Paris Twilight by Russ Rymer Page B

against. Even the impervious waiter, whose name is Jeko and who extends his neglect more benignly these days (we share a bond. It turns out he visited Perth Amboy once, and he brings up New Jersey at the oddest times), won’t complain if I dawdle the hours away penning you a letter about forgotten disputes, all this childish childlessness stuff.
    I guess what I’m trying to get at is this: The whole parade of generations is driven by the need to solve a mystery, a mystery we can never solve, and so we pass it on. The mystery is the meaning of individual moments in our lives, the lost step, the leaf’s twirl, the close of an eye, the sound the chair made when the chair was pushed back. Example: You and I standing on a sidewalk in the snow on an evening that we don’t yet realize is irreversible. Now, there’s a mystery I would ask to have answered. I would like to say: What does it mean that I was given a life, and that the life I was given turned around such an instant? May I submit the question? To whom do I address the envelope?
Recipient Unborn
?
    For a while, I addressed it
Recipient
,
Corie Bingham
. Not because of her beauty and her youth—splendid decrepit beauty, tattered youth. I blame it on her eyes. They had a color, sometimes, when they looked into mine, that shone as dim as verdigris, like light in deep forest, but that usually were copper, a cheap trinket gold blushing through the brown, just as I’d seen them in the seconds of our first meeting, as I would see them on our second meeting, and upon our third, right here in Portbou. And they were empty, so terribly empty. But I am getting ahead of myself. I haven’t even told you about the palace I discovered at Saxe’s place when I turned the key and opened the closet door.
    Â 
    In truth, it wasn’t that easy.
    I couldn’t even locate the keyhole until I’d chipped away an ancient piece of electrician’s tape that someone had pasted over it that had long ago hardened into shell. When I did finally get the key into the lock, it worked smoothly—the tumblers clicked, the bolt scraped open. That’s all. The key worked, but the door didn’t budge. Its edges were sealed with caulk and plaster and tape and paint, every sort of thing, and I went to work gouging all this out, stabbing away viciously with a table knife and a spatula. I also had to dismantle two clothing rods from their brackets. The visiting sunbeam abandoned the closet and left me swearing in the dark, but finally I could feel a little give in the door when I pulled on the knob and so I gave it a mighty tug, using all my weight, and then another, and with a third, the thing flew open so fast, with a great shower of dust and a racket of falling plaster, that I thought the whole wall had come away in my hand.
    In my passion to get the door open (which I suspect was fueled by my pique at the stupid safe), I don’t think I even considered what might lie on its other side, had probably expected to find a bricked-up entry or a crawlspace or a utility corridor. I especially hadn’t stopped to imagine the consequence of an alarmed neighbor greeting my thundering demolitions and home invasion with the wobbly barrel of
grand-père
’s old bird gun hastily loaded with
grand-père
’s buckshot. But there was no wall and no neighbor, none of that. At first there was just silence and a blinding barrage of light, which landed on the floating cloud of plaster dust like judgment on Lot’s wife and re-calcified it into a solid, impenetrable curtain, a brilliance so tangible that I moved my hand to push it aside as I stepped through.
    The room I stepped into past this curtain of dust was the antithesis of crawlspace. It was one of the most extraordinary I’d ever been in. In shape, first of all, for it was oval, and in size, though wall to wall, it was only maybe five times as big as my residence next door. Its true immensity was