Paris, Christ.
The sky is light-filled from somewhere south of six in the morning to somewhere north of ten p.m. this time of year, and even when the sun sets the light lingers, failing but mercurial, this slow-descent of night. As if night had been sliced open, right down its nerve-dark spine, and stuffed full of sunlight. So far north one feels balanced at the edges of things during the extremes of the year, the solstices, the equinoxes, the axis points around which the sky revolves, or at least the sun and the goddamned earth.
--
They stay in the Belle Etoile suite on the seventh floor of the Le Meurice, on the Rue de Rivoli, across from the Tuileries, in view of the Louvre, the Place de la Concorde, the Mini-Palais and the Grand-Palais. From the seventh-floor wrap-around terrace they can see the Eiffel Tower and the constant river of traffic up and down the Champs-Elyseés. The crowds snaking through the courtyard of the Louvre, descending beneath the metal-and-glass pyramind in hopes of an early glimpse at the Mona Lisa before her room fills up with gawkers and flashbulbs. The riverboats plying the Seine and the bridges, grand and pedestrian both, arching so finely over her.
--
Sera has never been to Paris.
That's not quite true, but see she doesn't remember it. Whenever she was here, and where-ever and why-ever every piece of it is tucked not-so-neatly behind the curtain that separates some nameless past with her matchless present and she lives in both at once, quiet and alert, forehead pressed to the glass of the window of the taxi or limo or antique jag or what the fuck ever they take from CDG in to the city proper, watching the city unfold around her, mouth open, warm breath fogging the glass. Her heart beating, beating.
--
All the pleasures of Paris.
Maxim's and the Champs-Elyseés. Shopping along the Rue Royale. The Louvre, the fucking Louvre, conveniently perhaps after or before hours, depending on how one measures time, or in the midst of the crowds, part of the ever-moving circuit filing past French, German, Dutch, Italian masters. Christ on his cross, Napoleon crowning Josephine, Liberty leading the people over some ill-fated barricade, into yet another ill-fated revolution. Notre Dame and Saint Chapelle and either the vulgarity or the genius of the 19th century: Sacre Coeur with its blinding-white dome shining over all. The cafés of Saint Germaine de Pres and the clubs of Pigalle, from the Moulin Rouge to the Sexodrome (that is a real place) and the sex shop four blocks from their posh hotel, all blearing red neon lights. One day they eat at Epicure and the next at some corner brasserie near the Champ de Mars where they order one and another bottle of the most expensive champagne in the place, and Sera starts out next to him but ends up in his lap and they pick up the hot French waiter (Alex, Alex is his name. Slim and dark-haired and precise and pressing, just a little bit invasive, see? With a helmet and leather gloves he slaps out as he laughs because yes he would like to come home with them and a Vespa on which he weaves in and out of traffic like a goddamned nymph or a shuttlecock or what the fuck ever. Some days later it is not a hot French waiter but two Australian girls on holiday in Europe for the summer backpacking after finishing their baccalareates in law and medicine, respectively.)
--
The rhythm of his life though, that doesn't change, does it? The daily workouts, mind and body. Body and mind, because he can feel the promise of something, behind his eyes or beneath his skin: he is always seeking and now he is close. He is so close, he is on the verge - .
--
Late afternoon. Some weekday, and the sun is shining and the sun shines so fucking long here, and the sky is a blue that feels at once brilliant and mercurial. Weekends are better. Locals flood the quais and the parks, array themselves everywhere with picnics planned or makeshift spread out around them, changeable little knots. Weekdays there are fewer locals and more tourists, or maybe the local staff nipping out for a slightly-less-leisurely lunch of a take-away sandwich and an orangina enjoyed out in the sun.
It isn't even 2 p.m. yet and half the bouquinistes lining the Quai Voltaire have not yet bothered to show up for work and unlock their boxes. Others have, though. Spread out and displayed their wares, everything from 20-year-old volumes of Paris match to vintage posters to Hungarian knock-offs of the Harry Potter novels to third-hand well-loved copies of Un Saisan En Enfer to - well, you just have to browse to find out. Paris is a city of books and a city of light and this bouquiniste has little more than romance paperbacks and cheap light-up Eiffle Tower souvenirs.
The next guy, though, looks like he's from another era.
Another world.
Hawksley RothschildHawksley does not appreciate Paris. For its loveliness, for its ethereality, for its history. He appreciates it for what he appreciates anyone and anything for: what it can give him. What he gets from it. He is a selfish, spoiled boy.
He appreciates things solely for how they make him feel in the moment, though his loyalties shift just as easily elsewhere -- such as when the sun comes golden and liquid through the windows at a time when he would rather be sleeping. He does not appreciate the sun for its shining or its life-sustaining warmth, despite the fact that the sun is a part of his very own soul. He is a selfish, spoiled boy.
He has been here before, and he has spent holidays here. He has watched fireworks as the world sets them off at midnight and he has fallen half in love with someone or someone else here or there in Paris, as you do. He doesn't ask Sera the uncomfortable questions she cannot answer, because he does not care if she can answer them. She is as she is; what does it matter if she has not always been so?
Except she has never been to Paris.
So he takes her to Paris. That night. They have no jobs, they have few responsibilities. He has Collins; she has her band, plus the hangers-on who love her with cultlike devotion. He blows in her ear in the car to watch her shiver. He eats her out on the jet. It hardly matters to him that they end up in Paris,
or Istanbul,
or Greece,
or anywhere.
--
But they are in Paris, and the things they say about Paris are true. All of them true, and there is a pulse and power here that they can both feel, a resonance that thuds like a beating heart from beneath them. They were going to go back after three days.
They do not go back to the States after three days. They are gone longer. They are gone so long that he forgets what month it is. He does not care. He licks Alex's wrist, watches Sera and Lara from the corner of his eye while his mouth encircles Jessica's nipple. He is not asking any of them for the time, and they do not offer it. He tunes out when they discuss the real world, or the world outside of this otherworldliness. He sleeps deeply. He sleeps in patches of sunlight for hours and hours, leaving Sera to explore on her own sometimes because he does not wake til the sun sets and the sun sets so late and she is eating brunch at eight in the evening because she didn't exactly get up at dawn, either.
The days are long, long, long. He cannot get enough of the sunlight.
--
Hawksley is walking, and maybe she is with him, maybe she is asleep. He is not entirely sure he's awake, as he walks. He stopped to get some ice cream. He looks at books, and looks through them, you never know what you will find, you never know what it is worth, what name you will recognize.
MiailhesHawklsey looks at books, because you never know what there is,
or what you might find. Passes over the Serbian short stories and pauses, hand hovering, over the handwritten life of a fictional saint whose name has been scratched hurriedly off the cover. This place is different than the one before it and the one beyond that. Maybe he felt that on his tongue or vibrant, right, all ringing through the fine bones of his inner ear.
(Sera isn't here. She sleeping something off, maybe, or stoned in the Orangerie swimming through the Monets. She likes The Kiss in the Robin museum and also The Gates of Hell and also the ridiculous people who photograph The Gates of Hell from every angle. She also likes Chanel and doesn't know that Coco Chanel was a Nazi sympathizer. Likes Chanel enough that she buys a new dress there that costs half the GDP of certain third-rate third world countries and actually covers her body from one inch above her knees to one tenth of an inch above her boobs, that's how much she likes Chanel.)
The saint's life, though. He turns it over in his hand.
The leather is warmer than it would be even had it been sitting in direct sunlight, which it decidedly is not.
Still, he knows it to be rubbish.
That does not mean he puts it down, though perhaps he does. Perhaps he picks something else up.
Everything is at his fucking fingertips, after all.
Selfish, spoiled boy.
--
"I don't suppose you know what you're looking for."
A stranger. A little man in a little folding chair against the stones lining the quai who watches Hawksley not-quite-benignly from behind the glint of his glasses in the sun.
Hawksley RothschildSants. He thinks of gifts for Sera, because her friend is a priest or something? And she was a Catholic School Girl. It will be a joke: first that he gets her a book and second that it is about a saint. He touches it though, lifts it up as he turns it over, and turns it over again, hardly realizing he is just turning it like a stone plucked from a river, smooth in the palm, a worrystone. He touches it, captivated by its softness and its warmth, thinking
it feels like skin
and remembering
it is skin.
Touches it and touches it, over and over, even as he looks at other things. He is spoken to, and prepares a droll look, turning to glance at the man with a raised eyebrow. "English?" he retorts, as though this is a surprise, or somehow diminishes the man's authenticity to the moment.
MiailhesHe is at once a spare man and a straight man and a man with a curving spine. Khakis and pennyloafers and a modest and not-particularly-fashionable collared white shirt that is meant to look crisp but merely looks crumpled, a loosened silk tie, the shift beneath a forgettable windbreaker. Old-fashioned glasses, the sort that are round, the sort with flexible fishhook curves on the arms to tuck neatly behind one's ears.
They are tinted, slightly.
Wisps of white hair frame a shining pate like a monk's tonsure, but this is time and male-pattern-baldness, not the commitment of a religious fanatic to the strange dress codes of a stranger god.
A folding chair, plastic and metal, against the warm old stones of the warm old quai. Gaggles of tourists drift by the stall; drift by and pass onward to the next. There are no postcards, no posters, no cheap-metal plaques and trays, no pictures of Bridgette Bardot or Serge Gainsborough or Jean-Paul Sartre smoking a cigarette outside the Café de Flore.
Well perhaps there is a picture of Jean-Paul Sartre smoking a cigarette outside the Café de Flore, but somewhere in his stock, but it isn't on display.
"Vous ne parlez pas francais, n'est-ce pas? But if you prefer Yiddish or perhaps Armenian, I will try to oblige."
The French isn't perfect. The accent too stiff. Too un-supple.
Hawksley can hear that, even if he doesn't speak the language.
Hawksley RothschildSo Hawksley throws down the Arabic. You weren't expecting that, were you, old man? Ha! He rattles something off: a line of poetry, perhaps. He smirks. He hears the poor flexibility of the man's French because, you see,
Hawksley does know French. It was the first language he learned after the one he grew up speaking. He speaks it rarely, though. He feels like it's a crutch when it comes to picking people up in the United States. He could tell them that their teeth look like a military cemetary and they'd drop their pants for him, if he said it in French with a smoldering look in his eyes.
He shrugs. "English is my first. Yours?"
He is still holding the book, and watching the man, and thinking this is not a day, or a night, or a dream, or waking. He wonders if he's high. Sera wouldn't dose him without telling him, he thinks. Maybe he forgot her telling him.
MiailhesHawksley throws down the Arabic. The old man breathes out a quiet snort. He makes no pretense at knowledge of the words or dialect, but see there is an archness in the look with which he favors the Hawksley that feels very knowing. Hawksley can fucking see the pressure of the old man's tongue in the old man's cheek, see. As if he were biting it.
But he is not biting it. He is just listening and responding and rising from his cheap folding lawn chair, which scrapes against the stones.
Hawksley wonders if he is high. No, no - Sera wouldn't get him stoned without his knowledge, would she? But could he have picked something up from the nightstand, from her goddamned skin -
--
There are people around. Strangers. Sunburnt tourists, footsore and happy. The wind swirling in the open space over the river. The riverboats gliding by, one of the elegant arches of the Pont Neuf visible in the middle foreground, if Hawksley thinks to look.
The tourists, though, they hardly notice this particular stand. They do not notice it. They move on by,.
--
"Silesian." The man supplies. And, yes. There is the accent, faint but Hawksley well-versed and well-read and fucking smart. " - was mine. Then a handful of its revenants - " he does say revenants. " and so on, as one goes. "If you were just browsing I can leave you to it, you know.
"So many people are these days. Just browsing. That volume you're holding has a certain interest. The unvarnished life of a saint who never lived, whose worship has been confirmed in not less than a half-dozen independent locations, mostly in the Ardéche, written in verse by a woman confined at the Hôtel Dieu in Beaune for one hundred and seventy three years, who may or may not have been a witch.
"It may or may not have been an autobiography. I hope you don't mind uncertainty.
"But if you like certainty, I have another work that might interest you. How's your Latin?"
Hawksley RothschildThe tourists are a blur of people, of shapes with fuzzy edges, colors dim from proximity. Hawksley pays them no mind, so inwardly focused, so narcissistic, that he is barely even noticing the man he's talking to. He smirks a little, just a moment before the man rises, and watches him as he approaches. For some reason, Hawksley does not move. He turns the book over and ove rin his hands.
Silesian, he knows, is a language. Or a European subdivision of the Carboniferous period of the geological timescale. Or Angelus Silesius. These thoughts, too, blur in the same way the tourists do.
"Well of course a witch wrote it, if the subject never existed but was worshipped. Writing things bring them into existence, haven't you ever heard of Thoth?"
He says this drolly, or tries to, but it comes out faster than he means for it to. Hawksley pauses there to take a breath. "I ate uncertainty's pussy for breakfast," he says, and he is not lying, "and my Latin is better than your French," which is also not a lie.
MiailhesThat makes the old man smile. There is something both unremitting and indulgent about the expression. The light flashes off the lenses of his glasses, which are - somehow - darker than ever-you-dreamed.
He is at Hawksley's side then. Rather quickly but also somehow puttering. There is an air of puttering about him there is an aura of puttering about him as he drifts - not hesitantly but consideringly - over his stock. Leatherbound and handstitched, fading inks and failing threads, antique on antique on antique in shaded by nothing more than the unlocked and opened bouquiniste box itself.
"Never been much for the Egyptians, to tell you true," the old man mutters conversationally as he searched. "Always preferred the northern sort. Mimir and the like. Maybe it's the blood. Maybe I just like my gods with severed heads. Ahh,"
His hands are on another volume.
And he is handing it over to Hawksley.
"The journal of Lucius Vitruvius Gromaticus. Recopied by a peripatetic monk with chillblains and a fondness for hairshirts in the 11th century. Recopied again by a clerk with a fondness for Rabelais in the 15th century. Typeset by Andras Chevelle who printed seven copies in Bruges in 1801. It seemed an inauspicious number, so he burned six of them and kept one to prop up an off kilter trestle table in his scullery.
"You never know. It may be precisely what you're looking for.
"Fifty-three Euros for the pair of volumes seems a fair deal. N'est-ce pas?"
That inflexible French again.
The strange old man smiles a gap-toothed smile.
Hawksley RothschildHawksley has slapped people for less, when it comes to the ancient Egyptians. He almost calls Collins to GET DOWN HERE AND BRING ME A GLOVE. A NICE ONE. so he can whack this old man with it and thus challenge him to a straight-up duel. Hawksley knows how to fence. Don't think he'd feel bad about whipping an old man with a foil, either. He wouldn't. He. Would. Not. Sir.
What he does instead is look affronted, and that look holds until the old man hands him a book. A journal. The man knows far too much about its origins, shares it freely, which makes Hawksley almost certain he's making it up because Hawksley is a tourist who hasn't stopped caressing the life of a fictional saint that may be an autobiography of a witch, a tourist who loves books, gravitates towards them, lives among them, even if they are peddled but unappreciative halfwits who don't even get what a big deal Thoth is, oh my god.
"How is seven inauspicious?" he says, but he's not really asking. He is looking at the man who is offering to sell him a one-of-a-kind book, plus another, for fifty-three. He cocks his head and looks slyly at the new book, reaching over, taking it from the old man's hand with a gentleness that betrays his real feelings.
"No," he tells the man, and haggles with him.
They settle on forty-four instead of fifty-three. It still adds up to eight, infinity resting on its side, the number repeated so many times in Hawksley's own birthdate. He likes eights. He takes both volumes. He begins heading back to the hotel, thinking of looking back, but,
he is not the type.
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