Suitable Precautions (11 page)

“Really, which gods would those be?”

“Dead ones, obviously.”

“Right, God is dead, in both the singular and the plural. But you have a rosary.” I point to the beads twisting wildly in your hands.

“I have a fear of flying, so I prefer not to take chances.”

“I have a fear of flying too.” I walk you over to an airport bar, conveniently located a mere promenade from the machine that will hurtle us into the sky with all the fury of those dead animals that have become increasingly combustible over the past few million years. It is a kind of recycling program: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This is what our dead gods intended.

“I'll have a martini,” you say.

“We don't do martinis here,” the bartender says with a look in his eye that seems to suggest he doesn't trust fashionably dressed men in Italian leather shoes.

“What do you do?” you ask.

“Beer,” he says proudly. Apparently he invented the drink himself.

We sip our beers and for some strange reason this causes both of us to feel more connected to the earth: rotten plants and dead animals. Planes into air. Bodies into pulp. God into death. Robots with beeping batons. “The circle of life!” I say, and we drink to that. “Speed!” you say, and we drink to that. “Death!” I say, and we drink to that. “ART!” we say together, and drink to that, intoxicated by what we suspect is much
more than pilsner lager. As we drink we become our own work of art, writing ourselves with every laugh and slurp, wondering how it is that so many people refuse to be their own authors.

“That's just it,” you say. “There are no more people. Only robots. And robots can't write worth a damn!” You smash your glass on the floor, a gesture I respect: you always know how to round out a good idea. The bartender, however, does not appreciate the finer qualities of the English language. There is some suggestion that uniformed robots will be coming soon to deal with us, and as neither of us feels particularly interested in dealing with any more artificial life than is absolutely necessary to sustain our own, we run. This, I suggest, shows that we have a sense of humour and are therefore not robots, but rather animals. Indeed, we run with the reckless abandon of animals who one day will be dead; of animals who will use dead animals to launch themselves, dying as they are, closer to the sun, which is only partially visible from the double-paned window of a jumbo jet with exits located at the front, side, and back. Take note of the safety card in your seat pocket. In the unlikely event of a water landing, put on your lifejacket, slide down one of the rubber slides. Refrain from jumping about like animals close to death.

“I wanted the aisle seat,” you say, and I come to understand sacrilege.

Someone famous is now two and a half hours late, and so consequently young people with clipboards and headsets
are frantic and a woman with an unseen and exotic pet in her purse is demanding a dish and a bottle of distilled water. Of course, no one is naming names, but we anticipate a lady of a certain age and British accent who will be wearing a short skirt of the style designed to make people say, My God, I wish I had thighs like that, even though nobody has thighs like that, not even the lady in question. But still we want to see her in the hopes that a flake of her shed skin will land on us as she breezes by, and we will imagine that it is a piece of her halo breaking off. Despite the fact that there must be girls backstage taping their breasts into mesh halter tops, we feel compelled to look at the empty chair that is cordoned off with a ribbon of white silk. From our previous experiences with giant hamburgers, we know that a cordon means art. We didn't fly here defying unknown, potentially dead gods for nothing.

There are protesters outside with placards that read, Faites attention! We are not sure to what, other than the cordoned-off empty chair, but we agree, and so while waiting we join in with the chant that is slipping itself through the doors the clipboard people are opening and closing, opening and closing to the rhythm of their heartbeats: Animals are people, too! People are animals! Suddenly another, somewhat complementary chant springs up: Women are people, too! We object to objectification!

“Repetition is the sincerest form of stupidity,” you say to me between chants.

We continue chanting because we are bored and because we know that eighty-three percent of Parisians are insane. It is fine to shout about wanting to be women who want to be people. We are inside the protective circle of diaphanous
gowns and outrageously applied eyeshadow. Everything is simply fabulous.

“Simply fabulous,” I say to the craggy-faced woman with the microphone. “I love it because it's so wearable. I think it really speaks to what women want nowadays, which is to be treated like people.”

“Yes,” you say, “people who are animals!” You embarrass me when you take a sly, claw-like swipe at the camera, but what does it matter. It's only television.

Then I am no longer embarrassed, or bored, or just pretending to be bored for effect, but I am happy. Happy and I know it. I clap my hands.

The black man is seven feet tall and wearing mink. His walking stick raps along the floor with a noise that sounds like take-that-and-take-that, and take it we do, for who is going to object to the sounds of a seven-foot, mink-clad black man? There is always a chance that I was wrong about the death of the divine.

Out of the penumbra of this Goliath appears a Venus, caressed by a dress the colour of lilies gone bad, and carrying a fan, perhaps to encourage enthusiasm from the nipples of the mesh-shirted models, who are only just beginning to teeter their way around. Yes, the lights are dimmed and the music thumps inside my ribcage, but I cannot turn my attention away from this lady seated eight rows ahead and to my right, behind a silk ribbon.

“It's starting,” you whisper to me.

“I know,” I say, looking, “but the show must go on.”

Darkness overtakes the crowd, and we are forced to watch the stage. This speaks volumes about the way people think of art: they love the scenery, but can't find the subject. They
aren't selling art on stage, those hawkers of mesh and tit. They just dress up women who look like antelopes and call it art, attaching a price tag for authenticity. They sell the simulacra, but they are content to let the real thing sit in the darkness with her sunglasses on, when anybody knows that she needs light to shine. I'm putting that in my review. Not the part about the reflection, but the part about the antelopes. This is why I do what I do—I see the truth in advertising. Looking at the male models, I realize they all have the sharp eyes of lynx. This can't be an accident. Not in a business where women are girls are antelopes are the antimatter between silk and chiffon.

“La femme, ce n'est jamais ça,” says a woman sitting next to me. She nods as though it were a cultural activity, which it is in certain circles in Paris. To nod is not necessarily to agree, but rather to include oneself in what potentially suggests exclusion. To nod is to accept.

“Why is it the women all look like antelopes?” you ask me, and I suddenly realize why we are such a good match. Professionally. That's as far as my interest goes, the fact that I fell asleep on your shoulder during the plane ride notwithstanding, though your eyes are very blue.

“Do you think it's a birth defect,” you continue, “or just some kind of eye-on-the-side-of-the-head aesthetic?”

“These girls are just too modern for their own good.”

“Do they sell hamburgers here, or are the French not very into that?” you ask.

Now the chants are coursing in over the music: fur is murder, leather is death. The antelopes look skittish. The man in the mink coat is on a cellphone, escorting his Wilting Lily out a side entrance, and over a loudspeaker no one knew
existed, a voice as deep and as intimidating as a god's says, “Children of the new generation, do not be afraid.”

For a moment I think people are having seizures, but it turns out that they are dancing, flailing their arms and legs with deliciously reckless abandon, kicking over chairs, roaring with pleasure as they vomit champagne into their handbags, scaring the antelopes. One of the lynx pounces and brings an antelope to the floor, her tits still snug in her shirt, thanks to the technological miracle of double-sided tape. The lynx and the antelope roll about violently, until the antelope hits the lynx in the head with a folding chair with white silk ribbon on it.

“The animal kingdom,” you say as we watch transfixed. There is a bartender abandoning his post. The champagne bottles sweat dejectedly and we know that some injustices cannot stand. We've a long night ahead of us, and a man cannot write without refreshment. We gather the perspiring beauties in our arms and make our way to the dance floor. We have work to do.

“Hello,” I say into my phone as we dance, “Marjorie? Take this down.”

We sip from the bottles and wait for the morning papers. The Word is now ours, Marjorie our secretary-Moses, and we are waiting for our disciples to flock to the magazine sellers and the street vendors. We swagger down the street. We have lost our money and our plane tickets, and forgotten where our hotel is, if we even had a hotel in the first place. But there are much more important things to worry about.

The show, you say to one scandalized old lady walking a dog, must go on.

T
HE DEAD BOY'S NAME was Ronaldo Diaz. I remember that he drowned at a public pool in Chicago during the family swim hour. He was a weak swimmer, the newspaper said, who managed to slip into line for the waterslide and get lost in the splash of other, happy children. He was an only child, and he was there alone. His mother, a single parent who worked the day shift at Safeway and the night shift at Fresh ‘n' Go Variety, had sent him to the pool because it was only June and already a vicious summer, the kind that made the city open emergency cooling centres for homeless people and initiate rolling brownouts. Mrs. Diaz was quoted as saying that all she wanted was for Ronnie to have a little fun after school. She didn't have air conditioning and the pool was free—what else was she supposed to do? “All those lifeguards are white,” Mrs. Diaz told the reporter. “You tell me why they didn't see him.” There was going to be an inquest.

The picture of Ronnie was a school photo. He had on a dress shirt, which was carefully ironed and buttoned to his
neck. Over the shirt he wore a chain, and at the end of it was a small cross. At least I thought it was a cross, but it was hard to tell from the grainy photo. There was something around the boy's neck, that was for sure, and the neck itself made me think the kid would have grown up to be a bruiser, a guy with a shaved head and big muscles, a girlfriend he watched like a jealous dog. He was just a kid—only nine, the headline said—but he had the look. Thick dark hair and a strong chin he pushed out, daring the photographer to take the picture as he bared his teeth. His mother probably loved his fat cheeks, but that kind of softness sent boys to the gym to toughen up once they made it to high school. It gave them something to prove.

I slid the photocopy over to Cheryl's half of the desk. Len was at the front of the staff room, jabbing the paper with his index finger the way a pigeon pecks a stale piece of bread.

“This,” he said, his sandals squeaking as he paced in front of the blackboard, “this is what I'm talking about when I talk about a lack of communication. How did this kid get anywhere near the slide without doing a deep end test? There but for the grace of G-O-D, people.” He spelled out the letters, sticking his paper to the board with a magnet that said Stay Alert, Stay Safe 1999. Cheryl kicked me under the desk, then made fists, closing her eyes and rubbing her knuckles together before jolting herself awake with mimed defibrillator paddles. “Today,” Len went on, “the D and D Report is about waterslide safety.” He tightened his ponytail, which was tinged slightly green from chlorine, and looked us over like a gung-ho missionary. Cheryl rolled her eyes. Our pool didn't have a waterslide.

Most of the other lifeguards, even the few who were actual adults with children and cars, thought that Len was a weirdo and a pervert, a grown man who lived with his mother and made a habit of picking the girls with the biggest breasts for the CPR booster sessions. I thought him strange too, the way his skin repelled water like a rubber tarp and left him bone dry on the deck while the rest of us stood hunched and goosebumped, shivering until training was over. The sleekness of his ponytail was the only sign that Len had ever been in the water. “It looks like a leaky ferret, or something,” Cheryl had said on my first day. “It's like, ‘Dude, the 1980s called, and they want their deadbeat dad hair back.'” Then she had asked me if it was true that I was in university, and could I buy her a mickey of vodka for Friday night. After that, we were friends.

It was Cheryl who came up with the name for the weekly briefing: the Dead and Deader Report. All of us, even Len, to his credit, called it the D and D. The D and D consisted of Len bringing in articles about people dying, or almost dying, in swimming pools, usually after doing something stupid. There was the guy who took a swan dive off a hotel balcony into a wading pool during frosh week, and the parents who let their five-year-old cook her brain in a hot tub while they went to the swim-up bar. Each week, Len passed out a new article, and we were supposed to talk about how we, as responsible lifeguards, would have prevented the incident. His point was simple. “The problem is that most people think we save lives,” he said. “The fact is, if you have to save somebody, you've already screwed up.” Cheryl agreed Len had a point there, but that was mostly because she flirted her way through her exams and didn't know a Pia
Carry from a Heimlich manoeuvre. She usually tried to take shifts with one of the adult lifeguards, in particular a woman with flabby thighs we called the Diving Board Nazi. “She scares people out of the pool,” Cheryl said with admiration. “It's awesome.”