Tram 83 (5 page)

“I can make you happy, just say the word.”

There was something prophetic about Requiem. Lucien had already been informed, at the Northern Station, as if in a parable: “The City-State works like this: the girls are emancipated, democratic, and independent. Poverty does away with shame and your courtesies. Here, it's often the girl, be she baby-chick or the opposite, who takes the initiative. She slips you into her strategy. She looks you straight in the eye. She asks your name. She tells you
that you've got a great body, that your voice gives her goose pimples. She telephones you, again and again. She clings to you like a leech. But not always from love and other affections. She sticks fast to you because you buy the drinks (given the price of beer at the Tram!), the food (outside of the Tram, itinerant restaurants serving dog-stew, cassava, and smoked rice with onion), and then, after bed, you give her a bit of cash for the work accomplished, transport, and so forth. It's the girl who tells you the proper procedure when you screw. She manages the whole shebang, from Genesis to the Letter to the Corinthians: ‘Put your leg like this, place your right hand on my belly, ride me like I were your horse, stroke my curves, back, forward, back, forward slowly, stop, now start stroking my hair …'”

“My name, Lucien …”

“You live with the First Man?”

“The First Man, who's that?”

“Requiem.”

“Since yesterday.”

“Is he your brother? I glimpse a resemblance. He bangs on about his brother who lives and works in Peru.”

The girl had come closer to him, nearly hanging on to his raggedy clothes.

“Peru …”

He smiled.

She pressed her head to his left shoulder.

“Peru …”

“You fit the description.”

Darkness. Christelle gave a little scream. Power cut, commonly
called “blackout.” He remained calm, yet concerned.

“My heart told me not to take the elevator. Blackouts compete with the angelus bell and the man in the minaret.”

“…”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Me?”

“You don't look like an imbecile. History teacher …”

“Ex …”

“Aren't you ashamed?”

“Why?”

“It's a waste of energy. We live in the present moment. And what do you do to eat? The students are always on strike and it lasts for years!”

“Do you work?”

The inhabitants of the City-State mumbled when asked about their profession. High voice. Evasive answers. Narrowed eyes. Vague and uncertain look like the trains that depart and return with the diggers and students. “They shit in the train,” added Requiem, almost in tears, as if he were a tourist, or cousin to a tourist.

“Well, am I sussing out a deal?”

“Detective,” he said, ironically.

“Just a good lead.”

Noise throughout the building. The power was back. Christelle, Chris to her friends, took advantage of the situation, and changed the conversation.

“I'm inviting you to our Coupé-Décalé party this Saturday. Are you free?”

“No.”

Downstairs, they went their separate ways, delighted to have made each other's acquaintance.

“You got any dough on you?”

“I'm poor.”

“Married?”

“Not so much.”

He had somewhat mastered the chapter on “Discussion with a young woman you meet in the elevator.” Requiem had given him the code: “Try by any means to remain neutral, cold, and forlorn.”

“Do you love me?”

He crossed the street.

5.

SECOND NIGHT: THE NIGHT WORE HER SWIMSUITS AND UNDERSHIRTS SHE FORGOT TO WRING OUT
.

Jalopies out of gas, deep-frozen products from the Galapagos Islands, knickknacks, ceiling fans, oil changes, sheep, sarcastic remarks, hearses on alert, eggs contaminated with melamine, relics, minarets as far as the eye can see, bistros, baker-deli-linen-fish-lumber stores, phone booths, internet cafés, criminal records, pools of stagnant water, garbage bags at the mercy of beggars, stray dogs, no-entry signs, mountains of refuse, black market in the merchandise and its derivatives, discotheques, abandoned locomotives, born-again Christian evangelist churches, cockfights, settlings of scores, boxing galas, mosquitoes resistant to all pesticides, booing, trolleys, wimps bankrolled by mercenaries, Neanderthals, laundries, desires, beverages, arranged widowhoods of wives of soldiers declared missing, ringworms, jeers revised and corrected by the foreign press, daydreams of dissident rebels prepared to open another front because of an oilfield, magic potions to treat unidentified diseases, backwash and backwash, cannibals, bleeders,
baby chicks with their “do you have the time?”, idols with feet of clay, smoking rooms, palimpsests, cathedrals, repeat offenders in custody released on bail who return to the scene of the crime with the weapon of the crime, oriental tapestries, suicidals, the comings and goings of naked-men diddlers, assorted gaffes, superfluities, prolegomena, dark looks, erections paraphrased and channeled into paper tissues … The night came on with her swimsuits and undershirts she forgot to wring out.

All nights have this particularity: they are long and popular.

They teem with the rabble. They stifle awareness and accrue neurosis. They bind a straw mattress and a clock into an unrecognizable muddle. They come from the heart, improvise, and facilitate multiple partnership agreements between foreign bodies.

Lucien walked straight ahead. He crossed two alleyways. He stopped at the Industries traffic circle a moment, to catch his breath. Dashed into the first greasy spoon.

“I'm hungry, sir.”

“What will you have?”

“A piping hot soup, followed by veal kidneys with a bell pepper coulis.”

“Sorry, sir, we do Chinese food here.”

He trembled, just like a kid learning to pick pockets. He had but one concern: to fill his stomach.

“Sorry, sir.”

RULE NUMBER
34: watch out for hunger! Toddlers, barely weaned, have been known to take entire trains hostage, including the merchandise and everything that moved inside and out. Remote cause: the hunger that dissolves any possibility of escape.
Direct result: armed robbery with bloodbath.

“One soup, two bowls of rice with any sauce.”

He sat down. They served him the food in a sort of cup.

“Enjoy your meal, sir.”

His throat burst into music with the rhythm of each mouthful. His shirt became spattered with stains, but so what! People stared at him as he wolfed down his food.

“My tip, sir.”

Lucien left the place the same way he'd entered, like a shot. He dove into the darkness in search of an unknown bliss. He was thinking of nothing. He took random streets. Stopped to admire some jugglers.

“Do you have the time?”

He soliloquized. He probed tentatively at the fog of his past. He stepped over the sleepers stretched out on the sidewalk. The city was filled with these boys who held the record for the longest slumber. The kids drugged themselves and thus glided for weeks without seeing the light of day. (A few women ventured to emulate the strategy. They didn't last long. They were raped. Abused in their long sleep.)

He envied these kids. If only he could arm himself with the courage to do as much! If only he was that young man, covered in muck from head to toe. Maybe he was happier than those people who hide their nervous tension and attempt to take on situations they can no longer handle.

“Do you love me or don't you?”

The City-State is one of those territories that have already broken through the barrier of internal suffering. You share the
same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same trains, the same rot, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you've got family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise, like a ship, you wash up on the edge of hope — a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed, the route marked out in advance. Fate sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying.

Death holds no meaning since you've never really lived. You cheat life. You devise a life that's bogus. You devise a life on the basis of porn film tapes. It's the only thing you can get hold of easily in the City-State. To escape the monotony, fever, sleeping sickness, earthquakes, cholera, and cave-ins, everyone, with the exception of those who hang out in Tram 83, gets into American porn or Russian porn. Long live globalization! Long live American porn! Long live Russian porn!

“Do you have the time?”

“No.”

“Foreplay is important but it kills love to give it too much credit.”

He stopped, struck up a conversation with a child who was selling guava at that late hour of the night,

“You a tourist?”

“Why?”

“Because it's tourists who speak kindly to us, and take pictures of us that they go and sell back home.”

“I am not …”

“Give me some money.”

took a motorcycle taxi, direction: Tram 83.

6.

MEETING A PUBLISHER SENT FROM HEAVEN IN TRAM
83.

Lucien walked into Tram 83 around three in the morning. Men with multiple pronunciations, always the same. Ditto the single-mamas, shorthand for women. Darkness. A band dispatched from Acapulco was performing a revised and corrected Marvin Gaye opus. The instruments could barely stand. Two strapping lads on drums. Three on attack-vocals. Two hairy fellows on lead guitar. A saxophone. And the band's supremo himself, in braces, complicating the basic vocal quartet (now soprano, now alto, now tenor, now bass and backing vocal). When he raised his voice, a young, almost naked tigress came forward, a strategy to win over the already seduced crowd. Euphoria. And indeed they succeeded in electrifying the room without the slightest effort. Nobody playing court tennis. Nobody playing poker. Nobody playing chess. Nobody bowling. Nobody even in the sanitary facilities. At university, he and Requiem used to implement the same method. Before the show proper, a dessert: either a circus number, or else a quick striptease turn performed by five volunteers. It caused
quite a stir. The ecstatic students disrobed, climbed right up on stage and swore by the delights of forbidden fruits. Requiem, who was a good, a very good actor, couldn't stomach the idea of holding out a hand to the audience. “What a waste,” he cried vehemently, “we came for texts, not for orgiastic sessions of any kind!” Of course this Requiem was of a different tune in his youth, calm, sincere, and loyal. Time makes brutes who wait for just the right moment to draw their pistols. That doesn't mean Requiem was a brute — a necessary nuance.

“Do you have the time?”

Lucien headed toward the table they'd occupied the previous night. A man, school principal type, past fifty, was already sat there. Alone with his cigarettes and a fine row of bottles, portents of an inveterate alcoholism. When you got wasted, you didn't return the empties, in order to avoid misunderstandings. The waitresses and busgirls were inclined to tell you ten bottles instead of the three or five you'd actually ordered. No surprise to come across a guy with fifty empty bottles on his table and even the floor.

“Evening, sir. May I sit here?”

Standing before the seemingly very pleasant man.

“As you wish!”

Hardly sat down:

“Where are you from?”

“Vampiretown.”

“And before, I mean, before Vampiretown?”

Lucien stammered. Remembered his friend, Porte de Clignancourt, putting himself through the ordeal of contacting Paris theaters, and he there, in the middle of watching a botched concert.
Remembered the girl from the elevators. Remembered that abrupt power cut.

“I just came from the Back-Country.”

The man's curiosity intensified. Clasped his hands together as if invoking higher deities. A gold bracelet on his left wrist let Lucien guess at his interlocutor's pecuniary caliber. Behave and maybe he'll help you get on your feet again, he wondered softly to himself.

“How so?”

“I'm passing through. I don't know if I'm going to extend my stay.”

“I can see life's treating you well here.”

He told him this with all the pride of Archimedes discovering his “any body partially or completely submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by an upward force equal to the weight of the volume of fluid displaced.”

“Yes, I'm enjoying myself.”