The Last Days of New Paris

And in all the years since, this famous ground has been impenetrable. No one has been able to push through the windless windlike force it extrudes, its own memory of its explosion.

“I know you want a picture,” Thibaut shouts. “But how can you get in there…?”

She points.

The exquisite corpse is walking forward. Continuing where they can’t. The old-man face sniffs the air, the steam train’s plume streams backward. It recognizes this place, some stink of something here.

Thibaut’s insides are boiling. Sam shoves him after the manif. It strides without effort through the outer fringe of glass.

“That thing won’t let me get close to it,” she says. “You, though…”

“I can’t take your picture for you!”

“I don’t want a fucking picture, you fool,” she says. “There’s something in there. Bring it out.”

What? What is she asking me?

Am I doing this? Thibaut thinks. I can’t be.

But not only is he grabbing the cord that trails the ground behind the manif, and winding it around his wrist, to link himself to the exquisite corpse, but now he is running, shoving his way toward it, putting his hands on its metal body.

Thibaut is drunk on whatever streams out of that place. He walks with this most perfect manif, this ambulatory chance, like the towering exquisite corpse on the grounds where his parents died, that first manif he ever saw, a terrified boy, that would not hurt him.

Glass shatters unendingly but Thibaut is safe and can force himself on in the corona of the manif’s presence. They pick their way together between tables and chairs, pushing, Thibaut gasping in hot air, into Les Deux Magots, inside.

—

A room full of darkness and light, glare and black, heat and soot, and Thibaut can hear his own blood and the drumming of wood. His face streams with heat. His eyes itch. The tables are dancing on their stiff legs. They somersault endlessly at the point of an explosion.

There are bodies. Skeletons and dead flesh dancing, too, in the same blast, meat ripping from bones and returning to them. The exquisite corpse steps like a dainty child through a carnage of burning waiters, and Thibaut follows, fighting for breath, on his mission again.

The kitchen is full of a storm of burst plates. At its center is someone long-dead. He is a ruin.

A tough, wiry young man, whose glimpsed face snarls and burns up and whose bones burst from him in twitching repetition, his grimace dead pugnacity then dead pain then the rictus of just death, again and again, too fast to follow. He moves like a blown-up rag doll as fire and devilry and shrapnel flay him in a cloud of shards. His hand is on a metal box, it blossoms extruding wires, paper, light. It, too, bursts forever.

Out of it comes, had come, would come the blast.

The exquisite corpse trembles, this close to the point. A dream straining against what made it into flesh, reaching, with limbs like industry, for the bomb.

As it takes the exploded box from the hand of the dead exploder, Thibaut hears Sam scream his name.

Going out is so much faster. The manif and Thibaut half run, half fly.

Sam is waiting as close as she can come. She shouts in delight to see them reemerge. As they approach her she shouts again, eager and loud, at the sight of what the exquisite corpse carries.

But the bomb is strewing parts as it comes, and nothing is happening.

The box is collapsing and the explosion does not. Behind them the room continues to blow endlessly apart.

Thibaut and the manif run into the last of the light and Sam stands in the road with her camera out and Thibaut realizes there is a wall of smoking thorns around her, a defense from somewhere, already withering, and at the edge of the junction, Thibaut can see Nazi soldiers gathering.

Something is coming. The street trembles. There is a booming as if things are falling out of space.

“Give it to me!” Sam bellows as they run.

But the box is still dropping components and wires and now its case is falling apart. Sam reaches toward the manif she does not like to touch, grabs it from the exquisite corpse’s hand.

It scatters into nothing, and is gone. Sam screams a long scream of rage.

—

Mortars streak over them and take down buildings to block their way. Sam and Thibaut veer. The exquisite corpse does things to physics and they blink with the twists, and ahead of them now is the river and in it the Île de la Cité, and they keep running east along the riverbank on the Quai des Grands Augustins and across from where the Palace of Justice once was and where there is now a channel of clear water that spells something from above, and where sawdust swirls from the windows and doors of Sainte-Chapelle, a landscape of choking drifts and sastrugi at the island’s edge.

The exquisite corpse is ahead of them. It lurches left onto the Pont au Double, leads them over the bridge. It is as if Paris ushers them in. To the island, to where Notre-Dame looms.