The Last Days of New Paris Read online

  “It was never Fall Rot,” says Sam. “Kill Fall Rot and we have called up a manif. Oh dear God. It’s bringing a city.”

  The young man makes it with every look, is reestablishing Paris in pastel outlines, no not reestablishing but establishing newly, a simpering pretense, as it had never been. A cloying imaginary.

  “They’ve found a self-portrait,” Sam says.

  The last of the Nazi soldiers are scattering before the annihilating gaze finds them. Now the young man is turning slowly back toward Thibaut and Sam.

  “He never could paint people,” Sam whispers. “He always left them out. Painted everything empty. Even when he drew himself, he couldn’t do features…”

  The figure turns and Thibaut glimpses its faceless face. Empty. A faint graphite sweep where there should be eyes. Blank as an egg. A poor, cowardly rendition, by a young bad artist.

  “It’s a self-portrait,” he hears Sam repeat. She and Thibaut reach for each other, hold each other up in fear.

  Thibaut says, “Of Adolf Hitler.”

  —

  And they try to run, and as Thibaut shouts for her and grabs her pack and as the watercolor manif’s attention sweeps toward her, Sam moves with more than human strength. She moves to get them away with speed and motion borrowed from her paymasters below. Her eyes flicker and a corona flares around them and she leaps, reaching, straining for the cover of a wall—

  —and she slows in her trajectory and lets go of Thibaut as the Hitler-manif turns and eyelessly stares and takes her in and all around her the broken buildings become postcard-perfect in the cone of that regard. And Sam herself freezes. She is in the air and the self-portrait looks at her and she is just gone.

  Gone. Sam is unpersoned. Effaced in the manif’s gaze.

  Thibaut crawls backward and bites back her name. The street is pretty, and empty of her.

  Too slow, too late, he understands that the manif is looking in his direction, now.

  He hurls himself into the window of a cellar. As he falls, the glass heals behind him, brittle as sugar, as the Hitler-manif revises history, brings its vision to bear.

  Behind the new façade its stare invokes, the rot of war remains. Thibaut still has hold of Sam’s bag, and Sam herself is gone.

  He climbs stairs and gets bearings fast and pushes out through another window for a side-street not yet in the manif’s field of view.

  There really is no Sam. In the distance Thibaut can see some last German soldiers, injured and slow. The watercolor manif must glance at their blockade, because it goes, imperfect for the desired scenery. A featureless street appears in its place. As the manif’s look takes in the soldiers, they, too, are instantly not there.

  A little blank-faced nonentity bringing peace and prettiness, ending the rubble. Where there is discord, there it brings peace. Not even of death, but of nihil. Paris will be an empty city of charming houses.

  This is what the Führer’s self-portrait proclaims.

  Thibaut braces against a perfect wall. He stays out of sight as it passes. He cranes out behind it and aims at the manif. He shoots. He misses. The manif walks on. Thibaut fires again and it ignores him. He wails as it crosses the threshold of old Paris. It brings its terrible emptying picturesquing gaze to his embellished home.

  —

  The watercolor will raise a quaint city. And everything will end. The struggles of the manifs, the angry smoke, the muttering walls, the fighters for conviction, the partisans of freedom and the degradation. Human muck, ready to live and die.

  Thibaut hears the smacking of lips. In his hand, the head of the exquisite corpse is moving. He can see a pulse in its larva. Its beard-train lets out a little smoke.

  The face smiles at him. It looks knowing. It meets his eye.

  Thibaut begins to run. He takes the pretty street behind the watercolor, the seer of empty buildings. The manif of the Führer. The face of the exquisite corpse mutters encouragement from Thibaut’s grip.

  The Hitler-manif stands at the border of the old city. It hears Thibaut and starts to turn.

  And Thibaut has no plan. No idea. Just before the deadening, emptying stare hits him, he simply hurls what he holds.

  The exquisite corpse’s head catches the manif’s look in his place and it does not disappear. It flies through the air at the featurelessness. It hits it full on.

  Thibaut blinks. He looks down at himself. He is still there. He remains unseen.

  The manif is wrestling with a head too large, a head that has fallen over its own. Like a carnival costume. The exquisite corpse’s head sways as the watercolor staggers. The mask blocks its eyes. It blocks the unembellishing gaze that fixes the ruins into nothing.

  The self-portrait struggles below it and Thibaut can feel the waves of the watercolor’s cloying attention. The face of the exquisite corpse winces. It grows translucent. It is almost banished from this vista by the stare beneath. But with a growl, the exquisite corpse screws up its own presence, and stays right there.

  There is an unfolding. A shuffling of presence.

  Now the watercolor wears some misplaced boot on one foot, a manif boot abruptly appeared. Its head was not chosen by its artist. The faceless manif of Adolf Hitler is randomizing. There is a fluttering, a cascade of options. As Thibaut watches a quick clicking circuit of alternative objects comes into place as the manif’s head. Now its legs are not its legs, but a succession of other things, in random stutter. Its body, too. It is becoming a triple figure.

  And though he can still see the brown of its original suit and the distinctive and ugly emptiness of its head slip into position repeatedly among the parts that have started to make it up, to concatenate randomly, the flailing manif is no more defined by them than by the fruit, the bricks, the lizards, the windows and lavender and railway lines and endless other things that are suddenly, also, for instants, its components.

  It is becoming exquisite corpse. It is remade. It is without artist.

  And in its wake, as its wan precision is replaced by that stochastic rigor, that self-dreamed dream, the buildings that it saw into twee perfection are less perfect again. They quiver. Their colors bleed. They are too saturated, their lines are wrong again. They remember their cracks. And then with breaths of stone-dust they are back to ruination, or are not there, or are battered by age, scarred with the stuff of history, again. Paris is Paris.

  There is a scream. A swallow. The light changes. The sun scuttles forward, eager to end this day. Thibaut sinks to his knees. He kneels before the entrance to Paris. He bows his head. The city is as it was.

  —

  Standing in front of Thibaut, where the Hitler had been, is his exquisite corpse. Tall again. Old-man face, leaf in his hair. Anvil-and-pieces body. It leans—no, Thibaut realizes, no. It is bowing. It is taking leave.

  Thibaut stands, too, so that he can bow back.

  The exquisite corpse turns and steps politely away from him, over the threshold, into the nineteenth. Where soon enough, the civilians, the partisans, will know that something has happened.

  —

  It will not be long before the occupiers reestablish control of these borders. This plan to remake the city has failed, so they will return to their original methods of control, and plot again. Thibaut is outside, alone since the manif looked. For a few hours, at this point, the borders will be open.

  The exquisite corpse is turning up boulevard Sérurier. Its body parts flicker like a timetable display, between options. It rebuilds itself: four-part, this time, feet underwater, a woman’s legs, a body like some cubist rumination, flattened head, a puckered-lip dream. It walks on, into the city, where it will keep changing.

  Thibaut looks east, into streets outside the old city that are no longer sickly perfect but are still, for a while, empty.

  He can go almost anywhere. He looks away from the city’s heart, for a long time.

  And turns back, at last, to the arrondissements he has known since he was a child. Where there is still
a fight.

  He is wistful, enjoying the air beyond the limits, knowing it will be a long time until he can breathe it again. His way is clear.

  There are other cameras in Paris, to find.

  The Last Days of New Paris needs writing. Even though these are not the last days, he decides.

  Thibaut grants Sam’s memory a moment. He wishes her something. I have a mission, he thinks. The mission. Start from scratch, redo history, make it mine. A new book.

  He puts her notebook and her films in her bag. Thibaut shoves it deep into a hole in the brick of the barricade. The limits of the zone. He makes her records, the evidence of treachery and machinations, secret plans, spells and dissenting art, part of the substance of the edge. For someone to find.

  The sun picks out the edges of the affected part, the crumble where there was destruction. He waits until he sees bats in the sky. Then, bruised and tired, triumphant and unsure, Thibaut takes a deep breath and steps over the boundary, back into New Paris, the old city.

  AFTERWORD

  On Coming to Write

  The Last Days of New Paris

  In the autumn of 2012 my publishers forwarded me a handwritten message. It was from someone of whom I hadn’t thought for many years. I’d known her slightly when we were both students at the same institution, though we’d been in different departments. It was close to two decades since we’d spoken. At first I didn’t even recognize her name.

  Some online searching reminded me, and filled in blanks. When I’d known her she’d been studying art history, and it seemed that she’d gone on to teach the subject at universities in Europe, specializing in modernism. In the late ’90s, so far as I could ascertain, she’d gained a small degree of notoriety by putting on a short series of collaborations with scientists and philosophers, something between performances and avant-garde provocations, with titles like “Not River but Estuary: Steering Aurelius Upstream(s)” and “What’s Once and What Wasn’t Is Still.” I could find no details or descriptions of any of these events.

  Around 2002 her online trail dried up. She seemed to disappear. Until she wrote to me.

  Her message was terse. She’d read an essay I’d written some time previously that touched on Surrealism, and it had reminded her of my interest in the movement. On that basis, she said, she was contacting me on behalf of someone who very much wanted to meet me, and to whom, in turn, she was certain I’d find it interesting to speak. But there was, she said, a very limited window of possibility, “some doors opening only occasionally and briefly.”

  She gave the name of a hotel in Farringdon, a room number, a date, and time (less than two weeks away), told me to bring a notebook, and that was all.

  I’m not certain why I chose not to ignore the message. Curiosity, mainly, I think—I’ve received a fair number of eccentric invitations over the years, but none with this sense of vaguely aggressive urgency. In any case, after hemming and hawing, rather surprised at myself, resolved to walk away the instant I was made uncomfortable, I made my way to the—faded but not depressing—hotel. I knocked at the given door, at the given time.

  To my surprise it was not my correspondent who opened it but an elderly man. He stood aside for me to enter.

  He was well into his eighties, but he stood very straight. He still had half a head of hair, and it was not all gray. He was lean and still strong looking, in clean, faded and battered clothes in a very outdated style. He never lost his expression of suspicion, throughout the hours I was with him.

  I asked after my acquaintance and the man shook his head impatiently and answered in growling French, “Ç’est seulement nous deux.” It was just we two.

  My French is bad, but much better passive, listening, than speaking, which turned out to be just as well.

  I introduced myself and he nodded and rather pointedly did not reciprocate.

  He indicated me to sit in the room’s only chair, moving his bag from it. I hesitated to do so because of his age but he motioned again, impatiently, so I obeyed, and for most of the hours that followed he remained standing, sometimes pacing, sometimes shifting his weight a little from leg to leg, never losing his restlessness or energy. When he did sit, it was on the very edge of the made-up bed, and rarely for long.

  He told me he understood I was a writer, and that I was interested in Surrealism and in radical politics, and that on that basis he had a story to tell me. I allowed that I was, but cautioned that I was by no means a specialist in the history of the movement. I told him that there were many people more expert than I, and that perhaps he and my acquaintance should seek out one of them.

  The man gave one of what was to be his rare wintery smiles.

  “Elle a déjà essayé,” he said. She had tried already. I was, he said, the fourth person she had contacted, in an increasing hurry as, according to that unclear schedule, time grew short. He let that sit a moment. So I was the best that she could come up with, and now it was my job to listen, to take notes, and ultimately to do with what he told me whatever I thought best.

  He waited while I organized myself, got my pen and paper ready. I brought out my phone to record but he shook his head so I put it away again. He seemed to chop the air in front of me with his hands, organizing his thoughts.

  “Your Paris,” he began, “is old Paris. In New Paris, things were different. There was a man in New Paris. He was looking down. It was night. Beyond a wall of ripped-up city, Nazis were shooting.”

  Thus began thirty-nine extraordinary, indeed—the adjective isn’t hyperbolic—life-changing hours. Over their course, uninterrupted by sleep, growing more and more bleary and vague, fortified by crisps and chocolate and water and a nasty wine from the mini-bar, the man told me the last days of New Paris, the story that I have presented here.

  He spoke in passé simple and imparfait: he was never other than ambiguous about whether what he was telling me was a story, though his explanations of the city’s quiddity, of its history, his descriptions of the streets and landscapes of New Paris, were completely vivid. At times he would hesitate and take my notebook from me and scribble an illustration of what he was describing. I still have them. He was no artist, but sometimes it helped me visualize. And very often it would provoke a memory in me, of some other image or poem or passage, and I would take it from him and draw myself, asking him, “Is this right? Did it look like this?” Sometimes much later I would go back to my own books, looking for a source I thought I could recall. Here I’ve reproduced those of my sketches that he implied were most accurate.

  On three occasions during our time together, he brought out some notebooks of his own. Battered, ancient, blood- and dirt- and ink-stained things. He would not let me read them in their entirety, but he would show me certain sections, certain dated entries in scrawled French, and let me copy out phrases or even other sketches of what he documented (those last he clearly had not drawn himself).

  The man was an utterly compelling storyteller, but a disorganized one. I was captivated and adrift. He spoke with concentration and without hesitation, but—clearly feeling under immense pressure of time—he went too fast, and my notes, made in translation, would falter. He told events out of order. He doubled back on himself to fill in details he realized he had missed. Sometimes he would contradict himself, or veer between historical speculation and seeming certainty. He could be sidetracked and go off on a rumination or explanation of some detail of New Paris that, while rarely anything other than fascinating, was only tangentially related to the story he was telling.

  About New Paris itself, he never spoke with anything other than the most wrenching, oneiric specificity. In his descriptions of the time before the S-Blast, of Marseille, of the Villa Air-Bel, he used a different register. Then he was recounting something told to him, something reconstructed, the result of investigations—investigations unfinished and full of holes, that I, dutifully, with much research, would later do my best to fill.

  At first the man would be extremely peremptory
with any interruption. As time wore on, particularly in the small hours, when I was startled into awareness of myself by the lonely sound of some car or solitary pedestrian from the night outside (we didn’t close the curtains), if I raised a hand to ask for clarification, to suggest the source of some manif he described, to query some historical detail, he would listen more patiently. I would ask questions, and he might answer, and our interaction became an interview of excursuses, at times for an hour or more, before returning to the main track of Thibaut and Sam’s journey through the ruins of New Paris.

  The man never told me his name, and I did not ask him.

  He never referred to Thibaut in anything other than the third person, including when he showed me the notebooks. Of course, however, I became certain that Thibaut was he. In these notes, I’ve proceeded on that assumption.

  This was deeply jarring. Because if, I wondered, I believed he was Thibaut, did I believe he was telling me the truth?

  Of course it was absurd. But sitting there in that cheap chair exhaustedly listening to the visitor tell me about life-and-death battles, while London’s late-night traffic muttered outside, it didn’t seem so. It seemed possible, then plausible, then likely. That I was speaking to an escapee from New Paris, describing some old struggle.

  Escaped from his place how? Come here why? I couldn’t bring myself to ask him. I was too cowardly, or too respectful, or too something, and then the opportunity was gone.

  It’s hard for me to reconstruct it now, but I think I thought that this was only one chapter. That the story of Thibaut and Sam, and the more partial and uncertain backstory of the Villa Air-Bel, and of how New Paris came to be, was the first part of a longer history; that he would tell me more stories, of the years subsequent, and perhaps details of other places in that art- and demon-fouled world.

  But during a second day he grew more agitated, more uneasy, and spoke with more and more speed. He rushed to reach the end of his story, of what were not, it transpired, the last days of New Paris.