Before or
after an alarm clock beeps (especially in a foreign city), birds tend to wake
me up. I take a dawn run in Paris, wondering how the rain refracts their
banter. For me it refreshes a spent city: yellow vested riots still in my nose,
glass of smashed boutiques in the grooves of my shoes, feigned photojournalism stored
on my phone. Perhaps a throwback to the Bastille, liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Perhaps a soupçon of banalité...
But the
birds this morning lure me away from the cobbled streets, into the relative
peace of the Parc de Bagatelle. Sparrows, probably, and wrens; crows and canada
geese; a woodpecker far too early; a heron lofting near a path along a lake,
and that’s when I take note of other creatures in the park—rats and rabbits and
a caveman, cooking something on a fire obscured by the gate he had probably
pried open. I want to espy—imagining a morning pot of coffee or crack cocaine—but
Prufrock that I am, I dare not disturb his entombed universe.
I stride
away from the lake, onto a service road. From behind I hear a van approach and a
bellow of “police!” I’d seen a hundred vans the night before—swat teams waiting
for the yellow vests to take their cause too far—and my instinct is to show
myself as totally unyellow, a tourist on a morning jog. From the passenger
window a nonpoliceman laughs at me as the van lumbers by, drive-by shooting
speed. I veer off into a forest path.
The map at
the hotel had indicated a Shakespearean theatre in these woods, a thing I’d
love to find just now. In the city the other night I had seen a staging of The Picture of Dorian Gray, relishing
some references to Hamlet; at 7am,
mid-March, there wouldn’t be a play, but drama happens other ways.
Back on the
service road, parked cars have busted windows. Yellow vests? Robin Hoods? That
mocking nonpoliceman? Other cars remain intact, their engines running, drivers
smoking against the oxygen this park affords. In a cul-de-sac I stumble into a
klatch of vans, one with gaudy christmas lights to disco up the dawn. A woman
in a bright red negligee lounges at the wheel of an almost-as-red van; her
tired eyes barely rise in my direction, uninterested in why I’d wonder why
she’s idling there.
St
Patrick’s Day, and Sunday all the more. Guys in skulking cars seem none too
lucky—less ashamed than voluntarily desperate, playing the odds that spirits in
the drizzly air would keep their down-low on the up and up. And lose themselves
a little while in a windowless fuck truck.
I stop in
my tracks. Nothing on the south side of this park, on yestermorning’s run, had
been out of place. Birds would say as much—or that’s the way I heard them then.
Now their chirping sounds subdued. I aim toward the corner of the park that
will usher me to the Arc de Triomphe. The north side of the lake stands
somewhat in the way, and I imagine prostitutes or cavemen jumping in, the only
way to bathe away the grime their circumstances make.
Across the
water, a gathering in gray. My misty glasses veil their personhoods, and so I
guess they must be troopers on the lookout for more gilets jaunes, those yellow-vested warblers. I squint to ascertain:
their bodies just too small, collectively, devoid of helmets, gasmasks,
billyclubs, shin and shoulder pads. Lo and behold! they are nuns, assembling as
if this pond were the Sea of Galilee. I decide, with second thoughts, to curve
along the path to eavesdrop on their prayers. It’s St Patrick’s Day, and Sunday
all the more.
My head
swivels for two sisters running late. They join without apology, it seems, and the
gray group waddles silently along the shore. Some have rosaries as thick as
rope, most are empty-handed. I pass them and then a swan as large as Zeus, oblivious
to such association. A dozen stories come to mind about this species—I don’t
need a baker’s dozen, per se, yet the nuns behind me may provide for yet
another.
That said,
I feel guilty for pretending to run south, away from my goal of the Arc de
Triomphe; I swing away from the lake to double back, passing the nuns with due
space, so as not to gawk. They are talking silently to Zeus, gesturing toward
the water, as if he’d lost his way. I want to witness whether their influence
will work, and because some of those gestures come with bread crumbs, the
creature complies, lifts his heavy webs and glides into his kingdom.
By
coincidence, I’m sure, pictures of less-blessed swans litter the Champs-Élysées. My strides slow as I come
to the mess that made for yesternight. Swarovski,
with its diamond-encrusted logo, is all but dead, a thousand blue boxes from
its innards—all with single swans, feigning ignorance. Perhaps the nuns had
meant to scoot them where they’re meant to be.
I warm down
the mile or so to where the hotel shower promises some difference, if not
substantially. The conference that I came for has me working on St Patrick’s
Day, and Sunday all the more. The hours click by the way they always do, and
then I fly into the evening, remembering the times I’ve heard, for real, a swan’s
song. Once, exactly over Charles Bridge—missing human heads by inches.
And as the
plane descends, fighting turbulence along the way, the pilot tests the runway
with one wheel and the next, then thrusts the aircraft up again, causing hearts
to flutter. The lady next to me speaks French, a mumble for the question of
mortality. Eventually the pilot assures us on the intercom: the maneuver is alright,
all for safety’s sake. Another loop around Prague can’t be so terrible.
I twirl my
wedding band and pray. Not for nothing on St Patrick’s Day.
Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2019)
