by Dan Rhodes
Monsieur Akiyama looked on, slightly baffled, as this girl they had hired to drive them around the day before wept tears of joy on to his wife’s shoulder. It had been an unusual trip so far, with people falling in love with photographs and so on, but he didn’t see what he could do but allow it all to happen. Over breakfast, his wife had given him a stern talking-to. He had spent many years at the head of the family, she had said, setting rules and making decisions, running it like a small department within a large corporation. Now he was retired, and it was time for him to step back from all that, to relax a little and hand some of those responsibilities to her. It all seemed very curious, but he didn’t dare raise an objection.
Thinking about it, he supposed he had never really warmed to Natsuki Kobayashi. There had been something hard about her, maybe even calculating. The last time he had met her had been at her apartment for dinner and her cat, an objectionable creature called Makoto, had clawed through his trousers and scratched his leg, and instead of reprimanding it she had picked it up and given it a kiss, and shown him a photograph of it wearing a knitted Viking’s helmet. Monsieur Akiyama had pointed out that he had spent many years at a senior position within a large corporation, and if a subordinate at this corporation had scratched the leg of a superior they would not be rewarded with kisses and cuddles, and the superior who had been scratched would not then have to suffer the further ordeal of having to look at a photograph of the subordinate dressed in a knitted Viking’s helmet.
Natsuki Kobayashi had taken this innocent observation to heart, and spoken to him in a rather inappropriate tone, saying that her apartment was not a large corporation, and the cat was an equal, not a subordinate. The rest of the evening had passed under something of a cloud.
It had been an unpleasant experience. He supposed his wife was right: Sylvie Dupont would make a better daughter-in-law. She did seem nicer. Ultimately, though, the decision would lie with Toshiro. He had always seemed to be very fond of Natsuki Kobayashi.
As the chaos swirled around him, Monsieur Akiyama surprised himself by coming to the conclusion that, on balance, he was having a nice time in Paris, and that maybe there was something to be said for a little bit of disorder after all.
Love was in the air, and when Sylvie had finally untangled herself from Madame Akiyama and Herbert, Aurélie took the opportunity to announce that she had a brand new boyfriend called Léandre Martin.
‘I met him in Le Marais,’ she said, ‘and he looks a bit like Jesus Christ.’
‘Not this again,’ said Lucien. ‘Do all women fancy Jesus?’ He looked to Sylvie to find out her views on the matter.
She nodded. She couldn’t deny it. ‘Yes, it’s true. Jesus is incredibly sexy – like you wouldn’t believe – but most men who try to look like him don’t get it right. They just look like dirty hippies, or folk music people. It’s not often you see a real Jesus.’
‘I know,’ said Aurélie ‘and the best thing about it is that I don’t think Léandre’s even trying to look like Jesus, he just happens to look like him. It’s a coincidence. He’s definitely not a dirty hippie, and I’ll tell you something else: right from the start, from the moment our eyes met, I felt as if I already knew him. There was something about him that seemed really familiar.’
‘Well, obviously,’ said Lucien. ‘He looks like Jesus. Everybody’s seen Jesus before.’
‘I suppose so. But there was more to it than that. It was almost magical.’
Sylvie gave her a half smile, trying to indicate that they needed to have a talk about this later on, just the two of them. ‘You’ve got it bad,’ she said.
Aurélie smiled. ‘I really have.’ She told them all about how she had spent the morning and most of the afternoon with him, how they had walked and talked and made each other laugh, how wonderful he had been with Herbert, and how they had arranged to meet up for lunch the next day.
‘Tread at least a little bit carefully,’ said Sylvie. She recognised something in Aurélie’s instant infatuation that she had seen in so many of her boyfriends. And then she thought of Toshiro Akiyama, and realised she was guilty of exactly the same lack of caution.
‘For once there’s no need,’ said Aurélie. ‘Nothing can possibly go wrong.’
Sylvie half-smiled again. They needed to talk about all this when it was just the two of them. Or the three of them, as Herbert was certain to be there.
Caught up on this tide of romance, Lucien asked Madame Akiyama if she had mentioned him to Akiko.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
He nodded sadly. He told her he understood. He wouldn’t be asking again, at least not until he saw them off at the airport, when he would hand Madame Akiyama a letter and implore her to pass it on to her daughter. He had already begun to draft it. My dear Akiko Akiyama, it began. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure what to say. Nothing he tried seemed to sound right.
Madame Akiyama continued. ‘But I’m going to send Toshiro this picture right now.’ She showed him her phone. On it was a photograph she had taken of Sylvie with Poirot before breaking the news about Natsuki Kobayashi. Lucien looked at the picture, and it was a while before he could bring himself to hand the phone back.
He watched as Madame Akiyama pasted the photograph into an email. He thought Sylvie looked beautiful. Toshiro Akiyama would have to be insane not to fall in love with her.
Madame Akiyama pressed send.
VENDREDI
XIII
The doors had opened at six o’clock, and Life was due to begin at seven. There was to be no private viewing, no champagne reception, no room full of specially invited movers and shakers from the art world. Thirty press passes had been given out, but when the reporters arrived at the venue they found they had to queue with everybody else, and once they were in the auditorium there was no special enclosure reserved for them. They had no choice but to stand or sit alongside the people who had been fast enough to buy tickets for the opening night. They all complained about this, of course, and two of them stormed out. Though they had been sent by bitterly rivalrous publications, the pair of them presented a united front as they told Le Machine’s press officer that they were not prepared to spend their Friday evening standing next to ordinary people while they watched a man do a shit.
The press officer smiled as they threw their passes to the ground and disappeared into the night. There was always an incident like this. She picked up the passes and handed them to the people at the front of the returns queue, who couldn’t believe their luck and raced past security to the back of the auditorium.
By six forty-five everybody was in, and the room was buzzing with anticipation. The stage was set. The glass phials were in place, the largest on each side of the stage – the one for urine was on the right, and on the left was the one for faeces, complete with its gas collection mechanism. Smaller containers for less voluminous secretions were placed on a table to the left-hand side, some of them within a refrigerated glass cabinet. As the event went on, viewers would be able to mill around and approach the exhibits in order to get a really good look at them. A narrow runway bisected the front half of the auditorium, so Le Machine himself could go out and stand among his viewers, and they would have the opportunity to approach and examine him.
Also on stage were a bidet and a shower. Answering some criticism they had faced in Tokyo that a small amount of his bodily excretions would be washed into the sewers, Le Machine had arranged for all the shower and bidet water to be put through a filter, a large version of the kind that is found in a coffee machine, and any skin flakes or stray particles of faeces would be collected and put into their own jar. Right at the front of the stage was a clear glass urinal that drained into a clear glass jug. At the back of the stage were a whiteboard and black pen, a bed, a set of weights, specially made from glass, and a small kitchen consisting of a single gas ring, a few miscellaneous utensils, a sink and a small table, beside it a folding chair. This stage, for the next twelve weeks, was to be one man’
s home.
The loudspeakers were silent: there were no announcements, and no introductory music played. For what would be the last time in a long while, people in this room were able to hold conversations, and the occasion was such that they were talking only of Life.
I hope we’ll get to see him do a poo, said one. It would be great to be able to say we were there when it happened for the first time in Paris.
Elsewhere, somebody was saying that a friend of theirs had seen Le Machine in San Francisco, and that, Apparently he can do a poo without any wee coming out. Every time, as well. That’s pretty impressive.
There were a number of languages and accents to be heard, scattered among the chatter of the locals: Korean, American, German . . . Somewhere an Englishman was holding forth to a stranger on the French love of urine. They’re crazy about it, he was telling them. In fact it’s all they’re interested in – they call it eau d’amour. That’s why I could never have a French girlfriend – I’m just not into water sports. They come on to me all the time, he lied, but I turn them down.
To hear what they were saying, it might be supposed that there was little more to Life than going to the toilet.
Monsieur Rousset’s daughter, Doctor Élise Rousset, had been appointed Le Machine’s chief medical supervisor for the duration of Life, and backstage in his small private room, which was little more than a cubicle, she was nearing the end of his full medical. She had the power to stop the whole event if she felt there were any doubts about the state of his health, but she found nothing untoward. Le Machine was a fine physical specimen, and he seemed calm as he readied himself.
Her father had become Le Machine’s number one fan, and he had been dropping all sorts of unsubtle hints about what a wonderful son-in-law he would make for some lucky father, and how it was inevitable that he and she would become close over the coming weeks as she gave him his regular on-stage check-ups. She felt a little sorry for her father. He wasn’t going to get his wish. She supposed that if she had liked men at all then she might well have had a bit of a crush on this perfectly sculpted body. She could appreciate its beauty, but at the same time she felt no desire to press herself up against it.
She had always told herself that she would only tell her father about her preference for women if she was ever to find herself in a steady long-term relationship, and that moment was fast approaching. Things had been going well with Thao all year, and it had been months since they’d had a long and pleasant conversation about how neither was interested in seeing anybody else. They had reached the point where they had been going online and browsing apartments together, and they had drawn up a shortlist of their favourites, and were starting to arrange to view them.
She had wanted to hold off telling her father for as long as she could, not because she worried about his reaction – she knew he would always love her no matter what – nor because she was in any way insecure about the way she was, but because she knew how much he enjoyed girl on girl porn, and she didn’t want to do anything that might risk spoiling it for him. It was a central part of his life, and she worried that the knowledge that his daughter was a lesbian would permanently alter his relationship with it. For him, lesbians weren’t really people, they were purely sexual beings that were put on earth to take their clothes off and roll around together in improbable scenarios for the titillation of men. It seemed unfair to the point of cruelty to bring them from the realm of fantasy into his everyday life. He was a good and caring man, and as she pondered the worst-case scenario, it might even be that this knowledge about his daughter would lead to such a psychosexual minefield that he would no longer be able to bring himself to watch his favourite films, and that saddened her. But with Thao on the scene, she knew the moment was approaching when he would have to know.
When she was small she had rummaged through his pile of preview videos, and worked out from his personal star ratings which films he liked the best. It was the covers of these films that told her it was OK for women to be together, that she was not the only person in the world who felt the way she did. It was only later in life that she realised that the scenes she saw on these video cases had very little to do with real life, but even so just knowing that somewhere in the world there were girls who kissed other girls had helped her become comfortable with herself from a very early age. Her mother had always known, and she sympathised with her daughter’s reason for keeping her father in the dark. She had met Thao many times though, and had grown fond of her, and had already begun to think of her as part of the family. She knew as well as Élise that the time was coming when he would have to find out.
Le Machine coughed twice, and she relaxed her grip on his silky smooth testicles. Everything was in order. She signed the necessary papers from the insurance company, wished him well and left the room. They had been running late, but had caught up. The show would begin on time. He had requested a few minutes alone.
He paced up and down, and ran his hand across his newly razored head. He had too much to think about, and didn’t know where to start. There was Professor Papavoine, there was the strangely furious journalist from L’Univers, who had barked all sorts of questions at him, there was . . . there was everything. He had left too much until the last minute, and the time he should have spent in quiet preparation for the weeks ahead had instead been filled with places to go and people to see, and too many difficult conversations. He had even arrived at the venue half an hour late, to find a frantic crew wondering where he had got to.
So much had happened to leave him shaken. He felt he had experienced every possible emotion that day, some of them brand new to him, and they had left him in a state of turmoil. He wondered whether the doctor would have been quite so ready to declare him to be in full health if she had been able to see inside his head. He had done his best to appear calm, but he had never felt this way on an opening night, his mind a maelstrom of conflicting thoughts. He knew he had to hold himself together. The last thing he wanted to do right now was stand naked in a room full of strangers, but too many people were depending on him, and he couldn’t back out. He had no choice. He was going to do it. He only hoped he wouldn’t need a phial for tears. There were always a couple of spare receptacles to hand, in case of unexpected secretions; in Tokyo he had caught a bug and repeatedly vomited into a glass bucket, but he had never yet needed one for tears.
He picked up his phone, and made a call. It went to voice mail. He left a brief message, and hung up. Then he switched the phone off and put it in his holdall with his clothes, which he locked inside the medical cupboard. He wouldn’t be needing any of his stuff for the next twelve weeks.
He closed his eyes, breathed deeply and did what he could to ready himself. He called for his masseur and his sound designer. There were ten minutes to go.
When he was a child, Jean-Didier Delacroix’s father had told him over and over again that one of the most valuable weapons in an arts correspondent’s armoury was inscrutability. There is no point in having your opinion written all over your face, he had told him, and Jean-Didier Delacroix had found this to be among the most valuable of his father’s lessons.
His renown had spread, via his appearances in L’Univers as well as the photographs of him in the society pages, posing alongside his equally celebrated lover, and recently he had even begun offering highbrow punditry on television shows. His had become a known face at cultural events, and he often caught people stealing glances at him to see if they could somehow read his response to whatever it was he was reviewing. Sometimes they were rivals trying to pre-empt his copy, other times disinterested but mildly curious members of the public, and sometimes even the subjects themselves. Whoever it was, he made absolutely sure they didn’t find out. If they wanted to know what Jean-Didier Delacroix thought, they would have to read the newspaper.
His father had tested him throughout his teenage years. Whenever his son was back from boarding school he played him music that he knew he would loathe, and waited to see if so mu
ch as a flicker of disgust crossed his face. Likewise, he would sit him in front of a favourite painting and make absolutely sure that his expression betrayed not one iota of approval. His father had introduced a degree of torture into this regime, attaching electrodes to various parts of his son’s body and administering shocks as punishments for betraying a critical response through a slight nod, a raised eyebrow or a pursing of the lips. You call that being inscrutable? his father would bark, as he pressed the buzzer and sent his son’s body into spasm. How are you ever going to make a success of yourself as an arts correspondent if your review is written across your face for the world to see?
Sometimes the electric shocks were an exercise in themselves – his father would press the buzzer and see if his son could withstand the charge without his face revealing any pain. Over the course of several years he became able to do this every time, and his father told him that he was now ready for the ultimate test. He chose not to reveal the nature of this test, but late one night he had crept into his son’s bedroom, held a razor-sharp knife to his throat and told him he was going to kill him, drag his body to the woods and have repeated oral and anal sex with his butchered corpse.
By this point Jean-Didier Delacroix had been drilled to perfection, and he gave no visible reaction. His father put the knife back into its sheath, and congratulated him. His work was done.
Jean-Didier Delacroix was grateful for these lessons. There can’t be many children whose fathers are prepared to give them such an immersive and effective programme of instruction in their future career. As he stood in Le Charmant Cinéma Érotique, one of five hundred and thirty people waiting for Le Machine to appear, he knew that his father’s groundwork would be more valuable than ever before. He checked his watch, and what a watch it was. There were two minutes to go. Sure enough, people had recognised him, and were casting glances in his direction.