got out, shading their eyes to look upwards.

  Soon Place de la Concorde was blocked and there was a growing clamour of horns coming from cars on the Champs-Élysées which stopped when drivers there also got out and stared in amazement or whipped out their phones. Bubble seemed to create a collective reflex in onlookers, causing them to look up and extend their arms towards it.

  The structure seemed to be hesitating between warm and cold currents of air when a siren blared briefly, announcing the arrival of a fire engine in front of the park gates. Several men in uniform got out and went over to the park-keepers without taking their eyes off the giant brain floating above Place de la Concorde.

  The chief fire officer asked what on earth was hovering above the Obelisk.

  ‘It’s Bubble,’ replied Karim. ‘It was over the pond; now it’s up there …’

  ‘I see. And how did it get there?’

  ‘The park rats released it …’

  The man nodded and said, ‘Rats, well, you can explain that one later. But for now … why is it floating?’

  ‘I think it’s filled with helium.’

  ‘This just gets better,’ said the fire officer. ‘How big is it?’

  ‘The same size as the pond, sixty metres.’

  ‘OK. We’ll have to call Aviation Safety.’

  Bubble was now more than forty metres above the ground. Karim turned back towards the park. In front of the gates, journalists and cameramen, microphones in hand, were interviewing witnesses. Other press cars and motorbikes continued to arrive. The tourists and other pedestrians who had filmed or photographed the events were already uploading their images to social media and the continuous news networks had interrupted their programming to stream what was happening at Place de la Concorde.

  *

  Stan Lepelle was working in his studio in Yvelines on his latest project, a football in the form of a polyhedron. He decided to take a break, switched on the television and went to pour himself some carrot juice. When he returned, he found he was looking at his own face – his official photo with the frowning look of the artist preoccupied with the major issues of his day. Then that image disappeared to be replaced by a picture of Bubble in the skies of Paris, escorted by a helicopter on the way to the Eiffel Tower. The glass of carrot juice slid from Lepelle’s hand and smashed on the tiles.

  The Glory of Bubble

  Helicopter EC145 from Civil Security followed Bubble for twenty minutes before concluding that any attempt to harpoon the structure would be impossible without endangering the aircraft and its crew. They had brought back astonishing pictures of the brain gliding over the city, which had been shown on television and shared across the web. Foreign TV stations had immediately picked up the bizarre images. From CNN to NHK, news channels showed the surreal pictures of the giant brain floating above the French capital on loop. The feared collision with the Eiffel Tower had been avoided, Bubble having expertly risen in a series of jolts as if trying to escape its tormentor – or taunt it. When Bubble reached six hundred metres above the ground, the helicopter was relieved of its mission and the authorities took a very French decision: they would do nothing.

  Until Bubble had risen above the height flown by short- and long-haul flights, pilots had no other option than to circle over Paris waiting for the brain to decide to fly off upwards. Bubble was still gaining height and speed. Even though it was not at all the aerodynamic shape of hot-air balloons, Michel Chevalet (known and loved by the French for his explanations of scientific matters over the last forty years on various TV channels) said on i-Télé that Bubble had ‘mutated into a kind of weather balloon’ very similar to the one launched from Japan in September 2013 which had also measured sixty metres in diameter. That balloon held the record for the highest unmanned flight of an inflatable structure and had reached the mesosphere, that is to say, it had reached 53.7 kilometres in height. Other scientists disagreed with Michel Chevalet, pointing out that the Japanese balloon had been made of an exceptional material, only 0.003 millimetres thick, which was not the case with Bubble. ‘That’s true,’ conceded Chevalet, but he went on excitedly, ‘Bubble, though, has been constructed from a rubberised material, BN657, never before tested in the atmosphere. It’s a sort of genetically modified rubber, if you’ll excuse the simplification, and so no one knows how it will react. It’s rising more slowly, but it’s possible that it will rise as high, or even higher!’ Michel Chevalet had then launched into a description of the secondary effects of the thermosphere, and the ionosphere if it rose that high, which would cause Bubble to expand into a perfect sphere before its inevitable implosion.

  Stan Lepelle was fascinated. On Google his name was now associated with two million results and images of his works had all been replaced by pictures of the giant airborne brain. The recognition and celebrity he had craved for so long had finally arrived. His art dealer had called, over the moon. Without even saying who was calling, he had reeled off ecstatically, ‘It’s amazing. It’s extraordinary. It’s like a prophecy. Emails are flooding in from all over the world. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Everyone wants you! I’m going to ask the Qataris to double their offer. It’s rising, rising! It’s rising as fast as your stock, Stan, it’s magic!’

  ‘It is indeed a prophecy,’ replied Lepelle, seriously.

  ‘TV reporters are asking to interview you. I’ve given them your address – they’re going to come and do it live. Make sure you look after them well. I’ll ring you back, I have another call coming in.’

  The dealer hung up before Lepelle had the chance to point out that he should have asked before giving out his home address to journalists. But none of it mattered any more. He felt a preternatural calm, a strange, saintly feeling of well-being somewhere between languor and floating. Ivana had disappeared after he had destroyed the giant stud and some of his pots of acrylic paint with a poker. She had not been in her room when he had gone up to see. He had not bothered to try to track her down on her mobile.
It was obvious that she had upped and left. Already the memory of the beautiful Russian seemed distant.

  After the phone call, Lepelle went into the corridor leading to the record room. From the living room he could hear the news getting back to French and international politics. But the end of the news programme would again turn to Bubble, now even higher above the earth – a happy story offering a little bit of magic to a world on the edge of the abyss, a little bit of magic he had provided. He, Stan Lepelle, ‘the famous French contemporary artist’ as he was now known.

  He pushed the door open. The sun flooded the parquet floor and shelves. Lepelle moved softly round the room, his fingers gliding over the slate fittings, and went over to his drum kit. He touched the cold golden metal of the cymbals, gave them a flick that set them spinning, then turned to the shelves that held the songs and albums he had helped create. In another life. The phrase ‘another life’ seemed to appear to him with a clarity he had never experienced before. It was as if he were seeing the words floating in the room and gently bouncing off the walls. Two words: ‘another’ and ‘life’. His drumsticks lay on the drum stool and he picked them up and looked at them before clamping them together and breaking them over his knee with a sharp snap. He put the pieces on the floor by the drums and went out, turning the key in the lock. He padded silently over to the window of the American-style kitchen. He opened the window wide, feeling the fresh air on his face, closed his eyes and threw the key as far as he could into the garden. He didn’t even hear it land. It must have ended up somewhere in the grass or in a flower bed. He wouldn’t be able to find it again. The rain would ensure it was buried in the earth and it would rust underground until it disintegrated. The room with the records would stay closed for ever.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the bell at the front gates. He went to the bay window in the living room and saw cars and motorbikes parked with at least twenty cameramen and journalists. A lorry bearing a satellite dish was manoeuvring in the street. He pressed the intercom button. ‘Come in,’ he said, pressing another button to open the gates.

  As the day wore on, journalists from TV stations all over the world arrived at Lepelle’s house. The reporters were ordered not to leave the artist. As long as Bubble continued to break altitude records, they were to stay close to its creator and wait for his comment. The new arrivals put their equipment in the living room and busied themselves with their connections and video playbacks, when they were not helping themselves to fruit juice in the kitchen. Practically every language was being spoken in the living room and the ground floor resembled a film set organised entirely around one man: Stan Lepelle. The Japanese, who were the least obtrusive, addressed him with great respect, while the CNN reporters clapped him on the shoulder as if he’d won a great sporting event.

  *

  When Bubble had broken the record set by Felix Baumgartner (the parachutist who had ejected from his astronaut’s capsule thirty-nine kilometres above the ground) the company that manufactured BN657 rubber (made in France as the news services were keen to point out) began to tweet about the unexpected resilience of their product, and also about their stock price which had just risen 32 per cent. At fifty-four kilometres above earth Bubble broke the record set by Japan for an unmanned balloon flight, and the Japanese reporters from NHK looked at Lepelle with even more respect. Michel Chevalet was jubilant when the structure reached eighty kilometres; now it had broken into the ionosphere. According to Chevalet, it was possible that Bubble would reach the Kármán Line.

  ‘What is the Kármán Line, Michel?’ the journalist asked Chevalet.

  ‘The Kármán Line lies at an altitude of 328,084 feet above the earth’s surface, that’s to say 100 kilometres, at the level where atmospheric pressure disappears. Or to put it more simply, it’s the frontier between us and outer space. If it crosses that line, Bubble will have entered outer space.’

  Lepelle had just finished an interview with Korean TV when the phone rang.

  ‘He’s buying it!’ shouted his dealer. ‘François Pinault has just bought Bubble.’

  Lepelle sat down on one of the few unoccupied chairs in the living room. ‘The press release from Agence France-Presse has just arrived,’ continued the dealer. ‘I’ll read it to you: “François Pinault, the billionaire and contemporary art collector, has just announced his intention to buy the ephemeral structure Bubble for an undisclosed sum.”’ Then he crowed, ‘Do you want me to tell you how much he’s paying?’

  ‘Later,’ replied Lepelle.

  And he hung up.

  When Bubble did pass the Kármán Line, the company manufacturing BN657 announced its stock had risen 620 per cent since the beginning of the day. The synthetic rubber Bubble was made of could be put to infinite uses, both civil and military. Now the images reaching television stations were coming from the International Space Station, ISS, whose telescope showed Bubble floating over the rounded shape of the earth.

  ‘This is the most beautiful day of my career,’ breathed the dealer, who had come to join Lepelle in Yvelines. ‘We’ll take the ISS photos and make limited-edition copies in partnership with the Pinault Foundation. You can sign them … It’s going to be wonderful.’ He was almost sobbing as he hugged the artist.

  Lepelle had made art history. He was more famous than Warhol, more famous than Jeff Koons. He actually felt, for a brief euphoric moment, as though he had become as well known as Leonardo da Vinci.

  Rue de Moscou

  ‘If he pulls it off, which is not in doubt, it will be a first for astronomy, a first for art and a first for science all at the same time. Stan Lepelle is with us. Welcome, Stan …’

  ‘Hello,’ replied Lepelle, smiling.

  ‘You’re talking to us from your studio in Yvelines …’

  Lepelle no longer wore the frown of the concerned intellectual. Now his smile seemed youthful, making him appear as likeable as in the days of the Holograms.

  ‘You have brought glory to France!’ began the journalist who must have been trained in reporting on competitive sport rather than art and culture. ‘I think we have the new images from the ISS,’ he went on as a video of rare beauty played behind him, showing the brain floating above the planet.

  ‘But we at BFM-TV also have a surprise for you, Stan Lepelle: we have a direct line to the cosmonauts of the ISS,’ the journalist announced proudly. ‘ISS, are you receiving?’ he said, pressing his earpiece into his ear. ‘Can you hear us? This is French television …’

  Alain muted the sound. He had returned home after a day of visiting patients. Many of the apartments he had visited had a television in the patient’s bedroom. So he along with his patients had been able to follow Bubble’s adventure all the way into outer space. Alain was one of the few doctors still to do home visits – almost no general practitioners still offered them. In fact, fewer people now wanted to become doctors, least of all GPs. Le Quotidien du médecin had recently published an edifying article on the ‘French medical desert’: older doctors were retiring and there was no one to replace them. The article cited the example of a Romanian woman doctor whose arrival was eagerly awaited by the residents of one of the cantons of Lozère. But that in turn caused a problem, since Romania was also lacking in doctors and having to recruit GPs from Ukraine or Lithuania.

  The apartment was silent. Véronique had left that morning for an interior design fair at Porte de Versailles and had let him know that she would not be home until dinner time. After making himself coffee, Alain turned to the day’s mail that Madame Da Silva had posted through the door. There were the usual invoices and flyers, but also a handwritten envelope addressed to him. He was about to open it, when the doorbell rang. Alain got up and called through the door to ask who was there.

  ‘Ivana,’ replied the voice.

  ‘Ivana …’ murmured Alain as he opened the door.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember me?’ she said, standing in the doorway, a suitcase on wheels at her side.

  ‘Y
es, I do remember … it would be hard to forget you,’ he replied, noticing that the young woman he had only ever seen lying down was a good head taller than him.

  ‘I have something for you. Can I come in?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Alain, standing aside to let her pass. ‘In here,’ he said, indicating the waiting room which served as the living room when there were no patients.

  Ivana went in, dragging her suitcase.

  ‘Are you going somewhere?’

  ‘Yes, I’m going back to Russia; my flight is in a couple of hours. After that I might go to California – I have friends there. Oh, so you’re watching this too?’ she asked, pointing to the television, which showed pictures of Bubble in outer space. ‘It’s good. He must be happy; everyone’s talking about him, and that’s what he wanted.’

  ‘Don’t you live with him any more?’

  ‘No, I left him,’ she said, taking off her leather jacket.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Alain, automatically.

  ‘No need!’ exclaimed Ivana, sitting herself confidently down on the sofa. ‘It’s better this way. Much better. More straightforward.’ There was a short silence then Ivana asked if he had any whisky.

  Alain nodded.

  ‘Pour me a whisky. Lepelle doesn’t drink; there is only vegetable juice at his house – organic carrot, artichoke, algae. I’m sick of it.’

  ‘Ice? Water?’ offered Alain from the dining room.

  ‘No ice or water! Just as it comes,’ replied Ivana.

  Alain came back into the living room with a bottle of Bowmore and two glasses. He drew his armchair closer to the sofa.

  ‘Stop,’ she said, when he had poured the right amount.

  The amount seemed very precise and he served himself the same.