The Last Days of New Paris

It will not be long before the occupiers reestablish control of these borders. This plan to remake the city has failed, so they will return to their original methods of control, and plot again. Thibaut is outside, alone since the manif looked. For a few hours, at this point, the borders will be open.

The exquisite corpse is turning up boulevard Sérurier. Its body parts flicker like a timetable display, between options. It rebuilds itself: four-part, this time, feet underwater, a woman’s legs, a body like some cubist rumination, flattened head, a puckered-lip dream. It walks on, into the city, where it will keep changing.

Thibaut looks east, into streets outside the old city that are no longer sickly perfect but are still, for a while, empty.

He can go almost anywhere. He looks away from the city’s heart, for a long time.

And turns back, at last, to the arrondissements he has known since he was a child. Where there is still a fight.

He is wistful, enjoying the air beyond the limits, knowing it will be a long time until he can breathe it again. His way is clear.

There are other cameras in Paris, to find.

The Last Days of New Paris needs writing. Even though these are not the last days, he decides.

Thibaut grants Sam’s memory a moment. He wishes her something. I have a mission, he thinks. The mission. Start from scratch, redo history, make it mine. A new book.

He puts her notebook and her films in her bag. Thibaut shoves it deep into a hole in the brick of the barricade. The limits of the zone. He makes her records, the evidence of treachery and machinations, secret plans, spells and dissenting art, part of the substance of the edge. For someone to find.

The sun picks out the edges of the affected part, the crumble where there was destruction. He waits until he sees bats in the sky. Then, bruised and tired, triumphant and unsure, Thibaut takes a deep breath and steps over the boundary, back into New Paris, the old city.

AFTERWORD

On Coming to Write

The Last Days of New Paris

In the autumn of 2012 my publishers forwarded me a handwritten message. It was from someone of whom I hadn’t thought for many years. I’d known her slightly when we were both students at the same institution, though we’d been in different departments. It was close to two decades since we’d spoken. At first I didn’t even recognize her name.

Some online searching reminded me, and filled in blanks. When I’d known her she’d been studying art history, and it seemed that she’d gone on to teach the subject at universities in Europe, specializing in modernism. In the late ’90s, so far as I could ascertain, she’d gained a small degree of notoriety by putting on a short series of collaborations with scientists and philosophers, something between performances and avant-garde provocations, with titles like “Not River but Estuary: Steering Aurelius Upstream(s)” and “What’s Once and What Wasn’t Is Still.” I could find no details or descriptions of any of these events.

Around 2002 her online trail dried up. She seemed to disappear. Until she wrote to me.

Her message was terse. She’d read an essay I’d written some time previously that touched on Surrealism, and it had reminded her of my interest in the movement. On that basis, she said, she was contacting me on behalf of someone who very much wanted to meet me, and to whom, in turn, she was certain I’d find it interesting to speak. But there was, she said, a very limited window of possibility, “some doors opening only occasionally and briefly.”

She gave the name of a hotel in Farringdon, a room number, a date, and time (less than two weeks away), told me to bring a notebook, and that was all.

I’m not certain why I chose not to ignore the message. Curiosity, mainly, I think — I’ve received a fair number of eccentric invitations over the years, but none with this sense of vaguely aggressive urgency. In any case, after hemming and hawing, rather surprised at myself, resolved to walk away the instant I was made uncomfortable, I made my way to the — faded but not depressing — hotel. I knocked at the given door, at the given time.

To my surprise it was not my correspondent who opened it but an elderly man. He stood aside for me to enter.

He was well into his eighties, but he stood very straight. He still had half a head of hair, and it was not all gray. He was lean and still strong looking, in clean, faded and battered clothes in a very outdated style. He never lost his expression of suspicion, throughout the hours I was with him.

I asked after my acquaintance and the man shook his head impatiently and answered in growling French, “Ç’est seulement nous deux.” It was just we two.

My French is bad, but much better passive, listening, than speaking, which turned out to be just as well.

I introduced myself and he nodded and rather pointedly did not reciprocate.