Michel Thomas had been injured in the riot. He’d gotten a projectile to the face, resulting in a black eye, as could be seen in news photos all over the internet. It helped to confirm his reputation for uncanny timing, for prescience. Notorious and nonpartisan, Thomas was always at the scene of the crime, a bystander and observer to society’s convulsions. Cagey, a likely reactionary, but most of all, a writer with no affiliations, with a talent for washing up on the shores of chaos.
The state was going after Pascal Balmy. There were photos of him and Jérôme and Alexandre in the paper. Their families had hired the finest lawyers in Paris to represent them. The police had launched a massive raid of Le Moulin, and as evidence they cleared out every last volume from their library of five thousand books.
Jean was under investigation. Bruno’s name also came up, as a “bizarre survivalist” who had mentored the group, but they had found no evidence of illegality so far.
Bruno had changed his email password. I could no longer hack his account. This hurt, but I understood.
There were long debates on French TV over whether, juridically, these people could be held accountable for the death of Platon.
Meanwhile Nancy was getting her attention, making her case. Someone had scanned and uploaded to the internet the twenty-five hundred FBI documents that the Feds had released to Nancy and the boy. An activist with hours and hours to kill might sift through them and come up with information about me. I myself had no instinct to do that work, or to glance at even a single page of those documents. There was nothing in them for me to learn.
What had Bruno said about the future?
When we face our need to control it, we are better able to resist that need, and to live in the present.
I stopped reading news articles. I stopped watching videos. My new rule about drinking had been an attempt to rid myself of a crippling attachment. The internet was yet another crippling attachment, and so I banned it.
I walked for hours each afternoon on knobby paths along the cliffs above the sea.
I walked to a lighthouse and watched its magnificent crystal flash and turn.
There’s that old myth about the humble lighthouse and the giant battleship. The ship has mistaken the lighthouse for a boat, a little pissant boat that better get out of its way. The captain of the battleship comes on the radio, to command the little boat to move, a boat that he doesn’t understand is a lighthouse on a rock. The captain believes he is in a power struggle with the thing in his path and that the more forceful and arrogant he is, the more likely it will yield. He is not wrong that he is engaged in a struggle for dominance. He’s only wrong that he’ll win.
The hotel would close soon for the winter. My friend, the sloe-eyed clerk, told me about a small house I could rent cheaply, on a bluff above the cliffs beyond the little village.
My first night in the new house, I went out on the veranda and lay down and looked up at the deep.
I proceeded as Bruno had taught me:
First, locate the Big Dipper, by the four points of its cart.
There it was. The tinker’s cart. A cart he fills with wares to be sold and pushes across the sky. The cart of an eternal traveler.
Form a line from the bottom corner of the front of the cart, Bruno had said, to the star at the upper corner. Continue that line upward, to Polaris.
Polaris does move, Bruno had explained, as the earth’s axis shifts, in a cycle that lasts twenty-six thousand years. Just a little less than the gap of time between us, he had said, and the mysterious people who put their pictures on the walls of Lascaux, who put a reflecting pool of the night sky in the lightless chambers of the earth.
I can’t intuit their reasons, Bruno had said. But I can be certain they studied the sky. And that we must, as well.
Polaris glowed, the steadfast star, Bruno had called it. Reliable and fixed, and yet the sailor-priests of Polynesia had managed without it.
A key principle of their navigation, Bruno had explained, was an inversion of movement: destinations arrived toward sailors, rather than sailors moving toward destinations.
This concept of seafaring was called etak, Bruno had instructed, or “moving island”—in which a sailor in a canoe traveling the open ocean, whether standing with his legs apart feeling wave-swell, or seated and rowing, or seated and not rowing, this sailor was himself stationary, while waves and the occasional landmass flowed past his boat.
These sailors weren’t stupid, Bruno had said. They knew they were not actually standing still. They were employing a special form of cognition, a skill that was crucial to getting somewhere.
You and I, Bruno had said, don’t live in their world. Our own earth, our version of it, is fitted with Cartesian coordinates, a straitjacket of plumb lines and cross-stitches. The sky is no longer visible in most places. Our stars have been replaced by satellites, whose clocks tell atomic time.
With GPS you can know your location without looking out the window, he had said.
You can know your location without knowing your location.
You can know things without knowing anything.
We often proceed as if we know things without a sense of what knowledge even is, Bruno had said.
The earth is turning, for instance: sure, we know that because we’ve memorized it. But our knowledge of the earth’s turn is false, it is knowledge without context, disconnected from the rest of the universe.
When the sun rises, we think it’s rising. When it sets, we think it’s setting.
The sun is not rising, and it is not setting. The sun, my friends, has no daily orbit.
He had called them his friends.
Bruno, they were not your friends.
It is us, he had gone on, who are moving. The earth is turning, and we don’t sense it.
We’ve ceased to locate ourselves in a larger system, a grand design. We’ve cut the rope, my children.
His children.
They don’t deserve to be your children, Bruno.
Here, perched over the dark, calm bed of the Spanish sea, the sky was the same as a Guyenne sky.
When you engage the heavens, Bruno had said, you merge into the flow of time, the right-now and the before and the to-come.
