Revolution (22 page)

39

“E
xcuse me, please.”

I look up into a pair of midnight-dark eyes. For a few seconds, I panic. I don’t know where I am. Or who I am.

“The line … she moves,” says a man with an Italian accent.

“Oh, yeah. She does. Sorry,” I say.

The EverReadies are ten feet ahead of me. I put the diary in my bag and catch up with them. I can’t stop thinking about the last few entries. Why did Orléans change Alex into a boy? What did he have her do that made her think dying would have been a mercy in comparison?

I’m going to have to wait to find out because I’m only a few feet away from the catacombs’ entrance now. A sign by the door tells me the price of admission, and that there’s a lot of walking involved, and that the catacombs are not for small children or those of a nervous disposition.

I pay the unsmiling cashier, walk past the guard, and head to the mouth of a steep and spiraling stone staircase. Down I go, into a cold, damp half-light. A guy ahead of me makes a joke about Dante’s
Inferno
and says we’re heading into the first ring of hell. Somebody else says, “No, that’s the Louvre.” Everyone laughs. Too loudly.

We keep descending, down eighty-odd steps, and come out in a room, a kind of gallery, full of informational displays. I walk around, reading the history. Turns out there are miles of abandoned tunnels under Paris—and not, like, seven or eight, but 186.

People mined gypsum and limestone under the city from the time of the Romans to the nineteenth century, leaving a huge network of tunnels and rooms. All that mining turned the bedrock into Swiss cheese and that’s why there are no skyscrapers in central Paris—the remaining rock can’t support their weight. Most of the tunnels are unstable and dangerous and off-limits to the public. The ossuaries, or graveyards, I’m about to enter occupy a 780-meter block under the fourteenth arrondissement and contain the remains of approximately six million people. Six
million
.

I walk on through the galleries and read about some of the people whose bones are thought to be in here. Madame Elizabeth, the king’s sister. Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress. Robespierre and Danton. The writer Rabelais and the actor Scaramouche. I bet there are some interesting conversations down here at night.

I keep reading and learn that after Robespierre fell, there was a backlash against the political group he led—the Jacobins. Young aristocrats who’d survived his reign launched the White Terror and beat up Jacobins in the streets. They also gave Victims’ Balls—dances for people who’d lost a family member to the guillotine. Dancers wore their hair cut short, like the condemned, and tied red ribbons around their necks to mark where the blade fell. Some of the balls were even held in the catacombs.

I look for more information, trying to find out if people used the catacombs to hide themselves during the Revolution, stupidly hoping that there might be something—a paragraph, a line—on a crazy girl who dressed like a boy, set off fireworks, and kept a diary. But there isn’t.

The galleries end. A sign on the wall points the way to the ossuaries and tells me that in the event of a power failure, emergency lights will come on and I should follow the black stripe spray-painted on the roof of the tunnels to the exit.

I walk on, behind an older couple, a group of teenagers, and the Americans, and find myself in a low-ceilinged stone corridor, a former quarry. It’s cold and I have to crouch as I walk. A few more yards, and I’m in the Port Mahon gallery, where a quarryman who was a soldier in Louis XV’s army carved a model of a fortress where he was once kept as a prisoner. Next I pass the quarryman’s footbath—a deep, still well of clear groundwater—and then I’m at the entrance to the tombs.

The panels at either side of the doorway are painted black and white. There’s an inscription above them.
Stop! This is the empire of death
, it says. And suddenly I want to go back. Back through the gallery, back up the staircase, into the light. But I don’t. I get a grip because I want to know what this place is. I want to know where Alex was.

I walk through the doorway. And then I see them, the bones. Wall after wall of human bones. The sight of them all stops me cold. There are skulls piled on skulls. Femurs on femurs. Some are neatly stacked. Others are worked into decorative patterns—stripes and bands and crosses and flowers. It feels like I’ve stumbled into the basement of a mass murderer with a flair for interior design.

The people around me, the ones who were joking and chattering just seconds ago, are silent now. Some are walking around in a hushed sort of awe. Some can’t take it and want to go back. I hear a sniffle, a sob. I turn around and see that the EverReadies weren’t prepared for everything after all. The mother is upset. Looks like microfleece only wicks away sweat, not death.

I keep going. So do the tunnels. They go on and on. I walk for ten minutes, twenty, thirty, and still there are more bones. There are fountains, too, and headstones, crosses, and obelisks. There are poems and lamentations. There are warnings and iron gates to keep us from going the wrong way. Plaques explain that the bones I’m looking at are from the Cemetery of the Innocents or the Cemetery of St. Nicholas, but they don’t explain how there can be so many of them.

Who
were
they all?

I keep walking. And I must be going too slowly or taking too long, because everyone else is way ahead of me. I’m by myself and it’s so quiet. I think of Alex as I walk, and what it must’ve been like to be down here alone, with only the light from a lantern. And the thought’s so awful, I walk a little faster. A few minutes later, I come to a split in the tunnel and I’m not sure which way to go. The black line on the ceiling veers off to the left, but I hear voices, whispery and low, coming from the tunnel to the right, so I take that one.

It’s darker, this tunnel, and narrower. The bones are much closer to me. I pass by a large skull perched on top of a wall, and suddenly I can see the man it belonged to. He’s a big, brawny butcher, singing bawdy songs as he hacks up a pig. And the skull next to his, with a high forehead—that one belonged to a schoolmaster, pale and stiff-necked. The one over there, the small one, it was a little girl’s. She was pretty and pink-cheeked and full of life. Skull after skull. With their empty, unseeing eye sockets.

The voices I heard, they’re getting louder, more urgent. I tell myself it’s people up ahead. That or the sound of water dripping. I’ve seen wet patches on the ground and droplets on the walls. But there are no people. And the walls are dry. And then I realize what it is—it’s the skulls. All of them. They’re whispering to me.

“I want to smell the rain again,” one says, close by me.

“I want to taste melons. Warm from the sun,” says another.

“I want the sound of my husband’s laughter. The feel of his skin against mine.”

More join in until it’s one sad chorus of longing. They want roast chicken. Silk dresses. Lemonade. Red shoes. The smell of horses.

I’m losing my mind. I must be. And then a breeze blows through the tunnel, which is impossible, because we’re twenty-five meters underground, and I catch a strange smell, spicy and strong—cloves. I’m totally freaking out now. The voices are in my ears and the smell is in my nose and in my mouth and it’s so strong it’s suffocating me.

“Help me,” I say. “Please.”

“Miss? Excuse me, miss, but you’re not supposed to be down here.”

I look behind me. A security guard is standing in the tunnel, shining his flashlight on me.

“Miss? Are you all right?” he asks.

“I don’t think so.”

He walks up to me and takes my arm. “This way, please,” he says. “Lean on me if you need to.”

I need to. I stumble along next to him and after a few minutes, we’re back at the fork. He swings a metal grille closed over the tunnel’s entrance and locks it. There’s a red-and-white sign on it that says
GENERATORS—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
. I didn’t even see the door before. When I was trying to decide which way to go.

“I’m sorry. I … uh … I couldn’t catch my breath,” I say, embarrassed.

He smiles. “It happens. Some people react badly. They feel ill or faint or become disoriented. This place can be overwhelming.”

But it’s got nothing to do with my breath. I lied about that. It’s Alex. She wanted me to come down here. To go down that tunnel. She wanted me to follow her. To find her.

The guard walks me down the proper tunnel and leads me to a folding chair. There’s a first-aid box next to it and a telephone. He tells me to sit down for a few minutes. I do, with my head in my hands.

It’s the Qwell. It has to be. I’ve been taking too much for too long and it’s built up inside me and it’s really screwing me up. Making me see things and hear things. On Henry Street. On the quai. And now here, in this freaky-ass spookhouse. It’s making me think I’ve got some sort of weird connection with a dead girl.

The guard has me sit for a few more minutes, then escorts me the rest of the way through the tunnels and up a staircase to the exit.

“I’d advise you to get some water once you’re outside. And to eat something,” he says.

Another guard checks my bag to make sure I didn’t take any mementoes. As if. And then I’m out. Aboveground. Back into the world of the living.

I get a cheese crêpe and a bottle of water right away, and then sit down on a bench under some trees in a park and eat. When I’m finished, I close my eyes. Lift my face to the sun. Take a few deep breaths. After a little while, I feel saner. Calmer. What happened in the catacombs was just an episode of weirdness brought on by too many pills. Like every other weird thing that’s happening to me lately. I have to back off the Qwellify. I have to take even less. And I will. Starting tonight.

I open my eyes and look at my watch. It’s ten past one. I’m going to get up now, head back to the archives, and humbly beg Yves Bonnard’s forgiveness. If I’m successful, I’m going to photograph as many of Malherbeau’s papers as I can, and then I’ll go back to G’s and work on my outline. And everything will be cool.

As I’m gathering up my lunch garbage, a little kid toddles up to my bench. Her mother calls to her, tells her to come back. She stops, swaying a bit on her legs, like she’s still getting used to them.

She looks at me, her eyes big and solemn, then takes a few wary steps in my direction and thrusts her fist out at me. She’s clutching something in it.

“Hey there,” I say to her. “What have you got?”

She uncurls her fingers one by one, until I can see it, lying flat on her fat little palm.

A feather, small and brown. From a sparrow.

40

“I
heard from Dr. Becker today,” Dad says.

I stop what I’m doing, which is Photoshopping a nose ring onto Beethoven, and look up.

“What did he say?”

“That your mother’s doing a bit better. She’s tolerating the new drugs. She’s eating and she’s participating in group therapy.”

“Did he say if we can talk to her yet?”

“He said give it another day or two.”

“Okay,” I say agreeably.

Sure. Why not? In fact, I’ll give it two—Saturday and Sunday. But on Monday I’ll be at the hospital. And then Dr. Becker will need every security guard in the place to keep me from talking to her.

“How are you doing on your outline, Andi?” he asks. “Are you making progress?”

“Yeah, I am. I’ve got a first draft. It still needs work, but it’s a start. And I’ve got a good chunk of the intro,” I say, smiling.

“That’s great,” he says, smiling back.

“Yeah,” I say. “How’s the testing going?”

“Quite well, actually. We’re hoping for results by Monday.”

“Cool,” I say, smiling even harder. It makes my face hurt.

“There’s going to be a dinner on Wednesday. At the Élysée Palace. You could come. If you wanted to,” Dad says.

“Wow. Yeah. The only thing is, I’ve got a plane ticket for a flight on Sunday night. Remember?”

“Oh. Right. Are you going to be finished with your outline by then?”

“I am.”

“And it’s going to be good?”

“I think it is.”

He nods, turns his attention back to his laptop. I do the same. Dad got home early tonight. We ate some takeout Thai food with Lili. Afterward, she went to work in her studio, and Dad and I took over the dining room table. Now he’s sitting at one end and I’m at the other. We’ve both been working quietly for hours. Not fighting. Which is good. All I have to do is get through tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday without another big blowup.

I finish with the nose ring and decide to give Ludwig some green hair, too. It suits him. He’ll make a good visual in the intro. I’ve already extracted the measures I needed from the Allegretto of his seventh symphony and mashed them up with a chunk of the Stones’ “Paint It Black” to give an example of my premise. It nicely illustrates an A minor-E7/C-G7 parallel harmony. I also recorded myself on my cell phone’s camera, explaining how Malherbeau’s use of A minor in several of his earlier works likely influenced the Allegretto. I sent the clip to my e-mail and imported it to PowerPoint. The quality’s lacking a bit, but it’ll do to show Dad. When I get home, I’ll redo it on St. Anselm’s video equipment.

I finish with Ludwig and log off. I’m beat. I’ve been working like mad ever since I talked Yves Bonnard into letting me back into the library. Begged him to let me in, actually, promising on my life that I’d be mindful of others and nondisruptive. I photographed Malherbeau’s papers all afternoon, came home, and started on my outline as soon as I finished dinner. I banged out a rough draft by eight, then worked on the introduction.

I think I’m actually going to do this. I’m going to be done with both my outline and intro by tomorrow night—in plenty of time for Dad to read it and sign off.

I tell him goodnight now, scoop up my stuff, and head to my room. As soon as I get there, I dump my bag out on my bed and paw through everything, searching for Virgil’s CD. I’ve been wanting to listen to it ever since he tossed it to me at the catacombs. When I got back here, I asked Lili if she had a CD player and she gave me an old Discman.

I load the CD, hit play, and listen. A voice comes on, a lone man’s, singing what sounds like an African chant. The voice fades, drums come up, then lots of voices singing the same chant, like a hundred, and then Virgil comes in rapping. It’s good. Really good. Shivers-down-your-spine good.

The next song’s about America, about a rapper promising to take it by storm. “Banloser” is on there, sounding different than it did the other night—a lot more polished. He’s got one called “I’m Shillin’” about selling out. And one called “Morning Light,” about watching the sun come up over Paris on the hill at Sacré-Coeur. I recognize it. He sang it to me last night.

The rhymes are strong and the music’s even stronger. He’s got reggae guitar going in one. Seventies funk in another. Samples of American gospel. A sitar. A muezzin’s call. French schoolkids singing a nursery rhyme. Chinese violin. Songs with the whole world in them, just like he said.

I grab my cell the second the CD ends. To call him and tell him how much I love his songs.

“What!” he barks.

“Um, hey. It’s me. Andi,” I say, a little uncertainly.

“Hey. Hold on a minute.”

I hear the sound of brakes squealing, then Virgil lets fly, telling some guy to do something to himself that isn’t physically possible.

“Sorry,” he says to me.

“Bad day at the office?”

“The worst. This fu—this city is totally out of control tonight. Can I call you back? In half an hour?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

I hang up and stare at the ceiling, not sure what to do while I wait. I’m kind of hungry. It’s been hours since I had dinner. I could head to the kitchen. Eat some leftover pad thai. An orange. A piece of cheese. I could wash up and get ready for bed. Which might be a good idea, as tomorrow’s already Saturday and I still have a lot of work to do. I plan to visit Malherbeau’s house and take more pictures. And I have to get a second draft of the outline done.

My eyes drift to my bed and the stuff I dumped all over it. The diary’s there, lying under my keys.
I was not to die that night. That would have been a mercy. I was to be reborn
, Alex wrote. Reborn as what? To do what?

I want to keep reading, and I don’t. I’m curious, and I’m scared. I need to find out what happened to Alex, and to Louis-Charles, but what if it makes me crazy again? Like it did in the catacombs?

I walk away from it and into the bathroom. It’s not the diary that caused the freak-out in the catacombs, I tell myself as I’m brushing my teeth. Because it can’t be. It’s a diary. Words on paper. That’s all. It was the Qwellify that did it. I have to face up to the fact that I’m taking too much, really and truly.

I head back to my bedroom, pick the bottle up from the night table, and shake two pills out of it. I want to back the dosage down. I do, but I’m nervous about it. I’ve been pretty steady the last few days, pretty stable. As far as the sadness goes, at least. I’ve been seeing things, and hearing things, but I haven’t found myself standing at the edge of anything. Not the Seine and not anyone’s roof. I don’t want that darkness back. But I don’t want whispering skulls and shrieky puppets and old guys turning into young guys right before my eyes, either.

I’m standing here, still trying to decide. An orange? Some cheese? Bed? The diary? Suicidal impulses or hallucinations? Two pills? Or one?

I pop one Qwell and put the other back.

I’ll have the diary, thank you. Straight up, please, and hold the crazy.