The Fugitivities, стр. 26

delivery van that had pulled out hurriedly into her lane. The woman was on her back in the street, and a small crowd had gathered around her. Passersby stopped, dumbstruck, some putting their hands to their mouths, others looking around anxiously or reaching for their phones. The woman was wearing a navy-blue business jacket, and Jonah could see her dark hair coming out of her helmet, which rested motionless on the pavement. It was impossible to tell if she was conscious. A wail came pulsing up the boulevard. Police arrived and began diverting traffic. With the traffic stilled, the plane trees appeared even more majestic, their crowns basking in the evening light. As the ambulance neared, some bystanders began to move again, but others just arriving now stopped, transfixed. The paramedics crouched over the woman’s body. There was a shout, and a man in a light-blue shirt, holding a phone to his ear, ran up the sidewalk. He was sweating heavily, and everyone understood. He knelt over her, talking into the helmet and turning periodically to consult with the medics. And then Jonah could see a small heaving in the woman’s chest. The man held her wrist. The medics brought out an orange canoe with straps and a pillow. The driver of the van hid his eyes with his hand.

Jonah waited a bit longer. Then, feeling vaguely irritated with himself, he turned and left the scene hurriedly. It was overwhelming, the touch of human stuff, the queer vastness of it colliding all around. Everyone knew all of it could, in the space of one head-on smash, come to a full stop. That there was a day, a definite one somewhere still in the future, full of the same buzz and pullulation of other people living and going on, when it would be someone else in some version of that crowd looking on at him, lying there, watching him exit the play with no more difficulty than the energy it took him to turn and walk away.

The accident had caused him to backtrack, reversing course along the opposite side of the boulevard as the summer evening deepened. At the Odéon intersection, looking more miserable than ever, Danton thrust his arm out over the loiterers assembled at the base of his socle. Jonah turned off the boulevard into the medieval passageways running down to the Seine. He passed art galleries with garish and austere baubles. Tourists fumbled with their digital cameras. At the angle of the rue Jacob, he thought he heard a piano playing. But it was only a waiter storing his silverware. He pressed on into the quiet streets. On the rue Bonaparte he passed the cobbled courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts and its Greek statues, and then the Tunisian greengrocer where he sometimes bought clementines in the winter. He kept thinking of Phineas. That image of Phineas Newborn at his piano, staring down at his own hands.

He arrived at the crossroads near the statue of Condorcet. To his right, the Pont des Arts stretched across the Seine to the Louvre. The bridge was peppered with young professionals and students. They lounged against the railings or formed circles around cheap bottles of wine and beer, laughing and rolling cigarettes. Dealers roamed their periphery looking for sales. Street vendors with key chains, plastic gadgets, and bottled water, buttonholed tourists trying to pose for each other with a romantic view. A column of jolly Americans dressed in khakis and polo shirts rolled by on Segways, traversing the scene like a vaguely alien but benign patrol force.

Paris at the dawn of the new millennium. The softness of its way of life, its affordance and assumption of the artful enveloped them all like a delicate and indefinitely antiquated movie set. It was, Jonah said, almost sickeningly beautiful. He stood in it as one who had neither a place nor no place in it. He hadn’t done nothing to nobody. But really, he had done nothing, could do nothing, other than grow more like the city around him. Become a waxy walker in the museum of nostalgia, a curious prop, seemingly borrowed from another set for the tourists to ponder with disinterested bewilderment.

What was he doing? Elsewhere life was happening, moving in some fateful direction. It might ultimately be catastrophic, but it was moving all the same. The decisive meanings would be discovered and won or lost there. His college friends, armed with their degrees, were moving to Brooklyn or out to Silicon Valley, where the future was being encoded as a set of calculably diffusive effects presided over by a sempiternal abstraction devoted to watching, recording, and taking a cut. He knew he wanted no part of that. But what alternative vision did he have? These thoughts obsessed him as he walked back across the city to the rue de Tocqueville.

His bedroom was full of movie posters, most of them rolled up in tubes in a corner leaning against his desk. He got them for free on the job and had more than he knew what to do with. He had seen so many films, too many. Art films from small European countries that were younger than he was; obscure westerns that only the elderly came to watch, and usually dozed off to. Even the glorious Isabelle Adjani who stormed across the screen in her avenging genii, her Emily Brontë, her Adèle Hugo, her Camille Claudel; even Adjani’s achingly romantic poses looked somehow hollow to him now. He was tired of watching. What was he really looking for? What did the watching conceal? He loved the movie theater; he loved working in the booth, feeding the reels and watching the platters turn. But how long would any of it last? What did it have to do with him? It came back to the same thing. The movies were his way of hiding. And he knew it. He just hadn’t had the courage to admit it. Somehow Phineas had said it for him. Reached