The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [136]
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LUCIEN WENT TO the garden, where he cleared a plot and spent several hours digging. After gently rolling up Guillaume’s body in a blanket, he brought it downstairs to clean and dress. He retrieved his mother’s wedding ring, which, along with his father’s, he placed on a chain around Guillaume’s neck. As Lucien carried his father outside, he began to consider for the first time what it might be like to live for two hundred years, and how long it would take before he knew if the vaccine was working. Though he still tended to believe that he had merely survived, and would continue to age like anyone else, he felt a tremor of fear about confronting such a vast unknown. Not willing to reflect too deeply on what in either case could not be undone, he allowed his fear to pass through—or at least around—him, as if he, too, were an island in the Seine. As he kissed Guillaume’s cheeks and put him into the earth, under the indifferent posture of the trees and flowers, there was a part of him that envied his father his perfect death, but this, too, he refused to consider for more than a second, knowing that he could no longer imagine his own.
AFTER SPENDING MOST of the next twenty-four hours in a deep, exhausted sleep, Lucien emerged from the apartment and realized the Île was almost entirely deserted. Closer to the Île de la Cité, he found a small militia of servants left behind by the nobility to guard the mansions; from one of these men he learned that the emperor had been deposed and a new republic formed. As shocking as this news was—Lucien could not remember a time when Louis-Napoléon had not ruled France—of more immediate concern was the news that Prussia, still intent on destroying the new French government, had sent troops said already to be within striking distance of Paris, which meant Lucien would not be able to leave. Venturing into the city, he saw bands of men parading up and down the boulevards, guns and knives in hand; he went to the train station, where all passenger cars had been replaced by cargo trains filled with wheat and other foodstuffs rushed in from the provinces, and finally to the Bois de Boulogne, where like something out of a strange dream, he saw herds of cattle wandering aimlessly through the flower beds and stands of forest.
Less than a week later, the Germans arrived and promptly formed a giant noose around Paris; wires were cut, so that nothing penetrated this barrier except a few hot-air balloons, released from the highest hills of Montmartre. Bombs rained down, and the cafés and theaters went dark; statues were covered in burlap sacks, and even the arcades remained empty after a shower of glass fell on a group of pedestrians and sliced them to pieces.
As the months passed, Lucien became demoralized, not only on account of those wounded and killed or otherwise suffering from the siege but also his sense that the city was giving in to a collective longing for death, the very thing he had turned his back on. In the lapping waters of the Seine, he heard the hushed whispers of the condemned and starving, begging for a dose of the poison hemlock that continued to grow in Guillaume’s garden. He took to wandering the streets, mostly at night, where even in a starving city, some of the shadowed doorways and twisting passages in the old sections of the Left Bank led to underground cafés and dance halls. When the city seemed most deserted, Lucien heard strains of music but could not always determine if they came from under his feet or from in his head. Strings and harps seemed to cascade down over the darkened streets from the black sky above, and he heard a soft, maternal voice warning him to be careful.
On one such night—in an underground club off the Boulevard St.-Germain, not far from his old theater—he recognized his old friend Gérard Beyle in a group of men, all wearing the red