by Hari Kunzru
Inside they sat me down with a cup of hot coffee and wrapped a blanket round my shoulders. Someone found me a dry pair of socks. They were thick woolen hiking socks with a diamond pattern. I looked down at my unfamiliar feet. The room was unfamiliar too. Located in a wing of the Center that was not usually accessible to the fellows, it seemed to be some kind of staff lounge. While Frau Janowitz and Dr. Weber negotiated with the police, Uwe had been set to watch me. He sat in a corner, pretending to read a magazine, occasionally looking up with a sly smile.
“I told you there was nothing to see at the Conference House,” he said. “You should have believed me.”
Dr. Weber came in, followed by Frau Janowitz. He was dressed for dinner, and had clearly been called back from some engagement to deal with me. How was I feeling, he wanted to know. Any suicidal ideation? Frau Janowitz checked her phone and made no eye contact. I said I was fine, all I wanted to do was rest. Dr. Weber wanted to know if he should phone my wife. He thought he should let her know. I forbade that absolutely, and I must have been more vehement than I intended, because Uwe put down his magazine and came to stand next to his boss, as if preparing to intervene. Things were very jumbled. I asked some questions about the history of the house that Dr. Weber didn’t seem willing to discuss. Yes, it had been built by a Jewish family. All these houses had a complicated history. Why hadn’t it been returned to the heirs? He didn’t know. He did not see why it was relevant. Please could I focus? I seemed to be having some kind of crisis. Surely I would agree that it was not appropriate for me to continue my stay at the Deuter Center. This was not the right place for me in my current condition. Frau Janowitz would make herself available to assist me in planning my travel. What, he wanted to know, was I doing at the refugee accommodation? The police said I had been accused of taking an unhealthy interest in children.
This made me very angry. Uwe raised his hands and moved to stand in front of Dr. Weber. I said I wasn’t going to hurt anyone, but this was very bad. Surely he could understand. To be accused of that. He had, he said, my best interests, and also the best interests of the Center to consider. It was a question of reputation. I told him if he cared so much for reputation, he might look into the conduct of his staff. It was not ethical to put cameras into the bedrooms of guests. I didn’t know German law, but I would be very surprised if what they were doing was legal. He said he had no idea what I was talking about.
I told him I was more concerned with the future than the past. He smiled and nodded, as if to reinforce this positive-sounding sentiment. He said he thought my wife would be very happy to have me home. Frau Janowitz returned with the news that she’d booked me a seat on a flight leaving for New York in the morning. Uwe escorted me back to my room, and though there was nothing so crass as a guard outside my door, I knew that if I tried to leave, he would be watching.
THE FRENCH PHRASE is l’esprit de l’escalier, and there doesn’t seem to be an exact equivalent in English. Staircase wit. It’s an idiom that evokes the eighteenth century, the Paris of the Age of Reason. The philosophe has left the party, and is almost on the street when he thinks of the precise thing he should have said, the mot juste. With every fiber of his being, he wants to go back up, to say the words that have belatedly come to mind, to destroy his celebrated opponent’s position and reap the dazzling social rewards. He wants his wit to be recognized, but he can’t turn back time. It is already too late.
Take that regret, the fleeting moment after the door has shut, muffling the music and the sound of conversation, and raise the stakes, introduce the possibility that there is an existential risk to losing the debate. Of course an argument at a party isn’t any kind of action, neither can it bring about some particular version of the future, nor prevent it from coming to pass. That is mistaking the map for the territory, ascribing a power to words that they don’t possess, the power to bring into being the thing they name. Yet by allowing myself to be humiliated by Anton and his friends, I honestly felt I’d triggered a disaster, not just for me but for everyone and everything I cared about. In the future that was drawing me towards it, the future that I had failed to refute, there was nothing but horror. I couldn’t accept that. I couldn’t allow it. I had to make up for what I’d done, my failure to find the mot juste. At the time, I would have reacted impatiently to anyone who said I wasn’t thinking straight, that my decision to follow Anton to Paris wasn’t motivated by the coldest rationality.
I didn’t board my flight to New York. Uwe drove me to the airport, and helped me check my bags. He walked me to the security line and said goodbye, telling me that I should look after myself, he was sorry things had gone so badly for me. I can’t remember what I said. I may not have said anything. He watched me until I was almost at the desk to have my passport checked, then turned and walked away. As soon as he was out of sight, I ducked back under the tape, went over to one of the airline ticketing desks and bought a seat on the next flight to Orly.
I sat at a bar near my gate and drank a shot to steady my nerves before I made a call that I’d been putting off. Rei had left eight messages, all of which I’d ignored. She took a long time to pick up. As I listened to her phone ringing, Anton sniggered silently at my nerves. I said hello in my best and most natural voice and she asked what was going on. “Tell me you’re OK. That’s all I want to know.”
I said I was. I said I couldn’t really be more specific. I said it was hard to explain.
“You’ve really freaked the Deuter people out, whatever you’ve done.”
“They called you? I told them not to call you.”
“Why wouldn’t you want them to call me? They said you were found wandering around at night with no shoes on.”
“I wasn’t wandering around. That makes it sound—whatever. I knew what I was doing.”
“So what’s wrong? You’re about to get on your plane, right.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I made a mistake.”
“What do you mean, a mistake?”
I spun out a long silence. I heard the irritated tremor in her sigh.
“Honey, I’m at the office, and I’m kind of slammed. I really want to talk, because I’m worried about you, but let’s do it face-to-face? I have to be in court in under an hour.”
“I do need to talk to you.”
“Call me when you land. As soon as you land.”
“How’s Nina?”
“She’s fine. Missing you.”
Another long pause.
“Look, it’d be great if for once you remembered what it’s like for me when I’m here.”
“Please. I’ll tell you what it’s about.”
“Really?”
“It’s just…”
I trailed off again. I wasn’t sure why I was forcing the issue. I wasn’t even sure that I had anything to say.
“OK,” she sighed. “Two minutes. I’ll close my door.”
A pause, then she got back on the line.
“So what’s on your mind?”
“I need to ask you something. It’ll sound strange, but humor me.”
“OK.”
“Why do you believe in human rights?”
“That’s what you want to talk about?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, I thought you were finally going to be real with me. I thought you were going to tell me what’s been up with you all these months.”
“I’m trying. Please.”
“I just don’t have time for any more— Oh, forget it.”
“No, go on. Any more what?”
“Any more bullshit, OK? You’re over there. You’re supposed to be writing your book. I’ve spent so long trying to coax some sense out of you, and now I’m hearing you’ve been— I don’t even know what you’re doing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“God, it drives me crazy. You’re sorry. You’re a
lways sorry. I just want to find out how to help you. You drop all these hints about your dark existential crisis, but what do you actually want me to do? Is it that you just like to have someone worrying about you? You want to keep me on the hook?”
“No. Of course not. I’m trying, here. I’m trying really. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
“About what?”
“Human rights. Why you believe humans have special rights.”
“I really have no idea. Why are we even talking about this?”
“Please.”
“It’s what I do. I practice human rights law. It’s my job.”
“Which you do because you really believe, deep down in your heart, that people have an inherent dignity, because they’re human.”
“Do we have to?”
“Please. It’s what you believe, right?”
“Of course.”
“But why?”
“Why do people have rights?”
“Yes.”
“Because they’re people.”
“But why are people important? Why are we more special than, I don’t know, an eagle? Or a coral reef?”
There were sounds in the background, and I heard her say to someone, just one minute.
“I have no idea, honey. I have no idea why you’re more special than an eagle or a coral reef. But you’re scaring me. So please call me back the minute you land. Make sure you call as soon as you get in. Now I have to go. I have no choice. People are waiting for me.”
“Isn’t it just a fiction, though? Just something we tell ourselves?”
“No.”
“We say all these things. That we have consciousness, that we feel things so deeply. If we still believed in the soul, maybe. Do you believe in the soul? I can’t believe I’ve never asked you that.”
“We’re human. That’s enough. I’m going to hang up, now. Please, just call me from arrivals. You’re scaring me. As soon as you get in, OK?”
The line went dead. I sat with the phone in my hand, feeling as if I’d let slip some terrible secret. Not to feel human. To walk around concealing your own emptiness. This was how the horror had crept in, how it had poisoned the future. And I’d not said the thing I most wanted to say: that I was sorry; that my negligence was culpable, and it had left her and Nina without the means to survive what was on the horizon; that though I was afraid, I was completely unable to make myself understood, not to anyone, but particularly not to her. All I really wanted was for her and Nina to live without fear. That would have constituted success for me, giddying, impossible success. I knew that were I to confess my jumbled apocalyptic terrors, it would make Rei afraid, even if—particularly if—she didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. She’d be afraid of what it meant about me, or at least more afraid than she already was, and she would mistake my fragility—of which I was only too aware—for the content of my message. I needed her to understand that the most pressing problem was not my mental state but the state of the world. The danger was objectively real. There was no guarantee that the needle of crisis, which had always pointed away from us, at other families in other places, would not swing in our direction. I wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t worry about me more than necessary, that she should focus her energies on making preparations for herself and Nina. I wanted to say that I wasn’t coming home.
IN A TAXI, heading into the center of Paris, I worked my phone, trying to find some trace of Anton’s presence in the city. All I had was the overheard snippet of conversation with Karl. This is all stuff for Paris. We can deal with it then. I hoped that he wasn’t coming to do something private, some dinner or closed meeting that wouldn’t be searchable online. I got lucky. A premium vodka brand had commissioned “Three Short Films on Inspiration” and was presenting a screening at a cinema in the Latin Quarter, followed by a Q&A with the subjects, a dancer, a creative director, and Anton. I’d given the driver the address of a hotel near the Gare du Nord, the first place that had come up on a booking site, but now I diverted him to the cinema, even though the event wasn’t for two more days. I asked if he knew a cheap hotel nearby, but he said I was in the wrong part of town. I got out anyway and walked around, trying to attune myself—that’s how I thought of it—as if I were a receiver, a sensitive piece of technology that could pick up Anton’s presence through some kind of occult magnetism. As the taxi drove away, I realized that I didn’t have a suitcase with me. My bags must have been unloaded from the New York flight. They were probably in a storeroom at Tegel.
Eventually I found a hotel, the Prince something or other, the most down-at-heel in a row of similar establishments on a steep street behind the Odéon. I rented a tiny garret room, accessed by a rattling elevator about the size and shape of a vertically oriented coffin. I went online and reserved a ticket for the screening, then went back out onto the Boulevard Saint-Germain and bought underwear and toiletries. I didn’t really regret losing my luggage. It almost seemed like good luck, a shortcut to asceticism, to the total focus I would need in order to complete my task.
Rei was leaving agitated messages on my phone. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to them. Ignoring a string of emails with all-caps subject lines, I sent one to her telling her not to worry, that I was in no danger, just “taking some time to think.” I didn’t say where I was. Then I spent an hour scrolling through videos of Nina, watching her chatter and play at various ages, forwarding and rewinding her three years of life to persuade myself that I was keeping faith with her and Rei, and even if I couldn’t speak to them, they were on my mind. I wished I could send a transcript of my thoughts, a log or spreadsheet. Hours spent thinking of: Total of boxes C1 to C16. The woman who took sudden unscheduled naps all through her pregnancy, who I used to find asleep on the sofa, or her yoga mat, even once nestled among hangers and plastic wrapping in a pile of dry-cleaning left on our bed; the baby girl I’d carried in a milk-stained sling, whose head I’d surreptitiously sniffed as I walked to the supermarket, woozily intoxicated by new fatherhood. I haven’t left you. Not in my heart. See, I have receipts.
The room was covered in busy rose chintz. It was easiest to be in there with the light off, but in the dirty yellow glow of the bedside lamp it was bearable. Without moving, I could explore the streets of Paris, looking for Anton in the crinkles and folds of the rose petals, the interlocking patterns of stems and thorns, traveling without moving like one of Dr. Weber’s opiated Chinese sages. Sometimes the walls closed in and I had to walk the streets for real, looking in the windows of bookstores, examining the permutations of the city, its vast potential for meaning. There was a synagogue nearby, with armed police standing guard outside. Throughout the quartier, on walls and doorways, someone had written a phrase, perhaps a political slogan, in black marker. Europe en danger. These things were clues, signs of the new dispensation.
Even so, when the evening of the screening came, I wasn’t ready. I lay on the bed inside my box of roses, exploring the possibility of not moving. If I just stayed still, the event would take place without me. The audience would find their places, the films would be shown, Anton and the others would speak, the audience would leave, some janitor would sweep between the seats, lock up and switch off the lights. The wave that was rising up towards me would peak, and then fall away.
But what then? The only way out is through. The words—a catchphrase of Carson’s heroin-addicted partner Penske in Blue Lives—had been repeating on a loop as I walked around Paris. The only. Way out. Is through. Again and again. If I didn’t find Anton, I would be in limbo. If I wanted to live, to make it back to Rei and Nina, I had to get dressed and leave my room. Outside, the city was going about its business. The hotel was only a few minutes’ walk away from the cinema, and as I arrived, a small crowd was already waiting to get in. I hung at the fringes. The filmgoers were young and dressed in flashy branded streetwear. I’d been wondering who’
d pay to go and watch advertising (the tickets, while not expensive, were not free) and now I had my answer. Would-be beautiful people with disposable income, people who were trying hard, a desirable demographic for a liquor brand. While they waited, they vaped and peered at their phones. Across the street, workers were setting up a bar in a hotel courtyard, ready for the after-party.
The doors opened. I showed my ticket and took an aisle seat near the back. Though I looked around, I couldn’t spot Anton, then, just as the house lights were dimmed, he came in through a side entrance with several other people, who all took reserved seats in the front row. I felt dizzy, nauseous. I should have left. The CEO of the vodka brand climbed onstage and made an introduction, thanking numerous people. My stomach cramped. I wanted to go to the bathroom. Anton was in two places at once, superimposed. In the front row, oblivious of my presence, sitting behind me, sniggering. You almost shit yourself at the sight of me, he whispered into my ear. You can’t tell me that’s not funny.
The first film was about a contemporary dancer, who took inspiration from the natural world. There were close-ups of her muscular body, interspersed with shots of plants and insects. She wore costumes with hard, inflexible elements. Shields and carapaces. She did not like soft and pretty things. It was important to her that people understood this. She was not a soft and pretty dancer. The second film was a scroll through the socially mediatized life of a man with a job at a fashion magazine, the kind of publication with a small circulation and a large budget for parties and promotions. He took pictures at the parties and had his picture taken. He frolicked in exotic locations and was served fine food and drink. It was hard to say if all these things were his inspiration or only some of them or whether he himself was the inspiration, inspiring and taking inspiration from himself in an endless autocatalytic loop.