the Rehearsal, Comeback House, and one day it’ll be your turn to move in teased Robbie as he tugged at Petites Cendres’ hair, why not next spring, I mean like a lot of them you’re not so hot on stage, nor the liveliest, but not one of the dying either, more like, well, getting ready or rehearsing, what do you think Petites Cendres, and I probably won’t be far behind, maybe a few more years, that’s all, Herman too and a whole lot of others, sprained ankles and all, so often perched on heels that were almost stilts, but Petites Cendres was turned off by Robbie’s monologue, he wanted to steer the conversation away from Yinn who dropped into it too often like so many lightning flashes, so he said, met any sugar daddies lately, not a one Robbie said, I’m tired of them, not enough time for sex, but the other day I lured a young one into my lair under the edge of the veranda, piercings all over his face, here for a weekend at the hotel with his folks, imagine that, twenty and still living at home, he said I want a fling, nothing complicated, it’s my first night out without them, I said boy have you got some catching up to do my friend, isn’t it time to loosen up the apron-strings a bit, so pretty boy, you know under this makeup, sexy dress and black curls, I’m no girl, I’m a guy, so are you sure that’s what you want — a guy — or are you so innocent you haven’t a clue, uh-huh I know what you are, but I’m not experienced or looking for anything, you know, complicated, just a good time, see the condom I got, I mean it’s like candy, appetizing, and you’ve got real soft eyes, so I took him home, and Yinn finished his last show of the night then came over to me and said, he’s underage your kid, isn’t he, I’m not a minor, no way, the pretty boy yelled back, oh he was experienced all right, a full moon and Robbie’s sweet eyes did him in, no nothing complicated he said but at my place pretty boy fell asleep on my shoulder, and come morning he told me it was the sweetest thing he’d ever known, Robbie’s shoulder, boy I must be getting old playing daddy like that, the kid said so there are a whole bunch of you living here together, you sure are lucky, so who’s this Yinn character, a yoga guru or something, he seems like some kind of supreme master, his eyes pull you in like magnets, wouldn’t mind spending a night with him either, hey I gotta go, my parents are waiting at the hotel, I was supposed to be back by midnight, they must be wondering where I am, Robbie you sure are lucky to live your own life, don’t know if I could do it, disappoint my parents, besides I’m engaged to a girl so there’s no way out, it’d have to be a double life, hmmm said Robbie, maybe, you never know, so there you go with one of my innocent late nights at home, snug and cozy, father and son, first lay for beginners, Christ you need to take out the piercings one by one just to kiss the silly things, when all they really want is to nap beside some Puerto Rican big brother, still it’s also comforting to the sugar daddies who go and break your heart, Robbie quipped to Petites Cendres still huddled beneath the sheets. Fleur remembered the sheet music and parts left over from the composition contest and still at his mother’s, how had she persuaded him not to enter when it was the thing he most wanted in the world, he could have proved he still had it, that he was as good a musician as ever, but no, she wanted him to play piano or cello in a Cajun trio during the Captains and Boats Festival, it was a tradition that paid well, no need for a special outfit either, he could just show up barefoot, his friends Seamus and Lizzie would be there too, all of them out under the stars, musicians, ballads, and songs, plus the show would benefit her favourite cause and help protect illegals from persecution, so forget about composing all right, this New Symphony was just one of those long hair pieces anyway, recycling the sounds of sirens in the city, no, forget it and sign up with the Cajun trio, now wouldn’t that be fun to see him back with the two of them, so gifted, and Fleur hadn’t seen Seamus and Lizzie for such a long time, didn’t he care for them anymore now he’d taken to living in the streets, today in music any sound can be created, he wrote back to her, the cries and all, what on earth do you mean she wrote back, what do you mean all the cries, son, it’s too late anyhow, too late for everything, little by little he realized he had been the root of their divorce, for his father approved of his leaving to study music abroad, he’d gradually come under the influence of Fleur’s well-meaning grandfather, so he said yes to the Russia trip, yes, but his mother had resorted to divorce, he was constantly surrounded by their bickering about a future that was his and his alone, yes mine he raged from underneath his hoodie and snatched up his flute but played the sonata once again mechanically, with no concern for its beauty, and it hurt to feel this way, with Kim and her dog and drumming a few feet away, both the dogs, Damien and Max, growling at one another while Kim yelled at them to stop, a few weeks ago she had combed his hair and now it was all tangled again, his mother had said yes too late, but he thought to himself why, why is it too late, it’s too late, the age of geniuses is past, but what did she know about him, thought Fleur, to speak to him this way, she’d always done this when a composition is entered in a contest, there’s a chairman and members of a music committee, you could never stand up to that, son, these are serious educated folks, they’re not going to give the prize to some street kid, believe me it isn’t for you, all you’ll do is scare them with your lifestyle, they’ll jump on every flaw or mistake like that, you’ll throw them off balance and they’ll make fun of you, there’s nothing you can do about it Garçon Fleur, that’s simply the way it is, I’m not the same person I was up on the stage, whatever, the tavern, pub or sidewalk restaurant, I’m not the same despicable fake Garçon Fleur, nossir, living in the street has taught me my own brand of wildness and I know I could make the music committee respect me for being who I am, he wrote back to her, and not on any laptop like the ultra-rich Rainbow Kids that Kim despises, my music is completely me too and shows life as it truly is, harsh and real, and I live in the middle of it, I’ve never lost hope in my music, others, like Kim for example, don’t have anything, and lots of others too, less than nothing, that’s the pity I hang on to, he wrote when he took the time to write at all, stretched out hungry on the beach and glad at least that Damien was well fed and watered, no creature in all the world was as dear to him, the same as Max was to Kim, he couldn’t do without the love of this dog, he couldn’t explain to his mother why when all she said was that he cost her son too much and made him go without, her unspoken reproach was that Fleur preferred Damien to her, son you must be blind, he is after all only an animal, isn’t he, but Fleur’s reply was that without Damien and his sympathetic gaze he would feel even more worthless and depressed, she couldn’t possibly see inside his cloud of defeat and bitterness, how could Martha know her son was always thinking of her, Clara, the only ray of hope left to him, she thought he dwelt too much on his reading about the lives of musicians and their work, never mind that he only had a grade-school education, still he read too much and that’s where all his dreams and ambitions sprang from, it was too late and yet still he dreamed of going back to his music she said, but Fleur kept on thinking others are busy writing what I want to write, composing my music, conducting my orchestras, they’re creating while all I do is run downhill, both inside and out, and all the while he played his flute but heard other people’s music with a stab of sorrow, they had to hear his New Symphony, or else call it the Symphony of Disappointment or maybe Defeat, with its cock-crows, lung-wrenching in the hot air like the strident cry of sirens for a robber caught in the act, or of an ambulance, the patient inside in pain, cock-crows for how he hadn’t eaten in days, some concrete carnal music like Péter Eötvös’s The Seven, written for the astronauts aboard Columbia, performed any number of times by now in memory of what all had seen for themselves on their screens, a space helmet atop a pile of the little debris to be found, space being a source of silence, nothing more, and not everything immolated in its wild race would come back to us, the silence of eternity perhaps, wrote Fleur to his mother, yes that one lonely helmet, so solitary and silent, this was the image that inspired the musician, this and seven more like it all reduced to nothingness and
silence in a single astral spark, and television took countless people on its arrow aimed straight at heaven, then the sudden freeze and destruction, seven almost audible heartbeats from the astronauts, Fleur wrote to his mother, now that, wasn’t that the true power of music after all, pinning down an instant of reality, describing it suspended between life and death, never to be forgotten? The violin concerto gave voice to the slipping of seven lives into the beyond, the exchanges in a mixed choir split the night, the violin refracted a spectrum of screams from seven broken bodies projected by a spray of fire and fused together in a wheat-like sheaf, and yet the musician had given each his or her own voice too, a last cry with an explosion of repressed joy through the choked rasp and shudders of the violin, a solo violin with six others scattered through the hall to reflect the last torment of each individual in this astral tragedy, the space between was the tomb that enveloped all its victims, human or animal and from whatever nation of the universe, one by one, perhaps a mere moment to drain them of life, these seven souls still drifting dismembered and scattered, drifting perhaps forever like so many other satellites, their exploration never ever ending, indeed their true mission in space, so sang the unseen violins as Fleur conceived them, an evocation of all that refused to die, that is what he intended, he told his mother, that is the power of music, she wrote back that he must, must come back home, even if he had to drag Damien along since they were really so inseparable, Fleur could help her out when she was too busy at the pub, she’d cook for him too and he’d get to see Lizzie and Seamus, his friends in the Cajun music group, sure, they could use him on piano or cello, why waste any more time, just come on back, and as he played his flute in the street he thought about what his mother had said to him over and over, too late, it was too late. As he swung in his hammock and smelled the summer fragrances, Petites Cendres recalled the wave of images and scenes as though in a theatre, he could smell jasmine on Yinn and in his black hair when he stood close enough in the bar or the Saloon, in summertime, when Mabel left him alone to his wafting perfumed memories, he swung in his hammock, what day was it again when those young New York models showed up and the boy with straight blonde hair and creamy skin smiled at him as he entered the Saloon, wonder if his designer was still playing chaperone back there and would he ever see him again, wait, there was another blonde kid, closer, more accessible, he was Yinn’s new discovery for Decadent Fridays, an angel who never seemed to wear anything more than tight underpants or swimsuits day and night with money peeking out of them whenever he did table dances, this prepubescent Cupid or Eros, according to Yinn, had a yen for wild loose loving, though it sometimes ended very badly, pure affection, irresistible childlike embraces he offered to one and all by flinging his arms around someone’s neck, when he used to go out every night how many times had Petites Cendres felt the brush of those airborne kisses from little Cupid with his short blonde locks and virginal pink chest like the New York model’s, the one Petites Cendres still called his boy, he’d even yelled it out in the street when they wanted to arrest him for stealing a motorcycle, don’t you lay a hand on my boy, he was just kidding anyway and they let him go right away, or his designer paid the bail and got his bewitching little punk back, it was a joke, just a stunt to get your attention, gentlemen, always doing dumb stuff like that when I’m bored, anyway who knows where Petites Cendres’ boy was now, smiling the way he did as he entered the Saloon back when Petites Cendres still stayed out all night every night and could get a whiff of the jasmine in Yinn’s black hair if he dared get close enough. If today’s the day to go to the vet’s thought Kim, Bryan’s going to be upset if he still can’t take his dog for their usual bike ride around the island, how Misha loved to run happily along beside him, but every time Bryan showed up the vet said, we’ll have to wait a bit, Misha’s not ready to be taken in hand, see, look how he’s trembling, I’m concerned he might not even recognize his master, so Bryan would kneel down before the dog, saying it’s me, Brilliant, don’t you remember me, they lifted us both up to the helicopter in a net, right up over the putrid water and branches, my half-brother Victor beneath us, not moving, not getting up, drowned, with his face dragging in the palm leaves and the scum, seawater swelling out his overalls, we got saved Misha, he didn’t, if my friend were still with us I wouldn’t be the way I am Misha, please stop trembling when I try to hold you, the Third Great Devastation is long over and there won’t be another one, I promise, Misha had been in the clinic since that deadly hurricane along with other victims, he was every bit as nervous as Bryan was but at least he’d get better, they said taking such patient care of him, oh if only it could be visiting day at the vet’s, Brilliant cried all night long, saying his name over and over again, poor Misha got struck down too and now he doesn’t even recognize me; Kim hated when people let their emotions take over and she had no idea how she would act towards a sobbing Bryan, if it were visiting day he wouldn’t be waiting tables at the Café Español, which means he wouldn’t have any fancy goodies to bring home, one more night without anything to eat, and Bryan sure knew how to serve up breakfast or midnight supper on the beach when no one was looking, he’d pour some wine or champagne in glasses that were also a gift from the café he said, what a wonder life is, but for Misha, and where are they, his dear Misha and Victor, Nanny’s own son, Nanny who couldn’t stand hitting my white mother’s son, nope, I wouldn’t be the way I am if they were still here, things would be different, my books would get published, so Kim told him why don’t you write a book about Misha, but Brilliant sobbed and said no, I can’t, I feel guilty about everything, well there’s nothing you could do about thunder and insane winds coming out of the sky, Kim said, if God exists the way my mother thinks, he answered, Victor and my dog would be here, Kim also knew Brilliant was the best cyclist in town and second in the final, and why not first said Kim, next time you will be, she placed a hand on his narrow shoulder, you’ve got to, then you’ll get some respect, at this Brilliant felt a surge of confidence that maybe somehow tomorrow might be better and he told her, you’re right Kim, I will come in first and it’ll be in your honour, yep, that’s what I want, to honour you and Misha. And while Robbie struggled to rouse him out of bed, Petites Cendres noticed Robbie’s scorpion tattoo passionately signed “Robbie Belongs to Daddy”, now that was passion or maybe overblown romanticism, feelings of one man for another that made Petites Cendres hunger for the nightlife he’d left behind so he could just sleep and daydream, he never used to like dawdling in bed here at Mabel’s boarding house, total denial of all that ailed him he thought, both inside and out, a sclerotic passivity he was fully conscious of, the least memory played on his nerves and stabbed him like the indelible scorpion on Robbie’s shoulder come to life and rubbing Petites Cendres’ cheek as they fought over the covers, the tattoo reminding him of his entrenchment while others went on with their lives, loving, singing, dancing, showing off they way they did at the Cabaret or the Porte du Baiser Saloon, like nighttime transfigurations they all gained in age, whether in beauty or ugliness, for months that turned into years, Petites Cendres forever in his room or out on the veranda in his hammock where he could see the sky and the ocean, the flight of the ibis and turtledoves, as Robbie said, the times are changing my friend, and now it’s my turn to wear the crown, no offence to Yinn, no, on the contrary, and that’s why you’ve got to come to the coronation tonight brother, it’ll be Yinn’s thirty-third birthday soon he murmured, the pain of those words pierced Petites Cendres so that he suddenly panicked, what if his life ended today, before the sunset over the sea, just a murmured goodnight, his little spark going out like that, but here was Robbie laughing in his ear and that got a rise out of Petites Cendres who started laughing too, still staring at that scorpion tattoo on his friend’s shoulder, the world doesn’t stop turning because you’re in bed asleep, look at Yinn’s success in Asia, and now he’s back and he’s designing theatre costumes, running to and from his studio to our rehearsals, doing us up in oriental silk
s every night, then to the architect’s with plans of the future home for young retirees, writing plays when he’s got the time, but his thirty-third is about to sound, and he did say that would be his personal revolution, oh yes things have changed since you took to your bed my friend, Robbie whispered in his ear that any siren call to the valley of the shadow of death and that enticing eternity beyond was really not a good thing, Petites Cendres should stay far away from that temptation and cling to what mattered, love and life, exactly as Dr. Dieudonné said before leaving, Petites Cendres was on the road back to health he said, and he needed space to heal his wounds, injuries that hurt worse than any malady as Robbie said with humour, Dieudonné was too busy to deal with broken hearts, such trivia didn’t concern him, he was driven to action, and that’s why he’d volunteered to work in countries rocked by the cholera epidemic and not enough doctors, Robbie said broken hearts were not only pointless but ridiculous if you think about it, yeah ridiculous, things are changing, they already have he whispered again in Petites Cendres’ ear, and I’m not as svelte as I used to be, ladylike ankles and all, Yinn says I’ve gotta lose some weight in fact it’s kind of crazy how things change, I mean the Next One has already turned into Number One, or will soon, Yinn uses his first name Cheng now and says you should be proud of being Chinese, you’re the most perfect and delicate dancer I’ve got, oh Petites Cendres you’ve just got to see him onstage, Robbie said, and so humble in a black lace blouse that shows off his long neck, yet you barely notice it beneath his black silk jacket, he doesn’t really like putting himself on display, his face and slow, measured movements are the most moving, I can’t explain how he does it, it’s dance enchantment, a subtle magnetism that Yinn taught him, not even a hint of the old awkwardness, you wouldn’t even know him from before, uh-uh, I’m not going anywhere said Petites Cendres, I don’t care what’s happening with the nightlife he lied, or the Next One, Robbie remarked in Petites Cendres’ ear, who used to be so gawky and is now the Prince of the Cabaret though you’d think he was totally unaware of men’s desires, even if he has turned into sort of a Yinn clone, that mask sometimes without a hint of movement or a smile, artfully hiding his feelings and the underground surge of desire, that’s the common denominator Yinn’s trying to build into the new ones, a kind of grandeur that people don’t like or even get in our work, especially that kind of spare, straightforward look, but he cut himself short and switched to the subject of Fatalité, gone of course, and only to be seen haunting him, larger than life, day and night on his video screen, and Désirée, riotous as ever, eyes shining with malice, whose hip-slinking at Robbie seemed to say you’re starting to forget me aren’t you, that’s only for the dead you know, they should be forgotten, but not me, I’m still here, see my lips move, my eyes glint, remember our supper on the beach in Mexico, well our suppers everywhere, wherever you go at night lately I’m there with you Robbie, it’s only for the dead, Petites Cendres cried suddenly, you’ve got to forget them, but Robbie brushed him aside and reached for his phone with the red glow of a message, look, it’s the kid sending me his picture Robbie said, let’s see what he says, dear, dear Robbie with such sweet and sad eyes sometimes, here’s a photo of me with my fiancée, thanks for putting me up that night in the big house with you and your friends, you all seem so happy together, Robbie went on, Junior and his fiancée, she’s every bit as much fun as he is with her face piercings, see they even look alike don’t they, how cute, he says they’re getting married, postmodern punks, let’s wish them lots of happiness and a ton of kids, so there you go, that’s life, as Yinn would say, the imperfect cycle of eternal beginnings-again, but Petites Cendres said nothing, he was fixing a disturbed stare at the scorpion tattoo that adorned Robbie’s shoulder. Daniel, having plenty of time to kill as he waited at the airport, thought back to the friends he’d known when he was young who had been addicted to cocaine, what relief that his kids weren’t dissipated the way he was then, back in those erratic days he’d met the master choreographer Arnie Graal, who would end up teaching his son Samuel, this was the Arnie, he said, who wanted to free dance and choreography from barriers of sex and race, and he’d managed just that in A Survivor’s Morning, a fusion of various arts and boundaries, Arnie the scandal-rouser who had dared put on the stage bodies that no one wanted to see anymore and which were dangerously close to leaving for their ultimate destination, in Arnie’s care they were rocked gently to sleep by other dancers and then embarked on a transition that seemed only too real and implicated the audience unabashedly for the full three days, each man, woman, and child’s last breath, whoever they were, whatever colour, all underwent a mortification that Arnie countered with a cadence that accompanied their leaving, African sounds that contracted them for a last outburst of joy, where, wondered Daniel, was this friend Arnie now who loved and desired the very boundaries his dance sought to abolish, provocation in beauty reducing them to dust, oh so fragile all of a sudden, he said it himself, a leaf wafted out over the ocean where everything disappears, and all that returned for Daniel was that provocation in beauty, Arnie’s outrageous beauty and the words that escaped from his dance, I’ll go beyond what is forbidden he said in A Survivor’s Morning as I stave off age with the shine of my teeth, charismatic dancer of the darkness, pushing back frontiers then doing away with them, disappearing with them, Arnie the excessive and exceptional friend no more, but recollected by Daniel as though he were right beside him, face and body challenging him, suddenly there, smiling with almost insulting irony, he’d say, listen Daniel, this is me, Arnie, how the hell did you get through all those New York escapades so unscathed when I couldn’t make it, it’s like you once said, black artists and sports figures don’t live long, must be the burden of our ancestors wearing thin the thread of our lives, then pop it’s gone, sure I tempted fate by reaching too far and doing too much so the heart and nerves got torn, I wasn’t only a dance genius to them, I was also Snow Queen of the sauna dance, and critics said I shamelessly encouraged the culture of Me, why not, this whole era is narcissistic anyway, but you were going to learn wisdom and moderation with a wife and children, weren’t you, whilst I was like an animal with its throat cut, I fell into a black hole before I turned thirty, there, hear that saxophone and alto voice, they were for my choreography, a pas de deux, because of my excesses they wanted me to fail, fade away, but there I was like a dancing flame consumed by its own heat, then one day your son Samuel showed up saying you and I were like brothers, one damned for his commitment, and you my brother, on the straight and narrow, the clear path, which of us was right, neither one maybe, both of us driven by higher powers that would not brook our best and least selfish hopes, what do you think? Life’s a mix, we get tossed into it and spun around hopelessly with an obsession that takes us to where I am now, and when I think of your son and you, I dream of a world maybe where everything’s comfy, yes ecological and comfortable, go my friend, follow that dream of yours whilst I go down with Nijinsky, dancing beneath the waves of that ocean you see through this airport window, adieu my friend, a voice insinuated itself into Daniel’s deepest reflections, it was Laure saying are you okay, you sure nothing’s wrong, no nothing Daniel said, I was just thinking about my daughter, what a pity if I don’t get to see her photo exhibit at college, yes that would be a shame she murmured, but they’ve just announced we’ll be flying soon, though they didn’t say when, Laure replied, they really don’t give a damn about us, do they, smoker, non-smoker, whatever, there’s also a friend I was thinking about, Daniel said, I guess we’ve got too much time on our hands, we start thinking about lost friends, though the last part he kept to himself, unheard by Laure as her trembling fingers fumbled in her purse for cigarettes, even if she wasn’t allowed to smoke it was still comforting to touch the coloured packet longingly and know it was still there, yearning for the smell and taste of every one she’d smoke by the hotel pool tonight once her life was back on track and her vacation had finally begun, too bad this guy Daniel, kind of
nice, was so wrapped up in himself, she’d’ve liked to chat with him a bit, that’s what the married ones are like she thought, so content with their lives, yeah a chat would be nice, but only with cigarette in hand or hanging from her lips, otherwise there was no point talking to anyone. I really don’t want to sleep in the shelter tonight, Kim thought as she languidly tapped the drum with her sticks, her laid-back manner was bound to irritate Fleur as he played flute for the passersby who stopped to listen for a while then drop some coins at his feet, but the way he played, Kim thought, it was like he saw them through a mist, or maybe not at all because his eyes were closed, the shelter, that was for widows, loafers, nagging wives, old folks, or mothers with babies and no place to sleep, they lie around town in filthy sweaty swimsuits all day, or when they’re cleaned up they’ll steal my stuff and sell it for crack or beer, they get chased out of everywhere, specially the tourist spots, and they’re always tailing me asking for something, hey kid you got a sweater I can wear tonight, anything, yeah I know it’s supposed to be curfew for women, otherwise no supper and no bed, they close the doors and only keep the homeless mothers with babies, and if they leave the shelter the social worker takes away their kids, so either that or they’re always there with their snotty kids crying day and night, they’re not as bad as the ones that steal and chisel from you, in fact some of them are good mothers, but they’re out of work and homeless till maybe someone finds them a job one day, and if I lend my sweater to one of those widows, thieves or light-fingers, even an old one, you know I’ll never get it back, Kim thought, suppose I get some sandwiches out of the garbage, they’ll steal them too, gotta keep an eye on them, chase them down, they’re always alone with no dog and out after shelter curfew, no alcohol inside, they keep a strict watch, drugs too, if they’re out late it’s often so they don’t smell of booze and they’ll just go on thieving all night instead, lifting what they can, money, coke, anything, bitches, old women with no pride at all, they scare me, broken-down sneaks, they’re sickening, no way I’ll end up like them, no uh-uh, me and Fleur we’ll get a house and never ever be back on the streets, all clean and well dressed, hey there’s a hen calling her chicks, now where is she, oh hey up in the tree again, clucking away so high up her chicks will never get to her no matter how much racket she makes, it goes on and on and drives me crazy, ’cause I’m so hungry but I don’t want to go to the shelter with all those swollen-faced old women, slick thieves, they oughta go sleep in jail, they often do, better than the street they say, three squares a day, a place to sleep, not out on the street, nope, they give you clothes in there, shower every day, you get to learn stuff too if you want, not like the street they say, slimy robbers, I can’t stand them, old and ugly, hey kid, they say, in jail they respect us, treat us good, not like you and your delinquent friends, rainbow punks, all you do is look down on us, go on admit it girl, that’s how it is, and let me tell you it ain’t Christian what you’re doing, hating us like that, not Christian at all, why even in jail we old women, the oldest most worn down before our time, even we get respect, sure we do, so why don’t they get organized the way the men do, they’re often more disciplined, get together for meals around tables in the parks under the palms by the sea, they grumble together, share bread, but they don’t stand apart the way women do, bunch of hypocrites and robbers who’ve hit rock bottom, some bums look like monks, meditative, living in harmony with nature and all, but not those bitches, no, they don’t get along with anything or anyone, just too crude, too low down to see, yeah they scare me, living in harmony with nature’s what I need most, when it’s this nice out that your heart could near burst with delight, the peaceful hoboes are just sitting there peacefully at the platform or table, they seem like they’ve been blessed, that’s how free they feel, nothing to worry about but look out at the Atlantic, hundreds of birds on the beach, pelicans shaking their wings before they take off sliding over the waves, Fleur has a platform all to himself, and he doesn’t want me following him but I do, I go up the steps behind him so close to the sea, and he works, he composes his music, that’s what he always says, he wants to be alone, no Kim to bother him, oh he may talk rough to me, maybe even angry, but the wind just carries it away so I don’t hear, all that comes to me are the waves and the birds, turtledoves, gulls, doves, so beautiful, everything just so, as it should be, but Fleur stays hidden under his hood and goes on writing, he doesn’t want me there, but I just lie down on the bench so he doesn’t notice me, I don’t think I have parents or anything anymore, I don’t know what happened to them, Fleur is all I have, maybe they’re off drifting somewhere, they must have given up their kids to the authorities who massacred them the way they tried to massacre me till I ran away, all I’ve got are Fleur and Brilliant and Jérôme the African, the ones I see every day on the street or on the jetty where the boats lie with sails all folded up, and empty chairs for swimmers and beach-walkers, Fleur says he writes some holiday nights and there’s a jazz band on one of the nearby platforms, when he finally breaks down and talks to me, Fleur says all these spaces should be filled with music, this is where I first heard Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, some old conductor with crazy hair, yeah, that’s what they need on all these platforms by the sea, so they know music is for everyone, it was a requiem for the people who are really down-and-out like us, that was back when he still spoke to me kindly, he didn’t chew me out so much, it was real nice then and your heart would near burst with delight, then he looked out for me and the light-fingers and nasties and broken-down women stopped trying to rob me, they left my stuff alone. Daniel looked out at the sea, the calm, almost silent sea, and thought if the critic Adrien, a friend of his father’s, were to pan his book Strange Years now it would have to be from sheer contrariness, it was a first novel by a young and inexperienced writer he’d be putting down, sure thought Daniel, Adrien’s as sharp a critic as he always was, thinking Daniel had written it after a line of coke, that must account for how slow it was, elastic and apparently not knowing how to stop, not Adrien’s exact words, of course, for the book’s soporific and numbing effect on the reader, the events in play were troubling enough, Daniel hadn’t actually lived them but had found out about them in his drug addiction, maybe that route to revelation via cocaine was not for an old man like Adrien, as caustic as ever, but now perhaps vulnerable and capable of being seduced by a devious young woman like Charly, and who knows, despite his acerbic leanings Adrien could have been partly right, without the solace of cocaine Daniel might not have been able to unleash those images of the past that everyone kept from him, his parents especially had always led him to feel he was born into a fairy tale wherein flipping back through the pages to the past revealed a horror story, and drugs had helped him see every bit, all of the hidden truths buried deep in time, cousins in Poland who hadn’t managed to flee Lukow in Lublin, among them the uncle shot in the snow that winter of 1942, whose name was borne by Daniel’s own son, Great-Uncle Samuel prostrate with all the other rabbis, here and there a hand raised to beg in vain, kneeling in the snow before their murderers and the final surrender, how many times Daniel would see them in his mind’s eye, aligned and kneeling incapable of flight, Daniel, with the restraint that happens between friends, had never shared his burden with Arnie, who had nevertheless guessed it and treated him like a treasured brother of his own choosing, respecting the crushing unspoken weight he bore, a weight that seemed to have spared most of his and Mélanie’s children and fallen only on Augustino as a heritage, thus tormenting him as well, as appeared in every book his son ever wrote, and in words his father might have used with the same precision in his first book Letter to Young People Without a Future, in his last second of life what did the Angel of Death, as they called him, feel, his real name forgotten at Auschwitz where he treated and dissected thousands of shattered bodies, thus wrote Augustino, what did he feel believing himself immune to all judgement for so many years, when his heart stopped in a private pool or a river where he practised the breastst
roke daily, was he reliving all of it in that petrifying instant as though back in his abject lab in Auschwitz while the water turned the colour of his murders, why do this, why kick and thrust alternately with legs and arms amid this surfacing wreckage of bloody victims that threatened to bury him then and there in the filthy water, as his own inquisition settled in around him, this calculating and demonic creature thought there might still be a way out, he could escape them all, all he had to do was stop his heart from beating and they were all foiled one more time, he felt the splitting in his chest like a tree felled from inside and thought of escape yet again as barely audible voices called him towards the bottom, the tortured cries of women and children he had erased from memory, Doctor, Doctor Death, have pity, have pity on us for we are here though you swim away. That’s it, Kim thought, I’ll be seeing Bryan tonight, he’ll come up to me with the usual hop in his step, holding a cardboard box with our supper in it, another freebie from the Café Español he’ll say, it’s for our midnight supper on the beach, really good too, freshly caught fish with veg, and he’ll tell me all over again the story of his victory over people from seven countries in the marathon last year, he tells it a lot, South Africa, Germany, France, Canada, everywhere, he’ll say, they started at dawn in the first shivers of sunrise over the ocean, one was a four-legged runner and no it wasn’t Misha, he was still getting over his injuries, he used to love running with us before the Second and Third Great Devastations, this time it was Holé, they wanted to give him a first-place medal, nope, Holé was the only dog signed up, instead of Misha who was at the vet’s and didn’t know his master anymore, yes they eat together on the beach in the sound of the waves and free of persecution, this box lunch wasn’t stolen, it was a gift as Bryan would say, and if it was Sunday, Fleur would put aside his flute and listen to the hymns sung by a baritone in the Episcopalian church, along with the midday bells when all was calm and quiet with only the music from temples and churches till noon and a piano echoed and drowned out the baritone hymn-singer, I wanted to ask Fleur during that peaceful oasis in the town what’s going to become of the two of us Fleur, you and me, can you tell me, but he would’ve just turned away and grumbled you and your questions, if you want to know the future why not get Rafael Sánchez, the Mexican, to read the tarot for you, don’t ask me Kim ’cause I don’t think we have a future the two of us, as my mother Martha would say, it’s too late, way too late, our stars aren’t aligned, then I’d be so sad and lonely in that silence, the bells and the baritone gone quiet in the noonday streets, it was times like that I’d think Fleur’s in love with someone else, not me, even if he hasn’t said it or in a way he has, I know who it is, Clara the musician, not me. There would be posters all over town thought Fleur, the Master Concert, winner of the Moscow International Prize, Clara would be the guest of honour in all the concert halls, and in the picture her face would be inclined towards her violin, “Hear the masterful violinist play works by Haydn and Liszt,” and my heart would beat to bursting at catching up with her again, but what would she say when she saw me with no shoes and my hair a mess, would her agent or the conductor say it’s Garçon Fleur, once as much a prodigy as our virtuoso Clara, she was the one who made it through, look how sweet her face is when she’s playing the violin, transported by ecstatic gentleness, there isn’t a concert hall that won’t be at her feet, rigid rules, parents and teachers have wrought her youth to perfection with ruthless discipline, never letting go or having fun like other children her age, as sure as raps across the knuckles if she let her bow drift, back straight as a steel rod, but Fleur, well, no discipline at all there, just sliding down and down, knowing nothing at all about Haydn or Liszt, what was it his mother Martha said, she’d never let her son be treated like that, stiff, rough discipline, what, for music, never, she loved her son too much for that, though his father and grandfather said such a phenomenally gifted child was not his family’s property, he should be allowed to go and fulfill his destiny, not be snatched away by motherly love, awakened to the blinding truth that Fleur must not belong to any one person but only to music, they begged her to let him leave the island and study far away so he could truly blossom on his own, but she clutched him to her and maintained her domination until the day he found Clara again, and when he saw her posters on the walls around town, her head bowed towards her violin, near once again, then oh yes then he’d enter his New Symphony in the Young Composers’ Competition, oh yes he thought, the time would come when he was no longer the fallen man, a poor begging street musician. No, Tammy told her brother, oh no, you’re not going out in black leather pants, shiny black shoes and beaded white gloves, no way you’re going out like that, it’s exam time and you’re not going into Trinity College dressed like that Mick, uh-uh, why don’t you just go listen to music in your room, you’re not going anywhere on an exam day, it’s nighttime for you she told him, the coolest look, the hottest dance steps, black hat pulled down low over black glasses, Mick checked it all out in the mirror in his room, nice eh, outrageous look, yeah Tammy said, but Trinity College is a conservative school, besides if Mama knew she’d never let you out, yeah but she isn’t is she, today’s her creative writing class and she won’t be back till this evening, anyway I’m not scared of her, you’re getting thin though, you’ve got to eat more Tammy, that’s how they both get to push you around, you’re too weak, they feel ashamed of having a feeble-looking kid in the house so they pay tons of money to those clinics, you’re almost eighteen, we ought to run away, get yourself some lipstick and mascara, you just don’t get what it is to be young and male and wanting to be on the magazine covers, I’m gonna make it, you’ll see, I may not be that good-looking but I’ve got a wild imagination, and I’m gonna use my inspiration and uniqueness to go wherever they take me, are you on something, Tammy asked, putting her arms around his waist and holding him tight, it feels like you are, maybe you better not go to college for the exams today, they’ll spot your weird behaviour straight off, they know about it, same as our parents, only they pretend they don’t, if you want to go out, do it tonight, wait till dark, the uptight kids’ll spot you for sure and they’ve got no use for you, well they’ll see me and that’ll be that, you think I’m afraid of them, Mick replied, they tried chasing me but I’m too fast for them, they’re all a bunch of crude loudmouths, yeah the coolest look, the hottest dance moves, Mr. Sexy straight out of a magazine, you’ll see, but Tammy was thinking about how little she heard from Mai on her cellphone now she was off at college, things like come back to us Tammy, please, back to earth Tammy, I haven’t forgotten you, I’ll see you soon, at Christmas vacation, oh it’s exciting, so much going on, what a life when there’s such a lot to do, my parents keep telling me to forget about Manuel and to stick to my courses, can’t wait to see you Tammy of mine, but there’s no way I can forget Manuel, he was my friend, for so many months Mai hadn’t sent her a word from out there, nothing, it was a silence that left her hanging, where was she and what was she doing, Tammy wondered, she always had a lot going on in her life and here was Tammy with nothing, Mai was sociable, loved and admired by everyone, but Tammy was alone all because she was dumb and skinny as Mick would say, how stupid to get this thin on purpose, anyway he was off to Trinity College for his exams all tricked out like that, probably a bit high too, as usual, if he wasn’t he’d certainly had a little something, thought Tammy, who could his pusher be now with Manuel’s dad in jail, he hadn’t known anyone else and it seemed pretty safe in Manuel’s house, either that or the beach when they had their midnight dips, the doors were all padlocked now, same as the discos he owned in Lebanon, he’d stayed in many cities with his young son, taking care of his various businesses as he called them, all that and it still seemed like they were completely safe, no one watching us at night under the moon with only the waves to know, thought Tammy, yet all that time they were on our trail, outside the garden gates, people listening to us even when we went for a swim, always against us and thinking bad things, funny that M
ick kept it up all the same, he wasn’t worried about the eyes beyond the garden gate peeking into everything, even spying on our conversations and our games when we thought we were safe, that’s how good we felt, fearless Mick my brother, did you forget that terrible story about Phoebe, she would say, kind of a new parable for all the teens bullied in school, she was just as carefree as you, charming too, and all the boys liked her, and the girls were jealous of the little Irish girl freshly arrived in the school and the neighbourhood, soon she made friends with a football player and the other girls were jealous and mean, so they started harassing her and being nasty, in the bookstore, everywhere she went, and they drew an X over her picture on the wall at school as well as bullying her on Facebook, then one day on the way back from school they threw a soft drink in her face and yelled Irish hooker, here take that, and they laughed at what they’d done, Phoebe’s mother complained to the school and asked how many months this was supposed to go on, but they paid no attention, then guess what happened Mick, well, they went on that way for months, mean and jeering, yelling foreign Phoebe go back to Ireland, we don’t want you here, Irish whore, you’re here to steal our football players, go back where you came from, then after school one day the beautiful and proud Phoebe felt so put down and desperate that she hanged herself with the scarf her sister had given her for Christmas, hanged herself under the stairs to the bedroom they shared, same as you and me Mick, we share everything, so do you want me to see you bullied and persecuted, is that what you want Mick, she said to him, and Mick thought about his Prince, his brother from Neverland, where elephants and lions now wandered aimlessly in their Neverland limbo surrounded by kids every bit as bewildered as they are now the Prince has gone, the Prince, Mick’s true brother and his father too, his real one, not this historian who never wrote about the present, Mick didn’t want him and his out-of-date books on dusty revolutions in dusty centuries past, a great way to avoid what was going on in the real world, revolutions that would last, the less obvious but more passionate revolutions were being carried out by kids and their computers, not barricades thought Mick, my father doesn’t get that it’s about reforms without arms or agitators based on the art of a new way of living, outside their degeneracy, that’s what the Prince had carried out on his Neverland ranch and around the globe, and now three elephants, tigers, and monkeys wandered disconsolate and abandoned in their jungle sanctuary, where was he now, the Prince of black outfits, at sundown you could hear him still being interviewed and telling the journalists, it’s surprising but I’m one of the loneliest men on the planet, that’s right lonely, the thought of it saddens me to tears, but look how beautiful my kids are, and I tell them you don’t need to sing or dance, just be who you want to be but don’t hurt anyone, then we all laugh, really, every day, oh they know I’m a perfectionist and all I want is to throw open the doors to freedom, sure a pioneer and a perfectionist, opening doors can be a painful thing, still that’s what he said, thought Mick, he gave everyone escape through the miracle of music, great music for all, the way he sang it in “Earth Song” — Mick listened to it over and over, suddenly throwing his arms wide the way it happened in the video, like embracing the whole Earth, then he held that position looking at Tammy, suddenly he said remember the Prince playing to an empty hall, totally empty and bathed in red light, and he sang “You Are Not Alone” as though he were everyone’s brother or father, talking just to us, the children of a new planet, no you’ll never be alone, remember Tammy, but all she said was I’d rather you didn’t go to college today, skip the exam. I’ll be right there behind the desk conducting, or a composer or a pianist, thought Fleur backed by the bells and the approaching sunset over the sea, I’d always be writing some new orchestral piece, and overseas travel is useful but exhausting, I wonder if I’d have the stamina for it, rehearsals, concerts, reaching the right public while I’m still young, maybe tomorrow I’d be off to do some concerts in England, perhaps even meet Clara, some musicians do it all, conduct, compose, and I’d be one of them, with Clara by my side whenever possible, at first of course I’d be a pianist, but one with a delicate balance of virtuosity in other instruments, and instead of playing in the street or only when my mother takes a fancy, on the wharves and pub terraces for sailors and sailboat captains, I might have learned to conduct symphonic youth orchestras, conducting my music, my own music, along with other young composers, and we’d be feted all over the world and I’d get commissions the way Clara does, one day in Paris, the next in London, and we’d be married, so in the evening I’d go and get the kids from school, our kids, like that old composer with the wild hair on the platform by the sea with his Britten and Stravinsky, yes, I’d have my own requiem or my own sombre New Symphony on the stage by the sea, powerful voices for the resurrection, yes, a rising tide of voices, and what a worthy life I’d be living, my commissions would earn lots of money and eventually I could afford a synthesizer and a computer so I could write in a cabin all night long, Damien would always be there with me of course, The Opera of Extinction, that’s what it would be with the very last sounds of the very last moments, I’d write it all, I am now as we hear the bells of the town, and Kim says she’s hungry but what’s she going to eat tonight, she says we have to get up at dawn tomorrow to clean the Old Salt’s boat, the two of us, that’s right the Old Salt, not a tooth left in his head, you and me, you remember him don’t you Fleur, we do it for him every Saturday, I go right on pretending I can’t hear Kim, hey anyways he’ll give us a bike, Kim went on, a bit roughed up just like him with his black nails and no teeth, but it’ll be good, a bike, hey we could go all over like Jérôme the African, but he never goes anywhere, just leans on his bike and lounges around the waterfront selling necklaces, no, he’s meditating on the sea, Kim said, sells crack too, said Fleur in frosty bad temper, the whole day gawping out to sea, and he thought to himself this break is about over, now to pick up the flute even with sweat scalding his temples under that hood of his, Tammy turned to her brother and said, since Manuel’s dad got arrested I’ve been thinking a whole lot, it’s like that night was just bound to happen Mick, as usual when he was high he wasn’t listening though, it was like everything fell all to pieces, that’s what Mai said when I was dragging along behind as she skated along in the fog, it truly was a night that was waiting to happen, that’s when I realized his dad never should have sold us those drugs, I wasn’t ready for everything to come crashing down all at once like that, since they busted him I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and when your life falls apart like that you can’t get it back, hey Mick, are you even listening to me, nah you can always get over it Mick replied, if you eat normally that is, and do karate exercises and swim in the ocean all the time, when you’re a young rockin’ male like me, you can get past anything, even having deadbeat parents like ours, we decide what happens to us right from birth, for real Tammy, I mean our ancestors did, didn’t they, what about the Prince, emerging from that mess of his own burning hair when they made that commercial in Los Angeles, pale face rising out of the flames, and what about that other star, the rock guitar player, staring down arrogantly from his easy chair, suede boots rolled up over his jeans, leaning back and volunteering nothing, like a devil of chaos being interviewed, and that cigarette hanging lazily from his dangled hand, Keith Richards might as well have said so you think I’m going to tell you my life story, the orgies and sexual games, yeah right, keep guessing, look I’m being honest, it would be lies anyway, I was a good soprano as a kid, I even sang for the Queen — like that, go ahead and believe it, right and everything after that would be lies too, lies like truth or truth like lies, half-assed, I really did love animals always, that you can believe, read the book, that’s where I spit it out, anything that claims to be sincere isn’t, I’ve always done things that way, never listened to anybody, not even friends who were like brothers to me, you know those scruffy faces from shady underground nights stoned and drunk in the wee hours on LSD, cocaine, heroin presided over by God him
self, excess that’s what gets me going, sure I did it all, and nothing ever really did anything for me the day I took a tumble, fell right out of a tree all covered in flowers, I’m surprised I’m still alive, Fiji it was, right out of a palm tree, okay so maybe that visit from the great god LSD and heroin was a little too close that time, I was just a guy that loved his addictions, always had to have more, I’d have a needle, you know a syringe, hidden in the folds of my hat and coke in my pockets, and I’d hallucinate listening to the Ella Fitzgerald songs my mother used to sing, she still does he used to listen to Ella said Tammy’s brother dancing on black patent-leather tiptoes, see that, Keith could get over a fall out of a palm tree, the other one was called Mick like me, scruffy, scuffed up, and stoned as him, and they made the Rolling Stones, see they made it Tammy, same as all the others before, you can get through anything said Mick tiptoeing in his shiny leather shoes. Still nothing on the flights, Laure said standing next to Daniel at the window facing out onto the shining sea, no telling how long we’re going to be stuck in this departure lounge, god I hate this, I haven’t had a smoke since this morning but it seems like days, she was getting frantic now, boy they just love putting the screws to us smokers and it keeps getting worse, you watch, one day they’ll just kick us out of society altogether, arrest us for smoking on the street even, I’m not being paranoid either Daniel, believe me, too much, it’s all too much, she was beginning to stammer now, and as though wanting to be pardoned for his preoccupation, he gave her a sympathetic look and said, you’re right, I feel really bad for you, when in fact, seeing the plover scratching at the white sand with its feet, he’d been increasingly absorbed in thoughts not only about being the father of four children but also the fact that his grandson Rudolf would soon be six, he should be hearing the bells chiming, the clock measuring out the shrinking time for exaltation that still remained to him, or else give in and say it’s late, time to go and sleep the guilty sleep of maturity, rest his dwindling strength — was it complacency, a habit that he and Mélanie both found deplorable, she who shared her husband’s robust and active exuberance — no, this didn’t seem real to them, nor had they ever been so much in love, surely part of the charm of being apart so often, yet as Mélanie became more radiant and youthful in the joy of her grandson and the pride of being a leader and fighter among women, Daniel took umbrage at it, ah the vanity of man, he thought, a grandson almost six years old while his own four skipped into adulthood together, that was already a lot, but a grandson who’d already learned to walk and talk like a grownup, already showing signs of independence, that truly consigned the bohemian daddy he used to be to the past, no longer what they called a young author and father surrounded by a cohort of youngsters as he wrote and read, the word youth that had clung to him would have to be peeled off, Mélanie though managed to keep hers with the arrival of Rudolf, Daniel was already two generations a father, God, Daniel had got here in so few years and now he’d have to ponder the unthinkable, that word he refused to say, soon it won’t simply be maturity but old age, a grandfather’s a man preparing to be old, waking up one day with a hundred wrinkles on his face, losing all his hair, as if robbed of his youthful looks by his children, now that was a sad thought, it seemed like only yesterday that Samuel was stroking the head of the infant hanging in front of him with little wool-clad legs sticking tenderly out of his baby carrier, he told Laure it was so touching, and he couldn’t see a baby in its father’s arms without wanting to go over and stroke its head and newborn hair, Laure was definitely not in the mood though, she grumpily rejoiced at the fact there was no such thing nearby, boy this one sure was sentimental, how could he go on about babies and newborns when she was miserable without her smokes, really miserable after all these hours of waiting, didn’t he understand it was like losing a lover? What you need, Robbie told Petites Cendres, is a nice sprinkling of orchids and hibiscus in your hair, ’cause there’s no way I’m combing that thick mess on your head, I need you looking good for my coronation tonight, well, at least we’ve finally got you dressed, look Robbie, said Petites Cendres, sitting on the bed in his shift and brushing with his lips the scorpion tattoo on his friend’s shoulder, nope, uh-uh, no more going out at night for me, and as he said this Petites Cendres breathed in the enchanting perfumes of those January nights when the girls were showered with chilly-smelling artificial snow as they paraded out into the street in their fake furs a little before the last show, when the yellow chandelier shone at the foot of the wooden staircase in the Cabaret, Robbie’s femininity didn’t need enhancement though, splendid peasant that he was, and as he shifted to and fro to keep warm, his rubber breasts bobbed beneath the velvet neckline, which drew stares from everyone, he was also the one that women most liked to photograph, tall Cobra standing next to him sometimes and the two of them wafting out into the night that special brilliance and fragrant perfume of bodies ready to party, all this went through Petites Cendres’ mind as Robbie reminded him of the sprinkling of flowers and grabbed his hair, which caused petals to fall from his own hair and stick to his friend’s face, so bracing those January nights, as flowered and perfumed as they were glacial when Yinn suddenly appeared at midnight in a dark blue coat the colour of night sky, long enough to mask his legs right down to the high heels if he hadn’t allowed for fine slits to reveal his sensuous thighs and penis under a black bikini, this of course was the hour when Petites Cendres would slide over to the red sofa hoping no one would notice him in the dark, the cloaked Yinn certainly didn’t, never thinking there was a silent observer in his presence, or if he did, then paying no heed, sweeping past in his vast coat, Yinn was too busy giving orders to the girls for the next show in that very authoritative masculine Artistic Director’s voice, the panels of synthetic blue fur swept over Petites Cendres’ knees and feet as he crouched there on the sofa, more like blows to him than caresses, as though in sweeping by in that sumptuous coat with such perfect indifference each time, Yinn were repeating over and over, you know, Petites Cendres, I don’t even see you, that’s right, to me you’re invisible, I don’t have time to care whether you’re here or not, I have work to do, you know, work that Petites Cendres knew meant being the commander, the boss of the night ahead of them, hence impatient and driven by rigid fervour for theatrical perfection, dancers, singers, none of which the indolent Petites Cendres was part of, no, hoping in vain to cling to life and find a john, or else hoping nothing anymore after all these days of waiting for his cursed powder to bring him back to life, but no one was offering any, meanwhile all around couples abounded, sometimes three at the bar, kissing in sweet intoxication, young men starting out together, a symbiosis of three or four faces together he thought, whatever the range of colour, rose pink to flat black, but all with the same length of hair, the same little goatee around the lips, the same almond-shaped eyes beneath a large forehead frowning as though it were cold, same hats, yes, symbiosis like faces arranged for an icon, thus isolating Petites Cendres even more, these young energetic and polite people in threes or fours, all of them the picture of health, made him fade into the background as much as the sweeping panels of Yinn’s coat, so little did he resemble them, Yinn like Petites Cendres belonged to nothing and to no one, and here he was tonight, despite the fragrances borne to him on the cool winter air and the bodies celebrating out in the street, he was but a shadow lurking behind and thinking of all this, of those January nights and the sweep of Yinn’s coat, Petites Cendres said again to Robbie, nope, I’m never going back, ever, nightlife isn’t for me, knowing how much he lied and how little Robbie believed him, still powdering his hair with bits of orchid, there, Robbie said patting his cheeks, it’s nearly party time. Kim watched Jérôme the African prop his bicycle heavily loaded with water bottles and rags against the sidewalk, and he came towards her, taking away her drum, here you don’t know how to play that thing, he said as he took the drumsticks too and started playing so hard that even with the street noise and five-o’clock traffic Fleur went and sat with
his dog by the wall, that’s what was weird about Jérôme the African, he was always stoned, and he smelt like a male beast who slept in parks, way less hygienic than being by the sea and showers Fleur didn’t tell Jérôme the African this was his special spot, thinking how hungry he was and wondering if Kim had brought him some dinner from Brilliant, then he wouldn’t have to go and see his mother for a few more days, he thought of hunger as an insect that chewed away at his stomach and his liver, the way music devoured his soul, so he was never at peace for a moment, and he was sleeping with his hood up when the howling voice of Jérôme the African woke him, saying or chanting or humming or howling who-knows-what and pounding his fist into the drum, in Côte d’Ivoire he said, I’ve seen rape and pillage and child-soldiers reared for killing, they got me too and I sang long live the fighters and militias, complete freedom to recruiters, oh we got drunk so we could pillage and massacre and rape and murder, long life and freedom to the unpunished ones who round up kids to fight, no they’ll never be put on trial, no International Criminal Court for them, nossir, they’ll just go right on getting more seven- and eight-year-olds to kill and vandalize, long life and freedom to those who shanghai for rape and murder, they will go free and unpunished forever these kings of hell, so sang Jérôme the African and howl as he might he was barely audible above the strident noise of sirens and the street, thought Fleur, piercing sounds, the gut-wrenching cries of Jérôme the African, still soon maybe they’d hear the song of the grasshoppers and this, this would be what Fleur, with his ears buzzing, would write into his New Symphony or Opera of Extinction, of course, oh but how good it would be to sleep he thought as he curled up with his dog, just go to sleep in Damien’s warmth. And what have I got to offer my grandson Rudolf, thought Daniel, what feast does life hold in store for him when he’s already got everything, when so many others born into the same times haven’t survived abandonment, starvation, want, and any number of conflagrations, was there any way at all that Rudolf had not been spoiled from birth, for love of one’s child has now become love of oneself, an unconscious form of narcissism that is part of being a select social class and parentage with its own special laws and privileges, from a baby’s first smile we know that admiring attachment to ourselves, or maybe it’s a mark of our morbid astonishment at being able to survive in such a fragile world, some of us born dying and others living long and comfortable lives, of course Rudolf would be one of those, though Samuel had never felt a strong paternal drive in him, more taken up with his art as a dancer and choreographer, in fact he reproached himself with being a bumbling father, not maternal like his own, though Mélanie was an exquisite mother, nevertheless Daniel was the maternal figure in their home, he loved playing with them, always kissing and cajoling them and fetching them from school in his Jeep, it was as though all Mélanie’s mothering was lavished on her one daughter Mai, and for the others she was a militant first and a mother second, raising awareness was her preoccupation thought Daniel, and now poor clumsy Samuel had almost drowned the infant trying to teach him to swim in the family pool too soon, hmmm, a floating cradle bobbed on the green-tinted water as the tiny hands and feet shivered and stretched out towards the night as though already expressing Rudolf’s fearlessness, not the rippling water or the night or the song of the toads disturbed him, already a small man, thought Daniel, and in mere months would he even be needing any of us, such concentration of power and such an anarchic and scattershot will to live even when he was nursing, as if to say mine, everything is mine, such was the unfairness of it all, Rudolf was born for abundance and joy in living, Augustino was right when he ironically teased his innocent father as he often did, wait and see Papa, you’ll do just as you did with my brothers and Mai, you’ll tell Rudy to look around at all the beauty in the world before the bestial manipulators and dictators ruin it, you’ll take him out to the archipelago same as us and say, look at those large birds with pink wings and hooked beaks, pink flamingos filtering the muddy lake and pond water through those beaks, and best of all, look at how they fly, even and majestic, then there’s the iridescent bee digging its nest in the plant they call black root and of course the crocodile jaws, open and showing a thousand teeth out in an Everglades park, the grey-white eaglet that sometimes perches on garden fences, the scarlet hibiscus in bloom, not to mention all those birds that come to share our picnic on the table at noon, and the golden butterfly with them but not going far against the wind that forces its wings apart, then Rudy will ask how you did it said Augustino, why did the wind break its wings, and you’ll say well the storm winds were so strong that the butterfly had to stop flying, like when it’s too cold for them, they’re not used to it around here, that’s when iguanas die in the gardens, it’s too chilly for them to survive, it’s brutal, so we find them lying there in the garden in January, then Rudy’ll say the same way I did, oh c’mon, tell me the truth now, you mean they’re dead don’t you, and when I felt disappointed you used to say the golden butterfly, like the iguanas, can’t survive extreme temperatures or abnormalities that come about because of a distorted climate, that was how you dealt with everything, though you always prefaced it with words like before the world falls apart or finishes falling apart, take a look at the beauty all around, and on about the pink flamingos level and majestic in flight, you’d say we are near the end of the world Papa, and that’s what you’ll say to Rudy, that we’re the golden butterflies and iguanas devastated generation upon generation by the glacial cold, there is little to look forward to, at this Daniel would take his own defence against his irascible son Augustino who always caught him off guard as unpredictably as he dressed, jeans worn through at the knee, hair standing upright, no Augustino came the answer, I don’t share your dark pessimism, I’m not just going to tell nice fairy stories to Rudolf, I’ll tell him about a world whose beauty is still very resilient, yes that’s it, he said to his son Augustino, realizing he didn’t know him well at all, perhaps he was totally unfamiliar with the anxiety that lay deep in his son, mysterious and so quick to flare into outrage, was it because he, along with his mother, had been the most afflicted by the death of his grandmother, never, never did he say the name Mère or Esther, to do so would have meant betraying the immense sadness he felt, like Mélanie, he’d learned to hold it in, though in quiet moments on his brief trips home when he thought no one noticed, it was as though his eyes were filled with tears thought Daniel, did he feel the consoling hand on his shoulder as he fled towards the beach abandoned by night or went out running till dawn then threw himself down on his solitary bed? It was Saturday and the Old Salt told Kim, that kid who’s always with you, what’s-his-name, Fleur, he’s a dreamer that one, doesn’t know how to dock a boat or swab it, poor girl you wear yourself out dealing with the lines all alone and what does he do with his life anyway, he can’t even use a water bucket, he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty, Kim said he’s a musician, well then let him wear gloves the way I do answered the Old Salt from a mouth unencumbered by teeth, hey now why doesn’t he get up and out of the cabin and help you clean up girl, a bright blue sky like this is meant for being outside and breathing the wind, an easterly wind and I bet you my heron will come and land right on my gangplank at one o’clock, always does, we chat for a while and he takes off again, flies right out over the blue waves, he’s a sailor too you know, but he prefers a good clean hull, likes it when everything on my boat’s shiny, and what about you girl, do all those guys treat you with respect, Fleur and them, oh I wouldn’t want to have a girl, boys is all I’ve got, long time since I saw them, a girl’s too much fuss, and when are those parents of yours getting out of jail, that’s no place for them when they’ve got kids, that’s not a life, gotta be pretty dumb acting that way, not thinking about them, ’course haven’t seen mine either for centuries, the centuries pass by and so do we, sometimes you wonder if you ever really had them at all, all I could think of was being a sailor forever out on the water, know what I mean? And Kim said, junkies, that’s all they w
ere, they’d’ve sold us if they needed a fix, one day, let them rot, I never want to see them again, I can get on fine without them, sure we’d’ve been sold for a fix, they’re no parents said the Old Salt, no way, no parent would do that, nope, human garbage is all they are, Kim felt debased all of a sudden because of her parents and asked him, is it true the grey heron comes to see you every day on the gangplank, you gotta be patient he replied, he’ll come see us, he likes a good easterly wind, he’s travelled far and wide over the seas like me, sometimes as far as Baie Saint-Louis if it’s bad weather and his feathers are ruffled and his wings are dishevelled, but he’ll come, I promise, soon as the wind changes he comes to warn me it’s going to rain and storm real bad, maybe hurricanes from July to September, then he swoops down to the boat all atremble under the darkening sky and tells me to let my brother mariners know, tie up your boats or it’ll be like 1909, I still remember that one, the wind actually took out a cigar factory one morning in October, ’course I wasn’t there naturally — I may be old but I’m not that old — they told me the whole thing and it still sends shivers up and down my spine, folks got up in the morning and found nothing there, no factories, no cigars, no fancy hotels, just wooden wreckage everywhere, all that was left of their houses, hey what’s up girl, why you so sad, it’s that boy isn’t it, Fleur is what’s bothering you, so why isn’t he here cleaning the boat with us, he can’t she said, he’s inside writing his music, he mustn’t get his hands dirty, musician’s hands, that’s all rot said the Old Salt, it’s plain he’s not the boy for you, look okay you can have my bike seeing I can’t use it anymore, friends tell me I’m gonna bust my skull if I try getting through these streets at night, specially after the pub, well I mean a man’s gotta have a little fun doesn’t he, what do you think girl, do I look as old as they say those other sailors look, jealous I’d say, and Kim told him he wasn’t a hundred so he wasn’t that old, his skin was just tanned by the sun and his blue eyes had that washed-out look from staring at the horizon, while she said this she was really thinking that Fleur could never love her because he loved another, Fleur inside the cabin young and handsome, such a loss, her own hurricane of 1909, hey look, yelled the old man suddenly, there he is, the grey heron’s come to greet us, always on time, he so loves that easterly wind, see he’s ruffled and all over the place but here he comes, specially for you, and there he was, a huge outline against the blue, maybe the Old Salt was right, who knows if he’d come back all this way for her, and she so wanted to yell to Fleur, hey look at how wonderful everything is today, balance and harmony, just look will you it was past five now and Jérôme the African in his multicoloured hat folded his shades and casually climbed on his bike with a clink of water bottles in string bags, then took off to the wharves to sell his necklaces, at least that’s what he said, but Kim figured it was more about coke, anyway off he went, but not before spraying his face with water and laughing loudly as though making fun of Kim and of Fleur who was now packing his flute reluctantly, well actually come to think of it, there was nothing and no one he didn’t make fun of, and as she listened to his sharp footsteps on the pavement and his bike overloaded with rags and bottles, a languid clicking, the soundscape of their misery, Kim then realized it had been a long sad and painful day after all, with nothing but Fleur’s music to alleviate the desolation, and tomorrow they’d be on board the Old Salt’s boat again, forever on the sea and so close to the sky, maybe he was the father she never had, the right one for her, not some junkie, he was so hospitable to her, too bad he didn’t like Fleur and figured he was lazy, she tried to explain it wasn’t like that, he was unique, like no one on Earth, and even while he played on and on listlessly he knew he had to write that opera or the New Symphony or whatever weird mission he might conceive of, being a great- grandchild of Doctor Death, incapable of warding off that heritage, was it some sort of secret punishment to be part of a family that heralded in Age of Crime in which the science of a physician-poet suddenly made killing a perfectly normal part of life, a modern-day Prometheus, one that Fleur carried as part of his burden, Oppenheimer, writing and reciting the finest poems as the bomb was about to go off and sharing this ambiguity amid evil with Fleur, never hurting a fly but for this one poisonous idea, first and foremost the soul of innocence baptized in blood and in the name of science, a kind of cool delirium that chilled Fleur to the bone despite his hoodie, yes a Prometheus for these cursed times, stealing the gods’ fire to consume cities and humans, like him Oppenheimer was also a well-meaning man of science with the delusion that he could create mortals not with clay but with a radioactive atom that would immortalize him, he however had no restraints imposed on his madness, not chained to a mountaintop or devoured by eagles, his chemical assemblage had gone unchecked, for it was not his alone, backed by the approval of his colleagues and all around him, this Prometheus of the nuclear age held in his feverish hands the plutonium pellet he would hurl into mythology, hallelujah, and life on Earth would be destroyed as surely as the project at Los Alamos succeeded, the bomb even had a cute little nickname, the Gadget, and when he went home to his wife at night they would discuss it, she being the only one perhaps to feel a gust of terror separating them, the plutonium ball, the Gadget, might part them forever like a veil even in their most intimate moments, so loving to his wife yet raised for life among men, this American Prometheus distressed his wife by yielding nothing to her feminine intuition or apprehension which alerted her to some monstrous but dimly perceived danger, but listening to her would mean giving up his mission and his duty lying right there before them in the magnificent landscape of Los Alamos soon to be irradiated with the very first bomb blasts later to be repeated in Japan, and what came after was precisely what Fleur would write, after the sin, almost his own, and perhaps it was that too, the Opera of Extinction or the New Symphony would be that rise of the last breath of ashen powder, then a hand lifts itself, flowers spring forth once more, the desert explodes in the rich colour of blood petals, and the tears of regret or remorse of the doctor of such promise would flow like a river of blood, no longer able to kiss his wife for fear of staining her face, no sooner washing his hands in the lab than seeing them stained with the deathly froth once more, consumed by the fire stolen from Heaven to vapourize humans, the dazzling man of science, still so young, will sleep no more, neither alone nor with his wife, and she tormented by the weight of his sin, no more sleep, indeed barely lying down only to hear there’s the target, Hiroshima, straight on target, on target, don’t be afraid, just the explosion of so many suns, the thudding rise of blinding suns, and that question too haunts him, those, those below this lightfall, what is to be done with them in this cloud of light, you can’t see them can you Doctor, but it will happen, horrible and stupefying, unimaginable he thinks, then reassures himself that it’s a rational scientific experiment and nothing more, but that’s the confusion of insomnia talking, to seek ways of targeting the enemy and wiping him out, of course, a wartime exercise that’s all, General Groves did say to aim at all, all, the toxic radioactive plutonium would spare no one, nothing, in other words the entire city, and one day history will salute me and I’ll write a poem about how to face the desert alone, he thought of John Donne’s sonnets, oh how he wishes he had written them, and even in the throes of troubled, uncontrollable insomnia, the poet’s lines rock him gently, sometimes like a sleepwalker he approaches the room where his little girl sleeps, other little girls like her in the city of Hiroshima, yes there too are little girls like his, yet different, not the same race, no it’s not the same, he must banish the thought, he heads back to his room, wraps his arms around his wife and goes back to sleep, or will he, will he forever be deprived of sleep, after the first explosions you will see nothing anymore, after the nebulous night of the atom, day will turn into night and you, like the heavens, will hear the tearing of stone, the voices of all the little girls in the skies, thousands of them, not unlike your own, crying Doctor Death, Doctor Death, don’t you wish you had
n’t Doctor Death, this Fleur’s opera will allow us to hear, the stifled sobbing to Heaven of little girls hanging from the spattered trees, then the macabre voice of the orchestra in a desperate clamour welling up from the fissured earth, next in the distance a soprano female voice still crying desperately, no, don’t do it, think of our daughter, you mustn’t do it, but the clamour of comets reversing trajectories drowns out the frail voice which he would have rejected anyway, in love with his wife or not, reciting lofty spiritual poems for her to the end, sometimes accompanying her as though praying by her side, yet he knows he will not listen to her, will not give in to her charms or human pity, to nothing and to no one will he bend, from the first flames lighting up the sky over Alamogordo, New Mexico, that very first test against a stormy pink sky, the mantle of his divinity wrapped her tight in its grandeur, for surely his wife knew she had espoused a god, a god of radioactivity, and why this panic all around him with a sky of such vivid pink that one needed thick glasses for protection, what a pity for such a silent and beauteous night to be spoiled by a tempest so violent, by his wife’s side later on he suddenly said yes, children, children hanging in the trees just carried away, a solitary three-legged dog cinder-blackened, limping and alone under a sky the colour of ink, was this an August day, he said, and what funeral-draped year beneath soot-bathed clouds was this, and these little girls, were they asleep or awake with their books ready for school, and how many of them were there Doctor Death, for our records you understand, but then perhaps I’d be better off losing all memory, without this atrocious burden of divinity conferred by a gift for science, will it eventually grind me down, and here, here the soprano voice would come in singing, sleep my love, you can sleep, yes sleep, for in this atrophied godliness a man would nevertheless be reborn from his own ashes thought Fleur, yes, a woman’s voice, and then the orchestra, Kim remembered what the Old Salt had said, when men make wars, and I know a thing or two about that, the first to go are children and animals, oh you should have seen us, me and the others, exterminating first sharks, then whales in the Pacific, a shameful vision that stops me even now from fishing like the rest of them, my time, the criminal time, may be past but shame still wakes me at night, we lobbed grenades at them for fun, oh and I can’t tell you everything we did girl, you’re too young, you’d never understand why we did those things, then we moved on to children in their mothers’ arms, but I’m not going into that, young as you are, you couldn’t begin to plumb the depths of our villainy, and yet here I am out on the water begging forgiveness of the fish but surely not deserving of it, but that heron, he comes every day on the dot at one, and I know it’s his way of saying all right, think of it no more, you are made as you are, then he’ll open wide those wings and off he’ll fly without another word, this is how it is when he comes to my gangplank each day, a wondrous good thing from Heaven, I truly believe it is a favour, said the Old Salt to Kim. The siren shrieks reached Kim and Fleur as two ambulances with their separate victims passed one another on opposite sides of the street, fun with coke, thought Fleur, boys and girls overdoing it and going under or almost, and now for the white sheet and a medic pressing down on their heart, saying breathe, breathe, it’s oxygen, breathe, and wondering where they were headed, betrayed by some glitch in their circulation, irregular pulses at the temples syncopating with the rhythm of the metal buckets that Jérôme the African was playing on the sidewalk, long, hollow sounds, come on breathe, and Jérôme responded with feet and hands within earshot of the patient laid out on the gurney, yet somehow Fleur felt more in tune with that other one, Doctor Death, the doctor of death to all those little girls in Hiroshima and perhaps to himself as well, for how could one survive God the Father’s own original sin, even after denying his existence, God being merely the name we give to our reason for living, yet that too is really a matter of physics, not some completely disconnected god, perfectly impersonal if anything, so proclaimed the twisted mouth and mortified body of the other physicist, thought Fleur, the humbled Stephen of supreme dignity in a wheelchair, now his indeed was the truth, whereas Doctor Death served a personal god of distinct traits, and in doing so set himself up as the atomic divinity, though still a man, husband and father of a little daughter, unlike Hawking who challenges no earthly deity but that impersonality, that absence which ironically perhaps condemns us to love one another, so went Fleur’s reflection, even if the physicist was not as preoccupied with human feelings as he, a mind bent merely on the pitiless laws of physics, beneath that mop of hair almost a child in some respects, his eyes blinking with pain behind the glasses along with his twitches and creases, appearing to say these were just individual body parts afflicted by an illness that still left the rest of him a happy man, fortunate enough to enjoy a life shot through with the beauty of the universe, fortunate enough to work on the theories of physics, a rare domain my handicap leaves open to me, fortunate enough for my books to be read and even reprinted in paperback, who would have thought I could reach so many readers, so many living beings, but also unfortunately they bring me so many questions I can’t answer, I have very few solutions to life’s problems, those are enigmas I can’t solve, physics and math can teach us a lot, naturally, like how the world began, but human beings and our behaviour are beyond their reach, the way the impersonal God, thought Fleur, leaves us to our own devices, and Stephen in all modesty knew this full well, imagine your mind is a computer and your consciousness its program, well that will go on working even when the computer itself doesn’t anymore, theoretically it’s possible, isn’t it, no it isn’t thought Fleur, it can’t be because even if the computer, life, comes apart, what happens to a consciousness cut adrift from its body, what still active regions of memory does it go to, where does its eternal activity lead it, to say, inhabit new bodies freshly born, since it alone hungers after eternity, transcendent and permanent, surely that was it, for the physicist who looked like a kid has said the end of our world does not exist since all worlds are continually expanding and will do so until they reach emptiness and night, increasingly desert-like and darker like the inexorable darkness and void beneath the South Pole, far beyond our worlds both known and unknown, but the kid-like physicist wasn’t born with all these theories, so full was his brain that he was also a poet just as Oppenheimer had been, and though he couldn’t be certain, he asserted that if we survived long enough we’d be able to control the entire solar system, even colonize it like Earth, though nothing could ever be as hospitable to us, and if our own planet proved hostile and uninhabitable there was no certainty we could survive anywhere else, our long-term future depended on reaching far more distant stars, and that required a great deal of time, perhaps more than we had, what differentiated the scientist of the nuclear age from his predecessor was that Doctor Death had been sure we could colonize the solar system and that all stars were within our grasp, but before we could colonize other worlds and planets our experiments would have to reach the stage where they wiped us all out, the little Hiroshima girls being merely the first and quickly forgotten like so many falling angels or falling snowflakes, never thought of again, this was the direction Fleur’s mind was taking as the beginnings of his symphony or opera emerged in grating sounds from his flute, heavy clouds hung over the beach, it didn’t really make sense to write on an empty stomach, besides who could ever unscramble the scribbles and cabalistic symbols in the feckless and unbridled manuscripts of the uncouth man who loved Clara, no more than a child prodigy turned into hideous oaf who made crushed and frayed sounds with his flute, for what else could he offer a woman who was a prodigy herself, though an uninterrupted one of superior intelligence that had never been allowed to wither in trivialities, servitude, or warding off hunger and thirst, not Clara, no, she ate well each day without care, a care that was constantly his along with his humiliation and subjugation to a welter of needs, such as feeding on garbage or nothing at all or slipping into drunken sloth or ceasing to think and exist altogether, yet live he did, and as proof the
re was his ability to love her despite his numbing misfortune. Enough of these damn sirens thought Kim, where had Brilliant got to, would he even be here tonight, though it was often after the midnight service that he came, either on foot across the beach or in his boss’s convertible, then he’d suddenly say to her, sleep for a few hours, I have to go out for a while, and he was gone but a few hours, but where to, wondered Kim, probably out drinking, though in the light of dawn his face was tanned and serene, there was no way to know what he’d been up to, nothing about him, not even the places he hung out at night, what if one day he just never came back from who-knows-where, not that he was a liar, but he always showed up laughing and gave nothing away, and said here we are in time for breakfast at the Café Español, I swiped a croissant for your coffee Kim, his gaze fixed far away, who knows where, Kim noticed the hair growing long over his ears, a bit like a dog, one he’d switched identities with out of a sense of loss, Misha, Misha, he lamented, when am I going to get him back, and he looked at Kim with the same welling up of fury that he saved for panhandlers in the street who got their dogs to do all the work for them, lazy buggers he’d yell, dress their dogs up like clowns to beg for them while they loaf in the sun all day with sunglasses and a hat, lazy buggers, poor dogs, such dignity and such degradation, if the vet hadn’t saved Misha after the Third Great Devastation, it’s those unscrupulous panhandlers who’d treat him that way, slaves to their indolence, but when Brilliant blew up like this, she thought, it was probably a sign of the increasing ups and downs in his life, a life in the disaster zone, a derailment he’d say, just one great devastation on top of another, if he’d been one of those spoken poets holding forth to foggy clients in a bar, his misadventures in the supposed safe haven of New Orleans would be getting foggier too, covering his tracks so no one would know he was Bryan, just Brilliant, the poet winning them over in droves with his charm, but in private, well, these explosions of anger, even fury, Kim worried that they might be symptoms of some more serious disorder that stemmed from his alcoholic childhood, the tremors and agitation and paranoia about the theft of his as yet unwritten writings might mean he was having the DTs, in fact hallucination seemed to be his main trait, for lately he’d taken to telling her he saw them everywhere, in the bathroom mirror, on the floor tiles, and that was the reason he stayed away from the room his sister had rented for him in town, pursued as he was by all the deluges of New Orleans and even by words on mirrors, walls, and floors wherever he went, in fact in his calmer moments he actually took delight in reading them, but then when he lost it he claimed they’d been stolen from him and put there by someone else, that was when the delirium struck him especially hard, lasting for several days, and Kim would apply ice to his forehead and remind him he’d gone off the rails, remember that, now wake up will you Brilliant, you have to be at the café by eight, used to these constant battles with his ghosts, he’d reply, sure Kim, now where are my white socks and my good Bermudas and my shirt, they’re waiting for me and I have to look neat and tidy or they’ll throw me out and jobs are hard to find, what am I thinking, hey what if they made off with it when they took the giant palm leaves, the acacia, the beam, the beam it was in the crash, then he felt Kim’s hand on his head and ice cubes melting onto his scalp, ah my head, it’s there after all said Brilliant, must be if you’re holding it in your hands Kim, whew, yes I have it back again, now all I need is to get to work, it’s there, all of it. From under his hoodie, Fleur opened his eyes surprised to see Jérôme the African running down the street nearly naked, no sandals, nothing but those tight black underpants clinging to his black skin, running at an easy relaxed pace with a triumphant air, though Fleur could see the whites of his half-closed eyes looking almost as though he’d come through a fever and exulted in racing his body with renewed pride, running free and naked as a man of the wild thought Fleur, to the beat of his music it seemed, or was he just wildlife on the gallop never to be caught, not like those habitual city joggers, his sprint was of one pursued and expecting a hand on his shoulder, or was it the strident noise of sirens and the street that made him quiver sensually thought Fleur, prey to a kind of ecstasy as the pink hues of sunset began to sink beneath the sea, it was past five and the town was at its rowdiest, hard to believe that through all this din you could still make out the murmuring doves, their sweet songs almost sighed, this was something he could reproduce and amplify on the flute, hard as it often is for art to imitate nature or glorify it in some way by amazing sound inventions, murmurs, and rustles from all kinds of instruments, he should jot this down right now while the solitary cooing stood out against the woven backdrop of sound, its barely breathed song of love, perhaps to be totally devastated by human madness but still audible for now, then thinning into a hopeless lament, Petites Cendres emerged from Mabel’s boarding house with Robbie clutching his arm as though afraid to see him crumple onto the sidewalk with the shock of being outside after so long, okay at least he’s standing Robbie said, he’s coming to my coronation tonight and it was your music that finally got him up and out, honest I don’t know what I’d do without you Fleur, the latter just smiled without answering though he wanted to say he was hungry, never thinking of anything else at this late time of day, and there was Jérôme the African still running through the sticky heat, would Fleur end up going to his mother for food or would Brilliant show up with his cardboard box of the day’s goodies, what was it that made Kim dog his steps like that, still, forgetting his resentment, Fleur introduced her to Petites Cendres, this is Kim, we hang out in the same spot, immediately losing himself in his flute music, something he’d once written for harpsichord he said before retreating inside his hoodie, and Robbie said how beautiful it was, in fact though Mabel was a pious woman she’d say it almost makes you think you’re in the Community Church or the Temple, Robbie of course went to neither one, not his calling he said, no way, he was still holding Petites Cendres upright as though he’d stumble at any moment, geez here I am getting a spare tire and you’re practically swimming in your clothes, Kim too noticed Petites Cendres’ skinny body, jeans and tank top both too big for him, less hair too and that was the last trace of his flamboyance, now one sickly apparition, something like Brilliant, what’s the point in caring about these guys, thought Kim, if they’re too out of it to go anywhere, besides goodwill and charity were kind of pathetic so she wasn’t crazy about them, okay there’s still time before the coronation said Robbie pointing to the gold paper crown on his head, Petites Cendres, you and I are going for a cocktail by the ocean before you start going all self-pity on me, hey taxi, taxi, quick, my buddy here can’t walk much he said as they jumped into a cab, holding Petites Cendres with a firm grip close to his own belly burgeoning under a green dress that was too tight over muscular brown legs, that was when he realized how much Petites Cendres’ relatively short stay in bed had weakened him, geez he should have chased him out of there sooner, he regretted, you just don’t go on letting someone sleep forever like that, it’s really unhealthy, and he recalled all those taxi rides with Fatalité, including the one by the sea back when things were really getting bad though they never actually talked about it, then once they were out on the terrace Fatalité would quickly get drunk on champagne, he laughed too loud and Robbie told him so, not realizing that these were his only diversions, satin dresses, stiletto heels, and Cuban cigars, sure Fatalité laughed and laughed, whatsamatter aren’t you glad I’m having a good time, eyes starting to tear up under the creamy lashes, well you see we’re not on stage right now Robbie replied, this is a classy establishment, chic in fact, you used to know how to behave before, didn’t you, who me never, Fatalité shot back, besides when did you get all hoity-toity Robbie, must be your latest daddy kicking in, there was something else on Robbie’s mind he wasn’t saying, although Yinn still loved his hubby Jason he seemed to be irresistibly attracted to My Captain, and Jason was the jealous type, well no daddy will ever own me again Robbie said vaguely, not a one, believe me Fatalité, Jason, Y
inn, even Yinn’s mother, Cobra, Geisha, and the whole bunch have had lovers but that didn’t prevent them from being family to Robbie, and Yinn’s philandering or longing for someone else would have upset the stability and balance in his life, though it was already shaky, for Robbie himself had taken off with numerous manipulative sugar daddies and got tired of them fast, a stormy month or two would do it, in the push and pull of one’s drives one gives a lot to a man one doesn’t know, then one gets over it, that’s why Yinn told Robbie not to trust strangers when they dazzle with talk of fortune and glory, it’s all just pretense, they only want your body for a night, that’s when Fatalité’s loud tense laughter exploded somewhere deep inside Robbie, whether it was cocktails by the sea, stretched out on the beach or wherever, Fatalité’s spirit would escape in laughter, never defeatist though, Fatalité was just taking his leave gradually, without making a thing of it, in a cascade of laughter as though he were still singing and dancing onstage in all kinds of burlesque contortions, those were the times when an uneasiness came between them, if they shared a beach towel Robbie might get up all of a sudden filled with a frail kind of pity for Fatalité’s body in the sun’s glare as though cursed in its nudity in every way, you’re recoiling from me aren’t you Robbie, you’re afraid you’ll hear my vertebrae clicking or maybe they show too much in the sunlight eh, look honey, go take a swim and leave us corpses to ourselves, I won’t mind, Fatalité laughed again as he pulled the towel his way, it was only now, here in the street as he helped Petites Cendres keep from falling down on the sidewalk, that Robbie wished he hadn’t left Fatalité alone on the beach, Fatalité who was weak and couldn’t go into the water himself, he could still see Fatalité that day lying helpless there on his beach towel, hurt but still laughing, go on honey, take a swim while you can, it’s okay, you’re athletic, hey it wasn’t long ago you used to sit behind me on the motorbike, remember, whizzing through the countryside, nothing was too much for us, California, Mexico, and you hanging on to my back with your hand on my thigh, I was a man’s man then and boy were you impressed, male by day and female by night in the clubs, the whole jigsaw of sexes, a perfect physical performer as Herman would say, yeah go on, don’t hang back Robbie, just leave this old thing lying here on its beach towel letting the sun shine through with no shame at all, you’re young, healthy, and handsome Robbie, just leave me here, then stricken with remorse while he was bathing, Robbie ran back to Fatalité and sat next to him on the towel that got all wet from the pressure of his body and the rain of drops he shook from his hair, look you’re young and beautiful too he said, you get crazy with all your grandiose ideas and your absurd laugh, yeah I get that from my mother Fatalité said, everything in fact, a nutty woman and larger than life, a high-class hooker, let me tell you, not just any slut, she brought me up and fed me, everything sublime I get from her, he repeated, no easy job bringing up a kid in those circumstances, well you did do some time when you were eighteen didn’t you Robbie replied, that’s not the best way to get brought up, it was no big thing Fatalité said, Yinn had to come and get me out, prisoner, outlaw, oh my mother sure liked her heroin, didn’t you Mama dear, that’s what killed her, I’d started dealing a bit like her but I was saved by a fairy godmother with a big heart who decided to adopt me, sort of her son or brother, and that was Yinn, it was a dirty needle that got me sick, just that, it doesn’t take much, hardly anything at all and you’re suddenly a leper among lepers, surprise, surprise, who’d’ve thought, oh invincible Fatalité, yeah right, son of a high-class hooker, nope, never saw that one coming, Fatalité no longer laughing talked a lot about his mother to Robbie that day on the beach, she had me when she was only fifteen, kind of like a big sister, but who wants a fifteen-year-old with a bastard, so he had to strike out on his own, and I had to go everywhere with her, even in the arms of her men, nobody wanted me except her and she held on to me, she was the love that underlay all the hate and humiliation from other people, two shipwrecked delinquents, but who feels sorry for fifteen-year-old mothers and their sons, we were inseparable, one as pale and blonde as the other, we both had so much to forget and we shared a liking for all kinds of intoxication and addiction, let’s see, first we needed to forget about my birth, then being poor we felt entitled to do what we liked, so we learned to steal, but for the longest time she was my dearest companion, no one cares about people like her, and sex was sort of a pathology for her, a kind of melancholy separate from her other scattered senses, she was in a constant state of crisis, never knowing if we’d eat anything that night or if we’d find a place to sleep, who would care for her or ease her suffering body even when she saw no quick way out but suicide, reality having become a distended version of everything around her after she’d taken something toxic because there was no shrink to help her, this was the abyss of the marginalized and largely invisible, perilously unsettling whether mentally affected or not, no one to answer for her at fifteen, certainly not me or her, poor thing and her offspring sighed Fatalité, well let’s get some sun and forget about all that, and he started laughing once more. Fleur was still thinking about the music they heard in town and all around them, in the open-air bars and hotel gardens, on the wharves, his friends in the group Cool Springs would be playing there and getting paid well, from seven to midnight jazz and blues groups would show up in the cabarets and theatres set up for concerts, all of them in black suits and white ties, getting paid to play, they had poured their souls into it every bit as much as Fleur, though he had nothing else to invest, they had wives, homes, cars, and people came to sip margaritas as they listened to Cool Springs and some rockers Fleur thought were too noisy and didn’t mix with, though his mother held it against him, for Martha herself had an evening pub overlooking the ocean, refugees and immigrants would bring their families, even young children, and dance on the terrace, now what was to stop Fleur playing for them, she’d long sheltered the stateless and displaced waiting for papers that never came, she knew their life, she’d been influenced by Alphonso, a nutty priest and bold philanthropist, he’d selflessly hidden Haitians and Cubans in his church far out on the Archipelago, he relentlessly turned in priests who were sexually abusing children, and that was why they kept sending him farther and farther away, not that it stopped him, as he wrote to Martha, the political hypocrite in the Vatican still protected those criminals, so he just denounced them more vehemently, I’ll never shut up he said, sure my mother has right in her heart thought Fleur, she loves humanity, too bad she had to be his mother just the same, a family of twelve would have done her just fine, but her overabundance of love got dumped on only one son and it was too much for him, he wasn’t the one for her he thought, no really not, the Cool Springs were into their jazz and blues now and it was nearly time for the acrobats, charmers wearing snakes coiled like collars, peddlers of roses and jewellery, and then there was a shout in their midst, it was Mabel, whose parrot Merlin had fallen off her shoulder onto the planks, followed by the cry of a painter concentrating on the sunset, it’s him, it’s the Shooter, it’s him Mabel, he fired the shot, I just had time to spot him before he covered his face, we all know it’s him, the young killer who shoots all the animals, the one they’ve been looking for, Mabel, the painter by his easel seemingly didn’t hear Mabel’s cry over the noise of the waves, the lamenting and terrified clamour, for Mabel had actually felt the pellet whistle past her head, but what had happened and where were those tiny balls, many of them fired with great precision all around her head, oh no, there on her shoulder Merlin’s orange breast and blue-and-gold wings were bloodstained as the Shooter’s precise aim dropped him from her shoulder and Jerry the other parrot said in his strident begging voice Mama, Mama, look, let’s go Mama, let’s go yelled Mabel, but who among the art sellers and animal trainers had heard, or even the magician who bragged about his cats dancing through hoops of fire, and the painter busy turning his canvas purple with the setting sun, the Shooter, it’s him the Shooter attacking the innocent, Mabel looked at her feet
incredulous, her Merlin was dead, such a beautiful bird too, look at his head thrown back, he’s not moving said a man next to her, he’d shown birds before and sold roses now, look at all that blood on his wings, who did this, who did it, we didn’t see or hear a thing, it was like a party, fireworks and all, fun is all, those little bursts held tiny pellets, so small we can’t even get them out of his body, no I’ll do it wailed Mabel, my Merlin’s not going to any pet cemetery with pellets still in him, and there she stayed a long time crying and carrying on with the bird in her lap, but it was her Sunday best and she was going to wear it when she visited her daughter in Indiana, so she mustn’t get it stained, Reverend Ézéchielle had given her a plane ticket to go and see her third grandchild, but this didn’t augur well, Merlin being, being, but she couldn’t get herself to say the final word that would seal his going forever, as if into a drawer open before her with all the dead jumbled together, no Merlin, no, she’d keep him with her till she took him to the pet cemetery beneath the shade of Australian pines among white dunes by the sea, no this didn’t bode well, Merlin so chatty and suddenly silent, looking as though he were asleep, well now maybe he was resting so he could last to eighty and outlive any of his owners, longer than Mabel herself, no, he wasn’t, that’s all, he wasn’t, asleep was all, but the twinkle in his eyes slowly went out and a veil was gently drawn over them, yes, like being asleep she thought, no don’t cry, you mustn’t stain that dress, you bought it specially for the trip, no, it’s to see your daughter in, even if Mabel could go on without Merlin, what about Jerry who kept on saying let’s go Mama, I love you, let’s go, and she replied gotta be patient Jerry, gotta be patient, we’ll have to get on the bike and go to the pet cemetery, be patient now, your brother’s gone poor thing, what are we going to do now you and me, eh, and her mind went back to Herman’s lace cape, torn in the motorcycle parade as he rode along on his multicoloured tricycle yelling there’s a sniper in the crowd, it was as though a kid’s penknife had been tossed into the air, said Herman, or firecrackers, Mabel thought also of Marcus who was in prison because of him, because he’d got sedatives to help Herman with his cancer, risked his life, given it up in a way, while Herman was still roaming around free, and Marcus would never get to be a nurse because he was in prison for him, Herman no longer a convalescent, was out singing and dancing at the Cabaret every night, in fact the Shooter had sworn he’d get vengeance during a celebration or show of some kind, vengeance maybe but why Merlin, why on earth him wondered Mabel, the motionless bird in her arms, Merlin never hurt anyone, totally random, that’s what it was she thought, shooting blindly everywhere, out under the Australian pines she’d place some flowers and spend a long time stroking Merlin’s breast and riddled wings, a long time, so Jerry, now you’ll be the only one on my shoulder eh, that’s how it will be tonight, your brother’s gone, let’s go, let’s go Mama Jerry replied, okay, but first I’ve got to pry these pellets out of his wings, you know no matter what the Reverend says, it was cruel of God to take my Merlin from me, that’s right, he did take what was mine didn’t he, down there on the beach silken tents had been set up for a wedding, and oh what fun they were having thought Mabel, women in low-cut dresses and men feeling awkward and sweaty in their suits, wine flowing into glasses, hearty laughter, a stuffy-looking wedding thought Mabel, and here I am unhappy and adrift, you hear that Jerry, nobody cares about us, my oh my, look at those bouquets of yellow roses on the tables, they’re gonna drink and eat till midnight, totally unaware of us, I wonder what Petites Cendres will say when he sees you’re not out on the veranda anymore, what’ll he say, huh, that the world just keeps on bleeding beauty, pouring it out, that’s right Merlin, and there’s not a thing we can do about it, look now they’re lighting the torches for evening, the painter said still working on the sunset, there are perverse kids doing perverse things, I think it was a kid, no mask, just vanished, he said he was sorry for her loss and she smiled back at his elderly face despite her tears and suddenly felt old and tired, it’s like he got me through the heart instead, and she pointed to her ample bust, you gotta call the cops so they can look for him, you gotta call them said the sunset-painter, yeah sure I will said Mabel without conviction, I can go with you, I’m a witness he said, sure okay we’ll go tomorrow said Mabel again, feeling even older and uglier than before, I’ve got a boarder at my place who isn’t doing too well, a depressed boarder she emphasized, and he isn’t right, and this boarder of mine, he’s gonna be awful sad when he finds out about Merlin, that he, but she stopped short and went on to talk about her daughter expecting her in Indiana, and I’m gonna be a grandmother for the third time she told the painter, but he was wasn’t listening, absorbed in portraying an ocean had suddenly turned ferocious and melted into the night with lots of blues, two kinds, navy on top and pale beneath split by an imperceptible sliver of gold, though he was still thinking what a pity it was about the dead bird, why did fate seem to have it in for this poor black woman, now why is that, didn’t she have enough to worry about, tonight she hadn’t sold a thing, no ginger brew or roses, I bet they’ll end up on Merlin’s grave, even with blood on them, no it was real sad he thought, he was luckier though, no sooner had he finished a painting than he sold it, not for much of course, but he could really churn them out, and here he was each evening, same sunset dissolving as night came on, must be a misunderstood artist, a real one who knew exactly how to render the fluidity of blues one on top of another, one darker navy and one lighter, that’s it he thought, it needed to be structured like a Bonnard, the colours intense and dominant, it might have been one of his watercolour seascapes such as Paysage de Saint-Tropez, he had wandered through Spain and Morocco enchanted by the warm even torrid colours of the street artists, yet he managed to sell a lot, and this wasn’t lost on the other painters, who envied his success, though still misunderstood, too subtle for them his burning hot tones, too subtle he mused, an undiscovered Bonnard, still he’d become rich, not them, and as for poor Mabel, well it was a pity wasn’t it, the parrots were her bread and butter, too bad about the roses too, the straw-hatted painter carried on with the sun angling down into the fierce colours of the sea, he wished he could include the wedding party, almost a hundred of them on the neighbouring beach, late-afternoon bathers too, black dots against the waves or arms moving lithely over the deep blue water, on another pier almost deserted there were white umbrellas all folded up as though ready for the night silence creeping across the entire ocean, he wanted to paint and keep it, the blue day so very blue, almost green with the line that bounded it all, like Bonnard he’d done his share of bumming around, and he did like his pictures well structured, bold colours, hot, but in his case nothing would be exactly the same, probably always to be unknown, just a hot-seller, nothing more, oh how he’d love to seize the eternity of this day, the sky, the wedding party, the white umbrellas, the voices in the waves, and if that woman Mabel had been easier to deal with, he’d’ve liked to paint her too with the parrot on her arm, sure, all of it, everything, this ran through the painter’s mind under the straw hat, such a delicate touch thought Mabel, even eating from his bowl, elegant movements from his legs to the tips of his claws as he lifted the rice to his curved beak, oh Merlin, she thought, my royal bird from Brazil, you could pronounce so well, Mama let’s go ordered Jerry to hurry her up, it’ll be evening soon, let’s go, let’s go Mama, I love you, what time is it, beddie-byes Merlin, beddie-byes Merlin, what time is it, Merlin you were such a good mimic, what a recital she murmured to the bird still motionless in her arms, the other, Jerry was white as snow and clung to her shoulder, yes okay we’re going she said, we’ve got a way to bike over to the white dunes at the pet cemetery, that’s where your brother will sleep Jerry, right, let’s go, we’ve got to be strong, God was cruel to take you away from me, I’m gonna say that to the Reverend, wait and see, what made him take my Merlin eh, why, I’ll say to her, and Fleur’s mind went back to that day the concert was announced on a poster, the picture of Cl
ara, his own Clara, he’d need a suit and shoes, first the shoes, boy what a lot to get done, it wore him out but he’d be there, then guess what, the concert season was cancelled, there it was in the morning newspaper, nothing before winter because the musicians were on strike, some backer had not paid them, ticket holders would be reimbursed, what a disappointment, they’d been waiting for this, okay everybody take it easy, the season will begin again in January, just a little financial adjustment to make that’s all, no need to crowd around the concert hall, Fleur did though, I’ve got to get in, I’ve got to see her, she’s a great virtuoso he said to the hostile man at the door, look you don’t get it do you, there’s no concert before winter, and even then who knows, do you have any idea of the times we’re living in young man, me for instance, I haven’t been paid one red cent, I was supposed to listen to the music free and sell tickets to latecomers, that’s all, not even a tip a lot of the time, yep, that’s how it is nowadays my young friend, I wouldn’t have let you in anyway, not barefoot, never ever heard of that before, bare feet in a concert hall, no swimsuits neither, nor cellphones, you can bet on that, and certainly no dogs, no way you’d’ve got in, so that was it thought Fleur, only mediocre music got rewarded, same thing with musicians, rockers like Cool Springs and their noise, while devoted musicians like the symphony got cut to the bone, no choice but to go on strike, boy that’s humiliating, revolting thought Fleur, forever playing his flute out in the street while he literally shook with hunger, and what made it even harder to stand was smelling all those heady aromas from the restaurants as the doors opened, striking musicians, what a blow to Clara, everyone, soloists, trained musicians, fervent artistes on the receiving end of such contempt, such downright lazy cowardice, no using their instruments for months and Clara’s name stripped from the poster like a slap in the face, he thought of the striking musicians as absent spirits onstage, like in a dream he often had during those uncomfortable nights on the beach near the edge of a wood where no one would see them, him and Damien in their cardboard kennel on the sand, the dream went back to before Fleur was born, and he was the guest pianist in an opera, either Mozart or Beethoven, at a festival in Vienna a little after the Second World War, the musicians kept everyone waiting a long time, where were they, beneath which pile of rubble, this was supposed to be a time for renewal and rebuilding yet no one knew what had become of the celebrated artists invited there after all those years, but they were expected for the performance to be given by the surviving musicians and singers, Fleur positioned his fingers on the keyboard and looked around, but for hours, even days, no one showed, yet there he was in his tux when suddenly a wave of red light washed over them and, as out of a grave, the actors and musicians emerged, all of them skeletons, some still with tatters of skin clinging to them, now the conductor was at his lectern and nodding to Fleur, saying when they killed my orchestra they killed their music, I am conducting because I alone survived those unimaginable catastrophes, the silence of the dead is what you will hear for this is the time of postwar silence when reconstruction begins, not one musician from my orchestra is left alive, not one, then Fleur would wake up under the stars alone with no one but Damien, who was fast asleep, no music, nothing he thought, there would be no performer in Fleur’s opera, nothing but the sound of waves, and no one to play any music, for I too will have disappeared like those in my dream, only shreds of consciousness and life remaining, as he touched his chest he knew he’d been dreaming, a regularly occurring nightmare, he felt the warmth of Damien’s head next to him, he stroked his ears, running his fingers through the fur and thinking I’m alive, I’m breathing, oh smell that morning ocean air, sure it was a dream, nothing more, that vision of the missing and disappeared haunts me every night, out there as he played his flute, he pictured Clara’s face gone from the poster, white paint barring her name, maybe he’d never see her again, no concert before winter and then some doorman said nope, Clara’s gone, young people were emerging from a pizza place gulping it down two or three slices at a time, some kind of idiotic contest they thought was a riot, thought Fleur, must be students on vacation, the sticky dough hit him with its vulgar smell of tomatoes, anchovies, and olives that set him off in all directions at once, somewhere over their greedy mouths and perfectly tended teeth, god it’s revolting he said to himself, the street pressing in on him, in so close it never relented, and the smells gave him a headache, and as if to put him off even more Kim said, see that, everything’s wasted with them, even food, if they don’t finish those pizzas I sure will, this time he felt sorry for her and didn’t bother telling her to shut up, she’d never known what a home was, parents collapsing their veins didn’t count, the street was all she’d ever known, why put her down, though he’d often been prompted by his habitual irritability, Brilliant would be here any time now yelling and twitching, hey here’s the catch of the day, fresh veg too, look, asparagus, potatoes, a real feast for once, so Fleur wouldn’t be going to his mother’s, no ma’am, still some nice brown beer with Martha would be nice, it was time he got cleaned up too, top to bottom he thought, still the smell of the anchovies and tomatoes didn’t seem so bad now, he was certain Brilliant was on his way with something hailing a taxi and climbing in with Petites Cendres the way he used to with Fatalité, Robbie thought about the eternity of marriage ahead for Yinn and Jason, even if Yinn had been pure in his love at first sight and his marriage to Captain Thomas years before, My Captain he called him when he came calling at the bar in the Porte du Baiser Saloon in his checked sleeveless halter-tops and his captain’s cap tilted over one eye, oh too much, too much, Robbie thought to himself trying not to tumble in head over heels, so where was Yinn’s sense of balance now, flipped over and upside down perhaps unlike everything else in the house, which was so well ordered and harmonious, Yinn with Jason for a husband plus a stoic mother who respected everyone’s whims and fancies except when they disrupted the orderliness of things in the house, whims sure, unruliness no, especially now when everyone seemed to be walking on eggshells, all thoughts were on Fatalité and his unlikely future, certainly Robbie could think of nothing else, save him, save him and keep him from those dark thoughts, rekindle his hope for the present, which for him could only be a source of rejoicing, whimsicality, and poignancy, though Robbie would have hoped for something a little calmer and wiser, hell no he thought, that isn’t going to happen is it, I mean this is Fatalité we’re talking about, a case of excess if ever there was one, more excess, excessive excess, the comatose nights on coke, and to top it off Yinn, as though needing a counterweight to all this, was leaning on the bar in a white tank top, sandals, and denim cargo Bermudas, hair brushed back from his prominent forehead and over his shoulders, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and a little distant, perhaps with a coolness that served only to heighten desire, waiting for Captain Thomas to come in from the street with his mind elsewhere as Robbie recalled, possibly the ocean depths he had been visiting day and night right into the wee hours of the morning, I got to swim among the sharks quite confidently, he told Yinn, the clearest water, branches of coral, and he was off soaring to mystical heights in the depths of the ocean, real peace of mind he said, it’s so amazingly beautiful you don’t ever want to come back Yinn, you know the deeper you go and the less often you breathe the more you become that plant in the coral we once were, or the fish resting on a sandbank, practically nothing at all, it’s so inexpressibly ecstatic and sweet, there are no words for it, Yinn was listening to all this with impatience at not being noticed enough himself and, with a certain nonchalance that seemed unconscious but wasn’t, Yinn, being neither indecent nor tasteless but more like a nice but naughty boy, slipped down his denim Bermudas, under which he wore nothing, to just below the waist, but all Captain Thomas got to see was a constellation of tattoos on his hip, oh and I forgot, he went on, it was the full moon and those satyrs of ours were out and about in total freedom, all blonde manes and torsos, but you Yinn with your pants down like that, your torso, your si
lky underarms, fresh-shaved legs, you’re better than any hairy boy, and that skin of yours has to be velvet, uh-huh you’re coming on my boat Yinn, bring Jason and Robbie with you, my friends get a sailboat ride and champagne, plus breakfast with strawberries and lime cocktails you’ll never forget, what else are you offering asked Yinn, standing with his hip to one side, tell me what else, well anything your heart desires the captain answered still dreaming of oceans and heedless of Yinn’s erotic little game however minor it was or however languid his staged offering, the captain went on unaware, we’ll see the dolphins at play, so I’ll expect you and your friends on board tomorrow morning, and this captain was the one Yinn would soon be calling My Captain, somehow cancelling out the infidelity to his husband, yeah that was back before Yinn turned thirty-three but it’s so right now thought Robbie, the lavish times of his glorious immaturity when Fatalité was still alive, a time that seemed so far away though it was barely yesterday he thought, yes, really long ago. Fleur had another dream that was balm to his soul, often on dry nights in November or else when the jasmine was in flower as summer approached, the ocean waves brought him its enchanting perfume just before he lay down to sleep on the sand with Damien, barely were his eyes closed when it took him back to his grandfather’s fields in Atlanta, away from the city itself, and these had taken on huge proportions in his early youth, as though he and the plantations had grown up together and as though the harvested fields had never had the grass burned off or put forth only what was unproductive, Fleur had walked among grasses that seemed to reach the sky and it was like meandering through the bright colours of a painting, beet and wheat fields, and beyond that a second garden made up solely of luscious fruits, a luxuriant orchard where fruit trees also reached skyward and there were peaches and wild apricots to be eaten while ambling through it, but what most struck Fleur was the amazing height of the grasses unchanging in their greenness, then all of a sudden as he picked his way through them, more than head-high even for his grandfather, who was tall in his prime, there he was, Grandfather himself, saying to his beloved grandson for whom he’d wished a magnificent musical career, Fleur do you hear that, every blade of grass is the voice of a man or woman singing the opera Fidelio, there do you hear them, and once more the boy heard the harmony of voices when he woke, it’s the wind Grandfather had said, the wind sighing through the grass in the fields and the fruit on the trees, it’s the wind that makes them sing in unison like a choir, can you hear it Fleur, and there it was as he and Damien woke in their cardboard shelter on the beach, the wind with its salty smell and taste, like soprano and bass voices or their inflections repeating themselves as they sang in the waves, quick thought Fleur, I must write this down while it’s still fresh or I’ll forget, no I mustn’t do that, it felt like happiness or was it just a sensation, well anyway he might have to change the title of his opera to include the word joy, hmmm yes, he thought, I’d sure like to know what they’re going to do with us, Laure said to Daniel, it’ll be nightfall soon and here we are still locked up in this terminal, humph, what are they going to do with us anyhow, no way they’re gonna let me smoke this whole time, yes indeed, an instrument of repression, that’s what it is, what else can you call it, the airlines are all against us, must be something serious to keep us hanging around all this time, said Daniel calmly or pretending to be calm, but the sky is perfectly clear and there was no apparent reason to keep all the planes grounded, really clear, there must be some reason they’re not telling us, but if he’d been really honest he’d’ve told Laure she was pigheadedly selfish, after all she wasn’t the only one stuck in this situation, there were more than a hundred others piled in here with them and most were waiting in silence, busying themselves with reading or electronic games or cellphones or portable computers, while Laure on the other hand was idle and stuck to Daniel like his shadow when he wanted to be alone like everyone else with his computer open to the picture of his daughter’s face, Mai came first with her inquisitive eyes, pierced ears, and straight-line brow, then her brothers and Mélanie on the next page like a map of the planets, comets, and worlds he would navigate, as though master of the universe, able to stop just an instant in his aerial voyage at the campus in Ireland where he was to speak tomorrow to many pairs of inquisitive eyes through which Mai’s own would shine, her face was more adult-shaped of late and resembled Mélanie’s during their early days in New York, when he’d fallen in love at the same tender age and she’d told him that drugs would only dull his writing edge, not liberate it, and there she was again in Mai’s inquiring eyes with the same relentless intransigence he thought, pensive and seeming to voyage with Daniel when he read or wrote on the computer, a technological miracle of almost supernatural dimensions, Mai, however inaccessible, was somehow always there by his side like an image he could never shake, just as she had been when, very young, she’d played among his books and manuscripts while he worked, cooing to herself as she turned the pages of heavy books or scribbling away on the scrap paper he’d tossed away, and like a squirrel or cat or some other curious little animal in the garden, he always knew where she was, yet here he was in this terminal, too considerate of Laure to dare open his computer to her picture, for his fellow voyager stuck to him like glue, saying you see Daniel we’re all held down, held in, and there’s no getting out unless they decide to let us, not even a stroll in the hallways with those stupid glass doors everywhere, what’s going to happen to us, tell me Daniel, what, I’ve never gone this long without a smoke, it’s repression by the company and everyone, but I’m not giving in, oh no, she’s right thought Daniel as he listened to her, it’s true she was repressed, going this long without smoking was like depriving an alcoholic of drink, yes he owed it to her to listen and understand, even if he did feel distracted by what Mai had written to him the day before, my profs are going to inform you Papa that four of us, Karine, Christy, Vita, and me, might get bursaries in art and photography next year, still it isn’t fair because the others have to keep working to pay their fees, and the first two are African Americans from families so poor they had to go to foster homes, so you have to understand Papa that it would be unfair for me to take the money, and if you look at the picture you’ll see each of us has a red and blue ribbon of honour, in it we’re having dinner with our profs, it’s a real treat because the three of them really deserve it, Karine wants to study medicine and become a surgeon and she needs every boost she can get Papa, I already have you and Mama and I don’t need to work while I’m a student, besides you know how I am, not particularly ambitious and I won’t need to study long-term like my brother Vincent, in fact I’m probably just as lazy as Samuel in school, the best thing is to go dancing after class with my friends, like when I used to go to the beach with Manuel, Tammy, and the other girls late at night in our bikinis, there’s no beach here so we go to the disco instead, Papa do you know if Manuel’s dad is out on parole yet, do you ever see Manuel these days, I’ve got to go sweet Papa, it’s time for class, kisses to my one and only Papa, I do love you so, Mai, words that Daniel loved to watch flow down his screen, waves of them rippling and singing, then slowing to a bashful trickle as Mai realized it wasn’t a good idea to mention Manuel and his dad, especially when Daniel reproached himself for knowing next to nothing about that part of her life except that he had a premonition of danger when she hung out with the boy, afraid he might be losing her, or perhaps it had already happened unknown to him, that mysterious and disturbing period in her life, oh how secretive our children can be, like so many other parents he and Mélanie had sent her away to college, far from those threatening surroundings, what if they’d been wrong he wondered, though she did sound so confident when she wrote to him, her words flowing naturally as a brook, could it be they actually hid something in their depths, perhaps a veiled homesickness she was feeling far from the one she loved, Manuel, a name to be avoided like his father, perhaps she was really giving voice to her ennui there among strangers in a strange place, the thought of it sadde
ned him as he revisited the trips abroad that were meant to nourish his writing yet produced nothing, the writers’ colony provided none of the solitude he needed but surprised him with how different he was from the others, a sort of asocial originality, alone among a talented cohort, self-isolating, rarely spoken to and rarely speaking, so why shut yourself up in a Spanish monastery with other artists and writers he was asked, it was to write his novel Strange Years, still not finished even now, write and rewrite it as he might every day, Daniel was first and foremost an ecologist, and writers and novelists couldn’t work without a sense of eternity before them, they wrote in a present that folded the future into it as they said I’ll redo this tomorrow, not right now but later, or so it was for Daniel, who couldn’t help thinking more about his children than his writing, one day he’d be old and able to work with no fear that the Earth was about to blow up, indeed that’s who he’d be, an older but wiser writer somersaulting into indifference, indifference to everything, living by his pen alone in his room, though that room would need an opening onto the sea and the birds, for he’d be impervious to humans and their torments, though not to nature, but he longed to be proof against the anxiety that took him by the throat on his walks through the orchards and fields in Spain, outside while the others were inside their cells writing or painting or sending up discordant new sounds from the music studios, the tamed anarchy of art, while he, Daniel, created absolutely nothing, produced absolutely nothing in the nothingness of his blocked and aimless soul, sinking deeper every day into listlessness, only to be wakened from it by a pain that was greater than his own, a little girl crying in the scorching silence of the afternoon, crying in immense sadness while her mother pleaded, no Grazie, don’t cry, you’ll see what a fine dinner it will make, all those artists need something good for their dinner Grazie, but the little girl continued crying, my rabbit, he was mine and you cut my rabbit’s head off, she murmured, he was mine, he ran around in the forest with me, my very own rabbit Mama, there were no distinct words to it, but two old men Daniel had met playing bocce when he was out for a walk were beneath the trees, grumbling about the foreigners up there in the monastery, artists, writers, what are they doing here, or so Daniel imagined them saying, of course maybe they were simply too wrapped up in the game to do anything but grumble out there under the trees like that on such a devilish hot day, but after he’d heard the little girl asking for her pet and the farmwife who wouldn’t give it to her, a piercing soul-sickness afflicted his throat, double-pronged, as he heard her weeping, for this surely was only the first, he thought, a precursor of many more devastating losses to come, and there’s nothing I can do for this poor child’s heart, not a thing, for tonight I’ll be one of them, one of the visiting artists, writers, and musicians in the monastery gorging bare-fanged on Grazie’s pet rabbit at the refectory table, what shame I feel for all of us, what sadness, yet Daniel, far from being an ascetic, knew he wouldn’t refuse it when Grazie’s mother served the rabbit to them that evening, no, in fact he’d be drawn to it as surely as the others, warming to the farmwife and her culinary abilities, ah can you smell that he’d say, and more such idiocy, apparently forgetting the afternoon tears of a little girl’s very first grieving in the delightful smell of such a well prepared meal, the stubborn uneasiness would give way to carnivorous delight as he raised his glass of red wine to the health of one and all, addressing them not as refined creators but as gross feeding-machines such as he was himself, while feigning to be as they were, conscientiously plying their arts in their cells, fully he knew how false and frivolous was his façade, having written absolutely nothing since he’d got there, and tomorrow would be no different, the tears of a little girl in the scorching silence of afternoon in an austere landscape, a leaden angst piercing your flesh, the burning sadness of knowing your own mortality, nevertheless tearing through dinner, not a thing, no, Daniel said nothing, he felt how completely alone he was. On party nights, thought Fleur, as fevered streets began to eclipse the fading day, onstage at her pub and the life of the party, cheeks afire, occasionally accompanied by a singer on electric guitar, Martha managed to look opulent yet graceful in her Indian tunic, and Fleur recalled these words in the night, the ballad sung by the woman who accompanied my mother, blessed be you who wander with no roof or place to sleep tonight, you without country, souls forever wandering yes, blessed be you, thus it went as Martha’s protégés, Jamaican, Haitian, and Cuban refugees, gathered on the terrace till Martha swept them up in the dance right out there under the stars, Fleur showed up briefly while she was getting them into the throbbing beat, oh son, there you are, you came after all, your musician friends Seamus and Lizzie are waiting for you son, come and dance with us, all your old friends are here, the ones who’d been to the concerts Fleur played as a child now held him in contempt, no matter if they hugged him and made nice, none of it was true thought Fleur, not one little bit, he recalled their jealous gossip when they saw him at the piano, only five years old, you watch the little prodigy, he’ll be down in flames before he’s a grownup, Garçon Fleur, sure, right, Garçon Fleur, watch when he’s twenty and can’t play a single note, he’d had to ditch those phony friends who gave him the overwhelming urge to head straight back to the street, oh no, don’t go, his mother said, you’re not leaving already, come into the house tonight and let’s talk, he worried about her taking in all these people, Mama you can’t look after all of them and they’ll get deported, then what about you, you’re likely to get arrested like Father Alphonso, but she replied do you think I’m scared of the law, besides Alphonso wasn’t arrested, his superiors sent him to a parish in New England, and do you think that’s going to shut him up, no way, he still goes on exposing the Church’s crimes against children like those orphans in their seminaries, they are never going to silence him, besides, do you really think I need to be afraid of the law when the law’s unjust, Alphonso hid refugees in the Archipelago because he had the courage and so can I, but Mama you’re not Alphonso, you’re only a woman and a woman alone, I’m all you have, ah well now, she said, having a son uprooted and footloose here in my very own town only a few steps from home helps me to understand a whole lot of things, and she took his hands in hers, then fell silent, her eyes moist, at least take a blanket with you for the nights, she said, thanks Mama, I’ll use it for Damien, thanks, and he was gone, for how long she couldn’t know, Kim wondered as she looked at Fleur forever playing his flute with his face buried in his hoodie, he’s got a terrific mother and a divorced father who still writes though he never knows exactly where to find him, all I’ve got is a couple of junkies rotting in prison for ten or twelve years, not that they deserve any better, too bad the courts didn’t do it sooner when it would have done us kids some good, all three of us, my mother let the youngest die of hunger, skinny little boy in his cradle, premature and sick, he wasn’t going to make it past thirteen months, who could afford the operations and medication anyway, my mother said they robbed apartments and cars only so they could pay for their crack and coke, none to waste on the littlest one so why bother feeding him, bird’s gotta fly by itself they said, he isn’t made right anyway, a reject, he’ll fly away on his own, I mean before they had us they were just boho nomads till they got the criminal seed sowed in them, then turned into delinquents and brought us up in this mess, I saw everything that happened to my brother, I was right there, I knew if he didn’t get care he’d die, I watched the whole thing, everything they did, no courts to step in then and if I told someone they wouldn’t believe me anyway, nobody would’ve taken me seriously, that scrawny baby just lying there, they’d never believe me, I was still pretty small myself, besides I was afraid of them, yes really afraid, they’d tell everyone how much they loved us, even show off their tattooed legs:
Nothing for You Here, Young Man Page 2