The Last Days of New Paris

“Historians of the playing card,” Breton said, “all agree that throughout the ages the changes it has undergone have always been at times of great military defeats.” Turn defeat into furious play. The story had reached Paris with its manifs. Breton, Char, Dominguez, Brauner, Ernst, Hérold, Lam, Masson, Lamba, Delanglade, and Péret, purveyors of the new deck. Genius, Siren, Magus usurping the pitiful aristocratic nostalgia of King, Queen, and Jack. Père Ubu the Joker, his spiraled stomach mesmeric.

The cards were made and lost, and sometimes found again. If the war stories were true, a bird-faced Pancho Villa, Magus of Revolution, played by some Gévaudan militant, had saved his fighters from demon-baiting soldiers. In 1946, the cephalopod heads of Paracelsus, Magus of Keyholes, rose from the Seine and sank two Kriegsmarine ships. Freud, Carroll’s Alice, the Ace of Flames, de Sade, Hegel, a beetle-faced Lamiel are rumored to be loose.

Thibaut carries the Siren of Keyholes. Victor Brauner’s work. That double-faced woman in snarling jaguar stole. Drawn on paper but transferred by some force, scribbled lines, unfinished and all, to a card.

But Thibaut is too cautious a player. He trudges in guilt. He walks with the exquisite corpse, avatar of mad love, in a week of kindness.

—

“Tonight,” Sam says. They bivouac in a preserved café. “There’s another picture I need to take.”

Thibaut looks up through the unbroken window and struggles to speak. “How about a picture of that?” he says at last.

The stars are wheeling far faster than they should. The sky is dark gray, the stars yellow, and they are not the stars of earth. They are alien clusters. Abruptly and from nowhere Thibaut knows each constellation — the Alligator, the Box without Locks, the Fox-Trap. They shift in all directions.

Sam is smiling. “The devils must be looking through the telescope,” she says. “It’s like that woman said.” He didn’t know she’d heard her. “That’s the sky over Hell. They must feel nostalgic,” Sam says. “There’s no gate here. It’s hard for anything more than scraps to get in or out. To Hell, from Hell, I mean. All the demons can do is look.”

“Do you have any pictures of devils?” Thibaut says. Sam smiles again.

—

There are lost Nazis in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Men who sob at some depredation, mesmerized by the Statue of Liberty in the grounds. Its head is gone, just a knot of girders, its up-thrust right hand a gnarl. Protruding from the iron chest is a corpulent flesh eye. It blinks. One soldier calls out a prayer, in German, then French. He is hushed by his comrades.

Thibaut and Sam creep by them in the hedgerow. The exquisite corpse fades in and out of their company, always returning. It accelerates through the overgrowing gardens, through thickets and rosebushes, its caterpillar rearing, to where tall railings at its edge are spread like the tines of a ruined fork.

Night comes with gunfire. The beige and black shutters of rue Guynemer are bloody. Sam does not take rue Bonaparte but smaller streets, away from the lights and engine sounds of someone’s excavations. The Bureau of Surrealist Research is nearby — long-closed but haunted with emanations from those early experiments, cabinets of juxtaposed equipment. The exquisite corpse is energized here.

This is a contested zone. In the rue du Four they hide at the sounds of shouted German. “There are bases nearby,” Sam whispers. The Hotel Lutetia where Nazi officers are stationed, the Prison du Cherche-Midi where political prisoners become experiments and food for terrible things.

“Where are you taking us?” Thibaut says. When he sees the spire of a church at the end of rue de Rennes, he abruptly knows the answer.

“You can’t get in,” he says. He wants to be wrong.

“Neither can you,” Sam says.

Two of the five corners of the junction they reach have slid into building-dust. Where rue de Rennes meets Bonaparte, a great rock, like something split from a mountain, hangs just above the ground. The church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés is still a church, and it looks untouched. And there, on the fifth corner, is Les Deux Magots.

The café’s green awning flaps frantically, pushed outward by a rushing wind from within. Around it are tables and chairs, all heaving up and suspended as if about to fly away, then spasming back to their positions on the ground. Up again, head height, and back. As they have jumped for years.

The windows are blown out repeatedly, surrounded by broken glass that twitches and snaps back into the panes then out again, repeatedly, an oscillating instant of combustion. The café rumbles.

Sam walks heavily toward it, into the empty road around it. It looks as if the air exhausts her, as if she walks against a gale. She stops, gasping, still meters from the entrance. The air rushes in Thibaut’s ears.

It was from here that the S-Blast came.