After he makes bail and collects his personal effects from the capricious, crooked-nosed corrections officer working behind the bulletproof glass, Edward de Vere limps from the county jail and takes a seat outside on one of the benches that faces the broken fountain in the center of the sprawling, concrete plaza. It's morning now. A cold wind lashes his face. Black exhaust from a passing bus stings his eyes. When the smoke finally clears, he sees the woman from last night gliding gracefully across the slick pavement. In her purple dress she looks like a phantom freed from cumbersome flesh, the agony of existence. He wonders if she has been waiting for him the entire time, keeping vigil out here in the cold. With a furtive glance over his shoulder to make sure the cops aren't observing him, he stands up and approaches the woman. If they catch him speaking to her, they will almost certainly charge him again with solicitation.
It's the first time de Vere has seen her in broad daylight, and he studies her features carefully. She might be thirty, she might be fifty, it's impossible to say, but unlike the usual castaways he chances upon in hotel bars and restaurants—those lonely, ruminative spinsters politely sipping cosmopolitans and hoping, even well into middle age, to have a romantic encounter with a dashing stranger but who in the end always settle for the usual scamming rogues, men like de Vere and sometimes men far worse—this woman understands that romance is nothing more than a fantasy, a sickness, a disease no different from the angry sores erupting on her arms and legs or the black nodules spreading through her lungs.
He calls her name, but she doesn't seem to hear, gives no sign. She climbs over the polished granite rim of the fountain and stares at something near the patinated bronze sphere. Using the lethal tips of her stilettos, she cracks the thin sheets of ice that have formed around the perimeter and then searches through the scattered bits of copper for the occasional glint of a silver coin. The pigeons follow her around like lost children and peck at her ankles. She tries to kick them aside and almost falls over.
De Vere decides to take a calculated risk. "Pardon me. What did you say your name was?"
She looks up and scowls. "I told you last night."
"Tamar, isn't it?"
"Why you asking if you already know it?"
Though he is mad with thirst, desperate for a glass of water, he says, "I thought maybe we could get a drink together."
"A drink?"
"Yes, if you know a joint that's open this early in the morning."
Polishing a quarter on the hem of her skirt, she says, "You're buying, right?"
"Naturally."
"Okay, come with me."
Since neither of them has a car they must travel on foot. Like children in a fairytale, banished to a forest of twisted black trees teeming with tribes of ravenous nightroaming trolls, they follow a trail of cigarette butts through the ruin and desolation of the old neighborhood. They walk beneath the steel arches of a bridge on the verge of collapse; they pass boarded-up storefronts and faded billboards for cheap liquor and high interest loans; they slog up a gray ridge strangled by long tendrils of telephone lines; and in a weed-choked gravel lot, they battle through a cloud of buzzing flies and nearly trip over the remains of a dog, its belly bloated with corpse gas, its tongue angling toward a puddle of oily water.
"Gonzago..." de Vere mutters with affection.
"What you say?"
De Vere pauses to catch his breath. He rests his hands on his knees and asks, "Do you know what day it is?"
"Saturday, I think. I dunno."
"No, no, no. What holy day is it?"
"The fucking Epiphany. How should I know?
"It's the Day of the Dead, my dear."
"Ain't no such holiday."
"There most certainly is. So it's only fitting that we should find ourselves wandering the streets and alleys of this wretched necropolis."
"Man, you like to talk a lot of shit, don't you?"
As he wades through the brown surges of foul odor emanating from the sewers, he decides on a different approach. In the plodding English of this devastated industrial town—his mother tongue, brusque, arrhythmic, percussive—he jokes how the city looks like Montemarte after the long awaited apocalypse, Sacre Coeur bulldozed to make way for a row of lamentable tenement buildings, a once magnificent view of the Eiffel Tower obstructed by the sulfur-spewing stacks of a blast furnace. De Vere knows he must stop daydreaming about the charmed life he once led and learn to accept his precipitous descent into bankruptcy and hopeless destitution. He is a barbarian returned at long last to the provinces, the city of his birth, a puissant thanatocracy where not even the specter of death offers the howling, beggared multitude a way to escape from so much pointless suffering. Indeed, the Church has always taught him that it is only after death that the real suffering begins.
A dozen blackbirds explode from an abandoned duplex and wheel in the sky.
"In its own weird way," he says, "this is a very pretty place."
The woman snorts. "Yeah, sure, and someone once said that hell is probably a pretty place."
Edward De Vere smiles. Yes, he thinks, life here is very different than in the City of Light. Different languages, different customs, different states of mind.
