The Metropolis Case

by Matthew Gallaway

  He held his father’s hand and was reminded of what this hand had done for him, not only in his childhood but over the past month, when Guillaume’s work had inspired him in unexpected ways. He explained all of this in a low, hesitant voice, pausing here and there to allow space for his father to respond, as though engaged in a final conversation. He promised to carry on as they had discussed, in the service of truth and discovery, and as he spoke, he realized that—unlike before, when he had expected to die—he meant it, knowing he needed this kind of structure—and ideally, meaning—in his life going forward; to return to the state in which he had existed following Eduard’s death would be disastrous, whether he lived for one day or one century. At the same time, he continued, in the event his father could hear him—and in spite of everything, smiling through his tears—there would be limits to what Guillaume should expect; there was no point in pretending, for example, that Lucien would ever be a scientist, or any kind of scholar, at least in the traditional sense. “Aime la vérité, mais pardonne l’erreur,” he offered as he closed his father’s eyes, which seemed to confirm the official passage of these famous words from one generation to the next.

  …

  LUCIEN WENT TO the garden, where he cleared a plot and spent several hours digging. After gently rolling up Guillaume’s body in a blanket, he brought it downstairs to clean and dress. He retrieved his mother’s wedding ring, which, along with his father’s, he placed on a chain around Guillaume’s neck. As Lucien carried his father outside, he began to consider for the first time what it might be like to live for two hundred years, and how long it would take before he knew if the vaccine was working. Though he still tended to believe that he had merely survived, and would continue to age like anyone else, he felt a tremor of fear about confronting such a vast unknown. Not willing to reflect too deeply on what in either case could not be undone, he allowed his fear to pass through—or at least around—him, as if he, too, were an island in the Seine. As he kissed Guillaume’s cheeks and put him into the earth, under the indifferent posture of the trees and flowers, there was a part of him that envied his father his perfect death, but this, too, he refused to consider for more than a second, knowing that he could no longer imagine his own.

  AFTER SPENDING MOST of the next twenty-four hours in a deep, exhausted sleep, Lucien emerged from the apartment and realized the Île was almost entirely deserted. Closer to the Île de la Cité, he found a small militia of servants left behind by the nobility to guard the mansions; from one of these men he learned that the emperor had been deposed and a new republic formed. As shocking as this news was—Lucien could not remember a time when Louis-Napoléon had not ruled France—of more immediate concern was the news that Prussia, still intent on destroying the new French government, had sent troops said already to be within striking distance of Paris, which meant Lucien would not be able to leave. Venturing into the city, he saw bands of men parading up and down the boulevards, guns and knives in hand; he went to the train station, where all passenger cars had been replaced by cargo trains filled with wheat and other foodstuffs rushed in from the provinces, and finally to the Bois de Boulogne, where like something out of a strange dream, he saw herds of cattle wandering aimlessly through the flower beds and stands of forest.

  Less than a week later, the Germans arrived and promptly formed a giant noose around Paris; wires were cut, so that nothing penetrated this barrier except a few hot-air balloons, released from the highest hills of Montmartre. Bombs rained down, and the cafés and theaters went dark; statues were covered in burlap sacks, and even the arcades remained empty after a shower of glass fell on a group of pedestrians and sliced them to pieces.

  As the months passed, Lucien became demoralized, not only on account of those wounded and killed or otherwise suffering from the siege but also his sense that the city was giving in to a collective longing for death, the very thing he had turned his back on. In the lapping waters of the Seine, he heard the hushed whispers of the condemned and starving, begging for a dose of the poison hemlock that continued to grow in Guillaume’s garden. He took to wandering the streets, mostly at night, where even in a starving city, some of the shadowed doorways and twisting passages in the old sections of the Left Bank led to underground cafés and dance halls. When the city seemed most deserted, Lucien heard strains of music but could not always determine if they came from under his feet or from in his head. Strings and harps seemed to cascade down over the darkened streets from the black sky above, and he heard a soft, maternal voice warning him to be careful.

  On one such night—in an underground club off the Boulevard St.-Germain, not far from his old theater—he recognized his old friend Gérard Beyle in a group of men, all wearing the red armbands of the Communards. They greeted each other warmly, and Lucien invited Gérard to visit the Île. The next day he learned that Gérard’s two children had died during a flu epidemic more than five years earlier, after which his wife had left. Lucien relayed some of what had happened to him over the same period, and for a while they sat in silence, which seemed to make the tragedies they had just described feel very far away. Succumbing to nostalgia and affection, Lucien reminisced about their former jobs at the St.-Germain and the years they had spent carousing around Paris, and remarked how strange it was to realize that he now was older than Gérard had been at the time. While Gérard was willing to indulge him in these memories, and even smiled a few times as he recalled certain details that Lucien had forgotten, he was less willing to romanticize this period of his past, explaining that it had been marked by a cynical disbelief in everything.

  “You were so wise,” Lucien protested. “Everything you said about love was true.”

  “Perhaps.” Gérard shrugged. “But while love was everything to you then—what were you, sixteen or seventeen?—it was already past for me.” He paused and considered Lucien with a grimace. “You’ve suffered—we both have—but let me play the elder again and say that if you can’t find something to believe in—and I’m not saying it has to be the communes, but hopefully it won’t be the monarchy, or even the republic—your life will be very long and tedious.”

  ONE AFTERNOON IN March, Lucien noticed a pause in the shelling, followed by a series of triumphant cries and shouts. He ran outside and crossed the bridge to the Île de la Cité, where thousands had congregated, kissing and hugging, so that the city appeared to have been conquered by a bedraggled army of hobos. Looking out over the masses, Lucien realized that not a tricolored flag could be seen in a frothing sea of red: the city—just as Gérard had predicted—had been taken over by the radicals of the commune. Lucien found a spot in an alcove of one of the fountains at the Place St.-Michel from which he could watch and cheer. As far as revolutions went—and like every Frenchman, Lucien had been extensively schooled in both the concept and the reality—this one was not so bad. As night fell, lines of old women paraded past, sweeping brooms in time to a band of brass players, who in turn were followed by painters and sculptors who had fabricated a giant float out of old scrap metal and paper flowers. There were dancers and singers in sequin suits and laborers and factory workers, while prostitutes celebrated the new age by offering their services for this one night only at a 50 percent discount.

  As the morning light crept into the eastern sky, Lucien remained asleep in the fountain, oblivious to the thud of soldiers—the French national army—marching through the city gates. He woke up to witness the soldiers advancing into the sleeping crowds, where they plunged bayonets into those at their feet and fired bullets that ripped off the heads of those who stood up groggily to protest. He watched helplessly until the wave passed, after which he crawled down from his hiding spot; as he edged along from doorway to doorway to make his way back to the Île, he continued to hear the harsh whisper of flames and gunshots, interspersed with screams and the shattering of glass, all of which—like the splintering crack of a human bone—did not need to be experienced to be recognized as grotesque sounds of war.


  Near the river, he turned a corner just in time to see Gérard and several of his comrades trying to block the Pont d’Hiver against an advancing column. The soldiers took the bridge without engaging the communists so much as marching right over them. Lucien sprinted ahead, arriving just as the soldiers reached the other side, leaving Gérard wounded and gasping; blood seeped from all over his body. Lucien placed his hands under his old friend’s arms and as bullets flew dragged him out of harm’s way to a sheltered spot under a stone balustrade. His mind raced as he tried to decide what to do; he repressed an urge to protest the injustice, to stand up like a vengeful deity and wipe his city—his country—from the face of the earth, to protest this last shred of belief—the one he had always held in the fundamentally good nature of his fellow countrymen, the one that would have prevented him from ever believing, had he not seen it himself, that they could kill each other by the thousands—being ripped away, seemingly forever, after everything else he had endured.

  He rested Gérard’s head in his lap and tried to comfort his friend. Though Gérard seemed too stunned to talk—Lucien was not sure he even recognized him—the pace of his breathing became less frantic, and his moans subsided. As he held him, the rough texture of Gérard’s shirt reminded Lucien of the first time they were together at the St.-Germain, and he thanked Gérard for having been so kind to his younger self. He also thanked him for teaching him that the city was a different kind of theater, and finally for these past few weeks, when Gérard had helped Lucien negotiate a loneliness that he suspected could be appreciated only by those whose parents and lovers were already dead.

  Gérard lifted his head and looked up with shining eyes. His lips barely moved as he fought to speak just a few words. “Did we win?”

  With his free hand, Lucien wiped clear his own eyes and then leaned down. “Oui, mon chère, we won,” he confirmed, almost but not quite singing the words as he would a lullaby, and knew that like so many lies, this one resonated in the truth.

  38

  The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths

  NEW YORK CITY, 2002. It was the beginning of May, and Martin’s new plants—a mix of dwarf conifers, Japanese maples, and alpine succulents—had arrived that morning in several large boxes from a nursery in Oregon. He’d spent the day, brilliant and warm enough to make the chill of April seem far off, on his deck replanting a collection of concrete troughs—also left behind by Leo—which he had already refurbished with new topsoil, sand, and peat. As he worked—unpacking each plant before carefully placing it in a designated spot and padding it into its new home—he had enjoyed an almost narcotic intoxication he had not experienced since pottery class in high school, or before that when he used to paint goalie masks. In many respects, it had been a perfect day, exactly what he had hoped to achieve when he left his job, and as he settled into a living room chair, from which he could admire his new botanical charges, the wet leaves of which glistened as the sun arced down toward the Palisades, he found it difficult not to contrast the tone of such thoughts with the wounded, bellicose state of the city—and even, or especially, the country at large—since 9/11, and for a second he wished that everyone could afford to take at least a few months off, to cultivate a plot of earth, to be reminded of the certainty that whatever happened, beautiful things could still grow out of almost nothing but air and dirt and water. It was a ridiculously naïve idea, of course—to think that society’s problems could be solved through gardening—but he smiled as he remembered discussing it online a few days earlier with a fellow alpine enthusiast and seeker of a long-term relationship. They had been chatting at regular intervals since “meeting” a week earlier; the only negatives were that this guy lived in Brooklyn—effectively one hundred thousand miles away from Washington Heights, as they had joked—and that he was about to leave the country for three months. But they had agreed to get coffee when he returned, which represented the first concrete step in Martin’s “self-improvement program,” as he regularly referred to it—with only a trace of irony—in discussions with his sister.

  HE SIPPED HIS whiskey, which transformed the encroaching stiffness in his fingers into something almost electric. He flipped over the My Bloody Valentine LP he had on the turntable and thought about Maria Sheehan—he had introduced her to the band—and made a mental note to send her an e-mail. He wondered if he might see her more than once a year now that he had more time, but then considered that her schedule would no doubt remain the limiting factor. He remembered the day he’d met her—or technically, remet her—in New York City, at Jay and Linda’s wedding, and how shocked he had been by her transformation into a striking and urbane version of the scowling girl he used to see at his father’s company in Pittsburgh. Her voice, of course, was mesmerizing, but there was also the way her lustrous black gown fit so perfectly, as if each reflection of light off the silver threading had been designed to elevate her singing into an effortlessly magnetic performance.

  Going to Jay’s wedding had not been easy for Martin, not because he didn’t wish his friend happiness but because it drew into such sharp relief his own—and at that time, more recent—failures. This disconsolation had made Maria seem like a mysterious and regal countess from some forgotten country who could take him away from his troubles; and in a way, that was exactly what she had done, allowing him for those few minutes to believe that what he felt was more than a reactionary desire to love a woman, knowing that doing so would make his life so much easier. It was more than just a fantasy on his part; he had genuinely fallen in love with her, if love was sharing that which cannot be shared, to the extent that the respective deaths of their parents had created some implausible bond of truth and experience. Or at least this was what Martin had told himself at the time, when he was confronted with the strange but miraculous revelation that he wanted her, not as a friend but in the most visceral, physical way possible, as if in the grip of a chemical addiction. He didn’t care that he was “in the closet” or having more sex with men than he wanted to admit even to himself, or that this sudden desire did not seem so far removed from the ridiculous notion he had long held about meeting the perfect woman who once and for all would “cure” him of his homosexual tendencies. If it meant a chance to resolve their shared grief, then to make love with Maria had at that second seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

  WHEN IT WAS over, if some part of his vision remained—i.e., he could not escape the feeling of having experienced something magical and ineffable with her that went beyond having sex in a utility room at a hotel, even a luxury one like the Pierre—he knew it was not something that could ever be described as love, or at least not the romantic kind. So when she stared up at him unblinking and motionless, he pushed himself off her, still wanting to be near but not to touch. He caught his breath and became aware of the sounds of the hotel: the mechanical click of the air-conditioning, the distant clanging of pans from the kitchen below, the thud of music from the ballroom. Maria sat up and looked at him as she removed her underwear from her foot. “Well—that’s what I call fucking,” she said.

  Martin laughed at the brazen quality of her statement and helped her to regain her balance. They returned to the hallway and parted ways to go to their respective bathrooms, where as Martin looked in the mirror, he admitted that not even Maria Sheehan would ever be “the one” for him, and although he had come to terms with this certainty in the past—or so he believed—he felt inspired, or altered, enough not to want to hide it from Maria or anyone else. He owed this to himself as much as he owed it to her, and the second it was acknowledged, it felt like a fait accompli, so that he looked back at who he had been a minute earlier and wondered why it had taken so long.

  He met her back out in the hallway. “I have to tell you something.”

  “What now?” Maria stepped around him to a mirror, where she reattached to her ear a dangling hoop of an earring.

  “Uh, well—I’m gay,” Martin said, and laughed at the ease wit
h which it slipped out, newly amazed that two words could ever have caused him so much grief.

  Maria gave him an odd look in the mirror. “Really? And here I thought I was a woman.”

  “I’m serious,” Martin insisted. “I don’t know what happened, it’s just that—”

  “Wait.” She now turned to face him. “You’re really gay? Like—” Maria frowned. “I’m not going to catch anything, am I?”

  “You might.”

  “You better be kidding.”

  “I am.” Martin had in fact recently received a clean bill of health; at this point, he still labored under the impression that a single kiss with another man could leave him infected with any number of gruesome diseases—besides AIDS—which sent him to the doctor with hypochondriacal frequency.

  This seemed to satisfy her. “So nobody knows? Not Jay, not Linda? What about your ex-wife?”

  “She knew,” Martin admitted. “She took me to the cleaners when we got divorced. But nobody else.”

  “Good for her,” Maria remarked, severely. “You could have said something before—before we fucked.”

  “I’m sorry—it wasn’t premeditated,” Martin offered. “Or at least not consciously, and I didn’t want to wreck it by pretending it was something I would ever want again. Does that make any sense?”

  “No—not really—but sort of.” Maria placed a hand on the wall as she reached down to adjust her heel. “It’s just that I had my own little drunken fantasy.”