The Last Days of New Paris

“I was taking pictures,” she says.

“Of what?”

“Everything. The last thing I saw was the Propagandastaffel.” The censors’ building, where fascist authorities oversee what remains of propaganda and art in a city where art hunts. Which is a great deal. She opens a bag and pulls out a canister of tightly coiled film. “To keep a record.”

She hands him one and nods permission. Thibaut unspools it a little, lets a streetlamp outside the window shine through it. He squints at the tiny images. Occluded streets in negative. Tanks by the pyramid in Parc Monceau, firing in formation at a great sickle-headed fish, a Lam manif swimming violently in the air. A humanish pillar. Thibaut looks closer. It is a woman made up of outsized pebbles, lying down on grass, her legs languorously in the water.

Sam opens her notebook for him to see her neat English handwriting.

“A book,” she says. “The Last Days of New Paris.”

He is quite still. “What?” he manages at last.

“I’m here to put all this down.” She looks at him quizzically. “You don’t think this can remain, do you? It can’t. It shouldn’t. But it’ll still be a tragedy when it ends. Don’t you think this city deserves marking?”

Thibaut unrolls a few more pictures, nervous to see the images of places he has never seen, in his own city. That he is leaving behind. There is so much of it. It is a world. Can it really be finished?

He looks closely at what she is showing him — the materials of a eulogy. These are his places.

“It’s hard to develop them here,” Sam says. “I’m out of chemicals. The rest will wait till I’m out.”

Negatives of soldiers and devils, machine-gun stations, ranks of vehicles, the Nazi zone. Embryos of a book. A first and last travelogue. “We need this,” she says. “For when it’s all done.”

He looks at tiny offices with swastikas on their walls, their desks bursting with paper. Close-ups of those papers. How did she get in?

Here: the Palais Garnier, its stairs dinosaur bones. He squints. Le Chabanais, the walls of the great building dissolved, light glimmering through the resin that has set around suspended women and men and the opulence and billowing cloths and gilded fittings within. A vegetal puppet, stringy, composite floral thing with fleeting human face ooze-growing up boulevard Edgar Quinet. Thibaut frowns at the sight of an arm, the remains of a white statue, a broken human face six or seven feet high, lying with stern expression in a pile of foundations. Plumes of stone-dust.

Then the sweep of a gray flank. A house-sized curve. Thibaut blinks. “That’s Celebes,” he says.

Sam takes the film back. “Enough,” she says.

“It was. You saw Celebes.”

The most famous manif of Paris, the elephant Celebes. Like a gray-ridged stockpot the size of a warehouse, under a howdah of geometric shapes, bull-horned trunk swaying like a small train.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It was something. It was fast. I took a picture and ran. It was only a glimpse.”

“You’re here to take pictures?” he says eventually, as if he’s sneering. As if he hadn’t gazed at them. He looks longingly at the film she holds. “To take pictures for a book?”

—

The sun over Paris isn’t an empty-hearted ring, nor black and glowing darkly. It is not the shining rubbing of a great coin, smudged as if the sky was buckled paper. It looks everyday today.

Thibaut and Sam trek through the fifteenth. Sam says she’s never seen these streets, but she moves confidently, checking her books. They duck undercover at the sound of firing or demonic burning, the wrong rhythms of a manif’s hooves. They pass over a coming-together of railway lines. Not knowing why, Thibaut lets her lead.

There are sounds below them. In the shadows under the bridge, black smoke hangs and discolors the ground. Sam stares. Thibaut watches its drifts. He sees that it shifts against the wind. That it takes shapes.

Fumages, smoke figures wafting in and out of presence. They bicker soundlessly over the body of a man: they rip his clothes and stain him with soot and lift him in snagging gusts.

The presences stop. They drop their corpse. They look slowly up at Thibaut and Sam, smoke heads rising. He sees hesitation in the manifs, as they watch him without eyes. He can see them overcome it, that something has changed and it will not hold them.

He says, “Move.”

—

Sam fumbles with her camera as she starts to run. He tries to remonstrate, to speed her up, he reaches for it but she slaps him away with startling strength. Air shifts as they stumble into the fourteenth. Sam is behind him now and Thibaut turns and sees that she is kneeling in a sudden wind. She holds her camera up with one hand, the other on the ground.

The fumages have risen. They are on the bridge. His heart accelerates at the sight. They move, half in half out of coagulation, a roiling mass of smuts. They reach, and come for her.