Coq, page 22
“Nothing.”
He presses something into my palm, a small silk sack. I whittle my finger through the cinched opening and dump the contents into my hand. It’s a heart. Not the smooth polished hearts you’d find in a gem store or washed up on the beach or punctuating a text, but a tiny anatomical one with valves and ventricles and veins. It’s intricate, mixed metal and miniature glass. Fine art.
“I bought it after seeing the Wall of I Love Yous,” Glen says. “At this little shop on the Champs.”
The splashes represent fragments of a broken heart. Gathered together, they form a full heart.
I stare at the piece, observe the detail of each miniscule glass vein, the silver aorta, the gold vena cava, every fragment fused or soldered together. Fixed. I look up at Glen, his expression hopeful, alert. I believe him. The reconstructive possibility of an us, because Georgia’s right: I’m still in love with him. A fact, perhaps cruel, perhaps foolish, probably regrettable, but a fact nonetheless.
I think of the books Joan used to collect. 5000 Awesome Facts (About Everything!). My father would read them to her at bedtime after they’d both had a snack and she’d recite what she could remember the next morning at breakfast: an avalanche can travel 80 miles an hour, the first candy canes were made without stripes. The heart can continue beating even when it’s disconnected from the body.
I can’t stop loving Glen and yet when I study the little mechanical heart, I imagine not that it’s mine, or his, but Felix’s: fixed and whole and healed. I feel him suddenly, Felix. The weight of his chest on my rib cage, his frantic mouth and gentle gaze. I search for him in the crowd.
“Auntie Claudia!” A shriek behind me. “Why is Bobo on the ground?”
Shit. I tuck the heart back in its delicate sack, and pick up the giant stuffie.
“He’s dirty!” Emma shouts, batting debris from its fur.
I ignore her, take a pull from Glen’s flask and perform a headcount. Joan and Liam are still standing on the bench not ten feet from us. Joan shouts climate phrases, alternating between French and English. Liam continues to film, holding his phone in the air and slowly turning three hundred and sixty degrees. Dan’s gotten himself a drink, an Italian soda, and he slurps it obnoxiously.
“Where are Dad and Mona?” I ask, noting they’re no longer hanging off the tree behind us.
Dan shakes his head. “I wasn’t looking. You were in charge of them.”
How far could they have gone, high and practically immobile?
Another crowd surge, out of nowhere. Dan’s Italian soda lands on my foot. I kick it away. By the time I find my balance, Glen is gone. “Find Wes,” I holler, hoping he can hear me, but there’s too much noise. Chatter, bongos, electronic music, tear gas. I swim through the crowd toward the bench, toward Joan, but the protestors have been replaced by riot police.
“Yellow vests,” someone says, though the only vests I make out are bullet-proof, or in the case of the well-dressed man facedown on the pavement, fur.
“Joan!” I shout.
I can’t see her, but I’m certain the hand jutting up from the crowd and filming the chaos ahead belongs to Liam.
“Meeting spot!” I yell, circling, elbowing people out of my way. Where is the meeting spot? The buildings surrounding the square all look the same. Just look for the golden arches, we’d collectively told the kids, like the predictable, disappointing tourists we are.
Breaking glass. I cover my ears and duck as a bottle sails over my head. People run. I’m caught in a horde, one that moves like a landslide in a single preordained direction. I submit out of fear that any protest will get me trampled. I pretend I’m in a mosh pit in 1992, safe, alive, but instead of moving away from the square, the horde moves toward the statue, the centrepiece, the stage. My feet barely touch the ground.
Someone sets off a flare, and in the ensuing panic, the horde disperses. A police officer grabs my arm and shoves me in a direction he presumes, I hope, to be safe. At the end of the square something is burning, a trash can or an Uber. It’s hard to tell if it’s an act of terrorism or performance art. Sirens howl, families flee and under a red and white awning, Wes and Célestine kiss like end times.
I make my way toward them, past a sobbing woman shielding a baby stroller, a dog devouring a relinquished kebab.
“Wes!” I call. “Wes!”
A fire truck blocks my passage to the café where he and Célestine are making out. I haul my phone from my pocket with trembling hands: where is everyone?? I text.
Dan is the first to reply. McDonald’s.
Who’s there?
Me, Emma, Liam.
No Glen, no Dad, no Mona. No Joan.
My legs start to give. I grab a light post for stability, wait for the fire truck to pass so I can cross toward the golden arches, but a scuffle erupts to my left. Too close. I bolt across the thinning square, past hooligans and citizens, reporters and cops and that’s when I see them. Dad and Joan hurling bricks through a shop window.
forty-two
A climate protest and there’s garbage everywhere. Discarded placards, plastic cups, a single dreadlock. Police carry away a protester who resembles my mother: demure and cooperative and practically dressed. She’s stretched between two cops like a hammock, a tennis shoe print on her cheek. I watch her exit. The sway of her body, the way her tailbone grazes the cobbles sweeping away cigarette butts and parched leaves. I imagine my mother being carried this way off the plane, up the narrow aisle, past the saddened passengers and shoddy lavatories, the cockpit with its mysteries, switches and wrap-around windshield.
I close in on the row of storefronts, where piles of glass litter the sidewalk and wiry rioters climb through open windows like soldiers, athletes. I stare with curiosity as they return seconds later with armfuls of alarm clocks, cigarettes, cell phones and heaps of clothing.
I search for Joan and Dad in the chaos but it’s Mona I find first, vaulting out of a store window with a stack of berets under her arm.
“What the hell are you doing?” I ask, yanking her into an alleyway.
“Protesting,” she says with wide-eyed hysteria. She smiles and then frowns, the weight of the moment becoming brazenly clear. Her expression acknowledges that she’s crossed a line, that it was thin as glass and too easy. This is what happens when you live in the moment. She brushes her hand over the berets stacked in the crook of her arm, pinching the stalk of a grey one, as if contemplating its return to the store. Instead, she hurriedly stuffs the entire lot inside her giant klepto handbag.
“Where’s my dad? Where’s Joan?”
“They were right behind me,” she says. We peek around the corner into the shop. Empty. Shelves and displays are tipped. An ugly bowler hat balances on the edge of the counter. I pause to check my phone in case Joan and Dad have made it to McDonald’s.
A text from Dan: have you seen Bobo?
What the actual fuck, Dan.
Felix: are you safe? Above it, his last message lingers like the scent of a party: I want to taste you. My face flares all over again. I’m safe, I reply. You okay?
Glen: Your dad and Joan have been arrested.
Arrested? Can children be arrested in France?
Where are you? I reply.
Glen says, Head toward the burning police car.
That’s comforting. What then? Douse myself in gasoline? I grab Mona from the alley, stubbing my toe on a brick, and tug her towards the burning cop car. It’s been flipped. Mona and I cover our noses with berets. The fumes are nauseating, acrid. Fisher-Price sirens wail. Just beyond the car, on a film-set-worthy strip of sidewalk, are Dad and Joan. They sit, side by side like cell mates, legs splayed, hands tied behind their backs. Blood drips down my father’s face from a spot on his head, turning his hair into cotton candy. Joan sits tall and defiant. One of her sleeves is missing. Her braids are frizz. Glen is arguing with the police.
“Qui êtes-vous?” a cop asks. He’s short and robotic with Mediterranean skin, his accent heavy and neck thick as a cheese wheel.
“I’m her mother,” I reply.
He asks Mona the same question.
She points to my father. “His wife.”
I stare at my father’s pink hair and knurled spine. The man who is my father, but also a stranger with his own black box of thoughts and longings, secrets and regrets. Who knows if he really likes shredded wheat and curling and tree tinsel and free healthcare or what he really thinks about fatherhood or Paris. Who is a man when he’s not a father?
I try to imagine what Mom would think of the zip-ties on her granddaughter’s wrists, the gash on Dad’s forehead, the trash-strewn streets, and the lone police horse with the magnificent hooves and polite eyes, the air both promising and rancid as a revolution. There’s nothing to imagine. This moment is, because she isn’t.
Glen whispers, “They’re being charged with vandalism and malicious destruction of property.”
“They can’t be. We leave tomorrow.” I want to go home. The urge is acute and physical as fever. I want the chatty crows in the yard and the cleats in the hallway. The carpet stains and giant glasses of abandoned juice. Mom’s yellowed funeral bulletin. I miss my horrible ensuite with the oak vanity and peeling laminate and double sinks: mine, Glen’s. I can picture him there: shirtless and shaving, his feet bare, body covered in bike scars and stories.
Mona leans in. “Have you tried bribing the police? I heard they’re very bribable here.”
“I don’t have any cash,” I reply. Maybe they’ll accept a dozen Eiffel Tower figurines, or a sheath of berets or bread. Where’s Bobo?
“I tried that already,” Glen spits. “They wanted a thousand euro!”
“A thousand? For fuck’s sakes.” I rifle through my purse, uncover a few stray bills, half the handcuff, the parfait spoon, Felix’s sock. Felix. I check my phone.
Safe, he’s replied. Back at the hotel. Can I see you again? One last time.
Last supper, last call, last place, last post. Last. How potent and permanent. How devastating. I don’t know whether to beg him to stay, or help him pack, stop him from dying or assist him. I’m not sure if I’m capable of either.
I type back: I’ll try! and feel immediately shitty about my response. My last night in Paris, his last night. And I can only try.
Mona limps toward the officers. “Let me talk to them,” she calls over her shoulder.
Glen sighs, rubs his face. “We need a lawyer.” Stress has always looked good on him.
“A lawyer?” I reply. “I was thinking an ATM. They want a thousand euros, I’ll get ’em a thousand euros.”
“A thousand euros each.”
“Each? That’s criminal. They just got caught up with the wrong crowd.”
“The wrong crowd? Claudia, this isn’t some afterschool special. Joan started it. She threw the first brick.”
“And the cops can prove that?”
“They have video.”
My heart plummets. “That’s it though? They just have her throwing a brick?”
“It comes at the two-minute mark. Right after your father’s failed attempt to throw a café chair through the front door of a pharmacy.”
Maybe he needed Voltaren.
I watch Mona dabbing at my father’s head wound with a napkin. “You’re right. We need a lawyer.”
“And where are we going to find a lawyer on a Saturday night?” Glen asks.
I reach into my pocket. My fingers find the silk bag. The heart is in pieces. Beneath them, the damp scrap of legal paper. I pull out my phone and dial with a shaky hand: Émile Fontaine.
On the fourth ring, he answers. “Bonjour?”
The deepness of his voice startles me. He sounds six foot five. I picture a woodsman, a prison or point guard, not the gentle, refined legal professional in his law firm portrait. Not the man who loved my quiet, well-behaved mom.
“Bonjour?” he repeats with heightened curiosity. Music drifts in the background.
It’s late. I clear my throat. “Bonjour,” I squeak. “It’s Claudia. Janice’s daughter.”
He drops the phone; I hear it clatter on a hardwood floor, the shock in his breath. He mutters something upon its retrieval.
“Claudia?” he replies. “Êtes-vous à Paris?”
“Oui, avec toute ma famille.”
Silence follows. A magnetic, crackling silence. It’s the sound of wonder. It’s a lot like the sound of love.
“We’re in trouble,” I say. “My daughter and father have been arrested at the climate protest.”
“Pour quelle raison?”
“Vandalism and destruction of property.” I fill in the details: bricks, broken windows, blood, video evidence, the drugs in Dad’s pocket, the bribe.
His instructions are firm: pay up. I ask a few more questions until he urges me to get on with the exchange, “avant qu’il ne soit trop tard.” Before it’s too late. The words sit on my chest. “Too late” is a CLOSED sign, a dial tone, the back of someone leaving. It’s a Swiss clinic, a stroke, a pool drain, a coffin on your palm like a drink tray. It’s Cathy’s parked car waiting solemnly in your driveway for Wes to get his license. I can barely stand. Across the square, I spy the Grim Reaper from the train, scythe on his shoulder, black robe blowing in the wind. He’s looking for someone.
“Okay,” I reply. It’s as much of a response as it is an attempt to psyche myself up about breaking the law in a foreign country. I exhale. “What about after? I think my dad needs to see a doctor.”
“Bring heem here,” Émile says. “Best to avoid anyting on record. I’m not a doctor, but I can get heem cleaned up. I’ll send you my address.” A long pause and then, “Bonne chance, Claudia.” The last part comes out as a thin whisper, as if it had been squeezed from the back of his throat.
I stay on the phone for a second and listen to Émile’s soft fossilized sobs.
forty-three
“What kind of lawyer suggests we actually pay off the cops?” Dan argues. “Isn’t the whole point of a lawyer to use the law?”
“The kind of lawyer who knows that if we don’t, we’re not going home tomorrow,” I reply.
“We’re staying?” Wes asks. He squeezes Célestine’s hand. The air around them hums like a Louisiana swamp, alive and busy. Hopeful.
“Dad has cannabis gummies in his pocket,” I whisper to Dan. “If the police find them, we’re screwed.”
Emma is bent over a sandwich board mourning Bobo’s loss. She looks like she’s pulled an all-nighter. She threatens to call her mom.
“I don’t even think I have a thousand euro,” Dan says.
I tell Wes and Liam to watch over Emma as Dan and I cross the street toward an ATM. People sip wine at a café seemingly oblivious to the protest carnage only a square away. It’s almost inspiring and yet exactly why the climate is in ruins. It’s easier to ignore, let others sort it out. Laissez-faire.
Dan jams his card through the ATM slot and follows the prompts. He can only withdraw two hundred euro.
“What do you mean you can only get two hundred?” I push him out of the way. A line forms behind us. I can’t remember my pin. Why can’t I remember my pin? I can remember my childhood phone number, my student ID, the code to a lock I owned ten years ago, the number of crackers in a sleeve of saltines, the entire lyrics of Snow’s “Informer.” Not my pin. After a third failed attempt, my card is licky boom-boom down.
“What are we going to do?” Dan whisper-spits, his face red as a cockscomb. “How can you forget your pin?”
“How do you have only two hundred dollars?”
“Allison-Jean’s taking all my money,” he replies. “She wants to redo the kitchen.”
I look at my brother and feel sorry for him. How quickly a life can change. How suddenly a person can lose.
We cross the street back to where the kids are gathered on a lonely strip of sidewalk. Liam is doing his best to comfort Emma by telling her Bobo’s been reassigned to a new little girl, as if Bobo’s a body guard or a guardian angel and not a ten-pound sack of synthetic fibres constructed by an overworked nine-year-old in Bangladesh. Wes and Célestine are holding each other as if they’re the last couple on earth.
I stare at Dan. “What are we going to do?”
“Isn’t that Bobo?” Wes says.
We all look to where Wes is pointing. A man with a leather jacket old as the Bee Gees walks toward the Metro with Bobo head-locked under his arm.
“Bobo!” Emma shrieks.
I shove my brother. “Go,” I urge. “Get Bobo.” We need a win.
Where can I get two thousand euro? I check the time on my phone. I’ve been gone thirteen minutes. How long before the cops give up on the “arrangement” and throw Dad and Joan in jail?
“Auntie Claudia?” Liam says. “You okay?” I smile at my nephew, the neglected middle child, eighteen and lost as a library book.
“I need money,” I say.
He brightens. “How much?”
“Two thousand euro.”
“I got you.”
He’s got me? When I was eighteen, I still had a piggy bank. Liam pulls out his phone and then nods back toward the ATM. I motion for him to go without me. I don’t trust Wes and Célestine not to elope.
Liam returns with two thousand crisp euros.
“How?” I ask.
“Crypto,” he says with the nonchalance of an X Games snowboarder.
Crypto, I repeat inside my head. All this time spent contemplating love and brooding over the meaning of life and I could’ve been accumulating my fortune in bitcoin and NFTS. Maybe I should convert it all to the digital space. Virtual money, virtual reality, virtual love. Who needs flesh when you can have pixels? Why touch a face when you can touch a screen? Digital hearts can be upgraded. Digital hearts can be fixed.
Back in the square, fire crews have doused the flaming cars and garbage bins. Cops direct stragglers and onlookers to exits. A gentleman with shiny shoes and a fat cigar smokes outside a bodega, his posture loose as if this is any night in Paris. Champagne and blood. Party hats and steel-toed boots. Hope and despair. Mona’s in the distance conversing with the police, upholding the myth that an “investigation” is taking place.
