Fiston Mujila - Tram 83

The minutes crumbled away. The bards of the Revolution (who were resigning themselves to not leaving the stage) started playing their same repertoire all over again. The audience, who knew every song by heart, showed their enthusiasm. Requiem, sandwiched between two baby-chicks, cheered the resistance. The publisher, the police officers dispatched for the occasion, and Lucien himself, who promised to read just a quarter of the text, debated endlessly. Following the cave-in, suggestions that the city be put to the sack fed every conversation. The comings and goings to the facilities increased significantly. The single-mama-chicks cast their nets and hooks into the crowd. The waitresses, the busgirls, and a few single-mamas too sure of themselves glowered at each other.

“Foreplay is not essential.”

“I don’t like banks. That’s just my opinion.”

“Do you have the time?”

Meanwhile, he feverishly scribbled a few lines in his notebook: “They think only of satisfying their belly and their underbelly. The dogs bark, the trains loaded with gold bars move on. They’ll wake up one morning and realize the City-State no longer exists. The City-State will be a distant memory, the vestige of a … Even now, the City-State exists only in name. The heavens belong to the higher deities and the earth to the tourists and the dissident General as they excavate without breaking a sweat. What will they do when they no longer have their country and their minerals that sprout like wild mushrooms?”

It was not until two in the morning that they succeeded in convincing the assembled company of the necessity of literature in a nightclub.

“Do you have the time?”

The publisher introduced the event, championing this writer he had discovered in “the wreckage of this city that is losing its greenery when it would be better off opting for a behavior worthy of a modern city. Lucien is a supremely talented author. For the sake of the future, your future, back this man, invest in him.”

Lucien stepped forward to take the floor. He remembered his last time on stage: Back-Country, applause. That show had later cost him a seventeen-month suspended sentence, with a two-year ban on practicing a profession, for aggravated assault, breaching national security, and planned and systematic incitement to revolt. He extracted his texts from a portfolio. He took a serious stance. He opened the ball after having requested a minute’s silence in memory of the victims. He was trembling like a dead leaf. He emphasized certain words, raised his voice. He hadn’t counted on the audience trying to trip him up. One minute too many, one sentence out of place, and he’d find out what they were made of. Which wasn’t long in happening, as the imprecations began to rend the heavens.

The whole Tram as one:

“Get off, Lucien!”

Then as a scattered choir:

“Don’t you preach at us!”

“You’re hot, I want you!”

“Alligator!”

“Show-off!”

He was determined to complete his reading. He clung to his words. He fixed his gaze elsewhere. He held fast to a childhood memory. He thought about his friend, Porte de Clignancourt. He transcended himself. He skipped certain paragraphs. He was even tempted to procure some relief in the mixed restrooms.

“Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror!”

Back at university, he’d been told: “If you have difficulty concentrating, imagine yourself on a cot with an outrageously well-stacked girl, curves in all the right places, who begs you to thrust your cock into her. Hold, hold, hold fast to that idea, for God’s sake, and that’s maybe where you’ll find salvation.” He imagined himself with a buxom creature on Requiem’s divan. The abuse crescendoed. The Tram, the whole Tram as one, then disjointed voices, then as one, then disjointed voices, then as one …

Requiem laughed until he cried. Quite normal, considering the animosity that bound the two bastards close. The publisher, at a loss to know what to do, stoically downed his vodka. Seized with pity, the busgirls and the waitresses enjoined him to beat it. The single-mamas took advantage of this incident to break ranks, push through the crowd to hunt down a potential client, entice others, or go change — either in the mixed facilities, or in the darkest corners of the room. No harm in a little digression: the girls arrived wearing dignified attire which they modified as the night drew on, or according to the mood of the clientele, in such a way that they appeared almost naked at strategic times, three in the morning, say, or four. The guys who’d been singing up the Cuban revolution bluntly began retuning their instruments. But Lucien held out, raising his voice above the din.

“Do you have the time?”

“You’re cute!”

“Do you have the time?”

“Come sleep with me!”

A digger smashed a bottle and overturned a table in protest. The dogs bark, the trains move on. Lucien had corralled himself for good. He continued to read. The baby-chicks swayed their booties over to the mixed facilities. The students, initially friendly, suggested he lay down his arms. The single-mama-chicks washed their dirty linen, not in public, but with the mother superior, the den mama of the waitresses and busgirls. A young man sweetly left his seat, stepped up on the stage, and let fly with a left uppercut. An unusually violent punch. Lucien tottered, crashed to the floor. He remembered his third dream. He was giving a geography lesson to some pupils dressed all in green who asked him to go polish his shoes with condom lubricant. He persisted, and carried on reading them an article about cumulonimbi until a pupil stood up, gave him a thrashing, and ordered him to get back to the Northern Station, and jump aboard the first train for the Back-Country … The pages of his text lay on the stage. He made a superhuman effort, and stood himself up. A right this time. Bursts of applause.

“Another beating, teach him he’s not here to show off!”

The publisher tried to intervene. A slap despite his boss-man appearance. “That’ll learn you to respect guys who’ve really experienced life,” the attacker had said. The euphoria of a train entering the station. The jubilant shouts of the survivors of another cave-in. The jabbering of the slim-jims. They set to parodying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (for whites). The students carried him by the sleeves and threw him outside. Émilienne sobbed.

Requiem headed toward the mixed facilities.

Outside, they continued to manhandle him. Someone picked up a tire. Someone suggested he be burned alive. Someone said he was a spy, a police inspector, a secret agent, friend of the for-profit tourists. A girl with breasts wrinkled like socks even accused him of attempted rape one Thursday evening when she was strutting about not far from the railroad tracks. They continued to manhandle him. In the distance, the angelus bell, the fatwa from the minaret, the shrieks of a student gone mad from having used black magic to further his aim of resembling the tourists used to paying everyone a round. Blood, drool, tears, surely he’d just lost his legs in trying to grab ahold of a freight train! They continued to manhandle him, hauling him across the rails.

REQUIEM, MY MERCHANDISE IS SACRED.

The beating he’d received outside of his performance at Tram 83 had confined him to bed. Seventeen stitches by the doctors’ count. Lucien momentarily halted the writing of his stage-tale. The ambitions he entertained disappeared with every passing nightmare. Headless men appeared, advising he climb aboard the first train or risk ending up in the morgue, his guts exposed, his eyes scraped out. The texts just couldn’t make any headway in such a climate. He no longer felt the pertinence of Che’s lines, or even Gandhi’s in negotiations with George Bush Junior, tableau 10, entitled “Baghdad Boogie And Other Lives To Come.” The dramatist’s drama remains the distractedness of the characters on whom the plot depends.