Mr. Orsaz: Story of a Disaster on a Balcony
Cécile Barlier
Three hours before Celio’s arrival: I smoke on the balcony and I wait for the day to break.
The noise from the street doesn’t bother me. It’s not really noise, because it contains a swarm of miniature silences. The pause between the clacks released by summer sandals on the pavement. The hush trapped amid the cooing of the pigeons. The calm sandwiched macaroon-style in the next-door couple’s disputes. The quiet on the cusp of sirens’ tests. Later, when traffic hour comes and sweeps through Paris like a Mongolian horde, thousands of cars and buses and bikes create a drumroll from the city’s entrails, and underneath comes a vacuumed stillness as vast and secluded as the Orion Nebula.
The fact is that the day doesn’t break, it just billows across the balcony into the thin of the air. It flutters itself in. I haven’t slept. I don’t sleep anymore. I am not ready yet. Which means I need to buy cereal and I need to buy milk. Which means I need to make a list of the things I need to buy. Which means I need to have a plan for what to do with my son, because he is four. Today it is not raining. We will go to the park because he needs fresh air to expend the energy he has in large quantity—especially since he is a boy.
* * *
One hour before Celio’s arrival: I am about to leave the building to buy the things on my list when Anna opens the door to her loge and stops me. She looks at me with her divergent squint like her left eye is watching another taller me behind me. She says, “Mr. Orsaz, is Celio coming over this weekend?”
“Yes,” I say. I know she won’t stop there, because she never stops there.
“Would you like me to watch him for an hour or two?”
“That’s okay, Anna, I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Thank you for asking, though.”
This sounds polite and reasonable, it also sounds like I’m in a hurry, but Anna holds up her broom like a flag freshly planted in new territory.
“He is so cute, Mr. Orsaz, so little and so cute. I could take him to the park Saturday. Or even Sunday. You tell me?”
“It’s fine, Anna. I am going to take care of him,” I announce. I will take care of him: I am about to repeat as if my words need to carry the extra weight of incantations. Instead I say, “We have plans.” And I smile the solid smile on which people count.
Anna’s eyes briefly disappear under their respective eyelids, as if she was gathering strength before a possible comeback, but I don’t give her a chance.
“Good day, Anna!” I shout. “See you soon!”
I start walking away with long, decisive strides. I feel the faint motion of the air, I feel the slight swelling of the sidewalk under the sole of my shoes, I feel the buildings on either side closing in. In my back, I feel Anna following me with her eyes shrinking under the weight of her frown like a pair of small dogs resting under a heavy blanket. I hear the mumble of her disappointment in the distance.
* * *
Ten minutes before Celio’s arrival: I change my shirt and I put on the blue one. I clean the wooden kitchen table from dust and crumbs, I wipe it with a wet sponge, and I dry it with a cloth. I use the smallest amount of beeswax. I have experimented with various techniques, but this is the one that allows me to resurrect or even save my wooden kitchen table, which on other days looks dull, without color, without energy, unrecoverable.
I place Celio’s cereal box on the table next to the milk. His cereal is called “Treasures” and it comes in a red box. The Treasures in the blue box are not as good because they’re made with milk chocolate, and Celio says there is no point since we already add milk to cereals. That milk in the blue Treasures is redundant. I like Celio’s logic because it is simple and coherent. I trust thoughts that are finite and coherent; they make me smile.
Thoughts like: This is my son. Like: I have him over at the apartment every other weekend. Like: He is four years old and likes Treasures for breakfast, because he cannot have them at his mom’s house. All nice and clear. Celio’s mother drops him off every other Friday morning, but we agree that she cannot go up the stairs and has to wait until he waves at her from the balcony. The same way everyone agrees that we cannot live together, even though she says it’s because I never say what’s on my mind and Celio says it’s so he can have two houses instead of one and I say that these things happen.
It is true that the things that everyone agrees on are the things that just happen to fall in place, like a fold in a fabric that makes it drape a certain way.
A lot of things work in this way for me, they drape around me in a way that feels natural.
This means: If I have a son, then I can say, “I am a father.” Then there it is, a fact, period, an objective reality. And there is no point for me pretending I am not a father. If I had written a book, then I could say, “I am writer.” If I was driving a bus, then I could say, “I am a bus driver.”
Celio is behind the entry door now. Anna couldn’t help but accompany him up the stairs. I can hear them standing on the doormat. I hear Celio ask Anna if he can ring the doorbell. He says “please.” I hear my son being lifted off the floor and his finger extending. The bell rings. I open the door quick. I say, “Hello, Anna,” in a way that means, “Goodbye, Anna.” I let my son in and I pick up his small yellow duffel bag. I close the door. I ask if he’s hungry.
“Yes,” he says and goes straight to the balcony to wave his mom off.
I wonder how long Celio’s mother would stay double-parked on Rue Boileau if he didn’t wave her off. I wonder if she’d leave her car planted there and go up the stairs in a honking warfare.
When Celio comes back from the balcony and passes through the kitchen’s doorframe, his face looks like it was just being painted—a bit pink on the cheeks and damp at the hairline. He makes a face when he sees the Treasures.
“I don’t like those anymore.” He looks me over. “I like Frosties now.”
I shrug. It is strange how everything in the kitchen looks exactly the same while my body slides slowly sideways. I sit. This is a test—the first part in a game—the prompt.
Celio’s eyes are waiting for me, and blue. If I let this go, I’m done.
I pour myself a big bowl of Treasures, add the milk. Spoon in hand, I attack the bowl and take a first bite, followed by a second. Treasures are really the thing now. Celio comes closer and takes a seat at the table. He sucks his thumb while holding his blankie. He watches me eat his Treasures and makes small suction noises.
I close my eyes—closing my eyes brings about a blank canvas where I can focus. I am eating Celio’s cereal because he doesn’t want it. Celio gives me no choice but to eat his cereal. A mug of steaming coffee awaits me on the side. Cloaked in the steam, I cannot be broken. It smells like an uprising.
I do not know how long it’s been when Celio stops sucking and I stop chewing.
The whiplash of silence makes me open my eyes.
“So,” I say, “we go to Sainte-Périne or to the Jardin d’Acclimatation?”
“I don’t wanna go.”
“Come on, which one?”
This is part two in the game: empowerment. I’m giving my son a choice. If Celio has a say in where we’re going, he will be in.
His eyes feel like they are starving and I go straight to part three in the game: progress and reward.
“I’m sure they’ll have things you like to eat there.”
“’Kay,” and he says, “Ja-din” without the “r”.
Then suddenly the kitchen opens up around us.
I take Celio’s hand with one hand, and with my other hand I take his yellow bag. I lead him along the corridor, down the two steps that get into his bedroom. I tell him to sit down on the red chair in the middle; he sits down.
Celio hums to himself while I look for proper clothes for him to wear to the park. Clothes that we won’t worry about if they get dirty or torn. After a difficult start, we’ve reached a non-aggression pact. I kneel before him, slide his kakis off his legs and his white T-shirt above his head—it’s easy. I breathe in the sweet and sour smell of my son’s small body mixed with the soapy smell of fresh clothes. I picture a narrow laundry room with a short window just a bit open, a red ray of sun interrupted by the outline of a cloud. Only in the Province is there space for laundry rooms. In the old days, people used to say “mudroom.” I think about the fact that Parisian apartments don’t have space for mudrooms. I think about the fact that Parisian apartments don’t have space for mud or anything non-Parisian.
Celio’s all dressed up.
“Now we go?”
I don’t get a response, but I get a smile. Perhaps I live for Celio’s smile. Perhaps there is no other reason for me to go on living but to receive that smile. Now I don’t smile, of course I don’t smile, and if I were to smile it would not look like a smile. It is not something I can reciprocate.
“Okay,” I hear myself say, “let’s go.”
* * *
It is several flights of stairs later, and outside the morning is empty. The sidewalk steams from being watered by the street sweepers. A couple is busy talking at the corner of Chardon Lagache; the brunette stares at Celio and me as we pass them. Celio smiles at her, but she keeps on talking to her boyfriend. I wonder if my son has a one-sided smile: a smile that cannot be returned. I wish I could teach him the other smile, the one that can be repaid.
I go on walking and tell myself that we are just going to the park, and that it doesn’t matter if people don’t smile.
Rue Erlanger; I try not to make eye contact with a policewoman dispensing parking tickets.
“Papa, can you tell me the story of Brimborion?” Celio asks.
“Which one?”
“Brimborion.”
And I know I know this story. I know I told him many times. But I hear a long silence that buzzes through me like a laser light that penetrates in one of my ears and whooshes through to the other. I push my tongue inside the roof of my mouth to clear the air, like I used to do on mountain roads when the altitude changed too quickly. I think, It is the story of a small boy called Brimborion who doesn’t want to… and suddenly it is gone. I panic, because how can I explain this to my son? How can I not know Brimborion anymore?
I want something to happen now: a surprise. Something that steers us clear of the story of Brimborion. Part four in the game: the surprise.
Small surprises are the ones that count. If I can set aside a small surprise for my son, then he will forget that I forgot the Brimborion story and remember this weekend. But what?
I say, “Chocolate?” as we pass the De Bruges boutique, and I start to breathe again as I hold the glass door for Celio to get in.
* * *
We wait for the Bus 72 at the station, and we have our mouths full.
“I don’t wanna go to the Chinese Pagoda,” Celio says between two bites. His baby teeth are brown.
I ask if it is because it’s scary.
“I don’t wanna go to the Chinese Pagoda.”
I say it’s good to do something scary because then it’s not as scary.
“I don’t wanna go to the Chinese Pagoda.”
I say, “Stop saying that.”
Now is a good time to stand my ground. The ground is something solid. If Celio can ride the Chinese Pagoda, we’ll overcome his fear and we’ll be in a better place. If I can remember the story of Brimborion and tell him, we’ll have the Brimborion story in both our memories. Later, Celio can tell me the story if I ever forget again.
We will help each other.
* * *
This is Day Two. The sun comes up again. The sun comes up again, because it has a consistent routine. The sun deserves a prize for consistency: the Palme d’Or of consistency.
I get out of bed. I fix myself a bowl of Treasures. I eat the Treasures, and I wait. It is 6:45 a.m.
There is a knock on the door. It is Anna’s knock. She also deserves to be rewarded for consistency, in a different category: the pace of her knocks, which float by like eighth notes on a music score. Tak, tak, tak, tak—pause.
The air is quiet.
I wait.
Tak, tak, tak, tak—pause.
I tell myself I have a choice. One: I can stay here in the kitchen—wait for Anna to give up knocking and go back to where she came from. Under One, there is the risk of waking Celio up. Two: I open the door and face the prospect of a chat with Anna.
“Hello,” I say to myself out loud in the kitchen.
“Hello,” I respond to myself, with the emphasis on the second syllable. I feel like I jump-started something.
Now I am in the entryway. I open the door. I say hello. I say how are you.
“Is everything okay, Mr. Orsaz?” Anna asks right off the bat instead of answering my question.
I tell her it’s all good.
“I heard noises overnight. I thought I’d check in.”
I ask what kind of noises.
“Muffled thumps. Whomp, whomp. Like that, you know?”
“Whomp, whomp?” I feel defeated for repeating this back to her. I try to not let defeat wash over my face. I cough in my fist quickly.
“Right… I wanted to make sure you and Celio were fine,” she says. “I was a bit worried. My husband told me to wait till morning.”
“We’re good, Anna.” I try to keep my answers abrupt yet civil.
“Is Celio awake?” She moves her neck to look behind me. I know she notices that the scriban chest of drawers is on the other side of the hallway.
I tell her that Celio is still sleeping. I realize that I have no idea whether this is true or not.
She does the neck-craning again. I see that she sees I reshuffled the furniture overnight while I wasn’t sleeping.
Anna’s eyes are looking for ways to escape, and hazel brown.
“You’re so lucky that he’s a good sleeper. My son was never a good sleeper.”
I blink. I can feel it now: Celio is not asleep. My mind races.
“It’s too bad. Most children sleep well,” I say in a voice that is baritone and not mine.
She doesn’t add anything. We are getting to the end of the chat.
I wait ten seconds exactly. Then Anna retreats from the doormat into the hallway.
“Sure. Well then, have a good day, Mr. Orsaz.”
“You do the same, Anna.”
I pick up the newspaper protruding from the doormat where Anna stood a minute ago. My doormat delineates the last station before one gets into my world, like an access control vestibule. In the one year since I moved here, no one but Celio and me have set foot in my apartment. The doormat has kept us safe. I decide Celio is still sleeping.
I read the paper. Page by page, I go through the stories. The pages are tall and the paper makes a mild flutter when I flip them. Time passes with the government reshuffle, a sunny weekend before the beginning of the school year, the incredible tomato collection of a Normand retiree. I am trying to adjust the distance of the paper, but words stay smudged like wax pencil drawings. I make a note that my vision is declining.
It is what they call an early but decent hour in the morning when I go to Celio’s room. I come in and sit on the bed.
“Now we get out of bed.”
There’s no face protruding from the bedsheet, there’s a shape outlined by the red quilted blanket.
“Celio?”
My son’s body curls up in a ball. He doesn’t answer. I make a pause.
There is a lapse during which I ask myself whether or not I am becoming a bit hard of hearing. I wonder whether Celio did respond, but I just could not hear him.
I lift the blanket up. I throw it next to the bed on the floor.
“I don’t want to wake up,” he says with his elbows covering his face.
“You’re already awake,” I say.
He lifts one elbow and stares at me with an enormous question mark.
“We’ll go to the butcher on Rue d’Auteuil to buy a roasted chicken.”
I’m constantly making plans for an immediate future that will be nicer. It could always be nicer. There is the eternal promise of the moment where Celio will be happy about something I do for him.
Anything.
But right now I feel depleted. I lie down on the blanket on the ground next to Celio’s bed.
“Papa?”
“Yes,” I say.
“You want to sleep?”
“Maybe,” I say. This means absolutely and forever.
Celio talks about his best friend in preschool, whose name is Sasha and who is way small, about the playground with a swing next to his mom’s house which doesn’t have a merry-go-round, about the drawing he made last week for his teacher. Next, he says, “The drawing was you, Papa. It was you with your blue hair and me with my yellow hair.”
Oh. I scratch my cheek. “I have blue hair?” I ask.
Celio sniffs. “A little. It’s a little blue on your head sometimes.”
“Should I take the blue off?”
“Noooo… It would hurt you, Papa, to take the blue off your head.”
I do not know what I feel, only that all the hairs on my entire body rise like the United Nations blue berets. My mind is swaying. It would hurt you, Papa.
“Ah,” I say softly. I want to hide under the blanket, but I lie on top of it.
“You okay, Papa?”
His face pops from the edge of the bed above me. His eyes say a million different blue things.
“Just wait right here, okay, Papa?” And he walks off, out of the room.
I lie there a few seconds, a minute, unsure.
Celio comes back with a glass of water. I lift my head up.
“Wait!” he says.
He grabs his pillow from the bed and inserts it under my head. He brings the glass to my lips and tilts it until the water flows.
“You need to drink, Papa. Drink lots of water!”
I finish the water and I feel better. Celio hops back in his bed.
I lie on the ground next to Celio’s bed a long time, trying to find meaning in my son’s mouth noises and the small rustle of his sheets. I am trying not to think about blue hair, or about how long I have been without sleep. Like everything started wrong and now I am in a world full of thousands of small, happy sounds.
* * *
Rue Boileau, I smile the whole way because my world has come back and Celio holds my hand, and this is so true that one woman even smiles back at us.
When we get in the butcher shop, I say good morning to all the people waiting in line. No one answers, but we do not take offense.
* * *
It is early afternoon and after the roasted chicken. I am out smoking on the balcony, leaning into the banister, studying Rue Boileau from up top when Celio pulls my shirt with one hand, peering through his eyelashes like they are a small pine forest bordering the Mediterranean. He says, “Papa, Anna says she saw you throw your cigarettes onto people on the street.”
“I didn’t,” I say. These words sound true and definitive, but Celio gets closer to the banister and peeks through the railings to check.
I recognize the man crossing the street down below: His gait is familiar. From above, it looks like he doesn’t take actual steps, like he travels on invisible wheels, and his hair surges with the motion. Once on the sidewalk below us, he stops and pushes his hair back, away from his face. His gesture makes me a bit sick. I am filled with a desire to punish him.
From elsewhere, Celio asks, “Who’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I affirm. The firmness in my tone carries me. “But I don’t like him.”
“Me neither.”
“We don’t like him,” I repeat, and I feel vindicated. My lips blow a ring of smoke into the air: precise, complete, vibrant like a gleaming jellyfish. “What if something fell onto his head by accident?”
“Like now?” Celio asks. I can feel the excitement in his question. Like my answer can congeal into a mortal weapon and obliterate the perfection of the man’s hair, of the man’s posture, of the man’s life. I try to think but my eyes jump from Celio to the windows of the building across the street.
I hear Celio say, “Let’s do it, Papa! He’s gonna go!” his voice blinking like flashes from a lighthouse.
Slowly, I put out my cigarette on the banister; the ashes flutter down above the ledge.
There is a person looking at us on the third floor from the opposite building.
I think, This is not the day. Not today. And I throw the butt in the mason jar that I keep outside and that has leftover rain in it.
“Come on, Celio, let’s get in. We shouldn’t throw things at people,” I say, and I walk inside with the mason jar, but Celio doesn’t follow me. He’s asking me why I don’t throw my cigarettes at people when we’re together.
* * *
This is Day Three and it is 8:00 a.m. when I open my eyes and come face-to-face with my clock radio. I don’t believe the clock radio. This doesn’t seem like a sensible time. I lie in bed trying to find flaws in the passage of the minutes. I try not to think about Celio, who is somewhere in the apartment. Awake by now. I have a doubt. Like everything is misleading, except now I can hole up in my bedroom, and my son thinks I am sleeping.
I get off the bed. I tell myself that today is the last day. Celio gets picked up by his mother this afternoon. I may as well enjoy it. Play with him. I smile on my way to the kitchen, and Celio is there and the sunlight is refracting through the window and scattered through the air with traces of blue like we are inside a swimming pool.
I stop by the sink. I lean on the enamel and cross my feet casually. I watch Celio, who is standing on a stool between the table and the shelving that has the pickles and the sugar cubes.
“I am tall, Papa,” he announces.
“Umm…yes.” This sounds like I carefully evaluate his statement.
“I am taller than you, Papa.”
“What about now?” I say, and I pick him up from the stool and lift him up above me in the air.
I do not put him back down. I go across the kitchen with Celio hovering above me at the end of my arms. I begin to hum to keep my mind completely blank so that my hands can continue carrying him. I don’t know why I do that, but I don’t need a reason. My mind is whirling. My son is taller than me.
“You’re taller than me, Celio,” I say.
“Stoooooop! I don’t wanna be taller anymore,” Celio shouts.
I put my son down. He runs away from me and out of the kitchen. I want to ask what he wants to do on his last day, but he does not want to hear my questions. Instead he sprints toward the balcony.
I try to do everything right.
“Celio?”
He doesn’t answer me. He’s squatting on the balcony by the banister with his back turned to me.
“You’re not coming back in?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to,”
I ask what he wants.
“I want Mom,” he says.
I say that it is several hours until Mom is here to pick him up. I say, “Let’s do something until then.”
“I want Mom,” he says.
Celio’s words knock around in my head. When I try to imagine the two of us stepping into the next few hours, I trip over them like exposed tree roots.
I repeat that Mom won’t be here until one.
This is when my son turns back to me and I see his eyes transform into thin lines, while other much thinner white lines form above his nose and his forehead and his mouth opens larger than I ever saw and I can see all of his bottom baby teeth and his tongue pushed back to let out a scream that I know is coming long before I can hear it.
It is the scream that frightens me, because I can see my son’s metamorphosis but I don’t hear the scream yet. I could be deaf, or Celio could have stopped breathing.
In what they call slow motion, I lower myself into a squat position, my face level with my son’s face, my elbows resting on my knees, my hands clasped. I try to tell myself that I am ready for this.
Celio’s scream comes out at the same time as his fists aiming at my shoulders and my cheeks. I receive my son’s hits and kicks as a liberation. It’s like pouring rain after a long drought, and I offer my face and my body so as to absorb as much of it as I can. I close my eyes now. I don’t want to go, but pain shoots through my shoulder and my cheeks and I stumble from my squatting position to the side.
I hear Celio’s voice shout, “I hate you,” and I look up from the balcony floor where I lay. My son looks at the street and not at me. Celio is mad, distressed, determined. But small and soft and whole.
“Celio,” I say to him, as if his name conjured and condensed the things I want to say to him.
“I don’t want you,” he says in a way that is bare and unwavering.
He pushes me back inside. I want to say wait and my lips work but there are no words. I do not want to leave the balcony, but my son keeps pushing and he does not wait. He pushes me into the mean darkness of the apartment.
I say, “Okay. I will go then,” and I close the glass door to the balcony from the inside.
* * *
I spend two hours and half on the sofa, from where I can see him. Celio’s anger has turned cold, and it makes him rigid. He poses like a living statue. His rage sticks to him like a second skin.
I yawn. I feel exhausted. I light the light beside me even though it’s daylight. I move a bit so that the image of me is not in the window between me and Celio. I wonder how long it is before Celio’s anger melts back into something else.
This is the end of Day Three, and I lie on the sofa and I don’t wake up.
* * *
I wake up. I lie on the sofa. I don’t move. There is a weight in the living room atmosphere and I can’t lift it off my body. I look at the ceiling and the yellow play of lights from the street.
All I want is to go back to sleep. I see the window.
I fold my legs down and I try not to topple the blue pillow from the sofa. I sit up.
The noise from the street grows. I busy myself making my own sound override the honking. I pick on the loose threads from the blue pillow and I shred them into filaments.
Footsteps from one person, then stop; someone knocks on the door, door shakes, footsteps from another person. More people.
“Open!” one of the persons says to the door. “Anyone here? It’s an emergency! Open! Pleeeeease.”
I look past the window at my empty balcony under the yellow afternoon light, the railing straight and polished, and beyond the railing the windows of the building across the street and people in the windows with their faces frightened and fascinated, making ooohs and aaahs like an army of crying crickets. The whole building, the whole street full of people clamoring, shouting, but their noise doesn’t bother me because I focus on the pauses.
I straighten my back up and hold my shoulders back. I’ve always found good posture helpful. I look outside again. I notice one small hand at the base of one of the railings and I tell myself that it is an optical illusion, that of course it isn’t a small hand. I make a note again that my vision is declining and that I should check with an eye doctor.
* * *
I watch my own hands hold onto the edges, my nails grow white from holding; the veins under my skin flutter; my wrists hang at an odd angle. I clasp my hands together. I air-wash my hands to make them less cold, but they stay cold. Cold currents travel from my hands to the wrists to the forearms to my shoulders through my ribcage, where it is hollow.
I am cold, but I am too drained to get a blanket. The woolen throw that’s under me is under me.
I listen to the wet crackle in my ears. The liquid in my eyes swooshes back and forth when I blink.
My son is no longer on the balcony. I ask where my son is to my reflection in the glass door.
And my reflection calls my son by his name.
If the street’s cacophony stopped, I would be able to hear his answer.
* * *
There’s an explosion in the entryway. I know it from the vibrato of the wooden shrapnel that flies in the hallway. My stomach turns to molten lead inside me, spreading.
I grab the fleshy part of my thighs like my body is the one thing I can hold onto. Like my own flesh is the last ledge above the void that I can’t see.
People run inside my apartment like mice in the slipways of a ship. Tk. Tk. Tk. Tk.
I must not move or make a sound, yet every nerve in my body throbs. There is a dark pull in my chest, like the over-tightening of tuning pins.
Someone’s shouting: “Anyone there?”
I begin to hear my own breathing, and that is when my heart breaks. Because I know that I don’t know where my son is. Because I am here and he is not. Because I fell asleep.
Now in the glass door, I see three people barging in my living room and Anna is among them. They don’t pay attention to me at all, and I think I may have inadvertently become invisible except to the glass door.
Anna and the two men go straight for the balcony, and one of them steps over the banister. He squats on the other side of the balcony and talks in the process. His talking is liquid, like a hot stream where I could dip my fingers in. He keeps stream-talking while he grabs something from above the ledge.
The other man and Anna stand by.
What the man on the balcony grabs is grabbing him back.
A small hand, followed by a small arm, followed by a small head with yellow hair windswept by the Boileau air.
To no one, I say, “This is my son and I am his father.”
Celio is wide-eyed and nearly golden under the afternoon light as he gets lifted above the banister. Anna holds him up into her arms and doesn’t let go, and Celio holds her neck and doesn’t let go.
I ask the man next to me if I can talk to my son, but it looks like he can’t hear me.
“You’re under arrest,” he says. “You will have to follow me. Sir,” he says, “sir?”
But I am not listening. I am looking past him at Celio’s hands laced around Anna’s neck, his fingers as smooth and round as the bass hammers of a grand Steinway.
I don’t feel them place handcuffs on me because all I feel is Celio’s blue eyes looking at me from above Anna’s shoulder on the other side of the glass door.
Cécile Barlier
Three hours before Celio’s arrival: I smoke on the balcony and I wait for the day to break.
The noise from the street doesn’t bother me. It’s not really noise, because it contains a swarm of miniature silences. The pause between the clacks released by summer sandals on the pavement. The hush trapped amid the cooing of the pigeons. The calm sandwiched macaroon-style in the next-door couple’s disputes. The quiet on the cusp of sirens’ tests. Later, when traffic hour comes and sweeps through Paris like a Mongolian horde, thousands of cars and buses and bikes create a drumroll from the city’s entrails, and underneath comes a vacuumed stillness as vast and secluded as the Orion Nebula.
The fact is that the day doesn’t break, it just billows across the balcony into the thin of the air. It flutters itself in. I haven’t slept. I don’t sleep anymore. I am not ready yet. Which means I need to buy cereal and I need to buy milk. Which means I need to make a list of the things I need to buy. Which means I need to have a plan for what to do with my son, because he is four. Today it is not raining. We will go to the park because he needs fresh air to expend the energy he has in large quantity—especially since he is a boy.
* * *
One hour before Celio’s arrival: I am about to leave the building to buy the things on my list when Anna opens the door to her loge and stops me. She looks at me with her divergent squint like her left eye is watching another taller me behind me. She says, “Mr. Orsaz, is Celio coming over this weekend?”
“Yes,” I say. I know she won’t stop there, because she never stops there.
“Would you like me to watch him for an hour or two?”
“That’s okay, Anna, I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Thank you for asking, though.”
This sounds polite and reasonable, it also sounds like I’m in a hurry, but Anna holds up her broom like a flag freshly planted in new territory.
“He is so cute, Mr. Orsaz, so little and so cute. I could take him to the park Saturday. Or even Sunday. You tell me?”
“It’s fine, Anna. I am going to take care of him,” I announce. I will take care of him: I am about to repeat as if my words need to carry the extra weight of incantations. Instead I say, “We have plans.” And I smile the solid smile on which people count.
Anna’s eyes briefly disappear under their respective eyelids, as if she was gathering strength before a possible comeback, but I don’t give her a chance.
“Good day, Anna!” I shout. “See you soon!”
I start walking away with long, decisive strides. I feel the faint motion of the air, I feel the slight swelling of the sidewalk under the sole of my shoes, I feel the buildings on either side closing in. In my back, I feel Anna following me with her eyes shrinking under the weight of her frown like a pair of small dogs resting under a heavy blanket. I hear the mumble of her disappointment in the distance.
* * *
Ten minutes before Celio’s arrival: I change my shirt and I put on the blue one. I clean the wooden kitchen table from dust and crumbs, I wipe it with a wet sponge, and I dry it with a cloth. I use the smallest amount of beeswax. I have experimented with various techniques, but this is the one that allows me to resurrect or even save my wooden kitchen table, which on other days looks dull, without color, without energy, unrecoverable.
I place Celio’s cereal box on the table next to the milk. His cereal is called “Treasures” and it comes in a red box. The Treasures in the blue box are not as good because they’re made with milk chocolate, and Celio says there is no point since we already add milk to cereals. That milk in the blue Treasures is redundant. I like Celio’s logic because it is simple and coherent. I trust thoughts that are finite and coherent; they make me smile.
Thoughts like: This is my son. Like: I have him over at the apartment every other weekend. Like: He is four years old and likes Treasures for breakfast, because he cannot have them at his mom’s house. All nice and clear. Celio’s mother drops him off every other Friday morning, but we agree that she cannot go up the stairs and has to wait until he waves at her from the balcony. The same way everyone agrees that we cannot live together, even though she says it’s because I never say what’s on my mind and Celio says it’s so he can have two houses instead of one and I say that these things happen.
It is true that the things that everyone agrees on are the things that just happen to fall in place, like a fold in a fabric that makes it drape a certain way.
A lot of things work in this way for me, they drape around me in a way that feels natural.
This means: If I have a son, then I can say, “I am a father.” Then there it is, a fact, period, an objective reality. And there is no point for me pretending I am not a father. If I had written a book, then I could say, “I am writer.” If I was driving a bus, then I could say, “I am a bus driver.”
Celio is behind the entry door now. Anna couldn’t help but accompany him up the stairs. I can hear them standing on the doormat. I hear Celio ask Anna if he can ring the doorbell. He says “please.” I hear my son being lifted off the floor and his finger extending. The bell rings. I open the door quick. I say, “Hello, Anna,” in a way that means, “Goodbye, Anna.” I let my son in and I pick up his small yellow duffel bag. I close the door. I ask if he’s hungry.
“Yes,” he says and goes straight to the balcony to wave his mom off.
I wonder how long Celio’s mother would stay double-parked on Rue Boileau if he didn’t wave her off. I wonder if she’d leave her car planted there and go up the stairs in a honking warfare.
When Celio comes back from the balcony and passes through the kitchen’s doorframe, his face looks like it was just being painted—a bit pink on the cheeks and damp at the hairline. He makes a face when he sees the Treasures.
“I don’t like those anymore.” He looks me over. “I like Frosties now.”
I shrug. It is strange how everything in the kitchen looks exactly the same while my body slides slowly sideways. I sit. This is a test—the first part in a game—the prompt.
Celio’s eyes are waiting for me, and blue. If I let this go, I’m done.
I pour myself a big bowl of Treasures, add the milk. Spoon in hand, I attack the bowl and take a first bite, followed by a second. Treasures are really the thing now. Celio comes closer and takes a seat at the table. He sucks his thumb while holding his blankie. He watches me eat his Treasures and makes small suction noises.
I close my eyes—closing my eyes brings about a blank canvas where I can focus. I am eating Celio’s cereal because he doesn’t want it. Celio gives me no choice but to eat his cereal. A mug of steaming coffee awaits me on the side. Cloaked in the steam, I cannot be broken. It smells like an uprising.
I do not know how long it’s been when Celio stops sucking and I stop chewing.
The whiplash of silence makes me open my eyes.
“So,” I say, “we go to Sainte-Périne or to the Jardin d’Acclimatation?”
“I don’t wanna go.”
“Come on, which one?”
This is part two in the game: empowerment. I’m giving my son a choice. If Celio has a say in where we’re going, he will be in.
His eyes feel like they are starving and I go straight to part three in the game: progress and reward.
“I’m sure they’ll have things you like to eat there.”
“’Kay,” and he says, “Ja-din” without the “r”.
Then suddenly the kitchen opens up around us.
I take Celio’s hand with one hand, and with my other hand I take his yellow bag. I lead him along the corridor, down the two steps that get into his bedroom. I tell him to sit down on the red chair in the middle; he sits down.
Celio hums to himself while I look for proper clothes for him to wear to the park. Clothes that we won’t worry about if they get dirty or torn. After a difficult start, we’ve reached a non-aggression pact. I kneel before him, slide his kakis off his legs and his white T-shirt above his head—it’s easy. I breathe in the sweet and sour smell of my son’s small body mixed with the soapy smell of fresh clothes. I picture a narrow laundry room with a short window just a bit open, a red ray of sun interrupted by the outline of a cloud. Only in the Province is there space for laundry rooms. In the old days, people used to say “mudroom.” I think about the fact that Parisian apartments don’t have space for mudrooms. I think about the fact that Parisian apartments don’t have space for mud or anything non-Parisian.
Celio’s all dressed up.
“Now we go?”
I don’t get a response, but I get a smile. Perhaps I live for Celio’s smile. Perhaps there is no other reason for me to go on living but to receive that smile. Now I don’t smile, of course I don’t smile, and if I were to smile it would not look like a smile. It is not something I can reciprocate.
“Okay,” I hear myself say, “let’s go.”
* * *
It is several flights of stairs later, and outside the morning is empty. The sidewalk steams from being watered by the street sweepers. A couple is busy talking at the corner of Chardon Lagache; the brunette stares at Celio and me as we pass them. Celio smiles at her, but she keeps on talking to her boyfriend. I wonder if my son has a one-sided smile: a smile that cannot be returned. I wish I could teach him the other smile, the one that can be repaid.
I go on walking and tell myself that we are just going to the park, and that it doesn’t matter if people don’t smile.
Rue Erlanger; I try not to make eye contact with a policewoman dispensing parking tickets.
“Papa, can you tell me the story of Brimborion?” Celio asks.
“Which one?”
“Brimborion.”
And I know I know this story. I know I told him many times. But I hear a long silence that buzzes through me like a laser light that penetrates in one of my ears and whooshes through to the other. I push my tongue inside the roof of my mouth to clear the air, like I used to do on mountain roads when the altitude changed too quickly. I think, It is the story of a small boy called Brimborion who doesn’t want to… and suddenly it is gone. I panic, because how can I explain this to my son? How can I not know Brimborion anymore?
I want something to happen now: a surprise. Something that steers us clear of the story of Brimborion. Part four in the game: the surprise.
Small surprises are the ones that count. If I can set aside a small surprise for my son, then he will forget that I forgot the Brimborion story and remember this weekend. But what?
I say, “Chocolate?” as we pass the De Bruges boutique, and I start to breathe again as I hold the glass door for Celio to get in.
* * *
We wait for the Bus 72 at the station, and we have our mouths full.
“I don’t wanna go to the Chinese Pagoda,” Celio says between two bites. His baby teeth are brown.
I ask if it is because it’s scary.
“I don’t wanna go to the Chinese Pagoda.”
I say it’s good to do something scary because then it’s not as scary.
“I don’t wanna go to the Chinese Pagoda.”
I say, “Stop saying that.”
Now is a good time to stand my ground. The ground is something solid. If Celio can ride the Chinese Pagoda, we’ll overcome his fear and we’ll be in a better place. If I can remember the story of Brimborion and tell him, we’ll have the Brimborion story in both our memories. Later, Celio can tell me the story if I ever forget again.
We will help each other.
* * *
This is Day Two. The sun comes up again. The sun comes up again, because it has a consistent routine. The sun deserves a prize for consistency: the Palme d’Or of consistency.
I get out of bed. I fix myself a bowl of Treasures. I eat the Treasures, and I wait. It is 6:45 a.m.
There is a knock on the door. It is Anna’s knock. She also deserves to be rewarded for consistency, in a different category: the pace of her knocks, which float by like eighth notes on a music score. Tak, tak, tak, tak—pause.
The air is quiet.
I wait.
Tak, tak, tak, tak—pause.
I tell myself I have a choice. One: I can stay here in the kitchen—wait for Anna to give up knocking and go back to where she came from. Under One, there is the risk of waking Celio up. Two: I open the door and face the prospect of a chat with Anna.
“Hello,” I say to myself out loud in the kitchen.
“Hello,” I respond to myself, with the emphasis on the second syllable. I feel like I jump-started something.
Now I am in the entryway. I open the door. I say hello. I say how are you.
“Is everything okay, Mr. Orsaz?” Anna asks right off the bat instead of answering my question.
I tell her it’s all good.
“I heard noises overnight. I thought I’d check in.”
I ask what kind of noises.
“Muffled thumps. Whomp, whomp. Like that, you know?”
“Whomp, whomp?” I feel defeated for repeating this back to her. I try to not let defeat wash over my face. I cough in my fist quickly.
“Right… I wanted to make sure you and Celio were fine,” she says. “I was a bit worried. My husband told me to wait till morning.”
“We’re good, Anna.” I try to keep my answers abrupt yet civil.
“Is Celio awake?” She moves her neck to look behind me. I know she notices that the scriban chest of drawers is on the other side of the hallway.
I tell her that Celio is still sleeping. I realize that I have no idea whether this is true or not.
She does the neck-craning again. I see that she sees I reshuffled the furniture overnight while I wasn’t sleeping.
Anna’s eyes are looking for ways to escape, and hazel brown.
“You’re so lucky that he’s a good sleeper. My son was never a good sleeper.”
I blink. I can feel it now: Celio is not asleep. My mind races.
“It’s too bad. Most children sleep well,” I say in a voice that is baritone and not mine.
She doesn’t add anything. We are getting to the end of the chat.
I wait ten seconds exactly. Then Anna retreats from the doormat into the hallway.
“Sure. Well then, have a good day, Mr. Orsaz.”
“You do the same, Anna.”
I pick up the newspaper protruding from the doormat where Anna stood a minute ago. My doormat delineates the last station before one gets into my world, like an access control vestibule. In the one year since I moved here, no one but Celio and me have set foot in my apartment. The doormat has kept us safe. I decide Celio is still sleeping.
I read the paper. Page by page, I go through the stories. The pages are tall and the paper makes a mild flutter when I flip them. Time passes with the government reshuffle, a sunny weekend before the beginning of the school year, the incredible tomato collection of a Normand retiree. I am trying to adjust the distance of the paper, but words stay smudged like wax pencil drawings. I make a note that my vision is declining.
It is what they call an early but decent hour in the morning when I go to Celio’s room. I come in and sit on the bed.
“Now we get out of bed.”
There’s no face protruding from the bedsheet, there’s a shape outlined by the red quilted blanket.
“Celio?”
My son’s body curls up in a ball. He doesn’t answer. I make a pause.
There is a lapse during which I ask myself whether or not I am becoming a bit hard of hearing. I wonder whether Celio did respond, but I just could not hear him.
I lift the blanket up. I throw it next to the bed on the floor.
“I don’t want to wake up,” he says with his elbows covering his face.
“You’re already awake,” I say.
He lifts one elbow and stares at me with an enormous question mark.
“We’ll go to the butcher on Rue d’Auteuil to buy a roasted chicken.”
I’m constantly making plans for an immediate future that will be nicer. It could always be nicer. There is the eternal promise of the moment where Celio will be happy about something I do for him.
Anything.
But right now I feel depleted. I lie down on the blanket on the ground next to Celio’s bed.
“Papa?”
“Yes,” I say.
“You want to sleep?”
“Maybe,” I say. This means absolutely and forever.
Celio talks about his best friend in preschool, whose name is Sasha and who is way small, about the playground with a swing next to his mom’s house which doesn’t have a merry-go-round, about the drawing he made last week for his teacher. Next, he says, “The drawing was you, Papa. It was you with your blue hair and me with my yellow hair.”
Oh. I scratch my cheek. “I have blue hair?” I ask.
Celio sniffs. “A little. It’s a little blue on your head sometimes.”
“Should I take the blue off?”
“Noooo… It would hurt you, Papa, to take the blue off your head.”
I do not know what I feel, only that all the hairs on my entire body rise like the United Nations blue berets. My mind is swaying. It would hurt you, Papa.
“Ah,” I say softly. I want to hide under the blanket, but I lie on top of it.
“You okay, Papa?”
His face pops from the edge of the bed above me. His eyes say a million different blue things.
“Just wait right here, okay, Papa?” And he walks off, out of the room.
I lie there a few seconds, a minute, unsure.
Celio comes back with a glass of water. I lift my head up.
“Wait!” he says.
He grabs his pillow from the bed and inserts it under my head. He brings the glass to my lips and tilts it until the water flows.
“You need to drink, Papa. Drink lots of water!”
I finish the water and I feel better. Celio hops back in his bed.
I lie on the ground next to Celio’s bed a long time, trying to find meaning in my son’s mouth noises and the small rustle of his sheets. I am trying not to think about blue hair, or about how long I have been without sleep. Like everything started wrong and now I am in a world full of thousands of small, happy sounds.
* * *
Rue Boileau, I smile the whole way because my world has come back and Celio holds my hand, and this is so true that one woman even smiles back at us.
When we get in the butcher shop, I say good morning to all the people waiting in line. No one answers, but we do not take offense.
* * *
It is early afternoon and after the roasted chicken. I am out smoking on the balcony, leaning into the banister, studying Rue Boileau from up top when Celio pulls my shirt with one hand, peering through his eyelashes like they are a small pine forest bordering the Mediterranean. He says, “Papa, Anna says she saw you throw your cigarettes onto people on the street.”
“I didn’t,” I say. These words sound true and definitive, but Celio gets closer to the banister and peeks through the railings to check.
I recognize the man crossing the street down below: His gait is familiar. From above, it looks like he doesn’t take actual steps, like he travels on invisible wheels, and his hair surges with the motion. Once on the sidewalk below us, he stops and pushes his hair back, away from his face. His gesture makes me a bit sick. I am filled with a desire to punish him.
From elsewhere, Celio asks, “Who’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I affirm. The firmness in my tone carries me. “But I don’t like him.”
“Me neither.”
“We don’t like him,” I repeat, and I feel vindicated. My lips blow a ring of smoke into the air: precise, complete, vibrant like a gleaming jellyfish. “What if something fell onto his head by accident?”
“Like now?” Celio asks. I can feel the excitement in his question. Like my answer can congeal into a mortal weapon and obliterate the perfection of the man’s hair, of the man’s posture, of the man’s life. I try to think but my eyes jump from Celio to the windows of the building across the street.
I hear Celio say, “Let’s do it, Papa! He’s gonna go!” his voice blinking like flashes from a lighthouse.
Slowly, I put out my cigarette on the banister; the ashes flutter down above the ledge.
There is a person looking at us on the third floor from the opposite building.
I think, This is not the day. Not today. And I throw the butt in the mason jar that I keep outside and that has leftover rain in it.
“Come on, Celio, let’s get in. We shouldn’t throw things at people,” I say, and I walk inside with the mason jar, but Celio doesn’t follow me. He’s asking me why I don’t throw my cigarettes at people when we’re together.
* * *
This is Day Three and it is 8:00 a.m. when I open my eyes and come face-to-face with my clock radio. I don’t believe the clock radio. This doesn’t seem like a sensible time. I lie in bed trying to find flaws in the passage of the minutes. I try not to think about Celio, who is somewhere in the apartment. Awake by now. I have a doubt. Like everything is misleading, except now I can hole up in my bedroom, and my son thinks I am sleeping.
I get off the bed. I tell myself that today is the last day. Celio gets picked up by his mother this afternoon. I may as well enjoy it. Play with him. I smile on my way to the kitchen, and Celio is there and the sunlight is refracting through the window and scattered through the air with traces of blue like we are inside a swimming pool.
I stop by the sink. I lean on the enamel and cross my feet casually. I watch Celio, who is standing on a stool between the table and the shelving that has the pickles and the sugar cubes.
“I am tall, Papa,” he announces.
“Umm…yes.” This sounds like I carefully evaluate his statement.
“I am taller than you, Papa.”
“What about now?” I say, and I pick him up from the stool and lift him up above me in the air.
I do not put him back down. I go across the kitchen with Celio hovering above me at the end of my arms. I begin to hum to keep my mind completely blank so that my hands can continue carrying him. I don’t know why I do that, but I don’t need a reason. My mind is whirling. My son is taller than me.
“You’re taller than me, Celio,” I say.
“Stoooooop! I don’t wanna be taller anymore,” Celio shouts.
I put my son down. He runs away from me and out of the kitchen. I want to ask what he wants to do on his last day, but he does not want to hear my questions. Instead he sprints toward the balcony.
I try to do everything right.
“Celio?”
He doesn’t answer me. He’s squatting on the balcony by the banister with his back turned to me.
“You’re not coming back in?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to,”
I ask what he wants.
“I want Mom,” he says.
I say that it is several hours until Mom is here to pick him up. I say, “Let’s do something until then.”
“I want Mom,” he says.
Celio’s words knock around in my head. When I try to imagine the two of us stepping into the next few hours, I trip over them like exposed tree roots.
I repeat that Mom won’t be here until one.
This is when my son turns back to me and I see his eyes transform into thin lines, while other much thinner white lines form above his nose and his forehead and his mouth opens larger than I ever saw and I can see all of his bottom baby teeth and his tongue pushed back to let out a scream that I know is coming long before I can hear it.
It is the scream that frightens me, because I can see my son’s metamorphosis but I don’t hear the scream yet. I could be deaf, or Celio could have stopped breathing.
In what they call slow motion, I lower myself into a squat position, my face level with my son’s face, my elbows resting on my knees, my hands clasped. I try to tell myself that I am ready for this.
Celio’s scream comes out at the same time as his fists aiming at my shoulders and my cheeks. I receive my son’s hits and kicks as a liberation. It’s like pouring rain after a long drought, and I offer my face and my body so as to absorb as much of it as I can. I close my eyes now. I don’t want to go, but pain shoots through my shoulder and my cheeks and I stumble from my squatting position to the side.
I hear Celio’s voice shout, “I hate you,” and I look up from the balcony floor where I lay. My son looks at the street and not at me. Celio is mad, distressed, determined. But small and soft and whole.
“Celio,” I say to him, as if his name conjured and condensed the things I want to say to him.
“I don’t want you,” he says in a way that is bare and unwavering.
He pushes me back inside. I want to say wait and my lips work but there are no words. I do not want to leave the balcony, but my son keeps pushing and he does not wait. He pushes me into the mean darkness of the apartment.
I say, “Okay. I will go then,” and I close the glass door to the balcony from the inside.
* * *
I spend two hours and half on the sofa, from where I can see him. Celio’s anger has turned cold, and it makes him rigid. He poses like a living statue. His rage sticks to him like a second skin.
I yawn. I feel exhausted. I light the light beside me even though it’s daylight. I move a bit so that the image of me is not in the window between me and Celio. I wonder how long it is before Celio’s anger melts back into something else.
This is the end of Day Three, and I lie on the sofa and I don’t wake up.
* * *
I wake up. I lie on the sofa. I don’t move. There is a weight in the living room atmosphere and I can’t lift it off my body. I look at the ceiling and the yellow play of lights from the street.
All I want is to go back to sleep. I see the window.
I fold my legs down and I try not to topple the blue pillow from the sofa. I sit up.
The noise from the street grows. I busy myself making my own sound override the honking. I pick on the loose threads from the blue pillow and I shred them into filaments.
Footsteps from one person, then stop; someone knocks on the door, door shakes, footsteps from another person. More people.
“Open!” one of the persons says to the door. “Anyone here? It’s an emergency! Open! Pleeeeease.”
I look past the window at my empty balcony under the yellow afternoon light, the railing straight and polished, and beyond the railing the windows of the building across the street and people in the windows with their faces frightened and fascinated, making ooohs and aaahs like an army of crying crickets. The whole building, the whole street full of people clamoring, shouting, but their noise doesn’t bother me because I focus on the pauses.
I straighten my back up and hold my shoulders back. I’ve always found good posture helpful. I look outside again. I notice one small hand at the base of one of the railings and I tell myself that it is an optical illusion, that of course it isn’t a small hand. I make a note again that my vision is declining and that I should check with an eye doctor.
* * *
I watch my own hands hold onto the edges, my nails grow white from holding; the veins under my skin flutter; my wrists hang at an odd angle. I clasp my hands together. I air-wash my hands to make them less cold, but they stay cold. Cold currents travel from my hands to the wrists to the forearms to my shoulders through my ribcage, where it is hollow.
I am cold, but I am too drained to get a blanket. The woolen throw that’s under me is under me.
I listen to the wet crackle in my ears. The liquid in my eyes swooshes back and forth when I blink.
My son is no longer on the balcony. I ask where my son is to my reflection in the glass door.
And my reflection calls my son by his name.
If the street’s cacophony stopped, I would be able to hear his answer.
* * *
There’s an explosion in the entryway. I know it from the vibrato of the wooden shrapnel that flies in the hallway. My stomach turns to molten lead inside me, spreading.
I grab the fleshy part of my thighs like my body is the one thing I can hold onto. Like my own flesh is the last ledge above the void that I can’t see.
People run inside my apartment like mice in the slipways of a ship. Tk. Tk. Tk. Tk.
I must not move or make a sound, yet every nerve in my body throbs. There is a dark pull in my chest, like the over-tightening of tuning pins.
Someone’s shouting: “Anyone there?”
I begin to hear my own breathing, and that is when my heart breaks. Because I know that I don’t know where my son is. Because I am here and he is not. Because I fell asleep.
Now in the glass door, I see three people barging in my living room and Anna is among them. They don’t pay attention to me at all, and I think I may have inadvertently become invisible except to the glass door.
Anna and the two men go straight for the balcony, and one of them steps over the banister. He squats on the other side of the balcony and talks in the process. His talking is liquid, like a hot stream where I could dip my fingers in. He keeps stream-talking while he grabs something from above the ledge.
The other man and Anna stand by.
What the man on the balcony grabs is grabbing him back.
A small hand, followed by a small arm, followed by a small head with yellow hair windswept by the Boileau air.
To no one, I say, “This is my son and I am his father.”
Celio is wide-eyed and nearly golden under the afternoon light as he gets lifted above the banister. Anna holds him up into her arms and doesn’t let go, and Celio holds her neck and doesn’t let go.
I ask the man next to me if I can talk to my son, but it looks like he can’t hear me.
“You’re under arrest,” he says. “You will have to follow me. Sir,” he says, “sir?”
But I am not listening. I am looking past him at Celio’s hands laced around Anna’s neck, his fingers as smooth and round as the bass hammers of a grand Steinway.
I don’t feel them place handcuffs on me because all I feel is Celio’s blue eyes looking at me from above Anna’s shoulder on the other side of the glass door.
