Babayaga

This sentence set off all sorts of alarms in Vidot, as he realized the fatal danger Will was in. Immediately, Vidot’s professional instincts took over. He was thrilled. As a policeman, he had always waited for this moment, when he would actually protect the innocent from a real looming threat. Policemen generally arrived too late, not because they were lazy or incompetent but because nobody ever called them until the window had already been smashed, the blade had been stabbed, or the head crushed. By the time he and his colleagues arrived, the safe was bare, the blood was cold, and the only thing left for him to do was dry the tears, collect the clues, and help sweep up the shattered glass. This did not bother many of his peers, who were happy enough to simply cash their checks and go home, but Vidot lived perpetually on the balls of his feet, waiting for that desperate moment when his sense of duty and honor would be called into action. He longed to leap in front of a speeding car to save a heedless child or push a bystander out of the path of an oncoming bullet.

What could he do? His options here were even more limited than the dutiful police dogs that offered no more than sniffing, barking, or bites. Still, his sense of urgency was strong. Which is why, though he knew it was an insane and potentially even suicidal act, Vidot the flea did the one thing he could do: he valiantly and forcefully bit into the flesh of Will’s skull, sucking up his dangerously drugged blood and plunging himself into the strange and mysterious world below.

Almost immediately, he found himself wandering down through his old neighborhood on rue Mouffetard, which was almost as he recalled it, though now periodically punctuated by curious interruptions: a brook running through an alleyway, an Irish bar with a sign reading “Casey’s” standing where the old man Bourdon’s barber shop should have been. As Vidot kept walking, the unrecognizable elements of the landscape began to outnumber the familiar ones, the hat shop was now a stand of willows, the watchmaker’s now a record store, until, turning a corner by the old library, he came upon the sight of Will kneeling in a muddy field, a man holding a gun against his head. Their backs were both to Vidot as the entrance to Vidot’s old metro stop blossomed out of the field in front of them. Distracted by this, the man with the gun did not notice Vidot’s approach. Nor did he hear the detective lift the heavy branch from the ground and swing it round his head with all his might.

Moments later, the man with the gun lay at their feet as Will rose and dusted himself off. Vidot felt light-headed with excitement. He was not sure how to explain the situation, there was too much to say, so many odd and unbelievable circumstances had stacked themselves up, one upon the other, but then, at the very moment when he was shaking Will’s hand and preparing to start with a simple hello, Will completely vanished, disappearing right before his eyes, leaving the detective alone in a landscape that was now suddenly and completely Paris.

After that, Vidot walked around for what felt like hours, lost in his thoughts amid scenery that was at once surreal and all too familiar. He found himself missing Adèle with his whole heart, completely abandoning the deep hurt of her betrayal. He longed to sit with her again at their little dining room table, where he could relate to her all the colorful details of this incredible adventure. He had just saved a man’s life! It was, perhaps, the most richly satisfying act he had ever accomplished, and yet without Adèle there as a part of it, he felt empty and hollow. He realized that for him nothing existed in the world of any importance until he shared it with her. Adèle was his sole audience, his only validation. He had no eyes of his own and he was completely deaf without her. He was nothing, truly, but a vessel that carried his small puzzles and great triumphs home to her. Only after she absorbed them or interpreted them or merely smiled at his detailed and perhaps occasionally tiresome recital of them did the many dimensions of his existence finally bloom within him as well, opening up like rosebuds in water. This was, he realized, a perspective of their relationship he had never appreciated before, because he had never been so very far away from it.