He pushed me against the wall, more roughly than usual. His open hand clapped up against my face and head.
It really hurt. That’s something people don’t realize about a slap. They think, not as bad as a punch. But a slap can hurt quite a lot.
My face was stinging. My ears rang. My head was vibrating, rattled from the force of his huge, open hand.
I tried to get some distance from him, but he pinned me again and gathered my hair in his fist.
I didn’t want to let on he was hurting me. He meant to hurt me.
He squeezed the handful of my hair harder. His other hand was on my neck. I saw from his expression how angry he was. His woman had made trouble for him, trouble he was extending to me.
His hand tightened around my neck, making it difficult for me to breathe. One of my eyes was starting to twitch, my vision fraying at the edges.
He let go and stepped back.
“I’m leaving.”
He said this dramatically, like it was a further punishment, beyond choking me and trying to detach my scalp.
But he didn’t leave. He stood there with his face full of petulant sadness, as if his own outburst were a kind of hardship he was suffering, worse for him than it was for me. Perhaps I should even apologize, for having left him no choice but to rough me up.
“If you ever come here again,” I said, “I will jam a knife in your skull.”
It just slipped out.
I started laughing. I couldn’t stifle it. I was thinking of Bruno’s description of the skull with the stalagmite, stalactite, whichever, a mineral growth shooting upward like the horn of a unicorn.
We always picture, Bruno said, our picturing is ceaseless. We pick up things along the way, he said, that are of no use at all. They return as images that flash into our thoughts. The trick, he said, is to acknowledge these images, let them float past.
René said something I didn’t quite hear. Something like “You crazy bitch.”
Being choked had brought on a vascular event. Worse than usual. Full-blown. The edges of my vision were fractured oscillations. I could still see if I looked straight ahead.
Peering through my tunnel of functional vision, I watched him leave.
It was fun while it lasted, René. But you didn’t know this was temporary.
You people are not real to me. No one is.
The door was open to the night air. Despite my marbling vision, I managed to shut it and slide the crossbar.
An hour later I noticed that I could see.
It’s always like that. I am not aware of the moment when the problem subsides, and instead I’m suddenly aware that for a while I’ve been fine.
It was eleven p.m. I washed my face and did a couple of things on the computer. The fair was thirty-six hours from now. No changes to the plan, or so I was told by my contacts.
I reread the article about the document trove the Feds had released to the lawyers of Nancy and the boy. There were photographs of both of them illustrating the article (the boy was still sporting the chin-line beard, which gave him a Founding Fathers solemnity) but no image of “Amy” who had done them dirty. Googling around, it seemed there was nothing beyond the one article. Their Freedom of Information bounty would take time to sift through. Have fun reading twenty-five hundred government documents, guys.
I checked Bruno’s email once more, as I did every night before closing my computer.
There was a new letter in his sent folder.
THE MOULINARDS had emailed no new question.
He was writing into the void, a follow-up to his previous letter about the Debord years, after the war, and his beliefs on violence, his disagreements with Jean.
I wondered if he was trying to pretend the Moulinards weren’t ignoring him, and within this pretense, hoping to reengage them.
He had just read an article, he told them, which suggested a new theory, that the great beasts knocking horns in charcoal and ocher on cave walls in the Guyenne and the Dordogne and the Aude could have been drawn by Homo sapiens for a purpose that was rather separate from H. sapiens’s hunting and his killing, his material claims on the natural world.
If these new theories were accurate, Bruno said, H. sapiens may have been a better artist than Bruno had previously thought. These depicted beasts on cave walls, long regarded as deities of the hunt, might instead have been deities of the sky. Not the animals that man hoped to trap and kill and skin and eat, but those animals that shone as arrangements of stars in the celestial heavens, wondrously out of reach.
The depictions on the walls and ceiling of places like Lascaux and Combarelles in the Périgord, recently discovered Chauvet in the Ardèche, the caves of the Guyenne, if these painted animals were not hunted beasts but star maps, meant to anticipate the movements of the heavens, this indicated quite a few things about H. sapiens, in terms of his sophistication.
The famous red hands we find in various caves, he said, that arch overhead, hand over hand stamped up a wall like rising heat—like a migraine, he said, that blots your vision (Bruno, I was having one an hour ago!)—no one knew what these handprints were. Some now suspected they represented the Milky Way. Dung beetles take their cues from the Milky Way, to find their way back to their nests. Odysseus could not have sailed home without Ursa Major, which he kept on his left as he traveled eastward. The Great Bear and Little Bear circle the north celestial pole. The star farthest north seems to stand still as the rest of the night sky turns, Bruno said. This is Polaris, he said, the lodestar or steering star.
I want you to go outside, he said, and find that star.
If it is not yet night as you read my letter, cease reading until night falls. When it is dark, start here again.
Go out under the night sky. You’ll see the Big Dipper. Even under a full moon you will see it, and now, in late summer, know that its handle points up. The dipper’s cup, which to me has always looked like a cart without wheels, has two stars that form its front. Draw a mental line between those two stars that form the front of the cart, and extend upward, to the first bright star that intersects with your line. That is Polaris. Learn this, and it will be something you carry with you.
Go now, he said, and do this.
It was a plain request, a simple demand, to go outside and look up.
The letter had been sent tonight. Would Pascal or any of them do as he said? Jérôme would not. Perhaps none of them would.
