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.”

The Grizzly Bear Band and Wandering

We walked out of the museum and headed back to the pair of squares with all of the fun stuff. As we walked past the Ferris Wheel, towards the part of town we hadn’t yet wandered aimlessly through, we passed something odd.

See, Knoxville is basically in the Smokey Mountains. One of the things the city—and the tourist trap called Gatlinburg down the highway—liked to associate itself with was black bears. Black bears are an attractive mascot of the area because they fulfill two requirements:

1)                 They’re fuzzy – It doesn’t matter that black bears have the strength to rip off your head; they have fur that looks like they could be a great pillow during a nap, and so people want to hug them. This is why you see signs around the Smokey Mountain National Park that have something along the lines of, “Please, for the love of God, don’t approach bears."

2)                 They’re about to disappear – This is a sad thing, as it is proof that the nature of humanity is not to conserve but to destroy. It’s readily apparent that the majority of the human race doesn’t give two damns about the repercussions of pouring leftover motor oil into a river. We try to make up for it by making dying species the mascots of various cities or teams, but more often than not, this just depresses a lot of people.

Apparently, part of the role of the city’s mascot entails being featured in a mechanical animatronic affront against all that is good. The robot bears were kept in one of the market squares in Knoxville and only turned on during the holidays. Their cold, dead stares went across the square making children cry and making me wonder just what the hell the tourist board of Knoxville was thinking.

So, succinctly put, this was the last thing I expected to see on the other side of the Ferris Wheel in Lille.

On top of a red and white bandstand, encased in glass, and wearing Santa hats, there were four robotic grizzly bears, clutching instruments in their fur-covered robotic claws, their heads moving at an unnatural pace on unnatural paths, always looking just above your head as they strummed and drummed. I stood in front of the bandstand, my eyes wide open, staring in fear. The Student stood next to me, looking around at the square, not nearly as freaked out as I was. He noticed that I hadn’t said anything. “Is this you freaking out about nothing again? Like when you curled into the fetal position on the Millennium Bridge?”

“That was the correct reaction to hallucinating sharks,” I said. “And I don’t trust the bears.”

The Student cocked an eyebrow and looked at the robots. “Are you serious?”

“They’re robots, Student. You can’t trust robots. We’ve both seen Terminator.”

“What? Are you fucking with me? You’re fucking with me, aren’t you? There’s no way you’re not. If you weren’t you’d be certifiable.”

“Maybe I am,” I said. I took a deep breath as the bears went into an Edith Piaf song. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Good idea,” he said.

We walked for a while. Our trip took us through the old section of Lille, basically the area that had existed since Canterbury had been around and hadn’t been bombed during World War II. The buildings were plenty pretty, but I’d reached the point during the day that the meager breakfast I’d had—you know, the cup of espresso—had worn off and my stomach felt like it was going to collapse in on itself. “Boulangerie!” I shouted.

The Student jumped a bit and almost got ran over by an Opel. The driver honked and sped off. A couple people on the other side of the street looked over but carried on their way. “What?” he asked.

“We need to find a boulangerie,” I said. “Baguettes, rolls, something. I’m hungry.”

He nodded at a shop down the street that had a picture of a sandwich in the window. “How bout a sandwich?”

“Nope,” I said. “We’re in France, not England. As far as I’m concerned, the sandwich does not exist in this country. Only baguettes and pastries. And snails.”

“That’s incredibly stupid. We had some food beyond that last night.”

“Yes, and this is different.” I gestured around us. “Do you see Pascale or her incredibly attractive friends around here? No. Do you see me going ‘guh’ at women passing by?”

“You did a couple of minutes ago.”

“Shut up. We need baguettes.”

“Fine,” he said, shaking his head, “just stop complaining.”

We found a boulangerie down the road, I bought a baguette, we left, and I nearly broke my teeth on it. “Good God, it’s solid,” I said.

“It’s probably been sitting in that basket inside for a while.”

I snapped off the tip and crunched it in my mouth for a few minutes, begrudgingly thinking that we should have stopped at the sandwich shop.

A couple of minutes later, though, as we’d hit probably the mile mark in our wanderings, we stopped dead in our tracks as we looked down an alleyway. “Huh,” I said. “Look at that.”

“Yeah,” said The Student. “Wonder why Pascale didn’t mention this.”

In front of us was a huge Gothic cathedral. At the time, I would have said that it was on par with Notre Dame—of course, I am an idiot, and treat new things with the enthusiasm of a Labrador presented with a new smell. Picture in your mind a stone building, covered in spires and gargoyles and depictions of saints and priests. Now, imagine a megachurch in, say, Houston, with a glass-and-cement front and a stained-glass cross above the glass entranceway. That was the cathedral in Lille. (As an aside, the proper name is Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille. However, we’ll continue to refer to it as “the cathedral,” even though, technically, it is a basilica.)

The Student and I walked down the alleyway into the cathedral grounds, which were covered in mostly pristine snow. As we left the alleyway and entered the courtyard, we walked into a parking lot, in which was parked a solitary black SUV. (Mind you, the European SUVs are about half the size of their American counterparts.) Bird tracks peppered the snow, and a trail of two bootprints followed the exterior of the cathedral. On the other side, there was a standalone tone pedestrian alcove with a small bench. Behind that, past the grounds’ black iron gates, were a line of surely expensive flats and town homes. The entire scene was still. Probably, I thought, most of the people were walking around the city center or Old Lille, shopping, getting drunk off of vin chaude, or, more likely, gallivanting around in black-and-white sweaters and pretending that they were stuck inside boxes.

Out came our cameras. I looked at The Student’s and noticed something odd. “We have the same camera,” I said.

He looked down at his camera. Looked at mine. “Kodax Easy Share X-3729?”

I checked my model number. “Yep.”

“Huh,” he said. “Well, it’s a common model. I think. Affordable.”

“I wouldn’t know. My dad bought mine.”

“Mine did too.”

A stiff, cold wind blew by and a shiver ran down my spine. “Right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We walked around the cathedral—the long sides were about two hundred yards long, the smaller bits were about a quarter that—taking pictures of the arches, the gargoyles, and what looked like very stern popes. Well, I took random pictures of the sky and a few bricks. The Student seemed to be more interested in the architecture and took detailed pictures in manual mode. A black dog ran by and I took some pictures of that, then the person running after it, a collar and leash in hand. For me, this was a very interesting and profitable endeavor, but, judging by the cursing coming from The Student, not so much on his end.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Fucking—damn it.” He smacked the camera’s lens a bit. “I can’t get a detail photo of the gargoyle up there.” He pointed.

I followed where he pointed and saw a gargoyle perched on top of the highest spire in the front of the cathedral, on the other side of the cathedral. “That’s pretty far away.”

“And I need to take a picture of it.”

“It’s not going to happen, man.”

The Student grunted.

We moved on, followed the exterior of the cathedral some more, and then agreed that we needed to take a wine break. Luckily for us, there was a tavern across the street, near some bookshops and boulangeries—your typical French sidestreet, really. We crossed the street, walked in, and threw our bags on a table before ordering some wine. “Vin, s’il-vous plait,” we said to the tanned man in black behind the counter.

“Coming up, pals,” he said, in French-accented English.

“Oh,” I said.

“Well,” said The Student. “That makes it easier.”

The guy laughed and we walked back to the table, just a bit crushed that yet another person had seen through our French skills and, this time, had the audacity to call us out. “The accent’s that bad, huh?” I asked.

“Apparently.”

“I used to be the best in the class. The teacher, when she wasn’t shouting obscenities at us in French for not doing our homework, said I sounded like I was from the North.”

“Isn’t the North of France supposed to be inbred?”

“...,” I remarked. I blinked.

Silence.

We looked out the window until the guy brought over our mulled wine. I reached over to the window, saw a brochure for what seemed to be a bordello, and put it back down. This was not the sort of trip for a bordello. “Idea,” I said.

The Student took a break from staring at the vintage cigarette ad plastered on the wall behind me. “Mm?” he grunted.

“Short short story?”

He sighed. “Really?”

“It’s either that or we continue to sit here in silence. And, frankly, I can’t expect any of my readers to get into that.”

“You could always write about the bespec—”

“Shut up. Story or silence.”

“Fine,” he said. “Story, I guess.”

The Encounter

Time inside of a museum has a tendency to blur, like paint diluted with water. I checked my cell’s clock as we walked downstairs and saw that we’d been inside the museum for a few hours. Apparently, we’d been stopping and staring at every portrait in detail, but The Student’s discourse on Modernism must have shut down everything in my brain, save basic motor functions.

We walked down the flight of stairs and into the basement, the central part of which was set up to look like an amphitheater, with a bunch of black rows of seats facing a large projection screen set into a wall. On either side of the screen were sets of doors leading to the special exhibit hall. Sprawled out around and on the rows in the amphitheater were a bunch of shouting school kids. It was at that point that I realized that the stereotype of the French as a bunch of lascivious hedonists was true—the kids were all over each other in ways that, had I done the same in good ole boy rural Tennessee, I’d have been slapped with out-of-school detention and, probably, a severe scare-the-shit-out-of-you conversation by the police officer stationed in the school (which would have been ironic, as he was renown throughout the student body for being a lech). But, this being France, I shrugged it off and looked around.

The projection screen featured a film on repeat that seemed to be an video installation piece from the 60s. Some guy was driving a car, looking like he was either laughing like a mad scientist, or just having the best time ever. Then the film would cut to a woman sitting on a blue cube and slowly zoom in to an extreme focus on her right eye. After, there would be a cut to a dog walking down the street and pooping. Then the feces would be run over by a car, and then the film would return to the cackling man. I turned to The Student when the poop was on the screen, poked him (we were at this point sitting in the amphitheater behind the kids groping each other), and said, “Hey. That’s you, that is.”

He nodded. “Clever. Let’s move on.”

“Let’s,” I agreed.

The special exhibit hall was stark white with a lot of empty space. There looked to be about fifty people wandering around, looking at paintings and pictures in no particular order. The content of the exhibit was sketches of art schools from the Renaissance to the nineteenth centuries. A narrative about the changing methods and requirements of the schools was presented as one progressed through the gallery, and looking at one picutre in particular that seemed to be dead on, but was used as grounds to reject a student because “[the fingers] are out of proportion on the left hand, which shows that the student does not pay enough attention to accuracy, and cannot be admitted to the school.”

The Student shouted, “Holy shit!” and gripped my arm hard enough to make me think I’d stumbled into a vice.

“Good God, what?” I asked. He was pointing, I followed where he was pointing and let loose with my own, “Holy shit!”

Standing in a room in the exhibit hall dedicated to full-body sketches, right in front of a wall-sized coal-on-paper sketch of a nude female, was The Stalker. He held a notepad in his hand, but no pencil, and was staring at the sketch with the intensity of a toddler watching Nick Jr. He wore a black turtleneck, black trousers, and white sneakers. Slowly, as The Student and I stared on and stood as still as mannequins, he turned his head in our direction. He locked eyes with the both of us and grinned out of one of the sides of his mouth. We were frozen, as the victims of baslisks, and he walked towards us.

I whimpered a bit. Was I facing The Stalker as everyone knew him, or was I facing The Stalker as I’d seen him on that one, rare day—when he showed a side of himself that was normal?

We stood in place, probably hoping that if we didn’t move, The Stalker would lose track of us. After all, he was as terrifying as a Rex, so it was feasible that like the ones in Jurassic Park, his vision was based on movement. He continued forward, still grinning. When he was within speaking distance he said, “Well, well, well, what have we here?”

I gulped.

The Student regained some composure and said, “Hey, Stalker, you’re probably the last person I’d expect to see here.”

The Stalker took a deep breath and looked around him. He gestured at the art students and the sketches he was looking at. “Should I not be interested in the progress of art? Should I not be fascinated by the methods by which humanity has progressed in portraying itself to, well, itself? Is that what you’re implying? Or, perhaps, is it that you believe me to be too base, too depraved, to enjoy the human form?”

“No, not at all,” said The Student. I continued to stand still, hoping that The Stalker would walk away and not see me. “I was merely commenting on the strangeness of seeing you here, in Lille. It’s not the most popular tourist destination and—”

The Student leaned forward and came within an inch of The Student’s face. “When did you ever think that I was concerned with what was popular and what was not?”

Silence. The only sounds that came from the two was The Student going, “Oh, er, well, er,” and The Stalker breathing heavily.

Then, The Stalker grinned and tittered. “Joking. I saw it in a guidebook and decided to take a few days off from my work to immerse myself, however so briefly, in another culture.”

“What work?” I asked.

The Stalker’s eyes—lacking the black contacts, I noticed—burned fire at me. “My work.”

“What,” said The Student, “exactly, is your work?”

The Stalker turned his basilisk gaze to The Student. “It is of a private manner. Confidentiality.”

“Psychology?” asked The Student.

“No,” said The Student. He reached into the neck of his sweater and pulled out a pair of white earbuds, inserted them into his ears. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to appreciating art.” He nodded, turned on his music by pressing on his pocket—I’m assuming there was an iPod down there—nodded, and walked back to his alcove of nudie sketches.

I shivered and turned to The Student. “What the Hell was that?”

The Student shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s as if I was faced with a doppelganger, that’s the sort of fear I felt.”

“The Spider-Man villain?”

The Student turned to me and turned his head to the side. “I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.”

“There was a Spider-Man villain called The Doppelganger. He had eight arms.”

“Yes,” he said. “Quite. Let’s move on, shall we?”

The Student moved on through the gallery, slightly faster, and disappeared around a corner, skipping the rest of the sketches. I took another glance at The Stalker and saw him, ah, fiddling with... himself. I sped right the fuck on out of there, sparing one last glance when I heard a girl scream and two security guards leap up from their chairs near the entrance and dash towards The Stalker’s alcove.

I caught up with The Student and he said, “What was that?”

“Nothing. Dear sweet God let it be nothing. Hey, what’s this? This looks like Springfield.”

We stood in front of a wall-sized painting done in the style of a colorful cartoon. It was one of those paintings that was created to look like a city’s street plan, with cars and people put on as illustration. The buildings were multicolored, as if they were settings in a Nickolodeon cartoon from the 90s. The catch was, and this is what probably elevated the painting to Art status instead of Something Pretty to Look At, all of the buildings were unbelievably witty send-ups of American institutions. McDonald’s was Fat-Laden Restaurant; gas stations had the word “Blood” in their names; that sort of humor.

“It’s trying really hard,” said The Student. He sighed. “This is why I could never study modern art. All these pieces that are trying to make statements about the human condition, or the condition of modern society, for that matter, are just so damn lame.”

“Much like the novels you’re reading.”

He nodded. “Oh, yeah. Much like the novels I’ve read for the last five years, really. Sometimes I wish I could go back to middle school, when I could read atrociously-written sci-fi, the sorts that are released and go straight into the bargain bin.”

“Those were the days.”

He agreed and we moved on. The rest of the exhibit was mainly made up of some more neo-satirical-cartoon sort of stuff and some video installation works that tried desperately to subvert gender and age roles, and neither of us were really that interested. I wondered what would happen if we found a Literature Tour of Lille. Surely there had to be one. It was a large city near a couple of very important cities (Brussels and Paris), so, at some point, there had to be some major authors who wrote about or lived there. But through the time we were in Lille, neither of us caught any signs that this was the case.

           We made ready to leave the museum and retrieved our coats. (I made sure to not make eye contact with the girl behind the counter.) We left the museum, went back into the snow and the freezing cold weather, and that’s when I realized that I didn’t find out what happened to The Stalker. I shrugged the question off. If he could make it through English Customs at the beginning of our year while wearing black contact lenses, he could make it through a—please God—misunderstanding at a French museum.