The Journalism Party

A few hours later, Pascale, The Student, and I were back out on the streets of Lille. (The hours in between the story-now and the last time we met were filled with me shouting obscenities at my laptop due to my inability to write more than a sentence of my Ranting in Literature essay—I’d chosen the topic about Upton Sinclair’s Oil! being the first modern novel-length rant—and The Student, in turn, telling me to shut up as he was trying to read a difficult passage of the original language version of La Morte D’Arthur. For fun. So, really, you don’t want to hear about that.)

Pascale was talking about a friend of hers who came into France as a refugee from Afghanistan and was having trouble adjusting to the culture. “He talked to me about a girl he met and said she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen and he’d been following her around, watching her.”

“The fuck?” I asked.

“Weird, yes, but wait. Then, he says to me that he wants to marry her, and wonders how to approach her father. I told him that he should just talk to her about it. He said that he couldn’t do that since he hadn’t talked to her or her family before.”

“So he’d been following her around. Stalking her,” said The Student.”

“Yes.”

“The fuck?” asked The Student.

“So then I ask him about her, and he says, ‘She is fourteen.’”

“Fuck!” The Student and I said in chorus.

“Yes,” Pascale said, “exactly. And then I told him that this was illegal, and he said he didn’t understand.” Pascale then went “Pfft” and shrugged her shoulders and laughed.

I nodded. Good as a reaction as any, I thought.

“Oooo!” said The Student, pointing ahead of us.

I looked ahead and saw a small car, Ford Fiesta type, with a giant menorah on it, lit up with seven candles on the top, and the French equivalent of “Chabad Lubavitchers” on a placard on top of it. “Hey, we’ve stumbled upon a Jewish place!” I said. “Happy Chanukah, Student.”

“You too, my friend. Let’s get schloshed.”

“What does this mean? Sloshed?”

“No,” I said, “schloshed.”

She tried four more times, but she couldn’t get the hang of it.

I waved it off. “No biggy. It means drunk.”

“Ah, yes. There will be a lot of drinks there. You’ll like it, and I’ll introduce you to friends.”

“Sounds good,” said The Student.”

We turned a couple of corners and walked up to a building that could have easily been a church. We walked up the steps, into the lobby which, thank God, actually had heating going through it, and Pascale checked us into the party, which had not yet begun.

Imagine, if you will, a hallway in a public high school. The walls are decked out with announcements on several different colors of paper, the tile floors are stained, and the doors to different classrooms are discolored and the windows are fogged-over from various kinds of schmutz. The only difference between this hallway and the high school in your head is that everything is in French.

And there was a DJ stand and a rack of show lights, and a set of sincerely high-quality speakers set up along the walls, and the Christmas lights all around the edges of the walls.

Oh, and the collapsable table draped in a red tablecloth covered in five kinds of liquor and a few kinds of snacks.

But, other than that, it was like a high school hallway.

While I stood in awe of the actual, high-quality Scotch (single malt at a party – God I love journalism students), Pascale pulled a friend of hers over and introduced her to The Student. I didn’t notice, as I was still thinking about who would bring something not in a plastic bottle to a party.

Then, when I felt my hair being ruffled, I reacted in my normal way: I shouted, “Please don’t attack me!” and jumped in the opposite direction, in this case, into the table, knocking off the bottle of Scotch. In a rare display of the reflexes I hadn’t used since I played baseball when I was a kid, I ducked down, caught the bottle and put it back. Then, for good measure, I cleared my throat and looked at my attacker.

She was wearing a red sweater, had short brown hair, brown eyes, and had a great smile. “Guh,” I said. I shook my head. “Yo. I’m The Narrator.”

She looked between me and The Student, “The Narrator and The Student. Relatives?”

“No, thank God,” The Student and I said in chorus.

I pointed at The Student and shouted, “Jinx, you owe me a Coke!”

He sighed and shook his head. Pascale asked what that meant and The Student explained.

Jessica, for that was her name, held out her hand and introduced herself. In a rare occurrence, I did not go “guh” at her, but actually held a conversation.

The four of us, after The Student finished explaining the intricacies of American middle school humor and puns, grabbed some drinks and went on a brief tour of the school. There was a kitchen in there, which I found odd since none of the schools I’d been to had kitchens available for students—but then again, English Lit was never one of those disciplines that required students to pull all-nighters. Inside the kitchen were a few people smoking and reclining, talking rapid-fire. 

Other than that, it was a basic school-ish building with halls, restrooms, and classrooms. After the brief tour, we walked back into the bit of the hallway with the DJ booth and the lights and whatnot and saw that some more people had arrived. Pascale introduced us to them as well, and The Student and I engaged in some serious self-deprecation at the the expense of the South.

(One thing I’ve noticed: If you’ve lived in the South for a while, and don’t necessarily share the stereotypical beliefs of the region—which, if you’re travelling abroad, you probably don’t—then you can make some quick friends by joking about it. The vast majority of people have a perception of the South based on Deliverance, and you can make a distinction between the film and the reality, and still be funny. Such as: “No, people in Nashville won’t sodomize you if you make eye contact; however, they will if you say bad things about Garth Brooks.”)

Soon after that, the music started, and I was treated to the most bizarre array of dancing I’ve ever seen. They were even whiter than my AEPi frat brothers. The dancing on the floor—which accompanied everything from gangsta rap to ska—ranged from the hopping thing you see at teenage punk concerts (Pascale and The Student), jazz swing (Jessica in her own amazing little world), headbanging (a group of guys over in the corner), club dancing (led by a girl who’d chosen to drape herself in Christmas lights), and then my own spastic movements of the arms and legs that I considered dancing. In short, everyone was having a good time, even me, and I never have a good time dancing.

For example: the Greeks back in Woolf went clubbing as if it were their job. Thursdays through Sundays around ten at night, they’d descend upon Canterbury in five or six six-person cabs and go out for overpriced drinks in crowded basement bars across the city and stay until three AM, then complain that everything closed so early in England. It was mind-boggling to me, a person who would go out to a house party and fall asleep on a random couch around one in the morning. I went out with them a couple of times, a couple of them tried to teach me how to dance, I’d give up and hang around the bar and glare at people who fulfilled my requirements of “douchebag.”

 And so we drank, we danced, I fell in further “guh” over Jessica. (The state of guh can last anywhere from three minutes to three days, but generally not longer than that, and will, by and large, never result in my taking any action to form any relationship whatsoever with the girl—mainly because I’ve been rendered borderline retarded.) At one point, I may have started regurgitating John Donne poems, mangled beyond any comprehension to an English Lit student, much less a French journalism student, but I’m not entirely sure. The night gets blurry around the time when The Student and I formed an air guitar duo when the DJ (which, I should say by now, was actually a massive iTunes library that people just went up to and requested songs) played a string of Queen songs off of one of the greatest hits albums.

I do know that I sobered up about the time when the three of us were in the kitchen and someone was trying to make me understand a phrase. “No, that is not it,” he said. He was shabby, looked like he should be a poet instead of a journalist, with a scruffy beard, brown sweater, and a mop for hair. He said it again.

I repeated what he said.

“Yes,” he said, clapping his hands once and then pointing at me. “Exactement!”

“What does that mean?” I asked. I’d forgotten how to ask the question in French, which, in the back of my mind, struck me as extremely ironic.

“It means ‘you’ve missed the point entirely.’”

“But. W—that’s the complete opposite of the English expression that we were talking about.” That expression, I think, was, “You hit the nail on the head.”

“Oui, exactement,” he said. “We like irony in this country.”

“We like irony in the U.S.”

“No, you like sarcasm. Different things entirely.”

I responded with the phrase he taught me.

“Oui, exactement!” he said.

I’m not entirely sure why that sobered me up. Perhaps it was because my brain had to take away energy from the portions that were having fun being wasted and divert that energy to portions that were normally reserved for figuring out crossword puzzles. At any rate, thinking about the mental gymnastics that were required to make an ironic statement while being completely sincere were enough to sober me up. Which, looking back, was a good thing. Ten minutes later, as The Student was stumbling into coat racks shouting that someone had stolen his blue coat, when it was caught on his shoes and he was dragging it around, I’d needed that sobriety to carefully dodge around him, pick up the coat and shout, semi-convincingly, “Hark!”

He turned and blinked slowly at me, as if a Neanderthal. “Whuh?”

“I have stopped the vagrant mid-stride as he absconded with thine coat!”

The Student held a fist in the air. “Woo!”

“Here,” I said, flinging it through the air. The Student caught it. “Wear it with pride, for it is a trophy of goodness and wonderment in the modern world.”

The Student, drunk beyond any reasonable standard, put the coat on backwards. It was good enough. We waited up in the lobby as Pascale made the rounds, then headed back into cold and desolate world of wintertime Lille at night.

The Army of Snowmen

We walked down the drive, away from The Citadel and made it about halfway when The Student looked to the right and was off in a mad dash, camera held out in front of him.

I looked to where he was going and saw about twenty people scattered around a section of the park that had been invaded by snowmen. In a treeless, semi-hilly space there were about fifty snowmen and women in varying shapes, sizes, and stages of undress. That’s right, there were hooker snowpeople. 

The one I saw was about fifty yards away from where The Student and I stopped. He immediately bolted and treated each snowperson as if it were a model and he was making art. I wasn’t sure what possessed him to take angled pictures of everything, playing around with all of the various shutter settings on his camera and acting, generally speaking, as if he was on the verge of being the next Ansel Adams.

(I don’t say that to be mean-spirited. When we first arrived in Lille, and he started on his almost Tourette’s-like picture-taking spree, I asked him what he was going to do with all of the pictures he was taking. “Probably nothing,” he said.

“You’re not going to submit them anywhere?”

“Oh Lord, no. I’ll just upload them to my computer. Maybe use them as desktops from time to time.”

It was the most trouble I’d ever seen anyone go to in order to create a computer desktop.)

I made a beeline down the center of the field bit of the park, not because I’d seen the prostitute snowman yet, but because I wasn’t interested in staring at snowmen, and all the benches were taken up by young couples who were really, really into making out. So I walked on, made it to a part of the park filled with evergreens right next to an iced-over pond, looked to my left, and there, right next to a couple of shrubs, was a snowwoman wearing a lacy red and black bra, garters going up the bottom snowball, and matching panties. Someone had even taken the time to apply mascara and lipstick to the head of the snowprostitute, and I had to stand there for about ten minutes so my brain could thoroughly work out all of the insanity needed to think to oneself “Hey, I should make a snowprostitute,” and then, further, I needed to fully understand the dedication to one’s craft needed in order to apply mascara and lipstick to a fucking snowman.

It goes without saying that I had to sit down.

The Student found me a while later, still staring at the snowstitute, and said, “Ah, how lewd,” before taking a couple pictures. “Well, you ready?”

“What? We just got here. There are so many other snowmen to see.”

The Student tapped his camera. “And I’ve documented them all. Even the snowbear mauling the snowchild.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I worry about the state of humanity.”

“Personally, I think this is a good sign.”

“How so?”

I got up, dusted the snow off my jacket, and we started walking back towards the drive. “Well, think about it. In the States, especially Tennessee, what’s the general reaction to snowfall?”

“Chaos,” The Student said without any hesitation. Then he nodded, as if affirming the gut reaction put forward by his brain. “Yes. I was talking to my mother last night on Skype, and she told me about the Hell that she went through when she had to run to Kroger to pick up eggs. Apparently, she had to fight someone off a la Black Friday. Mishegas,” He finished, shaking his head.

“And yet,” I said, “take a look around you at these streets, at this park. Do you see the same madness reflected in the Frenchies’ eyes? In their actions? Nay, I think not. Instead, they go out and build snowmen, as if it’s a genetic or evolutionary reaction to seeing snow. This, my friend, is what humanity needs to strive for.”

“Snowmen?”

“More being in a state of mind where it is acceptable to express glee at things that, well, inspire glee. None of this repression of the inner child malarkey we have back in the States. You want to go out and build snowmen? By God, go out and build snowmen!”

“I don’t think anyone’s keeping anyone from building snowmen, Narrator.”

“Oh, they are.”

“Who is?”

“Society.”

“I—” he shook his head. “Yeah, sure. Okay.”

A burst of wind hit us from the northwest and we cursed in chorus.

The Citadel

“No, we’re not going in there,” said The Student.

“What? Why?” I asked.

We stood in the middle of a snowy driveway. To our right was a huge parking lot, in the middle of which a massive red and yellow circus tent was being set up, with an accompaniment of several smaller tents and some trucks idling, sending some exhaust up into the air. Off in the distance, past the parking lot and the river that ran by it, the spire of the h, with an accompaniment of several smaller tents and some trucks idling, sending some exhaust up into the air. Off in the distance, past the parking lot and the river that ran by it, the spire of the hôtel de ville shot up into the air, partly obscured by falling snow. On our other side, a large park, covered in snow, running children, and couples walking arm and arm. Behind us was a busy ring road, traffic moving around, and the other sounds of the city. In front of us was the Citadel, and a sign that made us a bit antsy. It read, in English, “Military land, no entry unless otherwise specified.”

I was of the opinion that if there wasn’t a gate, and there wasn’t a gate, then it was free entry. After all, the sign that pointed in the direction of the Citadel was brown, and that, as far as I could tell, was the sign that it was a public area of historical importance. And so, my suggestion was that we should just mosey on in and have a wander. Chances are that we wouldn’t get very in-depth on account of the whole language barrier, and neither of us was well-equipped to deal with reading different grammar as well as alien vocabulary, context clues be damned.

“We’re not traipsing into a military base,” said The Student, pulling his cap over his head and digging his hands further, somehow, into his puffy coat.

I pointed up at the top of the Citadel walls, which were a yellowy stone, and ornately carved with people that, I supposed, were to represent La République Française. “See those?” I further asked, pointing at the row of NATO flags along the walls. “Those are NATO flags, which means this is international territory in NATO’s possession. And who’s a major member of NATO? America. And what are we? Americans. We elect the government of America, thus we own this land.”

The Student furrowed his eyebrows and cocked his head forty-five degrees. “That is the most retarded logic I’ve ever heard. I mean that in the most literal sense. I once knew a person with Down’s Syndrome, and that sounds like it could have come from their mouth.”

“Or Glenn Beck’s,” I said, nodding a little bit.

“I’m glad you acknowledge that. Now, if I may state my reasoning—”

“The reasoning of a pussy,” I said.

“—then you can see where I’m coming from,” he said, moving on as if I hadn’t said anything, which, frankly, was the best course of action. “First,” he said, ticking off a finger on his black-gloved hand, “you can clearly see the man in French military fatigues standing at the top of that little archway up there, yes?”

I looked at the Citadel entrance that the driveway led to. Sure enough, standing on top of the wall, behind the archway, underneath a French flag and over a carved woman looking off to the horizon, there stood a man in military fatigues holding an automatic weapon, a French flag stitched to his arm, and he was staring at us. I nodded.

“Does he look pleased at our continued presence here, staring at a military base?”

I shook my head.

“Does this, in turn, say to you anything akin to this being a tourist attraction?”

“Well, he’s French. They’re smarmy by nature.”

The Student glared at me.

“No,” I said.

“Second,” ticking off another gloved finger, “while you’re correct in that one sign in the center of town was brown and had ‘Citadel’ on it, every other sign in the vicinity has ‘défense d’entry’ on it, as well as ‘militaire.’ This, to me, does not make it seem as if the public is welcomed with open arms. In fact, this states that we’re approaching a military installation, while it may be NATO-based indeed, and, to my knowledge, military installations are not tourist-friendly. You know, because of the guns.”

“I don’t see what guns have anything to do with it.”

“They’re guns.”

I stared blankly at him.

“We’re in Europe. They don’t like guns over here.”

“Ah,” I said. “Yes.”

“So, that’s why we’re not going to go into The Citadel.”

As if to punctuate his logic, a truck horn sounded behind us and we dashed over to the park side of the drive. A large, covered truck drove by and entered the Citadel. I wasn’t sure, mostly because I only glanced, but in the back, I was pretty sure I saw some people in chains.

“You didn’t see people in chains,” said The Student.

“What? How do you know?”

“Because that’s absurd. This isn’t a prison, it’s a rapid defense base.”

“What? How do you know?”

He pointed to a sign to our right that, in French, stated that this was the home of a NATO rapid action group. I assumed this meant they were the fastest to scramble to action in Call of Duty, and were thus rewarded with gamerscore achievements on X-Box live, but it probably had more to do with something serious. Like a terrorist attack. Or an invasion. Once again, real life is extremely dull.

“Fine,” I said, “we won’t go into the super cool military base, but you’re a dork for not even trying.”

“Even when trying would possibly end up with being thrown in military custody.”

“That’s the best kind of trying, man.”

So we decided not to go into the Citadel, but rather, around the Citadel. See, while the interior of the star-shaped fortification was off-limits, the exterior was a park. So while you couldn’t go inside and play with guns, you could walk around the fifteen-foot walls and the moat and pretend that you were a Gaul or something and run up and punch the walls as if you were a one-man siege. I tried to do that, but The Student held me back, saying that I’d hurt my fists. Whatever.

Anyway, we walked around the perimeter of the fortress, alongside the iced-over moat, between the walls and the leafless woods in the park, and took plenty of pictures. Rather, The Student took photos of various crumbling walls around the perimeter, some monuments to World War One and Two soldiers from the region, and some winter wildlife, whereas I tried to get the attention of some black Labs who were, as far as I concerned, circling The Citadel at sixty miles an hour while their owners stood around and chatted. Other families, distinctly Labradorless, went around Citadel with plastic sleds, on which sat toddlers who stared around as if this were the pinnacle of awesome. And, as The Student knelt in the snow trying to get a good angle on the way the sunlight reflected off of the ice on a pond of the northwestern corner of the fortress, I was suddenly hit with the realization of exactly where I was.

See, this happens to me from time to time. I’ll be complaining about something going horribly wrong with the day (such as someone looking at me weird on the bus or something) and then, in a flash, I’ll realize just how stupidly lucky I am not to be in Somalia. Or, in a less jokey way of putting it, how lucky I am to not be stuck in a situation where I’m starving, homeless, or dying. And, right then, standing in France on a snowy day like I hadn’t seen since my family moved out of Ohio, in what was in all honesty an absurdly easy Master’s degree, I thought, “Holy shit, the toddlers have it right.” Then, for good measure, I said it out loud.

“What?” asked The Student, now laying down on the snow getting an extreme angle photo of a frosted-over leaf.

“The toddlers are right.”

“Yeah,” he said, clicking the shutter. “I heard you, but what are they right about?”

“Life being great, and that we’re stupendously lucky to be where we are at any given time, and not some—’”

“You kidding me?” asked The Student, standing up and brushing snow off of his coat. “You just figured this out? We’re students in a foreign university, paying less than an out-of-state student does to go to UT for one year, and we’re going to get a Master’s degree within that one year. Yeah, that’s a pretty good deal.”

I scratched the back of my head. “Well, you know, it’s just sometimes I think that it’s not.”

“Why?” he asked, looking through the pictures he’d taken.

“Well, you know,” I said, shuffling my feet in the snow. “Er, the wind.”

He looked up, cocked his eyes at me and said, “Are you retarded? I’m beginning to think you are. Like, a highly functional form of something or other. I know some people in Psych, I can ask them to diagnose you, if you want.”

I cleared my throat. I’ve always been afraid that it will turn out that I’ve got some serious things wrong with me, that, deep down inside, I’m a nutcase. There’s precedent for this in my family. One of my grandmothers had bi-polar disorder, another developed dementia, paranoia runs rampant; neuroses are expected, and the list could be endless. Once, in high school, someone asked if they could psychoanalyze me and I all but shouted, “Get thee gone from my sight.” However, since then, I’ve toned it down a bit. “No thanks,” I said.

See?

“You sure, man?” he asked. “A couple of us are a bit worried about you.”

“Woah, like who?”

“No one,” he said, digging his hands and the camera into his coat. “I’ve said too much.” He walked away and I followed.

“No, seriously man, what’s going on behind my back?”

“Nothing. Just, you know, nothing.” He sped up.

I squinted my eyes. Paranoia was taking hold. “I’m gonna find out, you know,” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

We were now back in the park area, and I was ready to let the matter drop. For the moment. There would be a time, sometime soon, when The Student would be inconceivably drunk, and at that time, I would strike with such a barrage of questions that—“What the hell are those things?” I asked, pointing to a series of stone disks stacked on top of each other right next to a green-painted metal jungle gym.

Out came the camera, and then the rapid fire clicking. “An extension of the jungle gym?”

“What the hell kind of kid would choose stone disks over a jungle gym?”

“One that understands that playground equipment doesn’t necessarily need to conform to societal standards.” He moved closer to the disks and took another batch of pictures. “Because what is a ‘jungle gym’ but a Western European, most likely Anglo in origin, seemingly derisive moniker for a batch of twisted metal, perhaps a leftover from colonial thought – in which case, the ‘jungle gym,’ and, indeed, the entirety of the ‘playground,’ must be seen in the lens of post-colonial literature.”

I decided to let him go. He was on a roll.

He shuffled around some more and took more pictures of the disks with the jungle gym in the background as he spoke. “Thus, we must consider that all nations with ‘playgrounds,’ or, ‘exhibitions of post-colonial, Western supremacist thought,’ reflect each country’s colonial history. In the light of such thinking, does a French jungle gym portray the same thinking as an English jungle gym? Do these stone disks, in other words, call to mind a representation of French rule in, say, Southeast Asia, such as Vietnam and Cambodia. Are these stone disks, in fact, a representation of Angkor Wat, and thus are the French equating their past colonial power to that of a spiritual or religious deity?”

He stood, stretched, and snapped a couple final shots. “If so, they are imprinting the Occidental-centric view of the world upon their children by virtue of having these ‘jungle gyms’ in every playground.” He turned to me and nodded. “I think I’ve created a doctoral thesis, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “I think they were rolled here by Neanderthals and have stayed in this spot for centuries.”

“Yes,” he said. “Quite. Shall we head on?” He checked his watch. “I’d suggest that we get some food in town and head back to Pascale’s before the party tonight.”

“We really going to a journalism party?”

“Yes, why?”

“Because it’s going to be absurdly dull, man. Bunch of nerds hanging around, probably awkwardly, drinking soda or something.”

“Have you ever met a journalism student who wasn’t clutching a bottle of alcohol?”

I thought of The Drunkard. “No. You’re right.”

“And the Universe rights itself and continues forthwith. Speaking of, let’s head out, shall we?”

“Sure,” I said.

We walked back to the drive and walked away from The Citadel.

The Puzzle and Ex-Pats

Not much happened after we left the cathedral. We continued looking around, occasionally stopping at the odd bookshop or CD place.. The sole unique thing we saw was a horse butcher. It was a storefront much like all the rest in Vieux Lille, except it had a neon horse's head poking out from the top of the doorway. Horse steaks, burgers, and roasts were advertised in the window.

The Student and I, very used to a society that did not have horse as a meal, stood across the street and gaped in awe at the blatant display of horse-eating. Much like the rest of our fellow Americans, we thought of horses as modes of transportation for cowboys. Sort of like a living car. And, we thought, no one would eat a car. For a moment, the words of The Prophet rang true. Then, the next day, we asked Pascale about it, and she told us it was an old-fashioned thing. Sort of like eating pigs’ knuckles in the South was on the way out.

Anyway, a while later, we were back at Pascale’s apartment waiting on Sophie to arrive to wander on down to the bar to meet their friends. We had some dinner—a simple dinner I was really beginning to enjoy: a baguette with warm camembert, and some pasta with spinach. After, as Pascale and The Student were talking and washing up the dishes, I stood at the window, looking out at the snow-covered parking lot in the night, the parking lot lights tracing out the snow as it fell from the sky.

It was pretty still out there, aside from a couple tall guys in black hoodies talking underneath one of the lights. It struck me as Hoth-like[1]. I preemptively shivered.

Then the door opened, and in the reflection I saw Sophie walk in. “Guh,” I said. (The Student, as we were on the Eurostar back from Lille, watched as I made the notes for this entry and insisted I go in-depth about my true feelings for her. If you want to see that, go look at the other blog. The one with the “bespectacled vixen” and the poetic language.)

Everyone hugged and did the cheek-kiss thing, I blundered through saying, “Hi, how are you,” in English, and we layered up and headed out.

I wasn’t really that far off in my comparison with Hoth. It was damned cold outside and I spent most of the walk shivering, trying to bury my head in my neck and p-coat collar, and saying various obscenities that I’d picked up from foreign movies.

Pascale and The Student spent the walk swapping stories about the year they’d spent in England, and a lot of them revolved around a bizarre man from Frankfurt who had the laugh of a squirrel. Sophie spent most of the walk on her cell phone, and, eavesdropping while pretending to listen to Pascale and The Student, and using my rudimentary French, I understood she was trying to calm her boyfriend, who was convinced she was seeing someone else. I heard the equivalent of boyfriend and went to The Dark Place, the place from which the only escape was alcohol, followed by sulking, and then more alcohol. She hung up and Pascale headed towards the back of our little diamond, The Student subconsciously moving up to create a square.

He saw me trying to bury my head in my pea coat, probably saw the teeth grinding, put together the very recent transpirings going on behind us, and said, “Ah, so the curse is on you, now.”

“What?” I asked.

“You heard me. Now you’ll go along and find every girl to whom you’re attracted is attached. Never fear, my friend, for the veil of sadness shall soon lift and, yea, verily, you will find happiness. For the Universe does want us to be hap—”

“Shove it,” I said.

The Student shrugged and we walked on.

I looked around at where we were and saw a bunch of closed-up pawn shops, some open kebab shops, and a lot of cars that looked like they’d seen better days. I put this together with the presence of some angry-looking Turkish guys who were loitering in door frames and staring at us and realized that we weren’t in the best of neighborhoods. I realized that the two people from the city, and thus most likely to know where we were going, were behind us, and this was odd. “Pascale, where are we going?” I asked.

She looked around and laughed. “Oh yes, I haven’t been paying attention.”

She and Sophie conferred, and, after much pointing and laughing, it was decided to go to the right.

We did, and after a little while longer, we crossed into an area in which glowering angry-looking people became stumbling, drunken young people. And, up ahead, projecting out of a house, was a lit-up sign that said “The Puzzle.”

Inside was dark and, it all of a sudden hit me, was a bar. Not an English bar, which was really a club, but an American bar. The difference between a bar and a pub being, mainly, music, seating, smoking, and lack of leering old pensioners. The Puzzle had a stage set up on the other end of the room, on the opposite side away from the entrance, upon which a bunch of musicians were setting up instruments. Some electric blues a la Stevie Ray Vaughn was playing on the speaker system throughout the bar, and there was a lively vibe throughout.

Pascale poked a bit at her cell phone and said, “Okay, they are downstairs, so...” she looked around. “Ah,” she said, pointing in front of me.

I looked and, behind a couple of tables, was a staircase that, indeed led downstairs. We walked downstairs, left the dim, smoky bar upstairs, and headed down to the cellar.

It reminded me of something out of a Poe story. Well, a Poe story with some happiness, alcohol, and lots of people sitting around in very comfortable, wall-long sofas. So, in that regard, nothing like a Poe story.

However, it transpired, as it normally does in these situations, that The Student and I, after some time spent briefly talking to some people nearby, ended up having a long discussion with an American ex-pat whom I’ll call Alice, and her boyfriend, whom I’ll call Olivier. (Those may or may not be their correct names. I’m working off of a bent and folded and ripped business card of a webzine.)

Anyway, Alice and Olivier had met when Olivier was doing a yeah abroad in South Carolina. The two dated for most of that year and Alice decided that she might as well head over to France for her year abroad. Then, she decided that she liked it enough to stay over there, and arranged to stay for grad school, and was working on naturalization. As I figured out later, the visa process took a lot of chutzpah to go through, and the fact that she was doing it in a foreign language said shitloads about her willpower.

So we talked about being ex-patriots, and how cool it was being able to say we were Americans when Obama was President, unlike a year or so ago, when you had to say something like, “I’m an American, but fuck Bush." Around the half hour mark, I ran out of beer, so I suggested a beer run. Alice and The Student shooed Olivier and I away so we went up to the bar, where, because I’m a gregarious drunk, I bought the round and nearly had an aneurism when the total came up.

“You know,” Olivier said, in his better-than-mine English, “I can buy half the round.”

“No,” I said, wiping the sweat from my brow, “no, I—I got it. Just. Fuck, yeah, right.” I handed the euros over and tried to reassure myself that it was all okay, that I was fine because I had a credit card and another installment of my loan coming in.

“Are you sure? I can do it, it’s not a big deal.”

“Nope,” I said. “Money’s across the counter. It’s gone.”

The bartender returned with my change. My meager, two-coin change. I nodded at him and we headed down the stairs again, some of the red liquid dripping from my glass. For every drop that ran down the side, I counted up the wasted cents, and despaired.

We returned to our table to The Student and Alice talking about what it’s like to live in France as a foreigner. “It’s actually pretty nice,” she said. “The French are used to a large ex-pat community from, well, everywhere. The only place you’ll get any problems is Paris—and ‘problems’ consists of being looked at oddly.”

At this point, one of the guys at the sofa on the other side of us started shouting about something, and Olivier said, “Don’t worry about him. He can’t help it. He’s French.”

To which the guy turned around and shouted, “QUOI?”

We laughed and drank some more. Cigarettes were passed around, and the band upstairs started playing.

I went up and peeked and saw that the singer had the hair of Bob Dylan, the glasses of John Lennon, and the singing voice of Tom Petty. Backing him was a blues-rock band. It made me realize how much I’d missed live music. Canterbury had some bands that played from time to time in the same pubs and there was a blues night at a place called Orange Street Music Club, but the same bands had the same repetoire.

While this might have been the case here in Lille, I doubted it. The city was exponentially larger than Canterbury and had something like five universities within four square miles of each other. In my mind, that means that there are a lot of bored students, and where there are bored students, there are bands.

I went back downstairs and the rest of the night passed much like that. At one point, we four started conversing in French, where my dialogue took three times as long as everyone else’s, but in being forced to speak French in a way that I hadn’t been even in my college courses[2] made me improve—granted, it only lasted an hour or so, but the brief improvement was there.

Anyway, after about two in the morning, the bar was shutting down and we had to leave. People said goodbye, exchanged e-mails, and we left the cellar, up the stairs, through the bar where the band was disassembling equipment, and out onto the streets.

Along the way, we were attacked by some snowball-wielding, carol-singing teenagers in the most confusing display of vagrancy I’d ever seen.

We got some sleep, for the next day would be full of more wandering and then a journalism party at Pascale’s university.

---

[1] Now, hold on, I know that’s not the, ah, sanest metaphor to make.  It was just that, well, the temperature was dropping rapidly to a point where I don’t think life could easily be sustained.

[2] Aside from the Parisian teacher, my other instructors were either grad students or young instructors who’d rather be drinking, and so getting them to speak English instead of French in class was supremely easy.

In the Cathedral

I don’t go into churches in the U.S.. It’s probably because I’m tainted by dealing with Baptists, but I’m generally repelled by the sight of a cross, and when I see large droves of people walking into what could double as a sports arena, a shiver runs down my spine.

However, when I’m traveling, that reservation disappears, flinging itself into the wind, like a rabbit caught in Canterbury wind. I’ve been in cathedrals and megachurches in every city to which I’ve traveled, and even a giant synagogue in Manhattan. That was a pretty cool experience, but fundamentally different from the megachurches sprinkled around Nashville.

It’s because I view these churches and cathedrals as exhibits in a museum. They contain the heart of every city, and, in doing so, create a form of their religion infinitesimally different from other versions. If I’m lucky, I’ll be in the cathedral during a service. Once I wandered into a service in Canterbury Cathedral. It wasn’t much different from a Roman Catholic service, but the bishop did mention that he was always available for a chat over tea and biscuits.

In this vein, before I go about laying detail about the cathedral in Lille, here are some observations I gathered about the city:

·     While small, Lille has a vivid tourist industry. The amount of people wandering around the cathedral with giant cameras was staggering.

·     The city prides itself on multiculturalism. All the signs in the cathedral had several different languages printed on them. (Of course, this is par for Europe. It’s still jarring when you come from a red state that has a “If you don’t speak English, you can get out!” mentality.)

·     There’s a lot of pride in terms of the city’s history. Well, at least enough pride in its history to not allow a renovation on the Cathedral to take a decade due to lack of funding. (Ba-zing, for those in the know.)

The interior of the cathedral was spacious, but fairly modernized. In front of the entrance were rows of pews facing the apse (the main hangout of the high priest) and the ambulatory behind it. As in Canterbury’s Cathedral, the apse in Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille featured both the altar and a gated-off section with what I’d like to think of as the cathedral’s mascot: in this case, a large and ornate cruciform. Behind and around that, in the ambulatory, were several small chapels featuring important saints. The space was lit by huge stained-glass windows that we hadn’t noticed outside.

We entered the cathedral a few hours before one of the masses, and, off to the side in one of the aisles, in a glass room, a red-robed priest studied a book. There were a few other glass rooms, but these were empty. Further up the aisle were a few confession booths. These were not glass, but wooden. Part of me was glad that these weren’t glass, but another part of me was thinking up ideas of a reality TV show that just might rescue a floundering Catholic church’s reputation.

The Student dashed off to the left aisle and began lining up shots on his point-and-shoot camera. I didn’t bother trying to engage him in conversation, as his mind was probably looking at the Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille in relation to Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame or some such thing. Thus, I decided to go for a meander around the building and take thoroughly less detailed pictures of the chapels, maybe read some plaques, stare at a wall, have a sit on the pews.

I meandered down to the apse, glanced at the altar and took a blurry picture, then walked around the ambulatory. As I stood in front of a statue that I took to be Joan d’Arc, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand straight and heard some light breathing to my right. I turned, slowly, and there, standing and looking straight ahead at a wall, was The Stalker.

“Er,” I said.

“Hello,” he said, continuing to look at the wall.

“Something interesting there?”

“Did you tell him?”

I cocked my head to the side. Part of me started to pray to whatever saint stood in front of me. “Tell him what? That you have multiple personality disorder?”

He turned to me. The black contacts were back. “That’s not something to joke about.”

Silence. Time passed.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. I see you avoided getting thrown in prison for exposing yourself.”

The Stalker nodded. “Le Gendarmerie and I came to a mutual understanding. One that involved them understanding my position that a) I did not expose myself to anyone, and was merely licking my lips because there was capuccino residue, and the girl happened to be in my line of sight at the time and b) it would be a terrible thing for all those involved if I was to wind up incarcerated.”

“How’d you come to that conclusion?”

He turned back to the wall. “Through calm, intelligent discussion.”

“For that matter,” I said, “how did you avoid the border control folks way back in September?”

“Through calm, intelligent discussion,” he said.

I nodded, went, “Hmm,” and snapped a picture of the saint in front of me. “So how are you liking Lille, then?” I asked. I turned to my right and saw that The Stalker was no longer there. I looked around and saw no trace of him, no lingering possible psychotic/sociopath in a black trench coat. Only tourists taking pictures.

The Student made his way over towards the ambulatory and took around fifty photos of the statue I was looking at. “You see The Stalker?” I asked.

“Did you know that the representative style of this particular statue was prominent around the time of the Revolution?” He asked, clicking away. “Apparently, the face is replicated on every female saint statue created during that time; the sculptors were typically in the same, ah, cadre—is cadre the same word?—and it is posited by several art history scholars that the model was an oil painting of Bonaparte’s wife.”

“No kidding,” I said, blinking rapidly at this onslaught of supposition. “And who are these art history scholars?”

The Student lowered his camera, checked through the pictures he’d just taken. “Some absolute nutcases at Berkely. Had to read one of their articles for a Hugo paper last year. Worst drivel I’ve ever seen—then again, it’s art history.”

I nodded. I knew nothing about art history, other than there was a history of humanity creating works of art. “Quite. What’s the plan for tonight?”

The Student took out his phone and pressed a few buttons. “Looks like we’re going out to a bar to hang out with a bunch of Pascale’s friends from journalism school.”

“No kidding,” I said. “Sophie going to be there?”

The Student raised an eyebrow.

“You know,” I said, “just wondering.”

“Is there something I should know? Are you going to try anything on her?”

“What?” I asked. “No. No that would... that would... No. Come on, man. I mean, she’s pretty and all. But, I mean, cause I can’t speak French, right?”

The Student shut his eyes and gave a kind of shiver that only took up his head. “That was complete nonsense. But I gather that you think she’s incredibly attractive and would totally ‘hit that,’ in your almost impossibly awkward way. Right? Look, man, as long as you don’t put this up on your blog for the world to see and embarrass the fuck out of me, I don’t give a damn.”

“Ha!” I said, pointing at him. “That’s where you’re wrong! Only eight people visit my blog a week! Three when I don’t post anything.”

The Student raised an eyebrow at me. I thought for a moment that, since The Student was such an academic individual, the muscles right above his eyes got the most workout in his body. “Okay,” he said.

“I think,” I continued. “I’m not entirely sure. Blogspot’s stat counter is kind of confusing and strangely detailed. Especially compared to WordPress, which is really the Mac of the blogs, if you ask me. It’s really user-friendly and easy on the eyes, unlike Blo—”

“Shut up, please,” The Student said. “If I wanted to know about the differences and pros and cons between blogs, I’d just research it myself. Hearing about it, you see, is incredibly annoying, as it calls to mind the days of yore when everyone in my high school was on livejournal.”

I hung my head.

He checked his watch. “Let’s head out, I’d like to check out the rest of Vieux Lille before we go out tonight.”

I shrugged, buried my hands into my p-coat, and shuffled along behind The Student. We walked up to the entrance of the cathedral, put some coins into the donation box, and walked out. (In light of all the odd things I might have said about religion, this may or may not seem like an odd thing to do. My thoughts on the matter boil down to 1) Don’t fuck with the metaphysical and; 2) it’s best to build up what I like to think of as a karma buffer – donating to all sorts of religious institutions in order to placate the various deities. That way, I figure, if one religion turns out to be right, and it’s not mine, then I’ve got at least something going for me.)

Back in The Cafe

A tall, overweight man (a tourist, judging by the Anaheim Angels ballcap) bright blue swishy coat, and huge camera hanging from a black lanyard, walked into the café and said, “Holy piss, how bout that cold?”

The Student groaned, the guy looked over and said, “Bonjourney, fellas,” and laughed. He walked to a table and started taking off all of his gear. The guy behind the counter looked on in disdain, and The Student and I dropped our voices so as to not seem like That Kind of American.

“That it?” asked The Student.

“What, the tourist?”

The Student cocked his head to the side.

“Oh, the story.”

“Yeah, what else?”

“That’s what I was wondering. Yeah, that’s about it. Ya get it? He was assigned to kill silence, so he goes out and shouts stuff.”

“No, I got it, I just don’t get it.”

“What’s there not to get? He stop silence by shouting.”

“Yes,” said The Student, taking off his glasses and putting them gently on the table. “But why? Why was he asked to kill silence? That doesn’t make any sense. Is this a company that benefits from noise? Is silence a terrorist?”

“You’re thinking about this too much.”

“No, I’m not. Was this a joke?”

“Well, yeah, kind of.”

He leaned back, squinting more as he did so. “You told a joke utterly without humor or reason, not even a piece of anti-humor. And you did this for no reason.”

“Look, I had to kill the time some how. We couldn’t just sit here in silence while drinking wine.”

“Why not? I have a book.”

“Well I don’t.”

“Maybe you should go get a book. We’re in a university city, they’re plentiful.”

“I can’t read French.”

“You could probably find one in English.”

“Yeah, like Hop on Pop or some shit.”

“Pah!” said The Student.

“Pah!” I concurred.

We finished the vin chaud in silence. The Student broke out a hefty tome of a novel, one of those big ones that had probably made a nice home on the best selling lists across the country and was gaining renown as an exemplar of post-post-modern hyper-realism speculative fiction focusing on the dystopic realities of the modern family. Or a fantasy novel. I reached over and picked up the front cover to have a look. I was wrong. It was fucking Tolstoy.

I shook my head and grunted.

He looked at me cock-eyed. “What?”

“Tolstoy.” I grunted again.

“What about him?”

“He sucks.”

The Student flipped the book shut. “That’s your critique? ‘He sucks’? You’re not going to expound upon that bit of wisdom?”

“No,” I said. (I’d forgive you, Dear Reader, for thinking that I was just stringing The Student along at this point, because that sounds like exactly the sort of thing I’d try to do. However, that would not be the case. My hatred of Russian literature runs deep, stemming, as most cases do, from Dostoevesky, and then Chekov, and finally, Tolstoy. At the mere mention of Russian lit, I tend to start foaming at the mouth and appear to come down with a severe case of Tourette’s.) “No, I’m not going to expound. There’s no reason to. Tolstoy sucks, and everyone who likes him is either mentally challenged or a masochist.”

The Student sputtered syllables for a few seconds before saying, “Look, I admit that the Russian literary canon is made up of a lot of self-congratulatory wannabe philosophers, but that’s no reason to disparage the enti—”

“It’s every reason.” I brought the cup up to my mouth and found, to my great dismay, that it was empty. “Fuck.”

The Student closed the book and put it back in his satchel. “Okay,” he said, putting his hands up, “are you going to do that every time I break out Tolstoy?”

“Most likely, yes.”

“What if I brought out Edmund Rostand?”

“Who?”

“Cyrano de Bergerac.”

“Never read it, so whatever.”

“Good,” said The Student. “That’s my other option. You see,” he said, readjusting his glasses on his nose, “I’m working on translating it. I don’t feel that the version I have is sufficiently poetic, and—”

“Nerd!” I shouted.

The guy behind the counter shot us a look that said we were clearly That Kind of Americans and thus No Longer Welcome.

“Hey, let’s go inside the church,” I said.

A Brief Tale In Order To Kill Silence

He walked into his superior’s office. It was minimalist, you could say. There were no personal trappings inside save for a framed picture of a golden retriever, which sat on top of the heating unit underneath the window. His black desk had no decoration, and everything was meticulously organized at right angles to the edges. A computer monitor sat on top of the desk, to the right, hooked up to the CPU, tucked underneath.

His superior, who went by John Doe—much like everyone who had their own office—dressed in black suits with white shirts and black ties. He had parted hair, slicked to the right.

Number 7, the man who walked into the office, who had replaced Number 6 upon Number 6’s demise somewhere in the mountains of Turkmenistan, closed the door behind him and stood at attention, careful not to make eye contact with Mr. Doe.

Mr. Doe looked over Number 7. “We haven’t met.”

Number 7 did not respond.

Mr. Doe opened a drawer with a key and took out a black folder and placed it on the desk. He locked the drawer. “That folder contains your assignment. You may view it in the viewing room, but nowhere else. Standard protocol applies: Destroy the folder upon viewing it.”

The agent walked forward, took the folder—still not making eye contact—turned, and walked outside the office.

Inside the viewing room, a stainless steel cube in which a single rectangular fluorescent light buzzed overhead, Number 7 opened the folder and saw a single white sheet of paper with his instructions written in a clear, sans serif font in the center of the page. Each line did not extend more than two inches and was written in simple, clear English—of the sort that one would find in an encyclopedia article.

Number 7 read the instructions enough times to memorize them, replaced the piece of paper, and walked over to the slot in the side of the wall, over which “Incinerator” was written. He slid the folder into the hole, straightened his tie, and walked out of the room, making sure to turn out the light as he left.

Two days later, a man in a hole-ridden black sweater, jeans that were in danger of falling apart by the stitches, and a hollowed-out stuffed panda in lieu of a hat, stood on a street corner in an unspeakably small town in rural Montana. He had been screaming for seven hours straight, and, when the sheriff's department walked up to him to quiet the man, he knocked out several of them. Now, he stood alone, screaming nonsense into the night air.

The people of the town, for their part, seriously took up the idea of moving to another area, even though most of them had never left the county and saw the prospect of doing so as if it were a terrifying suggestion on par with hugging a puffer fish.

If any of them had made it close to the man, reached into his back pocket, and was not immediately attacked, they would have found a white sheet of paper. The white sheet of paper was one of the high-tensity ones, the sort that office letterhead is printed upon. It was a business letter from an organization that called itself “The Organization,” and it was from a Mr. Doe. On it was written: “Progress as stated. You will be alerted as soon as silence has been sufficiently killed.”