Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [84]
I load the CD, hit play, and listen. A voice comes on, a lone man’s, singing what sounds like an African chant. The voice fades, drums come up, then lots of voices singing the same chant, like a hundred, and then Virgil comes in rapping. It’s good. Really good. Shivers-down-your-spine good.
The next song’s about America, about a rapper promising to take it by storm. “Banloser” is on there, sounding different than it did the other night—a lot more polished. He’s got one called “I’m Shillin’” about selling out. And one called “Morning Light,” about watching the sun come up over Paris on the hill at Sacré-Coeur. I recognize it. He sang it to me last night.
The rhymes are strong and the music’s even stronger. He’s got reggae guitar going in one. Seventies funk in another. Samples of American gospel. A sitar. A muezzin’s call. French schoolkids singing a nursery rhyme. Chinese violin. Songs with the whole world in them, just like he said.
I grab my cell the second the CD ends. To call him and tell him how much I love his songs.
“What!” he barks.
“Um, hey. It’s me. Andi,” I say, a little uncertainly.
“Hey. Hold on a minute.”
I hear the sound of brakes squealing, then Virgil lets fly, telling some guy to do something to himself that isn’t physically possible.
“Sorry,” he says to me.
“Bad day at the office?”
“The worst. This fu—this city is totally out of control tonight. Can I call you back? In half an hour?”
“Sure. Yeah.”
I hang up and stare at the ceiling, not sure what to do while I wait. I’m kind of hungry. It’s been hours since I had dinner. I could head to the kitchen. Eat some leftover pad thai. An orange. A piece of cheese. I could wash up and get ready for bed. Which might be a good idea, as tomorrow’s already Saturday and I still have a lot of work to do. I plan to visit Malherbeau’s house and take more pictures. And I have to get a second draft of the outline done.
My eyes drift to my bed and the stuff I dumped all over it. The diary’s there, lying under my keys. I was not to die that night. That would have been a mercy. I was to be reborn, Alex wrote. Reborn as what? To do what?
I want to keep reading, and I don’t. I’m curious, and I’m scared. I need to find out what happened to Alex, and to Louis-Charles, but what if it makes me crazy again? Like it did in the catacombs?
I walk away from it and into the bathroom. It’s not the diary that caused the freak-out in the catacombs, I tell myself as I’m brushing my teeth. Because it can’t be. It’s a diary. Words on paper. That’s all. It was the Qwellify that did it. I have to face up to the fact that I’m taking too much, really and truly.
I head back to my bedroom, pick the bottle up from the night table, and shake two pills out of it. I want to back the dosage down. I do, but I’m nervous about it. I’ve been pretty steady the last few days, pretty stable. As far as the sadness goes, at least. I’ve been seeing things, and hearing things, but I haven’t found myself standing at the edge of anything. Not the Seine and not anyone’s roof. I don’t want that darkness back. But I don’t want whispering skulls and shrieky puppets and old guys turning into young guys right before my eyes, either.
I’m standing here, still trying to decide. An orange? Some cheese? Bed? The diary? Suicidal impulses or hallucinations? Two pills? Or one?
I pop one Qwell and put the other back.
I’ll have the diary, thank you. Straight up, please, and hold the crazy.
41
12 May 1795
Only the hopeless love God.
Have you ever seen a beautiful girl spend a second more at Mass than she must? Will a rich man kneel if there’s no one to see him?
The ugly, the fat, the poor, and malodorous. Lepers dropping bits of themselves. The cheese-breathed and pock-faced. St-st-stutterers. Droolers and twitchers. Lunatics. The scrofulous. No one loves them, not even their mothers, yet they will tell you—with rapture in their voices—they will say, God loves