Dostoyevskian
Antihero
The
nightclub was a converted warehouse on the Left Bank, just a block from the
river. They had painted the outside a muddy ochre. You went up a winding
staircase made of black slats, like a fancy fire escape, to a gap in the side
of the second level. You walked into the dark space with a bar running along
the front wall roughly parallel with the river and with an empty stage at the
other end. Barely discernible forms flitted among the tables, into or out of the
mysterious booths lining the east and west walls, up or down the interior stairs
between the second and third levels. I ushered my friends Matthew and Piper
into the space where they stood gawking, eyes adjusting, for a few minutes
before I could persuade them to sit down at a table near the center. I went to
get us drinks.
Not long after I sat down, I noticed
Matthew looking with his customary interest at the dark svelte forms passing at
intervals on all sides of us. Somewhere from age eighteen to twenty-three,
wearing black chemises and skirts that hugged and flattered their compact
figures, they passed almost noiselessly but not without glimmers of interest. From
a few of the other tables there came murmurs, faint snatches of talk.
We laughed and drank our way through
a few more rounds. After a couple of hours, I sensed movement in the space
behind Piper, who was sitting with his back toward the stage. I saw the
outlines of a form on the stage walking in our direction. Yes, I thought I saw
one of the weak isolated cones of light fall on a face with angrily arching
eyebrows and an absurdly elongated nose, like part of a monster mask put
together on the cheap for use in a kids’ play. Behind that nose there must be a
string, running around the back of the wearer’s head. After it passed out of
that cone of light, I did not see the form again, no matter how diligently I
scanned the stage. We went on drinking and talking.
Here is what I had not told my
friends. One of the vilest people in the world strolled through the avenues and
pavilions of the great city. A superficially charming man named Frank Russo had
the most ambitious plan to date to harness the universe of porn and prostitution
here in Paris and make it more readily available, through streaming and live
feed technologies, to a global clientele. Deeply repelled by the sex trade, I
had deliberately sought out places where we might run into Frank Russo. I
loathed him.
“So is this what you guys wanted?”
I took their satisfied manner for a
yes. Matthew said, “I heard there’s this place, somewhere here in the city,
where you can see, like, fifty nude women up on a stage at once, dancing and
moving in formation.”
“No way,” said Piper.
“Is that so remarkable?”
“It’s the concept I can’t get my
head around. I heard someone say, you know when you see it that it’s not porn.
It is so not porn.”
More shapes passed by on all sides. There
were accents around me and there could be no doubt that they were American. But
as with the people here, so with the words. It was outlines that came now.
Meanwhile, Matthew was in conversation with Piper. Now an idea seemed to
solidify in their heads at the same time.
“No. Come on, you guys. No.”
“We’re gonna do it,” Piper said.
“No.”
“Don’t you fucking talk to us like
we’re a pair of dogs you give commands to.”
“Guys. The action’s right here. If
you do this thing, I can’t be responsible—”
“Come on.”
Matthew followed Piper in the
direction of the stairs leading up to a landing joined to another flight of
stairs rising to a dark hole in the ceiling. I clutched my drink, staring directly
ahead. Shapes continued to move past me on either side.
I hung out drinking for a while. In
my peripheral vision, I saw three guys come into the place and proceed right to
the stairs my friends had just gone up. Then a few more women went the same way.
I had to know what was going on up there.
The series of thin black slats felt
precarious under my feet, like an ancient fire escape. Down there in the
dimness, the head of somebody at one of the tables turned upward as if to follow
my progress.
On the tiny landing, I turned and
continued up toward the rectangle of dark space. When I reached it and forced
myself to walk through, I was on a big floor. There were more booths up here
and their layout was elaborate. Here were rows with passages between them.
There was a bar up at the front, as below. Doors of booths opened and closed. Forms
moved in the dimness. Most were clad in black as below but I thought I saw flashes
of bare flesh in motion. Yes, a couple of young women were moving around nude
except for black boots and black gloves matching their hair. I could see some
of the young men standing outside the booths gawk at these women as they
passed. Up here, voices were more audible, accents more unmistakably American.
One of the nearly nude women came up
to me. She had jet-black hair combed back into a bun, alert arching brows, and
a snub nose. The smoothness and fineness of all her features made her
exquisitely pretty. Physically I might have been ready but mentally I was not.
Her hurt look barely registered as I continued to scan the dark space for my
friends.
When my gaze settled on the center of
the room, I saw a young man in a red polo shirt pushing the woman I had spurned
toward a booth on the far side of the room. They were within arm’s reach of the
door when she broke away from him and moved off. He yelled abuse at her in a
distinctly American accent before turning away to find other prey. I lost sight
of him when I finally heard a familiar voice. It was Matthew. He was moving
away from the bar, toward me, with a lithe form, thin and with short brown
hair, clinging to his waist. Straining my eyes, I saw that she was nude from
the waist down, and her left arm extended across Matthew’s pudgy belly, her
right arm across his back.
“Matthew. You’re disgusting. Keep
moving, man, o.k.?” I said, ushering the two of them down toward the murk at
the far end, where I knew there were a lot of risqué things for them to join in
now.
“Yes master,” he replied, adding
under his breath, “Woof woof.”
Their forms receded. Sickened, I got
myself another drink. As if it weren’t hard enough to make out things and
people, my vision grew a bit blurred. I groped toward the bar and then turned
right into a bathroom with a faint lamp over a faucet next to a pair of stalls.
Feeling queasy as I thought of all the lines of coke, all the blow jobs those
stalls had contained, I downed mouthfuls of water, doused my face, and rubbed
my eyes hard.
When I was standing again in front of
one of the booths, a few of the Americans near the bar were having some kind of
altercation and shoving one another. I watched them. Maybe they were horsing
around. Beside me, the door of a booth opened and a girl I had never seen
before walked out, fully nude. A few more people trickled in and some of the Americans
fanned out from the bar. Doors of booths opened and closed. Forms moved around
me and the blurriness was still there. I reached out to one of the passing
forms. My hand landed on bare flesh and I pulled it toward me. It was the young
woman who had approached me right when I came up here. Now I really looked
carefully at the face before me. The pinched eyes, the smoothly curving lips
were there. Yes, it was the same woman.
“Comment
t’appelles-tu?”
Her name was Élisabeth. At my
urging, she shared a bit of information. She had grown up in the slums of Paris
and the story of her parents was not worth repeating, she told me. Her brother
was on a sub in the South Pacific. She appeared utterly dumbfounded that I
should want to know these things. I let her slide both of her feet around until
they touched my ankles, feeling the weight of her bare breasts against my
chest, picking up an odor on her breath of something that wasn’t mouthwash. She
kissed me. She whispered in my right ear, inviting me into a booth with her. But
I yearned now to play the role of one of Dostoyevsky’s more tortured narrators.
I gently pushed her back a few inches. I told her I hated the sex trade, which
demeaned women. I asked her a number of probing questions, about her schooling,
her early loves, her work, where she saw herself in a few years. Though amazed
at my questions, she got over this reaction quickly enough. Élisabeth’s
sexuality had begun to blossom quite early in life. But I was intrigued to find
out that reading about “nos ancêtres, les
Gaulois” had kindled Élisabeth’s interest in the vivid pageants of history,
and the exploits of Asterix and Obelix had fed that interest, but—surprise,
surprise!—her awful boyfriends over the years had habits that required her to
keep quite busy. In her eyes I saw the restless intelligence of someone whose
life was far too small for her. I thought of reasoning with and guiding her in
the manner of Dostoyevsky’s narrator in his “Tale of the Falling Sleet.” The
keen intelligence I saw in those eyes made claims on me.
I told her how sorry I was for
having pushed her away earlier. She must understand that I just was unready for
an erotic experience. The young woman told me I had failed to anticipate the
ramifications of what I did earlier. I had exposed her to demand after demand. One
horny, foul-breathed foreigner after another had come after her, making her
duck and hide in the labyrinth of booths.
Worst of all, an American in a red
polo shirt had cornered her inside a booth and taken pictures of her privates
with a tiny device. All this outraged her sense of dignity. I nodded. I offered
to get her a drink and she accepted.
Walking toward the bar, I noticed
something strange through the open door of the restroom. Something was
happening in one of the stalls and it was too much even for the crowd at this
place. People were giving gasps and cries of disgust and moving quickly out of
the bathroom, shoving others out of the way. I continued to the bar and got a
couple of mixed drinks. But when I got back to where I had been talking with
Élisabeth, I made out, in the center of the place, the back of a red polo shirt
and a flurry of limbs accompanied by curses and threats. This man had harassed
Élisabeth on several prior occasions tonight. I rushed to Élisabeth’s aid,
exclaiming and denouncing what the owner of the red shirt was doing. The
American spun around and punched me in the jaw. Even in my stupor, it felt like
getting hit with a crowbar. I staggered backward and fell to my knees. The guy in
the red shirt rushed toward the bar. He moved up beside a man in a black blazer
and handed him a tiny recording device. On that device, I knew, was footage of
Élisabeth in all kinds of poses that people around the world would soon relish,
staring and drooling over every bump and crevice and orifice of her young body.
The man in the blazer was Frank
Russo.
Strange noises came from the bathroom
on my right. I turned my gaze. People were clearing out of there, gasping and
crying, but one person, a man in his twenties with straight dark hair, stood at
the door of one of the stalls and looking on, enjoying what he saw. No, the guy
who hit me wasn’t in there. I turned again just in time to see Russo, the guy
in the red shirt, and a third stranger, a thin man with Mansonesque hair and
beard, dart past the booths and through the door. Seconds later, I was on the
black stairs again, on the lower floor, and then outside.
A breeze ruffled my hair as I ran
toward the river. I dashed across the street and up one block and then stood in
a quiet stretch of the Left Bank with shuttered stands and kiosks. But then I
saw the three, running west. I thought they all felt stunned at the speed with
which I caught up to them. I tackled the guy in the red shirt, grabbed the soft
brown hair on the back of his head, and slammed his face into the pavement
three times as hard as I could. He screamed. His friends cried out and cursed
me in the nasal tones of Suffolk County and began kicking me hard in the head
and ribs. I thought, At least I get to
die in Paris.
Piper and Matthew ran up on either
side of me and engaged with Russo’s friends. The mild side of Piper’s persona
was fully absent now. He yelled and swore as he pummeled the guy in the red
shirt. Matthew made up in size and brawn for whatever he may have lacked in the
experience of and will to violence. He and the Manson figure spun repeatedly as
they clawed and wrestled each other. Their bodies moved into the middle of the
street before I heard a crunch and realized Matthew must have broken one of his
opponent’s bones. Matthew kicked the stranger until he fell to the ground, then
slammed his face into the street.
Frank Russo leapt onto the ledge
above the river and ran along it. I pursued him. He leapt off the ledge and out
of my vision. For a moment, I thought he had chosen to end his life. On reaching
the ledge, I saw that he had timed his leap perfectly, targeting the tourist
barge moving up the river below. But maybe he had not meant to burst through
the glass rectangle covering the barge’s middle third. The impact sent shards
and flecks of glass into the hair and skin of guests enjoying steak frites and
red wine. They gave horrified cries of a kind that would be familiar in later
chapters of Parisian history.
I mounted the ledge, ran along it
after the barge, and leapt. Not much of the glass canopy was intact. I landed in
the midst of high society in disarray. Here were men in $800 suits and women in
designer dresses, crying and cursing and flicking glass off their flesh and
hair. Russo managed to stand. The people here might have taken pity on him,
given the condition of his blazer. They could not have known whether his
landing in the barge was intentional. Still less did they know what had in his
pockets.
Nor did I. Besides the recorder, he
had a knife whose ten-inch blade fit neatly in its handle. Russo’s hand darted
into his right front pocket and came out again with the knife, which he flicked
open in a move so fast I barely saw it. I continued to act on impulse and slammed
him in the jaw as hard as I could. He tried to stab me in the heart, but he just
speared the wallet in my breast pocket, thick with bills and travelers’ checks.
I lurched backward and fell, upsetting a table. A bottle of Chateau Lafite slid
off but did not break. I grabbed the bottle by the neck, stood up, and dashed
it on Russo’s head, making him scream and drop the knife. Shards and splinters
and the exquisite red wine covered both of us. He raised a hand reflexively to
the gash running from his forehead to his left temple. His brief disorientation
was all that I and the four other men inside the cabin needed.
I told them all about the illegal
recording, but I wanted no involvement with the police. While they busied
themselves with Russo, I leapt right off the barge. Thank God I’m a swimmer.
In my strange traumatized state, I
had a vague idea that I was going back to the nightclub, so imagine my surprise
when I found myself minutes later in a wide alley. Too disoriented to turn
around and look for the street the club was on, I lurched along in a southerly
direction, wincing at the pain. I fell down and agony thundered through my
body. I got up and fought onward. Then I collapsed. While I was unconscious, a
vagrant came and kicked me around and took my wallet.
The next thing I knew, I was looking
at the ceiling of a hospital. The owner of one of the kiosks had found a
bloody, ragged man lying at the base of it when he showed up for work in the
morning.
My ribs and throat and vocal cords
had gotten severely damaged, so I could not contradict anything people said.
They assumed that I had gone to check out the more risqué parts of the city and
had gotten into trouble, stupid American that I was. Piper and Matthew stood
over my bed, saying little. A young woman who came from the embassy brought me
a copy of Quiet Days in Clichy.
Michael
Washburn
After studying literature and history at Grinnell College and the University of Wisconsin, Michael Washburn moved back to the East Coast to work in publishing and journalism. His fiction has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Rosebud, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Concho River Review, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Stand, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Weirdbook, Hellfire Crossroads, and Weird Fiction Review. Michael’s story “Confessions of a Spook” won Causeway Lit’s 2018 fiction prize.