Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

by David Hoon Kim

  Gadbois stood up from the table, and we shook hands. He looked to be at least seventy, a reasonably ugly man with a fleshy face and a perfectly bald head. His ugliness was subtle: it took a moment to realize, and fully appreciate, its scope. He didn’t seem the slightest bit surprised that I was not “European,” as though it were a given, to him, that all Danes looked like me, and vice versa.

  He said, gravely, “Bonjour, monsieur.”

  “Bonjour,” I said. “Monsieur.”

  After we sat down, Gadbois asked about my life in France, the weather in Denmark—but the usual inquiries about my background did not come. I knew that a sneeze could strike at any moment, but I nevertheless forbade myself from asking for even a tissue, convinced that the smallest show of ill health would jeopardize my prospects. Feverish and delirious, I was about to tell him, just to have it done with, that I had been adopted, when Clarisse came in with a bottle of wine on a tray. It was only as I watched her fill Gadbois’s glass that I understood, with a start, that the old man was blind.

  The main dish was brought in. With slow, practiced movements, Gadbois’s hand swept across the tabletop and closed over the fork and knife. Clarisse, as though waiting for something, stood in the background. At that moment, a strange and ridiculous thought entered my head: that Gadbois had intentionally kept his blindness from me on the phone, and in the laconic phrasing of his ad. He took a bite and said, “This isn’t mackerel. Are you trying to trick me?”

  I could tell, simply from looking, that the fish was mackerel; I had helped my father inventory the catch on our summer fishing trips.

  “It’s a mackerel, monsieur,” Clarisse said, unfazed by Gadbois’s reprimand.

  He took another bite. “Herring. You went out and bought a herring.”

  “Herring is more expensive, monsieur. You gave me only enough money for mackerel.”

  Gadbois turned away from his plate with calm disdain. “Is this mackerel, Monsieur Blatand?”

  I sensed Clarisse, in the corner, fixing me with her imperturbable gaze.

  “You’re right,” I finally said. “It’s not mackerel.”

  Gadbois, dignified and triumphant, turned to Clarisse and nodded once, gravely, his honor restored.

  In addition to the mackerel, other items on the menu—the roast potatoes, the buttered artichokes with shallots—were systematically contested by Gadbois. Clarisse responded to each accusation with equanimity and patience. At last Gadbois acquiesced, resigning himself to the impostor food. It was the best meal I’d had in months, and yet I couldn’t taste a thing. Each time Clarisse came around to fill my glass, I kept my eyes on my plate, unable to look at her.

  “You are not a student of physics,” Gadbois said, staring off into space, as though it had just dawned on him.

  I stared at his stained, grayish teeth. “Well, no.”

  “Have you translated physics texts before?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Have you studied physics at all, Monsieur Blatand?”

  “Well…” A memory resurfaced: dropping mold-encrusted coins onto the roof of the bicycle shed from my bedroom window in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby. “Some studies on gravitation, a long time ago.”

  Gadbois’s gleaming forehead shifted. “What do you think of the theory of relativity?” he asked, slyly.

  I stared at him. Was this a trick question?

  “The fact is,” he went on, “scientists have suspected for years, even decades, that there might be an inconsistency somewhere. No one has been able to prove it.”

  Gadbois stopped. I watched his flabby, brown-spotted hands smooth out the napkin, as though acting independently of their owner. I felt a painful, almost physical longing to see Fumiko, to hear her voice, feel her hand on my shoulder. Gadbois started talking about the inherent difficulties of describing something called a black body. I tried not to sneeze as I stared at the vacant seat next to him. A knife and fork had been set out alongside an empty plate, as though for a guest who had not come. Under the glare of electric lights, I saw that the porcelain was coated with a layer of dust, the silverware dulled by tarnish.

  After the meal, Gadbois suggested we go to his study. I walked beside him, matching my steps with his, which were cautious but never unsure. Suddenly, he halted in the middle of the hallway, and I was trying to decide whether to tell him that the study was still a few feet away when he pointed at the photograph I had noticed earlier.

  “My wife,” he said, reaching out and brushing his fingers over the wooden frame, “in 1963.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, I stood outside Fumiko’s room with a plastic bag full of food. Day four, I told myself, ear pressed against the door. Five, if one counted the evening she had locked herself in.

  “Fumiko?” I waited. “I brought you some food.”

  Some fruits, cheese, a boule de campagne, her favorite bread, from the nearby Franprix. I knew the exact contents of Fumiko’s cupboard, having glanced inside it the day before her self-confinement. Since then, each item had engraved itself in my memory, frozen in time: a bag of dried chickpeas, a canister of salt, a withered Fuji apple, the rock-hard stump of a baguette. The human body, I knew, could go up to three weeks without food. And Fumiko had all the water she could drink from the faucet.

  Back in my room, I wrapped all my blankets around me to keep warm—thinking wistfully of the dense, heavy comforters found in Danish country hotels—and sat down at my desk to start work on the twenty pages Gadbois had given me to translate. Instead of paragraphs on physics, it turned out to be a series of letters between Gadbois and the Académie des sciences. “After consultation by an expert, we must regretfully refuse your articles for publication. It appears that your work rests on principles that no experiment has justified. Your theories, in addition, do not contain any experimentally verifiable element.”

  Over the next few days, in between checking to see if Fumiko had left her room, I allowed the twenty pages to become my obsession, the cynosure of my day-to-day life, as all-consuming as a new love affair. I even caught a grammatical error Gadbois had made, writing une instead of un hémisphère, which, unlike une sphère, was masculine. (It was the kind of error native speakers rarely made, although rarely didn’t mean never, and I found such lapses strangely fascinating, like hearing a renowned pianist miss a note during a concert.) Sometimes, looking up from my work, I thought, At last I’ve found my calling. Once an indefatigable library rat, I no longer waited in line at Beaubourg or the bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, whose vast ribbed interior made me think of a whale’s belly; I stayed in my narrow, cramped room and worked on Gadbois’s text. “R. de Gadbois’s definition of gravity, based on a modification of Planck’s law of black-body radiation, ignores the effects caused by the disintegration of electrons near a rotating black hole.” “I insist that you seek the opinion of another expert. If my articles do not appear in the Academy’s reports, I shall include, in the English translation of my treatise, this potentially incriminating correspondence in its entirety.” “The articles submitted for publication by R. de Gadbois show great ambition. His substantial program is reminiscent of the articles published by Albert Einstein in 1905. Unfortunately…”

  At night, hoping to lull myself to sleep, I tried to recall what little physics I’d gleaned from magazines and science-fiction novels. Gravity was not a physical force but caused by a curvature in space-time. The density of an object determined its gravitational pull. Around a black hole, near the event horizon, the pull became so strong that time crawled along at a snail’s pace, a minute lasting several millennia. I imagined everything inside Fumiko’s room slowing down—the decomposition of atomic particles, radioactive emissions, transmigratory thought waves, universal corruption, entropy, and, of course, Fumiko herself—ground to a state of near-complete immobility. My eyelids began to grow heavier, the rest of my body, on the threshold of sleep, suddenly lighter. I began to retrace my path through Gadbois’s apartment, from the
entryway to the long, bright hallway that led past the study, past the kitchen and into the dining room. I was coming back for something, but I didn’t know what; my mind was trying to reveal itself to itself. Unexpectedly, I remembered that the maid, clearing away the table, had not touched the unused plate. I drifted off with the image of Raoul de Gadbois in his dining room—a dark, shadowlike form beside him. A human shape. Was it Fumiko, come out of her room at last? I couldn’t be sure: a curtain made of darkness hovered, obstinately, in front of her head.

  * * *

  I telephoned Gadbois, who invited me to lunch again. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought I saw a look of amusement flit across Clarisse’s face as she opened the door, before she turned away. I followed her down the hallway. Everything—the heat, the bright glare, the outdated and ageless furniture—was as I remembered it. Gadbois was waiting in the dining room. Solemnly, wearily, he held out his hand, which I shook. And then, taking his lead, I sat down, even as I realized, with a twinge of guilt, that it probably wouldn’t have mattered if I had sat down first.

  When lunch was brought out, Gadbois once again accused Clarisse of trying to trick him. Although the fish in front of him really was herring this time, he claimed that Clarisse had bought him carp (which he abhorred). I wondered, almost desperately, if his blindness could have affected his taste buds. I glanced at Clarisse and noticed a slight tremor, of annoyance or anger, run across her face. When Gadbois at last turned to me, I was still asking myself if this was a game he played with all of his guests or a sign of something more serious, like dementia.

  “What do you think, Monsieur Blatand?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “So you agree, then, that it’s not herring.”

  “I can’t really say.”

  “Well, Monsieur Blatand, it’s either herring or it’s not. Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “Then you agree with me, Monsieur Blatand.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I stared down at my plate (of herring) as Gadbois acknowledged another victory with a nod to his maid.

  The meal went by without further incident. The fish (I no longer felt I deserved to call it by its rightful name), though undercooked, was vastly superior to the canned ravioli I heated on a hot plate every night. Gadbois’s conversation was less reserved, almost voluble, and his gleaming forehead seemed to catch the light more frequently. Between sips of red wine, he tossed around hundreds of light-years and billions of degrees, and described chimerical landmarks—the Planck length, the Dirac sea, the Einstein-Rosen bridge—as though they were stops along one of the métro lines.

  Once we had returned to the study, Gadbois asked me to read through my translation. From time to time, he made me pause so that he might ponder, or pretend to ponder, this or that locution. (I assumed that his knowledge of English was, like the knowledge of dead languages, a mostly passive one.) While I read, the old man never stopped playing with a curious-looking object—a Plexiglas cube made of smaller, identical cubes and able to take on various proportions—and I remembered an episode from an old Greek myth, or the Elder Edda, in which a band of nomads come upon a sumptuous cavern whose enchanted waters have the power to grant eternal life. The nomads realize, at the last possible moment, that the man offering them a chalice to drink is blind: the waters offer immortality—but at a price. Long ago, the first traveler who stumbled into the cavern deceived the next one, who in turn deceived another traveler, and so on. As Gadbois paid me, he announced that he had succeeded in reuniting the multifarious and disparate branches of physics into a cohesive whole, picking up where Poincaré had left off a century ago.

  I tried to think of an appropriate response.

  “Do you think, Monsieur Blatand, that the Academy is right?” His unseeing eyes seemed to hold my gaze. “Do you think I’m a crackpot? One of those fools who waste their last years trying to square the Euclidean circle or disprove Cantor’s diagonal argument?”

  “Well,” I began, “that is…”

  “One thing Einstein did not account for was temperature.” He let this sink in. “Temperature, in turn, affects light. Light, and its proximity to matter. In other words, gravitation. All basic concepts, but S.R.”—I realized he meant “special relativity”—“doesn’t take into account the effects of gravitation, as though it didn’t matter.”

  I understood, listening to him talk, that he could have given me pure gibberish to translate and it wouldn’t have mattered. I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. Mostly for something to say in response, I asked him when he had started writing his treatise.

  “Do you believe in miracles, Monsieur Blatand?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He nodded, apparently satisfied with my answer. “It all depends,” he said, “on how one defines a miracle. For example, it is a miracle that I managed to find a linguistically gifted Danish gentleman with a knowledge of gravitational physics such as yourself. Don’t you agree?”

  Before I could say anything, Gadbois went on: “When I lost my wife, I found I had too much time to think. When I lost my sight, I found I could think better. My head filled with ideas. Time passes differently. When I’m not working, I let my memories flow or call forth my favorite passages from Tacitus. Or I do nothing—I let myself live. I can remain sitting in an empty room, perfectly still, for three or four hours without discomfort.” He paused. “Let us hope, between you and me, that the English will prove themselves to be more open-minded than my countrymen.”

  He gave me another twenty pages to translate. On my way out, I walked past Clarisse in the kitchen. She was pouring coffee into a small, ornate cup. I saw her—in one swift movement—spit into the coffee. When she glanced up, her face was perfectly blank. She raised a finger to her lips and gave me a half-smile:

  “You keep my secret and I’ll keep yours.”

  * * *

  On my doorstep I found the gray pullover I had given Fumiko for her birthday, which she used to wear when she was in a good mood. (There was a photograph just above my desk of her wearing it during our trip to Saint-Malo.) Picking up the crumpled piece of clothing, I brought it to my face to inhale Fumiko’s scent. It smelled mostly of wool, but I breathed in anyway. Clothes washed by her always smelled better than clothes I had washed myself, in the same machine, using the same detergent. A strand of black hair was stuck to one of the sleeves. I walked over to her door. The Franprix bag was still there, untouched. I backed away from it, as if to take a picture, until I bumped into the wall behind me. I let out a string of curses in Danish. The one thing I could never really do in French was swear, in the unthinking, spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness way of one’s native tongue. I sank to a crouch. In that position, I saw Pascal’s head emerge from his doorway, hair disheveled, skin pale and subterranean—but the circles under his eyes were gone. His beatific, unfocused expression abruptly changed when he noticed me sitting on the floor. He glanced at Fumiko’s door and then back at me.

  “Are you OK?”

  I nodded, trying to smile.

  “You look like you’re crying.”

  “No, I’m fine.” I wiped at my eyes. “It’s the dust. Allergies.”

  “You should see a specialist. Nine times out of ten, it’s the sinuses.”

  There was no mockery in his voice. His smile was sincere, without nuance.

  “Is there a disorder,” I said, “that affects someone close to someone with a disorder?”

  “What?”

  “A sort of ‘caretaker’s syndrome.’”

  Pascal shook his head. “Look, I know what you’re doing.”

  I stared at him.

  “If you’re going to change the subject, you can at least be more subtle about it. I may be oblivious, but even I can take a hint once in a while.”

  As I stood up, still clutching the pullover, I heard Pascal say, “I’m sorry about scaring you with my psychologist talk. I got carried away. I was wrong
about Fumiko. And about you. My new outlook has allowed me to make a lot of progress in my research.”

  I almost told him what was going on, right then and there, but something held me back: the same impulse that had halted my hand in front of the concierge’s door.

  “By the way,” he went on, “how is Fumiko? I haven’t seen her around lately.”

  I focused on a piece of graffiti scrawled on the opposite wall, “Arrash les ponts”—“Tear down the bridges”—as I answered, “She’s been busy with her drawings.”

  Pascal’s gaze didn’t waver. “You can tell me the truth,” he said.

  For a moment, neither of us spoke, and then Pascal asked, “You guys didn’t have a fight, did you?”

  A fight. He thought there had been a fight. “No,” I said, “we didn’t have a fight.”

  “That’s a relief,” he said. “When you see her, can you ask if she would mind being interviewed again? I have a whole new set of questions.” He seemed embarrassed. “She’s never home when I knock on her door.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  * * *

  The latest pages were harder to translate than the first batch. Gadbois’s notes and explanations concerning gravity were mostly incomprehensible to my profane mind. Though I did not especially like the sound of my voice, I read passages aloud; I recited, as dispassionately as I could, “Let x be the path in space-time between q and t, q incarnating the three coordinates in space and t incarnating time.” One by one, I pummeled through paragraphs on tachyons and neutrinos. I looked up “gravitation,” in a moment of boredom, and found:

  The phenomenon of attraction between two bodies, proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.