Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities

Paris

Paris In New York I wrote on little cards to explain what had happened in Paris. Walking along the Seine I remembered Melissa who said, think of me when you’re there. As if by imagining her I could bring her to me, the mirrored bands of water, the thickly gessoed sky. The first bed I bought for myself was in college after I moved out of the dorms. When I slept in that bed which had long belonged to someone else I felt I had dreams that were not my own dreams. I could not describe them except to say I held a knife in my hand which was a real knife, one my mother had given me for my kitchen when I moved out of the house. And that there were words written in fire on the wall of the bedroom. But I didn’t want words graven in fire. A river I have lived along. Long since I lived the river. The first night I left the apartment on rue Tiphaine and walked through Champ de Mars towards the river. The streets wet with asters and deletions. On the bridge across the river to the Trocadero gardens a street artist was drawing a young French man in charcoal. 44 | A crowd had gathered around to watch the beautiful lines of his face appear shadow by shadow on the blank paper. His irises were nearly black like an animal’s. I imagined myself in that crowd of people. What I wondered about the young man—that his face was so beautiful, eyes so open and clear— I wondered if my father had ever wondered about me, about my face. He wrote in Arabic script on one of my sister’s paintings, “You face is like a flower.” It’s my face I dreamed he said that about. I wanted to stay and be lost. Who doesn’t want to drown in the beauty of another. Underneath the bridge the river in the corner of the city I had never been. Within a couple of days of arriving I had the practicalities taken care of: francs in my pocket, a subway card, a library card, enough basic French picked up from the airport to center of the city I could find my way around. I knew where Gertrude Stein had lived, where Sartre and De Beauvoir were buried, Duras. At the cemetery I saw an abandoned mausoleum, its doors lying open, the shelf inside empty. A stained glass window above broken, the crack letting through a slice of the sky’s actual blue. Blue why I couldn’t see the prison torn down or why I could see the cathedral. | 45 Certain when I went to Chartres that all the stories about the Veil of the Virgin were true. Bones scattered and saved in gold reliquaries and hidden in crypts. I realized I had better apply some thought to the question of God and what He wants from us. Being for the moment more interesting to think about that than what we want from Him. Because if there was actually a Veil of the Virgin and I believe that much, believe it from seeing a cloth purported to be the Veil in question. Then. When we walked under the bridge I heard rain and other reasons. Here disappearance you followed the sound of drums across the river to the Trocadero. All kinds of people had gathered on the plaza overlooking the river and the tower. There were a couple of vendors who had spread out blankets on which to sell small crafts. The drummers. No one was dancing and though you wanted to dance you did not yet speak that language. Beneath Paris a necropolis. Like a rumor of hallways and hallways of bones, arm bones and skulls and leg bones, whole chambers of pelvic bones. A rumor also that the digging under the city nearly caused a collapse of the streets and so the bone-houses were abandoned. 46 | They are not really there, I was convinced. You couldn’t really find them. It couldn’t possibly be true. I found myself at a party full of my cousins’ friends, barely any of them spoke English. I fussed my best but could hardly communicate anything, yet I found myself trying to say the most complicated things. Is that why my sentences broke into little phrases. Because...