Radiant Days (13 page)

I walked over and slid a newspaper from the bundle—the
Washington Star
, the evening paper.

“See, the truck dropped these off.” I scanned the headlines, flipping to the Metro section. “Nope. Nothing there. I don’t know what you saw, but it wasn’t the northern lights.”

Arthur stared at the newspaper, then jabbed a finger at the dateline. “What does that say?”

“‘October 8, 1978,’” I read. “‘Sunday.’”

“It’s Saturday.”

“No, it’s Sunday, almost like midnight, but it’s still Sunday.”

“What does ‘1978’ mean?”

“It’s the year.” My impatience gave way to unease, the growing realization that this strange boy was genuinely crazy, or maybe something worse. “1978. That’s what year it is. 1978.”

“No, it’s not,” he whispered. His gaze darted from me to a
Metrobus trailing clouds of blue exhaust. His pale eyes glazed with fear. “It’s 1870.” He pulled the sheaf of pages from his pocket, unfolded a piece of newsprint, and handed it to me. “See?”

It was the front page of a newspaper.
Journal de Charleroi, Samedi, 8 October 1870
.

“1870?” I frowned. “It doesn’t look that old.”

“That’s because it’s not,” said Arthur. “I pinched it this afternoon, from a stationer’s.”

I moved beneath the streetlamp to get a better look. The paper wasn’t yellowed or faded. I pressed my thumb against a column of newsprint, withdrew it, and saw my skin stained black. When I sniffed the paper, I caught a whiff of fresh ink.

“This is so weird.” I looked at Arthur. “It’s like it was just printed. Where’d you get it?”

“I told you—I lifted it from a place near Charleroi.”

“That’s crazy.” Who would print up a facsimile of a newspaper over a hundred years old? Could he have stolen it from a museum? Though even in a museum, a newspaper this old would show its age. But why lie about something as trivial as stealing a newspaper, unless Arthur was a pathological liar?

In which case, why make the lie so ridiculous that no one in their right mind would believe him?

I handed the paper back. “Why’d you steal it?”

“Why do you think? No money.”

“Right.” I looked away. His total lack of embarrassment about lying was starting to creep me out, along with that intensely cold gaze. “So, you want to see if we can find something to eat?”

Without waiting for a reply, I started across the street, shoulders hunched against the wind. I didn’t check to see if he was behind me. I was hoping maybe he wasn’t. I learned in Norville, you never look back if a strange dog starts following you.

But then I heard the squeal of car brakes and a shout.

“What the hell you doing?”

Before I could turn, Arthur grabbed my arm, laughing breathlessly as the car roared off.

“You idiot!” I started laughing, too, as we ran to the curb. “You’re going to get killed, you know that?”

Arthur shook his head. “You can’t die in a dream. It’s impossible—you always wake up right before. I do, anyway.”

“You think this is a dream?”

“Who cares? I’m here.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

Washington, D.C.

OCTOBER 8, 1978

FOR A FEW
blocks we walked without speaking. Arthur stared at everything, especially other people. He’d turn and gape whenever we passed someone who was black, which in D.C. is most of the population. He reacted the same way when we passed a Vietnamese couple, and some teenage girls in skirts up to their ass, and two guys holding hands. Finally I lost it.

“Jesus, stop staring! You’re acting like a goddamn hick. I thought you were from Paris.”

“Not Paris. Charleville. A shithole in the middle of nowhere.”

“But you were
in
Paris, right? You didn’t just see it on a postcard or something.”

He flashed me an angry look. “Paris is nothing like this.
Nothing
is like this.”

I glanced at him, this scruffy kid with his hideous homemade clothes and incongruous baby face. In a way he was beautiful. Not my type, but someone’s, when he got older.

He looked at the world like he wanted to swallow it. I was accustomed to paying attention to things that other people didn’t notice. A dead sparrow’s claws, the way late-afternoon light slanted against the side of a building.

But now I began to see how surreal a stoplight was, strobing from amber to red to green. Plastic bottles, the acid-green wrapper from a bag of potato chips, a broken syringe—all these things are strange and even beautiful, if you look at them long enough.

Once, Arthur stooped to pick up a crushed ballpoint pen. Translucent plastic splintered between his fingers, a bloom of black ink. He turned and pressed his palm against a brick wall, leaving a blotched black handprint.

“There,” he said. “Now you.”

I looked around. Late as it was, this part of Georgetown still felt exposed and overlit. Not the kind of place you’d bomb, even in the middle of the night. Then I made the mistake of glancing back at Arthur, and got sucked into that blue-gray gaze.

It unnerved me. Young as he was, crazy as he was, he acted like he knew something I didn’t, and never would. Clea’s taunt came back to me—
Get a decent haircut and some clothes, go home to Norville
.

Arthur would never do that
, I thought.

And for the first time I realized,
Neither will I
.

I got out my spray can and shook it, hearing the loose rattle that meant the can was almost empty. With my finger on the nozzle, I felt a rush of adrenaline as neon-yellow paint swirled across the brick wall, a rising sun with a black handprint in its center.

“Yes!” I exclaimed, jubilant.

“Yes!” Arthur swung his arm around my neck and pulled me to him. The empty spray can clattered to the sidewalk and rolled into the gutter. I heard traffic in the street behind us, looked back and saw the familiar crimson blaze of a police car, two blocks away.

I pulled up my collar and steered Arthur along the sidewalk. “Keep going. Keep your head down.”

I walked as fast as I could without breaking into a run, but was brought up short when Arthur abruptly stopped in front of the Biograph Theater.

“What?” I said. “We’re
not
going to the movies.”

I looked up at the marquee:
FRENCH NEW WAVE MARATHON
. Beneath it was a poster, a black-and-white photo of a girl with very short dark hair kissing an ugly young man in a fedora and suit that were too big for him, a cigarette in his hand. Bright red letters proclaimed
À bout de souffle
.

“We’re not going to the movies,” I repeated.

Arthur tilted his head. “I like his looks.”

“He’s hideous.” I glanced into the street but saw no sign of the police car. “What’s it mean?”

“
‘À bout de souffle.’
‘Last breath.’ Like a dying breath.” Arthur pressed his face against the glass and peered into the lobby, empty except for a man reading behind the ticket counter. “What is this place?”

“A movie theater. They do art films. Foreign stuff.” I pointed at the list of titles on the marquee:
Pierrot le fou
,
Les quatre cents
coups
,
Le boucher
. “I went once with Clea; she goes with her husband a lot. Here—”

I pulled him down the sidewalk, to a recessed spot where there was a metal door with a handwritten sign taped to it:
KEEP CLOSED FIRE DOOR
. “Somebody told me about this. Just keep your mouth shut, okay?”

For several minutes we waited, and were finally rewarded when the door opened and a man stepped out, a smoldering joint between two fingers. He glanced at us and nodded, catching the door before it could close behind him.

“You kids behave,” he said as we slipped inside.

I padded down the corridor to another door. Arthur paused to gape at the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. I yanked him to my side.

“Don’t say a fucking word,” I breathed. “We could get busted for this, and if you say
anything
, I am out of here and you are on your own. Understand?”

He nodded as I carefully, silently opened the door, gesturing for him to follow me.

We were near the front, a few feet from a row of empty seats. Above us, an exit sign glowed red. Maybe two dozen people were scattered throughout the theater. Some of them looked like they were asleep. On-screen, a black-and-white movie showed the same short-haired girl arguing with the same guy. A white shirt flapped open over his bare chest, and he wore sunglasses even though they were inside a brightly lit apartment. He looked better than he did in the poster, kind of like Mick Jagger. The girl was beautiful. It was a crappy print, the soundtrack rustling with
static. The dialogue was in French, and I craned my neck to read the subtitles.

I just talked about myself, and you talked about yourself,
the man was saying.
You should’ve talked about me, and I should have talked about you
.

I glanced at Arthur. He stared at the screen, transfixed, light and shadow washing across his face as the figures moved around the apartment, as though they were performing some strangely detached dance. The man fled the apartment, chasing a sports car in the street. The police arrived seconds later and shot him in the back. Arthur gasped, jumping at the crack of the pistol. The man died as the girl looked on. At the end she turned and stared out from the screen, her beautiful blank face the size of a wall.

“Let’s go,” I whispered as the credits rolled.

We slipped back into the corridor, joined by a few other people leaving the theater. When we were back out on the sidewalk, Arthur grabbed my hand.

“That’s incredible.” His face was rapt. “It’s a secret?”

I laughed. “Not really. Usually it’s more crowded. This is some kind of all-night marathon.”

“Merle?”

I turned as someone called my name. “David?”

A figure in a flannel shirt and paisley bandanna stepped over to throw his arms around me: David Fletcher, my friend from the Corcoran.

“
Mon ange
, where have you
been
?” he cried. “I went by the studio one day, and they said you’d dropped out!”

“I got the boot. Flunked out, really.”

He shook his head in commiseration. “It’s for the best,” he said, and we both laughed. David had stayed at the Corcoran for the fall semester but left when he got a walk-on part in a John Waters movie shooting in Baltimore. He was a year older than me, nineteen, with long black hair and a soft-featured face: downy black beard and mustache, slightly crooked teeth yellowed from nicotine. His eyes were lovely—indigo, long-lashed, soulful. He wore a dangling chandelier earring and the bandanna tied, pirate-style, over his head; a blue plaid flannel shirt; and flared jeans that flapped over Converse sneakers that had once been red but were now so encrusted with crud they might have been made of cement.

“I missed you.” He kissed my cheek, did a double take when he saw Arthur behind me. “Oh, hello. I’m David—”

David stuck his hand out. Arthur regarded him curiously, then nodded back. “I’m Arthur.”

“He’s French!” David exclaimed.
“Bonjour, Arthur! Vous êtes français?”

Arthur took a wary step back.

“He’s just visiting,” I said quickly to David. “Exchange student.”

“Were you homesick?” David pointed at the Biograph’s marquee. “I just came out to grab a cigarette; I didn’t even see you in there!”

“We snuck in,” I said. I was trying to decide if it was a good idea or a bad one to stick with David. He always seemed to have wandered in from a different movie from the one that was my
own life, which was why it was not really a surprise when he went to that casting call in Baltimore and never came back.

“You snuck in?” David’s thick Brooklyn accent gave way to a goofy foghorn laugh at odds with his fey appearance. “Listen, I’m meeting someone—want to walk with me?”

“Yeah, sure. Where you going?”

“Pied du Cochon.” David grinned at Arthur. “
C’est un bistro, très bien
. It’s open all night, maybe we can get some food.”

We headed up Wisconsin. Being with David seemed to confer a sort of invisibility—the few people we passed probably thought we were panhandlers. He talked animatedly about the movies he’d just seen—he’d been in the Biograph since 3:00 that afternoon—but was cagey about who he was going to meet. I understood why when we entered the restaurant, a large, empty room crowded with tables, and a tall older man in an elegant pin-striped suit stood to greet him.

“See you, Merle,” murmured David. His hand squeezed mine, and he gave Arthur a good-bye nod.
“Au revoir.”

The older man embraced David, leaning down to kiss his forehead, then escorted him back out the door. When they were gone, I turned to survey the room. We were the only customers. Waiters leaned against the bar, talking or poring over newspapers. One of them glanced at me and gave a peremptory wave.

“Wherever you want,” he called, and turned away again.

We walked toward the back. As we passed a table covered with dirty plates, my hand snaked out to grab some french fries.
Arthur snatched a half-full beer glass and downed it. The fries were stone cold and limp with malt vinegar, but I was so hungry I didn’t care.