The Radiant City (28 page)

“Thanks.” The man takes Matthew by the elbow. The music’s beat is stronger here, although oddly it is no louder. Just the vibrations coming off the walls, the floor, as though the building has a heartbeat. As though the building is beginning to panic. He feels it in the pulse of the man’s fingers.

“On second thought, wait. There.” He points to a spot on the floor, and then opens a door and sticks his head in. “Jean-Marc.
Viens
.” He turns back to Matthew and says, “Jean-Marc will take you up.”

A man appears, with so many piercings in his lower lip it is a wonder it stays attached. He motions for Matthew to follow and he does, just as the border guard turns to let in two girls, one with green hair.

The building is a labyrinth of halls and doorways. The squatters have hooked up the electricity somehow, and wires run in complete disorder; extension cords connect to extension cords stapled around doorways and along the floor, but the elevator does not work. Matthew follows The Pierced Man up the stairs. The music is louder, and when he puts his hand on his sternum, Matthew feels it there as though it is trying to influence his internal organs.

A dark girl in a bright blue scarf and with huge gold rings in her ears passes them and she and The Pierced Man greet each other. On the second floor, he turns back to Matthew and says, in French, “First time here?” Matthew tells him it is.

“This is a good place,” The Pierced Man says, switching to English. “Not like other squats, eh? This is organized. We have committees. We’re going to the mayor. We’re going to get things right here, so they can’t throw us out. This is for artists, eh? Not for drug addicts. Not for
clochards.
You’re an artist?”

“No.” The beat grows incrementally stronger with every vertical foot.

“Writer?”

“Sort of.”

“Ah. Me, too.” When he smiles under the cold lights, Matthew swears he can see little bits of white tooth through the holes stretched in his lower lip.

Matthew looks down the hallways as they pass. Lights are on in some rooms and he sees canvases, bits of twisted metal, paints and mattresses. Artists have used the walls as well. Great swathes of red and black on one wall; figures, fairly well drawn, in a scene from one of the political demonstrations on another, the angry faces and wide-open mouths seemed to reach out toward him. Three buckets with painted eyes on them, attached to metal poles, stand against a wall. Halfway down the poles someone has tied bananas and plums. The fruit has blackened and fruit flies swarm.

On the third floor, they set off down the hall, turn left, then right, past door after door. Then they take another flight of stairs and turn right. They go a long way. So long that Matthew is sure they must have crossed the whole building and must now be in some other building altogether. He imagines the sound follows them. He imagines something sinister and heavy, hunting them with a stone club. In one room, a shooting party is underway, the junkies lounging on mattresses, leaning on each other, scratching themselves and twitching. Candles dot the floor around the mattresses and blankets, their flames flickering either from drafts or from the pulse of bass in the floor, the walls. A fine sprinkle of dust flutters down from the ceiling. “I thought you said there was no dope here.”

The Pierced Man shrugs. “What can you do? Two of them have lived here for a long time, since before we took over. They don’t hurt anybody.”

There seems to be no end to the hallways, and perhaps it is just because the lights are out at the end of them, but to Matthew they look like they lead to nothing, or rather, they lead only into darkness. The music is loud enough that now, had he wanted to talk, he would have had to raise his voice above the inexorable rhythm. Something electronic and soulless. He has the growing sense of many people above them and in his imagination it is a looming, writhing entity. His breathing is shallow.

They come into a cavernous space full of bodies. Walls have been knocked down here, leaving only the support beams. Lighting is uneven, provided mostly from bare bulbs hung from raw connections in the ceiling, or from construction torches, the kind with metal half-backs and wire grills, hanging from hooks around the walls. Couches form a large square in the centre, and these are crowded. Lots of low-slung jeans and belly rings and little tops on the girls that push their breasts up into the presentation position. The air is so pungent with smoke Matthew’s eyes water. The crowd is young, early twenties mostly, and he feels like a dinosaur in his fraying, unfashionable jeans.

The Pierced Man abandons him the minute they walk in and wanders away in the direction of a boy who dances shirtless, his six-pack stomach glistening with sweat. Matthew tries to get his bearings as he feels the floor beneath his feet bounce in time to the music, to the mass of dancers at the far end of the room. It is important to remember to breathe deeply. He hopes the redecorating that has gone on has not compromised the beams holding up the floor.

The question rolls through his head again. And the answer:
Because Saida asked me.

Four mismatched tables along the right wall, in front of what looks like offices, are laden with electronic equipment—turntables, mixing boards, video equipment and projectors that spray a series of moving pictures on a screen hanging over the crowd. The pictures are of someone diving into water, someone diving backward out of the water, a man on a bicycle riding along a wall, a man falling. A rangy young DJ with his head shaved to disguise his receding hairline wears headphones and works two turntables at once. Water-filled bottles cover another long table.

Matthew scans the crowd for either Jack or Joseph but the lights are uneven and it is hard to see clearly through the smoke, which is as much grass as tobacco. So much so, in fact, that he suspects he’ll be getting a contact high within minutes.

There is a ruckus of some sort going on in the corner and Matthew’s heart hammers, thinking a fight has broken out. Then he sees flames and hears shrieks even above the pumping bass and thinks a fire has started, but there immediately follows a flurry of diving and stamping and swatting. The sound of metal on wood and banging and crashing. He walks over.

“
Quelle
horreur!”
A girl stands in front of him, shaking her hands in the air.

“What’s going on?” Matthew shouts through cupped hands.

“
Les
cafards
!
”
She shrieks and shakes her hands some more.

Matthew moves in for a closer look. A woman with long hair, a long face and a pock-marked complexion stands near the wall with a blowtorch. Matthew’s skin ripples with goosebumps as though someone rubbed an ice cube on the back of his neck. He imagines grabbing the blowtorch, a device suitable for so many diabolical activities for which it was not designed, and smashing it against the wall.

In a semicircle around the long-haired woman fifteen to twenty people cluster, each armed with something heavy—boots, a frying pan, a telephone book. Another man grips a crowbar and bends over the baseboard.

“One . . . Two . . . Three!” the man calls, and then pries away the wood.

Hundreds of small brown insects scatter and scurry in all directions. People yell like warriors lunging into battle. The woman with the blowtorch dashes frantically this way and that against the wall, trying to nuke as many cockroaches as possible. Matthew may have shrieked as well, but the audio avalanche buries the sound. Everywhere people stamp and hurl and hit and mash. He catches a glimpse of someone who looks like Joseph, dancing a cockroach-killing tarantella next to a girl with short bleached-blond hair. He tries to keep sight of him, but people push, some toward, some away from the frenzy and all Matthew sees are feet and scurrying things and the red flash of fire. His chest feels like it is in a ever-tightening vice.

They could be ganging up on anything, with shoes, with bricks, rocks, knives, with blowtorches. It could be anyone on the ground there, under their feet, their flames.

Matthew pushes through the crowd then, toward the door, trying to get air. Faces leap in front of him; they look like masks, with wide eyes and wide mouths, and lips too red and teeth too white and shiny skin, and all around him is noise.

He may hear his name. He may not. His hands fly up and out, trying to clear space. His legs tingle with the desire to kick.

He pushes someone hard, a tall, beak-nosed man with an orange scarf around his neck who bumps into someone else, then bounces back toward Matthew and curses. Matthew mutters something about claustrophobia and getting out of his fucking way and then he is in the stairwell and it is dark, descending into somewhere cellar-ish and inhabited and he does not want to go down and cannot go back. He presses up against the wall.

A shout, something barely riding the crest of the techno sound wave. “Matthew! Hold up!” For a moment, he wonders if someone who knows his name is going to mug him. He scrabbles to find something to defend himself with—a piece of wood, a bottle, anything. The figure is backlit, looming above him.

“Matthew?”

The voice is familiar, the stance. The figure steps down onto the stairs. The mouth, something about the mouth.

“Joseph?”

“You all right?”

“Yes. No.” He does not want to run, but he has to put more distance between him and those blowtorch bearers. He retreats another flight, not caring if Joseph follows him or not. And with another floor between him and that, he sits down on the stairs.

Joseph comes down and sits next to him. “I thought I saw you. What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

It is important to sound sane.

“Lunatic asylum,” he says.

“What?”

Breathing takes up all his concentration. He counts. One-two-three, in. One-two-three-four, out. He runs his hands through his hair, willing them to be steady. “I just don’t like crowds is all.”

“This isn’t a good place to come if you don’t like crowds.”

“It wasn’t my idea.” His pulse begins to return to something like normal. He will be home in an hour, he tells himself. Just an hour. Back inside the nest. Just do the next right thing, finish the job, and get the hell out. He takes a good look at Joseph—his eyes are bloodshot, he is pale and his breath stinks of beer. “What’s with the goddamn blowtorch?”

“Crazy place, huh?”

“Crazy place.” Matthew wipes sweat off his upper lip.

“Well, hello campers.” Jack stands at the top of the landing and he looks like a sequoia. A swaying sequoia.

If someone yells timber, Matthew plans to dive over the banister and take his chances in freefall. “Hello,” Matthew says.

“Want a drink? They got Red Stripe Beer of all fucking things.”

“What are you doing here, Jack?”

“Me? This is the place. My place, like. Kids from the hostel turned me on to this place. They love me here. I am a legion, a ledge . . .” Jack blows out his lips. “I am a legend here. This is a Christmas party. You need a drink.” The blond girl appears beside him. “Hi, honey,” Jack says to her.

“I was just telling young Joseph here that I don’t much care for this place.”

“So, what are you doing here?” Joseph’s eyes dart in the direction of the girl.

“We should talk about that. Somebody’s worried, you know?”

“That is Farida.” Joseph points to the girl.

“Hello, Farida.”

“’Lo, Farda. No. Firda?” says Jack.

“She doesn’t speak English,” says Joseph. He beckons to her to come down and she does.

“
Enchantée,”
Matthew says and tries very hard not to sound sarcastic. The girl smiling at him is about as sweet as a girl can be, early twenties maybe, her eyes the colour and shape of brown almonds, with lips that look bruised, slightly swollen. Matthew is about to ruin Joseph’s night.

“Listen,” he says in English, his mouth close to Joseph’s ear. “Why don’t we call it a night, eh? Give your Mom a call, drop the young lady off if you want.”

“My mother?” Joseph’s mouth opens and he goes red. If there has been any doubt in Farida’s mind about how old he is, he has just blown it. He looks twelve.

“She called me, Joseph. She’s fucking frantic.”

“
Merde!
She has no right to call you, what is this? What is this?”

“Is ’er a problem?” says Jack and he pats Farida on the ass as she goes back up the stairs.

“Fuck!” says Joseph, and it is unclear if it is because of Saida or the pat, or Farida’s parting in general.

“What do you expect? No need to blow a gasket. You’re lucky she didn’t insist on coming with me.” Terror replaces anger. “Look, I know this is bad. I know it’s embarrassing. But it’s nearly morning, Joseph. It’s nearly four-thirty in the morning and I’m getting mighty tired.”

“Is it that late?” Joseph stands and cranes his neck to watch Farida glide away, her bottom swaying in skin-tight black pants.

“Let’s get you out of here without blowing your cover.”

“My cover?”