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Fantasy Stories

Corpse Vision

Written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Joe Decker couldn’t remember who poured him into the taxi that brought him to Le Café du Dôme. Either way, it had to be one of the Midwestern boys—gangly Jim Thurber or the new guy—whatsisname? William?—Shirer. Neither of them knew Decker had a room at the Hôtel de Lisbonne—him and everybody else at the Trib except that old stick Waverly Root. Of course, without that old stick, the paper wouldn’t get out everyday for the ex-pats and tourists to read in their little Left Bank cafes. Some were saying—mostly the folks over at the Paris Herald—that an alcoholic wave was sweeping through the offices of the Paris Tribune, making it damned impossible to get anything out let alone a daily paper.

Like the deadbeats at the Herald could talk. What they said about the Trib applied to the Herald as well: Each and every day, a goodly proportion of the staff was insensate due to drink—half because it was there and half because it wasn’t.

Joe Decker didn’t drink when he worked. He drank after he worked, and then only because he didn’t want to face his typewriter in that little room off Boulevard St. Michel. If anyone had told him he’d be writing hack in Paris while he was supposed to be writing his brilliant first novel, he would’ve laughed.

He’d come to Paris with $300, his typewriter, and a one tiny suitcase of clothes, figuring that, with the franc worth damn near nothing against the dollar, he could afford one year, one year of typing, one year of thinking, thinking, thinking. Six months later, he had 5,000 words of unadulterated horseshit and fifty dollars, barely enough to pay for the room which he was heartily sick of.

Besides, no one in Paris had heard of Prohibition or if they had, they thought it one of those crazy American ideas that would never work.

Oh yeah sure, it would never work. It had never worked him into a huge thirst, which he tried to slack on nights like this when he’d turned in his copy on some stupid tourist gala no one here gave a good goddamn about but which actually got sent home because the folks back at their parent paper, the Chicago Tribune, thought such things were the important goings-on in Paris.

He remembered heading down the twisty back stairs of the Trib building, the presses thudding, the air hot with fresh ink. Funny man Thurber had come along and Whatsisname Shirer, still all googly eyed because he hadn’t seen anything like this back in Ioway or Illanoise or wherever the hell he was from, and they’d planned one drink, just one—and the next thing Decker knew he woke up in this taxi with a throbbing headache and a mouth that tasted of three-day old gin.

In his exceedingly bad French, he’d asked the cabby where they were going. The cabby just waved his hand imperiously and said, “Le Dôme, Le Dôme,” and Decker wasn’t sure they were heading to the Dôme because Thurber or Whatsisname had told the cabby to go there, or because the cabby, like every other French taxi driver, knew the Dôme was the place to take drunk Americans so that they could get home.

Decker’s head was too fuzzy to conjure the words to get the taxi to the Hôtel de Lisbonne. Besides, he wasn’t sure he had the scratch. The ride to the Dôme was gratis—or would be if he couldn’t find a franc or two—because someone there would cover the fare, if not one of the patrons then one of the uniformed police officers who paced the beat near the taxi stand.

He would have to promise to pay them back. And he would pay them back. He had paid everyone back, which was about the only good thing he could say about himself at the moment.

Nothing he did was any damn good, not even the daily copy he wrote for the Trib. The words were fine, the prose was solid, the assignments stank. His friends were just as miserable as he was (although, as Wave Root said, miserable in Paris is like happy everywhere else), and there wasn’t even a woman in the picture. Well, not a relationship woman. There’d been more than Decker’s fare share of one-night women. He might have even had one tonight.

The thought made him search his pockets as the taxi pulled up on the Rue Delambre side of the Dôme. The café had been on this corner for nearly thirty years, but only since the War had it become a haven for Americans. Know-it-all Hemingway, the only one of Decker’s acquaintances who had finished his novel after he arrived in Paris, called it one of the three principal cafes in the Quarter, and the only one filled with people who worked.

No one who worked was there now. The tables on the terrace were empty, the chairs pushed out expectantly. A glow fell across them from the café’s open doors.

Decker staggered out of the taxi, handed the driver the lone franc he’d found in his front pocket, and had to grip the pole marking the taxi stand to keep from falling.

Not only did he have a throbbing headache, but wobbly legs as well. He had to stop drinking, that was all there was to it.

“Coffee?”

Decker still had one arm wrapped around the pole. He thought maybe the ubiquitous uniformed policeman had spoken to him, but he didn’t see an ubiquitous uniformed policeman. Instead, he saw an elderly man sitting against the wall, beneath the awning that someone should have rolled up by now.

“Or are you one of those British gentlemen who prefer tea?”

The old man spoke the oddly clipped English that Parisians learned—not quite British upper-class, but not quite British lower class either. Continental English, Root called it. Incontinent English, Thurber always amended when Root had left the room.

“Water would probably help,” Decker said, not sure he should let go of the pole.

“Water will help. Alcohol dehydrates the system. That is half of what causes the so-called hang over.”

The old man put a deliberate space between “hang” and “over.” It was those kinds of errors that Decker usually found funny. The French often mangled English idioms, like the time the editor at Le Petit Journal had introduced Decker to his assistant, calling the man “my left hand”—and not meaning it as any kind of joke.

“Monsieur,” the old man said with a wave of a hand. “Une bouteille d’eau.”

Decker was going to tell him that the waiters here never showed up when you wanted them, and certainly wouldn’t show when there were only a few customers, but the waiter who appeared, happily prying the top off a bottle of water, contradicted his very thought.

Of course, the old man wasn’t just French. He had to be a regular. French regulars were prized at places like this, places which the Americans had taken over, like they had taken over most of Montparnesse just south of the Luxembourg Gardens. It was essentially an extension of the Latin Quarter without being in the Latin Quarter at all. It had been that way since the 16^th century when Catherine de Medici had expelled students from the university. They had set up shop here and called it Montparnesse.

Decker knew such things about Paris, indeed, he had become a font of Paris trivia in his two years at the Tribune, all learned with bad schoolboy French and only a modicum of charm.

“It would be nice if you joined me,” the old man said to Decker as the waiter put down the empty bottle and a single, rather grimy glass.

“Easier said than done,” Decker said, not certain he could let go of the pole and remain standing.

The old man had a croissant in front of him and, despite the hour, a cup of coffee. He wore a proper black suit but no hat, which looked odd in the thin light. His hair was a yellowish white, speaking of too many hours in cafes around cigarette smoke.

As Decker lurched closer, using tables and the occasional chair to maintain his balance, he realized that the old man’s beard was yellowish brown around his mouth. His fingers were tobacco stained as well. But he held no pipe and no cigar or cigarette had burned to ash in the tray in the center of the table.

Decker made it to the table and sank into the chair the old man had pushed back for him. It groaned beneath his weight. He tugged his suit coat over his stained white shirt. He had to look as filthy as he felt.

The old man poured water into the glass. The water looked clear and fresh despite the fingerprints on the side of the glass.

“You are an American newspaper man, yes?” the old man asked.

“Yes,” Decker said, not that it was a hard guess, given their location.

“Joseph Decker, the American newspaper man, yes?” the old man said.

It gave Decker a start that the old man knew his name. “Is there another Joe Decker in Paris?”

The old man ignored the question. “I have a story for you, should you take it.”

Everyone had a story for him. Usually it was the kind of thing tourist rumors were made of, like why there were no fish in the Seine. But the old man didn’t look like someone who would give Decker a song and dance.

Of course, Decker wasn’t yet sober, so he had to assume his judgment about all things—like the kind of man the old man was based on how he appeared—was probably flawed.

“It’s two a.m.,” Decker said, “and—”

“Three a.m.,” the old man said.

“Three a.m.,” Decker said with a flash of irritation, “and I’m drunk. If you’re serious about this story thing, we’ll meet here tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to sleep this off, and we can talk then.”

“I do not go out in the daylight,” the old man said.

Two years ago, Decker would have rolled his eyes. But by now, he’d seen and heard everything. There were guys on the copy desk who didn’t go out in the daylight either, saying it hurt their precious eyes.

Decker went out too much in the daylight, seeing things that sometimes he wished he hadn’t.

He flashed on her then, body crumpled beneath Pont Neuf, feet dangling over the edge of the walkway along the banks of the Seine, pointing toward the river.

He closed his eyes and willed the image away.

“And that is why I do not,” the old man said. “You see them too.”

Decker opened his eyes. The old man was staring at him. The old man’s eyes were blue and clear, not rheumy like Decker had expected. Maybe the old man was younger than Decker thought. He’d met a number of those guys in Paris—men in their forties who could pass for someone in their eighties by their clothing, their white hair, and their gait.

“I don’t see anything, old man,” Decker said.

“Nonsense,” the old man said. “It is why you drink.”

“I drink because I’m lonely,” Decker said. Because he kept writing the beginning to that damn novel over and over while Know-it-all Hemingway sat in this very café with his stupid notebook and scribbled story after story, book after book. Decker drank because he hated writing puff pieces for the folks back home, puff pieces about touristy restaurants and American musicians and writers like Know-it-all Hemingway. Decker drank because the stories he wanted to cover “would discourage the tourist trade from coming here.” He drank because Paris wasn’t the answer after all.

“You drink,” the old man said, “because it closes your mind’s eye. I have watched you. You see too much.”

“You’ve watched me?” Decker was getting more and more sober by the minute. “You’re following me?”

“If you recall,” the old man said with the patience people reserve for drunks, fools, and children, “I arrived before you did. But I must confess that I have been waiting for you.”

“Me and all the other American hacks,” Decker said.

The old man smiled, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. The smile was friendlier than Decker expected. “Admittedly, you American hacks, as you say, are dozens of dimes—”

Decker winced.

“—but I, in truth, have been waiting for you.”

Decker drank his water. It did clear his head, although he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted his head cleared. “What’s so special about me?”

“You see,” the old man said again.

This time, Decker did roll his eyes. He drank the last of his water, and stood up. “Old man, I’m so damned drunk that this conversation isn’t making sense. How about I meet you here tomorrow at midnight, and I promise to be sober. Then you can tell me your story.”

“It is your story,” the old man said.

“Whatever you say,” Decker said, taking the bottle of water and heading north.

He had a hell of a walk—at least for an exhausted drunk. Normally he wouldn’t have minded the jaunt up to the twisty little streets near the Sorbonne. The Hôtel de Lisbonne was on the corner of Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and Rue de Vaugirad. All he had to was walk the Boulevard St. Michel toward the Seine and he’d be in his bed in no time.

But he usually avoided the Boulevard St. Michel. He avoided a lot streets in Paris, at least on foot. The old man was right; Decker saw things. But he usually attributed those things to drink or to too much imagination.

The soldiers he always saw marching through the Arc de Triomphe wore no uniforms he recognized. They marched in lock-step, their heads turned side to side as if they were little tin soldiers with moving parts.

But he didn’t always see the soldiers there. Sometimes he saw a flag that he didn’t recognize with a Fylfot in the middle. The Fylfot, an ancient elaborate cross, was supposed to ward off evil. But he somehow got the sense that the Fylfot itself—at least as used here—was the evil.

On the Boulevard St. Michel, he saw students rioting in the streets. The students were grubby creatures, with long hair and carrying signs that he did not understand. Sunshine shone on them, although he only saw them when it was dark.

Because of these visions, he studied Paris history, and found nothing that resembled any of it. The soldiers were unfamiliar, just like the flag, and the students too filthy to belong to any modern generation. He could dismiss such things as figments of his imagination.

But the woman—she had been real.

He had touched her, her skin cold and clammy and gray from the elements. Her eyes had been open and cloudy, her lips parted ever so slightly.

He had found her six months into his trip to Paris. Shortly after, he had wandered into the offices of the Trib, such as they were, and offered up his services.

Novelist, eh, kid? The man at the copy desk had asked.

Yessir.

You know how many novelists we get here, hoping for a few bucks? At least two a day. Sorry.

I have experience…

Those fateful words. I have experience. And he did. From his college newspaper to the Milwaukee Journal—yes, he had been a good Midwestern boy, once too, a boy who didn’t like near beer. A boy who actually had dreams for himself.

Five thousand words of horseshit later, stories about the tourists (Mr. and Mrs. Gladwell arrived this afternoon on a trip that has taken them from their home in Lincoln, Nebraska, to New York City through London, and now here, in Paris, where they are staying at the Ritz…), stories about everything except the woman, crumpled beneath Pont Neuf.

Somehow he made it to the Hôtel de Lisbonne without seeing anyone, real or imaginary. The front desk was empty, so he reached over it and grabbed his key.

As he climbed the dark narrow stairs to his room, he heard a typewriter rat-a-tat-tatting. Someone was working on something, maybe a short story, maybe a novel, maybe a freelance piece for Town and Country.

He unlocked his room and stepped inside, then stared at his own typewriter, gathering dust beneath the room’s only window. A piece of paper had been rolled in the platen since sometime last month, with only a page number on the upper right hand corner (27), and a single lowercase word in the upper left.

…the…

As if it meant something. As if he knew what he was going to do with it.

The paper was probably ruined, forever curlicued, although it didn’t matter. If he finished typing on that page, he could pile the other twenty-six pages on top of it, flattening it out.

If he sat down now, nearly sober, the old man’s words still echoing in his head (You see them too), he would write:

The woman discarded at the foot of the bridge looked uncomfortably young. Her brown hair was falling out of Gibson Girl do, now horribly out of fashion, her lips painted a vivid red. Part of the lip rouge stained her front teeth. If she were alive, she would turn away from him, and surreptiously rub at that stain with her index finger.

He looked away from the typewriter, from that little accusatory “the.” The description of the woman did not fit with the bucolic piece he had been writing, a memoir of Germantown Wisconsin in the days before the war, when he had been a young boy, and his father was still alive, tinkering with his new Model T, his mother tutting the dangers in the new-fangled machinery, the bicycle he himself had built from a kit, with the help of the man who lived next door.

Those were the kind of books people read now, memories of times past, not bloody, dark stories about dead women on Paris streets.

Decker took off his suit and hung it up, although he didn’t brush it out, like he should have. He lacked the energy. As he pulled off his shirt, he realized the stains were worse than he had thought. Long, brown stains up front, looking like blood.

He was thinking of blood, though. He wasn’t going to let his imagination win.

Besides, he still had one clean shirt. He needed to take the bundle to the laundry, along with his suit, so that he could look pressed and sharp again, instead of rumpled and disreputable.

He left his undershirt, boxers, and socks on, and tumbled onto the bed, the saggy mattress groaning beneath his weight. The bed hadn’t even stopped bouncing by the time he had fallen asleep.

****

She was there in his dreams, her rich brown hair piled on top of her head, with a few curls cascading around her face. She sat on the edge of the bridge, feet dangling over the Seine, leaning back toward the road. Her eyes smiled, her lips—a perfect cupid’s bow, just like the drawings she mimicked—rouged darker than her cheeks. The makeup softened her living face, making her seem as unreal as the women in the advertisements.

While her hair was old-fashioned, her clothing was not. No buttoned down shirtwaist for her with a long skirt that fell to her ankles. She wore a black skirt that grazed her knees, silk stockings with a perfect line up the back, and a blouse so soft that it seemed almost indecent. Around her neck, a simple St. Christopher’s medal, and a delicate gold cross with a tiny diamond in the center. A gold band on her right hand, a band she twisted when she saw him approach, a frown creasing her lovely forehead.

He stopped beside her. She was American—he knew that without asking—and he held his reporter’s notebook in his left hand, a pen in his right.

Her face shut down when he asked her name. And then her eyes clouded over, and her mouth opened ever so slightly.

The St. Christopher’s medal disappeared and the gold ring too. But the expensive necklace, the gold cross with a diamond in the center, remained, as if it were her calling card.

He woke up thinking about it, twisted to one side, the bottom of the cross bent slightly as if she had fallen on it against the stone walkway.

She had worn no stockings when he found her body, and the sensible shoes, made for walking in a strange city (he knew that as clearly as if she had told him) had been replaced by thin heels, the kind flappers wore with their knee-length dresses and opera-length pearls.

He woke up thinking of the difference between the smiling girl in his dreams and the dead woman on the walkway, her skin cold against his fingertips.

He stared at his typewriter, his fingers itching to finish that sentence.

…the…

The.

The woman discarded…

Discarded.

He got dressed, and stumbled out of his room, ostensibly searching for breakfast, but really on his way to get another drink.

****

Still, that day, he made it to midnight without taking a nip from the bottle he kept at the bottom of his desk drawer. He didn’t take the glass of wine offered with dinner, nor did he drink the shot of vodka offered to him by the White Russian he’d met while waiting for the American tourists he was supposed to interview in Le Procope.

He arrived at the Dôme exactly at midnight, sober as a judge. Decker had pressed his suit and worn his last clean shirt, mostly as an apology for the way he had looked the night before.

He hadn’t examined himself in the mirror until this morning, but even then he had looked a fright—his hair standing on end, his nose bulbous, the capillaries in his cheeks bursting from too much drink. His eyes were red rimmed and he knew his breath was bad enough to kill any small rodent unfortunate enough to cross his path.

So he cleaned up, although no one at the Trib noticed, except Whatsisname Shirer, the kid from Ioway or Illanoise. Whatsisname Shirer had raised his eyebrows, but hadn’t made a single remark, smart ass or otherwise, and so no one else seemed to notice.

Thurber was busy making up the news. Root was working, trying to get someone at the copy desk to expand the notes his so-called reporters had turned in. Most everyone else was so bleary-eyed that they would think they were imagining Decker in his spiffed up clothes and slicked-back hair.

Alcoholic wave indeed. It had become an alcoholic ocean, and he was seeing it for the very first time.

The Dôme had customers this night, at least a dozen sitting on the terrace, with more inside. The interior was grayish blue from all the cigarette smoke—it looked like a fog had blown through Paris and gotten stuck only inside the Dôme.

Outside, a group of men crowded around one of the tables. Decker recognized some of them from the transatlantic review. They spoke earnestly to each other, one of them shaking the stem of his pipe at a bespectacled man in an American felt hat.

Decker avoided them, just like he’d taken to avoiding Know-it-all Hemingway. Instead he circled to the other side of the terrace, near the taxi stand. This evening, one of the ubiquitous uniformed policemen paced, hands clasped behind his back.

The Dôme seemed normal, not like something out of a painting, the way it had the night before.

Because Decker was concentrating on its normality, he almost missed the old man, sitting at the same table, his back against the café’s glass windows. Another man sat with him, younger, sharply French with his narrow face, black hair, and up-to-the-minute gabardine suit.

Decker wandered over toward them, as if they weren’t his destination at all. When he reached the table, he pulled out the only other chair and sat.

“You’re lucky I remembered,” he said.

“I knew you would.” The old man wore the same suit. His eyes were as clear as Decker had thought. “You have not had a drink.”

Damn that incontinent English. Decker couldn’t tell if the old man had asked a question or made a statement. “I told you I’d be sober. You told me you had story.”

The younger man stared at Decker as if he thought he was rude. Maybe he was.

“I said, I had a story for you.” The old man emphasized the last two words.

Decker looked at the younger man. “Maybe some introductions would be a good place to start.”

“Maybe not,” the old man said. “We shall perform the—how do you say?—niceties after we have determined what disturbs you the most.”

“What disturbs me the most,” Decker said, “are people who waste my time.”

He shoved the chair back, about to stand, when the old man touched his arm. The old man’s skin was cold. In spite of himself, Decker shivered.

“Americans are impulsive,” the old man said to his companion. “And somehow they have come to embrace a lack of politeness as if it is a virtue.”

“Look,” Decker said, almost adding “old man” like he had done last night when he was drunk. That had been rude, but not intentionally rude. “I deal in hard, cold facts. The first hard cold fact you learn about damn near anybody is his name, which you’re not willing to tell me. So I’m not willing to stick around. See ya, pal.”

This time he did stand. He was going to repeat the same walk he’d made the night before, up the Boulevard St. Michel. Maybe he should walk around the Luxembourg Gardens instead, meander instead of go directly.

He was nearly to the group of transatlantic review writers when the old man said, “The students, they will be in the street tonight. And tomorrow, the flag will fly over the Arc de Triomphe.”

Decker stopped in spite of himself. A shiver ran down his spine. He hadn’t told anyone about those waking dreams. Not even when he was drunk. Probably not even when he was black-out drunk, since he got quieter and quieter—a man who knew how to keep secrets, Root used to say, when he was the one who poured Decker into a taxi.

Decker pivoted. He walked back to the table, as the old man had known he would. But the old man did not smile like a man who had won an argument. Instead, he remained grimly serious. The younger man continued to stare.

“The soldiers leaning out of the Hôtel de Ville, do you not notice how blond they are?” The old man’s voice was soft.

The other man watched Decker avidly, as if everything depended on his response.

The Hôtel de Ville was Paris’s city hall. And he’d only seen soldiers there once, in the middle of a summer afternoon, as heat shimmered on the boulevards and he sat outside, trying to find a bit of air in a city not used to extreme warmth.

“They wore helmets,” Decker said, knowing that was an admission.

“But they were fair-skinned, no?”

“Stocky,” he said, wishing he hadn’t responded. But that was what he had noticed, how stocky and square they were, as if the uniforms they wore with their unrecognizable helmets made them as solid as a boxer in the beer halls near Milwaukee.

“And they wore this symbol on their arms.” The old man pushed a piece of paper forward with a Fylfot drawn on it.

In spite of himself, Decker sat back down. “Who are they?”

“A nightmare,” the old man said. “One we pray we will not have. But our prayers will be for nothing. Because only strong nightmares leach backwards.”

“Backwards?” Decker asked, thinking of the woman. Was that a backwards nightmare? He had seen her six months after he arrived—years ago now—and he dreamt of her every night, awakening from those dreams unsettled.

“The soldiers,” the old man said. “They are little boys now, playing with battered tin soldiers from before the War. If, indeed, they are healthy enough to play. Most are hungry. Some are starving.”

Decker frowned. Even when he was sober, Decker didn’t understand the old man. The old man spoke nonsense. But a nonsense that Decker found enticing, in spite of himself.

“Starving?” Decker said. “Then why don’t you do something?”

“Why don’t you?” the old man asked. “Your country pushed for reparations. Your President Wilson. Somehow he knew how to cure the world. He made it sicker.”

“Congress never ratified that treaty,” Decker said, wondering why they were talking about the Treaty of Versailles conference from six years ago, from before he even arrived in the City of Light.

“And that makes it all better, no?” the old man said. “Leadership provided by your president here in Paris failed at home, so the fact that the other countries—”

“Grand-pére,” the young man said, touching the old man’s arm. “That is enough. He is not responsible for his country’s follies.”

“They are all responsible,” the old man said.

Decker was frowning now.

“You were telling me about soldiers and little boys,” Decker said, trying to get past this confusion. “Soldiers, little boys, and backwards nightmares.”

“They are not nightmares,” the younger man said. “They are visions. The future, haunting us here and now.”

Decker frowned. “The future?”

The young man nodded. “Events so powerful they reach backwards to us. We have seen the soldiers for generations now. We have not understood them until—what is it you call it?—the Peace of Paris.”

“You understand it now?” Decker asked.

“We understand that they are Germans.”

“Marching into Paris.” Decker snorted. “Are you hoping for this?”

Three men from nearby tables stared. Most everyone here served in the War or had lost someone who had.

“No,” the younger man said, holding up his hands. “It is the worst kind of tragedy. But we do know, from the students who are also a vision leaching backwards, that Paris herself will stand.”

“The students.” Decker wasn’t going to ask any more and he wasn’t going to reveal what he had seen. He was assuming the younger man meant the grubby students he had seen some nights as he walked up the Boulevard St. Michel.

“St. Sulpice stands. Notre Dame stands. Le Tour Eiffel stands. In the distance, away from the shouting, you can see Sacré Coeur. The bridges remain. If the Germans were to destroy Paris, they would bomb the bridges so that no army could follow. Then they would destroy the monuments to destroy our souls.”

Decker couldn’t resist any longer. “How do you know the students appear later?”

“They are less solid.”

“You can’t touch them?” Decker asked.

“No,” the younger man said. “You have not tried?”

He had avoided everything. He had avoided the students and the soldiers and the flags. He heard the whispery voices, and figured they had come from his own drunkenness.

“Can you touch current nightmares?” Decker asked.

“Only reality,” the old man said.

Her skin, cold against Decker’s fingers. So she had been real. Had he spoken to her once? Holding his notebook? Wanting to know who she was?

Why would he have spoken to her? He wasn’t yet working for the Trib. He was playing at being a famous writer, the American James Joyce, yet to publish his Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.

“Ah,” the old man said, peering into Decker’s face. “Something precipitated your visions. You did not see them when you first came to Paris.”

Decker looked at him. The old man’s skin was papery thin, his eyebrows so bushy they seemed to grow toward