Complete Stories (13 page)

“Is that all you can do?” his wife was demanding, an orchid of anger blossoming in her voice. “Beat them? Why don’t you ever help me instead of
ruining
our …”

All this time a part of Raumer’s mind had been fiddling with his image of Paris. Now instead of trying to make it come right he let it
be
backward, let himself go. He felt a rush of freedom. And disappeared.

He snapped back on the steps of the Louvre, thirty meters away. Nothing looked backwards anymore. In a twinkling instant the two heavily ornamented wings of the building had changed places. His tail-bone hurt where he’d dropped onto the steps. Across the road he could see Cybele and the kids looking for him.

“Bhom bhom bho-la?”

Raumer turned. A tall African was hunkering just behind him. A street-vendor. They were all over Paris this June. White plastic ivory elephants, brittle leather belts, strangely patterned wallets, and the little drums mounted on sticks. The vendor was twirling one of the drums between his fingers. There were two clay marbles attached with string, and when the drum twirled, the marbles rattled on the taut skins. “Bhom bhom bho-la?”

“
Non merci. Pas acheter.
” As he tried to brush the peddler off, the utter strangeness of what had just happened was hitting Raumer. He had been over there, and now he was here. Had he blacked out? But there was nothing stronger than coffee and a hangover in his system. Across the road, Iris squealed and pointed up at him.

“
Je vous le donne
,” the African said, holding out the little drum. Still twirling it. Pattapattapattapat. “
Pour devenir sauteur
.” Serious eyes under a high, noble forehead.

Raumer took the drum.
For becoming a jumper
. So the African had seen. Raumer had really jumped thirty meters. But …

Iris came pumping up the steps, her eyes fixed on the toy. “Can it be mine, Dad?”

A light touch of long fingers on Raumer’s shoulder. “
Inquirez devant le Centre Pompidou
.” He turned to thank, to ask, but the tall African was already gliding down the steps, no leg-movements visible under his black and yellow dashiki.

Iris was tugging at the drum now. One of the little clay marbles came off and bounced down the steps. Raumer bared his teeth at the child, then retrieved the ball. He slipped it into his coat pocket with the drum before the others could start in.

“You didn’t have to run off like that,” Cybele said, looking not quite pleased to have found him. “We didn’t even see you cross the street.”

“Daddy bought a toy drum, and it’s mine,” Iris announced. Jimmy’s face quivered, and Howard stepped forward, alert eyes fixed on the bulge in Raumer’s pocket.

“What is the matter with you children?” Cybele demanded. “Can’t you stop asking for things for one
minute
?”

“I’ll get them each a drum,” Raumer muttered. Four of the Africans were standing in a group ten meters away. Impassively, with long arcing gestures, they were working a stream of Canadian tourists. They could have been catching fish. Raumer hesitated, trying to decide which one he had talked with.

“You will not,” Cybele said, taking his arm. An old lady had just stepped out of a cab and onto the curb next to them. Cybele called to the cab driver in rapid French, then herded Raumer in. “I am going to feed you and these children before you murder each other.”

Raumer had a veal cutlet with a fried egg on it; Cybele had calf-brains in brown butter; and the kids each had a little steak with
pommes frites
. Coffee, apple juice, wine…they were all smiling at each other. A cool June day in Paris. It’s ridiculous what a difference food makes. The kids drifted across the cheap restaurant to play pinball with two francs they had scrounged.

Raumer took the toy drum out of his pocket to tie the string Iris had snapped. “So you did buy one,” Cybele said, lighting a cigarette. “It’s cute.”

“One of those Africans gave it to me,” Raumer said. “For jumping thirty meters through hyperspace.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I figure that’s what happened. When I disappeared. I’d been having that mirror-image feeling again and …”

Cybele sighed a cloud of smoke. “This is our vacation, Charlie. Our last chance. Can’t you wait till you’re back in your library to be so crazy?” She tried to soften the last word with a strained smile.

“I don’t think it’s crazy to be writing a book on the history of the fourth dimension. What am I supposed to do…walk around holding your hand as if we were still courting?”

“It might be nice.” Suddenly her reserve broke. “Oh, Charlie, don’t you care? We fell in love here. And if now all we can do is…
fight
…then we’re …” She held a supplicating hand out across the table.

“My jumping like that fits in with the theory I found in the Hinton book,” Raumer said slowly, not really noticing his wife. “We have a slight thickness in the fourth dimension. We’re like coins sliding around on a table-top. Our consciousness is down with the table-top…but if you somehow identify with the
top
side of the coin then things look backwards. At the Louvre I finally let myself go all the way up. The momentum flipped me right off the board. I could have come down anywhere. I could have come down backwards or sideways …”

While he talked, Raumer twirled the carved rod sticking out of the little tom-tom’s side. The strings and weights followed along, trailing like a galaxy’s spiral arms. When he reversed direction, the little marbles pattered on the tight skins. He rolled the stick back and forth, getting the hang of it. Pattapat. Pattapattapat.

“You don’t…you don’t really …” Cybele began, then gave up. “Why don’t we all rest and then go see the Pompidou Art Center at Beaubourg?” she suggested in a charged, artificially bright voice. “I hear it’s the kind of place where you and the kids won’t get bored.”

A wail cut the air. Howard. Iris had pushed the reset button on the pinball machine, and Howard’s franc had been lost. Raumer went over to put in another coin.

The machine was called
Dimension Warp
. The glass scoreboard carried a bright picture of two women learning the ropes from a hyperspace pilot who’s a robot. Those naughty cuties are taking notes and licking the points of their thick pencils…while that jivey robobopster fingers the controls. The player as machine, courting curvy Nature. Groovy.

Raumer split three games with Iris and Howard. Jimmy got to pull the plunger. The machine had an unusual feature, a little ramp a ball could jump over to land somewhere else on the board…in a special and otherwise inaccessible free-game hole if you were lucky. The cover-glass was set up high enough so the ball could sail quite a distance before clacking back into the plane of normal play.

“That’s what you did, Daddy,” Howard said the first time the ball made its trip through the third dimension.

“What do you mean?” Raumer gave his son a sharp look. He couldn’t always tell what went on behind that smooth seven-year-old forehead.

“He means that your turn’s over,” Iris interjected. They left it at that.

Their hotel was nearby, and Cybele wanted to go up to rest and change shoes. Little Jimmy needed a nap and Iris wanted to keep an eye on her mother. Eager to avoid the possibility of another ugly scene in the tiny hotel room, Raumer proposed that he kill some time with Howard and meet the others in front of the Pompidou Center in an hour and a half. Cheerfully, father and son boarded the Metro.

In between stations the DuBonnet ads flickered past. DUBO…DU-BON…DUBONNET…DUBO…DUBON…DUBONNET…Over and over. A pun.
Du beau
: lovely;
du bon
: tasty. Cybele had explained it to him the first time he’d come to Paris. Twelve years now. She’d been an art student then and he’d been at the
Université
on a scholars exchange program. An American machine courting a French cutie. Somehow he’d won her. But now he only wondered why he’d wanted to.

“What if the ball went under the board like a subway?” Howard asked suddenly, his big opened eyes reflecting in the black glass.

Cybele had told Raumer about Howard’s long ruminations. “All the machinery, the electrical stuff, is under the board,” he smiled. “The ball would probably get stuck, half under and half over.”

He had a sudden impulse to talk to the boy, to teach him something. He hardly knew the child, really. In the normal run of things Cybele did all the work with the children.

“Imagine this, Howard. Imagine that there were pictures that could slide around just on the pinball board. What would the ball look like to them when it rolled around?”

“Like a ball.”

“No, dummy. If all they could see was what touched their plane, then the ball would look like a dot moving around.”

“Unless you pushed it through.”

“That’s right. If you pushed the ball through the plane they’d see a circular cross-section. And when the ball jumps off the ramp, they’d think it had disappeared.”

“Why do you call it a cross-section? Cross means X.”

“It can mean cutting, too. If I had a real big sharp knife I could make a cross-section of you…cut you down the middle and shave off a nice thin …” Raumer stopped himself. That was no way to talk to a child. What was the matter with him?

At the next stop they had to change trains. Raumer’s memory was still playing tricks on him…they caught their connecting train in the wrong direction. Upset, he yelled at Howard for wanting to go to the bathroom.

When they finally got to the right stop, the boy’s face had turned into a tight little mask. Raumer suddenly realized that no one in his family really liked him. They had no reason to. Trying to buy a smile, he gave Howard the toy drum. No reaction. They climbed the stairs, and stepped out into the plaza next to the
Centre Pompidou
.

The building itself is as wonderful as anything in it. It is built inside-out, with all the structural supports, heating shafts, escalators, plumbing and electrical conduits attached to the outside walls. The machinery is all outside, and the traditional decoration is all hanging on the walls inside. The marvelous joke is that a lot of those functional-looking pipes outside are fake…pure this-is-not-a-decoration decoration. It isn’t enough for the building to
be
inside out, it has to
look
inside out.

The plaza was dotted with idlers, many of them arranged into circles around street-performers: a juggler, a fire-eater lying on a mound of broken glass, and a crazy man shouting fifty years too late about the surrealist staple of
rayons ultraviolets
. The chilly breeze was snatching the words out of people’s mouths and scattering them around the big square.

Right by the subway stairs there were a few sidewalk artists waiting for people to drop coins onto the pastels they’d drawn on the stone ground. One of the artists had filled in the black outline of a boy with fanciful pictures of body organs and thoughts.

Howard begged till Raumer put half a franc on the man’s picture, and then he pulled his father over to join a group watching a snake-charmer. Snakers are supposed to be Indian, but this charmer was another of the dashiki-clad Africans.

He was squatting on a piece of cloth patterned with squares and slanting lines. His snakes writhed sluggishly and spilled out of a big wicker basket. His flute was a gourd with two pipes sticking out. One pipe had holes for fingering the eerie, wandering notes, and the other let air out to play on the face of the snake being charmed.

A cobra on the basket top wove back and forth, following the movements of the snaker’s flute. Its hood was spread menacingly, and occasionally it made as if to strike. The tune drifted up and down a pentatonic scale, weaving like the snake’s body. Little Howard began twirling his drum in accompaniment. Typically, he’d been able to play it as soon as Raumer gave it to him.

When the snaker heard the sound of the pattering, his eyes flashed at them. The tune speeded up, and Howard kept pace. Slowly the snaker rose to a crouch, drawing the cobra higher and higher. Finally he was standing erect on his long legs and the cobra had reared up to an impossible height. Raumer hoped its venom sacs were gone. The music cut off abruptly and the cobra collapsed back to a great, shifting coil.

“Bhom bhom bho-la!” the African shouted. He was an imposing man with stiff ebony features. A few coins pattered onto the tessellated cloth beneath his feet. “
Dix francs de plus et je vous montre une merveille
!” He held out his ten fingers. He wanted more money.

Perhaps this was the man he’d been told to see, Raumer thought. That African by the Louvre had said something about coming here. On a sudden impulse he fingered a limp bill out of his pocket and tossed it onto the snaker’s cloth. Ten francs. It seemed like play-money.

“
Merci, Monsieur De L’Espace
,” the tall black man said with a slight bow. “
Et maintenant! Le truc Indien
!” He whistled sharply, penetratingly, and a young African boy in shorts came running across the square, carrying a heavy coiled rope.

The snaker gave a longer speech then, but Raumer couldn’t follow it. What had the man called him? Mister Space? He couldn’t figure it out. What a strange day this was. First that funny gap or jump near the Louvre…and now this snake charmer was making a rope uncoil and slowly rise into the air.

Howard was tugging his sleeve; he had something to say. “There’s a thread attached to the rope,” came the deafening whisper. “The little boy is pulling it up.”

The kid was right. Sharp-eyed little devil. There was a grey thread leading up from the rope. The thread looped over a nail in the air over-head, and the little assistant was surreptitiously reeling the thread in behind his back. Ten francs for such a cheap…a nail in the air?

The music squeaked, rose higher, and disappeared into the supersonic. The snaker laid down his flute. The end of the rope was up at the nail…it looked more like a thorn, really. With a single precise gesture, the African reached up and attached the rope to the thorn.

Meanwhile the little boy was sitting on the cube-patterned cloth, binding a long thorn lengthwise to the bottom of each foot. The thorns stuck out in front like crampons.