The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

She had noticed it last night at a piano recital, in which a slim Chinese woman, beautifully intense, played Rachmaninoff with superhuman celerity; and she notices it here, listening to Death in Vegas. Faces shining in the dark, riveted, young, are replicating the expression. The music they are listening to is electronically synthesized, and has a quality of pounding and insistent stammer: the squeal of a keyboard and the whine of electric guitars are encased in an overamplified throb.

Repetition, repetition, repetition, she thinks.

On the stage, absurdly familiar, is a skull-and-crossbones flag, and behind it hangs a screen of fluctuating and synchronized projections. Images loop, and loop again, then accelerate to crescendo. There are sol- diers marching in formation, dancers whirling out of focus, machinery, lightbulbs, a weather balloon ascending.

She wonders what meaning operates here, that employs the visual as mere flash. The bald head of the keyboard player is her stable sign; throughout the concert it is variously and fantastically lit-red, blue, purple, and then gold-but it remains somehow definite, a human globe, a wonderfully absolute, pure, and untechnical thing.

Ragged applause: then the system of repetitions restarts.

There is too much sound and too much light: she is feeling denuded and swathed in excess. Ordinary and strobe lights rake the dark crowd, and at some point this young woman, who has come to the concert alone, covers her eyes with one hand to counter the bluish-light blindness. Even with her eyes closed she can still see the fulgurous strobe, and she is even more willfully and emphatically alone; she is locked into some solitary concert and closed to community. She is a foreigner, people will know it, she does not belong here.

Someone reaches over and holds gently her other hand.

The young woman can feel the touch, which she takes as a gesture of solicitude. Perhaps, seeing her shade her eyes, someone has imagined her distressed. Perhaps it is simple kindness, a vague gesture of concert solidarity. When she reopens her eyes, blinking against the renewed brightness, a man is standing beside her: an Algerian, possibly, or an Indian, or a Moroccan. They are listening to music in Paris, foreign together. The venue for the concert is the Elysee Montmartre, an old cabaret-belle-epoque-looking, even in dereliction-a hall gutted and transformed for dance parties and concerts. The plaster ceiling is decorated with eight women's faces. They are gigantic and smiling and have flowing fin de siecle hairstyles; scarlet lights sit at their chins, so that they appear mean and infernal.

Here they are then, an instant couple, beneath eight scarlet-faced women. The man is staring at the stage; he has not attempted conversation. The music is now so loud that it has materialized as a physical force; the wooden floor vibrates with seismic shivers that move upwards through every body.

Quaker, the woman is thinking. This is like being possessed.

The Elysee Montmartre is becoming hot and stuffy. Patrons are removing layers of clothes and buying more beer. The room is filled with cigarette smoke and everyone wears black. Afraid that she will faint or swoon, overcome by whatever bodily, existential, or foolish conundrum, the woman pulls the foreign man with her, drags him through the dense crowd, and leaves the building, still quaking.

2

How to tell this compassionately? How to preserve his vulnerability? It was a small encounter, saturated with contingent sadness.

In the street the strangers faced each other, mutually embarrassed. They were exactly the same height, and she has discovered that he is handsome and possibly ten years her junior. Light from pink neon burnished his features.

Eleanor, she said, and extended her hand formally.

Rashid. I am Rashid.

He took her hand again and performed an Indian affirmation, a brief sideways tilt and motion of the head.

Australia.

India.

We rhyme, she joked.

You have excellent cricketers, Rashid said politely.

Cricketers, yes.

International value; how arcane it is, how transparent.

She was relieved to speak English, but disconcerted by her own uncharacteristic assertiveness. She was already wondering if she would sleep with him, this Rashid, this young man, this youth she had dragged from a loud concert as her hysterical accessory. They left for a nearby bar, walking side by side, careful not to touch each other or forge obligation, and then soon after, more trusting, to his rented room. It was a pitifully small studio, on the fifth floor of an old building in the nineteenth arrondissement. Paint blistered on the walls; unintelligible graffiti inscribed all the surfaces. In Rashid's room the lighting was yellow-brown and spilled from a glass tulip depending at an angle from the wall. The air was hung with persistent scents of Indian cooking. There was a small basin, a single chair, a pile of stacked dirty dishes.

Eleanor fought to repress a powerful intuition: What am I doing here?

Then she noticed a shudder, like an aftershock from the Death in Vegas concert. She assumed it was the Metro, somewhere deep beneath them. She heard its thunderous sound trailing into the night, and imagined the tunnel, and the tired driver, and the headlights flashing on walls lined with innards of cable and pipe, then the sequence of lit chambers and dark tunnels, lit chambers and dark tunnels, repeating on an efficient exhausted circuit; and she saw then the passengers of many nations embarking and disembarking, and heard the shoosh of electric doors, opening and closing; and she thought repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition…

You get used to it, said Rashid. You get used to the Metro.

He prepared cups of tea in the Indian style, milky and with sugar, and they sat together on the single bed, sipping and making self-conscious small talk.

When they made love, it was in darkness; Rashid was shy and inexpert. Eleanor held his body closely, but he felt absent, anonymous.

The kindness of strangers. (She almost adopts a southern accent.)

Pardon? said Rashid.

In the companionable quiet, she could hear a dripping tap and his soft, murmurous breathing.

And then, clothed in darkness, Rashid began to confess:

I should tell you, Miss Eleanor, that I have great shame, he announced in a low and slightly hoarse whisper. I was sent to France by my father-at huge expense-to do a computer course, technology: that was the deal. Why not United States or England? He knew a family here. They said they would look out for me. Take me in. For the first two months or so I tried very hard but my French was poor and I could not understand the technical terms. I studied, and I tried, but fell further and further behind. The other students in the course were all confident and cool. They called me le singe, the monkey, and they laughed behind my back. Finally, I could stand it no more, so I left the course. I did not tell the Guptas, the family I was staying with-kind people, good people, from Bombay like my family-but left every day with my hair combed and my books under my arm. I would wait in the parks, or wander the streets, looking into shop windows. I became an expert at wandering and wasting time.

But then one day I received a letter from home, from my father, asking me how I was doing-was I well? was I successful?-and I felt suddenly such shame and such deception. I left the Guptas that day and simply disappeared. I knew another Indian, a Bengali-he rents this place-who agreed to let me use his room while I looked for work. He works on night shift, so I use the bed at night, and he has it in the day. I have found work here and there-I am a cleaner, part-time, at the Elysee Montmartre, so I get to see all the concerts-but because I am illegal, I am poorly paid. I have no hope at all of repaying my father. No hope at all of saving a fare back home. And I live in dread of seeing the Guptas appear on the street. I avoid the Indian areas, and get my friend to do the