The Last Days of New Paris

Before he can step toward them, try to make them flinch again, the wind kicks up. It squalls right through them and the fumages struggle and start to wisp apart. They cannot coalesce. They strain to stay, but it blows hard and they dissipate in shreds and their smoke faces silently scream as they are snatched away.

Thibaut puts his hand over his eyes while the buffeting air subsides. He turns to her at last and Sam’s face is blank.

“Did you get them?” Thibaut says. She looks uncomprehending and he points at her camera. She still holds it up.

“Oh. I think so.”

It smells like tar on the rue Vercingétorix. Sam leads them to a black door.

—

Thibaut uses the strength his nightclothes give him to pull the remains of a car apart. It is so rusted its metal barely screams. He piles the pieces up into a hind. Sam unfolds a tripod and camera, points it at the door of 54 rue du Château. Mucky gray curtains cover the windows.

“So,” Thibaut says. “What’s here?”

“I’ve got a good number of manifs already,” Sam says. “The horse head. The stone woman you saw. I’ve been to the Trocadero.” The demolished music hall came back the day after the S-Blast. It contains lions. Sam grows excited as she continues her description. “But I need as many as I can get. All of them. If I’m right,” she says, “something very particular gets born here tonight.”

“How do you know?”

She points at her books. “I read between the lines.”

—

When she was very young, she tells him, she wanted to be a witch. Everything she says makes Thibaut feel callow. He is sure she is wondering why he keeps her company.

She wants to tell him how she came to be caught up by the art that now makes Paris what it is.

“First it was monster pictures,” she says. “Devils and bogeymen. Witches, alchemy, magic. Then from there to here. I’m hardly the first to come that way. Think of Seligmann. Colquhoun. Ernst and de Givry? Flamel and Breton? You’ve read the ‘Second Manifesto.’ ‘I ask for the profound, the veritable occultation of Surrealism.’ ”

“That’s not what he meant by that,” Thibaut says.

“He said he wanted to find the Philosopher’s Stone!”

“And he said he wanted to lose it again.”

They look at each other. Sam even smiles.

“From devils to Bosch to Dalí,” she says. “From him to all this. To the manifestos. That’s why I’m here.”

She hesitates, then continues quickly. “When information started to come out after the blast, information about the blast, I had to come. You just don’t know what it was like, to see that footage.”

“No. I was too busy being the footage.”

“I’m not suggesting it was easier for you.” She looks away, at the corpse of a crow. “I was in the gallery.” She sounds as if she is trying to recall a dream. “Everyone was screaming at all these crazy, jerky pictures coming out of Paris, all the manifs. ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ And I knew exactly what they all were. I knew the poems and the pictures and I knew what I was looking at.”

Since the blast, curators have been Virgils. Their monographs and catalogues now almanacs.

“The S-Blast,” Sam says slowly, “took instructions.”

She finds something in a copy of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution and holds it open for him. Thibaut reads, “ ‘On Certain Possibilities of the Irrational Embellishment of a City.’ ”

“They made suggestions,” she says.

He’s read this before, a long time ago. He reads it again: provocations, once fanciful, now true, descriptions of Paris, from years before the explosion.

“I’m lucky you heard my shots,” Sam says when he sits back. “Thank you again.”

“Did you find phantoms in the forest?” Thibaut says. Her calm energy is beyond him. “ ‘Chemical-blue, twisted machines of jujube-trees of rotten flesh’?”

“Yes,” she says. “And I took their picture. They’ll be in the book. I want the ruins. Soldiers. The Resistance.” She takes a picture of him in his nightclothes.

“Is it not too dark?” he says.

“Not for this camera.”

Thibaut breathes deep and considers. A heavy hardback. Photographs, eulogy, the nights and days of Paris after the blast. Who will write the text?

“So the Nazis saw you taking pictures and came after you,” he says. “With those wolf-tables. They think you’re a spy. What was it you photographed?”

Sam examines her camera. “Mostly what I want is the manifs,” she says. He thinks he sees distaste when she says that, alongside her eagerness. “I’m not leaving until I catch them all.”

They listen to the hooting of predators and the calls of prey astounded to exist. From behind the ripped-up car a feathered sphere the size of a fist rolls into view, sending up dust. It opens. In its center is a single, staring blue eye.

Sam stares back at it.