8

Things felt oddly bigger to me in Paris. The sky was more present than in New York, its whims more fragile. I found myself drawn to it, and for the first day or two I watched it constantly—sitting in my hotel room and studying the clouds, waiting for something to happen. These were northern clouds, the dream clouds that are always changing, massing up into huge gray mountains, discharging brief showers, dissipating, gathering again, rolling across the sun, refracting the light in ways that always seem different. The Paris sky has its own laws, and they function independently of the city below. If the buildings appear solid, anchored in the earth, indestructible, the sky is vast and amorphous, subject to constant turmoil. For the first week, I felt as though I had been turned upside-down. This was an old world city, and it had nothing to do with New York— with its slow skies and chaotic streets, its bland clouds and aggressive buildings. I had been displaced, and it made me suddenly unsure of myself. I felt my grip loosening, and at least once an hour I had to remind myself why I was there.

My French was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking was difficult, and there were times when no words came to my lips, when I struggled to say even the simplest things. There was a certain pleasure in this, I believe—to experience language as a collection of sounds, to be forced to the surface of words where meanings vanish—but it was also quite wearing, and it had the effect of shutting me up in my thoughts. In order to understand what people were saying, I had to translate everything silently into English, which meant that even when I understood, I was understanding at one remove—doing twice the work and getting half the result. Nuances, subliminal associations, undercurrents— all these things were lost on me. In the end, it would probably not be wrong to say that everything was lost on me.

Still, I pushed ahead. It took me a few days to get the investigation started, but once I made my first contact, others followed. There were a number of disappointments, however. Wyshnegradsky was dead; I was unable to locate any of the people Fanshawe had tutored in English; the woman who had hired Fanshawe at the New York Times was gone, had not worked there in years. Such things were to be expected, but I took them hard, knowing that even the smallest gap could be fatal. These were empty spaces for me, blanks in the picture, and no matter how successful I was in filling the other areas, doubts would remain, which meant that the work could never be truly finished.

I spoke to the Dedmons, I spoke to the art book publishers Fanshawe had worked for, I spoke to the woman named Anne (a girlfriend, it turned out), I spoke to the movie producer. “Odd jobs,” he said to me, in Russian-accented English, “that’s what he did. Translations, script summaries, a little ghost writing for my wife. He was a smart boy, but too stiff. Very literary, if you know what I’m saying. I wanted to give him a chance to act—even offered to give him fencing and riding lessons for a picture we were going to do. I liked his looks, thought we could make something of him. But he wasn’t interested. I’ve got other eggs to fry, he said. Something like that. It didn’t matter. The picture made millions, and what do I care if the boy wants to act or not?”

There was something to be pursued here, but as I sat with this man in his monumental apartment on the Avenue Henri Martin, waiting for each sentence of his story between phone calls, I suddenly realized that I didn’t need to hear any more. There was only one question that mattered, and this man couldn’t answer it for me. If I stayed and listened to him, I would be given more details, more irrelevancies, yet another pile of useless notes. I had been pretending to write a book for too long now, and little by little I had forgotten my purpose. Enough, I said to myself, consciously echoing Sophie, enough of this, and then I stood up and left.

The point was that no one was watching me anymore. I no longer had to put up a front as I had at home, no longer had to delude Sophie by creating endless busy-work for myself. The charade was over. I could discard my nonexistent book at last. For about ten minutes, walking back to my hotel across the river, I felt happier than I had in months. Things had been simplified, reduced to the clarity of a single problem. But then, the moment I absorbed this thought, I understood how bad the situation really was. I was coming to the end now, and I still hadn’t found him. The mistake I was looking for had never surfaced. There were no leads, no clues, no tracks to follow. Fanshawe was buried somewhere, and his whole life was buried with him. Unless he wanted to be found, I didn’t have a ghost of a chance.

Still, I pushed ahead, trying to come to the end, to the very end, burrowing blindly through the last interviews, not willing to give up until I had seen everyone. I wanted to call Sophie. One day, I even went so far as to walk to the post office and wait in line for the foreign operator, but I didn’t go through with it. Words were failing me constantly now, and I panicked at the thought of losing my nerve on the phone. What was I supposed to say, after all? Instead, I sent her a postcard with a photograph of Laurel and Hardy on it. On the back I wrote: “True marriages never make sense. Look at the couple on the other side. Proof that anything is possible, no? Perhaps we should start wearing derbies. At the very least, remember to clean out the closet before I return. Hugs to Ben.”

I saw Anne Michaux the following afternoon, and she gave a little start when I entered the café where we had arranged to meet (Le Rouquet, Boulevard Saint-Germain). What she told me about Fanshawe is not important: who kissed who, what happened where, who said what, and so on. It comes down to more of the same. What I will mention, however, is that her initial double take was caused by the fact that she mistook me for Fanshawe. Just the briefest flicker, as she put it, and then it was gone. The resemblance had been noticed before, of course, but never so viscerally, with such immediate impact. I must have shown my reaction, for she quickly apologized (as if she had done something wrong) and returned to the point several times during the two or three hours we spent together—once even going out of her way to contradict herself: “I don’t know what I was thinking. You don’t look at all like him. It must have been the American in both of you.”

Nevertheless, I found it disturbing, could not help feeling appalled. Something monstrous was happening, and I had no control over it anymore. The sky was growing dark inside—that much was certain; the ground was trembling. I found it hard to sit still, and I found it hard to move. From one moment to the next, I seemed to be in a different place, to forget where I was. Thoughts stop where the world begins, I kept telling myself. But the self is also in the world, I answered, and likewise the thoughts that come from it. The problem was that I could no longer make the right distinctions. This can never be that. Apples are not oranges, peaches are not plums. You feel the difference on your tongue, and then you know, as if inside yourself. But everything was beginning to have the same taste to me. I no longer felt hungry, I could no longer bring myself to eat.

As for the Dedmons, there is perhaps even less to say. Fanshawe could not have chosen more fitting benefactors, and of all the people I saw in Paris, they were the kindest, the most gracious. Invited to their apartment for drinks, I stayed on for dinner, and then, by the time we reached the second course, they were urging me to visit their house in the Var—the same house where Fanshawe had lived, and it needn’t be a short visit, they said, since they were not planning to go there themselves until August. It had been an important place for Fanshawe and his work, Mr. Dedmon said, and no doubt my book would be enhanced if I saw it myself. I couldn’t disagree with him, and no sooner were these words out of my mouth than Mrs. Dedmon was on the phone making arrangements for me in her precise and elegant French.

There was nothing to hold me in Paris anymore, and so I took the train the following afternoon. This was the end of the line for me, my southward trek to oblivion. Whatever hope I might have had (the faint possibility that Fanshawe had returned to France, the illogical thought that he had found refuge in the same place twice) evaporated by the time I got there. The house was empty; there was no sign of anyone. On the second day, examining the rooms on the upper floor, I came across a short poem Fanshawe had written on the wall—but I knew that poem already, and under it there was a date: August 25, 1972. He had never come back. I felt foolish now even for thinking it.

For want of anything better to do, I spent several days talking to people in the area: the nearby farmers, the villagers, the people of surrounding towns. I introduced myself by showing them a photograph of Fanshawe, pretending to be his brother, but feeling more like a down-and-out private eye, a buffoon clutching at straws. Some people remembered him, others didn’t, still others weren’t sure. It made no difference. I found the southern accent impenetrable (with its rolling r’s and nasalized endings) and barely understood a word that was said to me. Of all the people I saw, only one had heard from Fanshawe since his departure. This was his closest neighbor—a tenant farmer who lived about a mile down the road. He was a peculiar little man of about forty, dirtier than anyone I had ever met. His house was a dank, crumbling seventeenth-century structure, and he seemed to live there by himself, with no companions but his truffle dog and hunting rifle. He was clearly proud of having been Fanshawe’s friend, and to prove how close they had been he showed me a white cowboy hat that Fanshawe had sent to him after returning to America. There was no reason not to believe his story. The hat was still in its original box and apparently had never been worn. He explained that he was saving it for the right moment, and then launched into a political harangue that I had trouble following. The revolution was coming, he said, and when it did, he was going to buy a white horse and a machine gun, put on his hat, and ride down the main street in town, plugging all the shopkeepers who had collaborated with the Germans during the War. Just like in America, he added. When I asked him what he meant, he delivered a rambling, hallucinatory lecture about cowboys and Indians. But that was a long time ago, I said, trying to cut him short. No, no, he insisted, it still goes on today. Didn’t I know about the shootouts on Fifth Avenue? Hadn’t I heard of the Apaches? It was pointless to argue. In defense of my ignorance, I told him that I lived in another neighborhood.

I stayed on in the house for a few more days. My plan was to do nothing for as long as I could, to rest up. I was exhausted, and I needed a chance to regroup before going back to Paris. A day or two went by. I walked through the fields, visited the woods, sat out in the sun reading French translations of American detective novels. It should have been the perfect cure: holing up in the middle of nowhere, letting my mind float free. But none of it really helped. The house wouldn’t make room for me, and by the third day I sensed that I was no longer alone, that I could never be alone in that place. Fanshawe was there, and no matter how hard I tried not to think about him, I couldn’t escape. This was unexpected, galling. Now that I had stopped looking for him, he was more present to me than ever before. The whole process had been reversed. After all these months of trying to find him, I felt as though I was the one who had been found. Instead of looking for Fanshawe, I had actually been running away from him. The work I had contrived for myself—the false book, the endless detours—had been no more than an attempt to ward him off, a ruse to keep him as far away from me as possible. For if I could convince myself that I was looking for him, then it necessarily followed that he was somewhere else— somewhere beyond me, beyond the limits of my life. But I had been wrong. Fanshawe was exactly where I was, and he had been there since the beginning. From the moment his letter arrived, I had been struggling to imagine him, to see him as he might have been—but my mind had always conjured a blank. At best, there was one impoverished image: the door of a locked room. That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room, condemned to a mythical solitude—living perhaps, breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what. This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull.

Strange things happened to me after that. I returned to Paris, but once there I found myself with nothing to do. I didn’t want to look up any of the people I had seen before, and I didn’t have the courage to go back to New York. I became inert, a thing that could not move, and little by little I lost track of myself. If I am able to say anything about this period at all, it is only because I have certain documentary evidence to help me. The visa stamps in my passport, for example; my airplane ticket, my hotel bill, and so on. These things prove to me that I remained in Paris for more than a month. But that is very different from remembering, and in spite of what I know, I still find it impossible. I see things that happened, I encounter images of myself in various places, but only at a distance, as though I were watching someone else. None of it feels like memory, which is always anchored within; it’s out there beyond what I can feel or touch, beyond anything that has to do with me. I have lost a month from my life, and even now it is a difficult thing for me to confess, a thing that fills me with shame.

A month is a long time, more than enough time for a man to come apart. Those days come back to me in fragments when they come at all, bits and pieces that refuse to add up. I see myself falling down drunk on the street one night, standing up, staggering towards a lamppost, and then vomiting all over my shoes. I see myself sitting in a movie theater with the lights on and watching a crowd of people file out around me, unable to remember the film I had just seen. I see myself prowling the rue Saint-Denis at night, picking out prostitutes to sleep with, my head burning with the thought of bodies, an endless jumble of naked breasts, naked thighs, naked buttocks. I see my cock being sucked, I see myself on a bed with two girls kissing each other, I see an enormous black woman spreading her legs on a bidet and washing her cunt. I will not try to say that these things are not real, that they did not happen. It’s just that I can’t account for them. I was fucking the brains out of my head, drinking myself into another world. But if the point was to obliterate Fanshawe, then my binge was a success. He was gone—and I was gone along with him.

The end, however, is clear to me. I have not forgotten it, and I feel lucky to have kept that much. The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about. I don’t claim to have solved any problems. I am merely suggesting that a moment came when it no longer frightened me to look at what had happened. If words followed, it was only because I had no choice but to accept them, to take them upon myself and go where they wanted me to go. But that does not necessarily make the words important. I have been struggling to say goodbye to something for a long time now, and this struggle is all that really matters. The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle.

One night, I found myself in a bar near the Place Pigalle. Found is the term I wish to use, for I have no idea of how I got there, no memory of entering the place at all. It was one of those clip joints that are common in the neighborhood: six or eight girls at the bar, the chance to sit at a table with one of them and buy an exorbitantly priced bottle of champagne, and then, if one is so inclined, the possibility of coming to a certain financial agreement and retiring to the privacy of a room in the hotel next door. The scene begins for me as I’m sitting at one of the tables with a girl, just having received the bucket of champagne. The girl was Tahitian, I remember, and she was beautiful: no more than nineteen or twenty, very small, and wearing a dress of white netting with nothing underneath, a crisscross of cables over her smooth brown skin. The effect was superbly erotic. I remember her round breasts visible in the diamondshaped openings, the overwhelming softness of her neck when I leaned over and kissed it. She told me her name, but I insisted on calling her Fayaway, telling her that she was an exile from Typee and that I was Herman Melville, an American sailor who had come all the way from New York to rescue her. She hadn’t the vaguest idea of what I was talking about, but she continued to smile, no doubt thinking me crazy as I rambled on in my sputtering French, unperturbed, laughing when I laughed, allowing me to kiss her wherever I liked.

We were sitting in an alcove in the corner, and from my seat I was able to take in the rest of the room. Men came and went, some popping their heads through the door and leaving, some staying for a drink at the bar, one or two going to a table as I had done. After about fifteen minutes, a young man came in who was obviously American. He seemed nervous to me, as if he had never been in such a place before, but his French was surprisingly good, and as he fluently ordered a whiskey at the bar and started talking to one of the girls, I saw that he meant to stay for a while. I studied him from my little nook, continuing to run my hand along Fayaway’s leg and to nuzzle her with my face, but the longer he stood there, the more distracted I became. He was tall, athletically built, with sandy hair and an open, somewhat boyish manner. I guessed his age at twenty-six or twenty-seven—a graduate student, perhaps, or else a young lawyer working for an American firm in Paris. I had never seen this man before, and yet there was something familiar about him, something that stopped me from turning away: a brief scald, a weird synapse of recognition. I tried out various names on him, shunted him through the past, unravelled the spool of associations—but nothing happened. He’s no one, I said to myself, finally giving up. And then, out of the blue, by some muddled chain of reasoning, I finished the thought by adding: and if he’s no one, then he must be Fanshawe. I laughed out loud at my joke. Ever on the alert, Fayaway laughed with me. I knew that nothing could be more absurd, but I said it again: Fanshawe. And then again: Fanshawe. And the more I said it, the more it pleased me to say it. Each time the word came out of my mouth, another burst of laughter followed. I was intoxicated by the sound of it; it drove me to a pitch of raucousness, and little by little Fayaway seemed to grow confused. She had probably thought I was referring to some sexual practice, making some joke she couldn’t understand, but my repetitions had gradually robbed the word of its meaning, and she began to hear it as a threat. I looked at the man across the room and spoke the word again. My happiness was immeasurable. I exulted in the sheer falsity of my assertion, celebrating the new power I had just bestowed upon myself. I was the sublime alchemist who could change the world at will. This man was Fanshawe because I said he was Fanshawe, and that was all there was to it. Nothing could stop me anymore. Without even pausing to think, I whispered into Fayaway’s ear that I would be right back, disengaged myself from her wonderful arms, and sauntered over to the pseudo-Fanshawe at the bar. In my best imitation of an Oxford accent, I said:

“Well, old man, fancy that. We meet again.”

He turned around and looked at me carefully. The smile that had been forming on his face slowly diminished into a frown. “Do I know you?” he finally asked.

“Of course you do,” I said, all bluster and good humor. “The name’s Melville. Herman Melville. Perhaps you’ve read some of my books.”

He didn’t know whether to treat me as a jovial drunk or a dangerous psychopath, and the confusion showed on his face. It was a splendid confusion, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

“Well,” he said at last, forcing out a little smile, “I might have read one or two.”

“The one about the whale, no doubt.”

“Yes. The one about the whale.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said, nodding pleasantly, and then put my arm around his shoulder. “And so, Fanshawe,” I said, “what brings you to Paris this time of year?”

The confusion returned to his face. “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t catch that name.”

“Fanshawe.”

“Fanshawe?”

“Fanshawe. F-A-N-S-H-A-W-E.”

“Well,” he said, relaxing into a broad grin, suddenly sure of himself again, “that’s the problem right there. You’ve mixed me up with someone else. My name isn’t Fanshawe. It’s Stillman. Peter Stillman.”

“No problem,” I answered, giving him a little squeeze. “If you want to call yourself Stillman, that’s fine with me. Names aren’t important, after all. What matters is that I know who you really are. You’re Fanshawe. I knew it the moment you walked in. ‘There’s the old devil himself,’ I said. ‘I wonder what he’s doing in a place like this?’ “

He was beginning to lose patience with me now. He removed my arm from his shoulder and backed off. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’ve made a mistake, and let’s leave it at that. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

“Too late,” I said. “Your secret’s out, my friend. There’s no way to hide from me now.”

“Leave me alone,” he said, showing anger for the first time. “I don’t talk to lunatics. Leave me alone, or there’ll be trouble.”

The other people in the bar couldn’t understand what we were saying, but the tension had become obvious, and I could feel myself being watched, could feel the mood shift around me. Stillman suddenly seemed to panic. He shot a glance at the woman behind the bar, looked apprehensively at the girl beside him, and then made an impulsive decision to leave. He pushed me out of his way and started for the door. I could have let it go at that, but I didn’t. I was just getting warmed up, and I didn’t want my inspiration to be wasted. I went back to where Fayaway was sitting and put a few hundred francs on the table. She feigned a pout in response. “C’est mon frère,” I said. “Il est fou. Je dois le poursuivre.” And then, as she reached for the money, I blew her a kiss, turned around, and left.

Stillman was twenty or thirty yards ahead of me, walking quickly down the street. I kept pace with him, hanging back to avoid being noticed, but not letting him move out of sight. Every now and then he looked back over his shoulder, as though expecting me to be there, but I don’t think he saw me until we were well out of the neighborhood, away from the crowds and commotion, slicing through the quiet, darkened core of the Right Bank. The encounter had spooked him, and he behaved like a man running for his life. But that was not difficult to understand. I was the thing we all fear most: the belligerent stranger who steps out from the shadows, the knife that stabs us in the back, the speeding car that crushes us to death. He was right to be running, but his fear only egged me on, goaded me to pursue him, made me rabid with determination. I had no plan, no idea of what I was going to do, but I followed him without the slightest doubt, knowing that my whole life hinged on it. It is important to stress that by now I was completely lucid—no wobbling, no drunkenness, utterly clear in my head. I realized that I was acting outrageously. Stillman was not Fanshawe—I knew that. He was an arbitrary choice, totally innocent and blank. But that was the thing that thrilled me— the randomness of it, the vertigo of pure chance. It made no sense, and because of that, it made all the sense in the world.

A moment came when the only sounds in the street were our footsteps. Stillman looked back again and finally saw me. He began moving faster, breaking into a trot. I called after him: “Fanshawe.” I called after him again: “It’s too late. I know who you are, Fanshawe.” And then, on the next street: “It’s all over, Fanshawe. You’ll never get away.” Stillman said nothing in response, did not even bother to turn around. I wanted to keep talking to him, but by now he was running, and if I tried to talk, it would only have slowed me down. I abandoned my taunts and went after him. I have no idea how long we ran, but it seemed to go on for hours. He was younger than I was, younger and stronger, and I almost lost him, almost didn’t make it. I pushed myself down the dark street, passing the point of exhaustion, of sickness, frantically hurtling toward him, not allowing myself to stop. Long before I reached him, long before I even knew I was going to reach him, I felt as though I was no longer inside myself. I can think of no other way to express it. I couldn’t feel myself anymore. The sensation of life had dribbled out of me, and in its place there was a miraculous euphoria, a sweet poison rushing through my blood, the undeniable odor of nothingness. This is the moment of my death, I said to myself, this is when I die. A second later, I caught up to Stillman and tackled him from behind. We went crashing to the pavement, the two of us grunting on impact. I had used up all my strength, and by now I was too short of breath to defend myself, too drained to struggle. Not a word was said. For several seconds we grappled on the sidewalk, but then he managed to break free of my grip, and after that there was nothing I could do. He started pounding me with his fists, kicking me with the points of his shoes, pummelling me all over. I remember trying to protect my face with my hands; I remember the pain and how it stunned me, how much it hurt and how desperately I wanted not to feel it anymore. But it couldn’t have lasted very long, for nothing else comes back to me. Stillman tore me apart, and by the time he was finished, I was out cold. I can remember waking up on the sidewalk and being surprised that it was still night, but that’s the extent of it. Everything else is gone.

For the next three days I didn’t move from my hotel room. The shock was not so much that I was in pain, but that it would not be strong enough to kill me. I realized this by the second or third day. At a certain moment, lying there on the bed and looking at the slats of the closed shutters, I understood that I had lived through it. It felt strange to be alive, almost incomprehensible. One of my fingers was broken; both temples were gashed; it ached even to breathe. But that was somehow beside the point. I was alive, and the more I thought about it, the less I understood. It did not seem possible that I had been spared.

Later that same night, I wired Sophie that I was coming home.