“No, the shy guy.”
“The black guy?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.” Levi turns back to the TV, which is playing some kind of police detective show in French. “Never thought black guys would be your type.”
I don’t even know what to say. “Um, what the fuck, Levi?”
“What?” he asks. “That’s not racist.”
“Yeah, it kind of is.”
“I’m just saying, you usually like guys who are all skinny and French. Not black.”
I splutter, “I … I can’t believe I have to tell you not to say things like that, Levi.”
“Why not? It’s true.”
I ignore him, go into the bathroom, and shut the door. I splash water on my face and stand there at the sink, letting it drip down, for a long time. The way he talks like that—it’s so … inconsiderate. Brash. Naive.
And that’s exactly what Levi is. Sheltered. Eccentric. Definitely naive.
His pill bottles line the shelf, staring me down oh-so-innocently. For the millionth time, I wonder what they really do to him. I squeeze my eyes shut and imagine him as a child, running through the years up to today. He shifted over the years. Once he was happy, hyper, giddy. Then he was snappish, moody, offensive, like he is now. I remember the anger he was prone to, and the weeks when silence would emanate from the basement. Which Levi is a product of the pills? Where does he end and the medication begin? Do they take him from zombie to the crackling, sardonic, animated Levi, or vice versa?
What’s real? I ask the pills. They don’t answer.
I’m so confused.
I find his pill tray upside down on the floor by the toilet. I pick it up and set it next to the bottles.
“I just found your pill thing on the floor,” I tell him when I’ve finished changing into my pajamas and brushing my teeth. “Please take better care of your shit.”
Levi grunts. He turns the TV off and fiddles with his alarm clock. I drop into bed, not bothering to ask him when he’s setting it. I’ll wake up whenever I feel like it.
The alarm goes off at seven. Jerk.
I wait for Levi to turn it off, but he doesn’t budge. He’s curled into a ball, snoring away. I get up and turn it off.
I wait a little longer, but he doesn’t rise, not even when the sun fills the whole room with light. The bakery is open now. I need a croissant. I’m like a robotic homing device, so bent on bread that I almost get run over in the street by a bicycle. Doesn’t matter. The only things that matter are warm and delicious and buttery.
When I walk in the door, Margot is busy arranging a tray of croissants under the glass counter. She grins when she sees me.
“Bon matin,” she says. “Des croissants?”
I love that she knows me so well already. “Yes, please!”
She gives me two of the hottest, freshest chocolate croissants, a bonus jam cookie, and tells me to sit while she makes me a “café mocha masterpiece.” Her words, not mine. I sit at the table and take out my phone. TextAnywhere shows that I have a message.
Good morning, miss, Gable texted. Hope you slept well.
I instantly grin.
I did, thank you sir :)
“Levi is still in bed?” Margot asks. “Shall I package him some treats for you to take?”
“Yes, please.”
What shall we do today? Gable texts when I check my phone in the elevator, a paper bag of treats for Levi in my arms.
I have no idea, I answer.
Have you been underground yet? he asks.
What?
Okay, then I know what we’ll do.
Sounds a little ominous. Underground? I think I might’ve heard something about Paris having some kind of underground tunnel system or something, but I can’t really remember. I knock on our hotel room door, but Levi doesn’t answer.
“It’s me,” I call, knocking again. “My arms are full, open up.”
Nothing.
I have to put down the bag of pastries, fumbling for my room key, and open it myself.
“Jeez, lazybones, couldn’t even …”
Levi is still asleep. It’s eight in the morning. This is weird. Sleep deprived or not, he’s almost always up at this hour, but here he is, snoring away. I set the paper bag next to him on the bedside table and try to shake him awake, but it doesn’t work. He just rolls over and curls into a protective ball. I’m pretty sure he was a hedgehog in a past life. I sigh out loud, trying to sound extra exasperated. Maybe that’ll spur him into action, in case he’s faking and he really can hear me. But still nothing.
I turn on the TV and sit there, only half-watching. The volume is up loud, but it’s not waking him, either. I watch one morning talk show, then the news, and it’s getting close to eleven o’clock when I text Gable.
My brother’s refusing to wake up.
Does he have to come? he asks.
Well, no. And he probably wouldn’t even want to, and if he did he’d be miserable the whole time.
We can go without him and you can be back in time to have lunch with him or something, Gable texts.
Relief floods me. Yes, that sounds perfect. Go out for a little bit, come back in time for lunch. I grab the hotel notepad and pen off the desk and scrawl a note to Levi: Went out for a bit, back around 2—Keira
Okay, let’s go, I text to Gable. Where shall I meet you?
Gable texts, Take the metro to Place Denfer-Rochereau.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Place Denfer sounds identical to Place d’Enfer, Place of Hell. On the metro ride, I Google it and find out that it used to actually be called something like Barrier of Hell and Victor Hugo once wrote about it. They renamed it after a war general whose last name happened to be Denfer-Rochereau. Convenient.
The French sure know how to make something spectacular out of an intersection. In the Place Denfer-Rochereau, I count eight (I think) separate roads all coming together at odd angles, creating a shape like an asterisk. Triangular buildings all point to the heart of the star, where a statue of a lion presides. Little, leafy parks occupy the triangular space between the streets, giving the whole place a feel of frantic urban busyness, but also of leisurely walks through a zoo.
Gable waits for me, leaning against the wrought-iron fence outside the metro station. He smiles, no teeth, when he sees me.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Aye, ‘tis,” he says, and I laugh before I have time to wonder whether it’s a joke or just the way he talks. He’s still smiling, so I figure I had permission to laugh.
“Where exactly are we going?” I ask as he starts to lead me down the street.
“Underground,” he says. “The Paris Catacombs.”
“Catacombs,” I repeat slowly. “What’s down there?”
“I can’t tell you. It would ruin it.”
He leads me to a blackened wood shack with the words MUSÉE DES CATACOMBES DE PARIS on a sign above the door. The line is short, which doesn’t give me much time to prepare myself.
I am going underground.
Inside, after Gable pays for both of our tickets, we are shown to a stone entryway over seemingly endless uneven stone steps that lead down, down, down. An inscription, carved into the stone, reads ARRÊTE! C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT.
Stop! This is the empire of death.
My whole body takes up a new hobby: trembling uncontrollably.
Gable hops down a couple of the steps like it’s no big deal. I’m stuck at the top.
“Come on,” he says. “Something the matter?” He smiles.
I take a deep breath and take the first step. And then the next. And it gets a bit easier when I’m next to him.
I’m starting to feel okay with this whole descending-into-the-dark-unknown thing as we continue. We aren’t alone; there are plenty of tourists ahead and behind us. If everyone else can do this, I can do this. Right?
We reach the bottom of the stairs, and I’m not so sure anymore. The lighting is almos
t nonexistent, but further ahead of us, it illuminates intricately textured walls with a pattern I can’t make out yet. Rough stone? It feels old down here, very old. It smells old.
We take a few more steps and it becomes horrifyingly obvious what the lights illuminate. What the walls are made out of.
Bones.
Stacks upon stacks of bones.
Piles of tibias and fibias, their knobby ends facing out, so many I couldn’t begin to count them. Layers of them, meters thick, cut with layers, stacks, of skulls.
I clutch Gable’s hand and squeeze tight.
“Ouch, Keira,” he says, trying to loosen my grip.
I close my eyes against the horrors of the bones. So unapologetic. So undisguised. We are in a room made of the remains of other humans and no one else seems to be petrified by this.
“What is this place?” I whisper.
“An ossuary,” he says. “Seriously, Keira, stop squeezing my hand so tight.”
Ossuary: a place where they keep bones. I know this word, but I always figured they would be more like offices. Remains filed away in drawers or bags, out of sight. I never, in my wildest nightmares, thought it would mean haphazard stacks, skulls turned outwards to stare at you. Who would do this to other humans? My stomach is a knot of organs, solid as stone.
“The remains of almost six million people lie in the Paris Catacombs,” a matter-of-fact tour guide says nearby.
She goes on to name the battles and events where most of the dead came from, and I want to clap my hands over my ears. It’s so horrible, the thought of people raiding the battlefield for bodies, collecting all their bones, and piling them down here. Is that how it happened? Or were the people originally in some mass grave, so jumbled together that after decomposition it was impossible to distinguish one from another, and so the ossuary is actually more respectful? I don’t know what to think, what to feel.
I let go of Gable’s hand when he tries to lead me into yet another bone-lined room.
“I can’t,” I whisper. “I just can’t be down here right now.”
I can’t see his face very well in the dark; I can’t tell what kind of look he’s giving me. “Why not?”
“I—I …” My palms break out in a sweat. “I just can’t, okay?”
Everything is tight. My stomach. My ribcage. My clothes feel like they’re suffocating me.
“Okay,” Gable says, slowly stepping toward me. “Okay, let’s leave, then.”
We walk back through the rooms, against the grain of people. We push through tourists on the stairs. Everyone stares.
“Oh, she looks white as a sheet, she does,” an old British lady says as I pass her.
“The poor dear,” her friend says.
“Little girl scared?” a man cackles. “Scared of a bunch o’ bones?”
I hurry my pace and glance up at Gable. I don’t really want him to come to my rescue and I don’t expect it, but some defense, any defense, would be better than the stillness of his face right now. He’s silent and unexpressive as we burst back into the light of the Place Denfer-Rochereau.
My trembling doesn’t stop and my heart rate doesn’t slow. Gable wants to keep walking, but when I see a bench on the edge of one of the little parks, I sit down. I try to force my tense muscles to relax, but the tightness won’t go away.
At first Gable just hovers beside me. When I lean forward to rest my forehead in my hands, he finally sits, but still says nothing.
The Louvre, now the Catacombs … what’s happening to me?
Finally, my heart rate starts to slow and breathing comes a little easier. “I’m sorry,” I say. I force a quick laugh. “I—I’ve had this thing about death recently. I can’t really explain it. Well, actually, I can. I guess I just don’t want to feel like even more of an idiot right now.”
“You aren’t an idiot,” he murmurs.
“Who gets scared of a bunch of bones? They obviously can’t hurt me.”
“Who cares what that guy said.” Gable sighs. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken you there.”
“You didn’t know. Ordinarily, I’d have found it really fascinating, I’m sure. It’s just … I’ve had a rough year.”
He kicks at a rock. “You can tell me about it, if you want.”
“My brother … is just really screwed up. We’re just finding out he’s autistic, and he might have other diagnoses, too. He … tried to kill himself a little while ago. So I guess the thought of death is just really not helpful right now.”
He winces. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry I took you down there. That was so dumb of me.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I still feel like an idiot.”
I smile. “That makes two of us.”
He taps his mouth and looks around us, brow furrowed like he’s looking for something. I watch his finger tap, tap, tap against his perfect, pillowy bottom lip.
“There are other places you can go underground,” he says. “It’s technically illegal, and sometimes people do weird shit down there, but there are no body parts.”
“No body parts is good. Where are these places?”
“I don’t know.” He takes out his cell phone. “But I will find out.”
A stop at a hardware store for some supplies and a metro ride later, Gable and I walk into a dark courtyard behind an apartment building in Montparnasse. Dumpsters line one wall, and it looks like that’s all this space is used for.
He points across the courtyard. “There’s the access.”
It’s just a manhole.
“Are you sure?”
He nods. “The website says you lift the lid and climb down the ladder.”
“Okay,” I say, throwing caution to the wind. “Let’s do this.”
Lifting the manhole lid is the easy part. What’s really scary is the ladder down into the earth. Light from the sky illuminates a few rungs, but they descend into complete darkness.
Gable gets out the flashlight we bought and sticks it in his front shirt pocket.
“Here goes nothing,” he says, setting his foot on the first step. He looks hopelessly awkward at first, climbing down the first couple rungs with his chest on the ground, but once he’s oriented, he looks up at me. “Come on. Easy as pie.”
He smiles, and I shake myself before following him. My whole body starts trembling again as I slither down the hole and start the endless descent. The light only lasts a few feet, and then we’re in darkness.
“At least I couldn’t look down if I wanted to,” I say, my voice a desperate laugh.
“You’re fine,” Gable says. “We’re both fine.”
I don’t know how long we climb, but it starts to feel like forever. My muscles grow sore and my legs start shaking from the effort, not from fear. That’s a good sign, I guess.
Gable finally says, “Okay, I’m at the bottom now.”
A moment later, my foot touches rocky ground. Gable clicks on his flashlight.
It’s more like a room than a cave, with proper square walls and everything, surprisingly large. There’s graffiti everywhere, modern tags and older-looking scrawls and drawings. Stubs of candles sit on every flat surface and in every alcove.
“Should we light some of the candles?” Gables asks, pulling out the matchbox we brought. “Or explore a little more with the flashlight?”
The flashlight makes me feel like monsters are lurking in the darkness beyond the beam, and that something is about to jump out at us at any moment, horror movie style. But I sort of want to explore.
“Let’s go that way.” I point toward a big, arching doorway.
Through the doorway is another, bigger room, with what looks like a low bench running the length of it, candles placed every foot or so. The middle of the room has more makeshift stone benches filling up the center, like church pews.
“I read an article in National Geographic about the police finding an illegal movie theatre set up down here,” Gable says. “Screen, projector, seats, speakers, eve
rything. Even a bar.”
“That’s insane,” I murmur, speaking quietly so my voice won’t echo. “How did they get it all down here?”
“Through the access points, must’ve been,” he says. “There aren’t many. You can apparently explore for hours and hours without coming across another access that isn’t the one you came in.”
I shiver. “Let’s stay close to ours.”
“Of course. The people who do the hardcore explorations are professionals.”
“We are definitely amateur hour,” I confirm.
“Strictly.”
“Let’s light the candles.”
Gable takes out the box and offers it to me.
Lighting the candles, of which there seem to be hundreds, illuminates beauty I never thought could be found hundreds of feet below street level. The walls aren’t just graffitied; they’re covered in murals. There are anonymous faces, painted with the care of any artist working on canvas. There’s a seaside landscape, so detailed you can make out the wings of seagulls in the distance and expressions on the faces of beachgoers. There are plenty of naked bodies, writhing and dancing and performing acts not safe for the eyes of children. I find myself blushing as we light candles and uncover more images in the dark.
When the whole room is blazing with soft light, we sit down on one of the benches. The most spectacular, expansive painting of all is splayed across one wall.
It’s Notre Dame, brought to life ten feet high, each detail so crisp and precise I feel like I’m once again standing in the square, looking up at the towers. The bluebird sky, the trees, and the Seine are all faithfully rendered, and some shadowy human figures populate the walkways. A few are up in the towers, looking down.
From whence came the stones, the artist has written below their amazing painting.
“These caves used to be mines and quarries,” Gable says. “This must be where they quarried the stone for Notre Dame.”
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper. “What kind of person paints something like this so far away from human eyes? Almost no one is going to see it.”
“They wanted the right people to see it,” he whispers back.
Gable’s breath tickles my neck. It makes me shiver again. I turn my head toward him and he kisses me. I stiffen. His lips push gently, like they’re asking a question, and slowly, I melt. His hands slide around my waist.
Maybe in Paris Page 15