Radiant Days (23 page)

I no longer wanted to die. I wanted to be back in the city I knew, among the noise and fumes of rush-hour traffic with a satchel full of oil pastels and virgin sketchbooks; wolfing down a Reuben sandwich and a beer at the Blue Mirror; drawing Ted as he played his guitar on M Street; squatting in a warehouse in downtown Manhattan; clutching a can of neon-yellow spray paint as my tag glowed across a crumbling storefront:

I drew a deep breath and took two more steps, until my toes hung over the turf, twenty or so feet above the river.

Below me, the water brightened from muddy brown to amber to gold. In the distance, I could still see that tiny jot of black, rising and falling with the current. I watched until it was nothing but a black speck, until it might have been a grain of dust in my eye; watched until it all became one thing, water and sky and shadow turned to fire as the world blazed around me. A sound
rose above the soft rush of water, a plangent note that faded into the memory of a plucked string, a word that might have been my own name.

A blue flare slashed at the corner of my eyes, blinding me. The plaintive note rang out once more: no longer faint but deafening; not a name but a command. I stuck my hand into my pocket and ran my fingers across the cold prongs of the fish-bone key; took a deep breath and stared straight into the dying sun, consumed by a corona of indigo flame; and jumped.

Paris

MARCH–SEPTEMBER 1871

ARTHUR REMAINED IN
Paris another twelve days. Sometimes, he’d recall Merle and feel a twinge of longing, regret that he hadn’t tried to make her stay with him, or attempted to return with her to the night city.

But he knew that world was gone forever, along with the boy who’d lived in it. He was someone else now: he had watched a man die and felt not only revulsion but also detached curiosity. It turned out that fear, like misery, could spur him to write. So could desire, and the growing awareness that he was aroused by the very things that disturbed his sleep.

He joined the Communards who met at the Chapeau Noir, plotting a new regime that would overthrow the one that had abandoned the citizens of Paris during the siege; but grew impatient with the amount of time and energy it took to organize a revolution. In March, as winter began its slow death, he left Paris and began the weeklong walk back to Charleville. By the time he reached home, he had influenza.

He remained there for a month, long enough to recover from his fevers and to replace his disintegrating boots with new ones. The Mouth of Darkness burned his vile clothes, though he saved his frayed overcoat, a treasured souvenir that gave off a faint odor of café smoke when it rained. At the end of April he left again for Paris, where he became a runner for the Communards, bearing messages across the Left Bank in the guise of delivering paper to one of the tabloids that sprang up then disappeared, sometimes overnight.

After a few weeks he returned home again. He hated Charleville, loathed it with a passion that bordered on obsession. But, perversely, he could write there, boredom and rage distilling his memories of Paris into poems. Every evening he’d get drunk, close his eyes, and will himself to be someplace else. He’d write throughout the night, adding to the sheaf of poems he’d already penned, the notes he’d scrawled after witnessing the policeman’s murder in the Place Vendôme. He wrote until his eyes watered, until the pen fell from his fingers and his hand ached; until he felt sick and nauseated from exhaustion.

He was the boat, borne into an unknowable distance; and he was the poet, writing on a crumpled piece of paper. When he
finally plunged into sleep, he rode waves upon a sea of stars that overtook a paper boat, where a man bobbed like a cork among isles of blue and gold.

By day he wrote to Georges and to Paul Demeny, long letters that continued a conversation that had never really begun: more a conversation with himself about poetry, madness, the destruction of all the established writers whose work he disdained. He sent them poems as well, fragments of things he’d begun, lists of what he’d been reading. He was building a bridge between Charleville and the world outside, an escape route composed of words and loss and longing.

By autumn he knew he could no longer stay. His arguments with his mother had become screaming matches; once he had attacked her, and if his sisters hadn’t pulled him away he might have killed her. He gathered the poems he’d been working on—“Vowels,” a long poem called “The Drunken Boat”—and composed a letter to the one poet whose work he admired, Paul Verlaine. Verlaine was ten years older, married, comfortably settled in a flat in Paris. Arthur had never met him, or even corresponded.

But they had a mutual friend who lived in Charleville, and so Arthur decided to throw himself on the older poet’s mercy. He sent Verlaine several poems. When he received no response, he wrote another letter and sent him a few more. Finally, he composed a brief note on the last of the paper he’d received from the aunts in Douai.

He hoped the older man might be a soft touch; also that Verlaine might have a soft bed with, perhaps, room in it for an enfant terrible masquerading as a child poet. A few days later, he finally received a reply.

O
NCE AGAIN
A
RTHUR GRABBED THE FEW THINGS THAT WERE PRECIOUS
to him—his clay pipe and tobacco pouch, the wad of poems, his pen. The next day he left for Paris, where he would be proved right about Verlaine’s soft bed.

As for causing no trouble, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

Washington, D.C.

OCTOBER 9, 1978

LIGHT STABBED MY
eyelids, counterpoint to a throbbing pain in my arm. I groaned and turned onto my back, rubbing my eyes as I fought to untangle myself from a dream of ragged soldiers and a drowned man, a boy in the moonlight pressing his hand against mine as a drop of blood spilled into a silvery river where carp with human faces gazed up at us then disappeared. I stared at the ceiling of my room, searching for the familiar constellation I’d painted, Clea’s feline face amid a progression of radiant suns.

But my paintings weren’t there. I wasn’t at Perry Street. I sat up in a panic, disoriented; jammed a hand into my pocket and withdrew a glittering silver coin and a tarnished key shaped like a fish bone. One of the key’s prongs brushed against a small cut on my thumb, and I winced.

With that flare of pain I realized where I was: on the bunk in Ted’s ramshackle boat. Pale sunlight fell through the porthole;
the kerosene lantern swung gently from the ceiling, its flame extinguished. The window of the potbellied stove was black with creosote, the cabin so cold my breath stained the air. I pulled a frayed blanket around my shoulders and stood. I saw no sign of Ted, no guitar, no fishing rod. I called out a few times but heard no reply.

At last I wrapped the blanket around me against the cold and headed for the ladder to the deck. A note had been thumbtacked to one rung.

I swore under my breath: he’d gone in search of the lockhouse key. I stuck the note in my pocket and quickly climbed the ladder. If I hurried, I might be able to catch up with him, or at least find him at the lockhouse. That was presuming I could actually
find
the lockhouse.

I stepped out on deck, Ted’s blanket around my shoulders. A saffron glow suffused the sky as an early-morning sun shower swept across the water. Rain fell like fistfuls of glitter. Clouds raced across the sky, so low they seemed to catch in the leafless trees along the riverbank. I could hear the faint drone of dawn traffic, and the bell in the church tower at Georgetown University tolling eight.

I hopped back on shore, pushing through brambly undergrowth until I found the towpath. The rain stopped. Sunlight streamed through the trees, igniting puddles at my feet. Now and then I paused, scanning both sides of the canal for the fieldstone wall and white birches I’d seen when I first came upon the lockhouse. Mourning doves cooed as they fed alongside the path, erupting into a flurry of gray wings when a siren wailed nearby. There were hardly any trees here, just heavily trodden grass and gravel, the barred windows and doors of row houses. I passed another lock, footbridges, and a few spindly saplings, and came to a spot where the canal ran beneath the street, emerging into sunlight again on the other side.

But no lockhouse. I stopped and raked my fingers through my hair in frustration. The siren wailed again, louder this time. I clutched the blanket tighter and started walking. An amplified voice crackled nearby, and I looked up.

On the street above the towpath, a policeman leaned over the rail and gazed at the canal, speaking into a walkie-talkie. An ambulance and two patrol cars were parked behind him, red lights flashing. A few yards ahead of me, several people in EMT uniforms crouched on the bank of the canal. A cop spoke to a man in jogging clothes, taking notes. Two more EMTs walked down the path, carrying a stretcher.