Revolution (39 page)

73

D
ead people can’t sit up. They can’t run after you. They can’t move at all. Right?

Then why is that one, the one in the green dress, moving her arm?

Oh, wait.
She’s
not moving it. Silly me. A rat is. A bulging brown rat. He’s tugging on it. Gnawing on it. Pulling off pieces of flesh and gobbling them down.

Whew. I feel so much better. I feel happy. So happy that I start laughing. Like a maniac. So hard that I can’t stop. And then I hyperventilate. And then I yell at myself to shut up and keep walking before the gravediggers find me down here, rocking in a corner.

I smelled the dead people before I saw them, but this time I was ready. I had Amadé’s little sack of cinnamon and orange peel. It helped with the smell of them a little. It helped with the sight of them not at all. There are so many. Hundreds. Thousands. Headless bodies are everywhere—stuffed into small rooms, stacked along walls. How many people did Robespierre kill?

Once I’m past them I stop and shine my flashlight on the map of the catacombs. The one Virgil made. I stuffed it in my bag right before the police raided the beach. I’d forgotten about it but I found it this morning while I was digging in my bag for Tylenol. I looked at it, then asked Amadé how to get to the crypt—the one we came out of with his friends.

He told me it was in the Ste-Marie-Madeleine church and told me not to let myself be seen entering it. I ate another salami sandwich for breakfast, got dressed, and packed up my stuff. I thanked him for his hospitality. He barely heard me. I tried to ask him my questions, things like: Where were you born? Why did you stop writing for the theaters? When did you become a genius composer? But he waved me away. He was still listening to the iPod. He’d never stopped listening to it. He hadn’t slept all night. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it would run out of juice in another day or so.

I said goodbye and then I took off. Through the streets of Paris. To the church. Into the crypt and down the long cold tunnel into the catacombs.

I peer at Virgil’s map now until I find a section that contains the Madeleine. His drawings indicate that the tunnel leading down from the church is blocked. I guess it will be a couple hundred years from now, but it’s open today. I’m standing in it. I follow the path with my finger. After the block, the tunnel continues, forks and Ts a few times, goes under the river, and eventually leads to the beach.

I don’t know how all this happened. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know why it all feels and looks and tastes and smells real when it can’t possibly be. And I don’t care. All I want is to get back to where I was. To the twenty-first century. To Virgil. So I’m going to try to get back to where this all started, back to the beach.

“Virgil?” I call out now, hopefully. “Hey, Virgil, you there?”

The only answer is my voice echoing back at me. He’s not there. I’m alone. As usual. I wasn’t alone when I was with him. Which sounds stupid. Of course I wasn’t alone if I was with someone, but the thing is, I’m usually the most alone when I’m with someone.

I keep walking, shining my flashlight ahead of me. It’s quiet down here. I hear water dripping, rats squeaking, and the sound of my own feet—that’s it. The ground dips and rises. I have to duck in places, skirt a well, climb over a pile of stone from a wall that caved. After trudging for about half an hour, I find the first exit on Virgil’s map—St-Roch—a church in the center of the St-Honoré district. I remember the name from Alex’s diary. She came and went from the catacombs through St-Roch. I decide to check it out. Maybe I don’t have to walk all the way to the beach. Maybe there’s a quicker way back. I climb a narrow staircase cut into the limestone. There’s a door at the top, an ornate iron grille. I try the handle, but it’s locked. I shine my flashlight through the bars and see from the statues and crosses and cobwebs and dust that it leads to some sort of storage room. I look for lightbulbs in the ceiling, a vacuum cleaner, some sign of modern life—but there’s nothing.

“That’s only because it’s an old room. Nobody comes down here anymore,” I tell myself. And I try to believe it.

I head back into the tunnels and continue eastward. It’s hard to navigate. It’s really, really dark down here. Virgil has more tunnels drawn on his map than I’m seeing. But the main ones are here and I’m following them. I hope. After only another fifteen minutes or so I come up in what I think is a basement room under the Louvre. Which is good. It means I’m still heading east and working my way south, too.

What’s not good, though, is what I find in that room. Meat stored on ice. Milk in jugs, not cartons. Eggs in a basket. Dead chickens hanging from the ceiling. I’m still in the eighteenth century. Voices and footsteps scare me out of there and back into the tunnels.

I walk for a while. Under the river. Cold, murky water comes up to my ankles. Then to my knees. It drips on my head. I go slowly, sliding my feet, feeling for holes in the ground. As I get closer to the left bank, the ground slopes up and the water starts to recede. But it’s still murky, so much so that I don’t see the dead guy lying in it until I trip over him.

I scream and stumble, but manage to catch myself against a wall. After a minute or so, when my heart stops trying to batter its way out of my chest, I look at him. He’s propped up against the wall, half in and half out of the water. He’s not one of Robespierre’s, he can’t be—he still has his head. There’s a lantern in the water near him. He probably got lost down here and used up his candle, or his whale oil, or whatever the hell, and became disoriented and hysterical and died all alone in the dark, screaming and crying and clutching the walls.

And I realize something: it could happen to me. If I trip and drop my flashlight and it rolls away from me. If my batteries die. If I fall into a well.

The thought almost makes me turn around. But I don’t. I’m getting closer to the beach with every step. If I turn back now I’ll only have to try again later with weaker batteries. I keep walking and after a few minutes the ceiling finally stops dripping. I check the map. I’m on the other side of the river. Halfway there.

I walk on. I’ve got to get to the church of St-Germain. According to the map, the tunnel I’m in splits into three there. One path leads west, into the seventh arrondissement. One leads east, deeper into the sixth. The middle one, the one I want, continues south toward the fourteenth.

About forty-five minutes later, I’m there. I know because there’s a sign over a gated doorway that says
Saint-Germain
. I’m psyched. I’m actually doing it. I’m getting myself to the beach. I stop to rest for a few minutes, nibble a bit of bread that I brought with me, then get going again. The map says the tunnel should split soon. I pick up my pace, expecting to see the three-way fork any second, but instead I see a big fat wall.

“This is unexpected,” I say.

I shine my light over it.
Panthéon
is scrawled on it, with an arrow pointing east. Next to it
Invalides
is written, with an arrow pointing west. I’m standing at a T, with tunnels to either side of me.

“I must’ve read the map wrong,” I say, confused.

I peer at the map again, and as I’m following the path to St-Germain with my finger, I remember how the entrance to the tunnel, back at the Madeleine, was shown as being blocked, but really wasn’t. And I realize, with a sick feeling, that I didn’t read the map wrong. It
is
wrong. It was drawn in the twenty-first century and I’m in the eighteenth century and some of the tunnels it shows—including the one I very much need—have not been dug yet.

And suddenly, I lose it. I start crying and yelling and kicking the wall. “Why?” I scream at it. “
Why?
”

Why am I here? Why did this happen to me? Why can’t I make this whole bad trip stop? It can’t still be a drug reaction. The effects of the Qwellify would’ve worn off by now. It can’t be a vision quest thing. I mean, how long do those things last? Half an hour? I can’t be crazy. I just can’t be. I’ve survived so far. I’ve figured out how to get money. Buy food. Find shelter. I’ve figured out how to get back into the catacombs. Navigated my way through miles of tunnels in the pitch black with a flashlight and a homemade map. Could a crazy person do all that?

“So then why?” I shout. “Tell me why!”

But the walls and the dead people and the rats and the bugs are all silent. I sink down and sit on the ground. Back to the wall, arms wrapped around my knees.

I want to go to the Rue St-Jean. To Lili and G’s. Right now. I miss Virgil. And Rémy’s café. I miss Brooklyn, too. And my house. And Mabruk’s Falafel. I miss the smell of the city buses. Good coffee. The bridge all lit up at night. I miss my mother. And Nathan. And Vijay. And Jimmy Shoes.

But I don’t miss Arden. Or Beezie. Or St. Anselm’s. Or my father. That’s something. It means I’m not totally desperate. Not yet.

Maybe I’m in a coma. I fell running in the tunnels and hit my head, didn’t I? Maybe I hit it so hard I knocked myself out and the police found me and took me to a hospital and I’m lying in intensive care right now with a million tubes in me and all this is just my brain trying to amuse itself while I lie immobilized in a vegetative state.

Oddly enough, the coma idea cheers me up. It explains a lot—like why I haven’t snapped out of this yet. I pick up my head and wipe my nose on my sleeve. The beam of my flashlight is lighting a patch of ground and the black spider crawling across it. As I watch the spider, the beam dims. Just slightly.

Time to go. I don’t want to be down here when the batteries die. Just in case I’m wrong about the coma thing.

I stand up and start the long walk back.

74

“H
ugo stinks. Don’t you ever wash him?” I ask Amadé.

The hellhound is lying on the bed next to me. He growls every time I try to push him off.

“Seriously. You could take him for a swim in the Seine, you know. Anything would help.”

I get no answer. Just the same chords over and over again. Amadé’s composing, or trying to. I’m lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. It’s where I’ve been ever since I got back from my stroll through the catacombs. Amadé wasn’t exactly thrilled to see me, but he let me back in.

I put a pillow over my head now and try to block out the sounds he’s making but it doesn’t work. How did he ever get to be such a famous composer if he can’t get past the same three chords?

I can’t take it anymore. I raise the pillow. “Switch to B minor! There should be a tritone in the third measure. God!” I shout.

Amadé swears. He bangs his fist on the table. “Did I ask you for advice? No! I do not need advice. What I need is coffee!”

Coffee’s the least of our problems. We have no food. We’ve eaten everything I bought yesterday. We’ve run out of firewood, too. I sit up. Hugo’s funk is suffocating me.

“We need to eat,” I say. “I’ll go to the Palais. See if I can get a few coins. If I do, I’ll get some coffee.”

Amadé mutters something, but I don’t catch it. He’s bent over the table now, scribbling music.

I don’t want to go to the Palais—the memory of those drunken goons who groped me makes me shudder—but I don’t have much choice. I open my guitar case, to tune up before I go, and see that my E string has snapped.

“Do you have any spare strings?” I ask.

He points to a box on the table. I open it and find a tangle of strings. Trouble is, most of them look nothing like the strings I’m used to. Eventually I find what looks like an E. I replace the broken string, then try to tune my guitar. But it doesn’t work. The strings don’t sound right together. Probably because the one I got from Amadé is made of cat or dog or squirrel.

“This is no good,” I tell him. “I need a whole new set.”

“Go buy one.”

“With what? I don’t have any money. I just told you that.”

“Go to Rivard’s. My credit is good there. On the Rue de la Corderie. Just north of here. Go up the Rue d’Anjou.”

I get my Streetwise map of Paris out but the Rue d’Anjou’s not on it. What a surprise. “Way north? Or just a few streets north? Can you help me out here, Amadé?” I ask him.

He throws his quill down. “Fine! I’ll walk you there. Will that make you happy?”

“Yeah, it will. Will not starving make
you
happy?”

He doesn’t answer me, just shrugs into his jacket and stuffs the iPod into his pocket.

Outside on the street, I say, “You’ve got to give up on that chord progression. It’s not working for you.”

“I heard something similar on the music box. I wanted to try a variation.”

“Who were you listening to? Beethoven? Mozart?”

“Radiohead.”

I burst into laughter.

He pulls out the iPod. “Explain to me something,” he says.

“What?”

He points to the dial. “This one … ‘Fitter, Happier.’ ”

I shake my head. “Sorry, dude, not possible. I’d need the next two centuries to explain that one.”

75

I
t’s kind of beautiful, this scary world.

I still want to get out of it as soon as possible, but when I look around and stop thinking about how insane it all is and just see it without freaking out, it’s really beautiful. Stinky, but beautiful.

We’re walking north through the Marais. There are yards and gardens. I can see them through the gates of the houses. Flowers bloom inside them. A man drives a herd of sheep ahead of him through the narrow, cobbled streets. Another carries a cheese as big as a wagon wheel into his shop. A straight-backed girl in a slate blue dress, her gold hair coiled up on her head, washes windows. Men sit in a coffee shop, drinking from porcelain bowls and smoking clay pipes. Amadé stops and looks at them longingly.

“Come on, java-boy,” I say, tugging on his sleeve. “The sooner I get my strings, the sooner you get your triple grande double-caff soy crappucino.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

We keep walking. There’s no plastic in this world. No neon. No diesel fumes. No aluminum siding. No fluorescent lights. No loud tourists wearing T-shirts that say
MY PARENTS GOT TO SEE THE KING GET HIS HEAD CUT OFF AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY SHIRT
.

We pass a woman who’s standing by a fountain, a cup in her hand. She’s wearing a black dress with a red, white, and blue ribbon pinned to it. She’s thin and sad. Two small, skinny children sit on the ground by her feet. The sight of them kills me.

“A war widow,” Amadé says.

I look back at her. I see her move. Hear her speak. She’s very much alive but I know I’m looking at a ghost. Two hundred years have gone by since she walked the streets of Paris. There’ve been wars and revolutions out the waz since then. So many people killed. And the ones left behind, the ones like her, always tell themselves that it was worth it, that something better will come from the mess and the death and the loss. I guess they have to. What else can they do?

“I wish I had some money. I would give her a few coins,” Amadé says.

“I wish I had some balls. I would tell her I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. I would give her an apology. From the future.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re still at it. You think the Revolution was bad news, you should check out World War One. That was supposed to be the war to end all wars. Didn’t turn out that way.”

“World War One?”

I try to explain it. And World War Two. But he can’t get past the tanks and airplanes.

We turn right onto the Rue d’Anjou. I take off my jacket and tie it around my waist. It’s sunny and warm and the guitar case is heavy on my back and I’m sweating like crazy. I haven’t had a bath. I’m greasy and smelly. But I’ve learned that stink soon reaches critical mass. You reach a certain degree of smelly, then level off.

We keep walking down a nameless street that’s so narrow, I can almost touch the houses on both sides. Amadé starts talking about the iPod again. He asks me why so many of the songs on it are in English. I tell him because English is the world’s most commonly spoken language. He refuses to believe it. He says there’s no way the world’s people would choose such an ugly language over French. Then he asks me about the man Led, surname Zeppelin, and what sort of instrument he used to make the sounds on “Immigrant Song.”

“An electric guitar,” I tell him. He gives me a puzzled look. “Do you know what electricity is?”

“Electricity,” he repeats, frowning. “I think I know this thing. The American ambassador invented it. Benjamin Franklin. Do you mean to say that Monsieur Zeppelin’s guitar is powered by lightning?”

“No, not by … actually, yeah,” I say, laughing. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

“This is a wondrous thing,” Amadé says.

“Yeah, it is,” I say, thinking how cool that is—Amadé liking Jimmy Page’s guitar-playing. Because two hundred–odd years from now, Jimmy Page tells
Rolling Stone
how much he likes Amadé Malherbeau’s.

“Ah! Look where we are. Almost there. Come, we must cross,” Amadé says, taking my arm. We turn left onto the Rue de la Corderie, dodging a carriage, two sedans, and countless piles of horse poop.

And then I see it—an ancient, ugly building, looming above the stone wall that surrounds it. A dark tower rising into the sky. The Temple prison.

As I stand there, staring up at it, this whole weird trip becomes real. History itself becomes real. It’s no longer an account. A chapter in a textbook. Pages in a diary. It’s real. He’s real. He’s in there. He’s suffering. Dying. Not in the past. But now. Right now. I feel like I can’t breathe.

“Amadé,” I say. “There’s a boy in there. Louis-Charles.”

Amadé’s a few steps ahead of me. “I know,” he says brusquely. “There’s nothing to be done.” He walks back to me and takes my arm, but I don’t move.

“He’s only a child, Amadé.”

“What he is, is a lost cause,” he says. “Come on.”

But I don’t. I won’t. I just stand there, looking up at the tower. I remember Alex’s description of the dying boy. Of his suffering. Of her own. Of the despair she felt because she couldn’t save him. I remember her decision to stay in Paris when she could have left.

She died trying to help Louis-Charles. She died here. In Paris. In June of 1795. And now I’m here. In Paris. In June of 1795. Standing where she stood. Standing in her place. I put the guitar case down on the street, open it, and take my instrument out.

“Are you mad?” Amadé hisses.

I take a few steps back from the wall, wanting my sound to rise, to not get eaten up by the ugly stones. I’m not even thinking about the dodgy E string now. I don’t feel crazy anymore. Whacked out. Or comatose. In fact, I feel totally sane.

I start to play. I play “Hard Sun,” trying to hit those opening chords hard and perfect. I start to sing, channeling Eddie Vedder, wanting my voice to be strong and loud, wanting the sound to rise.

“Stop this! We have to get out of here!” Amadé shouts fearfully, tugging on my arm.

I shake him off and keep playing. Harder. Louder. I cut a finger. I can feel my blood on the strings. I hear shouting. It’s coming from the prison gates. Amadé swears at me. He walks away. A man approaches me. He has a uniform on and he’s carrying a rifle. He came out of nowhere.

“Move on!” he shouts at me.

“Please, sir. Ignore him,” Amadé says, running back. “He’s not right. He hit his head and ever since, he—”

“Stop playing!” the guard shouts.

But I don’t stop.

“Did you hear me?”

And still I don’t stop. He raises his rifle then and hits me in the face with the butt. Lights go off in my head. I fall to my knees.

“Stop. Now. Or I will shoot you dead,” the man says to me.

I look up at him. “Where did you come from?” I ask him.

He raises his rifle again, presses the barrel to my forehead. I feel blood running down my cheek. Pictures flash before my eyes. Pictures of monks on fire. Of bodies in a pit. Of napalmed children running down a dirt road. I push the barrel away and get to my feet. I hold my guitar with one hand and wipe the blood off my face with the other.

“A decent man. Just doing your job,” I say to him. “You were always here. And you always will be.”