The Architecture of Fear (10 page)

When evening came she told herself she should go out,
do
something, even if it was just see a movie, not just waste her time here in Paris. Maybe go to that party Francois had asked her to at one of his friends' apartment. Marcelo and some of Liz's French friends were going to be there. It would give her a chance to get to know them.

She had wanted to go, but something had made her say she didn't think she could, that she had a previous engagement she couldn't get out of with some friends of her family who were in Paris for a few days. Francois had given her his friend's address anyway, and told her to come after she was finished with them, the party would be going on most of the night and no one would mind if she showed up very late.

She should go. In a few weeks Isobel would be back, and she'd have to find someplace else to live, some other way to spend her time. Things would be a lot easier for her then if she'd already met people, started making friends. But she was scared to take the metro at night and didn't feel like fighting the crowds or risking getting caught in a riot—and Francois's friend lived near the Luxembourg Gardens, right where all the riots were going on.

No. It would be better to stay home. There'd be plenty of time to take advantage of the other things Paris had to offer when Isobel got back. Until then, her solitude was too precious to waste.

But she still felt nervous, jumpy for no good reason. She ran a bath to calm herself, found herself thinking, for some reason, about an article she'd read in
Time
or
Newsweek
about natural childbirth, whatever the method was where they had the women giving birth lie in the water to relax them, and then about a total-immersion baptism she'd once been conned into going to at somebody's house, with all the new converts leaping into the swimming pool and ruining their clothes while the preacher praised the Lord. She wondered what would happen if you combined the two, so the babies would be born already baptized.

Stretching out in the hot soapy water, she let the heat soak through her, relax her until she could just lie there, completely still, watching the light shimmer off the ripples that radiated out from her with every shallow breath she took, until at last the light merged into dream and she drifted off again, as she had so many times before, to dream that Carlos and Dagmar were there with her, holding her in their arms and soothing her, protecting her from the wasps outside the window.

The water was icy when she awakened. She must have been asleep for hours. She felt confused, vaguely alarmed—as though there was something she had to do, but she'd forgotten what it was; she could only remember that it was important, that she had to do it.

She felt stiff as she got out of the tub, started drying herself. Even her body seemed strange and awkward, unfamiliar.

She glanced unthinkingly at the plastic full-length mirror nailed opposite the sink. She'd gotten into the habit of using the little round mirror over the sink, just letting her gaze slide past the full-length mirror without ever really
looking
at the distorted reflection it showed her, but this time something about the mirror caught her eye, and she stared at it in shock.

Her image in the mirror now looked almost exactly like the last pictures Carlos had drawn of Isobel. Her breasts and flesh hung slack and flaccid on a stooped and twisted frame; a stranger's rheumy eyes leered back at her out of some withered crone's ancient face. Only her hair was the same, still long and red—but now that red seemed false, like a cheap wig that only accentuated her papery gray skin; how hideous the rest of her had become.

And behind her now she could see Carlos, Dagmar, Jean-Luc, all the others—some of them as clear and sharp as if they were in the bathroom with her, others, like Isobel, vague and blurred, more suggested than shown. Isobel seemed to be asleep, but all of the others were staring out of the mirror
at
her with the same cold, maniacal glee she could read in her own reflection's eyes, feel bubbling up in herself, rising to the surface of her mind from the depths where it had been hiding...

She tore her eyes away from the mirror, squeezed them shut, trying to blot it all out. But only her body was gone, and she was trapped on the other side of the mirror, inside it, staring hungrily out at her pitifully deformed physical self as it squeezed its eyes shut in abject terror, its bloated belly quivering and swelling as it ballooned outward with the eager new life within.

And then, somehow, she managed to make her body turn away, stumble out of the bathroom. She ran to the window and flung it open, stood there, panting, in the cold night air, trying to get her breath back. The night was starless, with only a faint hint of the city's diffuse glow to relieve its utter blackness.

She heard an enraged buzzing to her right, where the window had slammed into the outer wall, just below the wasps' nest. Panic-stricken, she grabbed the two halves of the window and pulled them closed. Before she could get the window latched a swarm of enraged wasps started beating themselves furiously against the colored panes, trying to get at her.

I've got to get out of here, she realized. I'm starting to see things. I've been spending too much time alone. I'll go to that party. I need to see Francois, talk to people. Then I'll be all right again.

But her hair-blower, her make-up, everything she needed to get ready was in the bathroom, and she couldn't go in there again.

That's crazy, she told herself, starting to get angry. I was still half-asleep; I must have had a nightmare. That's all.

But she still couldn't face all those reflections in that mirror again.

It was her apartment. Her mirror. She could do what she wanted with it.

I'll buy a new mirror, she told herself. A good one, where I can see myself as I really look. It'll be my contribution to the apartment.

There was a claw hammer in one of the kitchen drawers. She got it out, hefted it. Its weight was reassuring, like a weapon.

Before she had time to change her mind she squeezed her eyes shut again and groped her way back into the bathroom, over to the mirror. It was held in place by two nails through the top of the flimsy wooden frame. With her eyes still closed, she got the claw wedged in behind the frame, pried.

The mirror came away from the wall so easily she could probably have just yanked it off. It wobbled back and forth in her hands, like a big sheet of flimsy cardboard. She turned it around, away from her, finally dared open her eyes and look at it.

The back was rough brown fiberboard, with a gouge where the hammer's claw had bitten into it. There was nothing strange or frightening about it.

She felt ashamed of herself for her fear. Stupid. Just a hysterical woman, her father would have said. But as soon as she tried to carry the mirror out of the bathroom she felt the ordered meaning of the apartment around her shatter into senseless chaos, and through the fissures that had opened a flood of terrifying
wrongness
came pouring through. She took an involuntary step back, into the bathroom again, and the wrongness retreated, began to drain from the world again.

The mirror had to stay in the bathroom.

She stood there frozen, holding the mirror away from her, unable to make herself even try to take it out of the bathroom again, getting angrier and angrier as she told herself she was acting crazy: it was just a mirror; she could do what she wanted with it.

I'll nail it up backwards, she thought suddenly. Put its face to the wall.

She used the hammer to push the nails out, stuck them back in their holes from the other side. Holding the mirror in place against the wall, she hammered the first nail in—then suddenly, not giving herself time to think about what she was doing, pulled the second nail out of its hole in the frame and held it to the fiberboard instead, about three inches below the top,
right where her reflection's head had been,
and hammered it home as hard as she could.

The nail penetrated the fiberboard, hesitated an instant as the tough plastic mirror surface on the other side resisted it, stretched, then the nail punctured the plastic film and buried itself in the wall. The last of the wrongness drained away. She felt as though she'd just escaped something, freed herself from some enormous weight, and though she knew the whole thing was ridiculous she couldn't keep herself from grinning as she used the little round mirror over the sink to get ready. When she stepped back to get a better look at herself in the round mirror she glimpsed the other mirror's ugly brown back on the wall behind her. She needed a full-length mirror in the bathroom, but not that one. She'd put it in the closet tomorrow after all.

As she was leaving she glanced at the stained-glass window. The wasps were still there. They had stopped buzzing and hurling themselves against the panes of colored glass, but they were still crawling up and down, trying to get in.

She'd get some bug spray tomorrow, kill them all.

***

There was a man in a rumpled gray suit and no socks in her metro car, declaiming what sounded like poetry in a wild, crazed voice, spittle flying from his mouth. Everyone pretended not to see him and continued their conversations as if nothing unusual were going on, even when he came up and stared them in the face, shouted things at them. The car was crowded, and Tracy was back in the corner, where he couldn't get at her, but the elated confidence that had come over her as she'd hammered the mirror to the wall had deserted her: she could feel the insanity rolling off him, distorting everything around him, like a halo of heat waves making the air waver, and she didn't dare push past him when her stop came. She had to wait until he got off, which meant she had to change lines twice to end up at the St. Michel station, farther away from Francois's friend's apartment than she'd intended but still within walking distance.

The street outside the metro was full of students, hundreds of them standing around watching the blue-uniformed soldiers waiting in tense clusters by their buses with their clubs and guns and shields. CRS, for
Compagnies republicaines de securite,
Francois had told her. Everybody seemed excited, expectant, more like they were waiting for a football match to start than anything else.

She was just turning onto the rue St. Jacques when she heard the shouting begin behind her. She looked over her shoulder, saw tear gas bombs arching over the crowd and exploding, the students running her way, and then a line of CRS troopers was moving out across St. Jacques to block it off and she was caught up in the crowd, running away with the others as the CRS charged them. Sometimes the students would come to a halt, try to make a stand behind a makeshift barricade, but they always ended up getting routed, herded farther away.

By the time Tracy managed to get away from the others she was halfway across the Fifth Arrondissement, her sides aching and her eyes swollen and running from the gas. She didn't want to go to the party any longer, all she wanted to do was go home, but from where she was it looked as though it would be easier to get to the party than back to the apartment, and the only other alternative was to stay out in the street and risk getting gassed and beaten.

She circled around a few blocks to look as though she were coming from a different direction, planned what to do if the CRS stopped her—pull out her American passport and show it to them, tell them she was just an American tourist, she didn't even speak any French—but when she got near the address Francois had given her she saw that there were a dozen or more CRS on literally every corner, and she turned back.

It was 11:30 by the time she finally found a metro station, but it was already closed, though they were supposed to stay open past midnight. She didn't see any cabs, but her way home would take her away from anywhere there was likely to be trouble. She'd probably be better off just walking. Maybe she'd find a cab when she got farther away from the riots.

She didn't. It was almost three in the morning before she got back. She hadn't seen anybody on the street for the last hour, except for one bum snoring in a doorway.

It was only after she'd locked the gate behind her and could let herself relax that she finally realized just how hard she'd been working to keep herself from feeling terrified, so she could keep on going.

But she was home, safe. The whole thing with the mirror seemed silly, just some stupid trick of her overworked imagination. She'd turn the mirror back around tomorrow, until she could get a new one.

And it was silly to be so scared of the wasps. They wouldn't sting her, so long as she was careful and didn't fling the window open too violently or disturb their nest. That had been why she'd been stung so badly when she was a kid; she'd kicked the can with the yellow jackets' nest in it. They'd just been trying to defend their nest.

As she lay in the warm darkness of the nook, the stars shining through the bull's-eye windows over her head, she could sense the apartment all around her, sheltering and protecting her from the real violence outside.

***

She didn't see Francois at school Monday. On Tuesday she was sitting doodling on her napkin in the Alliance's cafe with Monika, an Italian girl from class, when she saw him come in, looking wonderful in a shiny gray leather jacket.

She waved to him, but he didn't seem to see her and went over to another table, started talking to two dark-haired, overly sophisticated-looking girls Tracy didn't know.

One girl asked Francois something in a teasing tone of voice. He looked around quickly, still without seeing Tracy, then took something black out of his coat, slipped the strap on one end over his right hand, and started slapping the palm of his other hand with it.

It was a short blunt club, a sort of teardrop shape with the heavy end wound with what looked like black electrical tape. A homemade blackjack.

Francois was grinning, clowning, acting out hitting someone much taller than him—probably a CRS—over the head with the blackjack, and the girls were laughing with him. He gave one of them the club. She fitted it over her hand, testing its weight, then slapped the table with it.