The Last Days of New Paris

It tugs back like a playful horse. It turns in ancient-eyed attention to the officers of the Reich. It puffs out its cheeks and semaphores its limbs, wheezes into its beard, rips into the street with the edges of its machinery body.

A tear full of white. The edges of reality break. The Nazis stagger on the wrong side and broken bits of car crumble into that papery void.

The exquisite corpse nods, and the Nazis all lurch and fall and slide away as if it shoved them.

Sam is running away from the rip and the soldiers. Thibaut hesitates, grips with his innard sinews, and goes to the exquisite corpse. He pats it gently with the tip of the rope-cudgel.

Its body resonates under his tap like a hollow oven. It turns slowly and looks down at him with its man’s head and eyes. He moves back. With skittish steps, the manif follows him.

“Come on!” Sam shouts. The Nazis fire from beyond the reknitting hole, and Thibaut spreads his pajamas into a shield, like a weaponized sail, and, the exquisite corpse behind him, he runs.

—

“Did you smell the exhaust from that jeep?” Thibaut says.

“Blood smoke,” Sam says. “That doesn’t run on petrol any more. They must’ve refit it with the help of demons.”

“They were trying to snag this thing,” Thibaut says. “Like with the wolf-tables. They’re trying to control manifs. And they almost did.”

“Not this one they didn’t,” Sam says. She looks back uneasily and away again. “They didn’t have a hope.”

It treads behind them.

Thibaut has unwound his cosh and dangled the table-wrangler’s cord around one of the manif’s metal extrusions, what are not quite limbs. It is not a leash — it is not taut and Thibaut would never consider pulling — but he has one end of it and the manif does not object to wearing it, and joined by the bond the living art comes with Thibaut as though he holds its hand.

—

It is morning, a part of the city all razed into a flat ashy vista. They are in rubble full of birdcages. Some are empty, some contain silent watchful birds. A broken screen; a litter of toys’ heads cracked like shells; a motionless little girl-thing standing in her white dress and watching with a featureless hole where a child would have features. From her they keep their distance and their gazes. Far ahead of them a baby’s face the size of a room protrudes from the ground like some whaleback, staring skyward. It squawls quietly. Sam takes a picture.

Beyond boxes of preserved butterflies, they see drapery hanging from trees. They hear spectral guns. This place is a shooting range haunted by ghost bullets.

“This is Toyen’s landscape,” says Sam.

“I know what it is,” Thibaut says. “I’m Main à plume.”

The exquisite corpse picks through the dust. Sam looks at it with the same expression that she wore the previous night, when she at last slowed under a balcony poised during its deliquescence, and turned and stared at the manif.

She could not stop herself rearing back at the sight, and the exquisite corpse reared, too, and stamped. In alarm, Thibaut tried to hush it, had concentrated his attention to that end. To his amazement the thing calmed.

“They don’t like me,” Sam said.

“Manifs?” he said. “They don’t have any opinion about you.”

But when he at last persuaded her to take the rope, the exquisite corpse bared its teeth, and Sam let it go.

“It seems to know you’re an ally,” she said.

Now Thibaut flexes his intuition again. The manif exhales exhaust from its beard-train. It follows him like something that knows something.

In the sky a storm of birds takes the shape of one great bird, then of a dancing figure, before they scatter. Sam takes a picture of that, too.

“I was on my way out,” Thibaut says to her abruptly.

“When I found you.”

Sam waits.

“A while back, I met a woman riding a manif,” Thibaut starts again.

“The Vélo,” says Sam. “I heard something about that…”

“You heard?” Thibaut can feel the card in his pocket. “Well, I was there when her passenger died. And when I went through what she was carrying…I think she was a spy. Like your chocolate man.”

“Naturally.”

“British. SOE.” Thibaut holds up the cord he carries. “She was controlling her manif with leather, too. Or trying to. We didn’t keep the thong: we should’ve done. She had a map. With stars drawn on it, and notes.”

“What did the notes say?”

A constellated Paris. They had pulled the dirty thing from her inside pocket. “Most of them were crossed out,” Thibaut says. “They were the names of lost objects. They were famous manif things.” Thibaut looks at her and can see she understands. “I thought maybe she was a magpie. She was artifact hunting, for sure. But perhaps it wasn’t for her.”

“Had she found any?”

He feels as if the playing card is moving in his pocket. “Well,” he says. “She had none on her. Maybe she crossed them off when she found out they were gone.”

“Or took them and passed them on.”

He licks his lips. “So anyway,” he says. “Eventually, we used it. The map. Of course. My comrades and I. Went looking. Went to the Bois de Boulogne.”

“Why?”