The Last Days of New Paris Page 8

  “You can’t get in,” he says. He wants to be wrong.

  “Neither can you,” Sam says.

  Two of the five corners of the junction they reach have slid into building-dust. Where rue de Rennes meets Bonaparte, a great rock, like something split from a mountain, hangs just above the ground. The church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés is still a church, and it looks untouched. And there, on the fifth corner, is Les Deux Magots.

  The café’s green awning flaps frantically, pushed outward by a rushing wind from within. Around it are tables and chairs, all heaving up and suspended as if about to fly away, then spasming back to their positions on the ground. Up again, head height, and back. As they have jumped for years.

  The windows are blown out repeatedly, surrounded by broken glass that twitches and snaps back into the panes then out again, repeatedly, an oscillating instant of combustion. The café rumbles.

  Sam walks heavily toward it, into the empty road around it. It looks as if the air exhausts her, as if she walks against a gale. She stops, gasping, still meters from the entrance. The air rushes in Thibaut’s ears.

  It was from here that the S-Blast came.

  And in all the years since, this famous ground has been impenetrable. No one has been able to push through the windless windlike force it extrudes, its own memory of its explosion.

  “I know you want a picture,” Thibaut shouts. “But how can you get in there…?”

  She points.

  The exquisite corpse is walking forward. Continuing where they can’t. The old-man face sniffs the air, the steam train’s plume streams backward. It recognizes this place, some stink of something here.

  Thibaut’s insides are boiling. Sam shoves him after the manif. It strides without effort through the outer fringe of glass.

  “That thing won’t let me get close to it,” she says. “You, though…”

  “I can’t take your picture for you!”

  “I don’t want a fucking picture, you fool,” she says. “There’s something in there. Bring it out.”

  What? What is she asking me?

  Am I doing this? Thibaut thinks. I can’t be.

  But not only is he grabbing the cord that trails the ground behind the manif, and winding it around his wrist, to link himself to the exquisite corpse, but now he is running, shoving his way toward it, putting his hands on its metal body.

  Thibaut is drunk on whatever streams out of that place. He walks with this most perfect manif, this ambulatory chance, like the towering exquisite corpse on the grounds where his parents died, that first manif he ever saw, a terrified boy, that would not hurt him.

  Glass shatters unendingly but Thibaut is safe and can force himself on in the corona of the manif’s presence. They pick their way together between tables and chairs, pushing, Thibaut gasping in hot air, into Les Deux Magots, inside.

  —

  A room full of darkness and light, glare and black, heat and soot, and Thibaut can hear his own blood and the drumming of wood. His face streams with heat. His eyes itch. The tables are dancing on their stiff legs. They somersault endlessly at the point of an explosion.

  There are bodies. Skeletons and dead flesh dancing, too, in the same blast, meat ripping from bones and returning to them. The exquisite corpse steps like a dainty child through a carnage of burning waiters, and Thibaut follows, fighting for breath, on his mission again.

  The kitchen is full of a storm of burst plates. At its center is someone long-dead. He is a ruin.

  A tough, wiry young man, whose glimpsed face snarls and burns up and whose bones burst from him in twitching repetition, his grimace dead pugnacity then dead pain then the rictus of just death, again and again, too fast to follow. He moves like a blown-up rag doll as fire and devilry and shrapnel flay him in a cloud of shards. His hand is on a metal box, it blossoms extruding wires, paper, light. It, too, bursts forever.

  Out of it comes, had come, would come the blast.

  The exquisite corpse trembles, this close to the point. A dream straining against what made it into flesh, reaching, with limbs like industry, for the bomb.

  As it takes the exploded box from the hand of the dead exploder, Thibaut hears Sam scream his name.

  Going out is so much faster. The manif and Thibaut half run, half fly.

  Sam is waiting as close as she can come. She shouts in delight to see them reemerge. As they approach her she shouts again, eager and loud, at the sight of what the exquisite corpse carries.

  But the bomb is strewing parts as it comes, and nothing is happening.

  The box is collapsing and the explosion does not. Behind them the room continues to blow endlessly apart.

  Thibaut and the manif run into the last of the light and Sam stands in the road with her camera out and Thibaut realizes there is a wall of smoking thorns around her, a defense from somewhere, already withering, and at the edge of the junction, Thibaut can see Nazi soldiers gathering.

  Something is coming. The street trembles. There is a booming as if things are falling out of space.

  “Give it to me!” Sam bellows as they run.

  But the box is still dropping components and wires and now its case is falling apart. Sam reaches toward the manif she does not like to touch, grabs it from the exquisite corpse’s hand.

  It scatters into nothing, and is gone. Sam screams a long scream of rage.

  —

  Mortars streak over them and take down buildings to block their way. Sam and Thibaut veer. The exquisite corpse does things to physics and they blink with the twists, and ahead of them now is the river and in it the Île de la Cité, and they keep running east along the riverbank on the Quai des Grands Augustins and across from where the Palace of Justice once was and where there is now a channel of clear water that spells something from above, and where sawdust swirls from the windows and doors of Sainte-Chapelle, a landscape of choking drifts and sastrugi at the island’s edge.

  The exquisite corpse is ahead of them. It lurches left onto the Pont au Double, leads them over the bridge. It is as if Paris ushers them in. To the island, to where Notre-Dame looms.

  Since the S-Blast the squat square towers to either side of its sunburst central window have been industrial silos, tall and fat, crudely hammered metal. One seeps bloody vinegar from imperfect seals: the air they enter is full of its sour stink, the ground below wet and fermented. Through the wire-strengthened windows of the other tank is a thick pale swirl. It’s said that it contains sperm. Thibaut has often begged the sky to bomb it.

  He barely sees it now. The manif takes them right, through the tangled wasteland of the gardens behind the church, and there at the furthest tip of the islet the Pont de l’Archevêché back over to the south side and the little bridge to neighboring Île Saint-Louis are both gone. Nothing but rubble in the river. There is nowhere to go.

  They turn. The mud shudders. “They’ve found us,” Thibaut says.

  —

  Out of the darkness by the buttresses of Notre-Dame comes a dreadful thing.

  “Christ,” Sam says. She lifts her camera. She looks almost exultant with fear. Thibaut shouts without words at what approaches.

  A walking jag, a huge, broken white shard.

  Aryan masterlegs, muscled in that Reich way, kick up dirt. At the height of a third storey is a waist, above which is what is left where a great body broke, a crack and a massive headless ruin. The right side is a crumbling stone slope, the left the remains of the torso that ascend to an armpit where one stump of biceps still swings.

  At the thing’s feet scurry Wehrmacht and SS men. A familiar jeep in a gust of scab-colored smoke.

  “What in hell is that?” Thibaut shouts. Fall Rot? he thinks. Is this staggering splinter the project?

  “Nothing in Hell,” Sam says. “It’s a manif. A brekerman.”

  “Breker?” shouts Thibaut. They got one of his to move?

  Arno Breker’s looming, kitsch, retrograde marble figures stare with vacant stares of notional master
y. Ubermensch twee, even in Paris they have all always been stubbornly lifeless, Thibaut has thought. But these legs are stamping closer.

  Once it must have been a white marble man taller than a church, clapping stone hands; now it is cracked and split and half gone and still walking. Can living artwork die? Can it live, before it does?

  “They got it upright again,” Sam whispers.

  “Again?”

  The camera clicks. The ruins of the brekerman rock back as if the sound has buffeted it. It steadies itself with its half-arm, comes forward. It stamps down trees and begins to run.

  The soldiers follow, rifles up. The jeep chutters. In it is the driver they saw before and the man in full church regalia, two others in plain clothes. This time Thibaut can see the priest’s heavy, lined, debauched face, and he knows it, from news reports, from posters.

  “Alesch,” he shouts. Alesch himself. The traitor-priest, head of the city’s demon-tilted church.

  The foot soldiers run at Thibaut and Sam and the exquisite corpse. The broken Nazi manif comes.

  Thibaut fires a useless shot. The stone legs raise a stone foot. He gazes dumbly up at it and sees that the thing is most lifelike on its underside, all folds, verucas, gnarls. It stamps. He leaps with pajama-aided bravery. His skirt parachutes and the filthy fabric flaps. Bullets hit him but the cotton hardens.

  He shoots midair. Not at the broken manif but past it, and over the infantry, at the jeep behind them all. The driver jerks and spurts blood, and as the car veers the exquisite corpse reaches from somewhere and hauls Thibaut back from danger, taking his breath all out of him. It huffs, and the two closest soldiers fold away with wails into nothing, leave pencil sketches of themselves where they were standing. Thibaut sees the jeep spin and spray earth and slam with an ugly burst of metal into the church’s side.

  Those brekerman legs run forward and with a great swing, kick the exquisite corpse in the center of its pile-up self. The Surrealist manif staggers mightily and sways and sheds bits of itself. Things wheel in the black sky.

  Sam is behind an outcropping of wall, pinned by fire and blasts of Gestapo magic. She is aiming her camera, again, and Thibaut sees that what goes between it and the soldiers is a jet of bad energy. She takes their picture and blows them away. She takes a picture of the brekerman legs, too, but they brace against the impact and stand tall and come for her.

  Coldly, suddenly, watching the broken brekerman withstand and the onslaught of the soldiers, Thibaut knows that even with whatever it is Sam deploys with her lenses, despite the wordless solidarity of the exquisite corpse, they will lose this fight.

  From his pocket he pulls the Marseille card. And plays his hand.

  —

  The Siren of Keyholes becomes. Between Thibaut and the soldiers and the staggering Nazi manif is a wide-eyed woman, in smart and dated clothes. She is not like a person. The lines of her are not lines of matter.

  She gabbles. Thibaut is staring at a dream of Hélène Smith, the psychic, dead twenty years and commemorated in card, glossolalic channeler of a strange imagined Mars. The inaugurated thought of her, her avatar invoking a spirit in a new suit in a new deck. Keyholes for knowledge. She writes in the air with her finger. Glowing script appears in no earth alphabet.

  German bullets spray away from her like drops. Smith’s letters crackle and in the sky there is a rushing. The night clouds race. A fiery circle is coming down, coming in, a dream’s dream, a manif of manif Smith’s conjuration of a Martian craft, spinning.

  Behind the suddenly stationary marble legs, Thibaut can make out the priest and another man stumbling from the smoking car. They retreat, supporting each other, further and further back as he aims at them, getting away from him, out of sight, and though he fires Thibaut cannot pay any more attention, because now the cartomantic Smith is pulling into presence the crafts of more Martians and troll-like Ultra-Martians. Her extra-terrestrial contacts exist, at last, in this moment, and they are descending, tearing into the air, firing. The Smith-thing exults.

  Bolts burn, twist, melt metal. Fire descends and holes the earth. A fusillade out of the sky engulfs the Nazis and their smashed manif giant. There is a sound and light cataclysm.

  And, at last, quiet and dark.

  —

  The sky is empty. Smith is gone. The card is gone. The wet towers of Notre-Dame quiver. Vinegar spurts where one’s seams are buckled.

  Where the dream Martians attacked, the ground has become a glass zone. Dying people twitch between the brekerman’s feet. The legs are pulverized, the marble feet charred. They do not twitch. They sink slowly into vinegar mud.

  Sam runs past the exquisite corpse. It trembles, wounded but upright. She is taking pictures, touching things, prodding smoking remnants. Her camera is a camera again. She reaches the buckled car and without seeming effort wrenches open the door by where the driver lolls. She rummages within.

  “Look,” she calls to Thibaut.

  “Hold on, be careful,” he says. She yanks a smoking briefcase from the man in the passenger seat and holds it up so Thibaut can see on it the letter K. She holds up something else, too, something twisted, three broken legs like another, wounded, Martian.

  “It’s a projector,” she says as he approaches.

  The passenger is pinioned and crushed, spasming and breathing out gore across an absurd little imitation Führer-mustache. He is trying to speak to the driver. “Morris,” he breathes. “Morris. Violette!” The driver’s uniform is a man’s but she is a broad, muscular woman, now a dead ruin filling her bloodied Gestapo clothes. The passenger turns his head, shaking, watching the exquisite corpse as it approaches.

  “The priest,” Thibaut says to Sam. “He got away.” With his other plain-clothed colleague. Moved by some uncanny means. “Sam, that was Alesch. The bishop. The traitor.”

  The jeep is pouring off bloody smoke. Sam pulls documents from the wreck, more dirty objects, the remains of machines. “Well, he went too fast,” she says. “Left stuff behind.” She pulls out a smoking canister full of film.

  “What did you do?” says Thibaut. He kneels, speaks almost gently to the passenger, whom he can tell is dying, too, who stares with widening eyes at the case Sam took from him, at the letter K. “You can control manifs, now? Is that your plan?”

  The man wheezes and bats weakly at him as Thibaut goes through his pockets and finds and reads his papers.

  “Is that your plan, Ernst?” Thibaut says. “Herr Kundt?” Sam stares at the man, at that. “What is Fall Rot?” Thibaut says.

  The passenger coughs through his blood. “Sie kann es nicht stoppen…” he says. You can’t stop it. He even smiles. “Sie eine Prachtexemplar gestellt.” They made a—something.

  “A specimen,” says Sam. “A good specimen.”

  “A specimen?” Thibaut says. “Of what?”

  But the man dies.

  Chapter Six

  1941

  Jack Parsons was drunk.

  The Surrealists were playing a game. He watched them sourly. Varo drew a snake coiled on a wheeled cart. She scribbled it in seconds. From where he was sat, Jack alone could see what she was drawing.

  “Allons-y,” she said. She held it up and turned it around, for one second, to show it to Lamba, who drew her own quick version. Which she showed to Lam, who showed his own rendition to Yves Tanguy, and so on. The glimpses were diminishing echoes, evolving from corkscrew serpent on its chariot to a spiral on a square.

  The frivolity disgusted him. But though Parsons could not say why, watching excited him.

  His hosts played games of whispering, hearing and mishearing each other’s words. They played games of attention and chance. They played games of absurdity and misunderstanding. Fry watched with affectionate interest; Miriam with fascination. Mary Jayne smoked in the doorway, her arm around Raymond. He radiated disdain.

  The games produced strange figures, and sentences that made no sense but that too made Parsons’s breath come quick. Do what thou wi
lt.

  The Surrealists drew and hid what they drew, folded paper to obscure it. They passed their papers around and added to each other’s unseen images. Watching, Parsons breathed out in time to a gust of wind that rattled a forgotten painting in a tree’s canopy outside.

  Oh, he thought with a rush, as they passed their papers again. Each drew a head and hid it and passed it; each drew a body and passed it again; each drew legs or a base. Oh, I get it. I get it.

  He rocked in his chair. He understood the link between his Colquhoun, the occultist, the hermeticist, tapper into the world’s backways, and the Colquhoun close to this austere, courteous Breton. The connection of the golden dawn and animals and pleromic beyond to the woman committed to the liberation of dreams.

  From an overlap in the middle of a Venn diagram, Colquhoun watched him.

  Maybe, he thought, in the suburbs of this oppressed town, this edge of an edge, maybe at this moment in a room full of the stateless, in a nation from which they wanted out, maybe here while they played foolish games to thumb their noses at perpetrators of mass murder, maybe an engine that he had built to do the math to make a clay man walk, to make words and numbers intervene as presences, might tap something else, too. Something that might trouble the Nazis.

  “I know a game,” he said. No one looked at him.

  He ran upstairs, returned with all his mechanisms. The Surrealists were on another round. Parsons watched them draw while he connected cords to batteries and muttered powerful words.

  “What are you making?” Fry said, looking at the mess of mechanics. “Is that art?” He looked triumphantly at Miriam. The Surrealists kept passing their papers.

  “Right,” said Jack. “It’s an art thing.” He turned switches, he checked gauges. He placed crystals, vacuum tubes, bits of paper at strategic places in the room. “Wait, just one second. Just a moment. Before you all unfold.”

  The Surrealists looked up in mild surprise. They did as he asked. Jack held his breath and nodded and wired up the wood and metal box at the center and turned a final switch.