We’d watched a man die. He was dead in our minds, and then he wasn’t.
He’d been saved. The horns and drums started up. The elephant took another gargantuan step. We shivered in our soggy clothes now. Complained to each other how our shoes and hair were ruined. Our wet wristwatches had stopped. Taxi horns drowned out the music.
Paper cameras and wristwatches and copies of The Celestine Prophecy, how could things of such vital importance just evaporate the way they did? That entire world of dot-matrix printers and pulling the tracking strips off the edges of continuous-feed printer paper—gone.
Before the elephant went out of sight people were already telling the story: he was nothing short of Lazarus, this man who fell and came back to life.
Probably they’re still telling it.
In the last days of road maps and telephone books, before global positioning systems and ride-sharing apps, my French editor hosted a dinner at her apartment on the Left Bank. As the guest of honor I sat at the head of the table. The other guests were her friends, smoking and drinking and arguing without rancor about who among them had gotten the others addicted to heroin. My impression was that everyone present had been or was currently a dope fiend. An assumption supported by the way they excused themselves from the table in pairs to use the bathroom and returned grinning and stumbling.
Me, I’d arrived from Portland that afternoon, exhausted with jet lag, and had spent the afternoon posing for a photographer who asked me to crouch on the floor in the empty closet of my hotel room because he needed an all-white background. The halo flash he used—a ring-shaped strobe that encircles the camera, meant to light the subject from every angle—he said it would hide the sagging bags and erase the red veins of my tired bloodshot eyes. The next day would be interviews and more photographers, with a book signing in the evening and a long dinner with a table of journalists. And tonight I only wanted to get to my hotel and pass out, but this party was in my honor so here I sat, squinting against the cigarette smoke, not understanding a lick of French and feeling, more and more, like the puppy in chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby surrounded by loud drunks, sleepy and ignored.
Did I mention I was angry, too? More than anything I was fuming mad. Tomorrow I’d be expected to work hard, and the least these French people could do was feed me and put me to bed. What’s more, my grandmother had died the day before. She’d been taking a medication to blunt the pain of her arthritis so she could keep working, and it had masked the symptoms of acute diverticulitis. My grandmother had died suddenly and painfully, and her funeral would be the next day, and I would miss it because I had a book tour.
To make matters worse, the host set a platter of Brie on the table. As the guest of honor I was expected to take the first slice from the thick wedge of cheese, something they explained to me in English. They were also trying to teach me the French cautionary rhyme, “Red before white and you’ll be all right. White before red and you’re better off dead.” Meaning, if you drink white wine before red wine you’ll suffer a hangover. At their urging I repeated the French back to them. Taking the knife, I cut the smallest bit I could manage off the pointed tip of the Brie wedge.
The table, the table went nuts. Junkies or not, they all squawked, “How American!” And, “Just like an American!” It seems I’d helped myself to the center of the cheese, the softest, creamiest bit. The correct thing to do would’ve been to slice along the entire side of the wedge, taking both a smidgen of the center as well as a share of the hoary rind.
After my apologies they went back to their argument, throwing impossible French words at each other. A man and woman staggered out of the bathroom and began to excuse themselves. They had to work in the morning and needed to leave early to get some rest.
Early? It was the middle of the night. I saw my chance and begged them for a ride. They shrugged. I climbed into the backseat of their tiny car, and we sped away.
This is how high they were: They’d stop at red lights. The light would turn green, and they’d stay stopped. The light would turn red, and they’d stay stopped. Other cars eddied around us, honking. We’d hurry off, only to stay stopped as they nodded off at another green light.
My anger was held in check by my fear. I couldn’t remember the name of my hotel, much less the address. We kept driving past the same statues and fountains. We were driving in circles. Where we were, who knew? I could bail out, but was this a safe neighborhood or a sketchy one?
At last the lights of the Eiffel Tower loomed ahead of us. The strung-out driver hit the gas, and we sped through one, two, three red lights, racing, weaving through the sparse traffic until the front wheel struck the curb and we bumped to a stop, parked on the sidewalk at the base of the tower…beside a police car.
The man and woman leapt from the front seat and began to run across the plaza, leaving their car doors open, the headlights on, the engine running. The police couldn’t miss this. As they ran toward the area beneath the tower, the couple shouted, “Run, Chuck! Run!”
They had drugs. I knew they had drugs. They were evading arrest, leaving me in a car filled with drugs.
