“It’s been made for me.”
“By whom, or what?”
“By my plants.”
“Again?”
“My plants. Every Fall I have to decide whether or not to bring in some of the annuals or leave them out on the terrace. If I bring them in and put them under lights, they weaken, grow pale, and stay deathly still. If I leave them out, they get full sun, full air, and they move in the wind. Sometimes they last even to December, but in the dangerous time of frosts and rain, and what you call Indian Summer, even though they die they may be better off than if they spend the winter paralyzed under lamps.”
“What I call Indian Summer?”
“English is not my native language.”
“Yes, of course. You’re French?”
“I am,” Jules answered, and an idea began to form, so he said, “I was born there.”
“But you live here and are an American citizen?”
“For decades.”
This seemed strange to the doctor because Jules’ pronunciation was extremely French for someone who had lived for so long in America. But he wasn’t about to open the question. “Good. That makes it less complicated. We need to know who you are. Did you have identification while you are running, a license, credit cards? From what was described it seems unlikely that anything was stolen, although it does happen.”
“No, I had nothing.”
“Not a problem. The nurse will come in to get what she needs for properly admitting you and contacting your family. She’ll take care of the paperwork. Right away, we’ll need your Medicare and supplemental plan numbers. There are a lot of forms, which you’re certainly able enough to fill out, but you can do it verbally – she’ll have a computer. All you have to do is review and sign. When we return, we’ll do a neurological workup, and if necessary load you back into the MRI once again just to make sure that we’re not overlooking anything and to see if in this short time there’s been a change. Sometimes these procedures take a while to assimilate, especially when you find yourself suddenly in a new environment. Don’t fault yourself for not being quick.”
Jules smiled, because he was already quicker than he would have thought possible.
A LONG TIME BEFORE, he and François had ridden almost the whole length of the Boul-Miche. Missing their stops, they engaged in discussion on the open platform at the back of one of the green-and-creme-colored buses that no longer ran beneath overarching trees as once, to the delight of many Parisians, they had. It was June, they were young, unknown, and full of energy. The diesel fumes on the Boul-Miche were actually sweet and so good for the trees that the canopy of thick, glossy leaves dappled the light as if the crowded avenue were under agitated water.
They were discussing the nature of paradox. François told Jules that he had lately discovered that the last person to leave the ship is also the last person not to leave the ship. François would ask his professors, point-blank, “What is paradox?” They knew, but were not quite able to define it, at least not easily, and they resorted to the dictionary, repeating that a paradox was, “an absurd proposition true on its face, or vice a versa.”
But for François and Jules this was insufficient, even inaccurate, and they had agreed that a paradox was more the statement of two contradictory propositions, both of which, nevertheless, were true. That two contending propositions could be correct was for Jules rather easy to accept in that it was an almost ordinary facet of music, and part of what gave music its escape from worldly friction in its ability to embrace even the starkest contradictions.
So now, in a New York hospital bed, Jules understood. Paradox, the reconciliation of opposites within a theater greater than the world, within infinite time and infinite space, was the solution to his dilemma. He understood now that he could never leave Paris, and he would not. But he had to leave Paris, and he would. He had it. It was all locked up, and he was happy. But it was complicated, painful, and would take some doing.
He could die at any moment or he could live to a hundred, which was as it had always been of course, and was for most people. But now, for him, this common condition was as intensified as if he were dreaming or in a movie in which he was strapped to explosives and had to choose to cut either the red or the blue wire. How much easier it would be for heroes if all such contraptions followed a convention similar to the laws of traffic signals worldwide. The red light always means stop. But was it stop the bomb from going off, or stop, don’t cut the red wire?
Jules threw aside the thin blanket, swung his legs out, and left the bed, thinking that this or any movement might be the end – even opening the closet door or reaching to take his running clothes from the shelf, or bending to grasp his running shoes in his left hand. After he shed the hospital gown, he sat down and put on his shorts and shirt. He was afraid to lean forward to lace up his shoes, but he had no choice. Then he stood up and walked out of the room and down the hall. Fit people in running clothes do not excite the same suspicion in a hospital corridor as, say, a limping, drooping, slowly moving and unshaven old man whose behind is visible from the back of his gown as he pushes the IV stand to which he is tethered.
As Jules walked south on Amsterdam Avenue he was tempted to run but didn’t. He had no money, so he walked the three or four miles to the hotel. He was perfectly okay when he got to his room. Contrary to his recent practice of strict economy, he ordered from room service, and his dinner that night – as he watched a million lights blink on in the great palisades of buildings, both close by and at a distance – was consommé, a salad, and grapefruit juice. They even had Badoit. Although he didn’t know why, he thought it would be good to drink water in excess of his thirst.
Alone in his room, he had lost or was losing everything at a faster and faster clip. But he was unafraid, excited by the lights, the form of the room, even the form of the bottle of Badoit, and by masses of lights corruscating through the dusk, like stars. From his tower he looked out at dozens of spires lit in many colors as if they were the jeweled tops of Empire obelisks. Most comforting was the silence. You could hear neither the street below nor even the air that even on a calm day was undoubtedly whistling past the windows.
It was strange to have a bedroom higher up than the top of the Eiffel Tower, and to see great distances across which were scattered buildings lit in white like Christmas trees, the catenaries of bridges like necklaces of blue lights, and immense ships moving silently across the harbor, slow skaters bearing torches across black ice. But there was no breeze and there was no ground, and he ached for home. The value of all the great construction was nothing when weighed against ordinary things that were modest and humane. He thought not of the magnificent towers so terribly out of scale but of people: of Jacqueline, Élodi, Cathérine when she was a child and as she was now, and Luc.
Firmly in the camp of the elephants, Luc thought of them as protection against crocodiles. He loved Babar, who was as real to him, or perhaps more real than anything in the world. When he was still able to visit, Cathérine had dropped him off with Jules while she left her car and took the RER into Paris to have lunch with David and to shop. Jules forgot everything as he willingly entered Luc’s world. They sailed a model boat in Shymanski’s pool. They released helium balloons and watched them with binoculars. Luc affirmed that he could see them, but he was pointing the binoculars more or less downward at the Seine. They watched cartoons, and ate the blandest, tiniest lunch Jules had eaten since Cathérine was three.
As Luc and Jules were building with Legos, Luc fell asleep. Jules carried him to the sofa, arranged pillows so he wouldn’t roll off, and then brought out the grand éléphant d’activités Les Papoum, a wonderful, velveteen elephant with cloth ears and rattles in its feet. He set it next to Luc, and sat in a chair from which he could see the child’s expression when he awoke.
Jules was reading an essay about the Roman quest for a quiet life – the monuments, coliseums, insulae, and legions had perhaps created the Romans’ desire for life as
nature laid it out at its simplest – when he heard a little yawn. Still holding the book, he let it drop to his lap. Luc opened his eyes. There was the elephant, from Luc’s perspective, towering above him. At first he froze. Then he smiled broadly and his eyes opened wider. Then he laughed, and lunged into his new friend, embracing it. All the great things that man has engineered, the vast cities, the dams, bridges, rockets, and trains, even the breathtaking forest of lights in Manhattan, could not hold a candle to that.
No one in the world but Jules Lacour knew that he had an aneurysm that would carry him away if, for example, he chose to outrun a pretty young girl on the long terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He could end his life at will, and it would never be taken as suicide. Other than the aneurysm, as far as he knew, he was in good health. He had kept up his strength because he had been sure since childhood that at some point he would need it to save himself or those he loved. Although he had not been able to save his mother, his father, or Jacqueline, he had always dreamed and prayed for the power and courage to do so. He had understood that never would he be able to come to their aid, and yet all his life he had dreamed that he would. And although he had never lacked courage, and had nurtured and come to the aid of others, never had he fulfilled his deepest desire, which was to save a faltering life by giving his own.
Touching Down
PARADOXICALLY, FLYING IS the handmaiden not only to fear but to optimism. Lifted above earth and oceans; seemingly higher than the stars close to the horizon; piercing through scudding, moonlit clouds; shot forward at great speed; the cabin carefully lighted; perfumed women circulating among their charges who sleep or read beneath pools of light … All this allows fresh starts, new thoughts, and the kind of planning that, once one touches down, assumes a weight and difficulty it does not have at altitude.
As the Airbus raced through thin air aloft, schemes and plans occurred to Jules almost uncontrollably. In the dimly lit cabin, its little spotlights illuminating here and there those who were still awake and working, he imagined thoughts issuing as if from a soap bubble machine and floating about, ephemeral and sparkling. But his speculations, tempted to fly off left and right, hewed to the centerline of necessity.
Disregarding morals in favor of necessities, he would have to abandon a lifetime of caution. For Luc, he would violate the categorical imperative. When things are so arranged, he thought, that observing the law crushes an individual, a family, the truth, then the categorical imperative need not be observed. He had already collided with the laws of the state. What he had in mind was far less a transgression but still illegal. Although in the hospital the first glimmer had appeared, the rest had come to him as he flew.
The plane now maneuvered over Paris grayed in morning light. As it dropped below the clouds, early traffic came into view, its red taillights reflecting off rain-slicked roads. There was a remarkable difference between the struggle below – thousands of cars slowing, skidding, sometimes stopping, all crowded together – and the enormous plane gliding smoothly through the air and aimed at the runway, like a rifle shot.
Despite all the troubles he would find, he was happy to be home. Though not vast, France is a big country, neither elongated like Italy nor broken into an archipelago like Japan, Denmark, or Indonesia. France is solid and centered. In Paris a Frenchman can feel that his world stretches more or less evenly in all directions, uninterrupted by sea or mountains, and yet not with the infinitude of the Russian Steppe or the Australian Outback. The center of gravity is just right, the country, although known as a hexagon, is like a protective sphere that most times allows the French to discover both the art of living and the perfection of art.
They flew low over fields, highways, and factories. The stewardesses strapped themselves into their seats. Now that Jules was an outlaw, he stared at the stewardess, the hôtesse de l’air, who he thought had perhaps expressed a desire – even were it fleeting – for him. And she stared back. Certainly he was too old, but there is a solidity and truth to age, and he was still physically able. Maybe for her he would be a novelty. Or perhaps what was most influential was that, as his inhibitions were overwhelmed by the sight and imagination of her, she felt his intense appreciation. She may have sensed the state he was in, and wanted to be taken to the ground along with him and cleared of everything but essence. Both of them had the same aura that envelops soldiers who fight with neither fear nor regret in a battle they know will be their last: release, abandon, humility, a feel for the earth, the defeat of time. But then, as always, there was Jacqueline, in the separate, inviolable world in which he would join her happily and soon. And that was enough for a constant widower as he wearily deplaned on the grayest of mornings in the city that still held his life.
II.
Blood Will Tell
DNA
JUST AS A CURVE is a series of infinitely small angles, and according to philosophers a point cannot exist, logically there is no present but only the infinitesimal and perhaps nonexistent space between past and future, as any schoolchild thinking about space and time might suspect. One thing that distinguishes Paris, however, making of it a magnet of attraction, is that it turns all this on its head. In Paris the present dominates the spectrum of time, spreading the otherwise invisible gap between past and future into spacious fields the ends of which one cannot even see. Just as music sounded out is only either heard in time that has passed or will be heard in time yet to come, and yet is solely of the present, Paris is overwhelmingly of the present as well.
The past is present in its reverberations and sustain, and the future is present in the clarity and beauty of its promises. For example, the crowds in ’44, surging with joy at the Liberation, continue to echo with such fidelity that one need not even close one’s eyes to see them. The future is also palpable not in pathetically featureless glass buildings but in generations yet to be born who are just like us, recapitulating every emotion and fault and, like us, suffering the illusion that they stand apart from a chain of life unbroken since the beginning of time.
In spring the trees of Paris bloom so lightly they seem to float on the breeze. In summer, its deep green gardens often shade into black and an orange sun revolves in the air like a crucible risen from a foundry. In winter, white silence in the long, treed allées and not a breath of wind. And in the fall bright colors and deep blue sky roll in on cool north winds.
AFTER AN UNSATISFYING, late dinner in a restaurant impatient to close, Duvalier Saidi-Sief and Arnaud Weissenburger sat like exhausted zombies in front of two huge computer screens in a cramped room of the Commissariat de Police du 16e Arrondissement, Passy, from which by a census of white automobiles they had agreed to work. Police stations, never empty, come alive at night. The two detectives had been staring all day at surveillance images issuing from portable hard drives delivered weeks after the crime. Such was the efficiency of the authority – they didn’t know which – that ran thousands of cameras to capture a present that, although the bureaucrats in charge probably didn’t know it, someone like François might claim did not exist.
To Arnaud and Duvalier, the inhabitants of the nonexistent present moved on astoundingly fast little legs. You could make them go faster, slow them down, stop them, or run them backward. Although both flics had the air of conspirators or people who know a great or terrible secret, they differed in their approach. Duvalier had to discipline himself not to force the images ahead at high-speed so he could watch clouds rushing with mysterious velocity across the rooftops. Arnaud was steadier and more thorough, perhaps because at one time he had had to stare at slabs of glowing steel as he guided them dangerously over giant hot rollers, and this he accomplished while sweating in heavy clothing and looking through a dark glass faceplate.
For hours they peered at the screens, sometimes trying to zoom in on the images of pretty girls so they could forget for a moment what they were doing and why. They didn’t even know exactly what they were looking for. There were two contradictory descriptions, but l
ab work had come back showing that the DNA of the O+ blood belonged to none of the three boys. Perhaps surveillance techniques of the future would chart the DNA of each fast-moving ant in the images, but now they had to find him before they could make a match. They did have a clue. The presumed assailant was male and 98% likely of Ashkenazi descent. So although it was neither necessary nor sufficient to do so, they kept their eyes open for Orthodox Jewish dress, even though they knew that only a small percentage of Jews would be identifiable by it, and that no one had described the suspect in those terms.
They saw such a person in images taken close to the time in question and not far from the bridge, near the École Militaire. The surveillance there was intense so as to protect the vast underground facilities of the GIC as it vacuumed up telephone and Internet communications throughout France. But this was a slight, young boy, hardly visible in the rain and walking in a direction opposite to that in which the assailant was known to have escaped. Although he might have seen something, they could not waste time searching for him rather than for the murderer. But they kept the Orthodox boy, along with many other things, in the back of their minds.
He had entered the Métro at the École Militaire and disappeared. They couldn’t check every surveillance camera at every station, even at that uncrowded hour. If he had been on the bridge, why wouldn’t he have entered the Métro at Bir-Hakeim?
“If he were there, why would he have skipped a station?” Arnaud asked himself out loud, quickly answering himself. “Maybe he wanted exercise. But it was raining. We know he’s not our suspect. What can we do?” They let it drop.