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Page 14.

Crossing wide streets, Rick had no concern with history—past, ongoing, or yet to come.

Preoccupied with his unchanging predicament—locked into an eternal present of guilt, dread, and impending doom—he walked for hours with his hands jammed deeply in his pockets. He saw his reflection passing on plate glass—a troubled look on his face, seen rippling past in smoky shop windows. In his own life, his personal clock had stopped and might never start again.

Looking over his shoulder from time to time, he got on and off the metro system at many stations, trying to shake possible pursuers. He had just under sixty Euros in his sock, stolen in Bad Homburg from a shifty Russian sidewalk carpet seller, who was illegally working outside the VAT and deserved to get burned. Then too, the Siberian still had the carpet, so he wasn't out much. Probably pissed. But he was alive. Rick hadn't had to break his neck for him to get away.

At a kiosk near the Louvre, Rick bought a cheap throw-away cell phone with ten hours of talk time. He stood for a few minutes, contemplating heavy traffic flowing around the square near the main entrance of the great art museum. Should he risk calling Major Kendra Walsh at the Judge Advocate General (JAG) office in Kaiserslautern (K-Town in G.I. jargon) and see how bad things looked for his upcoming court case—assuming he ever showed up alive again? After looking at the burner for several agonizing minutes, he shook his head, stuffed the phone into his backpack, and resumed walking.

He kept a couple of loose Euro bills in the black leather wallet in the left hip pocket of his jeans in case he were robbed on the street. For all the African and Middle Eastern looking faces that drifted by, nobody bothered him as he exited the Gallieni station on the metro in Bagnolet and wandered along desolate suburban boulevards. He felt dead already—a ghost, at one with the dark people and their dark lives passing in smoky gloom, on streets smelling of strange foods and distant, deadly homelands.

Night fell among the few drab, same-same glassy high-rise buildings. Torn sheets of cloud rippled over tree tops, reflected in greenish, underwater-looking plate-glass windows. The world seemed to be drowning in tears—swimming in dreams. Rick talked with his old buddy Charley Hafford, who tagged along some distance behind him and never seemed to catch up any more. Sometimes it seemed that Charley had died in the sands of Huilongistan—on a sun-baked asphalt road torn by an improvised mine. At other times it was not true—Charley definitely was along with Rick, as only a best friend could be. Much of the time, Rick was alone and pounding down as much mileage as he could to stay ahead of his pursuers.

With only sixty Euro on him, Rick knew he could end this at any time. In his pocket was the business card of Major Kendra Walsh, the JAG officer who was tasked with his defense before a court martial in K-Town. Kendra's boss was a big, ugly old black infantry colonel with flinty eyes, who hated Rick and made no bones about sending him to the slammer for life. Desertion was the least of it. According to the articles of accusation, Rick had led his convoy into an ambush through negligence. Under a quarter moon in a sky like dark blue ink, three explosions in a row had taken out the vehicles. Only Rick had lived because he had halted and stepped out to take a leak in a safe, quiet area that turned out to be anything but that. Six men had lost their lives, plus another six contractors. Each had been a joke, a smile, a conversation, a few moments of comradeship in a hostile, alien world stuck a thousand years back in time, where modern people might as well be an outer space invasion fleet—especially soldiers from far away, some of whom were women—it all meant the devil's work to these Neolithic people, who were of course manipulated for money and power by dour mullahs and ayatollahs from the bloody Middle Ages.

What are we doing here? was the frequent question. Oh yeah, invade to beat their fucking brains in, kill their kids, destroy their fields and goats, defile their women, and get the oil—it's a corporate crusade to bring them slogans of alleged freedom they cannot comprehend; and in the process get our dicks shot off, our faces ripped off our skulls, and our legs blown off since they strangely don't want us here. Should have stayed in good old Freedom Fries, Rick often thought. By their fruits ye shall know them.

There was other stuff in the story about events in Huilongistan, which Rick could not remember. Or he did not know if he remembered remembering anything—it was all very confusing. Luckily, he would die with his genitalia and face still attached. He'd die with the memories of six soldiers' and six contractors' brains and meat scattered on a gravel road surface, and he was accused of negligence in putting them in danger.

The concussions had left Rick muddled and wandering about until an MP patrol found him and called in a Medevac. It was all a mess, and Rick months later was still wandering around in shock. Sometimes he felt very clear, like this morning when he'd walked purposefully along busy, trafficky-loud boulevards in Paris as if he were not in his old life but this new life that he so desperately preferred to his own. Other times it was like swimming in deep, dark water.

Talking to himself and to Charley and sometimes Major Kendra Walsh, Rick walked and walked and walked. Sometimes it seemed as if he could walk around the globe from city to city, continent to continent as the line of day swept across the earth the way a clock's hands sweep over its face. You could keep marching or doing the ranger shuffle from traffic light to traffic light, city block by luminous brooding city block, all that gorgeous hewn stone sometimes carved in gryphons or gargoyles and choked with moss and ivy, at other times smooth and achingly bare in the finest modern traditions. Strangely, exhilaratingly, people in every city were the same. You could circle the globe in this dream state, melancholy in its truthfulness, visit a thousand cities—and it was all just Paris again and again. Or Keokuk, or Bangkok, or Calicut, or Ankara, or sipping kvetch in Ukraine. It was people, human lives, over and over again. Everywhere the same. Kind of bright and sort of melancholy all at once in a truthful way.

Rick took metro line 3 toward Bagnolet. The area had its own magic, Rick remembered—away from the tourism of central Paris, and more like a normal city with glass skyscrapers, industrial blocks, apartment jungles, and heavy traffic pouring like hot, glowing lead around the peripheral highway. Buried just one or two metro stops on line 3 west of here lay Père Lachaise Cemetery, a city of memories and mausoleum, where world famous names of politics, the arts, and other cultural lights lie in final rest—including Edith Piaf, Colette, Maria Callas, Oscar Wilde, Ahmet Kaya, Marcel Proust, Frederic Chopin, and more.

When evening fell, the time Rick dreaded most, he was walking along a very old street. Under crumbling asphalt he could see green-fuzzed paving blocks from centuries ago. Ghosts walked here, dead people who lived long ago, crisscrossing before him and all around him, as he sought the refuge of a sign whole loopy red neon letters spelled out Bar-39 (subhead in smaller green neon: étape trente-neuf) within a pale blue neon rectangle almost as blue-gray as cigarette smoke. The corner was sandstone, with laughter spilling from an open door. Rick stopped, swaying lightly, and smelled steak.

Now that's a homey aromey.

He smelled fresh beer, or at least the foam maybe swirling along copper bar surfaces, quickly wiped away by a firm, bare hand while a barmaid's strong voice barked at a joke told by a patron. People were in there, talking and laughing as if all the problems of Arabia and Persia and the Indus Valley and the Afghan mountain ranges either did not exist—or could be solved here.

"Go in there and get something to eat," Charley said. "Have a beer for me." He was a disembodied humanoid figure like a shadow in the night, or a rippling reflection dimly caught in a passing bus window. Turn around, and he was gone. But he was always there. Just sometimes he wasn't visible much.

"I think I will," Rick said. "I am feeling faint with hunger. That's why I'm seeing you, Charley."

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