The Ends, page 18
‘Sandwiches for you,’ they say, ‘for your journey.’ They put them onto the floor between us, and stand back. ‘You should take them.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, and Rhonda steps up, scoops them from the ground. I bow my head, and we turn, and leave, through the vineyard. In the light of the morning, it’s remarkable; these knotted tangles of grapes and stalks, perpetually growing, and this path being held back from them, just by dint of people walking it.
We sit on the outskirts, and we eat the bacon sandwiches, so rich and salty and with homemade jam in them, grape and tomato it tastes like, and we stare at the vineyard, and can’t see the houses contained within its fortress walls at all.
22
Towns and cities, they are the worst part. They are the part where you remember what exactly is missing. Because the countryside, it’s always empty, and in the moments you spend in cities, they feel like they’re abuzz again; but the reality is you’re in a sectioned-off area. You’re in Soho, or Manhattan, or the Marais. The outskirts of Paris are cold and abandoned, and it’s here you remember that we went through an apocalypse, or an event that could be counted as one; but actually, we aren’t even yet post-, we’re mid-, we’re embedded. I’ve seen some of the old films that spoke to events like this. They had empty dystopias, masked policemen, cannibal ravagers or feral creatures that lived in the darkness. They didn’t speak to this: the Marie Celesting of square miles of conurbation, the boarding up of the things we can’t change and the hoarding of things we don’t want to. They didn’t speak to seeing nobody and finding that unsettling. Not that there could be something lurking, but more: knowing that there isn’t anything lurking. The attackers, the maniacs – I think back to the people who assaulted me as I left Los Angeles, how long ago that feels, and how Rhonda was there for me – they are few and far between. They’re in the counties and states that have been forgotten. They’re not where people live.
Now, people live in the houses of the dead, assuming that they were left vacant. An elderly man – keeping his distance, wary of anything, having seen this through, a first-timer like myself – an elderly man on the train spoke to us about what Paris is like now. He is in the apartment he grew up in – ‘And where I will die, I hope!’ – and those around him all came after the Anomaly arrived. In the wake of it, as the city shrank, they came, and the city got smaller and smaller. Kept getting smaller and smaller. His hands demonstrating: open palm, closing to a fist, then gone. ‘Kaput,’ he says. ‘Now, it is the Marais. Outside the Marais, ahh, that is for the tourists.’
And that’s borne out as we travel through the city. We came here, once. Years ago, my father and I. He brought me here, and we went to EuroDisney, an attempt to win me over after the loss of my mother. She had taken me to Disney in Florida, it was one of my happiest times; with my grandparents, and before she knew that she was leaving. Before any of us knew how bad the world was – the galaxy, I have to remind myself to think bigger, always – before then, we had time that meant nothing other than the moment it existed in.
My mother, sitting with me on a rollercoaster made for small children, holding my hand as I screamed with joy.
My father, holding the knot on his necklace in his hand, pulling on it so hard that the skin around his neck creased into leylines. Asking me why I wasn’t having fun, asking me what he had to do. Telling me, in a rage, in a hotel room of gaudy pastel colours, designed to feel like it was ripped straight from a movie, that I was a waste of time and energy; and that the sooner we were swallowed – engulfed, his word – the sooner we were engulfed, the better for us all. Maybe then you’ll see.
The old man, Claude, asks us if we need somewhere to stay. We thank him, but we are just passing through. He smiles, and nods, and – because he has the air of the mystical to him, and who is he to let us down – and he says, ‘Aren’t we all,’ with a smile.
When he is gone, Rhonda whispers to me, impishly: ‘Was he Santa Claus?’ and we both laugh at that. Leaving the train station, and walking up through the 1st arrondissement, through the 8th, along the Champs-Élysées. There are only a few other people here, and we do not see them up close. Instead, they’re always in the distance, always further away than allows for details.
‘This used to be heaving,’ I say, ‘so busy with people. I remember it a little, it was so busy that my father had to take us away. He said it was too much.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it was famous. People are drawn to things that are already busy. Like moths to a flame that’s already absolutely engulfed by millions of other moths.’
‘You should sketch it,’ Rhonda says.
‘There are enough pictures of it,’ I say.
‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘But how many of them are from the goddamned apocalypse?’
‘Not many, probably.’
‘So, then. Be a pioneer or whatever. Do it, draw the street. The chans-whatever.’
‘Champs-Élysées.’
‘Yeah, that. Come on.’ She leads me to a bench at one side, and she sits. ‘There’s no immediate rush, right? No train to catch or whatever.’
‘No,’ I say.
‘So you sit here and draw, and I’ll go find us some food.’ She doesn’t let me say no. She reaches into my bag and she takes money, and she looks around her. ‘Maybe some clothes, as well. I stink,’ she says, but she doesn’t, I do, she’s just too polite to tell me so.
I hold my sketchbook, and I take the pencil up, and I start to draw. I find a base shape, first: the lines of the street, the intersecting angles with the buildings at the sides. The Arc de Triomphe at the end, like a gateway. Was that always the point? I wonder. I do not know why it was built. I do not know why it stands, beyond the fact that it does.
I have lost time, because suddenly the picture is complete, or nearly: everything in its place, and Rhonda is back. A bag in one hand with clothes, a bag of food in the other.
‘That looks good,’ she says.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, and she laughs.
‘Of course you don’t. Jesus, we’d all be fucked if we thought we weren’t useless.’ She sits next to me and hands me a salad in a cardboard box, a hunk of bread on the side. ‘There was this writer at the factory, he used to say, If you think you’re good, you’re not. The minute you think you’re good at something, that’s the point when you’ve stopped trying.’
‘I suppose,’ I say.
‘So, you don’t think you’re good?’ I shake my head. ‘There you go. You’re probably a fucking master warlock of art.’
‘I don’t think that’s a real title,’ I say.
‘I’ve made it one,’ she says. We eat our salads in silence for a while. Wooden forks into lettuce and egg and tomato and tuna, I think; and I notice a young man standing near us. Looking confused. Rhonda notices him as well, and we both half watch as he scratches his head, as he stumbles towards us. ‘Is he drunk?’ Rhonda asks. He looks it, certainly.
I feel my hand reach for my bag, a movement I make on instinct. Keep it close. Notebook and pencil back inside, people still want to steal. The looters took everything worth taking from the places we abandoned; this place has been left to dry itself out, a rot of dust and baked tarmac.
I see, in his hand, a gun.
‘Don’t say anything to him,’ I say to Rhonda. She opens her mouth, as if her own muscle memory prevents that from happening. ‘Don’t. His hand—’ She looks, and she sees. A moment as she tries to understand what it is, and then that look shifts, and she tenses her entire body. I feel it through the bench.
‘What does he want?’ she asks, but I don’t reply.
I held my daughter tight to me as she was afraid in the night. She did not know what she was scared of, and neither did I; but I could tell her that everything would be okay, and I believed it, and so she believed it.
‘It’ll be all right,’ I say to Rhonda. I feel her hand on my back as I turn myself more towards the young man. My body a shield, and she is using it.
The young man looks at us. ‘Quel jour est-il?’
‘Quel jour – what day,’ I mutter. ‘C’est—’ I run them through in my head. Lundi? Mardi? Mercredi? Is that right? ‘Mercredi,’ I say.
He nods, as if understanding something. Then: ‘You are American?’
‘Sort of,’ I say. ‘British. A bit of everything.’ Blabbering. I think I heard that, once; engage the shooter, they will see you as a person. They will be less likely to shoot you if they relate to you. ‘I have lived all over, but I spent the past few years in America. Decades, really.’
‘Decades, okay. Decades,’ he says. His tongue finding the word clumsily.
‘We were just leaving,’ I say.
‘Where are you going?’
‘England,’ I reply. ‘My sister – my half-sister – is there.’ A pause, as he stares at me. His eyes are not sunken as you might imagine. They are the opposite: absolute clarity in them, of their form, the light inside them, the skin perfect around them. They are eyes that haven’t seen enough yet. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Here,’ he says, quick as a snap. ‘I am from here.’
‘Okay,’ I say. I look behind him, at the wall: a graffiti of words, in black marker. Nothing artistic to them. Il vient de cette ruelle. Arrows accompanying the words. I didn’t notice this before, I was so intent on looking forward – at the quiet, the arch. Would I have noticed them otherwise? A symbol: a gun, stencilled, as if this is art. Le sien est dangereux, il est toujours dangereux. Markings on the floor, I realize now. Lines, painted in yellow. A path for him, or that he will follow. Dangereux, I understand that. Toujours, the next? Tomorrow? I forget. Il est toujours dangereux; he is toujours dangerous. Doesn’t matter what it means. This is the man, his toes on the edge of the yellow demarcations. He paces, and stays within his box. The gun loose in his hands, as if it could drop at any moment. ‘Do you need help?’ I ask him. I feel Rhonda’s hand pressing to my back.
‘I do not,’ he says. He looks behind him, at the writing on the wall. ‘Do you know what this says?’
‘I didn’t notice it,’ I say.
‘I am a dangerous man. It is me that it is speaking of, I think. Come.’ He indicates behind him, to the alleyway he evidently came from. ‘Come, I will show you,’ he says, and he beckons me with the hand that’s not holding the gun.
‘Don’t,’ Rhonda says, but I have to, because I think somebody always dies here, if they can. I look to the ground, where the pavement is stained with spatters of something: darkened, like mud, but I know that it isn’t mud. It is ingrained.
‘Don’t worry,’ I say. I stand, and I walk towards the young man.
‘My name is Theo,’ I say, ‘what’s yours?’
‘Alain. Come, through here, I want to show you the writing about me.’ I follow him, around the corner, into this small space. Barely an alley at all. More a place between buildings, as if they forgot to fill it in, somewhere that shouldn’t exist. It leads through to an adjacent street, in the distance. A couple of doors, which I can barely believe have the space to open out into here. And writing: as if somebody famous lived here, or we are in a museum, a curator’s card on the wall next to one of the doors.
‘You see?’ he asks. And I try to read it, but it’s dense, tightly packed French that seems impenetrable.
‘I don’t read French,’ I say, so he puts his finger beneath one of the words, and he translates.
‘This man who lives here always comes from this door, and he is always armed. The cycle, the loop, I think?’ An aside, he looks at me to agree to his translation, which I do with a nod ‘The loop means that he is with the gun, and he will always shoot it, because he wants to, he has got that into his head. He is a murderer—’ Alain looks to me as he says it, his eyes somehow even wider. ‘I am a murderer,’ he says. ‘I did not know this, until I left here. Until I saw it, you see? Every time.’
‘You have a gun,’ I say.
‘For myself. The Knot, it is coming, yes?’
‘It is here,’ I say.
‘Well, then. I am going to kill myself. For its glory.’ I see his skin, on his neck: a tattoo of the symbol. Curled in on itself. ‘But now I see, I am a murderer?’
‘You weren’t going to kill other people.’
‘I have never hurt anybody, why would I begin now?’ He jabs at the words. ‘But this says I am a murderer. So I am, I have been.’
‘Maybe it’s not you,’ I say.
‘I live alone. The man who lives here – it is me, it is very direct.’ Now, finally, as if we have both been waiting for this, he lifts the gun. A snub-nosed thing, that seems to almost disappear in his hands, his long fingers uncomfortable on its shape.
‘Why did you have the gun?’ I ask.
‘For myself,’ he says. ‘The Knot said, That is the day. It is the day and—’ He raises his voice, some dramatic display of his own lack of power. ‘I wanted to be heard! Heard!’ The echo of his voice around this small alleyway, in this space. Reverberating off every wall. ‘But they were correct, yes?’
‘Correct about what?’
‘That we go around again. That the Knot is not the end. It is a knot, yes? We can unpick it, and tie it again, and again.’
‘You can’t take back what you have done.’
‘It is not permanent. That is the word?’
‘The world is permanent. Your actions might be forgotten by you, but for everybody else they have consequences.’
‘Consequences.’ As if he’s trying on the word.
‘The world continues. It is simply your time that does not.’
‘But I get to do it again.’
‘You get to repeat mistakes.’
‘Or successes. Maybe I am meant to kill you. Maybe you are a bad person, a bad, bad man.’ He smiles, the thought tickling him. He does not believe it. He is broken; I wonder how long before this it was that he broke. On his timeline, his sense of linear time: days, weeks, months, years. Was he born broken? Waiting for something like the Knot to give him purpose? ‘Maybe I kill you, and I have completed my, what is it? Mission. Maybe we are all on a mission, maybe then I will be allowed to live.’
This cannot be the first time it’s happened. We are destined to rally against the things we are told are inevitable, I think. I wonder: is that why I have lived so long? To be given a lifeline with such finality, and yet here I am still. Not for much longer, admittedly, but regardless. Perhaps that’s why I am still here. So has this man—
‘Alain,’ I say, his name loud on my lips. And he stares at me. He nods, as if to pre-emptively say that whatever question I would ask him, I am correct, I am on the right path.
‘Get back from him!’ a voice shouts, and I turn, and I see a group of people, six or seven of them, pushing through from the avenue. Elderly people, for the most, and one pregnant woman, standing at the back, shielding herself behind the others. All wearing the telltale near-neon orange armbands of the Police Nationale. The speaker, an older man, walrus moustache and combed-over hair, stands at the very front, preceded by his rifle: this almost comically massive hunting thing, I am sure. I wonder if it is a blunderbuss, even; try to picture what such a thing might look like. ‘He will kill you, you see.’
‘We were talking,’ Alain says.
‘Alain Patrice, tu sais comment ça se termine,’ the older man, the Walrus, says, but Alain just smiles at him.
‘Do not smile,’ the pregnant woman says, then she looks to me. ‘He always smiles, it is very unpleasant.’
‘Unpleasant,’ I repeat.
‘Venez avec nous, maintenant,’ the Walrus says, but Alain doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch.
I realize, in this moment, that I could die now. Right now. The group are sweating this moment, worrying for their safety – and mine. Behind them all, Rhonda. The pregnant woman telling her to stay back, ushering her with her hands.
Alain keeps the gun pointed at me.
He is not trembling, not even a little.
‘He needs help,’ I say, to Walrus, to the group, but Alain laughs, and—
The blunderbuss roars, a shot that is so loud in this alleyway, and that echoes so much, it feels as if it never ends, pinging off the walls, a message to the streets, the city, the sky. I crouch, instinctively, hands over my head. And I gasp, and I laugh, because I can’t help that, I can’t help the noise coming out; and I watch as Alain slumps, feet away from where he was standing, I’m sure. The walls peppered with red pockmarks, bloodshot shot dug into hard old stone. Alain is barely there, barely intact.
Walrus reaches his hand to me, even though I am only cowering. A gesture, and he says, ‘You’re American,’ with the disdain that suggests I am not the first American he’s had to save from this situation.
‘Of a sort,’ I say.
‘Ahh, you are all American. You live there for any time, you’re American. France is blood, eh? America adopts, even if you do not want it to.’
‘Well, thank you. You saved my life.’
‘We saved many lives. He goes on a—’
‘It is a spree, if he escapes,’ the pregnant woman says. ‘So many people die, or as many people until his bullets are run out.’
‘So you kill him.’
‘Yes.’
‘What about restraining him?’ I look to the house he comes out of. Noise from inside there: of thumping around, of grumbling. Murmuring under breath. ‘He’s awake,’ I say. I mean: alive.
‘He has his gun in his hand. We have tried, you think we haven’t tried? We stand there, we wait, we blink, he is there, and he is holding the gun. We have been shot.’ Walrus looks to the others. ‘We have died, and come back, to protect the city from him. He kills himself, or he kills us, some of us, or he escapes and he kills strangers, and he causes them to lose where they have gained up to. You see?’
‘Like a video game,’ Rhonda says.
‘Yes,’ Walrus replies. ‘Like a video game, you see? There is no winning, you only keep defending, you keep defeating the big boss, and then it comes back. Like a video game, or a horror film.’
