He erased the word ‘cancer’, backing over it with the repeated, urgent taps on his keyboard. He couldn’t even look at it.
It wasn’t death that bothered him, that becoming nothing that he had witnessed in his patients so many times. There was little to that: you were and then you weren’t.
It was the process that bothered him, how one went about it. And even as he had smoked cigarette after cigarette, sitting in the tiny Chicago office with its linoleum floors and fluorescent lights, his one small vice in tending to the needy, he had hoped for a good death.
Now, though, the prognosis was in, and it promised his worst fear; a lingering death, long and filled with pain. He had cursed the guns that made his job on the Southside a daily struggle. And now he wondered how he would get one.
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I had never asked Simon for a favor or a free meal and wasn’t sure what his reaction would be to this odd request. It had the mildly surprising effect of transforming his disgust for the phone into curiosity. He picked it up and examined it more closely, flipping it over as if their might be some insignia or hidden cypher that could provide him with an explanation.
When
none presented itself he raised an eyebrow, withdrew a cigarillo from his breast pocket and used his free hand to light a match off the bottom of the counter. Touching the flame to the cigar he inhaled deeply, flipping the phone open with his thumb. He watched me for any reaction to this as he exhaled. I stood there, expressionless, until I felt the moment was right to give the slightest of shrugs. He returned the gesture, said, “D’accord,” and placed the phone behind the cafe’s bar.
I thanked him. Not wanting to rush off, I bought an espresso and drank
it standing. Simon started up another conversation about the weather, how the summer was going to be a hot one, only to be interrupted by a customer that was clearly from the States. Tall and
sure of himself, blonde enough that for a moment I thought he might
be Australian, he came in from the outside seemingly just to tell
Simon, “Hey, you can’t smoke in here.” I stared over my
shoulder at him, letting anger cloud my befuddlement, feeling Simon’s
disdain and his exhalation of cigar smoke joined me.
The
blonde scuttled back outside, no more immune to Simon’s scorn than
the average tourist. I went back to my coffee and Simon gave a
chuckle. “What? Does he think an inspector from Social Cohesion
is going to show up here?” He gestured towards the streets outside
his windows, half the storefronts shuddered and covered with
graffiti. I just shrugged again, laughing at the slightly Orwellian
name of the French health department. Thinking I was laughing at his
joke, Simon patted my hand. “You’re the only American I ever
cared for.” I gave him a small, chagrinned smile, suddenly
uncomfortable at having asked him to keep the phone.
Instead
of asking for it back, though, I retreated by draining my cup and
bidding him adieu. With a few hours to go before work I headed back
to the apartment. Dog hair and dust floated across the subway tiles
as I entered, a late afternoon wind moving with me passed the chipped
paint of the doors. Someone, probably not the constantly drunk
superintendent, had closed the broken elevator, maybe even before
anyone had fallen into the shaft. I climbed the stairs.
The apartment was empty. I called Sophie’s name, but my voice just dissipated into the small space, absorbed by so much peeling wallpaper and worn wooden trim. With the afternoon’s events I found that this produced a disquiet in me. But there was no sign of a struggle in the house and if someone had come to take Sophie there would be blood.
The film spoke of an America moving forward into the 21st century, a country at the height of its power, hijacked by fear and war. It focused on a simple tailor, a man dedicated to making his idiosyncratic yellow garments, the image of a woman who wasn’t quite the Mother Mary hanging in the background the entire time.
People come in and out of his shop: the Armenian man who disappears without explanation, the single mother who does the tailor’s laundry, the young African for whom he makes the funeral suit. All the while Mother Mary becomes older, darker, more gray.
Then the end comes when the government agents storm in and he begs them in a gibberish language, nearly hysterical as he urges them away. But the small and humble space of his shop becomes filled with brackish water, oozing out of the walls as if Hurricane Sandy had arrived again. The agents ignore it, though, screaming in barely controlled fear at the tailor, while the water rises up to their knees. The tailor doesn’t begin to weep, though, until the tentacles come out of the walls. He watches the unexplained appendages grab each agent by the boots and drowning them in the foaming water. He pleads for each man’s life.
It becomes an underground sensation, the film of this strange tailor standing still as the new America changes around him. People stream out of the theater, shouting and demanding change, unable to describe their motives.
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The owner of the tabac shop, a wiry middle-aged man with veins that went all the way into his eyeballs, got upset enough at my trespass to follow me out into the alley, his voice rising as we went outside. After a few paces I turned to face him down and he shut up. I didn’t want anyone following me right then and he got the message.
The back alley was sandwiched between shop fronts, barely wider than the small municipal garbage trucks. The proprietors tossed out rubbish onto piles of bags and milk crates until the alley was gray with scum and the stream of waste water that ran down the alley’s middle was a sooty black.
I moved down that dirty minefield at a quick pace, hoping to lose Brick in the process. I rolled the phone around in my pocket, trying to decide what to do with it. On one hand Mitnick might use it to call me. On the other, I didn’t want to keep it. Mitnick could probably use it to track me and I didn’t want him to know where I lived. Even the casino had the wrong address on me.
I decided to split the difference. I took a random direction and emerged back onto the white sidewalks and orderly streets of town. A quick look around told me Brick or anyone else resembling a Russian hadn’t followed me, so I headed to the closest tram stop. It wasn’t quite tourist season yet, but the car was still had a handful of people traveling in the off-season, mostly backpackers and pensioners hoping to save a little money. It had started to rain again, but it was light and didn’t dampen anyone’s spirits.
The No. 5 tram glided over the smooth cobblestones, past palm trees and the ochre facades of the Italian architecture that was brought here oh-so-long ago when this part of the country changed hands as often as the nobility who ran it changed pants. Watching the young hikers and old retirees smiling at each other, I wondered if Mitnick and his people weren’t the advent of some new kind of change.
The sporadic rains had slowed by the time I got out at Les Moulins. So much so that a few of Simon’s chairs outside were occupied by some young people enjoying coffee and cigarettes, too oblivious to realize they were in the wrong part of town or getting a buzz out of proximity to it. It was early yet, so they would be fine, as long as they headed back to the Promenade before the sun threatened to go down.
I walked in through the tall wooden doors, noticing last night’s tag that had been added to the entrance was already partially scrubbed off. Simon, appearing both diligent and disheveled, was behind the counter, cleaning out porcelain espresso cups, piling them into a small pyramid as he finished each one. I walked up to the granite counter and waited for him to finish.
Working with his usual efficiency, it wasn’t long before he turned around, drying his hands on a white dish towel he had tucked into his apron. Like any good French waiter, he was happy to ignore his customers for a time, so he gave me a warm smile and a big, “Bonjour.”
I asked him how he was. I knew from past conversations Simon was a widower and he didn’t spend much time outside of the cafe. It was his dry, well-lit place. So no surprise that his reply revolved around the day’s trade.
“Bien, bien,” he said. Once the cafe filled up, Simon never spoke in English. It kept the French customers happy and was a useful barrier to the foreign ones. He continued slow enough that I could keep up with him though. “Busier than usual. I’ve hardly had a chance to remove last night’s graffiti,” he gestured disgustedly to the front door at this, cursing whatever neighborhood rat dared defile his institution. Other than that, he had a few choice complaints about a few of the patrons.
I rolled the phone with my fist in my pocket, feeling its heat as I tried to listen patiently. The quickest way to ruin a relationship with a French merchant was to ask him how he was and then stare at your watch while he answered.
Following custom he returned the question and asked me about my day. I let my impatience get the best of me and I didn’t respond with the usual trivialities. Instead I took out the phone and I told him that my day had been interesting. Simon looked at the device with a kind of contempt most people would have reserved for a roach. “I was wondering if I could leave this here?”
The flames lick the bottom of the cage, hung by a chain above a giant brazier, iron pokers resting inside it, heating their pointed tips for administration to unrepentant flesh. None of this bothers the caged ascetic, who only weeps as he watches the inquisitors feed his books into the pyre. Tombs on astrology, pagan rites of Germanic tribes, the histories of Herodotus, all go into the fire, causing it to grow brighter and heat the cage.
“Stop,” he begs. “Please. You don’t know what you’re doing,” he says, thinking of all the lost knowledge that disappears from humanity with every scorched page.
“We must, brother,” the grand inquisitor intones. “As these books are burned, the flames that consume them will purify your soul.”
Feeling the floor of his jail heat, the monk grips the bars to hold himself away from the heat. He begs, “Christ would not want this brothers.”
With a hiss and spit the inquisitor hurls a book at the cage. “How dare you claim to know the mind of our Lord!”
Without consideration for the soles of his feet, the monk drops himself to catch the book. He is pleased to see it is Homer’s Iliad. Gazing upon the cracked leather of its cover, he strokes it. “If Christ is the representation of God and God is all-knowing, then with every book you burn you take us further from him.”
