I applauded Bruno Lacombe’s technological fumbles, which were surely responsible for the footprint he left on a discussion board dedicated to Soviet cryptozoologist Boris Nevsky. Bruno had posted a question about Nevsky’s archives, and whether any of Nevsky’s papers had been uploaded to the internet. His username on this discussion board was his email address—which contained his full name, and so it had popped up in Google—a wanadoo.fr account whose password I guessed correctly on my eleventh try.
In the emails themselves, Bruno explained that the diaphanous and spectral nature of this form of communication suited him, but, he caveated, it was important to remember that every technology is blessing or disaster, depending.
Of that moment when man first sparked fire—if such a moment could be isolated, and more and more these days he believed it could not be, in the sense that to believe in an original moment you had to believe in clock time, in calendar time, and he was dispensing with those concepts—he told Pascal and the group that although he himself was a crudivore, meaning he forwent the cooked, he did not reject fire completely. He maintained a hearth and used it. He said he built small fires. He said only a fool makes a large fire. He repeated this in a few different emails he sent them, like a mantra, a slogan, a cryptic cue.
I assumed he meant that a fire is best kept discreet. In the ancient world, and in this one, too, a fire would signal a person’s location. It might telegraph that a person had meat and was cooking it. A big fire was perhaps like a dinner bell, inviting unwanted guests to join you.
I took note of Bruno’s proviso about fools and big fires, sensing it could be a warning to Pascal and the group, either to stay under the radar, in regard to Tayssac, or to plan acts that were more subtle and sly.
Bruno said it amused him that anthropologists had never figured out how our ancestors had built fires inside caves without suffering the mal-effects of smoke. Live in a cave for a while, he said, and you will know the answer. When the hearth is correctly positioned in the dead center of the space, smoke travels up, pools along the ceiling, and forms one tidy column as it exits. The smoke does not wander and linger; it knows where to go. The lower edges of the cave remain breathable, safe for sleeping, for preparing food, and for man’s paramount art, which is thinking.
Bruno had renounced much of the baggage that came with man’s ascent into the world of the cooked, but fire itself he regarded as mystical. It was fire that allowed the Thals to sleep for long stretches, warm and safe from animals, who were warded off by the plume of smoke exiting their cave. Protected from predators and from harsh climates by their fire, the Neanderthals had slept for longer and longer periods, from generation to generation. Sleep was key to thought, and to intellectual development. As man’s thoughts became ever more complex, the longer he needed to sleep. The longer man slept, Bruno said, the more he dreamed, and the more penetrating and wondrous his waking thought became.
In his own cave, and its semblance of ancient life, Bruno said that he practiced sleep as a discipline. He had trained himself to sleep upwards of twelve hours a night. Sleep is time travel, he said. Sleep is revolutionary. And most importantly, he said, sleep feels good.
The more a person dreams, the more they imagine upon waking or before bedding back down, in those states, hypnagogic or waking, and hypnopompic or drifting off (Bruno had “pomp” and “gog” reversed, but I knew what he meant), which give us access to the invisible-real.
The point, he said, was that imagination and sleep and dreaming were the interwoven tresses of a single glossy braid, and this thick braid was a sign of health in a grand sense, of the heaven right here on earth, a garden of delights you should not wait for, pray for, but live in, occupy, and enjoy.
I pictured a braid that was a rope. I could not picture what it led to. All I saw was the rope.
LUCIEN AND I left the bar together and walked. It was a fresh and mild sunny day. We wound up side by side on our backs in the grass of the Place des Vosges.
Lucien pointed to a building along the square and said the writer Victor Hugo had lived there. He moved his arm so that it made glancing contact with my arm. I didn’t move mine and he didn’t move his. We lay with our arms touching.
After a while he turned toward me and ran his thumb over my face very lightly, and then he kissed me. I kissed back, but with a prim hesitancy. No need to rush this. Let him believe he’s making every move and every decision. Let him be certain he is in control.
He sat up on an elbow and looked at me. I was aware that my hair was fanning out over the grass and that this was the repose of a woman in bed, her hair spread over the pillow, a man above her looking down.
“What,” he said, smiling, detecting a spark in my eye, which he read as a spark of my happiness, my interest in him, presuming my emotions in this moment, us staring at each other, mirrored his own emotions at this moment.
I was happy. So happy I could almost feel my pupils dilate as I met his gaze. Things were going as I’d planned them to.
And then he leaned in like billions before him have done, acting upon a desire to kiss some woman. In such a scene between new lovers, a moment repeated everywhere all the time with no originality to it—none—Lucien surely felt that something singular and novel was taking place.
He pulled away from our shy kisses, gazing at me, thinking, deciding. And then he came down over me, shading my face from the sun, pushed his warm lips against mine, and thrust his tongue in my mouth with all the passion that his restrained manners, his effete bourgeois politeness, would have allowed him to muster.
For Lucien, what happened that day fit with how he saw himself, and who he wanted to be.
It felt right to him that he would fall in love with a stranger he encountered while playing pinball in an empty bar on a weekday afternoon, a mysterious woman with a cute American accent (my Rs are unapologetic American Rs) and a body he wanted to subdue but would be in no hurry to subdue, because he was well-bred (and on account of that breeding, inhibited).
I could sense him gathering a false hindsight that afternoon in the Place des Vosges, shaping a retrospective narrative, the thing a person tells himself about fate, about how everything had seemed fated, when the only evidence of this fate is how things went.
Something happens and people think, This was meant to be. The random nature of luck and of incident is too disturbing to acknowledge. I’m not the first to know this. It’s in the Bible. Ecclesiastes declares that life has no meaning, that evil will be rewarded, and goodness punished. He says that even the most honorable man can be left in town to die in the street, while the greediest fool gets a eulogy and a proper burial. But either people skip that part of the Old Testament, or they never read the Bible at all, and instead they follow their instinct to mythify a sequence of random events and the stream of strangers they encounter in life: Good things happen to them or people they like and they think, “justice.” Bad things happen to people they don’t like and once again they think, “justice.”
This is part of why a cold bump can be so effective: Lucien believed that he summoned me into his life by heart alone, by fate. He believed he deserved to fall in love (everyone believes they deserve this) and, in his specific case, with someone like me. His satisfied desire was a reward, as if it were part of a grand design based on birthright, on being from a good family, and making good choices, moral choices, and aesthetic ones too.
We took turns kissing and talking, lying on the grass of the Place des Vosges. Lucien was telling me about Victor Hugo, how Victor Hugo, exiled to the island of Guernsey in the English Channel, had heard voices in the waves, addressing him on the subject of the future of France.
As he spoke about Victor Hugo, I was hearing a voice in the waves of my own thoughts. What it said was that this thing with Lucien was a done deal. A done deal, the voice said. Which might also be, at least indirectly, about the future of France.
Three months later, we were living together.
LUCIEN DIDN’T ASK A LOT OF QUESTIONS, either before I moved into his apartment or after. He wanted to marry me and often told people I was his wife.
I said I made my income walking dogs, as this located me in far-flung neighborhoods like Vincennes, where I was in fact spending time, and had seen, in its large park, young people walking a jumble of random dogs that were not their own, and I had decided it was a good lie. Walking dogs was solitary and independent, piecemeal and part-time. Informal work that was impossible to verify, and from which Lucien would want to save me.
I said I was from Priest Valley, California. To French people, this sounds fine—poetic, even. Priest Valley. The name perhaps sent Lucien, a cinephile and aspiring moviemaker, picturing the casting ground for a Robert Bresson film, a land of rural pieties. A bare wood table, a tin cup, a flock of sheep, the clang of a church bell heard from a distance, et cetera.
In fact, no one lives in Priest Valley, California, not a single person. And not even people from California could tell you where Priest Valley is. Priest Valley is a signpost. Beyond it, on the left side of the road, are three ruined and vacant outbuildings and a row of untended old poplar trees that some settler must have planted a hundred years ago (trees that I had thought of when I’d first glimpsed the poplars at the top of the little road leading to the country home of Lucien’s family). Priest Valley is on Highway 198, which is itself unknown to native Californians, a route passing between mountain ranges in the very center of the state, a rural two-lane byway traversing a valley of pure green, like you’re gazing at the landscape through a Heineken bottle. There are no ranches, no developments, nothing but bottle-green hills.
The name Priest Valley exists on maps and was satisfactory to Lucien, as it would be to any of the people I might interact with at Le Moulin, Pascal Balmy or any of the others, if they inquired where I was from.
But my involvement with Lucien, childhood friend of Pascal Balmy, would reduce the number of questions they might ask, and curtail the usual paranoia you find with insurrectionary groups.
Lucien said he wanted Pascal to be a witness at our wedding, which was charming, in the sense that it’s charming when I know a whole lot more about a stranger and how he thinks than his best friend knows: Pascal would never have agreed. Ritual bonds, to Pascal Balmy, must not be tainted by the involvement of the state, which is his enemy. There won’t be a wedding anyhow, as by the time all the paperwork for such an affair might be completed, I will be gone.
But for now, I was the romantic partner of Lucien.
I was from Priest Valley, California.
I spoke French well, if not elegantly.
I was a thirty-four-year-old American, with a sex appeal that, for Lucien, was mysterious and could not be reduced to my looks. (And neither could it be reduced to my notable breasts, even as the novelty of them had not yet worn off for him.)
I had seen many of the films he cared about, talked about. This was important, because cinephiles like Lucien draw for their confidence to make films from their knowledge of film history, without understanding that the essential spark elevating a movie to art never derives from the low domain of “expertise.” Cinephiles are accountants, but I could speak their language.
I was suitably cultured, with an education, as Lucien understood it, that I had never figured out how to apply. And until recently I had walked dogs part-time for a few rich families out in Vincennes.
