by Jeremy Bates
Once again Rob felt bad for Pascal. He could tell her flirting was eating the sad fuck up inside. At the same time, however, he was happy for Danny. After that prick Marcel, she deserved to be happy again.
Marcel.
His name alone pissed the fuck out of Rob. It wasn’t just his cheating. That was almost the norm over here. Men cheated. Women cheated. A coworker of Rob’s thought her long-term boyfriend was cheating on her, or at least thinking about doing it, so she cheated first, to beat him to the punch. And look at the guy running the country. He began an affair with a woman twenty years his junior during the presidential race. A few weeks after the story broke, he divorced his wife, the First Lady, and carried on with the sex kitten. You ask the average Parisian what they thought about it, you’ll probably get a shrug and a “C’est la vie.”
So it wasn’t the cheating. It was the way Marcel had treated Danny, bossing her around, keeping tabs on everything she did. Often when she went out he’d call her every ten minutes demanding to know what she was doing. But when he went out, he’d be off the radar until he returned at two or three in the morning. Danny would call Dev on these nights, balling her eyes out. Rob would usually be nearby with the girls, listening to Dev’s end of the conversation. He couldn’t get his head around why Danny stuck with the fucker. She was usually so strong, so independent. It was like she became a different person when she was around him. Yet no matter what Dev told Danny, she wouldn’t ditch him.
Then, a few months ago, Dev ran into Danny at Les Quatre Temps, a shopping mall at La Defense metro station. Danny had a dark bruise along the left side of her face. The makeup job would have fooled a stranger, but not Dev, and Dev got the entire lowdown from her.
Marcel did it. They got in a fight while she was cooking dinner the evening before. She didn’t want him to go out. He punched her and went anyway. And this wasn’t the first time this had happened. Once Danny got talking, she spilled the beans. He’d been beating her for almost as long as he’d known her. He usually hit her on the body, so she could cover up the evidence, and when he struck her face, he did it in such a way he rarely left a mark. Danny tried to tell Dev that Marcel only hit her when he was drinking. Her denial was mind-numbing. The guy smacked her up on a regular basis, and she was trying to protect him?
Rob got home from work late that day. The girls were sleeping in their bunk bed, and Danny was sleeping in the guest bedroom, surrounded by all her stuff she and Dev had collected from Marcel’s flat, where Danny had been living for the last year. Dev told him what happened and wanted to call the cops. That probably would have been the best thing to do, but in the moment he was seeing red and wouldn’t listen to reason.
Rob drove to Marcel’s apartment building in the 12th arrondissement and waited across the street in his car for two hours until the fucker returned sometime past midnight. Then he pushed his way into the lobby behind Marcel before the door locked and beat the Frenchman with a steel pipe to a whimpering, bloody pulp. He wasn’t proud of this, but he didn’t regret it either.
Danny stayed at the flat for a month until she found the studio she was in now. To Rob’s knowledge, she hadn’t seen anyone else since Marcel. Will was the first. And, fortunately, Will was proving to be an all right sort. Rob just hoped he treated Danny well.
For her sake.
And his own.
Chapter 13
While Rob and I had been talking, clear, still puddles had begun to appear on the ground here and there. Pascal, Danièle, and Rob stomped through any in their way, while I sidestepped or hopped over them the best I could. Gradually, after numerous twists and turns, the entire passageway became a mushy gray paste that sucked at the soles of my shoes.
Pascal and Danièle stopped again. I came to halt behind them and peered over their shoulders. The tunnel was flooded with glassy smooth water that stretched away far beyond the reach of our probing lights.
Pascal said something and shrugged. Danièle translated for me: “He says sometimes the water is here and sometimes it is not. It depends on the weather conditions aboveground. He thought it would be dry today. He is sorry.”
I looked at him. He didn’t appear sorry at all. He appeared indifferent and smug.
“When was the last time you were here?” I asked him.
He barely looked at me. “Last week.”
“And it was dry then?”
“No, it was like it is now.”
“And you thought it would be dry today?”
He shrugged. “It is difficult to know for certain.”
“We will backtrack,” Danièle stated. “There are many ways to go—”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s just water.” I dropped to my butt and took off my shoes, one after the other, then my socks.
Danièle frowned. “That is not a good idea, Will. What if there is glass in there? We do not know.”
“We’re not backtracking.”
I stuffed my shoes and socks into my backpack, rolled the cuffs of my pants up as far as they would go, Huck Finn style, and stood.
Pascal smirked at my bare legs and feet. Then he and Rob strolled breezily into the water, splashing and chatting. Danièle and I went next.
The water was ankle-deep and not as cold as I would have thought, maybe fifty degrees. This surprised me. I thought it would be colder, given it had never been touched by sunlight. Unlike the puddles we had passed earlier, it was an opaque gray. I couldn’t see the bottom.
At first I felt tentatively with my lead foot before exerting my full weight. But after a number of steps and no encounters with razor-sharp glass or daggered rocks, I gained confidence and proceeded more naturally.
“It is okay?” Danièle asked.
“No problem.”
“Make sure you do not trip.”
“I won’t.”
“Motherfucker!” Rob shouted from ahead. “Deep here. Over my boots.”
He was right. Soon the water was shin-high, then knee-high, wetting the tapered folds of my pants. It swirled around my legs like miso soup.
“How much farther?” Danièle called.
“Almost there,” Rob shouted back. Then: “Holy shit!”
The panic in his voice made me freeze mid-step.
“What is it?” I said.
“Something just brushed my leg!”
“Fuck off.”
“Swear to God! It was long and slimy.”
A chill shot down my spine as I thought of fanged eel-like creatures and poisonous snakes.
Rob was maybe thirty feet in front of us, little more than a silhouette. I couldn’t see Pascal.
“Arg!” Rob cried. “It touched me again!”
He began running, splashing madly.
“Go!” Danièle said, pushing me forward.
I took her hand and ran, or at least I tried to; it was more of a pigs-on-ice madcap dash. The water dragged at my legs, my helmet chafed the ceiling, the knuckles of my free hand skinned the wall. I kept waiting for a prehistoric monstrosity to latch onto my calf or snip off a toe.
Then the water was back to shin-level. Rob and Pascal were shouting, urging us on. My eyes darted between the frothing water and Danièle, my headlamp jerking every which way, until we stumbled onto the mushy ground. I keeled over, as if I’d been poleaxed in the gut. Danièle fell to her knees, a light patina of sweat on her forehead.
Rob and Pascal tittered like loons.
It clicked for me, then Danièle as well. Her eyes flared. “Ta Gueule!” she shouted, scrambling to her feet. She smashed into Rob, pounding him on the head with her fist. Pascal attempted to pull her away unsuccessfully.
I might have laughed at this absurd theater, but my feet were in too much pain. I’d stubbed my left big toe on a rock, and it was already swelling and bruising. I’d broken the same one a few years back in New York, catching it on a door frame, making me wonder if I’d re-broken it. I’d also sliced the pad of my right heel. I couldn’t tell how deep the cut was, but i
t was bleeding freely and stung like a son of a bitch.
Nevertheless, I hadn’t brought a first-aid kit, and I didn’t want to ask the others if they had one, so I pulled on my socks and shoes, then stood, wincing. Danièle had stopped her assault and was now chewing Rob and Pascal out.
“Loosen up, Danny,” Rob told her. He’d moved a safe distance away and was dumping water from his boots. “Can’t you take a joke?”
“You do not think! What if we fell and cracked our heads open?”
“Gimme a break.”
“It could happen!”
“And so could getting locked in a sauna and getting lobstered alive. Or rolling your ride-on mower and getting chewed like summer turf. Or walking past a construction site and—”
“Oh, shut up!”
“If you think like that—”
“Really, Rosbif. Shut your mouth. I do not want to hear your talk.”
“My talk?”
She was turning red.
“Allons-y,” Pascal said quietly, putting his arm around Rob’s waist and leading him down the passageway.
“I will kill him,” Danièle stated when they were gone.
“He’s not that bad,” I said.
“He is such a loser.”
“He’s sort of funny.”
She glared at me.
I held up my hands. “I said ‘sort of.’”
“Because you only have to see him for a few hours. You know, he is married to my sister? I have to know him my entire life.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“He told you?”
“In passing.”
“I will kill him,” she repeated, shaking her head. She picked up her backpack and shrugged it on. “We should go. We are almost there.”
I frowned. “Almost where?” We had been in the catacombs less than an hour. Based on what I’d been told, there was no way we could be anywhere near the video camera with the mysterious footage.
Before I could ask for clarification, however, Danièle started away, leaving me to bring up the rear.
Chapter 14
Our destination, it turned out, was called La Plage—the Beach—a vast series of connecting galleries and caverns with sand-packed floors, from which I gathered the area had gotten its name. Almost every inch of available wall space was covered with the omnipresent graffiti, but also impressive murals. They depicted everything from Egyptian gods to magic mushrooms to surrealist Max Ernst-like portraits. One large rectangular support pillar had been transformed into SpongeBob SquarePants. Some of the paint smelled fresh.
We wandered from room to room, no one saying much, our headlamps sweeping the way before us. In the ghostly silence I saw countless cigarette butts, makeshift chandeliers sitting on rock-cum-tables, crushed beer cans, and strange metal rods and hooks protruding from the ceiling. These, I imagined, had at one time accommodated power cables.
My eyes kept returning to the murals. They were multigenerational, built up over decades, the new painted over the old in an ongoing cycle. The sheer amount, the variety, was incredible.
I stopped in front of an especially striking painting of a six-foot-tall naked woman that reminded me of the Statue of Liberty. It was clearly old, one of the few works of art that had stood the test of time without being vandalized or replaced.
Rob appeared next to me. “Nice tits,” he said approvingly.
Danièle joined us and said, “She is famous for cataphiles because—how should I say this? She represents all of us. Can you understand, Will?”
“Not really.”
“It is like what I told you before. In the catacombs, the above world no longer matters. I do not care if you are a janitor or a company president. Here, there are no bosses, no masters. We are all free. We are all naked.”
“And cataphiles just like to get naked,” Rob told me with a nudge and wink. “You should hear about some of the mad orgies they have. Sick fucks, they are.”
“We are not sick,” Danièle said. “You are sick.”
“You know, Danny,” Rob said, “I don’t know if it’s a language thing, but I’ve heard better comebacks from preschoolers.”
Danièle brushed past him and went to the next room.
“Seriously,” Rob said to Pascal and me. “You guys don’t agree? I keep waiting for her to bust out, ‘I don’t shut up I grow up and when I look at you I throw up!’”
“And your mother, she lick it up,” Pascal said.
Rob grinned. “Right on, bro! But it sounds sort of gay with your accent.”
Pascal shoved him. “Ta mere suce des queues devant le prisu.”
“And yours sucks bears in the forest.”
Leaving them to swap mother barbs, I went looking for Danièle. At first I had no idea which way she went, then I spotted the afterglow of her light around a corner.
I joined her in the largest room yet—and came to an abrupt halt. Three of the four walls were covered by a massive, continuous mural, a reproduction of The Great Wave, one of the most famous works of Japanese art in the world. It depicted an enormous white-capped wave roaring against a pink sky, seemingly about to swallow Mt. Fuji whole.
Bridgette and I used to have a print of it. She had picked it up at a garage sale, along with a number of old black-and-white Hawaii photos: a surfer standing next to a redwood board in the 1890s, the luxury ocean liner Mariposa at Honolulu Harbor, six-year-old Shirley Temple singing “The Good Ship Lollipop” on Waikiki Beach, the China Clipper landing at Pearl Harbor. We had framed all of these and hung them in a horizontal line above the sofa in the living room.
Danièle interpreted my stunned reaction as awe and said, “It is amazing, right?”
I nodded, but I wasn’t really listening. Bridgette was inside my head, and I couldn’t get her out. She’d been wearing a yellow cotton dress with a fat black belt that day of the garage sale. I remember because I’d teased her by calling her “Bumblebee.” Along with the print and the photos, she had two bags of groceries from the Asian supermarket down the street, and we ended up making a green Thai curry for dinner, which we ate with a bottle of relatively expensive wine. I’d just gotten the job with the travel book company a few days earlier, and we had been celebrating all week.
After dinner we’d been goofing around on the bed and she had said to me, “Should I go off the pill?”
“The pill?”
“Do we want a baby, Will?”
I was thrilled. “Really?”
“We’re getting married in three weeks. If we start trying now…”
“We’ll have been married for about a year by the time he’s born.”
“He?”
“He, she, whatever.”
She beamed. “So?”
“Yeah, I want to… I mean, if you want to.”
“Of course I want to!”
And we had rolled around and play wrestled, our clothes coming off piece by piece…
Pascal and Rob had entered the room behind me, causing me to start. Pascal started chatting with Danièle, while Rob slumped onto the chiseled limestone bench that lined the walls. He dug through his backpack, produced a couple beers, and asked me if I wanted one.
I turned my back to the mural, and the past.
“Sure,” I said.
Danièle and Pascal produced some tealights from their backpacks and placed the small candles around the cavern. Then they took off their helmets and turned off the headlamps, presumably to save batteries. They instructed Rob and me to do the same.
When everyone was settled on the limestone bench, I studied the can of beer Rob had given me suspiciously. The label read: “Bière du Démon.”
“Strongest blonde beer in the world, boss,” he told me.
I didn’t doubt him; it boasted a twelve-percent alcohol content.
“You drink this often?” I asked.
“Never tried it. But thought it would be appropriate for tonight. And they were only a buck a can at the Super U near my place.”
> I popped the tab, brushed the froth off the top, and sniffed. It smelled of fusel alcohols and bitter yeast. The taste, a skunky sweetness, wasn’t much better—and then the burning of cheap vodka kicked in.
Rob made a disgusted face—I imagine I was making a similar one—but said, “It’s not that bad.” To prove he meant this, he took another sip.
I smacked my lips. The aftertaste was an unwanted gift that kept on giving. I thought I could detect a hollow fishiness, and not in the delicate sashimi type of way.
Nevertheless, the demon grog was drinkable, and drink it I would. I wanted to forget that damn mural and forget Bridgette—Bridgette who was now married and pregnant.
I took another, longer sip.
“You like it?” Danièle asked me, surprised.
“I’ve had worse.”
“It is for hobos.”
“I probably look like a hobo right now with all this muck on me,” I said. “By the way, where’s all the sand from?”
“The ocean,” Danièle replied. “Millions of years ago Paris used to be under a tropical sea. And I should tell you,” she added, “that this is one of the most famous places in the catacombs for parties. If you come on a weekend, Friday or Saturday, you will likely see many cataphiles. Everybody drinks, smokes. It can be a lot of fun. Do you smoke, Will?”
“Pot?”
She nodded.
“I don’t buy it.” I shrugged. “But if it’s around…”
“Good. I will get you high later.”
I didn’t know if I wanted to get high down here, but I didn’t say anything.
“Any chicks at these ragers?” Rob asked. “Or is it one big sausage fest?”
Danièle scowled at him. “You are married to my sister, Rosbif. You should not care if there are ‘chicks’ present or not.”
“I’m asking for Rascal’s sake.”
“Pascal does not need woman help from you, do not worry.”
Rob and Pascal began bantering back and forth in French.
“Do you know most of the other cataphiles you run into?” I asked Danièle.
“Some. But there are always new people.”