Paris, St Patrick's Day

            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)