Authors: Toby Barlow
A little after the church clock chimed ten, the two would come home. Each night it was clear that they had been worked to the edges of their endurance. Dottie would immediately lie down on the bed, tired and silent, and proceed to undress while remaining horizontal. Across the room, a slouched Billy emptied his pockets of small bills and coins onto the kitchen table. Then he unpacked his black boxes. As they were dumped on the table, Vidot could see that in each case all the fleas lay still, without the slightest twitch or sign of life. They all had perished, worked to death in the course of a single day’s performance. With a quick, efficient bang, Billy would knock each box’s contents into the dustbin. Then he would strip off his suit and perform his evening toilet before finally coming to bed, where his wife, still in her makeup but now naked, already lay fast asleep. Billy would pull the blanket up over her body and whistle for their little dog, who would leap up onto the foot of the bedspread. Then Billy would curl up beside his wife, kiss her cheek gently, and switch off the light.
The Paris skyline sparkled through the window, its twinkling illumination bathing the room in a dark cerulean blue. The city’s glow seemed to be taunting him, thought Vidot, like the visions of silver crystal kingdoms that arise in the deliriums of fever-crazed soldiers. Vidot stayed awake, hypersensitive to everything around him, the rhythm of the nervous hopping fleas reminding him of deep African drums beating before a savage blood sacrifice, a percussive prelude to the certain doom that awaited him when the circus master rose again to don his terrible magnifying glasses. For tomorrow was the day; there were only three bottles sitting to Vidot’s right, and Billy used more than a dozen to prepare for every show. Vidot knew that he would have to come up with some sort of a plan if he wanted to survive.
Regrettably, Vidot’s flea-sized brain was at that point utterly devoid of any ideas. He knew that once Billy set his tweezers on him beneath that white cloth, his life was over. He thought of all the things he would miss: listening to football matches with the chef at Chez Barbe, playing dominoes with Claude Attal, walking through the market in the April spring when the cherry and the pear blossoms colorfully bloomed overhead. He thought of the comfort of a glass of Brouilly and the grace of Satie’s
Gymnopédies
and, finally, the warmth of Adèle’s kiss, a memory laced with bitterness now, but one that still defined his greatest ideal of happiness.
The tap-tap-tapping of the fleas on the glass kept distracting him from his thoughts. He wanted this to be a moment of contemplation, his last night on earth, and yet these persistent pests kept breaking his concentration as they leapt about in their little vials. As he gazed down the row, his neighbors’ ceaseless jumping reminded him of Camus’s Sisyphus, forever pushing his boulder up the hill and eternally happy in the futility of his effort. Then he noticed that a few of the fleas next to him, instead of frantically attempting to leap to freedom, merely were crawling about at the bottom of the glass. He watched to see if they would hop at all, but they did not. These fleas simply paced around, circling endlessly, as the condemned often do. Vidot thought at first they were merely depressed or discouraged, but then, looking closely, he observed that, in fact, the rear legs of the creature were shaped slightly differently. Vidot found this very interesting.
The next day began as the days had before: Dottie put the water on, Billy and the dog went out and returned soon with a single loaf of bread. They ate silently. Then Billy chose a pair of small oil paintings from a stack in the corner. Perhaps he was going to a dealer, Vidot thought. Whatever the errand, it was an unsuccessful one, as Billy returned an hour later with the same canvases tucked under his arm. As he placed them back in the stack, Dottie said nothing—it had clearly been too long since any paintings had sold for any comment to matter now—instead she kissed him on the cheek and heated up some carrot soup. A little later Dottie boiled a large pot of water and filled the bath, a narrow steel tub that sat in the corner of the loft. Billy combed her hair while she soaked. When she was done, Billy took their dog out again for a long walk, and when he returned, the mutt’s fleas were meticulously harvested, bottled, and placed up on the shelf. In the afternoon Dottie sat and modeled again while Billy painted. Debussy’s
La Mer
played on the radio.
When Billy rose from the easel and put away the paints, Vidot knew it was time. He sucked in his breath and waited, watching as, one by one, Dottie reached for the bottles on the shelf. The first bottled flea caused Billy no problems. Within seconds the flea emerged attached to a harness and was swiftly put away. The fate of the second one, however, was exactly what Vidot most feared. After disappearing beneath the white hood, his neighbor’s mauled carcass was quickly swept out, falling to the floor before it had even finished its final convulsions. Vidot had no time for sympathy, for at that moment Dottie reached for his vial.
The moment Billy shook him down onto the hard white paper Vidot began his charade. You’re going to have to force yourself to march, he told himself, march, march, march, though it is against your instinct, though every microgram in your exoskeleton is begging you to leap, to soar, to break free and escape the doom that awaits, this is the time you must march. He tried to remember what it was like to march in unison with his fellow cadets in his youth brigade. But that brought other memories that were even darker than his current condition, so he blanked them from his mind and kept marching beneath Billy’s careful gaze.
Observing his neighbors the night before, Vidot had come to the conclusion that while most fleas jumped, there were some fleas that could not jump at all, and these, he assumed, were the ones that Billy put into the chariot harnesses. Vidot knew his only hope at outwitting a man who had been outthinking fleas for more than thirty years was to convince the man that he was the wrong kind of flea. As he marched across the table, he prayed it would be enough. Vidot saw the gleam of the tweezers coming down. Then he jumped.
The fist came smashing down hard on the table behind him as he leapt. He had spotted a fold in the tenting where he knew he could hide for a moment. When Billy lifted the fabric to find him, Vidot leapt again, right over his captor’s head, through the small opening and out into the rich, warm kaleidoscopic light of freedom. He did not pause to look back, he did not know if he had enraged the circus ringleader or if his escape was being shrugged off as a minor irritation. He thought he heard Billy curse, and the little mutt barked, but Vidot did not pause to worry as he leapt, jumped, and practically flew up to the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, the great wide open window.
Only after he passed across the threshold and began tumbling and spinning down toward the cobblestone street below did it occur to Vidot that leaping out from a fifth-floor apartment’s window might not be the most prudent path to liberty.
XIX
Witches’ Song Five
Oh no, oh no, tut-tut, look and scream,
your pretty pest has gone,
flailing and flying over the abyss
heading to be flattened,
most certainly flat, on the solid surface below.
So, tell me, do, who will you pray to now, pious ones?
What divine hand swoops in for the rescue?
Ah, let me guess, some manly shade, yes?
Some broad-shouldered musky balled spirit?
A pretty boy Jesus? An undaunted Allah?
Or some wizened circumcised Jew with neat sea-parting tricks?
Boys, boys, so many boys you have placed
in control of your dreams, destiny, fortune, and fate, why?
Tell me this too: where was your own father
when you stumbled and fell?
Who scooped you up and set you right on your path,
swatting your bum for luck as you ran off, weeping “waaa-waaa”
through your lush ivy gardens?
See there, it was a woman’s hand that set you right. Yes.
Your mother or matron or nana who watched and nurtured.
So why this faith in the swollen and awesome
all-present phallic-bearing force?
Why do you pray for what you’ve never known?
It’s not that we’re envious or spiteful, no,
frankly we don’t much care,
Lyda spits out her distaste for Poseidon
in fish scales on the floorboards.
But I am curious, why so many gods come
bullish, hirsute, and bearded?
What bullies and brutes elbowed them there?
Yes, women are tucked in amid your marginalia,
Mary, Sarah, Hagar, Hera, Hestia, I can name each,
sulking there in the testaments’ shadows, outshone
like Diana by Apollo’s ever-bright aura,
or shunted to the side like Jacob’s two patient wives,
waiting there past the river’s ford as he wrestled his angel
the way boys will do, the same way this stupid flea
now wrestles against gravity.
Oh, watch him descend.
Book Three
I’ve come to consider bravery as just about the most pernicious of virtues. Bravery is a horrible thing. The human race has it left over from the animal world and we can’t get rid of it.
—
JAMES JONES
, The Paris Review
I
Superintendent Maroc had an important errand to run. But he was a procrastinator by nature; in his experience if you put off most things you found in the end you didn’t truly need to do them. But this errand was most likely not going to go away. Yet still, he stalled. He sat behind his desk, watching the big yellow clock tick its way around and listening to the little old detective rattle on: “This was, I don’t know, thirty years ago now, between the wars. I was then working for my father, who was prosperous then.”
“Your family had money?” Maroc said, not really listening.
“Before the war we did, yes, a bit. Mostly in property speculation, apartments out in the sixteenth. In any case, I was sent up to Frankfurt to meet with a group of Jewish bankers. Typical of business travel back then, they insisted on entertaining us every night. We’d start in their fine, fancy homes, I’d meet their wives and children, the butlers and maids would serve the thick coffee, I’d pet the little dog, hello, hello, et cetera, but afterward the bankers always wanted to take us out for a bit of additional entertainment. Their wives would never come along. You see, this was their time with their mistresses. We would meet up with them in the city’s various cabarets. It wasn’t so bad, there were lots of dancing girls, we’d drink champagne and sing along with “Das Lila Lied” and pretty women would come along and shake their round asses on my lap and, well, it was fun.”
“Good for you.”
“Yes, well, one banker, Jacobson, he had this girl. Amazing. A drop-dead beauty. Big dark eyes. She was a Russian but unlike any Russian I’d ever known. I’d always found them lean and angled, but this one had full breasts, the kind you want to drop your face into, and a sweet round apple of an ass as well, maybe not the type for everyone but I liked it. Just looking at this girl stole the breath out of my lungs. Every night out with the bankers, I found a way to dance with her, and more than once—probably too many times.”
“I cannot imagine you dancing, Lecan.”
“Ha, ha, me neither now, that would be a pathetic sight. But you remember how it was then, jitterbugs and Charlestons and lots of legs kicking high. Jacobson’s girl was so mesmerizing, positively hypnotizing. I knew it was rude, trying to monopolize her like that; it did not look good, especially night after night. But I still can remember one waltz we danced, my hand on the soft flesh of her hip, the other hand aligned with her shoulder blade, her little smile, the delicious glint in her eye … well, looking back, I can see that the banker was jealous. I’m pretty sure that’s why I came home without the loan. Papa was very upset. We could have used that money, it turned out we needed it pretty desperately…” The little man’s story tapered off.
“So why are you telling me this?” Maroc yawned.
“Oh, because I saw her,” said the little man, becoming animated again. “Last night. I swear it was her. I was sitting outside at Chez Loup and she walked by. Not a ghost, and not a girl that looked like her, but Jacobson’s girl, looking exactly as she looked thirty years ago. I swear to the saints, the woman has not aged a day.”
“Lecan, you are an idiot.” Maroc chuckled as he rose to put his jacket on. “Either you had one too many last night or your mind is rotten for good. Now, do you want to come with me or do I have to do this alone? It’s time to go.” Lecan gave him a resigned shrug as they gathered up their overcoats, hats, and umbrellas and went out into the wet night.
The first stop was a half hour from the station. It took a few moments before an older woman answered the buzzer to let them up to her flat. She met them at the door.
“Yes?”
“Madame Bemm, I am Superintendent Maroc. This is Detective Lecan. I’m afraid we have some terrible news.” Maroc quickly explained the situation, how her son and his partner, in the course of a critical investigation, had disappeared without a trace. He said they did not have any suspects now, it could be Algerians, possibly the National Liberation Front, it was hard to say. Maroc tried to wrap up as fast as he could, generously ladling out words like “noble,” “brave,” “valiant,” and “heroic” to describe a man he had barely ever noticed.
As he talked, the old woman silently looked up at him, her eyes widening with confusion, and then refocusing, as if the various sounds Maroc was making were only slowly assembling into words she could comprehend. When he finished, her face went pale. She placed her hand on her chest and inhaled deeply, pausing mid-breath to suck in more air. Watching this small woman gulp up what seemed to be all the oxygen in the room, Maroc had a bad feeling about what was coming next. He tried, as best he could, to steel himself from the inevitable, looking nervously to Lecan for support, but when it came it was far worse than he had imagined, a loud, piercing wail of grief so shrill that went on for so long it seemed as if the old woman was intent on utterly destroying his eardrums. In the middle of her glass-cracking shriek, she lunged out and grabbed hold of him, pulling him close until her cry finally broke into choking sobs that she buried in his coat. Gingerly putting his arms around her, Maroc gave her an awkward, hesitant pat. “Now, now, have faith,” he said, despite being sure that the situation actually was hopeless. She could continue to weep and pound her small fists against his chest all she wanted, it would not change the fact that Bemm—and Vidot—were most likely dead.