Paris Trance (18 page)

The Cassavetes season had finished months ago but an Antonioni season had just begun. The four friends went to see every film, too stunned by boredom and colour and space even to consider leaving. In the black-and-white films there was no colour to be seen, just the space and the boredom and people saying things. Some of what was said was lost on Luke because the dialogue was often in Italian and the subtitles in French. They were all in love with Monica Vitti, especially her green dress in
Red Desert.
Nicole liked the way the photos in
Blow-Up
became clearer as they were enlarged.

‘That was amazing,’ said Luke when they came out of
L’Avventura
.

‘Amazingly boring, you mean?’ said Sahra.

‘Yes, exactly.’

At weekends they went dancing. Luke, Sahra and Alex took Ecstasy. Nicole didn’t want to and this became an issue between her and Luke. Nicole was adamant that she did not need to take drugs in order to enjoy anything. She was happy to get stoned – which she had done only occasionally before meeting Luke – but she drew the line at anything chemical.

‘That’s so stupid, Nicole,’ said Luke. ‘Dancing is much better if you take E.’

‘But I love dancing anyway.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is that everything can always be improved.’

‘How can you ever be happy if you think that?’

‘How can you ever be happy if you don’t?’

‘What does
that
mean?’

‘It means everything can always be improved by drugs. It’s just a question of fitting the substance to the activity in question. Or finding the right activity for the substance. You admit that listening to music is much better if you’re stoned, right? And dancing is much better if you take—’

‘For you, yes.’

‘For everyone.’

‘But I don’t
want
to take it. I don’t try to persuade you not to. So why do you try to persuade me to?’

‘Because you’re missing out on something great. It can get to the point where there’s nothing but lights and music. You can feel yourself dissolving as an individual. You can feel yourself not existing.’

‘I love my existence.’

‘And we could do all that kissy-feely stuff you see people doing.’

‘We can do that anyway,’ said Nicole. ‘We can do it now if you like.’

Eventually Nicole was persuaded – by Sahra, who loved it – to try a half when they went to their favourite club, The Coast, as this near-derelict space bizarrely called itself.

The evening began at the cinema.
Strange Days
was showing and, as the lights went down, the four of them passed a bucket-sized Coca-Cola – ‘small’ by the gigantic standards of cinematic refreshment – along the row and swallowed their pills. Luke had seen the movie twice before but this time it blew his mind, totally. Coming up, he began to feel – in the film’s millennial argot – like he was wire-tripping, not so much seeing the film as jacking into it, living the experience of a movie which was a commentary on all the movies it had come out of: a pastiche of everything, even itself. Oh, it was perfect, perfect as the playback of Faith in her T-shirt and black bikini bottoms, teaching Lenny Nero how to roller-blade, and then heading back to the apartment and undressing in front of him. ‘So,’ she says, ‘you want to watch or you going to do?’ And Nero, sitting in his lousy apartment, looped into the past, feels and hears and sees himself say, ‘Watch and see.’ ‘I love your eyes Lenny,’ she says, moving beneath him. ‘I love the way they see.’

The apocalyptic party at the end of the film made them so desperate to get to the club that they practically ran there. As soon as they checked their coats they were like dogs let off a leash. The dance floor was crowded, the music pumping. With every track the surge of the music deepened. The lights poured into their faces. Under Nicole’s tuition Luke’s dancing had improved to the extent that he was no longer, in Alex’s words, ‘quite the embarrassment he used to be’. If it still seemed like he was having a seizure it was at least a rhythmic one. Luke looked at Nicole and Sahra. They had their arms round each other, laughing. Sahra moved over to Alex and they began dancing together. Nicole danced over to Luke and kissed him. She was wearing a sleeveless white dress, plimsolls. Her eyes were wet with laughter. Luke touched her arms, still dancing. The music surged and returned and paused, surged even while pausing, paused and surged and pumped again. The only light was a strobe: Luke saw Nicole’s arms and hair, coming and going, illuminated and vanishing, crackling into view and disappearing. Smoke began pouring on to the dance floor, so thick it was impossible to see. The trance deepened. The light became solid: purple, then green, then gold. Luke could see no one, not even Nicole, not even his own arms. There was no distance or direction, only the impenetrable light, the endless pump of the music.

Their eyes were still as wide as planets when they left the club, just as it was beginning to get light. Being outside made them realize how out of it they still were. It felt less like the city was getting light, more like it was reconstituting itself, as if it hadn’t been there in the night, as if it had dissolved and now, in the grey non-light, was becoming substantial again. As it did so they saw things they wouldn’t otherwise have noticed: bits of buildings, architectural details whose names only Nicole knew. It became lighter as they walked. At boulevard Richard Lenoir the market stalls were being assembled. Vans were crowded with boxes of fresh produce. Scales were being set up, prices written on cards. The immensity of the effort of getting the produce here – sowing, planting, ploughing, growing, digging up and transporting – seemed out of all proportion to the end results which, when all was said and done, were only versions of the onions, carrots and potatoes they had eaten for dinner the night before. It didn’t make sense.

‘It would be nice if somewhere was open,’ said Sahra.

‘We could try the Kanterbrau,’ said Luke. The sky was blue-grey now, birds were already flying in it. The Kanterbrau had just opened. They were the first customers. No one knew what to order, whether to opt for a night-cap or a morning coffee. Luke fancied a refreshing lager. Alex thought he’d have a refreshing lager too. Nicole wanted an orange pressé. Sahra was ready for coffee. Alex changed to coffee and so did Luke. Then he changed to an orange juice and the waiter trudged off, undaunted.

They were still full of chemically engendered expectation but that anticipation was gradually coming to refer to the past, to something that had already taken place. They were wide awake, distracted, glowing. They said things without being sure who had said them. Speaking and listening had become indistinct. Alex paid for the drinks. Their bodies were still full of the pump and colour of the music so they went back to Luke and Nicole’s and danced some more. When Alex and Sahra had gone home Nicole took a shower. She came back into the main room, wrapped in a towel.

‘Do you want to watch or do?’ she said.

After a few hours’ sleep the four were back together, still spaced out, tired and not tired, overcome by a lovely nostalgia for events that had taken place only hours earlier. Luke squeezed a jug of orange and carrot juice and then, as soon as they had drunk that, he made another jugful, this time adding a knuckle of ginger. Sahra lay with her head in Nicole’s lap, drifting. Alex played records. They danced some more and reminded each other of things they had seen and felt the night before, in the club and in the film, the two parts of the evening becoming more and more deeply intermingled as they did so.

Alex and Sahra left, Nicole went to lie in the bath ‘for two or three hours’. Luke tidied up and switched on the TV: rugby. With the sound turned down he forgot he was in France. He sat facing the screen, feeling suddenly alone, worn-out, dejected. The door-bell rang: Alex, back for something Sahra had left behind. As Luke opened the door to let him in he felt a surge of déjà vu. When Alex had retrieved Sahra’s bag Luke returned to the TV, trying to locate the origin of that sensation, the original experience of which he had just felt the tantalising echo.

He couldn’t, of course, you never can, because although that misleadingly named sensation sends you scurrying into your past, the moment it urges you towards is
that
moment itself. And at that moment you glimpse the Eternal Recurrence as a potential fact, as a mechanism, rather than a metaphor. That is the solution contained in the riddle of déjà vu. All memories are premonitions, all premonitions are memories.

For her part, Nicole was converted; after that weekend the four of them always took E when they went out dancing.

They also decided to spend Christmas together – without having any idea of what they would do or where they would go. Ideally they wanted to find a house in the country and spend the holiday there. Sahra had an uncle who, she thought, owned a house somewhere. She wrote to him the next day but heard nothing back. Staying in the city seemed a dismal option but, they agreed, if the worst came to the worst they would do that. They would cook a huge meal, get high, and let the day ripple over them.

In the meantime, in various permutations, they went shopping for Christmas presents for each other. Sahra and Alex went looking for presents for Luke and Nicole; Nicole and Sahra went looking for gifts for Alex and Luke. Luke didn’t go with anyone because he hated shopping.

‘We’ve tried to do it a couple of times,’ Nicole said to Sahra as they drifted round Magasin. ‘But then, after about ten minutes, before we’ve even tried anything on, he starts moaning about how expensive everything is. We always end up just going for coffee or to a film. The only thing he likes doing is looking at records.’

‘We go all the time,’ said Sahra. ‘I try on expensive cocktail dresses and Alex tries on expensive suits. Sometimes we even buy things. Not expensive things. Oh, let’s go into lingerie.’

‘Actually, that’s one of the things Luke
does
like to buy. Or at least to look at.’

‘Alex too.’

‘We’ll probably bump into them.’

The first displays were of night-gowns. Then girdles, substantial brassières and large comfortable undergarments. As they walked further into lingerie, the items became progressively skimpier, more revealing, so that the shop seemed to be undressing itself. Then, gradually, lingerie gave way to shimmery evening wear.

‘What now?’ said Nicole.

‘I’d like a coffee.’

‘You’re as bad as Luke! Actually I’d love a coffee too.’

They went to a café on rue Saint Honoré. The waiter brought their coffees and a handful of sugar cubes. The wrapping of each cube was illustrated with the flag of a different country. Nicole held them up one by one and Sahra tried to guess which country was represented. First was a tricolour: a white stripe bordered by two greens.

‘Nigeria,’ said Sahra.

‘Good,’ said Nicole. She held up another tricolour: red white and green, with a tiny emblem in the middle of the white.

‘Mexico.’

‘Very good,’ said Nicole, picking up a red flag with a yellow star in the centre.

‘Vietnam.’

‘You’ll never get this one.’ It was an absurdly crowded flag: four horizontal bands – blue, white, green, yellow – a red stripe running down the middle and a yellow star in the top left-hand corner.

‘Central African Republic,’ said Sahra without hesitation.

‘How did you know that?’

‘Alex and I were at a place with the same sugar last week. The same ones came up.’

‘Cheat! What a coincidence though.’

‘Not really. They’re only the flags of coffee-producing countries.’ Nicole threw the Central African Republic at Sahra. ‘Alex wanted to get Luke to come to a place where they have the same sugar and bet on how many countries he could name,’ said Sahra. ‘He knew Luke wouldn’t be able to resist it and he’d make a fortune out of him.’

‘He would have, I’m sure.’

‘I don’t think I’m in the mood for serious shopping today,’ said Sahra.

‘Me neither.’

‘Shall we go to a film instead?’

‘What would you like to see?’

‘I don’t know, we’ll have to look in the paper.’

‘It’s a shame Luke’s not here. He spends so much time checking the times of films in
Pariscope
that he knows them off by heart.’

‘And Alex.’

‘They’re funny aren’t they, these English men?’

‘Nothing they say is serious.’

‘And everything is.’

‘Yes.’

‘Still, at least they dress nicely.’

‘Too bad they look like working at that warehouse for the rest of their days.’

‘They love it there.’

‘I know. But it’s strange not to have
any
ambition, don’t you think?’

‘Luke is so lazy. He claims he came to Paris intending to write a book. I think he wrote about half a page. If that. And he has this idea of doing some stupid film about the 29 bus but he never will, I’m sure. He
has
learned some French but basically as long as he can play football, sleep with me, get stoned, go for drinks at the Petit Centre with Alex and go dancing at the weekend with the three of us he’s perfectly happy.’

‘Alex is the same.’

‘At least he can speak French. And he’s not
obsessed
by those things.’

‘Only because he’s got Luke to do his obsessing for him.’

‘Actually, do you know what I think Luke is really obsessed by?’

‘You?’

‘No. Happiness. For most people it’s incidental, almost a side-effect. But all of Luke’s energy – and that’s why he’s so unambitious in other ways – is focused on living out his ideal of happiness.’

‘Then I
was
right,’ laughed Sahra. ‘You’re the embodiment of that ideal.’

MC Solaar came on the radio or jukebox or whatever it was. The two women knew the song well and sang the first line together: ‘
Le vent souffle en Arizona
. . .’ Then they drank their coffees, tapping the table, listening.

‘
Alex
est son partenaire,’ laughed Nicole.