The Chain of Chance

from Rome. There I was in for another surprise. The hotel was filled to capacity with passengers stranded in the same way I was. I was now faced with the prospect of spending the night in Paris and getting up at four o’clock in the morning to make my 5:40 flight. There was no point in going back to Garges, either, since it was situated to the north of Paris and Orly to the south, I shoved my way through the crowd of disappointed passengers, reached the exit, and debated my next move. I could always postpone my departure a day, but that was the last thing I felt like doing: there’s nothing worse than a long delay.

I was still deliberating what to do when a man carrying a stack of magazines stepped out of a kiosk and began arranging them on the newsstand. My attention was caught by the latest edition of Paris- Match. Staring at me from the black front cover was a man shown suspended in midair like a gymnast executing a side vault. He was wearing suspenders and holding against his chest a child with streaming hair whose head was tilted back in the manner of a trapeze artist. Not believing my own eyes, I walked up to the newsstand. It was a picture taken of Annabella and me. I bought a copy of the magazine, which automatically flipped open to the page featuring the exclusive cover story. Stretched across the entire page in bold letters above a picture of the demolished and body-strewn escalator was the following headline: WE’D RATHER DIE FACING FORWARD. I skimmed through the report. They’d tracked down Annabella, and on the next page was a picture of her with her family—but nowhere was my name mentioned. The photos came from the video tape used by the airport to photograph all those passing through the Labyrinth. I hadn’t counted on the publicity. I was relying on their promises of strict confidentiality. I ran through the text again; it was accompanied by a sketch of the escalator and the detonation tank, with arrows indicating the path of my escape, and an enlarged detail from the cover photo showing a checkered sleeve situated between my pant legs and the landing. The caption underneath described it as the arm of the assassin blown off by the explosion. What I’d have given to buttonhole the author of that article! What was stopping him from mentioning me by name? Oh, I figured in it, all right—as “the astronaut.” But Annabella’s name was there, that “lovely teen-aged girl” who was still waiting for a letter from her rescuer. Though it wasn’t made explicit, there were sly insinuations that the airport disaster had given rise to a love affair. A cold fury took hold of me; I wheeled around, elbowed my way through the crowd in the lobby, and barged into the manager’s office, where people were all talking at the same time. Cashing in on my recent heroism, I threw the Paris-Match down on the manager’s desk and started outshouting everyone. I still blush with shame whenever I think back on that scene, but I got my way. The manager, unaccustomed to dealing with heroic astronauts, finally broke down and gave me his last vacancy, swearing up and down that it really was his last when the other passengers suddenly pounced on him like a pack of hounds let off their leashes.

I started to go for my bags but was told the room wouldn’t be ready till eleven o’clock; it was still only eight. I left my luggage at the reception desk and found myself in command of three hours’ leisure. I regretted having made a spectacle of myself, and since there could have been serious repercussions if a member of the press had happened to be present, I decided to keep a safe distance from the hotel till eleven. I wasn’t in the mood for going to a movie or eating out, so on a whim I decided to do something I’d once thought of doing in Quebec when my plane was grounded by a blizzard. I headed for the other end of the terminal, strolled into a barbershop, and ordered the works. The barber was a Gascon, so much of what he said was lost on me, but, sticking to my decision, I agreed to all the frills in order not to risk being hustled out of the chair. After a fairly routine haircut and shampoo, he shifted into high gear. Tuning in some rock-and-roll music on a transistor standing between the mirrors, he turned up the volume, rolled up his sleeves, and, tapping his foot to the music, started to go to town. He patted my face, pulled my cheeks, tweaked my chin, slapped a steaming compress over my eyes and nose, now and then made a small air hole in the burning-hot towel to keep me from suffocating, and asked me a question that I didn’t catch because my ears were still plugged with the cotton wads he’d put there before cutting my hair. My “ca va, bien” sent him scurrying to his cabinet for more bottles and lotions. Altogether I spent about an hour in the barber’s chair. Toward the end he combed and evened out my eyebrows, stepped back, and examined me with a critical frown; then he changed my apron, took out of a separate compartment a small, gold-covered bottle that he held up for my inspection as if it were some classy wine, smeared some green jelly on his fingers, and began rubbing it into my scalp. All this was accompanied by a steady stream of uninterrupted patter, the gist of which was that my worrying days were over now: I would never grow bald. After brushing my hair with a series of brisk strokes, he took away all the hand towels and compresses, pulled the cotton out of my ears, blew into each ear in a way that was both gentle and intimate, showered me with powder, snapped his towel in front of my face, then stepped back and made a dignified bow. He was pleased with himself. With tightened scalp and cheeks aglow, I got up from the chair in a daze, tipped him ten francs, and walked out of the shop.

With some time to go before my room would be ready, I started heading for the observation deck to take in the airport at night but somehow got lost. They were doing some repair work inside the terminal; one section of the escalator was roped off, and mechanics were making a lot of racket in the shafts below. Somehow I drifted into a crowd of people racing toward the departure area. Soldiers in foreign uniforms, nuns in starched bonnets, long- legged blacks who looked to be members of a men’s basketball team… Bringing up the rear was a stewardess pushing a wheelchair in which a gray-haired man in dark glasses sat holding a furry bundle in his lap; suddenly the bundle jumped down and started crawling toward me on all fours. A monkey dressed in a green jacket and a tiny skullcap stared up at me with darting black eyes, then pirouetted around and started hopping after the moving wheelchair. The rock-and-roll music coming from the barbershop was so infectious I could hear it reverberating in peoples’ footsteps and voices. Standing alongside the wall under some neon lights was a TV hockey game; I dropped in a coin and batted the luminous dot around till my eyes began to hurt, then got up and left before my turn was up. Passengers were still streaming toward departures. Among them was a peacock; it stood calmly with its tail lowered, narrowly missing getting hit, and its head tilted to one side as if it were trying to decide whose leg to peck first. Somebody must have lost a peacock, I thought. Unable to fight the crowd, I circled around, but by the time I reached the spot where the peacock had been it was gone.

I thought again of the observation deck but took the wrong corridor by mistake and wound up downstairs in a maze of jewelers, fur shops, foreign-exchange offices, and myriad other little shops. Pausing idly in front of the shop windows, I had the sensation of standing on top of a frozen lake and looking down into its deepest, blackest part. It was much as if the terminal had its own mute and murky negative counterpart underneath. To be more exact, I was conscious of the abyss without actually seeing or feeling anything. I took the escalator upstairs but wound up in another wing, in a hall full of golf carts, dune buggies, and beach cars that stood in narrow rows waiting to be loaded. Squeezing my way through the aisles, I had fun with the fluorescent sheen given off by their luminous bodies, an effect I attributed to the lighting and to the new enamel finish. I paused in front of one buggy that was glazed a metallic gold and caught a glimpse of my own reflection—a quivering mass of yellow with a face that kept stretching vertically and then horizontally; when I held my head in a certain position, my eyes became dark holes secreting black metal beetles; when I leaned forward, another, darker, and more imposing reflection would appear behind my own. I glanced around—no one—but the figure mirrored in gold refused to go away. An uncanny optical illusion. The hall was sealed off by a sliding door at the other end, so I went back the way I came, my every movement and gesture mockingly reflected by my surroundings as in a hall of mirrors. I was somehow disturbed by this proliferation of images. Then I realized it was because the reflections were mimicking me but with a slight delay in time, even though that would have been impossible. To drown out the rock-and-roll tune banging away in my head, I started whistling “John Brown’s Body.”

I wasn’t having any luck finding the observation deck, so I took a side exit and went outside. Despite the proximity of the streetlights, the night was so black and palpably thick you could have squeezed it with your hands: a real African night. It occurred to me that I might have been coming down with night blindness, that something might have been wrong with my rhodopsin, but gradually my vision improved. Must have been that excursion through the gold-plated gallery, I thought—my old eyes can’t adjust to the change of light the way they used to.

A huge building was under construction in a lighted area beyond the parking lots. Bulldozers crawled in and out of the columns of light, pushing their loads of shimmering gold sand. A flat cloud of fiery quicksilver hung over this nocturnal Sahara like the Milky Way, while time and again flashes of lightning stitched the backdrop in slow motion—the headlights of cars turning off the highway for the airport. There was something strangely magical in this otherwise ordinary spectacle. It was then that my return trip through the terminal began to take on an aura of anticipation—not of the hotel room, though I hadn’t forgotten about it, but of something more important. The fateful moment was approaching. It had the mark of absolute certainty, but, like a man struggling with a name on the tip of his tongue, I couldn’t put my finger on it, on what it was I was expecting.