Revolution (43 page)

85

B
ack through the church.

Back through the crypt.

Back to the grave.

Amadé half drags, half carries me down the stone steps, through the tunnels, past the sad and silent dead.

We stumble on, with just the light of a lantern we stole from the church, down white stone halls, farther into the catacombs, deeper underground. Until finally he stops and eases me down, until I’m sitting on the ground, back against the wall. And he’s kneeling beside me.

“You have your light?” he asks me.

“Yeah.” It’s inside my boot. I take it out. I turn it on. The beam is so dim.

“I’ll come back with help. As soon as I’m able. The woman, she can fix you.”

I nod, but I don’t believe him. And neither does he.

“If they question you, say I had a pistol,” I tell him. “Say I held it to your back. That you broke free as soon as you could.”

“It will never work. They’ll throw me in prison.”

“It will work. It does work, Amadé. So do tritones and A minor. Don’t forget that. Jimmy Page needs you. The world won’t be the same without ‘Stairway.’ ” I lean forward, groaning with pain, and kiss his cheek. “Thank you,” I tell him, collapsing back against the wall.

He picks up his lantern, as if to go, then puts it down again.

“I wrote music today. Did you know that?” he says. “It was good. Better than anything I’ve ever done. It’s going to be a concerto. In A minor. I wrote it because of the fireworks. Because they gave light. And hope. Because they were impossible.”

“The
Fireworks
Concerto,” I whisper, smiling.

“Why did you do this thing?” he says brokenly. His eyes are bright with tears. “Why did you give your life for nothing? The boy will die. You said so yourself. Now you will, too. And likely myself as well. If the guards get hold of me, I am a dead man. And for what? What did you change? The light you made is snuffed out. Hope is trampled upon. This wretched world goes on, as stupid and brutal tomorrow as it was today.”

I know those words. Orléans said them to Alex and she wrote them down. In her last entry. With her last breath.

I’m tired, so tired. And weak. And everything’s fading. But suddenly I’m laughing. I can’t help it. Because I understand now. I know what Alex wanted to tell me. I know the answer. I know how her diary ends. Not with a smear of blood, not with death.

“Oh, dead man, you’re dead wrong,” I tell him. “The world goes on stupid and brutal, but I do not. Can’t you see?
I
do not.”

PARADISE

The Guide and I into that hidden road
Now entered, to return to the bright world;
And without care of having any rest
We mounted up, he first and I the second
,
Till I beheld through a round aperture
Some of the beauteous things Heaven doth bear;
Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars
.

—D
ANTE

86

“A
ndi. Andi, wake up.”

I hear a voice. It’s far away.

“Come on, Andi, wake up.”

I want to, but I don’t know how.

“Come back. Please.”

I’m lying in the dark. I’m tired. My head hurts. A lot.

“Please, Andi. For me.”

I take a deep breath. And open my eyes.

“Virgil.”

“God, you had me scared.”

“Virgil, I was gone.”

“Yeah, I know you were.”

“No, really gone,” I say, in a raspy voice. “In the eighteenth century. In Paris. I … I was running. Trying to find you. But I couldn’t. And I fell. And some guys … they were at the beach … they helped me. And we came out in Paris, but not this Paris. Another one. From 1795.”

He looks really worried. He shines the light all around my face, then touches my head.

“Your forehead’s bleeding,” he says. “You must’ve knocked yourself out. You’ve been dreaming or hallucinating. Something.”

“I was there, Virgil. I was.”

“Uh-huh. Was the tin man with you?”

“It was real! I swear it was!” I say, a little hysterically.

“All right, calm down. We’ve got to get out of Oz. The flying monkeys are still around and they’re not too fond of boys from the
banlieues.
” He tries to get me on my feet. “Can you stand?”

I try to. I try to sit up but it hurts too much. Virgil opens my jacket, then winces. There’s a gash across the lower part of my rib cage. It’s bleeding, too.

“Looks worse than it is,” he says. “Nothing’s punctured or broken, I think.”

Virgil shines his flashlight around. Rusted metal brackets are hanging off the wall. Pieces of bent and broken iron poke out jaggedly from the floor and ceiling.

“This is an old wiring conduit,” he says. “You’re lucky you only got cut, that you didn’t impale yourself. I didn’t even know this tunnel was here. It’s not on any map. Where’s your stuff?”

I look around. My bag’s on the ground next to me. My guitar’s just ahead of me. Virgil reaches for it. He swears as he picks it up.

“What is it?”

“There’s a well. Right here. A deep one. If you hadn’t fallen when you did … if you’d taken a few more steps—actually, just one more step.”

But I didn’t. I didn’t take that step.

I sit up all the way now and notice that Virgil doesn’t have anything with him except his flashlight.

“Where’s your stuff?” I ask him.

“With Jules, I hope. I found them—him and Khadija—right before the cops showed up. By the Rue d’Acheron. I think they got out.”

I remember the Rue d’Acheron. It’s a fair ways from the beach. He could have kept going once he was there. He could’ve gotten out, too.

“You came back,” I say.

“No.”

Guess that was only a dream, too.

“I never left. Come on now; get up.”

He helps me stand. Puts his arm around my waist. I put mine around his neck. I turn my head and take one last look at it—at the tunnel I nearly went down. It’s long and dark, and there’s no light at the end of it. For a second, the smell of cloves is strong and sharp. And then it’s gone.

“Let’s go,” Virgil says. “We’re out of here.”

The first few steps hurt. They’re hard. But I don’t look back.

87

W
e walk. For a long time. We can’t get out the way we came in because we’d need to go through the beach and the police are still there. We heard them. We saw the glow from their flashlights.

We walk through tunnels, past bones and power lines and pits, until we come out in the basement of an abandoned car factory. South of the Boulevard Périphérique. In Montrouge.

We climb a set of rusted metal stairs out of the basement to the factory floor. The place looks like something out of a slasher film. Broken machines loom darkly. Chains hang from the ceiling. Needles and butts and beer cans litter the floor. There’s a row of windows along one side, floor to ceiling, all broken and boarded up. Virgil finds a loose board. He crawls out, then helps me out, and we find ourselves by an old access road, full of cracks and potholes. A murky little stream, strewn with tires and shopping carts, runs beside it. We follow the road to the front of the factory.

The entrance is boarded up. There’s trash everywhere—chunks of concrete, a rusted refrigerator, an old TV, and the battered backseat of a car. I hobble over to it and sit down. Virgil sits next to me. I feel shaky, but the dizziness is gone. The fresh air is cold and feels good. In the distance, I can see the lights of Paris.

Virgil looks at his watch.

“What time is it?” I ask him.

“One o’clock,” he says, digging in his pockets. “Where the hell is my phone?”

One o’clock. What seemed like days was only about an hour. I don’t know what just happened to me. Was it real? Or not? Was it the Qwell? The knock to my head? The only thing I know for sure is that a few hours ago, I was at the Eiffel Tower, ready to take an elevator to the top. I wanted to kill myself because I couldn’t cope with my sadness. Can I now? I wish I knew.

“I’m afraid, Virgil,” I suddenly say.

He stops dialing and puts his phone down. I expect him to say, “Of what?” And then try to talk me out of it, to make me see that I’m being unreasonable. That’s what everyone else does.

Instead, he says, “Yeah, you’d be crazy not to be.” He gives me a sad smile. “I’m afraid, too. I’m afraid every night in my shit neighborhood. I’m afraid I’m going to get my ass kicked when I leave it and when I come back to it. I’m afraid I’m never going to make it with my music. I’m afraid I’m going to be driving a cab all my life. I’m afraid that after tonight, I’m never going to see you again.”

He redials. Gets on with one of his taxi-driving friends. He takes my hand and squeezes it while he’s talking. I’m scared to squeeze back, but I do. I look at the side of his face, listening as he tells the guy where we are, and yeah, it’s a long story, but his friend is hurt and needs to go to the hospital and can he come get us? He thanks the guy and ends the call.

We sit for a bit, holding hands. He starts singing, softly. He sings lines from a song we were playing earlier, “My Friends.”

“
I heard a little girl
And what she said was something beautiful
To give your love no matter what
Is what she said
”

I lift my face to the night sky.

It’s still dark.

But I can see the stars.

EPILOGUE

Winter, one year later

I’m in a hospital room. Sitting on a hospital bed. Playing tunes.

There’s a girl in the corner. She’s sitting on the floor with her back to me. Rocking.

I’ve been playing to her for almost two hours but she won’t respond. She just keeps rocking.

Her head scarf shifts a little and I can see the scars on her neck. They continue, those scars, all the way down her back. Her caseworker told me that.

She’s Muslim, this girl. Thirteen years old. She was attacked in a park outside her building. She was beaten and raped. This was two months ago. She’s barely spoken since. Or eaten. Or done much else except rock.

I come every Thursday evening because her caseworker says she likes music. “Play gentle songs,” she advised.

It’s almost time for me to go and once again, I’ve gotten nowhere. I stop playing. But she doesn’t stop rocking.

Suddenly, I have an idea. Enough of the gentle tunes. I’m going to try something different. “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” As I play, I hear it—the sadness in four notes—and she does, too, I think, because she stops rocking. She turns her head, then her body. And I can see her huge sad scared eyes.

I keep playing. All the way through. I wish I had my electric guitar here. And David Gilmour, too. But I don’t. So I do what I can.

I finish the song. The last few notes rise and fade. We sit there for a few minutes and then I ask her if she’d like me to come again next week. She nods. And it’s all I can do not to jump up and down on the bed.

I tell her goodbye, bundle up, and head out of the hospital, feeling like a million dollars. It’s dark outside. And cold. I’m late. I stayed longer than I was supposed to. There’s no time to go home and shower. And I’m hungry. Starving, actually. I hope Rémy has stew tonight.

I sling my guitar case over my shoulder, hop on my moped, and start the engine. I pull out of my parking space and join the flow of traffic headed to central Paris. I’m over by the Invalides and I’ve got to get all the way to the Rue Oberkampf.

The traffic’s bad. I get cut off by a truck, then almost get flattened by a limo. The moped was a graduation present from my parents.

My father is still in Cambridge. He has a new son now—Leroy. He spends a lot of time with the baby. More than he ever did with me and Truman. I guess I should be bitter about that but I’m not. He’s kind of fading for me. Like the final notes of a song. It’s sad, but it’s okay. It’s hard for us to be together. It always has been.

He’s very busy these days, mapping the baby’s genome. Maybe it’ll help him understand what makes this child tick. He never understood me. “DNA tells you all the secrets of life,” he used to say. Except for one—how to live it.

I merge onto the Pont Neuf, get honked at by a cab, then cross over the river. The Seine is beautiful tonight, with the streetlights sparkling on its dark waters.

My mother moved back to Paris. She sold the Brooklyn house and almost everything in it after she checked herself out of the hospital last January. After having finally painted every square inch of the walls in her hospital room. I got a call one day. It was her. “Can you come get me, Andi?” she said. “If I don’t leave this place now, I never will.”

She chucked her pills out the car window on the way home. I’d chucked mine, too. Weeks before. Then she asked if she could listen to music. I played her the only thing I had in the car—a new CD of
Plaster Castle
, one without so many effects. One that wasn’t a noisy mishmash.

When we got in the house, she put her arms around me and cried and said she was sorry for being so crazy. She said I was her iron band all along, didn’t I know that?

We share a flat now, she and I, a two-bedroom in Belleville. She’s getting better. She has her bad days but the iron bands are holding. She’s painting again—still lifes, no more portraits. Sometimes the new paintings have references to Truman in them, like a penknife that belonged to him, or a feather he once found, or his key—the one I used to wear around my neck. I don’t wear it anymore. I keep it in a box on our mantel and take it out to look at it every once in a while. Truman is part of the picture now, not the whole picture anymore. There’s room for other things in my mother’s life again. There’s room for me. Which is nice. Because I need her now. I’m really busy.

I graduated from St. Anselm’s—much to everyone’s surprise. Because of my thesis. Because of the premise—the whole musical DNA thing—and especially because of the ending, where I said that the composer Amadé Malherbeau was really Charles-Antoine, Comte d’Auvergne, and that his groundbreaking use of minor chords and dissonance came about because of the grief he felt over the death of his parents, the former Comte and Comtesse d’Auvergne, at the hands of the revolutionaries.

I also suggested that his name for the Concerto in A Minor—the
Fireworks
Concerto—was inspired by the selfless acts of a young woman named Alexandrine Paradis, who set off fireworks over Paris in the last days of the Revolution, and who’d left behind a diary.

I could hardly say it was because I let him listen to Zeppelin on my iPod.

My thesis, Alex’s diary—they both caused a huge flap. Before I even turned it in, I’d been interviewed about it by
Le Monde, Die Zeit
, the
Guardian
, and a lot of other international papers. The
New York Times
did a piece with this headline:
Teenage Sleuth Solves Malherbeau Musical Mystery
. The article was nice but the headline was kind of cringey. I mean, Vijay’s still calling me Nancy Douche.

This is how it happened. When Virgil brought me home in the wee hours, after a visit to a Paris emergency room, I told my father and G and Lili, who were all a bit freaked out, that I’d tripped and fallen by the Eiffel Tower. The next day, after I’d slept and recovered a bit, I gave G the diary. I showed him the secret compartment in the guitar case, and the miniature of Louis-Charles. And I told him about the roses in Amadé Malherbeau’s portrait, and how similar they were to the rose on the Auvergne coat of arms. I told him I thought Amadé Malherbeau might be Charles-Antoine d’Auvergne.

G was of course totally blown away. He read the diary immediately. He went to Amadé’s old house to look at the portrait. He took photos of it and compared them to the coat of arms. A few days later, I found myself driving to Auvergne with him and knocking on the door of the old château. We introduced ourselves to the elderly woman who opened it and G explained that we were trying to establish a connection between the last Comte d’Auvergne and the composer Amadé Malherbeau and were wondering if the château still contained any personal effects of the doomed comte and comtesse.

The woman, Madame Giscard, invited us in. She told us that an ancestor of hers had bought the château in 1814 from the Jacobin official who’d acquired it during the Revolution. She said that heating and plumbing had been installed in the late nineteenth century but that little else had been changed. She then brought us into the great hall and showed us several portraits that had been hanging there for as long as she could remember. G immediately recognized some of the people in the paintings, like Louis XIV and Napoléon Bonaparte.

While G checked out the paintings on one side of the hall, I looked on the other. I saw lots of faces and places I didn’t know, and then, to the right of a huge fireplace, I saw one I did know—Amadé’s. He was sitting in a chair, playing guitar. Next to him, writing at a table, was the same woman I’d seen painted in miniature—his mother. Behind them both, standing by a window that opened onto beautiful fields and hills, was his father, the Comte d’Auvergne. He was holding a red rose.

It was good to see Amadé again.

With Madame Giscard’s permission, G called in an art historian from the Louvre. The man studied both portraits—the one in the château and the one in Amadé’s Bois de Boulogne house—and stated that in his opinion, they depicted the same three people.

Madame Giscard also let G rummage in the attic. He found papers that had belonged to the Comte d’Auvergne—including account books with payments made to various music masters for lessons for his son, a receipt for the portrait in the château, and early compositions written by the young Charles-Antoine—some of which bore a striking resemblance to early works of Amadé Malherbeau.

Music scholars from Yale, Oxford, and Bonn came to confer with G, to look at the diary, and to investigate the cache at Auvergne. G’s going to include Alex’s diary in the exhibition on Louis-Charles in his museum. I’m glad. She wanted the world to know what happened. Now it will.

I didn’t end up with a movie deal like Bender, but I did get an A plus. Beezie herself read my thesis. She said it was excellent and that my tracing of Malherbeau’s influence on modern musicians was fascinating. She especially liked my demonstration of the harmonic parallels between Malherbeau’s Concerto in A Minor and “Stairway to Heaven.” She said that Amadé Malherbeau came to life so fully in my thesis, it was as if I’d known him.

Yeah, it was.

I skipped graduation and I’m almost sorry I did. I heard it was a scene. Nick was so drunk he fell off the stage. Which kind of shocked the president of the United States, who was there because he happened to be in Brooklyn for a fund-raiser that day and he wanted to meet Vijay. Mrs. Gupta sent him a copy of Vijay’s thesis and he loved it. He wants V to intern at the White House during his summer break from Harvard.

I got my diploma from Nathan. He came over to my house to give it to me. We played Bach together for hours. He gave me his Hauser. I told him I didn’t deserve a guitar like that. He said, “No, you don’t, but you will.”

I applied to the Paris Conservatory and I got in. I’m studying with amazing teachers for a degree in classical and contemporary music, and when I’m not at school, I do volunteer work with a group of musical therapists—people who help traumatized children express in sound what they cannot express in words.

I turn onto the Rue Oberkampf now, finally, and pull up close to the sidewalk outside Rémy’s. I cut the engine, take off my helmet, and head inside. The room is warm and smoky and full of people. We’re packing them in. Every Wednesday and Sunday. I make my way through the crowd, scanning faces, searching for someone.

And then I see him. A tall, skinny guy. He’s patting the top of Rémy’s bald head and laughing. Virgil. My heart flips over at the sight of him. Which is schlocky, but true. We’ve been inseparable ever since I moved to Paris.

We went out the next day, Virgil and I—the day after we got out of the catacombs. I showed him Alex’s diary and he read parts of it. He understood the connection I felt to her, the connection I still feel, but he didn’t believe me about my trip back to the eighteenth century. I mean, he doesn’t think I actually went through some kind of time warp. And I can’t say I blame him. Because I’m not sure I do anymore, either.

“It felt real, though,” I told him. We were in his car, stuck in traffic near the Carrefour de l’Odéon, on our way to a café to hear some friends of his play. I had ten stitches in my forehead and a few more under my rib cage. “Paris in the eighteenth century, the catacombs, Amadé—it all felt so real. Even if it was only inside my head. But it’s crazy, right? To think I really went back to the Revolution? Back to something that ended over two centuries ago?”

He didn’t answer me right away. He was looking past me, looking at something outside my window. I followed his gaze and saw what it was—a towering statue of Danton.

“I don’t know, Andi,” he finally said. “In a way it never ended. In a way they’re all still here. Restless ghosts looking over our shoulders. They wanted the best possible things, some of them—liberty, equality, and fraternity for all. It was a nice dream. Too bad they didn’t pull it off. Too bad we haven’t.”

We heard a chorus of honking horns then. The cars in front of us had started to go. Virgil shifted into first. “Life’s all about the revolution, isn’t it?” he said. “The one inside, I mean.”

I look at him now, messing with Rémy. I like to do that, to look at him before he sees me looking at him. He’s wearing the usual—jeans and a hoodie. The sleeves are pushed up. I can see a bandage sticking out from under one.

There was trouble in his neighborhood a week ago. He was trying to get home after his shift. There was a fight on the street outside his building. He tried to stop it and was knifed. The attacker was aiming for his heart. Virgil blocked him with his arm. Barely. But barely was enough.

He turns then, and sees me, and his whole face breaks into a smile. For me. And my heart feels so full that it hurts. Full of love for this man I’ve found. And for the brother I lost. For the mother who came back. And the father who didn’t. Full of love for a girl I never knew and will always remember. A girl who gave me the key.

It goes on, this world, stupid and brutal.

But I do not.

I
do not.