Radiant City

by Lauren B. Davis

  Matthew does not want to have this conversation. Jack stares at him.

  “Do I think about it? Occasionally.”

  “And God? What about God?” Jack smoothes the foil out again, and keeps his eyes away from Matthew.

  Matthew shifts uneasily in the chair, reaches over, jiggles a cigarette out of Jack’s pack and lights it. The alcohol slides around inside him, weighing him down, dragging him to a place below, somewhere entirely unsuitable for a discussion of metaphysical subjects.

  “What about Him?”

  “Do you think, you know, whazzit, you know, what it’s going to be like? Forgiveness, or Wrath of Judgment.” He tries to sound glib beneath the blur of booze.

  Sometimes, especially this late at night and seen through the haze of alcohol, Matthew thinks that Jack’s face could be his own, with all his own malignant, unspeakable memories. Jack, more than anyone he knows, needs to believe in divine forgiveness, redemption. Peace. He wants to be able to offer him such things, but says only, “Maybe there’s just oblivion. You know—dreamless sleep.”

  “Yeah,” says Jack, and puts his hand up to cover his eyes. “I get tired, man. Sleep’d be all right, I guess. Aw, fuck it.”

  Guilt, Matthew thinks. The sack of skulls.

  Matthew walks Jack home, for he is drunk enough to be vulnerable to muggers, even with his great bulk. They walk past the gauntlet of strip shows and live sex shows on boulevard de Clichy. A blond girl in too-tight shorts and a red bra under a long grey coat open to reveal her charms, steps from a doorway into their path. Behind her gleam large photos under pink neon. In one, a naked blond kneels over the face of an Asian girl. In another, a man takes a girl from behind, and the bent-over girl performs fellatio on a man standing with his hands in her hair.

  “You like these photos, oui? Such pretty girls. Everything happening inside right now,” says the girl in the shorts and bra. “Come in and talk to these girls.”

  Jack smiles wetly. He puts one of his hands over both of hers and holds them against his chest. The other arm goes around her waist, drawing her close. He sways, as though trying to dance, and Matthew is afraid he will lose his balance, fall, crush her.

  “Okay,” she says, “you like to dance, you come in, dance inside, yes?”

  “Nope,” says Jack. “You come home with me!”

  “You hold me too tight,” she says. “You let go.”

  “Let her go, big fella,” Matthew says, trying to move his arm. It is like trying to bend a piece of wood. “Come on, eh, Jack? Release the lady.”

  From the corner of his eye, Matthew sees a very large, heavily muscled man open the door and move toward them. The man carries a wooden bat in his hand. Before he can reach them, however, Jack yelps and the girl lands on her rear on the sidewalk.

  “Maudit con!” she yells, while Jack falls onto Matthew, so heavily that were it not for the lamppost, against which he finds himself pinned, they would both have fallen to the ground and Matthew would have been crushed. Jack rubs his shin, where a thin trail of blood shows through the torn leg of his pants.

  “Fucking bitch,” he growls. “Stabbed me with her fucking high heel.”

  The bouncer yanks the girl to her feet and shoves her toward the door, then turns to face Matthew and Jack, holding the bat loosely in his right hand.

  “We have a problem, maybe?”

  “No problem,” Matthew says. “Going home.”

  Jack assumes the stance of a street fighter, legs slightly bent, the left in front of the right, hands in half-fists, one at the level of his chest, the other in front of his face. He tries to bounce on the balls of his feet, but is too drunk and falters, stumbling a few steps to his left.

  “I think this is a very good idea,” says the bouncer and he spits. “Take your friend.”

  Without another word he turns and disappears into the club, closing the door behind him. A good bouncer, Matthew thinks—one who rarely has to throw a punch.

  “I shoulda pummelled that shit into meat meal,” says Jack.

  “Let’s go home.” Matthew wanders up the street, knowing Jack will follow, hoping he will not kick out a window first.

  The streets twist and turn in this somewhat neglected part of Paris, nestled between the great ivory towers of Sacré Coeur above and the Moulin Rouge, faded and tawdry, below. The streets are cobbled here and treacherous to the drunken or the lame. A transvestite wearing a cheap wig and a short skirt that reveals burly legs, leans up against a wall, talking to a short man. They pass a joint back and forth between them, the scent sharp and rich. The transvestite stares at them as they lurch past. Her lips are gold-flecked.

  Matthew has to persuade Jack not to approach the crackheads and alcoholics lounging in various degrees of intoxication on the crooked stairs leading up to the place des Abbesses. They remind him of the mutilated corpses in Bosnia—impaled on the sides of barns, festooning the fences like tattered scarecrows, their eyes gouged out, their stomachs cut open. He shakes his head to scatter the ghosts.

  Finally, they arrive at Jack’s door. He wants Matthew to come up and have another drink, for apparently he has a bottle stashed. Matthew declines, but offers to help him up the stairs, a suggestion that offends Jack, and he leaves Matthew there, determined to prove he can make it up to the top-floor room under his own steam. Matthew waits outside the door, hears Jack stumble and curse, and then hears the anvil-drop of his feet climbing the steps.

  Trudging toward home, Matthew is chilled and exhausted. All the doorways seem filled with hollow-eyed shadows. A memory of his mother comes to mind. There was a horse she had, a quarter horse with a bad temper and a habit of rolling, trying to pin a rider beneath him. He pitched a fit in his stall one day and damn near tore his eyelid off on a loose board. Bad-tempered as the horse was, Matthew’s mother had spent days bathing the eye, binding it, calming the horse, trying to save the eye. When Matthew asked her why she bothered, she’d smiled and said, “I can’t help but care about the things I care for.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  All along, Matthew has known there are two subjects he must face if he is going to write the book: Rwanda and Hebron. As the watery December light falls across his desk, he picks up his pen and faces it. First things first. Do not worry about Hebron. First, there are other fields to cross.

  The pen feels like a shard of ice in his hand. His fingers cramp. In the Rwandan refugee camps, I came across a Tutsi woman, her head bandaged with a horrific wound and missing a hand. Perspiration breaks out on his upper lip. In her arms, she cradled a child whose eyes rolled aimlessly and whose jaw hung slack. There were three depressions in his skull. Deep, terrible dents, like dry pools with soft muddy bottoms. I could not understand why he was alive …

  “A boy he went to school with,” the woman said, “found him alive in the pile of bodies. He used a hammer on him.”

  She was from Ntarama. She had hidden with her children in a little church, along with several thousand others, because the soldiers cut them off and they couldn’t escape into the hills. “In years before, when the government killers came, they killed the men and left the women and children alone.”

  The gendarmes arrived and broke holes in the walls of the church. They threw grenades into the crowds of people and then fired shots into the congregation. “You cannot imagine the noise of screaming and the bodies everywhere. It was a terrible mess.” Body parts everywhere. She lay covered with dying people, blood and filth.

  The gendarmes broke down the doors then and walked through the piles, looking for anyone left still alive. “These people they finished off with machetes.” She heard them, their blades slicing and her friends and neighbours moaning. She prayed to suffocate before they found her, but they did not find her and when everything was silent and dark she crawled out from under the stinking corpses. Her husband and three children died, also her parents, and brothers and sisters, and their children as well. She was the only survivor.

  “And the boy?” I
asked.

  “Someone found him, a journalist, I think, and they brought him here. There was another boy with him, who saw it all, but he disappeared and I think he is dead. I will care for this boy now.” The boy’s head lolled helplessly beneath her handless arm.

  Rooms upon rooms full of soul-scarred orphans.

  The survivors of Ntarama chose not to bury their dead. They left the bodies and bones of their families lying on the floor of the church. They left them as a memorial so that no one will forget. I visited the church. It was a charnel house. I covered my mouth and nose with Vick’s Mentholated Rub to cope with the stench. The flies formed an undulating blanket on the bodies. They were so thick, when I breathed in they filled my mouth.

  Matthew stops writing and puts his head in his hands. The room festers with ghosts. They breathe on him, their breath icy and foul. He pours himself a large whisky and returns to the desk, gritting his teeth, shaking his shoulders to shrug the spectres away. They do not go far.

  It is an impossible task. There is no word in the English language, not in any language that he knows, for the feeling. Horror. Rage. Grief. Impotence. Confusion. Terror. Disbelief. Guilt. This is not the first place, nor the first time, such savagery has been unleashed, nor will it be the last. Surely, humankind should have found the proper word for this by now. They created it; they should be able to name it.

  He rocks back and forth, his hands clasped, his thumbs beating against his closed lips. He makes sounds. It tears him apart, the way he cannot find a word. But there is no word, no words that can do justice to the dead and maimed. There is only a list of atrocities. All he can do is transcribe the facts.

  Nyanza. A mass grave. At least two thousand dead. Bodies bloated, contorted, covered in blood, in flies, in excrement, putrefying. Dogs everywhere, family pets turned feral and horribly well fed.

  Ginkongoro. Mwulire. Mugonero. Kigali.

  Then the cholera epidemics began. Hundreds of people in a blasted building, yellow vomit running from their mouths. No water anywhere. No help coming. A hillside of children near a hospital hut, thought at first to be dead, but not all dead. Crawling toward the hut as they died. In the hut nothing but the dead. Rivers full of bodies. Fields full of bodies. Bodies in decay. Bloated bodies. Fly-swarmed bodies. Decapitated children. Naked women and children tied together and tossed in the rushing Akagera River. Lake Victoria polluted with an estimated fifty thousand corpses.

  Along with all the other journalists, he had cried out the numbers, pointed at the gashed and hacked bodies. He wrote his words and sent them along the wire, and nobody listened. Nobody came. Only clouds of ghosts, swarms of them, numerous as midges, as gnats, as rats, as flies, as maggots.

  In the course of days, a million dead.

  And so, the dreams of Rwanda—of lying under bodies, listening to the knife-man looking for anyone still breathing, nostrils clogged with matter. Dreams of the clawing dead. Dreams, once again, of burning barns and horses.

  At last, he puts the pen down and covers his eyes. His head aches. He does not have the strength to pick the pen up again even if he wanted to. The walls arc in toward him. The air is too heavy, the room too small, the dark too oppressive. He practically runs to the door, down the stairs across the street and into the café.

  The light spills out of the windows. Honey light. Golden light. Inside it is warm. It is fragrant with the smells of cooking. As the smells hit his nose, they mutate. They smell of decomposition and rot.

  “Coffee,” he says, as he claims a stool at the counter.

  “You okay?” says Anthony, poking his head around the kitchen alcove.

  Saida pours him coffee.

  “Not really.”

  “You need to eat,” says Saida. “I will get you something.”

  It is simple, these things: food, friends, coffee and light. He cannot eat, refuses food, asks for more coffee.

  Ramzi sits at the counter too, watching the news on a small television. “Hello, Matthew,” he says. “How are you working?”

  “It’s killing me.”

  “Ah, the artist’s soul,” Ramzi teases him. “You need an attic.”

  “I need something.” He sees his hands are trembling, sees Ramzi noticing his trembling hands.

  “You should come with me tonight. There is a good place for dancing that I know. Lots of girls.”

  “No thanks. Not my scene.”

  Ramzi turns to the screen. There are many lights flashing. People running. Police. Matthew’s adrenaline pumps. He leans forward, trying to catch the words.

  “What’s that?”

  “Ah, mon Dieu,” says Ramzi. “It is very bad. A bomb on the metro. Port-Royal Station.”

  Sirens are all over now, all through the streets, even in the café they can hear them.

  “There are many injured,” Saida says. “And there are dead. They are bringing bodies out. In the middle of rush hour on a busy line. They are animals, these people.” Her voice is ragged and her hand is at her mouth. “It is starting all over again.” The year before, a series of bombs had gone off in Paris, set by

  Algerian fundamentalists. Eight people slaughtered on the metro, just two stops from the present bombing.

  On the television screen people stumble about, covered in blood. Emergency workers run from one person to the next, swabbing, trying to calm them. The wounded thrash about on stretchers. Ambulances come and go, the wails rising and falling. The commentator sounds nearly hysterical. Early reports say police suspect the bomb was made of a canister filled with nails. Thick black smoke churns out of the metro entrance.

  Matthew’s pulse races and the room spins. He gets up, upsetting his coffee cup.

  “Matthew?” Saida’s eyes follow him as he backs toward the door.

  “Gotta go.”

  “You going down there?” says Anthony. “Want me to come with you?”

  If he does not get air, he will suffocate. “No. I’m not going there.” He pushes through the door, past a couple on their way in.

  When he is out on the street, he takes huge inhalations. He must get to his apartment.

  But in his apartment it is worse. He can hear the sirens. And there are all those pages about Rwanda sitting on the desk. He knows it is impossible, but he feels as though he has summoned the horror through his writing. Unleashed it like a demon. Called it to them through the threads of his memory. The phone rings. He does not pick it up. He goes into the kitchen, finds a bottle of vodka, and does not bother with a glass. He finds his pills. Takes four. Stuffs wax earplugs in his ears. Takes the bottle and gets into bed. The phone rings again. He ignores it. He waits for unconsciousness. The demons can’t get you when you’re there. Good drugs, he thinks.

  The next morning dawn refuses to break, refuses to take a stand against the night—it merely infuses itself through the watery light. Smoke-coloured mist envelops Paris. The day becomes simply less dark than night. The boundaries between things blur. Street, sky, stone, smoke from chimney pots, all have the same dull muffle of light. Shades of muffle it is, a damp wool scarf wrapped around Matthew’s head. At noon, he downs another handful of sleeping pills and crawls back to bed.

  The next day he does not get up at all.

  And so it goes.

  When hunger drives him from his nest of blankets, which begin to smell sour even to his nose, he eats pale green flageolet beans, salad shrimp, or corn, all direct from the can. He drinks vodka and when the vodka runs out he switches to scotch and then beer and finally just tap water and pills.

  Seeking a fork, one afternoon (or is it evening?) he opens a kitchen drawer and shrieks when he sees what’s inside. He jumps back, hitting the edge of the counter behind him with sharp force, right in the kidneys. There is a nutcracker in the drawer. And not even his nutcracker. Something left from a previous tenant that he had meant to throw out. Why didn’t I? Did I want to test myself? Nutcracker nightmares from Tuzla. The man whose hands had been mangled by force of a nutcracker. It took
hours, he told Matthew.

  He avoids the stove because the thought of the blue gas burner makes him shudder, as do knives. He forces himself to pick up and throw out the bag of sinister oranges because they remind him that being hit repeatedly with a bag of oranges turns the organs to mush but the bruises do not show for days. The radiators are malevolent, whispering that a small body will cook if tied to a hot one for long enough.

  He is afraid to look out the window, for there are too many cars out there and cars have hood ornaments. They all morph into the car of a Croat warlord who used the head of an imam for one. Cars also have antennas, which are the same as the one on the

  Soviet jeep on the outskirts of Kabul with twenty or so human ears tied it. Pull the fucking shutters!

  Matthew stands in the middle of the apartment and in the reflection of the windowpanes, he sees a little girl trapped against a wall in Hebron. He presses his hands to his eyes until pain shoots up into his brain, but still he sees things, sees faces, and hears blasts and the sound of screams. His skin is a fester of futility, a gangrene of guilt. He breaks out in small blisters.

  He drinks another scotch and takes another pill, unaware that he calls out to Kate. He covers his head with the blankets. And so on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Anthony is not working this morning but he telephones around ten.

  “I’m still worried about Matthew. Now he doesn’t pick up,” he says. Several days ago, Anthony told her he had talked to Matthew briefly but that he had been, to use Anthony’s words, distant and muzzly. “I went over yesterday after I left the restaurant. I knocked, but he wouldn’t answer. Nobody’s seen him.”

  “He has not been in for maybe four days now, is that right?”

  “Five, I think.”