China Miéville - The Last Days of New Paris

The figure turns and Thibaut glimpses its faceless face. Empty. A faint graphite sweep where there should be eyes. Blank as an egg. A poor, cowardly rendition, by a young bad artist.

“It’s a self-portrait,” he hears Sam repeat. She and Thibaut reach for each other, hold each other up in fear.

Thibaut says, “Of Adolf Hitler.”

And they try to run, and as Thibaut shouts for her and grabs her pack and as the watercolor manif’s attention sweeps toward her, Sam moves with more than human strength. She moves to get them away with speed and motion borrowed from her paymasters below. Her eyes flicker and a corona flares around them and she leaps, reaching, straining for the cover of a wall—

—and she slows in her trajectory and lets go of Thibaut as the Hitler-manif turns and eyelessly stares and takes her in and all around her the broken buildings become postcard-perfect in the cone of that regard. And Sam herself freezes. She is in the air and the self-portrait looks at her and she is just gone.

Gone. Sam is unpersoned. Effaced in the manif’s gaze.

Thibaut crawls backward and bites back her name. The street is pretty, and empty of her.

Too slow, too late, he understands that the manif is looking in his direction, now.

He hurls himself into the window of a cellar. As he falls, the glass heals behind him, brittle as sugar, as the Hitler-manif revises history, brings its vision to bear.

Behind the new façade its stare invokes, the rot of war remains. Thibaut still has hold of Sam’s bag, and Sam herself is gone.

He climbs stairs and gets bearings fast and pushes out through another window for a side-street not yet in the manif’s field of view.

There really is no Sam. In the distance Thibaut can see some last German soldiers, injured and slow. The watercolor manif must glance at their blockade, because it goes, imperfect for the desired scenery. A featureless street appears in its place. As the manif’s look takes in the soldiers, they, too, are instantly not there.

A little blank-faced nonentity bringing peace and prettiness, ending the rubble. Where there is discord, there it brings peace. Not even of death, but of nihil. Paris will be an empty city of charming houses.

This is what the Führer’s self-portrait proclaims.

Thibaut braces against a perfect wall. He stays out of sight as it passes. He cranes out behind it and aims at the manif. He shoots. He misses. The manif walks on. Thibaut fires again and it ignores him. He wails as it crosses the threshold of old Paris. It brings its terrible emptying picturesquing gaze to his embellished home.

The watercolor will raise a quaint city. And everything will end. The struggles of the manifs, the angry smoke, the muttering walls, the fighters for conviction, the partisans of freedom and the degradation. Human muck, ready to live and die.

Thibaut hears the smacking of lips. In his hand, the head of the exquisite corpse is moving. He can see a pulse in its larva. Its beard-train lets out a little smoke.

The face smiles at him. It looks knowing. It meets his eye.

Thibaut begins to run. He takes the pretty street behind the watercolor, the seer of empty buildings. The manif of the Führer. The face of the exquisite corpse mutters encouragement from Thibaut’s grip.

The Hitler-manif stands at the border of the old city. It hears Thibaut and starts to turn.

And Thibaut has no plan. No idea. Just before the deadening, emptying stare hits him, he simply hurls what he holds.

The exquisite corpse’s head catches the manif’s look in his place and it does not disappear. It flies through the air at the featurelessness. It hits it full on.

Thibaut blinks. He looks down at himself. He is still there. He remains unseen.

The manif is wrestling with a head too large, a head that has fallen over its own. Like a carnival costume. The exquisite corpse’s head sways as the watercolor staggers. The mask blocks its eyes. It blocks the unembellishing gaze that fixes the ruins into nothing.

The self-portrait struggles below it and Thibaut can feel the waves of the watercolor’s cloying attention. The face of the exquisite corpse winces. It grows translucent. It is almost banished from this vista by the stare beneath. But with a growl, the exquisite corpse screws up its own presence, and stays right there.

There is an unfolding. A shuffling of presence.

Now the watercolor wears some misplaced boot on one foot, a manif boot abruptly appeared. Its head was not chosen by its artist. The faceless manif of Adolf Hitler is randomizing. There is a fluttering, a cascade of options. As Thibaut watches a quick clicking circuit of alternative objects comes into place as the manif’s head. Now its legs are not its legs, but a succession of other things, in random stutter. Its body, too. It is becoming a triple figure.

And though he can still see the brown of its original suit and the distinctive and ugly emptiness of its head slip into position repeatedly among the parts that have started to make it up, to concatenate randomly, the flailing manif is no more defined by them than by the fruit, the bricks, the lizards, the windows and lavender and railway lines and endless other things that are suddenly, also, for instants, its components.

It is becoming exquisite corpse. It is remade. It is without artist.

And in its wake, as its wan precision is replaced by that stochastic rigor, that self-dreamed dream, the buildings that it saw into twee perfection are less perfect again. They quiver. Their colors bleed. They are too saturated, their lines are wrong again. They remember their cracks. And then with breaths of stone-dust they are back to ruination, or are not there, or are battered by age, scarred with the stuff of history, again. Paris is Paris.

There is a scream. A swallow. The light changes. The sun scuttles forward, eager to end this day. Thibaut sinks to his knees. He kneels before the entrance to Paris. He bows his head. The city is as it was.

Standing in front of Thibaut, where the Hitler had been, is his exquisite corpse. Tall again. Old-man face, leaf in his hair. Anvil-and-pieces body. It leans—no, Thibaut realizes, no. It is bowing. It is taking leave.

Thibaut stands, too, so that he can bow back.

The exquisite corpse turns and steps politely away from him, over the threshold, into the nineteenth. Where soon enough, the civilians, the partisans, will know that something has happened.

It will not be long before the occupiers reestablish control of these borders. This plan to remake the city has failed, so they will return to their original methods of control, and plot again. Thibaut is outside, alone since the manif looked. For a few hours, at this point, the borders will be open.

The exquisite corpse is turning up boulevard Sérurier. Its body parts flicker like a timetable display, between options. It rebuilds itself: four-part, this time, feet underwater, a woman’s legs, a body like some cubist rumination, flattened head, a puckered-lip dream. It walks on, into the city, where it will keep changing.

Thibaut looks east, into streets outside the old city that are no longer sickly perfect but are still, for a while, empty.

He can go almost anywhere. He looks away from the city’s heart, for a long time.

And turns back, at last, to the arrondissements he has known since he was a child. Where there is still a fight.

He is wistful, enjoying the air beyond the limits, knowing it will be a long time until he can breathe it again. His way is clear.

There are other cameras in Paris, to find.

The Last Days of New Paris needs writing. Even though these are not the last days, he decides.