Paris Twilight (37 page)

“Oh, I see,” the captain said.

“Let me strike a deal with you,” Emil said, and the two began moving across the parking lot, Emil's hand on the captain's shoulder, a cigarette arcing redly into a puddle. I peered back as the car moved forward, hoping for a stray glance as we exited the stockade, but there was none. He didn't look around.

 

Our exit was via a different gate than the one through which we'd entered, and when we'd left the depot behind us by only a few dozen meters, Drôlet braked to a halt in the middle of the street and put the car in park. He leaned his arm along the back of the seat and craned his neck around to face me directly. His question was his ancient and only and eternal question, except that this time it was all in his eyes, and, as I'd never known him to ask it so oddly and silently, I was shaken for a moment. Then it came to me that his effrontery was actually an invitation, and that
silent
was as brash as he could get.

“
Toward
home?” he asked finally, echoing his boss's orders, but his emphasis was front-loaded, and he left conspicuous air between the words, and as soon as I recognized the nature of the offer, I took him up on it, gladly.

“Yes, Drôlet, thank you,” I said. “‘Toward' would be perfect.”

The streets were spookily calm—the police had cordoned off the neighborhood. The only movements were the shifting of drivers in the dark cabs of the paddy wagons lined up in convoy along the far curb. Drôlet let the car drift forward at an idling speed with his window rolled down, gazing up through the windshield as if navigating by the stars. Which he was, in a way, or at least by
son et lumière
, sound and light, though his only quicksilver constellation was a helicopter whose gyrations brought it whipping suddenly over the housetops for a few loud seconds of grinding glare before it disappeared again. When its searchlight crossed our path, the world was turned a blinding antiseptic blue. Then it clattered off and left us with another sound, a low throbbing murmur like a pulse beneath the pavement, punctuated at intervals by squalls of whistling whose shrillness pierced the dark like the helicopter's glare, bleaching it the same cold ozone blue. At some point, his inner sextant satisfied him, and Drôlet parked and locked the Mercedes and we walked in the direction of the throb.

We came upon it full blast, suddenly, as we turned around the angle of a last narrow side street into the rumble of a human avalanche. The street before us was a thoroughfare, judging from its width—it must have had multiple lanes and generous, tree-lined sidewalks, all now buried from battlement to battlement beneath the throng of protesters, their multitude flowing over everything indiscriminately. Stoop, stair, truck, curb, car—all was stood upon, the streetscape elevated two meters up into a rolling topography of human heads. Our tributary conjoined the avenue down a small flight of steps, which allowed us a momentary vista over this vast molten flow that extended to our left back through pools of lamplight and under the inane stop-and-go of intersection signals, block after block, as far as we could see. To our right, several score yards away—Drôlet had placed us deftly—the sea met its seawall. We descended down into the mass; it was in that direction that we tried to move.

It was effectively impossible, the pressing so great that at times I was lifted off my feet and rocked back and forth in the stagnant tide. I was afraid to exhale, afraid I wouldn't be able to re-inflate my lungs. The tide had nowhere to go. It washed in place for long minutes and the pressure built and then some shift would occur and the whole mass would adjust an increment in one direction or another and the whistles would blow and we would accommodate to the new equilibrium. Whenever there opened any piece of leeway or when we were set down firmly enough for Drôlet to get traction, he would push us mercilessly ahead through the mass, and eventually in this gradual way we came to the foot of a tall crowd-shape enshrouding, as in amber, a delivery truck.

Drôlet yelled through the roar—I could read the
Madame
on his moving lips better than I could hear it—and he pointed to a person above us who was reaching down a hand. Drôlet gave me a sufficient moment to decline the informality, then he grabbed my waist and lofted me up to meet it. With some scrambling and yanking (you try spelunking in your best silk sheath), I got myself to the top of the palisade and found a place to perch on the edge of those heights and survey the source of our impoundment.

The impediment was only some thirty or forty yards ahead, at a point where the number of people didn't diminish but their mass changed color and character. The road was bisected by a Plexiglas barricade, shields behind which an army of helmeted riot police pushed toward us. Their front ranks wore gas masks; the vanguard of protesters drummed a tattoo on the impassive shields and screamed with an added fury, the two sides facing each other intransigent, warring continents contesting a fault. Like a fault, it would slip once in a while, abruptly one way or the other, and the mass would slide an increment more and the great terrifying whistle would rise into the night.

In the center of the straining line was the most bizarre sight: an embolism, a vacant space half as large as a tennis lawn and placid as a drawing room, delineated only by the solid wall of bodies that respectfully surrounded it, an incredible bubble of peace. The eight or ten people inside the bubble seemed neither pressured nor concerned nor even noticeably interested in the rage without. A column of light from the gyring plane burrowed down constantly onto it, and the little group glistened sharply in the ray like diamonds in a display case. Some of the men (and the one woman I could see) were in uniform, the others in suits. Whatever game was under way evidently required on their part a display of bored equanimity equal to the fervor of the troops. It occurred to me that this was some ghastly mockery of the party I'd just left, the celebrants pacing their parlor absorbed in concentration or in conversation, lost in the mood of the moment, until regularly they coalesced again into a central huddle—all they lacked was stemware.

By these odd rules of engagement, some vital brinkmanship was being advanced. I sensed beneath the bonhomie a massive mutual ongoing accounting of force and resource and nerve, for when one of the suited generalissimos looked out of the circle at the crowd, the crowd responded with a plebiscite of whistles and amplified roar. I recognized Massue's ponytailed head.

Then the row of shields parted, and through the opening, two new parties were admitted into the light. The first was Cassell, who stooped as though crawling from a culvert, and right behind him Emil. The newcomers shook hands around the group, and the huddle reconvened. There was evidently some contention or excitement, and people stepped away from and back into the conversation, and after five minutes or so it seemed a resolution had been hammered out, for there was more shaking of hands and a delegation struck off out of the bubble, tunneling through the crowd. The crowd that had seemed so impermeable found a way to let the delegation through. We (for Drôlet had spelunked up beside me) could follow their progress by the disruption roiling the pond. As they neared the far curb, a new beam, cast down from the whirlybird, landed ahead of them on the building façade. It illuminated, with a supernatural clarity, their destination, a second kingdom of utter calm even larger and even calmer than the one in the middle of the street, guarded by an outward-facing picket of rifle-bearing police. At its center, all alone, was Corie.

S
HE SEEMED, AT FIRST
sight, more eerily oblivious even than the generals, more oddly insulated from the tumult. She was at the top of some sweeping steps, the building at her back, sitting in a lotus position, forearms on knees, an icon of contemplative serenity. Her gaze was concentrated on the ground just before her; the police guards at the foot of the stairs held the crowd at bay as though the girl were a bomb that might detonate. I discerned the source of their caution. In one outstretched hand was a large open bottle, and in her other an object that glinted like a heliograph in the searchlight and glowed like a candle whenever the beam skipped away. It was Saxe's hurricane lamp, its wick aflame, missing its crystal chimney. The pavement around her glistened with spilled oil, and her jeans and coat were dark with it.

The ripple through the crowd arrived at the steps and eddied there a minute, and then I could see the pickets relent to admit someone out of the swirl and through the cordon. Emil emerged onto the steps. He climbed them without haste or hesitation, neither slow nor especially fast. His walk was without worry, it had purpose without guile, and a destination without any urgency. It was a walk without qualities. His hands were in the pockets of his jacket, and his head was down, and I imagine the effect, as he approached her, must have been like one of those cobras I've read about that hypnotize their prey with a lullaby of swaying. If Corie felt threatened or had moved to ignite herself, I couldn't discern it from where I was, but no flames rose and there was no conflagration. Emil strode to her without rush or pause, and with an almost blasé unconcern he sat himself down beside her, right in the puddle of fuel.

Somewhere inside of me it occurred to my conscience that a man I'd accused of being so self-serving he would pilfer a stranger's heart was engaged here selflessly in rescue, so selflessly he'd sat down in kerosene beside a stranger wielding an open flame, a stranger whose Armageddon he'd volunteered to share. Traitorous first impressions! Emil's tuxedo jacket shone like the brightest snow, and they began their conversation.

Impressions. Daniel, you must forgive me, I cannot seem to keep the whole thing straight. It all conflates from midnight on, Emil and Corie sitting at the top of the steps so side by side, so grave and close and calm in the jitter of the hovering beam—they derange in my mind with the other quiet huddle under the other and closer lamp, the lab coat Willem always liked to wear, like a lucky garment beneath his scrubs, as white as Emil's tuxedo. The street crowd had fallen in two as Emil ascended and sat, and its sound was cleaved in two, for everyone on the boulevard who was close enough to see fell silent, and the silence echoed off the wall of chant persisting from far corners. The silence spread by word of mouth, grew deeper. Wall to wall, the block became a chapel, you could hear the masses breathe into the apse of the sky as the whistling stopped and the drumming against the shields stopped and the only sound was the sound of waiting and the dry pulse of the helicopter rotors in the high distance, and Willem announced, “Begin quiet,” and the Bach invention that had accompanied our preparations was killed with a punch to a button on the CD player, and our work began in earnest.

 

I had arrived at the hospital on the morning after the night that followed the night of the demonstration, knowing with relief that Corie was alive and Sahran somewhere, but not knowing where they might be. In jail, I assumed, in Corie's case, and in Emil's? Had he headed out so soon? Without so much as a word?

I used irritation to keep my anxiety at bay during the empty intervening day between those nights, but it hardly worked. My Sunday was spent in a torpor of agitation. The trauma of the standoff on the steps, of Corie's flirtation with death and Emil's hinting about it, induced a sort of narcolepsy in me whenever I thought about it. Every excitement incited deeper somnolence, and I lay physically exhausted to the precise degree that I was racked by worry inside. I was thankful when the next day dawned and my morning call to Mahlev brought a summons to the hospital. Drôlet drove me over, and I distracted myself with routines, chatting with Odile about this and that as she settled her system and we awaited word of when an organ might arrive.

The moment word came, our surgery would commence. Once a heart is cut from the donor's chest by a harvest team, it has only four or five vital hours before a metabolic despair sets in and it begins to die, a loneliness of tissue. That single imperative sets the pace for everything else that happens: transport alone can eat up an hour—or longer, certainly, depending on where the donor is. The first thing required is readiness. This was the event I'd come for. I slept the last night in the hospital, in an empty patient's room.

Willem was nowhere to be seen during that day of hospital waiting. Then, in the evening, I heard his voice in Mahlev's office. There was some eleventh-hour fracas over the arrangements, and in the lounge down the hall where a couple of us had gathered, we could hear the tenor, though not the details, of the discussion. It wasn't hard to guess the situation—these things are common at the last minute. Was there a holdup? A likely donor discovered to be inappropriate? But at five the next morning I was awakened by Mahlev, who let me know with a knock and a whisper that we were on. I washed and got into my scrubs and hustled to the theater. When the transport arrives with the donor heart, the recipient should be open.

“Still There Drips In Sleep Against the Heart,” I murmured to myself, running through my equipment and my drugs. I stroked Odile's hand. The hypnotic had been added to the IV, and she was succumbing; her talk had faltered into senselessness and soon it would stop. “Grief of memory.” Memory: my meter—the pulse oximeter—was attached to her fingertip; her vitals were scrolling across the display. Her voice was supplanted by a different and deeper reporting.

Her repose at this moment was the profile I consider the most unfathomable and most disquieting point in surgery (it's the aspect some observers find the most unbearable, aside from the smell), the hardest thing to acclimate one's mind to, for surgery's most remarkable aspect isn't its violence; “That's just what's bound to happen when those most weak are prostrate before those most ambitious,” as Maasterlich liked to say. It was the weakness itself, the breathtaking vulnerability of the anesthetized patient. The patient, as Odile now, lay exposed before God, a sacrifice, utterly naked and unconscious and defenseless, supine on the tabernacle, inert as a roll of veal, a billowy bag of acids.