The Last Days of New Paris

“The thing is, Fall Rot was already awake,” Thibaut says slowly. “Maybe it wasn’t him that they were having trouble manifesting. That they were sacrificing things for. They wrote there was something like that, right? That they had trouble with, trying to bring up. But Fall Rot was already manifest. Maybe they realized they couldn’t make Fall Rot work. Maybe they were even trying to get rid of it, but they couldn’t kill it. But what if it was something else they couldn’t invoke. Until Fall Rot was taken down.” Sam is still. “By your bosses. You heard that noise. There was a lot of energy when Fall Rot died, for sure. Maybe enough, at last, for whatever.

“When you killed it,” Thibaut says, “maybe that was like another sacrifice.”

He looks into the eyes of the manif head he still carries. “If killing an exquisite corpse feeds Fall Rot,” he whispers, “what does killing Fall Rot feed?”

Sam and Thibaut look at each other. Neither speaks.

They begin to run. Through streets that aren’t just too scrubbed, too perfect, too empty for these times, but that have never looked as they do now. That do not look real. Thibaut feels like a stain, a smut of dirt.

“We thought it was manifs to feed demons,” Sam says. “What if it’s the other way? And they’ve been trying to call up a manif?”

Of what power?

They have been experimenting to control such art. Wolf-tables rallying to the whip. The brekerman, obeying orders as it collapsed.

“They’ve been trying to summon something,” Sam says. They hear gunshots. “In secret. And failing.”

“Only,” Thibaut says, “we succeeded.”

On the rue de Paris, running west toward the edge of the twentieth arrondissement, they see at last the rise of the city barricade at the end of this strange chintz. There by the German positions, jeeps, guns, mortars, the ready troops, the city is abruptly chaotic again, grime and imperfection again, smashed apart and becoming dust.

Between them and the waiting Nazi guards, where the walls change, is a slight figure in a brown suit.

The young man walks slowly toward the old city, as if in a dream or a slowed-down film. His footsteps take too long to land. He wears archaic clothes, trousers that balloon out from pulled-up socks. His hair is a strange pale parted black.

Sam has gone quite white. She says, “No.” As the young man approaches them, the German troops fire.

And Thibaut almost falls in astonishment because he sees the man unconcerned by any of the bullets that hit him, he sees him look hard at the closest shooter. And where the man looks, a house rises.

Emerging instantly from nothing, clean, freshly painted, fussily rendered, pale, almost translucent. And the soldier, all the soldiers who were where the house is now are just gone. Replaced, with a sweep of attention, disappeared from this scene.

The façades of Paris reappear, as the figure stares, and they are prettier and more perfect than they have ever looked, and they are quite empty.

“It was never Fall Rot,” says Sam. “Kill Fall Rot and we have called up a manif. Oh dear God. It’s bringing a city.”

The young man makes it with every look, is reestablishing Paris in pastel outlines, no not reestablishing but establishing newly, a simpering pretense, as it had never been. A cloying imaginary.

“They’ve found a self-portrait,” Sam says.

The last of the Nazi soldiers are scattering before the annihilating gaze finds them. Now the young man is turning slowly back toward Thibaut and Sam.

“He never could paint people,” Sam whispers. “He always left them out. Painted everything empty. Even when he drew himself, he couldn’t do features…”

The figure turns and Thibaut glimpses its faceless face. Empty. A faint graphite sweep where there should be eyes. Blank as an egg. A poor, cowardly rendition, by a young bad artist.

“It’s a self-portrait,” he hears Sam repeat. She and Thibaut reach for each other, hold each other up in fear.

Thibaut says, “Of Adolf Hitler.”

—

And they try to run, and as Thibaut shouts for her and grabs her pack and as the watercolor manif’s attention sweeps toward her, Sam moves with more than human strength. She moves to get them away with speed and motion borrowed from her paymasters below. Her eyes flicker and a corona flares around them and she leaps, reaching, straining for the cover of a wall—

— and she slows in her trajectory and lets go of Thibaut as the Hitler-manif turns and eyelessly stares and takes her in and all around her the broken buildings become postcard-perfect in the cone of that regard. And Sam herself freezes. She is in the air and the self-portrait looks at her and she is just gone.

Gone. Sam is unpersoned. Effaced in the manif’s gaze.

Thibaut crawls backward and bites back her name. The street is pretty, and empty of her.

Too slow, too late, he understands that the manif is looking in his direction, now.

He hurls himself into the window of a cellar. As he falls, the glass heals behind him, brittle as sugar, as the Hitler-manif revises history, brings its vision to bear.