The Last Days of New Paris

Around the world, the dreams and images, the work of all these women and men, the rage of Simone Yoyotte and the Martinican rebel students, the fury and delight of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, the fascinations of Georges He-nein, the red chaos of Artaud, the imaginings of Brauner, the constructs of Duchamp, of Carrington, of Renée Gauthier, of Laurence Iché, of Maar and Magritte, Étienne Léro, Miller and Oppenheim, Raoul Ubac and Alice Rahon, Richard Oelze and Léona Delacourt and Paul Nougé, Paalen, Tzara, Rius, of hundreds of women and men never heard of and never to be heard of but who were the spirit of this spirit, the inspirations behind and unsung practitioners of this ferocious art, echoed in France. Rushed in. Through the glass. Into Jack Parsons’s battery.

The older work of renegades, the poems of Aragon before his capitulation to the man of steel. The heroes of the past breathed dead breath into the machine, the singer of Maldoror, Rigaut, the ghosts of Rimbaud, the ruminations of Vaché, which never went away, had never gone and never would and which were always and forever part of France, all flared up like tracer bullets. And came down again, plugholing into a collection.

Into the machine.

—

The box hummed like a wasp; otherwise the room was quiet. People came slowly back from wherever they had been.

Everyone blinked except Raymond. He stared at the box.

Mary Jayne sighed. “Did you enjoy yourself?” she said.

Parsons laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said. His voice shook. “It was terrific. Thank you for having me.”

Breton closed his eyes. “This,” he said in French, “was an excellent night.”

“We’re glad you came,” said Varian Fry to Jack.

“Me, too. More than I can say.”

—

Jack listened to French night birds. Here he was in the moonlight with a battery full of distillate, of this overlapping thing, this Surrealism. That was a freedom right there.

Parsons knew how to take a substance, render it, burn it and use it.

What can I power with this? he thought. He would build a freedom machine. Home, he thought. I’ll tell Von Karman. We’ll build a new rocket. Armed with this. We’ll blow that fucking Reich away.

—

In the early morning Miriam and Mary Jayne sat in the garden drinking ersatz coffee, full of shyness they could not explain. They prodded the grass with their toes.

They heard Jack Parsons’s first shout and looked up. He raised his voice and bellowed again and hammered on the window with his fist.

They ran up the stairs and entered his room to see him tousled and undressed and screaming. Aghast, throwing clothes out of his suitcase, looking for the battery.

Which was not there.

Chapter Seven. 1950

At the corner of rue du Faubourg and boulevard Poissonnière, there is raucous music. Accordian and piano and a violin play a Jewish air into the city. The Rex rises into dark clouds, its sign peppered with bullets and still glowing.

“Who was he?” says Thibaut.

“The man in Les Deux Magots?” Sam says. “A crook. A thief. Just a murderer. It doesn’t even matter any more. I thought, we thought, if I could…That the box might be a way to open the city. Open gates and send messages. Out and…” She glances down. “But no. The S-Blast came out of that box and it’s here now.”

“Alesch was there,” Thibaut says. Sam says nothing. “And someone else.”

She says nothing.

“What’s going on?” Thibaut says.

“I don’t know. Truly,” she says. She holds up burnt documents and the canister of film. “Fall Rot,” she says. “They mention it in here, but it’s oblique. It’s all code words and hints, but I think they’re talking about the devils. And I don’t know why. That was Kundt. His commission used to hunt the artists, and I think after the blast, they started hunting the art. Turned into manif specialists.” She looks at him. “I told you the Nazis are getting better at manifs. And now the K Commission are working with demonologists. Alesch’s church.”

She opens a charred file. Her lips move as she reads the half-sentences that are all that remain. “They’re saying the devils should be aspects of something. And there’s something they want to manifest but they can’t, it needs more than they have…” She hesitates. “They’re trying to do something, Thibaut. They want something.”

The exquisite corpse’s beard-train whistles. This cinema is a stronghold of the Free French and their allies, no friends of Main à plume, and Thibaut focuses his mind, pleading with the manif silently for silence. Every time he communicates with the exquisite corpse — because that is what this is, communication — he hears nothing back but a tone like tinnitus.

“Stay,” Thibaut says. He pulls the cord. The exquisite corpse sinks to the pavement on the corner, becomes as architecture.

—