Radiant City

by Lauren B. Davis

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

  Matthew hangs up the phone and stares at the wall some more. His funds are less than limited. A few thousand. He is an independent, with no newspaper empire behind him. No long-term disability. His medical insurance will eat this up. He will never get any more. Bad risk. Very shortly, he will be destitute. If I’m still alive. Like mother, like son?

  Writing a book might at least buy time in which he can sort through things and come to a decision. The knowledge he now carries, heavy as a sack of skulls, irrevocably changes the world. There is so little hope, and no purpose to anything. The world is exposed. It is horror, and all his belief in the power of observation proven to be folly. And if his mission fails, if it turns out there is nothing to understand, no answer, then he knows very well how to permanently stop the pain. Until then, he might as well write a book, maybe even explain a thing or two.

  The agent calls again the next day. “I suppose we should talk,” Matthew says.

  “Good man,” says Brent Cappilini.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Matthew wakes with a start. It is how he always wakes now, as though someone has yelled in his ear. He opens his eyes, looks out the bedroom window onto the courtyard. Dark out there, but that means nothing, it might be morning, might be afternoon even. The bed is as hard as an army cot. That’s the problem with furnished apartments. That and the crucifix over the bed. Must remove that. He rolls onto his side, sits up slowly and hangs his head in his hands. Coffee. Must have coffee. He looks at his feet and notices for the first time the broken blood vessels around his ankles. When had they appeared? He feels sick to his stomach. Bathroom. The morning gag. Brush teeth. Do not look too closely in the mirror. Wash. Shaving optional. Forget shaving.

  Shuffle into the kitchen. Root around in the sink for a semiclean cup. Plug in the coffee maker. While coffee brews, go into the living room. The two large windows here tell him it is morning. Turn on the pint-sized television. Blah-blah-blah. Turn it off again. Go back to the kitchen. Open the refrigerator. Steak. An old bag of salad. A wrinkling tomato. Half a dozen cans of beer. Some goat cheese. A bowl of fat green olives marinated in garlic. Whoa. Stomach not ready for that one. Ah, milk. Coffee in cup, milk in coffee. Cup in hand. Sip. Ah. Coffee brain fizzle. There’s a dance in the old boy yet.

  He carries the cup into the living room, to the cubbyhole on the other side of the main room. He congratulates himself again on finding a top-floor apartment at 11 bis, rue de Moscou. He sees the apartment as monastic, with aspirations. He is trying to step out of the husk of his past here and wants as little as possible tugging at his sleeve. If he is going to emerge, he must do so unencumbered. If he is not going to emerge, he wants to leave nothing behind. The price is right and more importantly it is a top floor, so his claustrophobia is not a garrotte across his throat. There is no bang-bang-bang of overhead footsteps, and the light is good. The syrupy light of late August flows in through the open window, across the cluttered, battered old table that serves as Matthew’s desk. It soothes him, as does the view itself.

  The place du Dublin is not a particularly pretty square and it is in a small corner of the 8th arrondissement behind the Gare Saint-Lazare where there isn’t a single tourist attraction. Le Primavera Bistro on the corner sets up red tables and chairs and yellow umbrellas beneath the poplars whenever there is the least hope of suitable weather. There is also a green fountain that, like the quality of this morning’s light, pleases him. There is something about the miniature temple, with its steady streams of water flowing over the upturned arms of the goddesses Simplicity, Temperance, Charity and Goodness, that gives Matthew hope. The sunlight sparkling on the water is like laughter, transmuted at this distance from sound to shards of prismatic encouragement.

  Matthew has seen a great deal of light in his travels around the world, and he has come to the conclusion that it has different properties in different places: the harsh glare of a frozen icefield, the sweet veil in a bamboo thicket, the distortion of distance and depth that follows a thunderstorm when the sun’s rays stab under the skin of cloud cover, the threatening gloom of a darkening prison cell. Light takes on the characteristics of the objects in its path, and this, he has come to believe, is what humans do as well. Light can blind as well as reveal. It can save someone who wanders too close to an unseen edge, but it can just as easily betray a person cowering in a hidden place. He has concluded that contrary to what religious imagery would try to persuade the populace, light is neutral, and indifferent.

  The wounds in his body have closed over and physically, Matthew is as good as he is going to get. The mind is another matter. Diagnoses have been assigned. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Nervous Exhaustion. Still, the practical problem exists regardless of mental fragility: if you want to eat, you must have money. In a flurry of demented activity back in the United States the month before, he sold everything he owned. It put some money in the bank, but depressingly little. If he wants more, he must write the book. It is a simple equation, the execution of which has thus far evaded him.

  And so, begin now. Start again. But first, scan the bookshelf above the desk to see if there is any inspiration to be had there or, failing that, any excuse to procrastinate. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee, which is Matthew’s bible. But not today. Some short stories by Grace Paley. A book by M.F.K. Fisher, a gift from someone now forgotten. The Collected Stories of John Cheever, some science fiction. Asimov, Frank Herbert, Heinlein, Ray Bradbury. Nope. Sorry, pal. Nothing for you this morning. Pick up a pen and face the page. It must be longhand, for he has long since learned the terrible temptation of the delete button. Breathe. Start where? Beirut? El Salvador? He writes about Beirut, and Sid Cameron, the Belgian photographer who wore a brown-and-yellow paisley vest he never washed. About the day Sid took him to the Palestinian refugee camp at Sabra, after the Lebanese Phalangists had slaughtered thousands. About the endless swelling bodies, the wandering, weeping women, the rubble, the mutilations. About how Sid had thoughtfully turned his head away as Matthew vomited and then offered him a half-bottle of warm Coke with which to wash out his mouth. “You’ll get used to it,” said Sid, who had survived his initiation in Vietnam and told stories about what napalm and bouncing-betty landmines could do.

  Sabra was such a dusty place, and hot. Like Hebron. Don’t go there. Back away. Next stop, El Salvador. Still hot, but wet, damp enough to flush the dust out of memory’s mouth. The pen moves …

  El Salvador. Carl showed me the ropes. He drove slowly, thoughtfully, on his daily rounds, taking photos of all the new corpses that appeared like weird night-blooming succulents, fresh each morning. Fresh too were the strange blisters that blossomed on my skin, spreading like a pale parasitic vine across my hands, my arms, and my chest. The rash grew with the rising sun and receded each night, only to begin again. The blisters didn’t bother me much during the day, when they were nothing more than a soft burning, but at night, as they germinated under my skin, they itched like something crawling beneath the flesh.

  Carl laughed at me as the blisters spread across my face, making me look like a pimply adolescent. “You should have seen the stuff that’d grow on you in Nam. It was like farm country in your boots,” he said.

  What ever happened to Carl? Matthew thinks, back again in his body, at his desk, in this Paris apartment. Oh yes, newscaster somewhere in the American Midwest, last anyone heard. And then, knowing he should not, he reads over what he’s written. Frustration wells up from the bottom of his gut, bubbles over his chest and down to his fingertips. He thinks he should keep a large metal garbage bin next to his desk wherein he can have regular fires. It is difficult not to tear the page to shreds with his teeth. He has become, however, a very good crumpler, and his wastebasket is more than accepting.

  So, there will be no more writing today. But what, then? He does not want to do what he mostly does. Mostly he sits and tries very hard not to re
member things. Not Josh. Not the father. Not the daughter. Not Kate. Not his own father, brother, mother. Not Rwanda. Not Kosovo. Not Chechnya. Not so many places, not so many people. Not remembering them leaves very little room in his mind for anything else.

  It is now eleven o’clock in the morning, and from the window, he watches the young man at Chez Elias, a tiny café on the square. The man wears a white apron and uses a long-handled brush to wash the glass. Now he whistles optimistically, but Matthew has seen him sitting at a table in the window, no customers in the café, poring over maps with a look of deep dissatisfaction on his face.

  Matthew realizes he is jiggling his knee, tapping his foot, and he stops himself, because he knows from experience this nervous energy is not good for him. He tells himself he is adjusting to the tick-tock passing of time outside the crisis zones. He tells himself he is fine. He tells himself he should not have had that fourth cup of coffee. He tries to read the International Herald Tribune, a story about the North Africans, the san-papiers, who have occupied the Saint Bernard church in Barbès, demanding legal residence papers. It looks bad, with the government sounding tougher and tougher. It will not end well. He puts the paper aside. Folds it in a neat square and presses it flat. Looks around for somewhere to stuff his discontent.

  The sweep of the clock’s hands is agonizingly slow; the voices of the children on the street below are needles in his ears. He briefly considers calling Brent, back in New York, but it is too early, and besides, he already knows what Brent will say. How’s the book coming along? Come on, pal, get yourself together.

  Deciding what to do in a tourist town when one is not technically a tourist is a wretched task. Matthew has seen the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame on previous trips; he has chased the ghosts of Joyce and Hemingway through the cafés and bookshops. He does not want to stroll up the Gap-and-Planet-Hollywood-infested Champs Élysées. He certainly does not want to go to a museum. He begins pacing, which is a bad sign.

  Jack Saddler. Perhaps it is the morning’s work, the memories of Sid and Carl that make him think of Jack Saddler, but the name now springs to mind and he is surprised he has not thought of it before. Jack Saddler. Vietnam vet, ex-mercenary, sometime combat photographer. The last time he saw Jack, back in Kosovo, Jack had said he was heading to Paris, in need of a break. Jack Saddler, who knew a thing or two about lugging a sack of skulls.

  France Telecom proves helpful and a few minutes later Matthew dials a number for a mobile phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Jack?” There is a lot of noise in the background.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Matthew Bowles.”

  “Hey! You in Paris?”

  “Yup.”

  A moment’s silence and then, “How you holding up?”

  “Fair.”

  “I can imagine.” The sound of car horns. “Fuck off! Not you, Matthew. You’d think we were in Tehran the way the French drive. Can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you.”

  “Tell you what, you free later?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Meet me at this bar I know. Called the Bok-Bok.” Jack chuckles. “You’ll like the place. It never closes, and no one forces conversation if you don’t feel sociable, know what I mean?”

  “Just give me an address and a time,” Matthew says.

  When he gets off the phone Matthew looks at his watch, and then he takes a sleeping pill and strains toward unconsciousness until evening.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Saida Ferhat wakes up as alert as a fox with the sound of hounds on the wind. It has been this way for a long time, started only weeks after her marriage to Anatole twelve years ago. It does not matter that, since Anatole is gone, she no longer has to worry about dodging an early morning boot thrown at her head. Waking this way has become a difficult habit to break. She waits for her heart to stop pounding, and then slips her legs from beneath the blankets, and pushes her wide, strong feet into the thick socks that serve as slippers. She wraps her dressing gown around her and quickly braids her hair, so that it hangs in an arm-thick rope down to the swell of her buttocks. Once, her hair had been black as the inside of an ebony box, but now there is silver in it. A strand here and there, and there another. Each one witness to a worried night, a wary day. At thirty-six, Saida suspects she will be snow-topped before she becomes craggy-faced.

  She pulls the lapel of her robe up to cover the scars on her neck. It looks as though the skin is as malleable as clay there, as if a sculptor with no talent for creation has pushed it and pulled it, finally given up and left it unfinished. She flexes and straightens her right hand. The skin over the veins, stretched across the knuckle bones, is unnaturally smooth, and in the morning it is stiff, itches and pulls, no matter that she rubs almond and jojoba oil and aloe in each night.

  Going to the bedroom door, she puts her hand against the jamb as she opens it, trying to be quiet for her son Joseph who is sixteen and sleeping on the couch in the room that serves as living room, dining room and kitchen. He did not get in until too late last night, and Saida knows she should be angry with the boy, running the streets, hanging out in Barbès, smoking and slouching around like a thug. She looks at him, and in sleep his face is sweet, beautiful almost—his soft lips open, his perfect skin flushed. He looks nothing like his stepfather, Anatole, who has thick features and a low hairline. Joseph looks like his father, Habib, buried fifteen years ago in Lebanese soil in a grave beside his Uncle Khalil—his eyes are thick-lashed and his nose is long and fine. Only his lower lip is imperfect. A slight malformation there; at the bottom right it looks perpetually stung and swollen. Saida has told him since he was a toddler that Gabriel, archangel of the cleansing fire, must have kissed him there. It makes him more beautiful, she says.

  It is all she can do not to reach out and brush her hand over Joseph’s head, the hair fashionably shaved as though he were a prisoner. Whatever anger there had been evaporates and she lets him sleep.

  Saida uses the toilet and washes her face, brushes her teeth. She then leaves the apartment, stepping out into the dingy hall. Someone has ground a cigarette out on the floor and left the butt. A filterless Gitane and so it must be the fat man who lives with his ferret at the end of the hall. A filthy man. A filthy animal. Saida uses a tissue to pick it up. The man would shit in his own bed, she thinks. Two doors down, she lets herself into the apartment where her father and her brother, Ramzi, live. This apartment is also two rooms, with the men sharing a bedroom. The main room is slightly smaller than hers and there is a table with four chairs. There is also a larger armchair, bought second-hand for her father, covered in gold-and-blue damask, somewhat stained, and a round brass-topped table on which stands a silver tea set with a samovar that is not real silver. The tea set is the last remnant of life in Damour, of her mother’s good taste and of promises betrayed.

  Saida boils the coffee and sets out bread, cheese and oranges. Elias, her father, shuffles out of the bedroom, adjusting his dentures. They do not fit properly and they hurt him, she knows, but he is too proud to go without them. His hair sticks up at odd angles and his eyes have dark shadows under them.

  Saida worries about her father, who has never found his way in this country, never healed—as though anyone could—from the loss of so many family members. His wife. His parents. His younger son, Khalil. His daughter-in-law, Farida. His son-in-law, Habib. His grandson, his namesake, Little Elias. He walks through the world now, his ear cocked to the cries of ghosts. Nor has he coped with the fall in status. No longer a civil engineer, respected, a landowner—but a café keeper, and less, the old man who sits by the door. She knows he misses the field, the oranges and the sun. She knows he misses being a man who understands his world. He is so often baffled now, sits gazing out the window.

  He kisses her on both cheeks, pats her unscarred arm. “Good morning, Daughter.”

  “Did you sleep?”

  He raises his eyebrows and makes a tsk-tsk sound. “La. Two hour
s, maybe three.”

  “So go back to bed, Father.”

  “Give me coffee. I’ll be fine. An old man’s complaint. A lack of sleep is nothing in this world. Nothing.”

  Saida pours the coffee, sweetens it and hands it to her father. He blows on it noisily and then sips. “Good. Your brother sleeps like a drunkard. Tanks could roll through the living room and he’d hear nothing.”

  “Is he up?”

  Elias makes a face.

  “He’s going to miss the bread man.”

  “Get him up.”

  Saida goes to the door and opens it. “Yalla! Ramzi! Up!” Her brother lies on his back on one of the two narrow beds, long arms and legs dangling over the sides, his mouth open. She shakes him by the shoulder. Without waking, he reaches between his legs with both hands. Through the thin blanket Saida sees he has an erection and she feels blood come to her cheeks, bringing with it a flush of resentment. She slaps his arm. “Wake up! You’re late again.” His eyes spring open.

  “What?”

  “Get up, Ramzi. The bread man will come and you will not be there. What is he going to do? Leave the pita on the stones?”

  “I’m not your son, Saida. Get Joseph up if you want to bully someone,” he says, but he sits up and scratches his head, a sure sign he’s moving in the right direction. “What time is it?”

  “Seven-thirty.”

  “Shit.” He scrambles out of bed. “I need a shower.”

  “Yes, you do,” she says, wrinkling her nose as he pushes past her.

  She goes back to the kitchen and pours more coffee for her father, puts food on a plate for him. “Do we have grapes?” says Elias.

  “No grapes. Have an orange. I have to get Joseph up,” she says.

  “Are you taking me to the café, or is Ramzi?”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “The sheets should be changed today.”

  “I know, Father. You don’t have to always tell me,” she says as she leaves.