Walls of a Mind

by John Brooke

  The unused land where he found himself was hard, the walking easy, but he’d been on the move since dawn, the sun was relentless, he was needing water in a bad way, the mountain ridge was not getting any closer. Destiny could not take away the fear that came with a full realization of how the game had changed. The highest-ranking political prick around!

  Prince stopped in the middle of nowhere. His hand went groping in the bottom of his pack. He removed the gifted pistol. Felt it. Loaded it. Pretty simple. A simple tool to help him get to Stephanie.

  And if I should die? Love was his revolution’s core belief.

  Love that blasted rotting structure. Love that sustained a brand new world.

  Love was central to the cause and he couldn’t think beyond the thought of her.

  He still had two unused phones. Throwing caution behind him like surplus weight, he made a call. No answer. He did not expect one. Leave a message… Beep.

  He told her, ‘Steph, I keep thinking of Ulrike. I know she’s looking down from Heaven and hoping like crazy for the next true heart to pick up where she left off. I know she’s looking at you, Steph. Aye, you got it all, luv. You and me, we can lead the next march for some real justice. I — oh fuck!’ …A brilliant red and silver thing swooping in at him, screaming in a high-pitched whine. Prince threw himself on the ground.

  It was one of those ultralight things. Prince lay there, stunned, as it made a long arcing turn and headed back toward him, bearing in. He saw the guy’s face, smiling, grinning down — did he think it was a fucking game?

  Prince’s desperate hand found the pistol.

  The guy waved as he flew past. An apology for such a rude surprise?

  And Prince waved back. No problem, man.

  He picked himself up. Stomped the phone. Continued on toward the giant.

  · 32 ·

  RAPPROCHEMENT

  The four o’clock sun was seductive as it played off shadowy bends in the old streets. Sergio Regarri was walking the inspector to her car. He hadn’t said a word — he’d held the door as she left Rue Bonsi, then fallen in beside her. The inspector did not tell her judge to go away. She only warned, ‘I’m down there somewhere. Bit of a walk.’ She meant down on the flats by the river. Parking in the centre of town was impossible.

  He said, ‘I need a walk.’

  So did she. Aliette was feeling discombobulated, useless and mixed up. Angry with Margot Tessier. Angry with herself for being so utterly feeble in arguing for Stephanie McLeod. And worse, perplexed and… yes, angry to somehow be the object of the woman’s affection. She paused at the foot of the hill to get her bearings. The place was worse than Paris. A complicated medieval maze. There, a glimpse of the water at the end of a row of down-market shops and unkempt dwellings. She led them that way. And let it come out. ‘If she was just a bitch, I could handle it. But she is creepy and weird! No radar…Is she gay? I mean, I thought you and she — ’

  She stopped herself. She knew he did not want to go there.

  Demurring gracefully, he said, ‘I think she honestly wants to be friends. Or something.’

  ‘Never happen. I can’t abide people who think like machines.’

  Sergio acknowledged the agent’s brutal strategy, the risk it brought on Stephanie McLeod. But a lowly magistrate could propose no way around it. Machinations through the ministry would be too slow, likely messy in the aftermath. ‘Margot remembers every word, believe me.’

  ‘That’s the thing. I almost feel sorry for people like her. I’m sure they sign up with the right idea, but it comes across like some kind of faith. Blind faith. Dangerous. She’s so cynical. How can you be a cynic and an idealist? Deep down inside, where does that leave you?’

  ‘Duty?’

  ‘Can duty be so black and white?’

  Instead of an answer, he offered a hand. She took it. The day was done. Rapprochement was a good idea. They strolled, she began to relax. He listened with attentive sympathy as she tried to articulate the sense of invasion that was subtext to the icky girls-only chat the night of Margot’s appearance on her doorstep.

  He asked, ‘But she gets no marks for trying? I mean, it sounds like a compliment.’

  ‘I don’t need it.’

  ‘I have no idea how women relate,’ he admitted. Adding, ‘It’s not really any consolation, but I think it’s worse for Pellau. I mean, where it comes to roles and duty.’

  ‘Yes, poor man.’ The commander had flopped around like a whale on a beach. Before just lying there, docile, helpless. Making his notes…

  They turned into Rue George Sand. She’d left her precious baby in the shade but the sun had eventually found it, the doorhandle was burning, it was baking inside. She got in carefully, unclamped the roof, turned the key, pushed the button. The roof went up, and folded down.

  She donned her LA Dodgers cap.

  Sergio Regarri said, ‘You’ll just have to get to her first.’ Stephanie McLeod.

  ‘I will get to her first,’ she vowed, peering into her rearview, fitting the cap just so.

  She was not entirely surprised when he leaned in and kissed her. ‘Invite me for supper.’

  She resisted. ‘I’m too frazzled to cook, too tired to be good company, honestly, I — ’

  ‘I will bring everything. We’ll cook together…We’ll enjoy ourselves,’ he promised. Added, ‘We deserve it. No?’ …Did she happen to have a deep fryer?

  In fact she did. A birthday gift from the man from her previous life in the north. She had used it once. This background information was kept to herself. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  She told him around six for an apéro.

  …So he arrived at six sharp with a sack of fresh mussels from Port-Vendres — which turned out to be obscenely large and juicy — supported by a goodly supply of shallots and potatoes, a gadget for slicing them into perfect frites. And three bottles of white wine.

  ‘Ulterior motives?’ the inspector asked.

  ‘Not at all.’ Pure-hearted Sergio rolled up his sleeves. ‘Two for us, one for the mussels.’

  · 33 ·

  LOGICAL END POINT

  High summer is the season of the fête du village. Stephanie McLeod sat on a hill looking down at Roquebrun. Avi Roig had passed within a hundred metres of the spot the night before. Not that she been at that place the night before. She’d been on the other side of the ridge, lower, looking toward the valley below Berlou. But she’d heard him. On a windless night, his mournful marching chant had carried through the forest, endless, amazing how he kept it going, like a ghostly priest, and so strange to hear her name. It had taken some control to keep herself from answering.

  This was her problem; she would solve it herself.

  There was still some daylight. Below, the town square was in the final stages of preparation for the fête. Band testing the sound system. Volunteers placing trestle tables, unfolding chairs, climbing ladders to string paper lamps. The bar was stocked, the pit was ready to be lit. Soon the men would be opening their wine and mingling, while their wives claimed tables and laid them. There would be the smell of grillades wafting through a blur of blue, yellow, pink and orange lights criss-crossed over the feasting villagers. The music would start. The dancing would go on and on. And Stephanie McLeod would not be there. Not this year. Ever again? She allowed herself to weep as she watched from a hillside. A fool on a hill? A fragment of a melody.

  Papa had liked those gentler songs. Mama scorned them. She liked The Doors. She would dance, languid to The Doors, crazy to The Stones. You had to love her then. Love Caroline Marie-Maude Vadnais. Her real name. The name she had hidden away. Marie Beliveau sounded good in the post office. In the village she was Madame McLeod, if a person could say it. Or Marie.

  The memory of music faded, pushed away by a harsh, tobacco-shredded Quebec voice. Mama drunk, reciting her group’s man
ifesto: We will always be the diligent servants and the bootlickers of the big shots…We are terrorized by the Roman Capitalist Church…by the advertising of the grand masters of consumption…by those exclusive clubs of science and culture, the universities…

  Mama’s beliefs had festered like the cancer that had killed her. Of course, no one could draw a direct link from a compromised soul to malignant cells. The best they could do was infer it, call it stress, recommend meditation. Or comedy. ‘You have to laugh more!’ They were good people. They had tried. Her daughter knew Mama’s beliefs were the thing that killed her.

  A mailbox. How in the world had Caroline Vadnais got it in her mind to put a bomb in a mailbox? The anger that had spurred Stephanie to contact Just Friends now seemed so vague.

  The Secret Service woman in the windowless room had taunted, ‘Ulrike Meinhof, revolutionary? When he told you that — even once! — how could you not dismiss him for the child he is and walk away?’

  Clever Stephanie had been at a loss for an answer. The woman was right.

  Choices: If she walked away from everything, where could she go? How far would be far enough when you were being hunted for a bombing? And if she gave in to the simpering presumption of a boy called Prince and ran with him? How long could that last? Would such a choice be tantamount to death by violence? Or would it mean ending up in another lost village with even less of a sense of why than her mother had struggled to achieve? Her bitter mother, erstwhile proud and passionate member of the Front de Libération du Québec, dying in exile, having liberated exactly nothing.

  Oh, Mama…

  At the Faculty in Paris they would set you a problem, always large-scale, multi-pronged. It might involve the demarcation of an electoral district to favourably reconfigure the political demography. (One assumed one was working for the party in power.) Or, it might be more practical; you and your group (they were usually group projects meant to emulate upper-management models and dynamics) might be tasked with designing a set of rules for a community: silence on Sunday, for example, by-laws that would offend the least number of citizens within the problematic area. Short of eliminating certain groups (reform of immigration laws?), there was no way to conceive a perfect plan. This was by design, the point of the exercise being to develop a feel for managing from above, finding best solutions for impossible problems, arrived at by considering permutations, weighing calculated effects against competing elements and against the situation as defined.

  It was challenging, both morally and practically, and meant to be. Some of the more delicately constituted students found themselves in a state of nervous meltdown. They insisted on perfection — could not come to terms with the notion that it did not exist. Stephanie remembered this feeling as she tried to follow each permutation of her recent choices to their logical end.

  Sorry, kid: Every possible choice led to the end of her life as she knew it.

  Or hoped it might be.

  In the space of a brooding moment, the last of the daylight gave way to night, a limitless sky packed with sparkling stars, each star a possibility that had burned out long ago. Below, the fête was starting up, framed in happy colours. Stephanie McLeod picked herself up and retreated.

  Made a promise to herself not to cry again.

  Eat, Stephanie! — you’ll feel better. She heard the voice of careful discipline and knew she had to listen. She had existed on sparse nourishment all week: cheese from the fridge at home, baguette, sausage, and biscuits purchased the first day. Peaches and cherries from reachable branches. Vegetables stolen from gardens. A blessed sandwich snatched from the back of an unwatched van parked on the edge of a parcel of vines.

  That morning she had dared to go down to the Saturday market at Cessenon. It had taken two hours. After foolishly withdrawing money from the machine at the bank, she had foolishly stuffed her stomach with too many good things.

  After buying the newspaper and seeing the front page, she’d rushed behind a shrub by the river and thrown it all back up. Her stomach was still fragile, her spirit more so.

  She would eat later, when she made camp. She walked.

  As the crow flies, she was rarely more than twenty kilometres from home, moving at a measured pace, quiet, anonymous, a wounded creature whose only goal was to stay well clear of the dogs. Resting. Eating. Sleeping — always in the hills, feet and legs sore at first, less so with each passing day. And swimming. Stephanie knew the many secret places. They were all places she had gone with boys. For love. All that seemed part of another existence now, as though those secret spots made a map of her misbegotten life. But the cooling streams cleansed her skin, her hair, teeth… The sun on the warm rocks soothed her aches and allowed her to move on. Clean. Eating sparsely, but never hungry. And never cold. Fine weather was one bit of luck.

  She’d found a large and sturdy nylon jacket to lie in, in the same van where she found the sandwich. She told herself she would return it. One day it would be there again, waiting for its rightful owner, who would have no clue. That was fantasy — instinct told her she was going to die. But the thought made her happy for a few moments. Found copies of discarded or untended newspapers offered speculation on the ‘attacks.’ That was her reality. It was far from the truth, and with no mention of the Just Friends.

  Or herself. Yet.

  Careless or not, she listened to him once a day. Her Prince. She assumed they could listen in — two cars within minutes of her last call Monday proved that. Somewhere in all her walking and thinking, she’d come to the conclusion this was good. For her. A strategy was forming.

  If they were listening to her listening to Prince but not responding, they might surmise she was hiding from him as much as from them. Being smart people, they would begin to ask themselves why. No guarantee, but after a certain amount of time they had to. Didn’t they?

  That horrible woman in the airless room — she would see it.

  Walking, mulling, bathing in streams and resting in the sun, Stephanie was accepting her fate. But she was determined to win something back. She hated the notion of embarrassment being the final sentiment before she died. So embarrassing that she would let this happen. Each night, as she listened to that wheedling Scots burr, the anger flowed back full force. Anger overrode her fear. Anger embarrassed the fear right out of her. Stephanie was headed back to the source of the disaster with an inkling of purpose, and only too aware of her advantage.

  She had surprised herself. Hearing his shitty teasing, his nasty little farewell to a girl who hadn’t fallen at his feet, she’d been miserable and frightened. Then she’d stopped and teased him back. It had been spontaneous and too easy. I love you, but there has to be more. I’ll be in touch… Always too easy for the girl who was always smarter than everyone, especially the boys.

  If nothing else, she would show them she was smarter than him.

  I love you, you scheming prick… His messages all week said he’d bought it.

  It was fully dark now. She stopped, drank water, then slid the SIM card into her phone.

  Steph, I keep thinking of Ulrike … I know she’s looking down from heaven and hoping like crazy for the next person to pick up where she left off. I know she’s looking at you, Steph. You got it all, luv. You and me — we can lead the next march for some real justice. I — oh fuck!

  Stephanie removed the SIM card and moved quickly into the deeper darkness of the forest.

  ·

  A mazet is a rudimentary hut fashioned from cement blocks and crépi, or from gathered field stones, used by growers to keep tools dry, refreshment in a cool place, or when they need refuge from the elements. There are hundreds, if not thousands of them, unobtrusively dotting the edges of southern hills and valleys lined with vines. For Stephanie McLeod, they provided a ready network of way stations along the path to nowhere. Nowhere was the natural end point to a series of stupid mistakes. The next one waited where the fo
rest ended. She had cheese. Sausage. Bread. She ate with care. Maybe they’d caught Prince today. For blowing up Roland Bousquet? If it weren’t so insane, it would be funny. And if she weren’t such a complete and utter fool…

  She crawled inside that night’s mazet and arranged her bed with her face to the open doorway, the stars. She slept almost immediately… but woke later to a sound and lay there.

  Stephanie heard the festive music in the distance but she was determined not to cry.

  PART 3

  It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

  — A. de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

  · 34 ·

  LIZARD ON A WALL

  Sergio Regarri left early Sunday afternoon, claiming a mother who expected him for tea. Aliette Nouvelle envied him that. It was quiet on her little street. No sound but the occasional bird. Another Sunday when the world retreated to the bosom of the family. She had to be content with a chair on the terrace outside her door, a parasol, a book, a glass of beer. The beer was good. As for the book, it was a question of finding the wherewithal to open it. She would eventually. For the moment… She sat contemplating a lizard edging up the wall in the cover of the laurel rose, her brain as momentarily empty as its.

  Mussels and frites. Ice cream and love. More love after toast and eggs and a walk to the market and back that morning. A bit of lunch. A man growing faithful.

  She had advised Magui Dardé and Henri Barthès not to work today. Sergio had brought some calm perspective. Margot Tessier’s technology was useful, but to go tromping through the hills calling Stephanie! Stephanie!...what would be the point? Stephanie McLeod was not a lost child. She had choices. There was nothing to be done till Stephanie made her play.