China Miéville - The Last Days of New Paris

Thibaut unrolls a few more pictures, nervous to see the images of places he has never seen, in his own city. That he is leaving behind. There is so much of it. It is a world. Can it really be finished?

He looks closely at what she is showing him—the materials of a eulogy. These are his places.

“It’s hard to develop them here,” Sam says. “I’m out of chemicals. The rest will wait till I’m out.”

Negatives of soldiers and devils, machine-gun stations, ranks of vehicles, the Nazi zone. Embryos of a book. A first and last travelogue. “We need this,” she says. “For when it’s all done.”

He looks at tiny offices with swastikas on their walls, their desks bursting with paper. Close-ups of those papers. How did she get in?

Here: the Palais Garnier, its stairs dinosaur bones. He squints. Le Chabanais, the walls of the great building dissolved, light glimmering through the resin that has set around suspended women and men and the opulence and billowing cloths and gilded fittings within. A vegetal puppet, stringy, composite floral thing with fleeting human face ooze-growing up boulevard Edgar Quinet. Thibaut frowns at the sight of an arm, the remains of a white statue, a broken human face six or seven feet high, lying with stern expression in a pile of foundations. Plumes of stone-dust.

Then the sweep of a gray flank. A house-sized curve. Thibaut blinks. “That’s Celebes,” he says.

Sam takes the film back. “Enough,” she says.

“It was. You saw Celebes. ”

The most famous manif of Paris, the elephant Celebes. Like a gray-ridged stockpot the size of a warehouse, under a howdah of geometric shapes, bull-horned trunk swaying like a small train.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It was something. It was fast. I took a picture and ran. It was only a glimpse.”

“You’re here to take pictures ?” he says eventually, as if he’s sneering. As if he hadn’t gazed at them. He looks longingly at the film she holds. “To take pictures for a book?”

The sun over Paris isn’t an empty-hearted ring, nor black and glowing darkly. It is not the shining rubbing of a great coin, smudged as if the sky was buckled paper. It looks everyday today.

Thibaut and Sam trek through the fifteenth. Sam says she’s never seen these streets, but she moves confidently, checking her books. They duck undercover at the sound of firing or demonic burning, the wrong rhythms of a manif’s hooves. They pass over a coming-together of railway lines. Not knowing why, Thibaut lets her lead.

There are sounds below them. In the shadows under the bridge, black smoke hangs and discolors the ground. Sam stares. Thibaut watches its drifts. He sees that it shifts against the wind. That it takes shapes.

Fumages, smoke figures wafting in and out of presence. They bicker soundlessly over the body of a man: they rip his clothes and stain him with soot and lift him in snagging gusts.

The presences stop. They drop their corpse. They look slowly up at Thibaut and Sam, smoke heads rising. He sees hesitation in the manifs, as they watch him without eyes. He can see them overcome it, that something has changed and it will not hold them.

He says, “Move.”

Sam fumbles with her camera as she starts to run. He tries to remonstrate, to speed her up, he reaches for it but she slaps him away with startling strength. Air shifts as they stumble into the fourteenth. Sam is behind him now and Thibaut turns and sees that she is kneeling in a sudden wind. She holds her camera up with one hand, the other on the ground.

The fumages have risen. They are on the bridge. His heart accelerates at the sight. They move, half in half out of coagulation, a roiling mass of smuts. They reach, and come for her.

Before he can step toward them, try to make them flinch again, the wind kicks up. It squalls right through them and the fumages struggle and start to wisp apart. They cannot coalesce. They strain to stay, but it blows hard and they dissipate in shreds and their smoke faces silently scream as they are snatched away.

Thibaut puts his hand over his eyes while the buffeting air subsides. He turns to her at last and Sam’s face is blank.

“Did you get them?” Thibaut says. She looks uncomprehending and he points at her camera. She still holds it up.

“Oh. I think so.”

It smells like tar on the rue Vercingétorix. Sam leads them to a black door.

Thibaut uses the strength his nightclothes give him to pull the remains of a car apart. It is so rusted its metal barely screams. He piles the pieces up into a hind. Sam unfolds a tripod and camera, points it at the door of 54 rue du Château. Mucky gray curtains cover the windows.

“So,” Thibaut says. “What’s here?”

“I’ve got a good number of manifs already,” Sam says. “The horse head. The stone woman you saw. I’ve been to the Trocadero.” The demolished music hall came back the day after the S-Blast. It contains lions. Sam grows excited as she continues her description. “But I need as many as I can get. All of them. If I’m right,” she says, “something very particular gets born here tonight.”

“How do you know?”

She points at her books. “I read between the lines.”

When she was very young, she tells him, she wanted to be a witch. Everything she says makes Thibaut feel callow. He is sure she is wondering why he keeps her company.

She wants to tell him how she came to be caught up by the art that now makes Paris what it is.

“First it was monster pictures,” she says. “Devils and bogeymen. Witches, alchemy, magic. Then from there to here. I’m hardly the first to come that way. Think of Seligmann. Colquhoun. Ernst and de Givry? Flamel and Breton? You’ve read the ‘Second Manifesto.’ ‘I ask for the profound, the veritable occultation of Surrealism.’”

“That’s not what he meant by that,” Thibaut says.

“He said he wanted to find the Philosopher’s Stone!”

“And he said he wanted to lose it again.”

They look at each other. Sam even smiles.

“From devils to Bosch to Dalí,” she says. “From him to all this. To the manifestos. That’s why I’m here.”

She hesitates, then continues quickly. “When information started to come out after the blast, information about the blast, I had to come. You just don’t know what it was like, to see that footage.”

“No. I was too busy being the footage.”

“I’m not suggesting it was easier for you.” She looks away, at the corpse of a crow. “I was in the gallery.” She sounds as if she is trying to recall a dream. “Everyone was screaming at all these crazy, jerky pictures coming out of Paris, all the manifs. ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ And I knew exactly what they all were. I knew the poems and the pictures and I knew what I was looking at.”

Since the blast, curators have been Virgils. Their monographs and catalogues now almanacs.

“The S-Blast,” Sam says slowly, “took instructions.”

She finds something in a copy of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution and holds it open for him. Thibaut reads, “‘On Certain Possibilities of the Irrational Embellishment of a City.’”

“They made suggestions,” she says.

He’s read this before, a long time ago. He reads it again: provocations, once fanciful, now true, descriptions of Paris, from years before the explosion.

“I’m lucky you heard my shots,” Sam says when he sits back. “Thank you again.”